Making use of AI in 2025 - The year in Review

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Please Hold gets my vote for Oscar for best short film

Yesterday I saw the short film Please Hold, which is up for an Oscar this year.  It tells the story of Mateo who is arrested by an automated police drone while on his way to work, and incarcerated by a series of bots and drones that work for a high-tech automated prison company, never seeing or getting to talk to a human.  Like the protagonist in Kafka’s The Trial, the charges against Mateo are never disclosed.   Having spent two hours trapped in Comcast’s automated bot hell this past Friday, I can relate.  It’s happening more and more in modern life.   It’s also reminiscent of Sartre’s No Exit.  Contrary to Sartre, Please Hold shows us that Hell doesn’t require other people, modern automated bots are sufficient.

Replacing the regulator on my Grill

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Diet, Metabolism and Keto Book List

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Keto - Tips

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Photo site moved.

I'm on to the third site for my photos.

I started with Flickr  but Yahoo somehow decided to delete my account and I can't get into it any more.   I moved on the Phanfare but that was sold to SmugMug.  My wife likes SmugMug and has been using it for a log time so I moved my pictures to it.

They're now at  https://AndyNovick.smugmug.com/

 
There are two galleries from 2020: 

    Florida Winter 2020 

    Boston Winter 2019-2020

Plus  many more going back to 2013 when I restarted photography

Most, but not all, of these the 2020 shots were taken with the iPhone.   It's pretty good and it's always there with me so that's what I use.  I'm going to try and use the Nikon more in 2021.

Customer Service Success and Failure

Somethings work, some things don't.  I think I can report on which is which and which company makes a good faith effort.

2015
Fail: CapitalOne Credit Cards- Just trying to call in to activate a card.  Had to go through 3 advertisements for some other service.  This use to take 30 seconds. They turned in into a 3 minute ordeal before I hung up.  Won't be signing up for more of their cards.

2014
Success: The auto insurance system.  Got rear ended by a 20'ish driver.  The system worked.  We got picked up by a tow truck. Taken to a garage.  They wanted to do the work but the insurance company, Commerce Insurance, let me find someone I preferred.  I took the list they gave me and Angie's list and found one with a good Angie's rating not too far from home.  It took a while but it got done right.  The other driver's company was also very good.  Got my rental car at Enterprise without problems and they covered all the days.  It took a little back and forth but not that much.

2014
Fail: BoxxTech.  Very nice computers but customer support is pretty bad.  After I liked one I bought another for my wife.   But now the battery on the original one failed and it also can't overclock.  So I guess I'm not high on the computers either.

Andy

Getting back into photography

For a number of life reasons I’ve decided to get back into photography after a 20 year hiatus.  I could be a dinosaur and stick with film, I’ve always thought of moving up to a view camera for the movements and incredible resolution.  It seems that the same results can be achieved with digital so I’m going to make the switch and go with a Nikon D800E for the high resolution and sharpness.  So far it’s great but I’ve got a lot to learn especially about post processing.  But that effects how you shoot in the first place: gone is bracketing for the right exposure because that’s evident in the histogram, it seems to be replaced with expose-to-the-right and bracketing for HDR.  Well, there’s going to be lots to explore.  I’ve put some of my photos up on Flicker here: Andy's Pictures  

Eric's trip to Motorama's Battlebot Competition from the Sudbury Town Crier

The Sudbury Town Crier published this article that I wrote about the Rogue Robotics teams' trip to Harrisburg for Motorama.  Mostly I did the driving.  The whole Battlebot event was a gas, full of energy and ideas.  The LS team did great.

http://www.wickedlocal.com/sudbury/news/x2082701696/L-S-robotics-team-ties-for-5th-in-Battlebot-competition#axzz2MFjZHaVr

Lost: The Final Episode

The final season of Lost is to start in early February and an article in the WSJ prompted me to think about how the series should end. Would any of the open questions be resolved? So here, on January 23, 2010 is my script for the final 5 minutes of the show.


Juliet bangs the bomb with the rock. Big mushroom cloud over the island….

