Entry 798: What Can't DG Complain About?

I used to listen daily to The Adam Carolla Show. I haven't listened in, jeez, probably over a decade now, because it got way too repetitive. This happens to pretty much all podcasts, by they way, in which the hosts' pontifications about their personal lives are central aspects of the show. An individual person only has so many stories and so many jokes and so many stories to set up those so many jokes, and if you listen for long enough, you get to the point where it's like, Do I really need to listen to Adam do his bit on canned cranberry sauce for the one millionth time? And then you hit unsubscribed. This also happened to me with Sarah Silverman's podcast, and it preemptively happened with Dax Shepard's. My sister-in-law told me how good it was, so I was thinking of adding it to my rotation, but then a few months later she said she stopped listening, because he just told the same stories and jokes over and over, so I decided against it.

But one of the bits I used to really like on ACS was "What Can't Adam Complain About?" where Adam's producer would throw out a topic, and he would find something about it he didn't like and then just riff on it for a few minutes. I always thought I would be good at this segment because I'm a world class complainer. It's one of my finer qualities. Although, I get the feeling S doesn't feel that way about it. In fact, she seems to be more annoyed by my constant carping than amused. Fine art always goes over some people's heads.

Here's a sample from my latest list of complaints.

Microsoft Office Licenses
One of my least favorite technology trends is the nearly universal adoption of the software subscription model. You can't just buy software now and have it forever. You have to, in effect, buy it over and over again every year. My personal Microsoft Office subscription lapsed recently, but that's okay, because I found out that at my company, we can use our work license on up to five machines, including personal computers. So, I registered Microsoft Office through work on my laptop, and all was well. 

Until I tried to save something. Turns out Microsoft is so fucking petty, they won't let me save any Office documents to my laptop or personal One Drive account, and the documents that are already saved there are read-only. I have to use my work drive, even when I'm using my laptop. It's not the end of the world, but it is irritating, and it's like why? I'm not renewing, so they're going to punish me by making their product more annoying? If anything, that makes me want to get a Mac. It doesn't seem like the greatest business strategy to me.

The worst part about it is that I like to keep work and personal things separate. But I think that's already a losing battle. I started using my personal phone (the only phone I have) to authenticate certain work credentials a long time ago, and I just discovered it's easier to schedule work meetings through my phone than on my work laptop. The work/personal firewall as already been breached. Also, we get most our revenue at my company by selling software as a service, including subscriptions, so, yeah...

AI
I'm not going to complain about AI, so much as I am AI mania. AI itself is fine, but it's just that, fine. It's not the godlike omnipotence it's being hyped as. Maybe it will get there someday, maybe someday relatively soon, but can we pump the brakes a little until it does? We're now at a point were every company has to put the term AI in their mission statements just to seem relevant; everybody looking for a job has to tout their AI credentials (even if they don't really have any); and seemingly every podcast has to be about what AI holds for the future of whatever field the podcast deals in. I'm now kinda rooting for AI to render human thought completely obsolete within the next few decades, as if it doesn't, we are presently wasting a whole lot of time discussing how it is going to do so. 

Personally, I like using AI as a check on me. We use it at work for code review to identify potential issues and like ten percent of the time it finds something that requires a fix. It's rarely something major, but still it's legitimately helpful. What I don't find AI useful for is how it's being marketed, as a creator whose product I'm supposed to check. For work, I had to take these AI training modules, and they were very pro AI, but also very insistent that AI was only going to augment human labor, not replace it, so they would say things like: You can use AI to draft emails, because that's something AI is very good at doing very quickly! But then it's your job to make sure your message conveys all the information you want and that the tone is appropriate for the intended audience. That's something that requires a human touch! And I was thinking to myself, that "human touch" is what I spend 95% of my time on when writing an email, particularly getting the tone right. The longer I watched, the more I thought to myself that AI sounds a lot like a bad employee whose work you constantly have to monitor.

Of course, it will get better. That's the obvious retort to all this. But how much better and how quickly? And is better actually better? Right now AI tells you things that are obviously incorrect*, and so you know not to believe it. But if it told you things that looked correct, but still weren't, it could be more harmful. Like, if using AI becomes finding the needles that are its errors in a haystack of content, is that better? For me, it's more efficient to build the haystack myself and keep the needles out along a way. (And then an AI can check if I succeeded or not.) But maybe I'm just getting old--this century's version of the guy who looks up things in the encyclopedia because he insists it's faster than googling them. That's definitely a possibility, and I'm mostly okay with it. 

