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Overview
The script features a conversation between two people (Alan and Stephen) discussing various topics, primarily focusing on technology, entertainment, and human experiences. They discuss the function and utility of a script-editing tool and how it is used to organize and edit a podcast script. They dive into augmented intelligence topic, specifically the features of Chat GPT, an AI model developed by OpenAI that generates human-like text. They also share their interest in movies and discuss their thoughts on the film “Poor Thing”. Further, they discuss travel plans, especially trips to London and Isle of Wight, along with their love for food exploration. Finally, they delve into the discussion on intellectual property rights touching upon topics like copyrights, trademarks, and the concept of public domain.
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Transcript
Relentless Geekery 175
Alan: [00:00:00] There we go. We got going. It looks like Machu Picchu.
Yeah, that’s on the list. Okay. All right. Such a long list of things we discussed. Tell me about it. Okay.
Stephen: And can you hear me? I can hear you. Can you hear me? No, I can hear you. Yes. I can’t hear you. Gosh, darn it.
Alan: I’m unmuted. I’m hold
Stephen: on. It’s my stupid. Now say something
Alan: about now. No.
Stephen: Yes. It’s every time I switch between all these streaming things, it wants to, it grabs my microphone as speakers.
I’m like, it’s not an output, or I have weird. Yeah. I use my Oculus last night. So now everything wants to use the Oculus for output and input. I’m like,
Alan: no. Yeah, we’ve talked about that, that so many places seem to assume that they’re the only one that [00:01:00] is making use of your ports and they’re going to have to learn really quickly that people do switch between.
Various different streaming sites, various different devices, like you said, the
Stephen: Oculus and stuff like that. Some things are smart and have an audio profile and you can have multiple. This is my studio audio profile. This is my whatever, so when Zoom starts up, pick the audio profile that I use, the microphone and the speakers.
When Oculus starts up, pick the audio profile that works. This is 2024. It’s not a new thing.
Alan: I actually, another one of those solve problems type things. I remember when we used to hook up printers and they had to know whether it was serially or parallel. And then printers started to be smart enough that they would declare themselves with appropriate drivers and stuff like that, so that it was not only where you were hooked up to, but make sure that you had the right driver for an HP or a brother or an Epson or whatever like that.
So that all was working and then something seemed to break it. And nowadays regularly we have, [00:02:00] maybe it’s what network gets attached to or what there started to be not only company specific drivers, but they started to have like cups or various things where someone tried to make a generic driver.
You know what I mean? That, that, that would work for everything probably. There was a very good shareware program that came with its own drivers so that it would be like that, but then that started to break things and because it wasn’t only can you talk to the printer, they almost always had an interpolative queuing system where you didn’t just have to be directly connected to your printer.
It would put it out there as a virtual print, and then you could manage your print queue. Not everybody played nice with that. So it’s up to geeks like you and I to continually see, is it working or why isn’t it working? Or it was working and now it’s. Broken to figure all that out and I would have, I would always hope that once they figured it out, they’d say now that we know it’s not just leave it to software.
Sometimes you can embed it in a chip in the printer that all of those capabilities are in there. And then someone says, yeah, but that costs [00:03:00] 32 and we could go 30 by not including something that’s going to make it easy on everyone. Oh I don’t mind a little bit of troubleshooting. I hate where it’s wow, there’s my backup stopped working.
It has worked for years and years. And something having to do with my, I have a. More than a super drive. I have, a CD, DVD player that’s supposed to be able to handle everything you could put into it and burn to every format, both plus and minus way back and now more currently.
And then I to segue into one of the things you want to talk about. Hey, I went on the post Christmas. Buying bin, all kinds of boxed sets and like everything is working. And then was it David Bowie? It was somebody that was like, is he’s in a different format or did my device just decide to stop working correctly?
And I, okay, it could be that it’s a European format disc, even though I thought that was worldwide correctly done. Am I trying to import [00:04:00] something that, cause I know that there are some of these things that they have still Protection in, copy protection or zone specific protection and various different things.
And so it will, maybe it’s having problems with it, but it eventually gets to it. It’s just slower. It’s having to do some kind of header. Record level manipulation. It’s got to check with the website without my knowing it, that this is indeed legit, it’s just maddening. When you put in like 10 different disks and number 11 stops working but why it’s, oh
Stephen: I had something very similar Friday, I discovered that.
I’m two years behind on updates for windows that I haven’t gotten the updates. I’ve gotten a few minor things, but not the major stuff. And I’m like, okay I don’t like that because I was wanting to use the new included AI copilot for being have that little up and just give it a try. And it wasn’t there.
It’s on my laptop. So I. I spent way longer than I probably should have [00:05:00] trying to figure this out. And I’m like, what do normal people do? I’m getting in the registry and hacking through the registry type thing. And I was, so finally I strong armed it, did it manually and got it going.
And, update, leave my programs in place, just keep the settings, just. But the new stuff, it didn’t do that because I was forcing it or whatever, reset almost everything. I have to, I’m reinstalling programs. I’m setting it up. So no, this really does have to run when I start up. I don’t want to, but the worst one is Google Drive, Google Cloud Drive.
Because, okay, they offer whether you store things locally and keep it synced, or if you just use it cloud wise, you have to point it to the folder. It’s not the most simple to use. And so I had a whole drive. Dedicated to just my Google cloud. That’s basically my documents. That’s all my files.
Alan: You’re cutting in and [00:06:00] out a little bit again. And I
Stephen: got nothing running. But I have my one drive that syncs up with Google cloud. It’s you know that. So now I get Google drive, reinstalled, go through the setup. I point it to the same place and it says, Oh, there’s something already there. You can’t do that.
So you have to. Point. And then it’s okay, was there some files that weren’t done backing up yet? Cause even though it’s continuous, if I do a whole bunch of work one day, it’s go slowly filter it through. And then it’s wait, what, now do I delete everything that’s local and redo the whole thing and hope I get it from there.
And it’s just always a mess.
Alan: I have a similar story to tell. I use a thing called Mac updater. To look at not so much my system software but everything else all the other apps that you can put on your Mac, and it keeps track of what things have gotten out of date, and it has the ability to summon all the various different updaters now there’s probably three four different.
Somebody wrote [00:07:00] good updaters, and a lot of different companies use them, so it does all of the updating the software, updating the database behind it, playing with your preference files, whatever else it might be, and it works really well, and it really, I like the fact that I’m up to date with virtually everything, because falling behind, like you said, two years, luckily that was not Security updates in your case.
Oh,
Stephen: no, it definitely was a pigeon.
Alan: It was, but Google drive, it used to have that. They had multiple different products that was like Google photo backup and Google, multiple things. And now they combine them all into one. Mac updater doesn’t know that and hasn’t for years, either Google didn’t tell them or Mac updater isn’t handling that perfectly.
So I regularly get like one, two, three updates. They’re all going to the same Google Drive, 85. 06 or whatever else it might be. So when I try to say it has the ability to stop paying attention to this particular app, or don’t do this particular upgrade or whatever like that. And just that little bit of manipulation.
It handles it, but every single time again, I [00:08:00] have to handle it again. So for something that’s supposed to just be do it automatedly for you in the background, take care of it for you. There’s now little things that I have to do. So I, it’s funny, very unexpected because you will usually.
Google is very good at playing well with multiple platforms. And it really does make a point of not being the one to cause any problems. But what I also know is, and I think you know this, for 25 years of Google now, 20 years, let’s say, a lot of great Google things start off, not that Google said, let’s make a good cloud drive.
Someone did it in their 20 percent that they’re allowed to do on personal projects. Gmail came to be that way. Google maps came to be that way. I think maybe Google drive did. So it isn’t really lots of people, lots of eyes, QA, all that kind of stuff. Did it. One guy did it really well. And the first version was whiz bang.
