I didn't expect to be wowed. But I did get to experience their local flavor of natural disaster.
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Archives for January 2013
Voice Recognition and the Singularity
I’m all for technological progress and making the world an easier place to live, but I’m starting to wonder if we’ve perhaps jumped the gun on this voice recognition automated phone system thing.
It’s not because it doesn’t really work, though one could easily make that argument. Neither is it because making phone calls around other people has become an exercise in minimizing the public shaming of sternly and repeatedly saying things like “billing question” and “representative” before breaking into very long streams of numbers or admitting that “I don’t know it.” People can tell when it’s not going well and you’re losing a battle of wits to a phone robot that doesn’t have any.
Now, if you read enough Internet throughout the day, you might be aware of the forthcoming singularity. The point in which machines become smarter than us and potentially self-aware. This could happen soon. And I’d hate for their to be any kind of residual memory of a time gone by, when humans were literally cussing out the phone robots who weren’t able to understand anything because other humans thought it would be so cool to try and talk our way through phone systems rather than just pressing buttons.
Look, IT folk. I know that you have to always be pushing things forward to give the appearance of doing your jobs, but voice recognition isn’t ready yet. All you’re accomplishing is making us look extra crushable to our future machine overlords.
Refrigerators and the New Year’s salads that fill them
As we make our way through the post-apocalyptic hell-scape of 2013, I’ve found myself in the middle of several personal endeavors that could be easily confused with New Years Resolutions.
I’m not alone in this. The office refrigerator has been crammed full of tupperware full of salads for the past two weeks. The gym has transformed into some kind of bizarre observational tank. Hopeful overweight people in street clothes are given tours where they can watch the rest of us overweight people do rediculous things like burpees in badly fitting dryfit gear. It was the closest I’ll ever feel to being in an 80s training montage.
**Pro-tip:** It’s really hard to avoid looking like an asshole while doing hammercurls.
However, I don’t think of what I’m doing as correlating to the New Year. I tried to go through the whole resolutions thing a few years back, and I found that there’s no better way to give your hopes and ambitions a swirly than to stick them on some list of behavioral pipe-dreams at the beginning of the year. In my case, I’ve been slowly building up to this, and I happened to read some fairly motivational books towards the end of 2012. It’s not my fault that I realized just how badly I was sucking at some fairly important aspects of life when I did.
So here we are: I’m going through some kind of a self-improvement thing that’s easy to condescend to. I’m not afraid to admit it, even though I find myself rolling my eyes at half of what I’m reading nowadays. In fact, I’m resisting the urge to slam my fingers in my laptop as I’m writing this. But that’s the way of the world. Gotta move forward. Can’t just stay the same unorganized mess that barely squeaked through the first couple decades of life. Headway needs to be made! Wake needs to be created! Budgets need to be followed!
Onward!