Family, Media, Mysteries, Technology, TV, Uncategorized

VS versus VR

63 Comments

Two days ago I got the following text message from Nonny:

P a little surprised what a sweetheart I couldn’t remember the old Club was asking her about her interest but they seem to only be about the lieutenant who was across the room at the time she told me she thought you was hot start I agreed you could look at it and then she asked if I’d ever fantasize about sleeping with him sorry the TV is is making this I’ll hang up.

Now Nonny struggles with technology so as I began to read, I was trying to guess what she might be trying to say.  It wasn’t until I got to the fantasize part that I was really confused.  Then the last line about the tV made me laugh out loud.  She couldn’t figure out how to make the voice recognition stop recording when she realized it was picking up the tv.  Phew… my mother has never asked me about fantasizing about sleeping with anyone – and I don’t want that to start!

Then the same day I started VR for something and didn’t realize I had my phone set to Italian; normally it switches on by itself for my daily Italian lesson and then turns itself off when I’m done.  But I must have accidentally changed to Italian.  I don’t even remember what I was trying to say, but this is what I got:

Anonymous game ex fan Week and Hugh know Cost Wearing Nice T-shirt il Renzi stasera mangiare cioè stop period and Best me va bene anche a me Kiss Snapchat Giusy shorts T-shirt c’è in CAPS ormai Favorites schiena biologico Birthday Office

It must be a voice recognition foul up kind of week.  Two more on Wednesday that I caught on the blog right before I hit Post.

“And jam is also easier to make” turned into “And Jim is also easier to make”.

“I’ve never had a guy stand at the end of a row with a stick. Turned into “I’ve never had a guy at the end of a roller coaster”

I’m a little worried about what VR is thinking about me… fantasizing, making Jim and having a guy at the end of a roller coaster.  Yikes.

But when you think about the technology involved in these little tiny circuits being able to hear your voice, search the database for a match and then enter it as text in your application – it’s amazing that it works as well as it does.  What I really need is some kind of a cattle prod to zap me right before I hit “Post” to make sure I doublecheck what VR has done for me!

Do you have a technology currently bugging you?

63 thoughts on “VS versus VR”

  1. I turn on the hot tap, and the cold tap runs instead. No, actually, I saw Jack Benny do it on “I love Lucy,” known to us as “The Lucy Show.”
    I thought, “This show is getting stupid,” and never watched it again.

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  2. Sandy now talks somewhat like that. She is in St. James, no bed here. Awaiting placement, which is hard to find. She sundowns for the poor staff every night. Rational for me in the mornings, except for bird walks off into neverland every now and then, then she realizes what she has done. I bring over both iPad and iPhone for double the battery life. How would I have done all this without technology. And the technology in a hospital room!
    Went shopping last night, with no clue how to shop and cook for one. Nor what I want to eat, like to eat. For about 5 years I have cooked to. Fit her diet. Would I like pizza? Not sure. Pork? Lean cuisines and the like are the current strategy. Going to go for water therapy for first time in more than a week, turn in complicated form at county, and then drive 45 miles.

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    1. Clyde – Lean Cuisine and the like are a great idea while you are in transition – I just bought some La Choy Beef Chow Mein, because that’s the meal we just delivered on Husband’s route, and the smell had permeated the car, making us both hungry for that. I have a lovely home made chow mein recipe, but THAT isn’t going to happen today…

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  3. Oh, the technology at work! I have VR for when I write evaluations. I speak into my microphone and the words appear on my document. It sometimes comes up with the most fantastical things. I can enter words in a dictionary ahead of time, like names. I have to enter possessive, too, since Renee, for example, is completely different than Renee’s. I also have to state punctuation. It knows, somehow that when I say “comma” that it is to type a comma, not the word comma.

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  4. The Progressive Snapshot is bugging me again. I’ll get a discount on insurance when I prove to the computer that I’m a safe driver. On Wednesday this week, my rating was back up to A- after having been downgraded to a B for hard braking to avoid an accident. It took several months of error-free driving to accomplish this. But the monitoring dinged me 4 braking events when my phone slipped from the holder to the floor. It also dinged me for 250 round trip miles to see my Dad and watch the Saint Paul Saints.
    The display assures me that ” You’ve in good shape and still on track for savings!” (Note the exclamation mark)
    The display then commences a scold about hard braking for traffic lights and how I should try to keep the miles driven under 30 per day.
    When I next visit Dad, I will be sure to use the pause monitoring feature but I suspect Big Brother will still be watching me. The discount better be good!

