The Heat Is On

Maybe I’ve asked this before. I don’t know and I have no idea how I would begin finding out. So can someone explain to me the complexities that go into turning the heat for an entire apartment building on and off? Is it harder than click? I hope it is, because in spite of the fact that it’s been 20 degrees plus all week here, our heat has been blazing away the whole time. Is it not possible to turn it off during the day and then turn it back on at night if we must? It feels like such a waste. Like I said, maybe there’s a reason. Perhaps it takes the boilers forever to heat up or something. I guess I can handle that. But if that’s not what it is I’m going to lose my mind, especially when rent increase season comes around again.

A Post


Coming to you live from one of our nice lawn chairs that some dickhead pigeons have pecked the hell out of, it’s…a post about stuff! Yay!

Right now you’re all sharing my first nice weather beer of 2023 with me. Thank you for being here. It means the world. And before you ask, no, I don’t know how I managed to wait this whole awesome week to crack one. Somewhere along the way I became a model of discipline and restraint and didn’t even notice.

It strikes me as I sit here that I opened this blank document with no plans about what I would write beyond the beer thing. So…um…Hmmm…

Fuck pigeons, for a start. I don’t know why they started showing up here a couple of years ago, but now there are a few we can’t get rid of. Maybe somebody else was feeding them and along the way they discovered that our balcony was a fine source of nesting material thanks to the hair from when Carin would groom Tansy outside, but whatever happened, we’ve unwillingly become a Walmart for winged pricks. And now that there’s no longer a Tansy, they’ve switched from gathering up the super easy stuff to going after our convenient furniture. The lawn chair closest to the rail and another small chair in a similar position at the other end have both been attacked. It’s quite off pissing, not to mention an under-rated reason why it’s nice that Carin’s new dog will be here soon.

You know what? I really do not enjoy writing things on my phone. It takes forever and gives me headaches. I’m happy for those of you who feel so much more productive since smartphones came along, but even after more than a decade of using them, they’re still not for me. If I knew I wouldn’t miss all of the apps, I think I would happily switch back to T9. I was so much faster at that, even faster than I am with apps like FlickType.

Carin and I celebrated Christmas this week. She got me tickets to see Matt Andersen, and the show was on Thursday. It was our second time seeing him, and I can’t wait for the third. He’s so good, you guys. If you’ve heard him on the radio or Spotify or whatever and thought to yourself “hey, that sounds pretty nice,” you need to see a live show. Trust me, you’ll be a fan for life. He has such a great voice. It’s like a Swiss Army knife. It has all the power you could ever want, but when it needs to be, it’s so tender and emotional. His music grabs you and holds you, but it also has a way of letting you amble off to wherever your mind wants to go.

I also want to give a shoutout to the Hello Darlins, who opened the show. They have a simple sound that’s still somehow hard to pin down. It’s country, it’s folk, it’s blues, it’s a little bit of gospel. It’s familiar enough that when they start singing you momentarily think to yourself “I know this one!”, but at the same time, it’s new. We’ll be checking out their albums for sure.

I’ll leave things there for now. I’m going to relax out here and listen to the Jays, who will hopefully beat the historic Rays again. Enjoy this awesome weather while you can, if you’re getting it. This is April in Ontario. You can’t trust it.

It’s Dog-Bringing Home Time!

I knew that when the call finally came, I would be in shock and running in circles like a dog chasing its tail. I am, and more.

GDB called me today and offered me a class date. Yes. I am headed to get guide dog no. 4 on April 23, graduating on May 6. Holy crap holy crap holy crap! I’m also headed to Oregon, and not California like usual. It’s the same school, just a different campus.

I’m a whole sea of emotions. I’m over the moon happy. I’m scared about this new beginning. I’m relieved that this uncertainty that has been plaguing me for 3 years can finally be gone and I can live my life without worrying about having to cancel my plans because guide dog class came. I’m worried that the changes that have happened in our lives will make for a bored dog. I know I’m going back to the office, but we always get our groceries delivered now because it is so much less stressful to order them online than it is to battle with harried grocery store staff. I always get my prescriptions delivered, and will probably keep doing that, because the drug store is no longer next door to the office, or more accurately, the office is no longer next door to the drug store. I’m a little anxious because my dad is dealing with health issues and I’ll be far away, so I’m hoping against hope things continue to go well when I’m in class. I’m aware that I have felt combinations of all of these things before and it always works out. But I feel them all over again!

I will try to blog my training, but I’ll be blogging it on a new device that I’ve never used for this purpose. So…I hope it doesn’t look like chicken scratch and I hope I don’t give up and post it after I get home. But I’m definitely getting it written down and one day, you will all be able to read it.

There’s something really neat about this day. Today, 10 years ago, Tansy and I came home together to start our journey together. And 10 year’s later, today is the day when I got my call. There has to be something special there.

Whether it’s a sign or not, off I go into the wild blue yonder! I hope I get a dog with Tansy powers, or maybe unique powers of its own!

Scarily Good AI Generated Voices Are Basically Here Now

If you need to be creeped out and worried about the future today, here you are.

Prime Voice AI
The most realistic and versatile AI speech software, ever. Eleven brings the most compelling, rich and lifelike voices to creators and publishers seeking the ultimate tools for storytelling.

Grow Your Audience by Expanding into Audio
Generate top-quality spoken audio in any voice and style with the most advanced and multipurpose AI speech tool out there. Our deep learning model renders human intonation and inflections with unprecedented fidelity and adjusts delivery based on context.
Storytelling
Whether you’re a content creator, a short story writer or a video game developer, the opportunities for designing compelling audio are now endless.
First AI that Can Laugh
Stories with Emotions
News Articles
Let your news be heard as soon as they can be read. Automate your audio strategy. Engage and retain subscribers by expanding into the audio format.