*Case in point, I googled "colleges with presidents and a super bowl winning quarterbacks," and this is the result that the AI gave me. It did get 1-3 correct, which is impressive, but neither Franklin Pierce nor Matt Ryan went to Harvard, and the notion of Mitchell Trubisky winning a Super Bowl is patently absurd to anybody who follows the NFL at all.

 

 

Back to the Future:
As I mentioned in a previous entry, we recently cranked out the Back to the Future trilogy. I like it quite a bit, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way this time around. It's not any of the evident time-travel paradoxes, or the fact that the successful McFlys at the end of the movie live in the same house as the dysfunctional McFlys at the beginning (including Marty's brother, even though he's portrayed as somebody who could afford his own place), or the weirdness of Doc's best friend being a teenage boy. It's none of that. It's the contrived plot point that Marty's Achilles' heel is being called chicken.

I remembered this from the first time I saw the movies, way back when, but I didn't remember the back story, and then when we watched them this time around, I realize there is no back story. They just invented it out of thin air. In Part II, Griff Tannen calls Marty chicken, and he reacts to it as if it's an established part of the canon that he has a pathological aversion to this, but it's not. It's not even alluded to in the first movie. Then, future Marty gets fired from his job after getting goaded into a shady scheme by getting called chicken, and future Jennifer tells their kids, something to the effect of, "You know your father's one weakness is being called chicken." And it's like, Oh, okay, I guess this is a thing that the audience is supposed to know now.

It's pretty weak character development, to be honest, and I don't see why it's necessary to the story. Surely, the movie makers could have come up with a different way to make Marty's future go south. Also, in the scene in which he doesn't get baited into racing Flea ("Needles"), and thus avoids his life-altering accident, why does he gun it backwards and do a half-donut, instead of not moving at all, or just going forward at the speed limit in a safe manner? What Marty does actually seems more dangerous to me than racing forward.

Anyway, this has been "What Can't DG Complain About?"

Until next time... 

Entry 797: You Complete Me

Some good things happening here in my world right now and some bad things. The Seahawks won the Super Bowl in dominating fashion, and I've very much enjoyed basking in the success of my favorite professional sports team (tied with the Mariners). Every night since Sunday, before I've gone to sleep, I've watched some sort of highlight or game video on YouTube from the Seahawks' championship season. Last night, I watched the final quarter of the NFC Championship Game against the Rams. There are no points scored in it, but it's a great watch nevertheless. It's basically only two series. The Rams go on a long time-consuming drive that ends inside the Seattle ten-yard line, when the "Dark Side" D gets a beautiful, fortuitous fourth-down stop. And then the Seahawks take over and effectively run out the clock, getting clutch first down after clutch first down. It's a joy to watch, even though I know what's going to happen. In fact, it's a joy largely because I know what is going to happening. That I know that this is what propels them to the Lombardi Trophy is what makes it fun. Had they lost the game or been defeated in the Super Bowl, I wouldn't be watching at all.

In other good news, the snow is finally starting to melt here. There is still a ton of it, and it's still annoying, but the streets are a little bit wider, and I can see large pockets of green on my lawn.

But there is bad news also: Our president is still a megalomaniac, who is making life worse for pretty much everybody, including many who voted for him, and his abhorrent policies concerning immigration enforcement have put us on the verge of another prolonged government shutdown. As with the first one, just a few months ago, I think the Democrats are correct on the issue but wrong on the tactics. Dems don't want to fund ICE without reforms, which I totally understand and completely cosign, so they are refusing to allow the funding for DHS to go through, since ICE is a part of DHS. The problem is that DHS has like 20 agencies under its milieu, including essential services like FEMA and TSA, and these are currently not being funded. What's more is that, as I understand it, ICE got a special carve out of funding in that Big Beautiful Bill, so it has the money to operate without restraint for the foreseeable future. So, basically, a shutdown will disrupt the good parts of DHS, while the worst part of it carries on unfettered. Maybe I'm missing something, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Anyway...