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        1. I’ve had to turn off the voice of my GPS in the car because I’m just sure that she is exasperated with me when I don’t turn where she says I should.

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        2. Sherrilee, it’s the mispronunciation of place names used to annoy me. “They can put men on the moon,” I probably used to say. People would get tired of hearing it. But they can make it work out all that complicated stuff instantly, and sometimes get it right. Surely a simple, polite thing like pronouncing a name correctly, isn’t so hard. But now I never go anywhere, so everyone’s life’s more peaceful.

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  5. Surprisingly, no tech annoyances lately. Computers mostly cooperating. Phone is used minimally for text communication and the occasional email check or internet search. Fiber optic cable hookup for TV, phone, and internet has worked well (a few glitches in the TV connection since the local company (Jaguar) was purchased by Metronet, but hey, whatcha gonna do?

    I’m sure my luck will soon change though because I regularly am reduced to an angry, cursing ranter when my computer or some other device goes on strike.

    Chris in O-town

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  6. I am mad at the cable company right now and starting to seriously think I need to look into all the ways I can remove cable from my life. Our equipment is old and YA ordered two new boxes (free) that she installed. The first box came with a return label but I thought “that’s silly to spend the money to send a piece of equipment through UPS but I can just drop it off. “. When I went to drop it off I was told it would be an hour (or so) wait which I was not willing to do. (And if you try to make an appointment at your local cable store they tell you right up front and even if you make an appointment your wait time is probably going to be 15 minutes to a half an hour.This just chaps my shorts.) So we slapped the label on it and sent it through UPS. Second box didn’t have a label. I’m not even going to go into what it took but suffice it to say an hour and 15 minutes later of I finally got a label that I could print out on my PC. Grrrrr.

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    1. With sandy not coming home, I will drop cable TV. I seldom watch it. Will look for some streaming service ms m, or not, and will get TPT Passport. With a little effort I will later get a different internet service.

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      1. Came to St. James. She has oxygen level issue. So going to KAto to get her cpap the full mask of which she could not handle after she got pneumonia. Getting nose insert and bring all that back. 190 miles on the road today.

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  7. Our cat is enjoying the technology of the large paper grocery bag set on its side this morning. Oh, what fun! Especially when her favorite crumpled up paper ball is inside it!

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    1. There are time that Low Tech is so great. One of the mindfulness exercises we use at work is the very low tech game, Pick Up Sticks. It does more for our clients than any app ever will.

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    2. Had been planning to do a post about two cats and a dog. My son’s companion kitten has been perfect for him. She sits on wide window shelf behind his computer and sometimes puts her head over top of computer to complain. His workmates at the job he had until last Friday loved hearing and seeing the cat

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  8. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    Today is my mother’s 93rd birthday. I will be headed down to Iowa to “celebrate” with her and my siblings, so I will not be here much this weekend. She was born in 1928 as the world of technology began to change. Once I was running water in the sink, and I allowed it to run down the drain until the water warmed up enough for the task. Out of the blue she said “We had to carry every drop of water we used, from the well to the house.” This was true until Grandpa installed a hand pump in the kitchen. Given that, I can appreciate the technology of plumbing we now have.

    And then there is Word Press which I did not appreciate yesterday when it made me re-post my comment 4 times. Bah! WP irritates me to no end sometimes.

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    1. Living with WP is like having a roommate who farts a lot. By contrast, I love the technology of the YouTube comments page. You can return to a stupid comment and make it better, or if it was really stupid you can delete it altogether. For some of us, that’s important.

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        2. WordPress is not user-friendly. When someone tries to respond to a particular comment, WP often throws the comment into another location, leading to confusion. If you see someone referring to an “ectopic” post, that is what they mean. The program often loses posts or otherwise misbehaves.

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  9. Using my computer minimally at the moment. My appointment is at the Apple Genius Bar is at 4 this afternoon, hopefully, that will solve the battery issues and not cause any new ones. My iPhone I rarely use, don’t really know how, and don’t feel as if I need or want it. But yes, I do have a technology issue that is preventing me from using my oven. Stopped in a the repair place yesterday. The new motherboard needed to get the oven operational again is on back order, still, and would you believe the repair place has no idea when it might be available? I asked them to please call Frigidaire and ask, is that really too much to expect? They said they would, and would call me in a couple of days, but they clearly had the attitude to that I was being a pain the posterior. They had another customer, they said, who had been waiting since September of last year for a new part. I informed them that if that were me, I’d be an ex-customer. That’s simply unacceptable lack of service. I suppose that’s probably not helping the situation any, but at least they know that I’m not a happy camper.

