Anything But Boring: Day 0.5

So here we are. I’ll be in a cab headed to Oregon to get guide dog no. 4 in a couple of hours. It has been a long journey with a speedy end, but here I am, ready or not.

And about the ready or not thing. Leading up to going, I had the most complicated set of feelings I ever remember having. I know I really want this, but at the same time, I worry that my reduced amount of walking because of this pandemic has left me out of shape. I’ve been running the stairs in our building to try and do some exercise, but is it the right kind? Am I going to be extra rusty in the orientation department?

Also, since the pandemic, I find myself more nervous and unsure of myself when I’m out with people. So I’ve been worried about whether I would annoy my classmates or my instructors or both.

Combine that with the usual new guide dog feelings stew and you have a recipe for panic. At least that’s what my mind brewed up. My feelings have been running from fear to excitement to everywhere in between. Thank goodness, right now, they’re settled on excitement and a bit of nervousness so that’s good.

I’m such a goof. When I figured out that in these times, you usually get about 2 weeks of warning, I decided to make a list of things that needed doing and packing in preparation for heading off to puppy school. Am I ever glad I did! That list kept me sort of sane and driving forward without wasting a bunch of time running around in circles. It was a huge list but I got it all done.

So I’m going to the same school, but a different campus than I’ve trained at before. The campus is in a town called Boring. Apparently it’s very rural, but we drive to bigger towns to do a bunch of our work. I expect that these two weeks will be anything but boring.

I really should take a tiny nap before it’s cab time. But here we go. Brace yourself for 2 weeks of guide dog journals!

Anything But Boring: Day 0

I wrote this big post about my feelings about going to guide dog school and it’s all saved, but apparently this thing won’t let me paste from other apps into a browser edit field. You can paste between notepad and word processor but not between word processor and browser. Arg. So as soon as I figure out how to move the post over, I will.

The point is it’s time to go for guide dog no. 4. I’m going to the same school, but a different campus. This one is in a small town called Boring. Apparently it’s quite rural, but we go off into bigger towns to do our work.

So the town may be called Boring, but these next two weeks will be anything but Boring for me. Hopefully technology will let me share them.

The Be My Eyes Virtual Volunteer

I haven’t used Be My Eyes much in the last few years. Basically any time I would have, Carin’s been there with Aira to take care of whatever the problem was. But since I won’t have access to Carin or Aira for the next few weeks, it occurred to me that perhaps I should pop the app open and make sure that I still remember how to log in, just in case. And when I did, I found something potentially interesting. A new service, currently in development, called Virtual Volunteer.

The Virtual Volunteer feature from Be My Eyes will be integrated into the existing app and is powered by OpenAI’s new GPT-4 language model, which contains a dynamic new image-to-text generator. Users can send images via the app to an AI-powered Virtual Volunteer, which will answer any question about that image and provide instantaneous visual assistance for a wide variety of tasks.
What sets the Virtual Volunteer tool apart from other image-to-text technology available today is context, with a deeper level of understanding and conversational ability not yet seen in the digital assistant field. For example, if a user sends a picture of the inside of their refrigerator, the Virtual Volunteer will not only be able to correctly identify what’s in it, but also extrapolate and analyze what can be prepared with those ingredients. The tool can also then offer a number of recipes for those ingredients and send a step-by-step guide on how to make them.
If and when the tool is unable to answer a question, it will automatically offer users the option to be connected via the app to a sighted volunteer for assistance – our volunteer experience isn’t going anywhere.
This new feature promises to not only better support the blind and low-vision community through our app, but we also believe it will offer a way for businesses to better serve their customers by prioritizing accessibility. We plan to begin beta testing this with our corporate customers in the coming weeks, and to make it broadly available later this year as part of our Specialized Help offering.

An AI TapTapSee or Seeing AI that can answer followup questions has a lot of potential, if it works anywhere close to how they say it should. There are a lot of reasons why it might not (automatic image description can still be pretty janky and blind people can be awfully good at taking crappy pictures among them), but the idea that these sorts of technologies are ever improving and that people with know how have ideas for them is still somewhat exciting.

By the way, had I not stumbled upon this due to circumstance, I would have had no idea that any of it existed. Be My Eyes would be well served by jumping off of the useless release notes train as soon as it can.

The Floppotron Grows, Goes To the Circus

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on the Floppotron, and since last we left it, it’s gotten quite a bit bigger. It’s now up to version 3.0 and includes 512 floppy drives, 16 hard disks and 4 scanners. Ridiculous.

Here it is playing Julius Fucík’s Entrance of the Gladiators, A.K.A. that clown song from the circus.

Testing 1 2 3 Does This Look Like Klingon?

So…This is me testing to see if I can manage to write blog posts from here while at puppy school. If this doesn’t look like pure garble, there is hope for me.

My preparations are going well so far. My list is still long but it’s getting shorter. I think it’s possible that I can be ready to get in a cab next Sunday at quarter to 3 in the morning to head airportward. I may be a wreck, but I’ll be a fully-prepared wreck.

I think I’ll stop here just in case this morphs into non-translated braille. It will mean less screaming and less gnashing of teeth. Wish me luck.

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.