Audiobooks
Bring stories to life with vibrant narration. Give each character a unique voice. Our tool is built to meet long-form content demands.

Every book deserves to be heard
Uncanny Quality
Our AI model is built to grasp the logic and emotions behind words. And rather than generate sentences one-by-one, it’s always mindful of how each utterance ties to preceding and succeeding text. This zoomed-out perspective allows it to intonate longer fragments convincingly and with purpose. And finally you can do this with any voice you want.
Speech Synthesis
Our next-level text-to-speech (TTS) model lets you convert any writing into professional audio, fast. Powered by our proprietary deep learning model, the tool lets you voice anything from a single sentence to a whole book in impeccable quality, at a fraction of the time and cost traditionally involved in recording.

I know who the target markets for this are and I understand what the point is, but dear god, the potential for abuse here is staggering. Unlike a lot of synthesized voices, these ones, or at least the one I tried entering text into on the website, really do sound pretty good. And since they aren’t trying to mimic anyone specific, it’s going to be a lot harder to find the typical tells that something is up, because maybe that’s just how this fella talks.

That the company at least acknowledges ethics and taking action against misuse is nice I suppose, but moderating in real time at scale when the scale is the entire damn world is pretty much impossible. By the time you catch wind of the professional sounding fake news report and sort out that it’s not meant as satire, it’s already too late.

“So What’d You Get For Christmas?” “I Got My Affairs In Order!”

I’ve seen several news stories in the last couple of years about how Christmas is the worst time of year for heart attacks. It makes some sense. the holidays, fun as they can be, are also a pretty stressful time for many. Money, Travel, family disagreements, your doctor’s office texting you that you have terminal cancer…all of that can add up to a whole lot of extra anxiety. So please fill out this end of life form, if you don’t mind.

A photo showing the accidental text and the apology sent an hour later.
We wish you a scary Christmas and you soon won’t be here.

The mass text from Askern Medical Practice in Doncaster was sent out on December 23, according to the BBC. In it, the practice says that the doctor has asked the recipient to fill out a form DS1500 – which according another U.K. hospital system is meant for people who have a terminal illness to apply for benefits. The text also tells recipients they have been diagnosed with “aggressive lung cancer with metastases.”
In a second text, patients were asked to accept the center’s “sincere apologies.” 
“This has been sent in error,” it states. “Our message to you should have read We wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
The center, which has roughly 8,000 patients according to the BBC, has not publicly commented on the mishap. The practice’s last news release, issued in September, recognized the “excellent feedback from patients regarding telephone consultations.”

A List of Low Bandwidth, Easy To Read News Resources

Since a lot of news websites are cluttered as hell, it can be hard to find and consume what you’re looking for. this is true if you’re blind like me and want to beat the shit out of the next video/ad/countdown timer that won’t stop interrupting the screen reader or bouncing it all over the place, or even if you’re just a normal person who would like to quickly find some news and needs to do so without using a lot of bandwidth. If either of those use cases sounds like you, then this list of text only and lightweight interfaces for popular sites might be what you need.

It’s pretty light on Canadian content (so far CBC and Radio Canada are the only ones listed), but there’s quite a bit to work with here. There are even a few minimal interfaces for places like Twitter, Reddit and YouTube.

I Finally Had Everybody’s Teeth Dream

It took me nearly 44 years of being alive and nine since writing this, but last night I finally had a my teeth are falling out dream. It wasn’t very exciting and technically the tooth didn’t fall out by itself, but it’s as close as I’ve gotten.

I was sitting at a table in either a house or a restaurant, I’m not certain which it was (What am I, some nimrod from a Pizza Hut commercial?). There were a bunch of people there, most of whom I didn’t recognize from real life. As I was eating, I noticed that one of my teeth near the back felt a little off. Without excusing myself, I just stuck my fingers right on in there, wiggled it, and pop, out it came. The strangest part was that nobody appeared to notice any of this, and that I was shockingly ok with it. In fact, it seemed to somehow immediately improve the positioning of a few of my weird ass teeth.

I woke up after that and almost forgot the whole thing. I didn’t even manage to tell Carin about it this morning. It only came back to me a few minutes ago while I was in the bathroom thinking about brushing my teeth, which are still weird ass.

I wonder if this is the only one of these I’ll ever have, or if now that the seal is broken the floodgates will have opened up and I’ll be doing it on the regular.

Well Boys, Have I Got A Deal For You!

The story itself is a bit old, but the idea of drive drunk, damage car, head to dealership and attempt to sell damaged car is new to me.

Officers say the calls started coming in around 4:40 p.m. Monday.
They say witnesses reported seeing a SUV hit the median of the Lloyd Expressway near the Main Street exit. They say the crash caused a flat tire and the car to smoke, but the driver kept going.
Other callers say the driver was all over the road and now missing a front tire.

They say he eventually stopped at a car dealership and appeared “super drunk.”
Employees told police the driver, 30-year-old Jordon Mattingly, was trying to sell his SUV.
Police say he had swelling and scratches as if he had just been in a crash.
They say Mattingly smelled of alcohol and almost fell several times.

They went on to say that they found alcohol in his car and that he tested 3.5 times over the legal limit, which explains quite a bit here, I think.

By the way, if you’re looking at the name Mattingly and thinking to yourself that it sounds familiar, that’s because Jordan is the son of former baseball player/manager and current Blue Jays bench coach Don Mattingly.