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      1. Oh, I understand shortages, Wes. What bugs me is that they must have known this when they placed the order for the part. Had they told me up front that there were parts they might not be able to get, and without which they wouldn’t be able to fix the damn stove, I would not have invested $469.00 in the new part they have already installed, and which apparently is incompatible with the old mother board. Instead, I probably would have bought a new stove. I bet there’s no shortage of microchips for the new stoves they’re manufacturing. Somehow it’s the chips for fixing the old ones that they can’t seem to get their hands on.

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  10. OT: When we owned a cabin in northwestern Wisconsin we loved spending summer evenings at the Big Top Chautauqua tent. Many different shows happened there, such as the musical evening put on by John Hartford or the production of the Pirates of Penzance. As good as the music usually was, we favored shows that told stories about that region’s past. Behind the performers they would project old photos of fishing boats, kids with their dogs and portraits of early settlers. Of those historical shows, our favorite was Riding the Wind.

    I mention this because my daughter, grandson and former wife are right now in a car headed for Bayfield. They have tickets for Riding the Wind at the old tent tonight. I hope Liam enjoys this as much as his mom used to. Kathe hasn’t seen Riding the Wind since moving to Belgium in 1999, I think, and Molly hasn’t seen it since was a teenager. I’m so happy for them. Tonight I’ll put on the CD for this show and spend maybe two hours soaking facial tissues and trying to sing along

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    2. That is a heartwarming story Steve, really. But haven’t you got any more of those, you know, where you end up sprawled on the ground, exhausted and bleeding? I love those ones.

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    3. I’ve just received some emails from my daughter. Molly says Riding the Wind was as wonderful as we remembered. And I can’t tell you how much it thrilled me to read: “Liam loved it!” This show is probably more emotional for me than any other topic on earth. When I played the old tunes again this afternoon I wept harder than I have for years.

      You learn that all beautiful things in our lives are doomed to disappear at some point. Your favorite singer or author dies; your favorite building burns down; your favorite radio show goes off the air; your beloved State Fair attraction is retired so something newer can take its place. But tonight I get to savor the joy of something very special that has defied the reductive brutality of change, and the people I love were there to experience it.

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  12. My mom texts a simple “Good Morning, Have a good day” to the family every morning. Often with the TV playing in the background. Some days they’re pretty funny… some days it’s a mystery…

    I have an old iPad I use on occasion; usually theater related as I can control the lightboard with it and follow along in rehearsals, that sort of thing. But the battery is very iffy; some days it works, some days it’s dead even when just charged. And now I’m taking it to class…when it works… it’s left me dead in class enough that I finally ordered a new one. And the regular iPads are back ordered for 2 months, so I had to opt up to a fancier one. Course then I need the screen protector and keyboard, and not just any keyboard, but the heavy duty one because that’s what works best in the theater setting.
    And Kelly really likes her’s and she uses a pencil too and thought I should get a pencil to use w/ the iPad… so we’ll see.

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  13. OT:Crop report!! Don’t want to steal Ben’s thunder, but this is big time!
    My late sown tomato seeda finally produced thirteen good plants. The very hot weather (rightly mentioned by Renee), combined with the shortening days, have convinced the plants that it’s time to die, and put all their resources into what fruit they’d already produced. I have harvested on three days in succession, and yields SO FAR have been : Thursday, one tomato, almost ripe. Friday, one tomato, almost ripe. Today, Saturday, one tomato, almost ripe. In addition to this! There are still three late-appearing fruits of approximately an inch in diameter each. One of which will be ripe by tomorrow. So if we count those three as one, that’s FOUR tomatoes, out of only thirteen plants. A lot of the water used was recycled from another project. No money was expended on the round trip every day for watering, as I had another reason to be there anyway. So water, labour, seed, compost which I have mountains of. Total expenditure approximately 28,000 euros, or 7,000 per tomato. Possibly I could have bought them cheaper in a shop. No substitute for quality though.

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    1. Look up ” The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in 5he Quest For The Perfect Garden ” by William Alexander.

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  15. WordPress!! I decided I was going to use the expression “Chaps my shorts” on the end
    of nearly every comment. I thought I was being really funny. So the first remark got put WAY further down than it was supposed to. The second one, put in a different way, in a different place in the blog, they told me, oh dear, mustn’t repeat myself. And they didn’t post it! I mean, wouldn’t it chap YOUR shorts?

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    1. And now the one they said they wouldn’t post has come up after all. Where I wanted it to. Just to make me look like an idiot.

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