It's a four day weekend for both our children. This is a bit annoying, given how much school they missed due to the snow, but at least DCPS did something for which I've been advocating for years. They scrapped some administration days and turned them into a school days. We don't have parent-teacher conferences now, but I'd rather that be the case than have to tack on a days of school the week after "graduation" (this is Lil' S2's last year in elementary school) when a lot of kids will already be at camp or on vacation. It does beg the question: Why doesn't the district build these flex days into the schedule from the get-go, instead of adding them on the fly, being that we get at least one heavy snowfall pretty much every year? I still don't know the answer to that. But I at least give DCPS a half star for making a smart adjustment.

Actually, there is some drama at Lil' S2's school right now. A contingent of teachers are unhappy with the administration--they don't feel supported and empowered--and they have rallied some parents to advocate on their behalf. There is a letter to the chancellor going around on the message boards that a bunch of parents are signing. I think S might have signed it (or is going to sign it), mainly because her friend asked her to. Personally, I'm staying out of it. In four months, we will be done with this school, and so I don't feel super invested in the matter. I also don't want to just support the teachers reflexively (I'm admittedly still bitter about their reluctance to return during Covid lockdowns, even after getting moved to the front of the line for vaccines, even after it became clear that children weren't great vectors for the disease), and I'm not sure if it really is "the teachers" or just "a few teachers." One of the parents in a group chat I'm in is also a teacher at the school, and she posted something in defense of the administration, which definitely gave me pause about the whole thing. Basically, I would want to do some research and get all the facts and opinions before signing onto anything, and that seems like entirely too much work to me considering I won't have any kids at the school by the time I'm done. As long as teachers at the school don't start striking, I'm just gonna ride this one out.

Abruptly changing topics, it was Valentine's Day yesterday, and last night was one of those increasingly rare weekend evenings in which both of our kids are home and don't have any friends over, so we decided to have family movie night and settled on the 1996 romantic comedy Jerry Maguire. And by "settled on," I mean S and I decided that that's what we wanted to watch and cajoled the boys into watching it with us. Lil' S1 lasted about 15 minutes ("I didn't even want to watch it in the first place."); Lil' S2 made it about an hour ("This is boring. There's hardly any football in it."). So, we turned it off and watched a couple episodes of Modern Family instead.

S and I are intent on finishing it, though. We both forgot how good it is. It's nearly a ten of ten on the rewatchability scale. Every character in it is almost perfectly crafted and acted. Jerry and Dorothy couldn't be more charming as the leads; the little kid Ray is just as adorable as you remember ("The human head weighs eight pounds."); Rod and his wife are super likeable and funny; Jay Mohr is great as the movie's only real villain; and Bonnie Hunt is brilliant as Dorothy's sister (real appreciated her performance this time around). We still have about 40 minutes left in the movie, and hopefully we get a quiet time to finish it tonight--preferably before 8p. If it's any later, there is a real risk of S falling asleep during it, and then it will be like that one Valentine's day, many years ago, when S was pregnant and went to bed at like 7:30, so I celebrated alone by eating a heart-sharped piece of cake, drinking sparkling cider, and binge watching Friday Night Lights. Oh well, Valentine's Day proper is already over, and it's fake holiday, anyway.

Until next time... 

Entry 796: A Running Diary Of My Weekend

Friday 

4:00p: I'm frantically trying to finish work and hop on the stationary bike. I'm itching for a good workout, and if I don't start soon, things are going to get tricky. S was away for work all week, and I can see on the Find My app that she's landed and is in a car on the way home. If I'm already in the middle of my workout when she gets here then everything will be fine. If I haven't started it yet, then I'm going to have to talk (or more likely listen) to her for a sufficient amount of time, so as to not seem like an uncaring spouse, and that's going to push back my workout, and then the kids are going to come home, and then we're gonna have to do dinner, and so on and so forth.

4:15p: Lil' S2 calls, and he wants some friends to come over after school. It's fine with me, but I have to clear it with S first, so I call her, and she says it's okay, but she doesn't want them to walk home because of the icy conditions. I call Lil' S2 back and tell him that it's fine with us, but he has to clear it with his friend's mother because it's her turn to drive. (We have a carpool for when they can't walk.) 

