Category: Uncategorized

Testing Testing, Again!

Day before yesterday I lost contact with my blog for no reason that I can discover. This is a test to see whether the situation has righted itself without me doing anything other than signing in in the normal way.

Well, I successfully saved a draft. That’s already an improvement.

I was asked did I want AI to generate an image.

My prompt as follows … A camp of camel herders with tents and camels standing around, the surrounding countryside has corn growing, and a massive plateau rises in the background.

The result below … obviously the AI and I have a long way to go before we understand each other. My need is to learn more about prompt engineering.

The AI’s need is a more extensive library of images, the ability to ‘do’ metaphor, and an algorithm for interpreting unusual combinations.

Reading: ‘Doomsday Book’

Published in 1992

This is one of those novels that improves on a second reading. Probably I tried to race through it too fast first time I read it. And with a many stranded novel such as this, that will not work.

Although it’s a story of time travelling, and does the nitty gritty of the character in the 1300s very well, it’s also an extremely detailed story of the latter half of the twentieth century masquerading as the 2050s.

While I never confused the two eras, the detail of life in the so-called 2050s and the number of interesting lives that were being described, made it hard to sustain interest in the historian stuck in the 1320s. Especially since it became clear early in the piece that her rescue would have to originate in the future where she came from.

I found it increasingly difficult to have patience enough to go back into the 1320s and I suspect that the story set in the 1320s was always smaller. The mystery of Kithrin’s illness too had to be solved in the future.

The set-up took a long time, many pages of often not-understandable detail before we meet Kithrin in 1320. Which is normal in SF, of course. There is always a lot of material needed to be held ‘in abeyance’, as it used to be called, where a reader needs to remember a bunch of new facts before they are explained.

In this story, there were frequent reminders rather than an explanation as early as possible.

There was so much of such detail that it gave the impression of foam on the real beer underneath, or seafoam on a beach where you have to wade through to find the strand’s features.

Kithrin’s problems with the language in the medieval time where she was transposed went on for longer than I had patience for, yet this is not a novel where you can skip bits. The old words begged to be translated but the effort took me out of the story too often.

I began to look forward to Colin’s story for its comic relief, with hardly with any relevance to the main two stories.

The style tells me the time the events are taking place are maybe the 1950s to 1980s. It was published in 1992. And so the story’s present day reads like history in this present day, not the 2050s not too far into our future.

This novel will reward a patient reader prepared to chew through it steadily. Almost every actor in it, even walk on parts, get characterisation, their fifteen minutes on the stage. There were parts I enjoyed and parts that irritated me.

Plover aka ‘Masked Lapwing’

By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145114385

These last few day, whenever I walk into the bedroom for something, I stop and stare out through the windows at a little place on the grass beyond the podium at the plovers nesting there. Pronounced as ‘pluvvers’ according to a long-time Brisbanite.

My camera really does not do it justice so here’s where your imagination must come into play. [If you want to have a go at zooming in? The bird is sitting a little below the third panel of fencing from the right. All you will see is a little brown blob.]

In the last few days, I’ve only seen a couple of intrepid people take the concrete path from the podium across the grass to the old village. One of the dog-walkers had an angry, swooping bird follow them from one end of the path to the other. And, these birds are said to have a poisonous spur on their “wrists” … they have the spurs but they’re not poisonous.

“Breeding usually happens after the winter solstice (June 21), but sometimes before.” Quote from the Wikipedia article. Spot on. The birds began sitting seriously about four days ago. It’ll be interesting to see how long they take to hatch the eggs, as there is no info on that in my bird book or in the Wikipedia article. Today I was lucky enough to see the change over of parents a few minutes after dusk.

The chicks will be dependent on the parents for protection for about 5 months. I can’t see there being enough food (insects and worms) in that grassy area for that long, but if it does happen to suffice, I hope we residents can stay patient enough to see the chicks to maturity.

Talk about counting your chickens before they hatch! The Wildlife of Greater Brisbane tells me suburban birds rarely manage to hatch their eggs. Dogs, cats, foxes, humans … all of them disrupting and chasing and some of them predating. That’s being glum, of course. I did read that the Brisbane Snake Catchers as well as catching and relocating snakes, relocate plover nests. That has got to be a huge operation. Two large angry birds defending four eggs on a flattened bit of grass?

https://snakecatcherbrisbane.net.au/plover-management/

Just checked them and nope, they don’t. But they do give contact details to licensed plover catchers and a link to a neat “404 page IE a page not found”. [This latter will go into my collection of 404’s.]

‘A Scanner Darkly’

By Phillip Dick, an SF Masterwork published in 1999, original from 1977

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scanner_Darkly

Wrote this post three years ago:

“She risked her masked-up health and went into her new favorite library, St Vinnies—an Op Shop, charity or opportunity store—and “borrowed” eight old-fashioned print books. This because the local library was shut for Christmas-and-New-Year and the local virtual library not listening to her passwords, library id or pins.