Great. But then if somebody inherited it. They haven’t had the same level of love and quality and so forth. And so that’s why they don’t, or maybe it’s [00:09:00] three different people did Google drive, Google photo backup, Google, that kind of stuff. And then they didn’t sit down in a conference room and they
Stephen: might be located thousands of miles apart.
Knowing Google,
Alan: it could be that many companies talk about, you got to eat your own dog food. Apple has always been really good about Apple people use Apple products. And if there’s something annoying about how mail works enough people internal to the company, not the millions of people out here, but just in the 20, 000, whatever they have working, it gets, surfaced and people will say, I don’t want to do that every day.
I will fix that. I hope that Google kind of gets with the program or the Mac day updater gets with the program to finally coordinate.
Stephen: So the one thing that bothers me, it just irritates the crap out of me with Google photo and since I combined it with drive is. I used to easily be able to connect my photos and copy them over and it’s synced up and all was good.
Now I have it running on my phone so I can access my photos and [00:10:00] see them all. But by default, the phone. Takes all the pictures on your phone and puts them into your photos. So I’ve got little icons, GIF icons, and I’ve got pictures that aren’t even like pictures where it’s some app that installed, it’s a picture from them.
And I’m just like, and everybody’s like, how do we not do that? And it’s Oh, we help you by looking at all the photos. I don’t want you to look at all the photos on my phone. I just want the ones that I took
Alan: to write that are specific in that drive, that folder, whatever. I think I mentioned, I’ve had to do a whole bunch of coordination with where that has happened in my Apple music.
And I’ve been copying things over to make sure that it all gets into one folder, one true, big, good folder. But then what you find out is that it is updating that to the cloud and it’s doing it in the background and that it isn’t all like it gives deference to things that are going on in the foreground.
So what I think is going to be well, by end of the day, it surely will have synced everything up. No, if you do a whole bunch of movement. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that still [00:11:00] needs to be done. And in this case, I really can’t let it run overnight and not worry about it. But what I’ve actually been passed by a couple of times is, I work on my presentations on usually this thing, because my, my, my home situation here is where I have multiple monitors.
And so I can have the tool palettes open in the main screen and get all that done. And then I’ll look at it on my laptop to make sure that it fits the right screen for what’s going to be available at the place that I’m going in the laptops. When I’m going to bring with. Doing all those various different things.
I’ve been caught any number of times with I thought that I had saved it and I thought I was saving it to the cloud, but it really was saving it locally. And then it’s going to do it. And if it has, I don’t know, I guess I was extra busy in the foreground and I get downstairs to my laptop and it isn’t my most current version.
So I have to go. And then I left to remember. How do I force it? How do I force it to do the synchronization now? And it isn’t obvious at all. You have to go in and play with settings or right click on something that isn’t what you would expect you’d have to right click on. And so I, we talk about this, that things used to [00:12:00] Like elegantly break, if it really wasn’t working, there was something you could try. That was the first, second, third troubleshooting thing, but then they’ve made them more and more opaque. And what you were just saying, like Colleen and I all the time we’re talking about, we’re having trouble with this, what about the people that.
Aren’t good troubleshooters like you and me, what about the people that just throw their hands up and say, must be a virus. It isn’t. It’s just that you, and even if you try to understand what’s doing in the background, there’s not even I don’t know, I regularly go searching on the net for I’m having this problem.
I can’t be the only one having this problem. How have they solved it? And then you find out that there’s not only different answers, but even conflicting ones, and they have to check the dates to make sure that it was this way. And then they change it to this way. And it just becomes its own little research project.
Stephen: You get people answering that don’t really know that haven’t really read the question or thought about. They’re just like you know what? You should try this and they put something. It’s just shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not [00:13:00] helping. You’re just adding clutter because you want to be recognized as somebody that answered a thousand questions,
Alan: right?
And I’ve actually seen in those strings of things, someone will actually say, you really don’t know what you’re talking about. Here’s what’s really happening. And I’m. Google tech support. I’m Apple tech support. I’m Microsoft. You know what I mean? It’s okay to have a, an authoritative person chiming once in a while to clear the air, to get rid of the crud that is accumulating,
Stephen: right?
And when I’m providing support I’ve literally gotten these type of things like an email or a text saying, Hey. The image on the site’s broken. Okay. You got like a thousand images with 300 pages or worse. It’s they’ll say, Hey the site’s not working. All right. I maintain 10 websites for you that have dozens of pages each.
Maybe you can help narrow it down. And it turns out it’s not even that the site isn’t working. It’s that they couldn’t get to it from their computer, but they tell me, Oh, the site’s not working. So I’m spending hours trying to figure it out. [00:14:00]
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny when I have help, I help more, not so much currently, but I used to tell all kinds of family members, especially my parents, because I really didn’t want them to have to figure all this out.
They just want things to work. There’s any number of just that an image is like, so go ahead and clear your cash. You don’t know it, but in the background, so that it aids you a little bit in getting faster response, it takes. Pictures of things and loads them onto your local drive and only a certain number of limited ones, whatever the size of your cache is, but sometimes what happens is you have a picture that’s old and it isn’t updating that because it thinks it’s already gotten it, even though it really is important now that you get the updated version.
So sometimes that explanation. Like they were always very patient. It wasn’t like, don’t tell me that just make it work. My parents were very good about that, but it really was my having to explain that kind of stuff was like, it, there really should be something. Like I have all kinds of tools, like we’re probably even called tinker tool or something like that, that it has.
Here’s how to reset this, [00:15:00] clear the cache clear memory, all those kinds of things that without people knowing at all what’s wrong, at least this would get them back to a known working state, and like anybody who’s a coder, that you never commit without having a place to retreat to, and so that’s what I’ve often tried to, the need for backups and the need for it is okay to go back to. When you first started, like after you’ve done a whole day worth of stuff, make a quick copy of the text that you were working on before you exit the program, because it really might not be available when it comes back.
Nowadays, often things will have, hey, do you want to recover from your last known state? It’s not even obvious that it’s doing that in the background. So all you need to get once in a while is burnt by, wow, I just put a couple hours into that and it’s gone. It really is off into the, into bit heaven. And that burns so much that.
You learn all those little self defense things. I got how many besides word and various real word processors, everybody has either simple text or teach text or word pad or whatever. That’s just a place to go dump text. You might [00:16:00] lose formatting and font choice and stuff like that, but you won’t have lost this, the thought that went into those words.
I think like that you must have some of the same good habits because pain teaches you well, yes, those good,
Stephen: which is why my Google Drive is a completely separate hard drive that not only is the files synced up with what’s in the cloud, but it’s also backed up with my offsite backup. So it’s multiple, that’s my file, everything, you
Alan: know, I used to wait, but when they first became available, they used to have, SSDs.
And they actually had like fusion systems where part of it was an SSD, and then it had a mechanical drive off to the side. And I try to be smart about anything that I’m doing that’s caching, where you really need to be able to work with it quickly. We’ll make sure that the cache location is on the SSD, because it’s 10 to 100 times faster than any mechanical drive.
Some programs don’t let you set that they just want to handle it all on their own, and they want all their files to be together. So you have to make choice of one or the [00:17:00] other. And it’s Am I really going to use valuable SSD space for everything having to do with I don’t know Adobe Illustrator or something like that.
I don’t even know if that guy’s still around. So it I another one of those things like I don’t even know that people know to make this choice. Or like what the implications are of the choice, I guess is a better way to put it. And after a while, I’m like, I think I’ve talked about this. One of the best things I’ve been coding for a long time, as you have, and how many things you could get working, but then to bulletproof it was the next 90 percent of the job, you could get something working.
And so when they started to actually have in. the math development environment that they took care of garbage collection for you. And, for the folks at home, garbage collection is, you have to do a little bit of memory management. When you, whenever you run a program, it grabs a certain amount of memory, and then it will grab a certain amount of memory per data for the code and for the data.
And then it will expand that as you do things greater. But sometimes when you, then you’re done working on this and let it go. [00:18:00] Some programs are smart, and they release it back to the memory pool that is the system, and sometimes they hold on to it in case you want to return to it or something like that.
