Incidentally, I heard a story yesterday from a local farmer about another farmer, some years ago. This guy was a Catholic. On Christmas Day he had a cow with milk fever, which is nasty. When the vet arrived, the cow was in a bad way. The vet said,
“How long has she been like this?”
“Oh, since first thing this morning.”
“Why didn’t you call me out earlier?”
“I had to go to mass”.
The vet said he was totally taken aback and then said “What kind of a farmer leaves a cow in agony to go to a church service?” - and proceeded to tell all the other farmers what had happened.
So the attitude of the priest and the Levite survives two thousand years of Christianity.
The odd thing is that “Viking” hasn’t become a pejorative term, if anything the reverse.
Perhaps it was because they tended to stick to soft targets like monasteries rather than tough targets like Rome. When they got to this part of the world, my distant ancestors got their bottoms handed to them on a plate by Alfred at Edington and were Christianised, so perhaps they were just seen as warm and fuzzy tourists with funny hats. Whereas the Vandals (and the Goths, Ostrogoths, Vizigoths, and, as it says in Asterix, “tous les autres especes de Goth”) actually did bring down the Western empire.
Today I got to watch an iPhone user try and fail to use Siri voice commands to send a message while GPS navigation was up. He had to exit out of the navigation to use it.
Android does allow you to use voice commands during navigation and Google chose today to highlight that feature for me. As I was looking up an ETA for a trip, it popped up a big message “Try saying ‘Call Mom’”. Google, who knows everything about all of us (it’s seen my emails about the funeral, it knows my call history), surely knows that this is the first holiday season that I can’t call my mom. And that the last time that I could was last holiday season. So thanks a lot for that reminder Google.
Found the setting to turn it off. Language and Input - Voice search - “Ok Google” detection. (It was all turned off previously until they added some new feature and turned it on.)
When you make AI a key selling point for your platform, letting a 20 year old code a default message can make you look pretty bad. The worst of it is, it could have been set to suggest the person you call most often, so it was just laziness and lack of thought.
Don’t give them that much credit. My money’s on hard-coded text. I don’t have a “Mom” in my contacts because I spell it “Mum”, but I’ve got the same prompt.
Yes, that’s what I was saying. Hard coded. And by someone who thinks the entire world refers to its parent as “Mom”, which tends to provide geographical focus.
Edit - I’ve realised you misunderstood my post. I’m using “could” in English (i.e. “as an alternative to what actually happened”) while you’re using it in paraAtlantic as could as in “it is possible that”.
I’ve been caught by that one before drafting memos, I should have remembered.
It reminds me of how early “wait” icons were hourglasses until someone pointed out that most of the world has never seen them and they were replaced by a watch icon.And it was pointed out that much of the word didn’t tend to have watches and in those days most cheap watches were digital. And then finally we ended up with rotating dot icons, which are kind of an abstract dial clock.
Also, that Apple was supposed to have had a sales boost in the early days because a French Canadian senior manager made it easy to do basic accented characters. Bill Gates knew no French or German, and Windows is still utter crap at writing non-English languages on a standard keyboard.
My phone sometimes autocorrects common words to email addresses of dead people. First off, why would I want to type an email address, belonging to someone else, in something that’s not an address field? Also, I haven’t contacted these people in years, because they’re dead, so why would I want to type their email addresses anyway?
Rare words should be removed from the list of learned words anyway, because otherwise they just clutter up the autocorrect. Phone predictive text all looks like it was written by a 20-year-old comp sci student before he switched his major to construction management.
The more I use my phone for writing stuff, the more I consider writing on a smartphone to be Stuff That Really Grinds My Gears. In fact, using a smartphone in general annoys me more than it helps me. I would probably be better off with a flip phone, but this is a very minor thing to complain about.
People who can’t corner (well, curves,really). If you are slamming on your brakes in the corner, you’re doing it wrong. Slow slightly beforehand then accelerate through the curve. There is no more excuse for not knowing this in my part of the world than there is for not knowing how to drive in rain. (Which is another one).
Ick. That sucks. I’m lucky enough that as long as there’s nothing green nearby, I’m largely unaffected.
Reminds me of a commercial for I-have-no-idea-what, where a kid’s playing with his food, driving a vegetable around a mashed-potato race course. The father finally gets fed up, and you think he’s going to tell the kid to stop playing with his food, but he actually tells him to accelerate through the turn.
For myself, winter driving tends to repair most of my bad driving habits. When the road has a lot less friction than you’re used to, you learn very quickly why “decelerate, turn the wheel, accelerate” is the correct sequence to follow.
Yes! And one that just happened to me this morning:
If you are behind sometime at a red light, waiting to make a turn, and you start honking your horn at them the millisecond the light turns green, you are distracting them and SLOWING THEM DOWN, not speeding them up as you want to. Now they have to figure out what the fuck you’re honking about instead of just making that turn.
Again: NOT talking about someone speed at a green. The light has just turned green; traffic has just stopped; people run enough red lights in my neighbourhood that is a good idea to verify cross traffic is actually stopping for the light before proceeding.
Bonus: if this happens early in the morning, you are announcing to your neighbours you are an asshole.
2) Turn around in your seat, put on a big smile, and wave. If they’re honking, it must be someone you know, right?
3) Ascertain that there are no pedestrians in the crosswalk or cyclists passing on the right, then proceed.
Bonus if you are waiting to make a left turn and manage to squeak through on the advanced green or through the only gap in traffic, leaving them to wait through another light cycle.
