Clues that you are rich

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A lot of rich people don’t even realize they’re rich. Here are some clues:

  • You are worried about someone hijacking your car when you drive downtown.
  • You can afford things you actually need, like healthcare.
  • You don’t use a calculator while grocery shopping, and you don’t use the produce scales in grocery stores.
  • You spend money on traveling for leisure.
  • You never worry about hidden, snowballing fees or “poor tax”.
  • You never have to hustle to work out where you will sleep or where your next meal comes from.
  • You can invest in something that pays off later or just simply stock up because buying more is cheaper.
  • You don’t hold up the line with your complicated benefits when checking out in the grocery store line.
  • You don’t have to worry about logistics, like how you will show up to appointments on opposite sides of the city in one day.
  • You shop online.
  • You don’t have to worry about your kid’s tech access for school.
  • Bureaucratic procedures, such as getting a driver’s license, are not prohibitively impossible.

— It’s Training Cats and Dogs

Morgan Motor Company

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Spotted this beauty in the supermarket parking lot. I believe it is a Morgan +4.

Morgan Motor Company Limited is a British motor car manufacturer owned by Italian investment group Investindustrial. It was founded in 1910 by Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan. Morgan is based in Malvern Link, an area of Malvern, and employs approximately 220 people. Morgan produce 850 cars per year, all assembled by hand.[2] The waiting list for a car is approximately six months, but it has sometimes been as long as ten years.

“A yammy full of Georgia joy juice”

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The Shield premiered in 2002 and got glowing reviews but I never got around to watching it. Until now. It holds up well after 20+ years. The show was created and written by Shawn Ryan and while I can’t say for sure he penned this bit of dialog, somebody deserves an award for coming up with the line, “I’ve got a yammy full of Georgia joy juice.” And I thought I had every slang term for female genitalia.

Perplexity says (using British accent) she has no voice

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As good as I’ve found ChatGPT to be, it appears Perplexity (another AI tool) might be even better. One of my favorite features of ChatGPT is ability to “converse” with one of several human-like voices. I posted an example of this a few months back. Others nitpick but I find the voice amazingly human-like. Now that I have a Perplexity account I wondered if it has the same feature.

Does not have a voice feature? Sooo, what are we listening to here. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for this and I’ll update this post if and when. Perhaps it’s just a new feature (that it doesn’t know about?!)

What I was curious about –before this distraction– was why the ChatGPT voice is so natural sounding and the Perplexity voice is canned computer-speak.

DJI Osmo 3

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I purchased this camera back in January but a busted arm and cold weather prevented me from plunging in as I usually do with a new toy. Additionally, I found myself overwhelmed by the number of features and settings. All excellent features, but there are so many of them. I couldn’t find a place to start. So yesterday I turned the camera on and headed into the woods, paying to attention to settings. The video below was shot at 1080/30fps. I’ve reset to 4K/60fps for the next shoot. Watch this space. (PS: A YouTube search will tell you all you might want to know about this little gadget.)

Fallout

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“The end of the world is not what it used to be”

Is that a great tagline, or what? I’m about four episodes in. Making the end of the world funny is a tall order but the series manages to do so. Walton Goggins (Boyd Crowder!) is the perfect bad guy; Mykelti Williamson (Ellstin Limehouse, also from Justified) makes a early/brief appearance; Dale Dickey, another Justified alum (who was wonderful in Winter’s Bone) does her redneck thing, and I’m sure I’ll be seeing other familiar faces. Oh, and the soundtrack. Absolutely brilliant.

Public relations technology in 2006

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In 2006 I was asked to be on a panel discussing new technology tools for public relations professionals in the greater St. Louis area. Blogging was still relatively new at the time and I’d been at it for five or six years, consulting for advertisers on our various radio networks. It was a packed house.

2006 was a busy year for technology (social media?). Twitter officially launched in July; Facebook opened up to everyone over 13 years old, leading to explosive growth from 12 million users at the end of 2006 to 50 million by October 2007; YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in October, cementing its position as the leading online video platform.

I spent most of my working years on the media side of things rather than the PR side, but one (of many, no doubt) go-to tool was the written press release. These went out (fax, USPS, email) to any media outlet that might do a story (Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV) followed up by a phone call “pitching” the story. I don’t recall there being any way to get a release into the hands of the public. The internet –and, later, social media– changed all that. We started seeing and hearing the word “disintermediation.” Communicating directly to a target audience, bypassing traditional media.

By this time many (most?) businesses, organizations and institutions had websites but it took some technical skill to update these, a task made easier by the advent of blogs. And a well-written, frequently updated blog could be followed thanks to a bit of tech called RSS.

As I prepared to write this post I tried to recall what the field of public relations was like in 2006 (18 years ago!). Instead of googling I used a new (for me) tool called Perplexity that describes itself as an “answer engine” rather than a search engine. If you discount the personal touch, the result was much better than what you just read. I’m too new to this tool/tech to write intelligently about it does feel like a very big deal. I’m already starting to go to Perplexity for answers I once searched for on Google. And all we really wanted was the answer, right? Here’s a short (6 min) video overview of Perplexity and I’ll be sharing my experiences here.