Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Give Good Pets
May 22, 2024
pets care dog

The secret to giving good pets to your dogs is simple. You need to pet a little harder than you think. Most people just run their fingers through the dog’s fur, which dogs do enjoy, but it’s not the best way.

After many years of petting my dog, he has learned that I give the best pets. I believe this is because I am willing to dig in and give him more of a massage than just touching his fur. You need to find some muscle groups and really massage them. It’s more about getting past the fur and touching the actual dog.

Gunn Island
May 20, 2024
island camping story

Over the weekend, Riley, my dad, and I went on a weekend camping trip to Gunn Island via HipCamp. We had to take a canoe and a kayak to the island with all of our gear to set up. It was a pretty neat experience, both in the doing and that I got to spend time with Riley and my dad together.

I put some details into ChatGPT about the trip and asked it to make up a story. We all thought this one was pretty amusing, if not entirely accurate. Riley suggests that it should have provided more detail on the mollusk attacks, and I completely agree. Nonetheless, enjoy.

Solar Eclipse in Cleveland
April 13, 2024
cleveland eclipse astronomy travel

I took a few days off work to drive to Cleveland, Ohio, to witness the 2024 total solar eclipse. Back in 2017, the family and I too a vacation to Charleston, South Carolina, to watch that year’s eclipse. NASA set up a presentation in a minor league baseball stadium with a casual atmosphere. Although it was overcast and we couldn’t see the eclipse directly, we experienced the darkness and eerie lightened horizon.

This year was different. I couldn’t convince my kids to skip school, and Berta couldn’t join me due to her recent time off. So, I went on the trip alone. I booked a hotel room in Cleveland and drove out there on Sunday, the day before the eclipse. The six-hour drive was surprisingly shorter than what it often takes to get to Columbus.

Post Creation Workflow
April 04, 2024
Sn blog workflow

While writing this blog, I would like to be able to create a workflow that allows me to quickly create posts written in my own voice and post them to the site without a lot of effort. One of the things that causes a lot of effort to take place is having to type out every single word. These days, it’s pretty easy to use a microphone to record new spoken content and have it transcribed into something that can be posted online. I’ve recently been experimenting with a tool called AudioPen, which records my voice, transcribes it, and then submits it to an AI model to rewrite the content a bit. This is particularly interesting because if you’ve ever recorded yourself speaking live and listened back to it, you’ll note that you make a lot of mistakes, the grammar isn’t necessarily correct, and what you generally hear is pretty forgivable if you’re a listener, but not very forgivable if you are a reader of that transcribed text. I really wouldn’t want to publish directly transcribed text to the website without a significant amount of editing, and so it’s nice that it sends it through this AI model, which corrects some of the grammar and enhances some of the wording to really get at the meaning. Unfortunately, the prompt that AudioPen uses is a little more aggressive than I would like and removes a lot of what makes my voice hear, at least my written voice, sound like me. I tend to sound more like an AI model, so I’ve been playing with some other tools to hopefully make this as easy of a workflow, but with less loss of fidelity in the transcription.

I’ve been exploring a workflow that enables me to quickly generate posts in my own voice with minimal effort. One of the biggest challenges is the need to type out every single word. Nowadays, it’s fairly straightforward to record spoken content with a microphone and have it transcribed for online posting. I’ve been experimenting with a tool called AudioPen, which records my voice, transcribes the content, and then enhances it through an AI model. This approach is particularly fascinating because, as many of us might have noticed, live speech often includes numerous mistakes. The grammar might not be on point, and while these errors are generally forgivable to listeners, they are less so to readers of the transcribed text.