4:20p: I remember that I forgot to cook something for dinner, and if I don't get something started, the kids are going to bother me about getting carryout, and it's always incredibly annoying to get them carryout on Friday because traffic is so bad and last time we did delivery it was like $60 for the two of them, so I don't want to do that, nor do I want to fight about it, so I gotta have an established alternative. I throw some chicken in the pressure cooker and rice in the rice cooker and go to put on my workout clothes.

4:25p: S comes home. I didn't make it. What's worse is that I have a bunch of missed calls on my phone from Lil' S2 and a bunch of texts from his friends' mom. She didn't have room in the car for everybody who was coming over because her son neglected to tell her that he had not only Lil' S2 with him but two other kids as well. So, unable to get a hold of me, Lil' S2 and his friends started walking home, and S is not happy when she hears this, and she leaves to pick them up, even though she literally just walked through the door after traveling for the last 15 hours. I offer to pick them up instead, but I do so halfheartedly (for one thing, I'm in a t-shirt and shorts; for another, I don't really mind them walking), and I'm pretty sure S picks up on that.

4:27p: I shut myself off in the guest room where our stationary bike is, put in my earbuds, crank up the volume (my iPhone now warns me that it might be too loud), and start pedaling. I don't think S will be annoyed with me for going AWOL for an hour or so. I was alone with the kids for a week--and it was not an easy week!--so I think I have some relationship capital built up in my favor.

5:30p: S isn't annoyed at all, and she tells me all about her trip. I pretend to be very interested, and she pretends to not know that I'm actually only mildly interested. That's a happy marriage in action right there.

6:30p: I eat chicken and rice casserole for dinner.

7:30p: I watch two episodes of Modern Family with S and the boys. Lil' S1 takes so long to get ready to watch the show for some reason. We're all waiting for him, and I yell that if he takes any longer, we're going to be watching Ancient Family instead. It's a solid 6 of a joke.

8:30p: Lil' S2 has gotten into Rubik's cubing again, so he has me time him on his solves. His fastest is 45 seconds, which is legit impressive. The thing is, he uses the same algorithm I do, but I struggle to get below two minutes.

10:30p: I listen to a podcast and solve a crossword contest puzzle with a meta theme. I crack the meta very quickly and submit my answer. If I'm correct (and I'm confident I am; it's one of those things where you know it when you get it), and my name is selected at random, then I will win some sweet crossword puzzle merch. I've gotten the right answer in this contest probably 20 times over the past few years and never won it. One of these days...

11:45p: I get in bed to sleep, but S is in the middle of the mattress, so I have to try to push her over without her waking up. I'm somewhat successful. I get her to move a few inches and decide not to push it (or her) any further, even though I'm still kinda cramped.

Saturday

8:45a: I wake up and Lil' S1 is making pancakes. Although I typically don't eat breakfast, I make an exception because it's a family thing, and pancakes are delicious. It's a good decision on my part. The mix of butter and maple syrup on a warm fluffy pancake, washed down with some coffee, is an almost unbeatable breakfast combination.

1:00p: Lil' S1 has some friends come to play D&D and socialize in the way nerdy 8th graders socialize. Lil' S2, S, and I watch Back to the Future Part III to finish up the trilogy. It still holds up for the most part. The very end is kinda corny. I wish they would have handled it differently, but whatever. I ask Lil' S2 to rank the three films, and he says II, I, III. That's probably what I would have said as a child also. The future scenes in II are cool when you're a kid. As an adult, however, I think II is the worst of them. It goes I, a massive gap, III, a little gap, II. 

3:30p: Needing to do something physical and to charge our EV, I decide to clear a path in our driveway to the charger. I didn't do it before, which was a mistake, as now there is about six feet of solid, inches-thick ice that needs to be excavated before our car can get close enough to be reached by the charging cable. I have to use two shovels to do the job-- a long gardening spade with a triangular head to cut through the ice and a big flat snow shovel to scoop it up. It's very satisfying work--one of those jobs where initially you think there is no way you are ever going to get through it, but you just start chipping away (literally, in this case) and get lost in your thoughts (S needed my phone, so I wasn't listening to a podcast, as I usually would), and then you look up, and think to yourself Goddamn, I'm like halfway done already! The cold is absolutely brutal, with the whipping winds it feels like it's subzero, but I keep warm by bundling up. I do two things that are huge in this regard: 1) Wear a scarf and wrap it tightly from the bottom of my neck to my eyes, so that almost my entire face is covered; 2) Put one of those hard-warmers with the little pellets that you shake up in my pocket and grab it from time-to-time. Even with two pairs of gloves on, it's my hands that tend to get unbearably cold, so the hand-warmer was crucial.