You do that with enough programs, and all your memory gets allocated, and then it starts either throwing errors, or it slows down a lot, because instead of saving things in cache memory, it saves things to the hard drive, and you can feel a goo because that’s so much slower. Apple figured out how to do all kinds of stuff that would do near automatic memory management whenever you wrote Apple code, that it was really smart about releasing memory, releasing pointers, all of that.
And man, that just, it was a generational difference. So I can really concentrate on what I want to have the user see and what data they’re going to get to, and not worry about all the background stuff that you have to do to make it. Clean, fast, elegant, bulletproof, all that kind of stuff. So hats off to the people that, again, Apple eating its own dog food.
They use their own tools internally. And they must’ve said, we can’t continue to write like, I don’t know, a long time ago, they had a subsidiary called [00:19:00] Claris that did Apple’s versions of the Microsoft office suite, a word processor and a database and that kind of stuff. And. They must have had their own pain with I can’t like, what do people who I think that this is how it is, right?
I tend to write and I might have maybe one or two versions but I I don’t have 20. Whereas if you’re a brainstorming illustrator, you really might do 20 sketches just to see what it might look like and then show them to people and then use five out of the 20 or whatever like that. But you do have that kind of the generational thing of, wow, I didn’t realize that I was going to want to go back to five versions ago before I added the tree in the background.
Let’s scrub all that new stuff and go to here. And they had to get really smart about. All of that, how to keep every single version possibility, so you had places to retreat to, and that Apple figured out, how do you do that cleanly, that you’re not saving a complete. illustration of each of those versions, you’re saving the changes.
You know what I mean? If you know anything about display [00:20:00] devices and how those work, they’re often not like sending the complete image each time they send the changes, because most things I don’t know, here I am, I move back and forth from here. And so I’m moving, but everything in the background, this whole wonderful cloud scene in the mountains, all that is static, relatively and so if you want to keep sending this to be viewed All you have to do is take care of how much I am twitchy, how much I move around and raise a hand up and stuff like that. And they got really smart about that kind of stuff. So I loved reading about the generations of that when people figured out that you could do, it wasn’t called diffing, a different name, I’m trying to think, tweening, no, to do not.
Send the image again and again, but save only the changes and then have a way of quickly doing that. And then they started to do that in spreadsheets with like partial recalc that every time you recap, you didn’t do the entire spreadsheet. It did whatever you had changed since you last did it. And it had all those signposts for all the guy did out of a 40 linked spreadsheet set was [00:21:00] update today’s data.
And that’s all you have to recalc. So they got really smart, not only about how to do it, but how do people use it. And then make that smarter, stronger, so I hope that didn’t sound too luxury, but I think it’s actually fascinating that code has been through generations and they want what they want to, they want it to work, but it’s interesting to say, no matter how much you test it internally.
When you throw it out to 10, 000, a million users, you’ll find out that the way people really do it is they keep more windows open than you ever thought that they would. Because some people really like to have their, all their palettes around them, even if they’re not actually planning on changing color and font and, shadowing and all that kind of stuff.
But count on that being a memory drain to keep all that open and active. And then how do you handle that cleanly that every one of those things is. Is not going to stop you from doing the main thing, which is creating an illustration. Anyway, I
Stephen: Okay, I got a question based on your [00:22:00] list you sent me.
Are you guys planning to go to the Isle of Wight?
Alan: So we really are. Nice!
Stephen: We’ve Music festival, please, right? Actually,
Alan: no, it’s not a music festival. It’s because There’s a great Beatles song, When I’m Sixty Four. It goes, send me a postcard. And one of the things it talks about, We can get a cottage on the Isle of Wight.
We shall scrimp and save. We missed it for Colleen at 64. She’s a couple years older than me. Ooh, don’t, world, don’t listen to that. She’s the spring chicken and I’m the hoary elder. I’m sorry about that. But we, out of COVID, out of everything. Finances, she was still working hard to take the time Now we really are.
Much more time, reasonable money. We can do these kinds of things. And some of our favorite trips have not been, we’ve read all the guidebooks and we’re going to all the best places in the world. It’s been like a whim. It’s like, why did I want to go to Banff, Canada the first time? Because I thought it was funny to say Banff out loud, because it’s just it’s is [00:23:00] that where Nightcrawler goes? Is that where he
Stephen: teleports to, Banff? Oh, I thought it was the sound Mitzelplick made when he disappeared. And maybe it’s that
Alan: exact
We do our crossword puzzles. They just had Mr. McShazpitalik in a crossword puzzle. Someone committed to saying this near vowel less craziness, and even knowing how to say it. And then in order to make the puzzle go away, you had to say it backwards. Ba dum bump! That kind of thing. Back to this.
It really is that on this whim of we want to go because I’m 64 and we’re going to go to the Isle of Wight and get a cottage. I’ve already got a cottage, a little pink cottage on the southern shore of the island. So it’s on the Atlantic Ocean with an ocean view and we’re doing it. We often do this. We love going in collar times like April, May and September, October, because then prices aren’t crazy.
The kids aren’t running around, destroying things and stuff like that. Sorry that’s my view of children, but walking on a national park path. When it’s summer versus otherwise, it’s just amazing how many juice boxes and crap are littered because kids don’t do it. [00:24:00] And the parents don’t say, Billy, pick
Stephen: that up.
And yeah, that’s a whole issue. Then I can get out.
Alan: So having said that, we’re not only of course, doing the Isle of Wight, we’re doing that plus London and, we’re hard, we can’t see, of course, all of London, much less all of England in, we’re going like for nine days or something like that.
But. It’s a good start. Now that we actually, Colleen has never been to Europe, and we already had our cool Baltic cruise planned for September of this year, but this was the slot in between other trips that we have planned. March we have our Prague cruise, and July we have the comedy festival in Montreal.
So May was like, hey, let’s alternate months. And this I checked into airfares, they were reasonable. Checked into accommodations, can get them. And so we’re gonna go and do a Beatles song and just, that
Stephen: you said that, my thoughts went to the Isle of Wight festival, real popular classic rock music festival, from back in the day.[00:25:00]
Alan: Okay, it’s honestly, if that would have been coincident in time, it would have been extraordinary to be like, and hey, while we happen to be there. And actually, when people talk about what you’re. There’s lots of England besides London and that. I know, but there’s only so much you can do. But what will attract me is I don’t really just want to go to Scotland.
Maybe I can go to Scotland during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is world famous for having cool, odd acts and breaking new things that nobody’s ever heard of before and stuff like that. And going to a festival often is then you got to commit to there’s going to be 10, 000, 50, 000 other people there with you.
But The energy of doing that kind of stuff is actually very interesting. So we want to go see the balloon festival in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, I think it’s that way, so those kinds of things, it’s just a question of having an in of get a reservation early enough so that you’re not 30 miles out of town.
And that, and you know that every restaurant is going to be busy, but you just commit to the energy, the coolness of the event will make it worse. All the worth, all the additional overhead that you’re going to put with. What are we going to do in [00:26:00] London? Man, they got great museums, great art galleries.
They got, we’re going to of course try all kinds of London y food. And we actually have we’ve made enough friends in Ments over the course of time that when I wrote just a little bit about that, our friend Nikki said, oh, you have to come visit me. I’m at Essex. And how sweet, that immediately people are like, I’ll visit you. You, I’ll come in to you. It’s really nice, as we talk about other United States trips we’re going to go, it’s we can just go over here and visit Colleen’s childhood friend, Killer, which, by the way, it’s a girl, of course now a lady, but she was named that because she killed a spider when she was young, when she was deathly afraid of spiders.
And so the whole family was like, You’re a
Stephen: killer. You did it. And
Alan: it’s a name stick. You don’t know once in a while why you’re going to get an interesting, a funny childhood nickname that carries forward into all the rest of your life. So I do that. I don’t know. I Ha! So I start looking at we’re going to fly in and out of London.
