Calendar Project (Reprise)

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I’ve got a thing about calendars. That’s not quite right. I’ve got a thing about remembering when things happened. I’m not good at that, even important stuff. My primary objective in starting this blog was to have some place I could write things down and find them later. Favorite lines from movies or a TV show. Excerpts from books. I keep a pen handy when ready a book so I can underline favorite passages and/or make notes in the margins. Did this mostly in novels but as I started reading more non-fiction, I found those books tended to get more notation. When I finished the book I transcribed those passages to a file and saved them. Once I started blogging those notes became blog posts. (Index page)

In my younger —pre-web— years, my notes were written or typed. I wasn’t very consistent with my journals but I did manage to save mosts of them (now as PDFs)

When I started working at Learfield Communications in 1984 I had to keep a calendar. This is my desk calendar from June of that year, my first full month on the job. If you hover over a date you might see the entry. I quickly moved to a spiral-bound calendar. 

And eventually to the Day-Timer Calendar (of various sizes). I used those for the next few years, even after we had computers on our desktops.

I started using Google Calendar when it launched in the summer of 2009 and used it for almost everything, linking to relevant files (pdf, jpg, mov) in Google Drive. Google Calendar quickly became my daily diary.

In November of 2014 — a couple of years after I retired— I decided to get rid of a shelf-full of Day-Timers to make room for books. Before burning them I went through each day from 1984 to 1999, creating a corresponding entry in my Google Calendar. Flipping through those old pages brought back some physical sensations. A little stomach clinch over some bad news… tightness in the neck muscles as some unpleasantness unfolded. As I recall, this process took weeks going day-by-day, week-by-week.

The calendar became something of a “memory machine,” revealing a timeline of computer stuff and my first encounter with a web browser.

I included the word “reprise” in the title of this post because I just completed this process for the second time. A few weeks back I made the decision to migrate from Google apps to the Apple ecosystem. Email, calendar, cloud file storage…everything. I want to be able to take advantage of “Apple Intelligence” when it comes along later this year or early next. I want Apple apps to have access to all of my data. 

Why go to all this bother you might reasonably ask? From Douglas Rushkoff’s book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now:

“Where calendars led people to think in terms of history, clocks led people to think in terms of productivity. Only after the proliferation of the clock did the word ‘speed’ (spelled spede) enter the English vocabulary.”

My calendar is now as complete a history of my last 30 years as I’ll ever have. And I enjoy having it. Being able to find stuff that I had forgotten existed.

I think Derek Sivers says it even better in this post on the benefits of a daily diary:

“Years from now you might be looking back, wondering if you were as happy or as sad as you remember during this time. […] We so often make big decisions in life based on predictions of how we think we’ll feel in the future, or what we’ll want. Your past self is your best indicator of how you actually felt in similar situations. So it helps to have an accurate picture of your past. […] You can’t trust distant memories. But you can trust your daily diary. It’s the best indicator to your future self (and maybe descendants) of what was really going on in your life at this time.”

If you care about your thoughts, keep them. Exactly.

The Rise of Perplexity AI

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I’m not using Google as much as I used to. I find I’m going days with no more than one or two searches. I have subscription accounts ($20/mo) for ChatGPT and Perplexity. I’ll probably drop Perplexity with that account expires and Apple fully integrates ChatGPT in to iOS and MacOS. The following excerpts are from a Fast Company article by Mark Sullivan.

When you Google the term “Perplexity AI,” you get a familiar-looking response: a link to the company’s website followed by four other related popular queries, a handful of published articles, related searches, and an endless scroll of links.

Perplexity’s answer machine, however, provides a very different experience: entering the phrase “what can you tell me about perplexity ai?” yields several links to credible-looking articles and relevant information from the company’s website, followed by an articulate and neatly organized brief overview.

And therein lies the allure. Perplexity is easy, it’s elegant, it’s specific. Eighteen months after the online tool (then called Ask) first launched, it’s become one of the buzziest products in the buzziest of all tech sectors—generative AI. Journalist and educator Jeremy Caplan described Perplexity as “like having a smart assistant who not only finds the book you’re looking for in a vast library but opens it to the exact page that has the information you need. Google just points you toward potentially relevant shelves.”

“We never wanted this to be a consumer product. It was meant to be enterprise search, except we never got enterprises to work with us.” Large companies, Srinivas says, were reluctant to provide Perplexity with access to their proprietary data. So the team looked for data they could access and decided to create a tool that could search the web. Perplexity’s “answer engine” launched on December 7, 2022, barely a week after the very noisy debut of ChatGPT.

