After some insurance hokey pokey (the car was totaled, the car wasn’t totaled, the car was totaled for reals), Denisa and I discovered that yes, we were going to have to get a new car. For a researcher like me, this is officially The Worst. Not because I’m scare of some research, but because the research question (“What is the best car for Bryce and Denisa?”) has so many facets. We have to consider price,…

Ugh. What an ordeal. I’ve blogged before about how I cracked my tooth and would need to have it extracted. That was back in March. When I made the appointment to have the tooth come out, they didn’t have time until July. Then they called back in early May to let me know that actually the guy who was going to extract my tooth in July had quit, and they rescheduled me for September. The…

I went and voted today in the Maine primaries, mainly so I could vote to approve the school budget. But in the lead up to today’s vote, I started to get texts. Soooooo many texts. All of them telling me how I had to vote for somebody because he’d be the one person to stand up for Trump, or how he did something for Trump, or how he knew Trump’s gardner’s grandfather’s ex-bowling buddy. Guess…

Various corners of the internet have repeated the refrain time and time again: Hollywood’s not coming out with anything original anymore. It’s remakes all the way down. While I’d go along with a statement like most of the tentpole films that get a ton of marketing are remakes or adaptations, I don’t think that’s true for all film by any stretch. You just have to actually pay attention or look for the original ones out…

I’m still over here, plugging away at using generative text in different ways to see how best to apply it. Yes, I still have concerns, and I continue to yo-yo back and forth between thinking this is being overplayed and thinking it’s being underplayed. I’m reading books on the nuances of AI and generative text, and my biggest conclusion is that we still don’t really know what the heck we’re doing and why it’s working…

I headed over to the middle school again this morning for another round of career day. While I offered to talk about being a librarian or an author, no one seemed too keen on learning about being a librarian. (Surprised?) For the kids who wanted to know about being an author, their actual interest seemed to span a fairly wide range of “really want to know and ask questions” to “I have no idea why…

We had another run in with a deer over the weekend. Well, by “we,” I mean “Denisa,” and I suppose this is her first run in with a deer, so saying it’s another one is also kind of off. But you get the picture. She had just picked up MC from a party, and on their way home, a deer decided it would be a lot of fun to jump in front of a car…

As everyone and their brother knows by now, Trump was found guilty on all charges yesterday afternoon. And while I was floored by the verdict, now that I’ve had some time to think it through, I’m not sure what, exactly, it does to change things. Don’t get me wrong. I do think it mattered, particularly from an aspect of what would have happened if he’d been found not guilty. That was the outcome I was…

Back when I first watched the newest version of Dune, I was left dissatisfied for a variety of reasons. It lacked a consistent source of tension, it had too many characters, and it felt like all build up and no actual climax. I’ve since watched it two more times (once right before watching the sequel), and I believe it works better than I first gave it credit. The third time through, it was much clearer…

I’ve been on the record multiple times marveling at just how big of strides generative AI has been making since it first burst on the scene. Yes, I realize that “intelligence” is somewhat debatable with ChatGPT, but I also begin to wonder if it really makes much of a difference. It’s certainly possible that generative AI is just the first big step toward actual AI. But. I’ve been having a few additional thoughts the past…