We’re going to go down to the Isle of Wight. What’s the way to get there? You [00:27:00] could take a train down, a bus down, and then it really is an isle. So you have to have a ferry that takes you from either Yarmouth or Portsmouth or whatever else it might be. And I’m looking through. I put in just Google Maps.
Take me from London to Shanklin, which is where we’re staying. And I see all the little icons and stuff like that. And then I see an icon I’ve never seen before. HOV. H O V. Hovercraft. We’re going to take a hovercraft beautiful mainland from what’s in the big island to the small island. It really is. None of England is the mainland.
But I said, like, how cool is that? Honestly, a whole new life experience. I’ve never been on a hovercraft and I made it to 64 without that privilege. So we
Stephen: continually have this wonderful,
Alan: like The look of, we’re going to, we’re going to investigate and then once in a while you see something now that I know that
Stephen: exists, I can’t not cover the Hovercraft.
How cool
Alan: is that? So we’re going to be on Hovercraft ride come May. Anyway.
Stephen: I can’t wait to hear about that. That’s, something not everybody gets to do. [00:28:00] That’s really,
Alan: and we’re still, so a lot of this is enabled by, and I need to say this, carefully, mom and dad are now gone.
And they had some money. And so it’s trickling down to the sons and we’re not kabillionaires. It’s not if anything, thank God we didn’t get it. If my mom and dad were well off and we were trust fund kids that were like, the insufferable rich that just don’t really understand the value of work or the value of decency or anything like that.
We’re all getting it in a good time where. We’ve already had our lives. We’ve already got our houses and possessions and experiences, but some of us have kids and it’ll help us help them. Some of us have the things we’ve planned for a long time. I’ve always wanted to go to Iguazu Falls and it’s just enough money to say, we really could do that if we want to, as long as we’re spry, we’re in our sixties, but we’re not invalid by any stretch. So we’re starting to do those kinds of things that. Colleen has never been to Europe. Let’s go to Europe. Let’s go to South America. Let’s go to Australia. So year by year, and even things like, we’ve got, we’ve had [00:29:00] our 48 out of 50 state capitals, but never made it to Alaska and Hawaii because they’re like you can’t drive to them.
They’re really trips. But now we can actively plan on when’s the best time to go to Alaska. It can’t be during permafrost season. You have to go there from May to September, maybe even only like June to August, that kind of thing where we can. Do some of those things and have it the it’s not nothing, you can’t do these things for 500 bucks, but it’s not so much that it’s going to we’ll do that and not make the mortgage that month.
You know what I mean? We were okay. Our house is paid off or we have no debt. The kinds of things that we want to do now are experiences more than possessions. So we still have active plans for all the things we’re going to do to fix up our house to make sure that it’s really. Stage of the art, the house is a century home.
It’s built in 1930 and we’re almost at a century. So there’s things to do to upgrade the house. But while we’re doing that, we can do these other cool things too. And so we’ll see when we go to. I don’t know. We don’t have to go to the most exotic. I don’t think we [00:30:00] intend to go to Antarctica. I’m not one of those seven continents people.
But the fact that I’ve never been to Asia, it really is, that’s a pretty big place to have never been to. And there’s all kinds of cool stuff that we want to see there. So we’ll start looking at, is it the Middle East? And what parts of it are reasonable for travel? Is it the Far East?
And without going into it a ton. That’s a joy to me. It’s so cool in this era of being able to hop online and start seeing where are there, where’s the cool places to go and to stay. And what’s the cost of them. And funny, when you get outside of the United States, travel can be amazingly reasonable as can accommodation as can food, because the standard of living for all the rest of the world is much lower than the United States.
And I don’t know, I’m not going to a place to go to a five star restaurant. I’m going to a place to eat of the region’s good food without it being street food. I don’t want the wet market and get monkey pox. You know what I mean? So we’re being just and the happiness folks say that so much of doing this is not only the doing of it, [00:31:00] it’s all the investigation and anticipation.
And so when Colleen and I have these wonderful conversations and with the crews that were going on, we’re going with a bunch of Mensons. And so it’s going to be like, How cool is that going to be? There was like three dozen people that we’re going to get back and just be ultimate chatterboxes about what did you see that day?
Where are we going tomorrow? And this food is really good. Is this really lutefisk? You know what I mean? We’re going to have just silly fun times and hopefully our Christmas letters will, Oh my God, be even longer instead of shorter because of the cool
Stephen: stuff. More in it than in 2020.
Alan: Exactly. So there is that, I, I.
That’s funny. The reason I said I had to be careful is, we’re not, we just, we’re not going to, hey, now we’re moneybags. Who needs money? We can’t, we don’t want to and can’t handle it. Not because we’re not generous, but because we, I, it’s important to have people know that we’re still like salt of the earth that have a little extra money instead of everybody gets a Rolls Royce.
You know what I mean? We, [00:32:00] it’s
Stephen: like that. It is.
Alan: If I can, help a friend or help my family, especially help my family, my brothers are very much taking care of their kids, but it’s nice to be, I don’t know, every Christmas, I. We send out an advent calendar. We send out some like candy or nuts or things like that.
And I’ve tried to learn okay, make sure that this person who doesn’t like chocolate gets something like nuts instead. Or if they’re, they I’m type two diabetic, don’t send me a box of chocolates. You know what I mean? It’s not a good idea for me. So we’ve been it’s just nice that, and the formula for happiness is also, it really feels good to spend money on others.
As well as yourself, even more than yourself. And so it’s just nice to find out what we do for Colleen and I, we always are listening to each other. And then when you hear like a reference dropped in February that you fulfill in December, if they always wanted to have this book or go to this place.
So I hope that we can do. If our job now as retirees is not, we’ve done our share of the world’s work, and now we’re like, now, [00:33:00] how do we keep putting money into the economy from what we’ve saved and what we’ve invested in stuff like that? And that’s what we’re doing next is to do that wisely, to do that decently.
You know what I mean? It’s not like now I can rule over other people. Jesus,
Stephen: so you mentioned that the gift giving to Sunday, I didn’t make it up the cam on Saturday, but it’s a nice party. We missed you. Yeah. I, I looked outside and I thought about it. I’m like, man, it’s still snowy and blowy and cold.
And I’m just like, I’d love to go up there and see everybody, but. I just don’t want to fight all of this. Our road was covered a little bit and you
Alan: know, it’s like I mentioned just the night before we didn’t go to Paula Poundstone because it was really coming down and it was right at that quarter, what kind of Southeast of the city where you are or Akron is.
So we, we shied away on just 12 hours before.
Stephen: Right. Yeah, but I did go to Sunday to Western Pennsylvania holiday fest. We go there most years. And I mentioned it because. They do a gift exchange, a white elephant gift exchange type [00:34:00] thing. And Colin got a quill, like a real quill with real ink and the nibs and everything.
And he was like, how cool is that? Yeah, very cool. And somebody stole it from him. So he didn’t get to keep it. So he was very, but I mentioned that Because I immediately he went, Oh, man, I’m actually disappointed by that. He’s that was the coolest thing. So I went ping. Okay, wrote that down. So for Christmas, I’m gonna get Colin a quill pen set to
Alan: replace the and then gone, he’s right.
We finally have it then. Everybody’s had that happen, right? Oh, yeah. I was young. We went to the circus. I held on to a balloon that I got from the circus the entire ride home, and then in getting out of the car at home, it got away, and up into the air it went. And that is such an illustrative thing for me of Dad, get a ladder, my balloon, and of course it’s just gone.
It’s just gone. And is that [00:35:00] why I collect so many things that every one of them is a virtual replacement for that gosh darn balloon? God damn it. I can’t believe it. Really? That’s like a bad movie. You know what I mean? There’s something to that thing you had that got away. It just is in you forever.