Perplexity says it recently passed $10 million in annualized revenue. Almost all of that is coming from subscriptions to its $20-per-month Pro service tier, which the company says have been accelerating. The paid tier includes a research assistant, image and file uploads, and access to third-party AI models.

ChatGPT on my non-fiction reading

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ChatGPT: Based on the covers of the books shown in the images, here’s what I can surmise about the person who has read these books:

1.Diverse Interests: The reader has a wide range of interests, including technology, history, psychology, spirituality, science, and self-improvement.

2.Curiosity About Technology and Its Impact: Books like “The Inevitable,” “The Innovators,” and “AI Superpowers” suggest an interest in how technology shapes society and the future.

3.Historical Interests: Titles like “The Fall of Berlin 1945,” “D-Day,” and “Stalingrad” indicate a fascination with significant historical events, particularly those related to World War II.

4.Spiritual and Philosophical Exploration: The inclusion of books by Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, and other spiritual authors suggests a deep interest in exploring philosophical and spiritual ideas, possibly leaning towards Eastern philosophies and mindfulness.

5.Interest in Cognitive Science and Psychology: Books such as “The Brain: The Story of You,” “Consciousness and the Social Brain,” and “The Master and His Emissary” indicate a strong interest in understanding the human mind and consciousness.

6.Self-Improvement and Personal Growth: Titles like “Digital Minimalism,” “The Power of Now,” and “Meditation: Now or Never” point towards an interest in self-improvement, mindfulness, and personal growth.

7.Skeptical and Critical Thinking: Books like “The God Delusion,” “Breaking the Spell,” and “Why Buddhism is True” suggest a tendency towards skeptical and critical thinking, particularly about religion and spirituality.

8.Fascination with Future Trends and Speculative Thinking: Titles such as “Homo Deus,” “21 Lessons for the 21st Century,” and “The Singularity Is Near” imply a fascination with future trends, speculative thinking, and what lies ahead for humanity.

9.Interest in Societal and Cultural Issues: Books like “The Upswing,” “Zucked,” and “Chaos Monkeys” suggest an interest in societal and cultural issues, particularly related to media, technology, and economics.

Overall, this reader appears to be highly intellectual, curious about a broad range of topics, and keen on understanding the world from multiple perspectives, including historical, technological, philosophical, and scientific. They seem to value both critical thinking and personal growth.

I forgot to meditate today

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Thus ending a streak of 2,288 consecutive days on the cushion. More than 6 years without a miss. My best guess of when I started meditating would be May of 2008 so I’ve been at it for about 16 years and started tracking my practice (in a spreadsheet) in 2014. Back in 2015 I missed a day because I was sick with pneumonia and the following year I missed because I was attending my 50th high school class reunion.

How did I forget to meditate today? Not sure. Just got busy. Woke up in the middle of the night with the realization that my string was broken. How do I feel about this lapse? Sad wouldn’t be the right word. Maybe a little disappointed? I’m going with nostalgic. And a little relief that whatever pressure came with such a streak is gone. Perhaps I was sitting every day so I could make that spreadsheet entry rather than simply practicing awareness.

Like the man said, the only day that counts is today.

PS: Going forward I will not be tracking consecutive days of meditation practice. Rather, the total number of days practiced since I began tracking in 2014. [3,683]

PPS: This seems like a good time to retire the spreadsheet as well. I’m now logging my daily sessions in Calendar on my MacBook.

“More human than human”

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That’s the motto of the corporation in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic, Blade Runner. The film was released 42 years ago and has stood the test of time. I watched it again last night. For the tenth time? The twentieth? And every time I discover some perfect new visual detail or bit of dialog. Like this from Rachael:

“I’m not in the business. I am the business.”

As I watched the movie again last night I was aware of the phone by my hand and the AI chatbots within. I asked ChatGPT about the “More human than human” line.

The line “More human than human” from Blade Runner is quite intriguing. In the context of the film, it refers to the replicants created by the Tyrell Corporation, which are designed to be almost indistinguishable from humans but are often superior in physical and mental capabilities. Philosophically, it can be interpreted in several ways:

    • Creation and Perfection: It suggests that the replicants are engineered to be better than humans, embodying idealized qualities that surpass natural human limitations.
    • Identity and Humanity: It raises questions about what it means to be human. If replicants can think, feel, and even surpass human abilities, what distinguishes them from humans? It blurs the lines between creator and creation.
    • Irony and Critique: There’s an irony in the phrase, as the replicants, despite being “more human,” are denied human rights and treated as mere property. It critiques the ethical implications of creating life and the responsibilities that come with it.