“On arriving home, she began reading Phillip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Not wanting to stop for lunch she got a bottle of water, and a jar of Pano dark choc bits. Ate the latter and drank the former while continuing to read. Round about 4.30 PM, she remembered the not-getting-sick parameter, and drank more water before making and eating a peanut butter sandwich with blueberries.

“Though the read was not all that gripping, she’d decided to read it, so read it she would. If that makes sense. The title, which an FB friend was attracted to after the crone posted a pic of a bag full of reading matter, sounds like a take on ‘through a glass darkly’ … let me just check that …

“OMG! yourbibleversedaily dot com tells her: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. – 1 Corinthians 13:12. Paul’s famously poetic statement about the difficulty of knowing God in this life says a lot more than at first meets the eye.”

“Well, it tells her it’s definitely worth it to check references, sometimes only vaguely known. What she has read so far of Through a Scanner Darkly … Yep, yep, definitely shaping up … to Augustine’s interpretation: “For Augustine, we see the image of ourselves clearly, but, as a reflection of God, the image is an imperfect way of gazing upon God.”

“All she can think is, that poor sap. (Thinking about A Scanner Darkly’s MC now.) He thinks he’s on top of what he’s trying to do but of course he will come a cropper. I wouldn’t be surprised, she thinks, if there’s a proper death at the end, not just the split-brain drug-addled undeath.
So. She’ll keep reading. [Posted 22 Dec 2021]

This is me, here and now, two and a half years on. Apparently I did blog this at the time but I can’t somehow deliver the image. As you’ll have noticed this isn’t a book review but another post about blogging. What a supposed ‘seamless transfer’ looks like on the ground. When advertising gurus talk about seamless transfers they don’t take into account the oceanic number of input/output skills out there/here or the infinite gradations of computer use competence.

I know that though I’ve been using computers for 28+/- years, my skill set is highly idiosyncratic, as is that of everyone else who was self-taught. And I believe the majority of us are, aren’t we?

I had three options of delivering that pic and none worked so far. My Media Library has about 800 images in it, but not apparently the cover of the novel I was writing about. I did a Search and got a virtual copy. The result of that maneuver is at the top. No image that I can see. And if it does appear in the post between the time I hit the Publish button and you read it, it’ll be the old pic. Not the Blue green and yellow version gracing the Masterwork.

Or I could take a photo of the print version I have, email it to myself and download it. That hasn’t worked either. So far. Google for some reason has retrieved an email address I left in the dust six years ago.

My Google ID is my next job.

Stuck!

Me screaming frustration …

I am stuck between a rock and a hard place Americans might say. Old Americans, probably. I don’t know if that aphorism is still being used.

I am stuck between my old Mac, with an old copy of Microsoft Word that I’m perfectly happy with, and new Mac with a so-far unlicensed Microsoft Word 365 that has frozen several of my Files. I haven’t been asked did I want the new version and I definitely haven’t agreed to hosting it on my computer.

Of course I know it’s probably some handshake agreement between Apple and Microsoft, they thinking that because a person purchases an Apple laptop they will naturally want also to purchase a gazillion MB word processor suite with no questions asked.

It’s here and it’s freezing my work as if it owns my output. That fact already is making me dig my heels in. My files, on my computer–not even online– frozen on the say-so of a company too big for its boots? Ee-ee-eh! That’s me screaming, frustrated already.

I can’t post either Brick Stories or Lodestar as my files are stuck in Word-ruled limbo for some so-far unidentified reason, and it’s ironic because the only thing I use Word for is to turn screeds into PDFs, as I generally use Scrivener for first and second drafts. So I really really resent having to purchase a huge program, either on a monthly basis at $11 US ad infinitum, or outright for over $200 US … just to free my work!

I can’t even copy and paste into a another program. And this is immediately after I proved I’m human. This is the material I personally wrote, for pity’s sake!

Just had a call from BH who suggested I check out Acrobat Reader. Good idea. I will. But first Scrivener. Surely it has the capability to PDF? Sounds like a dance. It’s all I need a couple of steps here, then there.

Found it. Scrivener dances the PDF.

Goodbye, Microsoft.

Blogging: ‘On the Edge’

This is the post where I learn to embed a video clip …

I started with a sentence intro’ing my post. ‘Stumbled across this video clip entirely serendipitously just after realizing I’m no longer living on a knife edge between two dramas.’

Intended to embed without a drama. The instructions are clear, can I follow directions finally?

I followed the directions and pasted a link to the content I wanted to embed. I clicked on the button EMBED. It tells me to paste an URL. Huh? Where? Like, the box where is filled with the link?

I click on ‘Learn more about embeds’ and I’m told everything I already know and that I have already done.

No. Wait … scrolling further down I learn that I need to paste in the URL which acts as a link. Never mind FB telling me to do it the other way round. I’ll give the WP way another go.

So I paste the URL.

I get a tell … ‘Sorry this content could not be embedded.’ And two blue boxes with ‘Try again.’ and ‘Convert to link.’

https://www.facebook.com/reel/2462779200599055

But. In actual fact. Checking the post I see that I have a LINK where I had expected an EMBED.

LOL, topping Everest!

Not the one I wanted of a couple of climbers negotiating an edge.

Back to the drawing board