You’re a moment’s inattention. That’s often how you refer to it. I held on to that so much. And then somehow in the act of, you, how you climb out of a car, you hold onto the door jam, wherever else it might be at a moment’s inattention, it went away. And so maybe that’s why I’m I don’t think I’m anal retentive.
I don’t think I hold onto everything, no matter what it is, but I really have this thing of just. Whenever I walk out of the house, I got, the old joke about, spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch, that kind of stuff. I always make sure that I have things that matter to me on me.
I never leave my phone out my wallet out where it might be gone when it happened, when it has happened occasionally, I’m like. Shocked how in the world that because it was a totally different situation that made all my good habits be put [00:36:00] to the side for a moment. Yeah. And I, and that, but then that feeling of regret is somehow like triple quadruple what other people have because it’s the balloon, so anyway,
how about this junior psychologist balloon problem
Stephen: of the balloon psychology evaluation.
Alan: But the festival was good and you, okay, we were looking at going Kirtland. Farm Park has an ice festival coming up. I think this weekend and I love ice sculptures. I find them fascinating with how they capture the light and how they’re ephemeral by nature.
You, you don’t preserve them. It’s going to start melting, but people still really make beautiful mermaids and
Stephen: train sandcastle like a sandcastle.
Alan: Absolutely. And so And it’s, I don’t know, when it, we have been to one in, for instance, Medina, where it was unbelievably cold. That ice sculpture was not going to be melting for a couple days, not in a couple hours.
But us being out there was like, keep track of where the hot chocolate is, because at any point we might have to bolt inside. And, [00:37:00] and when you really have everything except a little slit for your eyes bundled up, because it really is like frost bitingly cold. I remember that and then Colleen’s let’s not ever do that again.
Let’s not, I’m built like a polar bear. She’s built like an ocelot. She’s sleek and doesn’t handle, when she gets cold and the cold is in her. Do you know what I mean? We make a point of, though I love this ice festival thing, I don’t subject her to, let’s go out on the tundra. We’re going to go to a place where there’s always some place to get to safety.
You know what
Stephen: She’s had the last two weeks, it’s been cold and windy in northeast Ohio and it’s been a bitey cold.
Alan: That’s right. Every time that she’s gone out, had to go out. She comes back in just okay, I’m gonna get my, I got her both snugglies over the year and we have one vent that’s right in the kitchen that comes out low and she will actually sit with her back to the vent and just envelop, with this snuggie and just warm herself up because she needs to get back to normal.
Stephen: Okay. Something I’ve been playing around with, I [00:38:00] don’t know if you’ve looked at it all, is Chat GPT offers the ability to make custom GPTs for specific type things. So I’ve been playing with that. I have
Alan: not. I’ve played with it. I’ve never looked into what’s the next things I might want to do with it.
Okay.
Stephen: And at first I was like, Yeah. Okay. Great. Whatever. But then I thought of something. I’m like, let me see if it’ll handle that. And of course, once I started diving into it and working on it and customizing it and tweaking it, because it allows you to create a custom. Chat bot for a specific topic without doing any programming.
You don’t have to pull up Python. You don’t have to get your tensor flow connected. And, you don’t have to do all of that. You basically, it’s like talking to an assistant and say, okay, we’re a lumber company. I want you to answer the phone and answer questions about lumber sizes of lumber types of wood, what woods use for, these are the questions you need to answer.
Don’t talk about the weather. Don’t talk about the new [00:39:00] cars coming out. Don’t talk about the movie over the weekend. Folks, you
Alan: literally just already got a lot of lumber specific knowledge. So the device is nurturing it and then applies it to future queries of the same kind. And
Stephen: you tell it, we want to be professional or laid back and casual, or we want to guide, we want to inform, you give it all these parameters and it asks you, how do you want me to handle this?
What do you want me to say? How do you want this done? Blah, blah, blah. So you’re trained, you’re actually doing. Artificial intelligence by training it to set these parameters and you get it focused
Alan: on that expert systems where you like the virtual you is you answering, a hundred thousand questions.
And after a while you can step back and have it be that it’ll capture 70 percent of what’s out there because you’ve embedded yourself, not only you, the knowledge you have. But the attitude that you have, the way in which you speak and stuff like that. That’s very cool.
Stephen: Okay. And so I said, okay, I’ve got two ideas for authors.
When we write something, we create, we encourage [00:40:00] the creation of two things, a log line and a Pixar pitch, at least the groups I’ve been in. That’s what we do. Cause the log line is, you won’t go back in the water. Jaws, right? That’s like a log line, but a log line is actually more of a description.
So to the
Alan: elevator pitch kind of idea, absolutely your thing down into something you could say to a person and say, it’s like can you land in space or
Stephen: something? Yeah. Okay. Or et. Alien gets stranded on earth and is helped by a boy to avoid the government and get back to his family.
That would be a logline for E. T. And it gives you that idea. Cause then, for an author, Number one, it gets you focused. That’s my story. That’s what I want to accomplish. And when it’s already done, And someone says what’s your book about? You tell them. That’s what you tell them. And then if they say, oh, that’s cool.
That’s great. Now read the blurb. And now let me tell you about it. Too often, I’ve been at so many author fairs and other types of festivals and authors, Oh, do you like to read? [00:41:00] Yes. Let me tell you about my book. And for 20 minutes, they tell you the whole plot. And I’m like, I’m bored. I don’t care.
And I don’t need to buy it now. So It helped with that. And then the other part is the Pixar pit. What?
Alan: I’ve had that same experience at Comic Cons and stuff like that where it’s I’m a patron. I’m ready to buy stuff. Tell me about your book. And when they can’t give you that pithy description, I think maybe the book’s going to be rambly too.
Yes.
Stephen: Okay. And then there’s the Pixar pitch, which Pixar actually uses this. It’s six things. It says once upon a time, and then this happened, and because of that, they did this. And then finally, so it helps guide the overall plot of the three, three, three act structure. Here is this boy, and then this happened and changed his world.
So he did this, and then at the end, this happened. So it’s.
Alan: Those three, girl, boy, loses girl, boy gets real back to classics.
Stephen: Okay. Very good. So I created two GPTs to help guide [00:42:00] authors with the intent being for young authors, people just learning about this, to create a log line and to create a Pixar pitch so you can.
Put in the summary of your plot. It’s not going to take a whole 100, 000 word book and analyze. It’s not the thing is to help you think and refine your thoughts down to what’s needed because people, Oh, let me give you my log line. And it’s three pages long. It’s that is not a line, they, you really do need to filter that down and coalesce all your thoughts to put it into one sentence. That’s very pertinent to the story. And that helped you really define it. Same with the Pixar pitch. You
Alan: don’t want very useful. These things are really useful. Exactly. Who doesn’t need this? Not only young authors.
Stephen: I made it for me. That’s the best ones, right? So let me, I’ll tell you the other one I made for me and I don’t think I’m going to release this one. But it’s to help get healthy meals and healthy [00:43:00] snacks. And I said, okay, look, I’ve got diabetes and high blood pressure and thyroid issues. I need recipes that balance healthiness with those three things.
It’s great if it has no carbs, but if you have so much salt in it that my heart blows up, it doesn’t help. Or you have multiple
Alan: factors that have to be taken into account.
Stephen: Exactly. Okay. Or if I have soup that has a little bit more salt at lunch, then I need something that’s less salt at dinner. I need. The overall balance for a day to be taken into account.
Yes, I can eat pizza, but I can’t eat pizza and nachos and a sandwich and cereal all in the same day. That type of thing. Exactly.
Alan: One insult per day, not three insults. Yes. You don’t have the, just plus pizza, plus some kind of creamy sauce. Yes. Go for the Alfredo.
Stephen: So I’m still working on refining it and instructing it what to do.
And I’ve been testing it. I want, we had pork chops. I said, give me a good pork [00:44:00] chop recipe that fits my criteria, my health criteria. And it came up with something I probably would have never made or thought of. And I know it’s not making this stuff up. It’s grabbing it from various places.