Overall, the phrase encapsulates the film’s exploration of humanity, identity, and the ethical dilemmas of advanced technology.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Scott called AI a “technical hydrogen bomb” and warned about its potential dangers.

“Can you put the president on the Internet?”

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It was 28 years ago, most likely the spring of 1996, when I was plundering around our newly obtain Apple Power Macintosh 9600 in my tiny office at the center of Learfield Communications, the operator of Radio Iowa, the Missourinet, and numerous collegiate sports radio networks based in Jefferson City, Missouri.  My little company, Echo Communications and jointly formed a partnership with the regional radio giant called Straylight and we had set about to build websites and streaming audio programming around Learfield’s properties using the recently invented Progressive Networks Real Audio player, later dubbed simply Real Audio.

The room, probably not more than about 10′ x 10′, had a rack of low-end Compaq desktop computers in one corner, a high-end Compaq Proliant Server running Windows NT 4.0, and my desk in the other.  On my desk was this beautiful new machinery from Apple Computers, the last of its generation it turned out that I had first seen Steve Jobs announce in person at the Moscone Center only a few years before to a crowded room full of hypnotized zealots. I was one of those zealots.

This PowerMac on my desk was the crown jewel of our little high tech setup, as we had outfitted it with a special graphics card that had to be purchased separately (a first for a Mac).  I had waited for the graphics card for weeks; without it the computer was useless and could not even show a boot screen. But properly configured with the card and a beautiful 17″ Sony Triniton monitor and the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, it was truly a bicycle of the mind.  With this machine and some rudimentary HTML skills, we created the marvels of the New Media age: websites.

What was special about the websites that we produced with Learfield’s award winning news and sports programming content is that ours had something that almost no other had: live streaming audio. Through our partnership with Learfield, we wired in audio feeds from our satellite connections just on the other side of the wall where I was hacking out the little Netscape and Internet Explorer buttons that told our visitors which browsers our pages could best be “surfed” on.

We had built RadioIowa.com as a place to feature the award-winning news programming created under the leadership of O. Kay Henderson, whom we just called Kay.  I had had the pleasure of meeting Kay and her team of journalists at their offices in Des Moines.  We were already publishing her stories on the website and we had been able to use our new Real Audio technology to include features from the recent Iowa Caucuses.

While I can’t remember exactly which website project I was working on that day — I had driven to Jefferson City from Columbia where I was still a Computer Science student at the University of Missouri — I will never forget the day or the precise moment when O. Kay Henderson and I made history.

I think actually from a news perspective it was a pretty routine day.  Apparently — I knew little of these things at the time — President Clinton had signed a very significant piece of agricultural legislation known as the Freedom to Farm Act which was a big shift in how farmers would receive subsidies from the U.S. Government.  Big news in Iowa and for the nation, but for me, I was completely clueless.

But as a 23 year old who had experienced the Presidential Election of 1992, the appearances of then Governor Clinton on Arsenio Hall Show, the live saxophone performances and the momentous energy among his supporters, I knew something of Mr. Bill Clinton.

When I picked up the phone, it was Kay asking me in an excited voice, “Allen, can you put the President live on the Internet right now?  I’ve got him on the line.  He’s just become the first president to digitally sign legislation.  We can make him the first President live streamed on the web.”

I was speechless, nervous, and nearly fell out of my chair.  “Of coursee!  Give me two minutes.” (In radio, you have about 10 seconds before the moment has passed.)

I fired up the Real Audio service and hoped that our T-1 connection would not be giving us any problems today.  We needed that ultra-high bandwidth connection (it cost us a few thousand dollars a month to lease the line) to support up to 100 (one hundred!) live listeners at the time.

Of course I had no time to get the word out that we would be live streaming.  No Google existed.  No social media.

The radio listeners wouldn’t know we were online and they would already be hearing the interview anyways.

But we DID IT!  “Mr. President, can you hear me?”  Yes I heard him say.  Then I muted and Kay did her magic, as she had done with Mr. Clinton many times before and as she would continue to do with other powerful leaders the rest of her career.

I never streamed a President again after that.  I did stream Margaret Thatcher as she spoke on the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s speak in Fulton, Missouri in the website we built called “Words On the War”.

But I’ll never forget that day we put the President online.  A blip for him and perhaps not even a memory for Kay, but it’s etched in my mind forever.

— Allen Hammock, July 4, 2024

More on Learfield’s online adventures: Learfield and the Internet (1995-2005)