4:00p: S needs my phone because she's switching us to a much cheaper plan. She gets her and Lil' S1's phones switched successfully and is very proud of herself for doing so, which I know because she mentions about five times how proud of herself she is. Hey, I get it. Navigating all that customer service stuff totally sucks. The only problem is that we can't switch Lil' S2's watch to the new plan because they don't offer standalone service for watches. You have to tie it to a phone, which we don't want to do. This also means we can't switch my phone yet, as all the passwords and stuff for our old account are on my phone. The solution is probably to break down and get Lil' S2 a phone. I guess we just embrace the dark side.

7:00p: Both the boys go to friends' houses for sleepovers, giving S and I a night to ourselves. We turn on a fire and enjoy some kid-free time, by which I mean we sit next to each other on the sofa while she watches something on her iPad, and I listen to a podcast and play NYT games.

10:00p: Remembering that the Super Bowl is tomorrow and that I'm going to be done with football for a while once it ends (especially if the Seahawks lose), I decide to watch a Super Bowl from my childhood. I settle on Super Bowl XXII, Washington 42, Denver 10. It's not a very close game, but it's a fun one, and you only really need to watch the second quarter. Washington fell behind early 10-0 after the first quarter, and then rattled off five straight touchdowns to take a 35-10 lead into halftime. It's pretty remarkable to watch. It's one of the greatest "flip the script" games of all time.

Sunday

8:30a: I wake up and spend most the morning doing chores--laundry, trash, and the like. I want to do a workout this afternoon, and this evening I'll be watching the Super Bowl, of course, so I gotta get all the boring stuff out of the way first. Plus, S took the boys "volunteering" (dropping off meals to elderly people), so I don't want to look like a slacker.

1:00p: Everybody returns home, and S is grumbling because the kids were bickering a bit while doing their volunteering. It sounds like pretty standard sibling stuff to me. They both want to make cookies for the Super Bowl tonight, but Lil' S2 refuses to work with Lil' S1, so they're each making their own batch. It's one of those things where Lil' S1 is actually a very good baker, and Lil' S2 doesn't like his older brother having that over him (even though it's only over him in his own mind), so he wants to prove that he can bake cookies on his own, even though he can't yet. It leads to a pretty funny exchange, with Lil' S2 looking at his iPad and Lil' S1 looking over his shoulder.

Lil' S1: Are you just googling "cookie dough"? I have a sugar cookie recipe you can use in my cookbook.
Lil' S2: I don't want sugar cookies. I want cookie dough.
Lil' S1: What do you mean you want cookie dough? All cookies are made from cookie dough, even sugar cookies.
Lil' S2: Yeah, but I don't want sugar cookies. I want chocolate chip cookies.
Lil' S1: Okay, then google "chocolate chip cookie recipes." You can't just google "cookie dough." [Turning to S and I and chuckling.] He was just googling "cooking dough."
Lil' S2: Just go away! I don't need your help! I can do it myself!

2:30p: Another funny quote from Lil' S1 involving food: "No thanks, I'll make it myself. I watch a lot of grilled cheese sandwich videos." 

4:00p: We are going to a friend's house for the Super Bowl tonight, and it's not a Seahawk-centric thing. It's just a normal, nonpartisan Super Bowl party. A lot of hardcore fans don't like going to parties with non-fans, because there are so many distractions around, but I actually prefer it specifically because of the distractions. It reminds me that sports fandom is supposed to be fun and social and that it actually doesn't matter to my life who wins. I do, however, download the Peacock app on my phone and log in with my sister-in-law's credentials. This way I'll always have access to the game. We usually leave this party at halftime, because the Super Bowl is on too late on the East Coast (why not a 4:25p start time like regular season games?), but the hosts like to do this raffle thing with all the kids during halftime, and so by the time we actually get home, the game is well into the third quarter. When it's two teams I don't care about, this is fine, but with the Seahawks, I might want to have S drive and watch in the car.

10:30p: Seahawks win the Super Bowl 29-13. Hell yeah!

 Until next time...