I said, okay. Now, I need a side dish to go with that. There’s no vegetables. Give me something with some vegetables. And then how about a dessert that’s low in calories, whatever. So it came up with, three things. And so I’m playing with it and testing it, but it’s just so much easier than trying to look all this stuff up yourself.
And I made sure to include. The glycemic index. So give me stuff that’s not going to spike my blood sugar and give me all the nutritional information as close as you can based on the recipes.
Alan: Very good. Honestly, like you said, even if you’re not thinking of releasing that, that’s going to be incredibly useful to you.
I can’t believe that people aren’t doing that already. There have been apps that were like, Hey, if I tell you what’s in my fridge, you can tell me what kind of meal I could put and not only that happenstance. [00:45:00] I’m trying to eat healthy, one of the things I should not even have in my fridge that I should not make use of, not every meal has to involve mayonnaise.
And so that kind of thing. Good for you. There must be other people that are doing this, right? Oh, God. Yes. You would think that the training set what’s interesting is if there’s a lot of Some of the objections that people have to chat GPT is always the trading data set, because if it’s all white males, then you really might have a skew against, you name it, black or female, or, and in case of dining is not only what’s the American diet?
Hopefully it has enough in there that it can say, here’s your ethnic meals that you might be able to make. But then you also have to say, I need the ethnic spices that go with that. And Indicative or at least muscle associated with Mexican cooking, Indian cooking, whatever else you would think that you would want to either do it specifically, I was going to say maybe specific to each cuisine, but I [00:46:00] don’t know.
I don’t sit down and say tonight’s Chinese night. I say, what do I have? And then as I just in my mind go through things like we haven’t walked things for a while. We could have a nice Chinese meal tonight, and what? That’s a very interesting application. It’s like having 100 chefs that are already like pretty accomplished what we’re doing.
And you get to accept suggestions from them and say, sounds
Stephen: good. So it takes feedback. So if it gives you a suggestion, you’ll say, you know what, I really don’t like beats. Don’t include beats in anything anymore. And it’ll remember that to a point. But I that’s the other point that I think a lot of people don’t Get with doing this.
It’s like any other programming is you want to make it so it’s useful and focused, you know Like a function, every function does one job You could tell new programmers when they have a function that does 20 million things. That’s not a function
Alan: You know this was army knife. You needed to be very specific.
Yes, i’m gonna make sure that the day Months and years are correctly formatted, right? like that [00:47:00]
Stephen: and so with the gpt’s The best ones, the most functional and the most useful are the ones that you get focused and you tweak it like what you just said. I said, Oh, you know what? Anything you think of and assume means it’s too big and broad and you’ll get two varied answers.
What I need to do is refine it and go in and say, look. Don’t just include American cuisine, include Chinese and sus Saskatchewan and Russian and German and, give it a,
Alan: a one that we know we already like. Yeah. I mean me everything again because of the exotic ingredients or because I don’t know if I try to cook and the first thing it says is start with one monkey.
It’s
. No we do need to have it easily available at Giant Eagle . Yeah. But that’s, it’s programming. It’s like doing what was that called when you’d think of the program and you’d write it out like an English sentences logo,
Alan: right? Logos. One of
Stephen: them was called logos. [00:48:00] Was it Logan?
Pseudo code was code. Yeah. Pseudo code was between coding and, okay. Yeah. So it’s like that it you’re talking and doing that, but you’re not doing the actual programming and stuff, so you have to think that way to still do it. Yeah. And it will take documents. So I could take a, here’s the health recommendations from the a DA and upload it.
The thing is, it probably already has looked at that. Oh you can upload documents to keep it focused if you have something that you’re using or whatever. So it is like programming without doing code.
Alan: Honestly that, so I would suggest that we should make this like a regular segment on our little podcast here, our experiments with chat GPT, because the way that people are creating these cool.
Dedicated, idiot savant systems is very interesting for being able to like, I don’t know, how do I do baking nowadays? I got my bread machine. I have 15, 20 books that I bought for like a penny online. And then I just say today’s millet day. I’m going to [00:49:00] find, I’m going to go to the index and look up millet and I could Contract that process down into, hey chat GPT, give me a nice bread thing that will use whole wheat flour and millet and and it’ll just spit out possibilities and refined it into, yeah, I wouldn’t mind having some fennel in there or I’d be able to say which ingredients I have or don’t have or what I like taste wise. I just made a a millet onion bread that Colleen said, it’d be better without the onion. So now I know, it would be interesting to have a, I don’t know. So that’s very interesting.
A baking assistant.
Stephen: Yeah. You should check it out and just
Alan: think of what I would offload my much experience and expertise into. Like I could be the conical cancer guy. I could be the baked bread. That’s the
Stephen: problem. Now that I’ve done it, now that I’ve said that and done it, I went, okay here’s the list of a hundred that I can think of that I would like to use and be great.
And just sitting here, it’s We need to do a relentless geekery one. Here’s all the subjects, topics, [00:50:00] items, books, movies, just listing it, and then it’d be like a geek of the day, tell me, give me a geek topic of the day, something new to go experience and look at, or try out and whatever.
I’m willing to. Put
Alan: some work into this. If we go through I think you said, we have an automatic transcripting machine that listens to our episodes and does a transcript and they’ll need to be cleaned up because even when I’ve seen the things that are computer generated, almost all of course, they need some.
Englishing, they need some humanizing and stuff like that. But that automate 175 episodes, clean them up, feed them in. And then we got virtual does Stephen L show,
Stephen: so then we tie it into the AI video and create avatars of us and it could just do auto generated AI shows of us talking about whatever topic, it’s
Alan: interesting.
I, I don’t want it to be that it generates something we’ve already talked about when we talk, I’m very aware and I don’t know that I remember perfectly 170 episodes, but I’m very aware of, I don’t want to go down the same path, right? Not only because I don’t want to be boring people, [00:51:00] but it’s also that’s not what he said before, does that story change over time?
But that is what happens is that people can talk about a topic and, I would rather that we also are trying to bring in new things. Maybe we will automatically because it’s current, we try to talk about the things of the day. And so whatever was happening two and a half years ago, anyway, there’s all kinds of interesting, we will learn more about how we want to do a virtual you and me and how we’d want that kind of stuff by doing it, the act of I’m, this is a very interesting project.
Stephen: I’m good. What website
Alan: has a chat GPT. Avatar that comes up and says, Do you want to geek it up with us a little bit? We can tell you all about all kinds of stuff because we are polymathically geeky. We remember when we meet. So again, I think we’ve talked about some of this in the very background.
The way this all started was Stephen and I had lunch and we said, We really could do something like this, and we made a, we, I took lots and lots of notes and made it into a big outline, and I think we might have touched about 70 percent of the [00:52:00] outline by now. I don’t know if we got to everything, but also we’ve done some of those things.
We’ve done deep dives and drills now, because there’s always new comic book stuff, movie stuff, but we really have touched up travel stuff, and having said that, it’d be cool to be like, Of all the ways in which this started, like maybe it could also have it say, not only what you and I think about, we have, everybody before we do the show, we have a little pre chat exchange and say how about this and this and this.
The fake could suggest, at one point you said you wanted to talk about jewelry, and you never have talked about jewelry. Let’s make that a topic upcoming. It really might be that it could be a kind of an interesting prompter. You know what I mean? That it would expand our thing to make sure we cover all the outline and stuff like that.
Yeah. Also, what are other geeks talking about? I don’t want it to be that we are. Only topical because a lot of times you’ll see that wow, suddenly everybody’s talking about what happened on. America’s got talent last night. [00:53:00] And I, I don’t know that I care about popular geekery, which is an oxymoron.
But I care about what you and I like, and then hope that other people will like it as well. But I don’t want to have to talk about something. It’s that’s just I dismiss that stuff. That’s nothing,
Stephen: we’ll have to play with it. We got our initial list. We can, streamline that and get it more specific with examples in that we’ve got, like you said, the transcripts, might need cleaned up a little bit or whatever, some of the sites we go to a lot.