Cut to commercial

Scene: DARMA project, Desmond Hume enters the numbers into the computer. Fade to…

Scene: From the outside you see a large airplane land but no markings are visible to the audience because of the angle. In the distance shots of LA. Cut to the plane’s interior from back to front to see the usual jostling of the cabin heads of some of the cast might be visible. Cut to a clock, the time is 10:42. Cut to the pilot, Seth Norris.


Sounds of the electronic bells on a typical airplane: Ding Ding


Stewardess’s voice over the airplane PA: This concludes Oceanic flight 815 non-stop from Sidney to Los Angles. Please enjoy your stay in California. We hope that you enjoyed your flight and will fly with Oceanic again soon. Those possessing United States passports…. (sound fades)


You hear and see the airplane door depressurize. More bells. A wheelchair enters pushed by a steward and heads for John Locke who moves into it with the help of a brace, dour look on his face, and is pushed towards the door first. You see other passengers getting up and not talking much to each other. Jack helps the pregnant Clair still not knowing that she is his half sister. Hugo, Michal, Walt, etc. exit the airplane.

Jack exits and heads right out of the gangway down the stairs. Cut to the tarmac. Jack sees to the handling of his father’s coffin.

Cut to the customs exit area. Passengers exits and are greeted by relatives.

Kate is taken into custody by a US Marshall.

Cast members proceed through the Imagration line. You see the back of the head of one of the agents as he gives Walt his passport back.

Cut to the agent's face. It's Ben Linus. He looks at the camera and winks.

THE END

2009 Calendar is up and available

My 2009 calendar is up on the web site with the first circled date, January 1. Of course, 1/1/ is the anniversery of the day the Year 2000 Bug didn't happen.

The design is pretty nice. If you haven't seen it there are both color and black and white PDFs available at http:www.NovickSoftware.com/2009.htm

Happy New Year

Andy

New HP dv9000 laptopnext

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ZoomIT 2.0 - PDF Reader/Editor - Troubles

Over the past few years I've grown to dislike Acrobat Reader. All those nagging downloads and the heavey slowness. So I've been trying ZoomIT but have had to uninstall it.
The problem came when I tried to print using ZoomIT a tax PDF that had been filled out already. When I opened the PDF it was okay but it asked to download a plugin that allowed it to handle the Javascript in the form. It did a nice job of the download. The first problem is that changes made with ZoomIT and saved didn't save. I'm not sure why not.
The big problem was that when I went to print I got a

BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!

The whole machine crashed and rebooted. I tried the file again with the same result.

Then when I went to their support screen to enter the problem I got stuck and couldn't complete the entry because I had made an invalid choice for the build number.

So much for ZoomIT.

God's Debris

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Fish Story of Plain Dumb Luck

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Walking through the Gates and getting hungry

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Congratulations to the New England Patriots.

Congratulations to the New England Patriots.
We had 20 people for our Super Bowl XXXIX party. Tommy, Eric, and I built this red and blue snow football as one of the decorations. Eric is the one kicking off with Tommy holding.

I started this blog thinking it wouldn't be about technology but I'm already going to let a little slip in. It's not my technology but I've run across two sets of predictions about where Google is going that are though provoking.

The most recent of the posts is John Dvorak's thoughts on the possibility of a Google browser and a Google OS. The browser sounds pretty reasonable and pretty easy to achieve. After all as JD predicts it'll be a version of FireFox. The OS seems a little more far fetched. The problem with new OS's has always been the availability of software, which I'll consider in another post. Here's the link to JD's article:
http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7BCB1AB36C-D097-4451-93C4-A19141400FB5%7D&siteid=google&dist=google

The other interesting posting is EPIC, an 8 minute flash movie about one possible future where GoogleZon takes over the news. I ran into it on Rocky Lhotka's blog. You'll find it at: http://www.broom.org/epic/ . Rocky's seems to be concerned about the possibility of authors earning a living in a world of where so much writing is free. The same holds for programmers in the face of the open source movement. How are we suppose to earn a living if software is free? There are a few models of success but only a few. In any case, the EPIC movie is worth watching.

Dealing with a Frozen Drain Pipe

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