We can do that. Yeah, I think we should do this now. You have to go to the link or whatever, get to it at some point. I’m assuming you’ll be able to embed this and just have it right on the website. That’s what I’m thinking.
Alan: You know what I mean? All those things. The reason that they’re popular is because they’re, if open source isn’t quite the right term they definitely are open to the public.
You know what I mean? There’s no there’s someone maintains the tools and makes it available, but all the things that are created, there’s no agreement that you signed to say anything you do with is now the property of chat GPT. [00:54:00] You know what I mean? There’s, long ago they did really good open source agreements that talked about that, that it isn’t that if you use this tool, that somehow now they have a hook into you, that the point of making it all open source was to make it so that the world would have it.
In fact, we haven’t talked about that, we, I’m sorry, we have. Mickey Mouse. Coming into the public domain. Finally, after the extended copyright, 92 years or whatever it for 95, 95, I think is the real number, but I think that it’d be cool to talk about, but
Stephen: people are doing it is not Mickey mouse.
It is steamboat Willie. Mickey
Alan: mouse, that particular image.
Stephen: And people don’t understand that. I saw somebody that was using a. Waffle maker. That was a Mickey mouse shape. He goes, Oh, look, public domain pancakes. It’s no, not really.
Alan: Yeah, it was a corporate logo. And so Connie and I just had a very interesting talk about this because.
I think that the way that copyright and trademark were created in a lot of ways was to say [00:55:00] absolutely the creator or the author or whatever gets to have rights to their work for a certain period of time because they did it, they should have it. But the need for society to be able to incorporate those things when, before they called them memes, when it was just popular, a good idea, everybody knows this character, the need to be able to do subsidiary work.
Extensions of that kind of thing to incorporate it into culture. That’s a need for society. And the need to not have it be that it’s automatic litigation about that, but that you surrender to the public. I’m glad it is so popular. And away we go. Disney is one of those ones that have said, let’s not have that be 17.
Or 30 or 50 or 70 or 90 years, they kept extending it because Disney has as many lawyers as they have illustrators, if not more. And having said that, I think there still is a need in society to finally say the author’s not around anymore. In some cases, it’s Not true. She mentioned like Edna Ferber, for instance, is fighting to have control over her own creations, and she’s still alive, so she could be the one writing those [00:56:00] works if she wanted to.
And it’s weird to have someone have their baby stolen from them while they’re still around to do it. But in some cases, It’s one or two or three generations afterwards and the Arthur Conan Doyle Foundation is still running Sherlock Holmes, if you will. But they weren’t the brilliant people that created Sherlock Holmes.
They’re like a third cousin that owns the rights to. You know what I mean? So that’s not a yes or no, black or white thing. There’s all kinds of. Combination of things that say what right does the creator have and what right does society have even the right word, what’s the best thing for society, I
Stephen: guess, and I totally agree with the copyright and if you create it, you should own it and have the rights to it and people shouldn’t be able to I’ve heard.
Games now a lot of these games with kickstarters that pirates are getting copies of this stuff through the kickstarter making knockoffs and selling it and you know that no, that’s wrong. But on the flip side, we’re also Our cultural thinking [00:57:00] of some of this has changed, used to get arrested if you tried to record a concert or take pictures, except for the Grateful Dead.
And now everybody’s got recorders and phones that take pictures. And they found out it’s Oh, wait a minute. People are still getting our music and they’re still coming to concerts. So that’s a good thing. So
Alan: first ticket sales, it’s first maybe sales or downloads
Stephen: or whatever else. Yeah. People are not taking pictures of the band and trying to sell them online as professional photos.
They’re not selling them to Rolling Stone illicitly or anything, or it’s rolling. To
Alan: me, the thing where it starts bordering on fraud, where they try to purport to be you’re like, if you’re trying to make something that is. Monopoly, but it’s not by them, then will they get protections as to not only the idea, but the images and likenesses that you’re actually, you’re harming them monetarily.
You know what I mean?
Stephen: Yes, but that’s tricky too, because what you can’t copyright ideas. I have an idea for this game. I can’t, you can’t copyright that. It’s
Alan: an instantiation of that
Stephen: idea. That’s fine. And with games, particularly, [00:58:00] you can’t copyright rules and mechanics because they’re almost universal.
So your special combination and the way you wrote it, that you can copyright. But if you have a board, that’s a square that you move around and you buy properties and sell product, you can’t copyright that. And that’s why you have all theseopoly games out there.
Alan: Exactly. Boy, this is the topic of intellectual property has always been fascinating because it’s what runs the world nowadays.
We’ve moved from a manufacturing thing Yeah. To a, and like how much, so I want to be that people get the benefit from having been the author of things, but also pushing back against this, and I mentioned this to Colleen, is there’s a thing called the network effect that the more. Copies that you have copies is not the right word.
The more uses you have of a certain thing, the overall value of the thing grows. Because if you put out, Hey, I’m going to have, I’m going to create a GIF. I’m going to create this format. And until it, like you might say, Hey, [00:59:00] this is the standard graphic interface format, image format. I really should know exactly what that is.
And by the way, Gif, not Jif.
Stephen: I always say Jif, because that’s what I always heard
Alan: originally. But you know what? I know that the author, the creator of that format, said Jif. And it’s if he’s like Frank Herbert, he’s wrong. He doesn’t get to change it the way that language works and letters and sounds work.
It’s graphics, so it’s Gif. It’s not Jurassic, anyway.
Stephen: But on the flip side Is it worth that much time ever in life to argue which one it is? We both know what you’re talking about. Let’s just move on. But
Alan: the value of his creation was more, the more that just like Adobe when they created PDF, portable.
document format, like the more people used it, the more that became the accepted standard. And then they got to license that to all the places that said if I want to take a copy of a Word doc, but freeze it so it can’t be altered, I create a PDF of it. I print it as a PDF. And so [01:00:00] it isn’t that you want to have.
Only I own the PDF. You want a lot of people to have access to it. And then it’s the tricky part of how much access and in what form and all that kind of stuff. And so nowadays you get licensing agreements all the time. You know what I mean? Where some people just want to have it to use for free instead of I’m going to pay a certain amount so that I’m legitimized.
You know what I mean? That I’m not cheating about doing this. And there’s people at the end of the spectrum that will say it’s all about fair use, free use, or it’s all about controlled use. And no, it’s almost somewhere in the middle. It is the real
Stephen: solution. So it depends on the situation. The term Heimlich maneuver is copyrighted.
You can’t use it. If you use it, it’s actually illegal. And that they have changed it. And the choice they made to change. It is not a better choice. It’s upward thrust. Wait, this sounds more like a porn movie.
Alan: Exactly. So how, like that, there’s any number of things that became eponymous Vaseline and aspirin and various different things.
And some people bemoan that [01:01:00] fact, but it’s more like, really, you wouldn’t want to be known as if you’re going to take a pill for a headache, it’s aspirin. You wouldn’t want to have that incredible association of the first thing that people say. It’s not Tylenol or any of the other ones. It’s aspirin.
So I would give up a little bit of my total ownership in order to say I have become the thing and make
Stephen: your products a aspirin really big.
Alan: So I don’t know something they faded into public domain because they didn’t defend it enough right so that’s what happens too is that if you don’t fight for every use of that, then you say it is now become a.
Term of use, a generic term. I’m trying to think what the illegal things are. Like
Stephen: Kleenex and tissue and aspirin. Those kind of
Alan: things, exactly. Like Xerox. And yet, and after a while, people, places get wise and they say, I think that like Lego is a generic term for those kind of interlocking blocks.
And I’d rather everybody think. If it’s that way, it’s Lego that is the thing to be if you’re going to be interlocking blocks. It’s not [01:02:00] Duplo. It’s not the various other things. So I really think that Heimlich should maybe be proud of the fact that he’s immortalized. I
Stephen: think he’s dead. It’s his family fighting,
Alan: Every time you save the life, pay me a
Stephen: dollar.
It’s his family. I’m pretty sure he’s dead and it’s his family fighting for
Alan: it. I think you’re right. And so the family is silly. Yeah. You know what I mean? Wow, boy, I didn’t really know that. That is a terrible example of you’re really going to fight to make. Thank God that this thing exists and they could save a life.
The guy coughed up the trunk of sausage that he shouldn’t swallow. Now pay me a dollar. Oh, come
Stephen: on. All right. So before we go, I went and saw the movie poor things with Colin. We
Alan: did too, just last Tuesday. Yeah, we
Stephen: just did. And what’d you think?
Alan: I loved it because I really love movies where I don’t know what’s going to happen next.
Yes. I kept up with, how it was revealed. So [01:03:00] it’s interesting. Colleen and I, in our conversation afterwards, I said the Godwin is supposed to be like Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein, and she really hadn’t caught that all the way she knew that there was, she was a creation and so forth.
But I really liked what we’ve talked about with science fiction, when you put out a character that is unformed naive and then use it to reflect humanity to see that all the things that we might have as assumptions, they’re not necessarily true. People really can talk. More bluntly, they really can’t have deeper emotions without even understanding why they have them.
They can be more overtly sexual. There’s all kinds of things that were like, wow, humanity can be really screwed up. If we just were a little bit more honest, we wouldn’t be
Stephen: definitely. So first of all, to let people know, there is more sex in this movie than most porns. Just so you’re real understand this before you go in.
It’s not classic
Alan: porn things with bump, trickle bump. It’s more like it’s very much a [01:04:00] part of her and how she
Stephen: interacts with people. That’s important too because it is a reimagining of Frankenstein. It’s not even more modern and there’s very dreamlike sequences and they use camera lenses and angles to distance you from the action.
It’s like through keyholes and stuff at times. And it really is about her. Yeah, it really is about her exploration of becoming human and then who’s the human and who’s the monster. And, I was going to say, you
Alan: know, often when they talk about Frankenstein monster that they say that Dr Frankenstein was really Frankenstein, but he really was the monster to very much the without any spoilers.
The people that she has to interact with, and how many times she’s confronted with, wow, that person really tried to use her, abuse her. They didn’t treat her as fully a human, an adult, a, an equal. And so it’s a very feminist movie in that way too. But you know what? It’s more humanist. It’s not only about, because she’s female, it’s about every single [01:05:00] person.
It, because it’s set in like Victorian times, there really are people whose life consists of I’m pretty much a slave. I’m a serf indentured to work in this job or in this house or whatever else it might be. And it talks about how that was the accepted rule and that rule, the accepted standard for a long time.
And that very much how we’ve broken away from that is know that there really isn’t a caste system, that there really isn’t only based on lineage and money, that everybody gets to be a full human being. Oh, there’s lots of good lessons to learn from this without it being, Oh no, it’s a scary monster movie, sexy movie, et cetera, et
Stephen: cetera.
The one I liked is her attitude is I don’t know anything. I want to explore. I want to embrace life and do it all. And people were trying to tell her you got to do it this way. You got to do this. She’s no, that’s not what I want. And she was very outspoken about it, but very accepting. We’re going to do this.
And I liked that. So I’m going to do it again. And who cares what you’re
Alan: I’m going to go places, I’m going to try things, I’m going to interact with anybody, not just people of [01:06:00] supposedly my particular social stratum.
Stephen: Very interesting movie. Yeah, it was different.
Alan: Yeah, we liked it so much.
And having seen the lobster, which is also by this guy, we actually, we went and looked up him up and got like all of his movies that we did. We watched not killers of the flower moon. Cause we just watched that, but that’s not even the killing of a sacred
Stephen: deer. Yes, that’s the
Alan: other one. And we’re going to try to catch everyone that he’s done.
And hopefully they’re all available somewhere. Netflix, Amazon Criterion, whatever you have to look because. I really like I’m so curious about not only does he make interesting movies and is brilliant and how he does it, but he really other artists really say, I really want to be in his movie, no matter what it is.
So it’s not like only independence where there’s often independent talent. There’s like Colin Farrell is in it and so is, Really good actors and actresses and sometimes only in bit parts, Wes Anderson, that like Bruce Willis will appear not as the, action hero, but more like a [01:07:00] scout leader and wow they’re, these people really can act and it’s only because of their career went, but the way to make the most money or what roles they kept getting off or whatever were of a certain stereotype or type casting, I guess is a better word.
And yet, yeah. I love the fact that he’s enough of an artist and auteur that other people are saying, I want to work with him like Woody Allen, what was Corsese, whoever the ones that attract people to them, so
Stephen: yeah, very cool. Yeah, it’s definitely one I recommend.
It’s not for everybody. It’s if you’re going to see, some big blockbuster with popcorn, this is not it.
Alan: That’s right. But it is. We really wanted to see it in a theater because we are. Starting to realize it is, I’ve often said, I really want to see certain movies in the big screen because I want the overwhelm.
I want the big sound and the big movie and spaceships flying past me. But there’s also something to be said for just an immersive experience. If I’m seeing it even on a nice big TV at home, you’re well aware of, hey, there’s a bathroom and a fridge and a, there’s things around us that could distract us.
And when you’re in the theater, you commit to. Right [01:08:00] there for two hours. Give it your full focus and great way to see certain
Stephen: movies. Yes. And we’ve been going to the 5 Monday movies up in Kent, but this was at Ravenna and it was 6 50. Cause they do Tuesday 5 movies and there were not the, this sounds horrible, but there’s a certain level class of people that’s all 5 movies and they go to it.
We have had some of the worst experiences watching movies on 5 a day. Cause. Again, this may sound harsh and it may be too much, but you get that trailer park trash type person coming in and they think they’ll sit and talk. We had to like multiple times tell people to shut up because we were watching the movie.
They were like, because they’re talking over. Yeah, and they’re on their phone. When we went and saw a horror movie, and they brought their five year old to it. Are you fucking stupid? This is a horror movie, .
But So we went to laughing. Yeah. Yeah. We went to [01:09:00] Ravenna. That was not $5 a day.
Paid the extra buck 50 and didn’t have the bad experience. So maybe we need to start doing that.
Alan: We really, whatever that thing is that has people go like at four o’clock to Golden Corral. Colleen and I are now old enough and tired of crowds enough and tired of date night enough that we really let’s go to our matinees on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, when we’ll have the theater to ourselves, we’ll get the same experience, but without the combat with rabble, exactly that.
And we really maybe we’re not going to go out on many Friday and Saturday nights anymore
Stephen: because we’re just tired. I’ve never done that. Yeah.
Alan: And during the day, like after we do catch today, there’s an exhibit that’s about to close down at the Cleveland museum of art about like Egyptian influences on fashion.
And it’s just cool enough. I like Egyptian imagery, the big head pieces and that kind of stuff. And. When you live in the town and you can drive over in 20 minutes and do it for an hour, not have to do the entire museum entire day and get all the food store and stuff.
That’s another thing we’re trying to embrace is go see the [01:10:00] exhibits at the Museum of History and the natural art and Western Reserve and all that kind of stuff. And just. Like the fact that we have the museum to ourselves. You know what I mean? The fact that everybody else is working and that we’re retired now, we’re taking advantage of that a little bit.
It’s our little reward. You know what I mean? So I’ll give you a report on the
Stephen: next week for everybody. There’s the preview. All right, man. Talk
Alan: to you later. These people talk about investing because hey, investing is going gang bang gang bang, gangbusters. Oh my God. What? What the hell’s in my head?
You were watching poor things gangbusters. I met poor things. No. Yes. Have a great week, Stephen. You too. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. Talk to you later man. Alright, bye bye-Bye.
