I recently wrote a little script that reads new messages in my mailbox, uses GPT-4 to decide if they are unrequested sales pitches, and deletes them if they are. Works like charm.
The next step of the project (which most likely will never happen) would have been to engage writers in endless conversations, expressing interest in their products but always finding an excuse to postpone a call. I have the prompt ready, it wouldn’t be hard to implement.
Everywhere I look there are companies developing little CRM agents to generate an ever growing mass of ever more convincing (groan) sales messages.
On the users side of the fence, Google has already plugged Bard into Gmail, Apple is rumored to come out with their own LLM tricks in the next versions of their OSs, while Microsoft is adding AI copilots to every piece of software they own.
Some say that the third world war will be fought by robots. I think it will happen in our mailboxes.
Very well organised vaccination center. In and out in 20 minutes. Go a shot of Pfizer. Stirred, not shaken, with three olives.
I didn’t have any side effects this time. So far, so good.
Now the concern seems to be the Indian variant, which is rapidly becoming the dominant variant in the UK. So maybe they won’t be removing all limitations next month after all.
Most countries which had very widespread contaminations developed their own variant, in Italy the “English variant” had huge success.
Here they actually call it “the Kent variant”. Must be something like the “Crema Inglese” (or Crème anglaise), which doesn’t exist in England. Then the “Brazilian variant” . The “South African Variant”. Now the “Indian Variant”…
I wonder why we didn’t manage to market an “Italian variant”. We are usually good at this stuff! Everybody would have been happy to get the Italian Variant. It would have been way more stylish and expensive than all other variants. An opportunity missed. Come to think of it, there hasn’t been a very successful US of A variants either. No Starts and Stripes variant.
The weather got a little warmer today, hopefully we are at the end of this endless cold spring.
I have a few meetings booked for the next weeks. In person. In town.
There’s a whole new sensitivity around meetings, everyone has a different perception of risk and is more or less willing to travel/meet/engage. There’s a whole new language around asking politely if somebody wants to meet in person or if they would prefer a zoom call.
I guess I’m more or less in the middle of this spectrum: I’m very cautious, get tested all the time (you can get free lateral flow tests here, which is a great thing), wear my mask. But at the same time I’m happy to start booking a few meetings in person or hang out with a few colleagues in our office.
For the last six months I have been eating less and exercising more. Besides what is reported by my scale, one other progress indicator is my “Cardio Fitness” measured in VO2 max as measured by my watch on my daily walks.
Recently I zoomed out on the Apple Health chart on my phone:
I love the fact that no matter what, by the end of this month I will move from my current “below average” condition to a pretty healthy “above average” situation. One of the advantages of the upcoming big five-o birthday, I suppose.
Charts aside, I feel in great shape. Even considering the several little health issues bugging me, I guess that good health is much more in one’s attitude than actual measurements.
So I’m doing very well, thank you. And how do you do?
This week I renewed for another couple of years my first internet domain: studioidea.it. I haven’t been using it for years, but it’s a piece of my past I just cannot let go. Who knows, maybe I will use it again some day.
I registered the domain in November of 1995. Official records say that it was registered in January 96, but I’m pretty sure it was 95. Probably they had not established modern protocols for domain registrations, or perhaps they had not invented calendars yet, I don’t remember.
Anyway, a little calculation revealed that sometime in the last year I passed the threshold of having spent more than half of my life connected to the Internet. Which sounds like a lot, but it also means that I have very clear memories of life before being online. Many people I work with just don’t have that notion, if not from the adventurous stories of us old farts. Many people I work with are younger of my domain name. Can you imagine?
Speaking of memories, I read that Fry’s Electronics shut down their stores this week. I remember going to Fry’s with my dad for the first time in the early 90s. At the time we would visit San Francisco every January for the yearly pilgrimage to Mac World. Discovering a shop which sold under the same roof computers, consumer electronics, junk food, books, electronic components and every other product a nerd my fancy buying made me think for the first time that there were other people like me on this planet (but maybe not in my neighborhood).
I visited Fry’s shops countless other times. I have fond memories of taking there several friends over the years (mostly to the Western themed one in Palo Alto). Last time I went after a long hiatus was in 2018, and it already felt like something from the past. In the post Amazon world a place like that didn’t made much sense anymore.
In other news, it’s the warmest end of February on record in Italy, and I have booked my flight back to London for the 6th of April. I booked before realising that Easter is on the 4th, so now I will have to figure out how to get a Covid test (with an English certificate) on Easter weekend. It’s going to be an interesting challenge.
That’s all folks, enjoy the early spring if you can, stay safe, be kind.
Another month flew by, and not much has changed. The sun is rising about 20 minutes earlier than at my last post, and we should be gaining another 40 minutes this month. This is relevant because every morning I wait for some light before going out for my walk: my days are getting noticeably longer.
I have finished listening to Obama’s audio book (interesting but long), and I’m now enjoying P.G. Wodehouse read by good ol’ Stephen Fry. Always a pleasure.
Sunrise on the Carso hills, one of these frosty mornings.
In other news, we have just posted a new episode of our podcast. If you want to hear Euan and I chatting about current things, you can find us on Apple, RSS or just clicking below.
You will appreciate how careful we are about finding new problems without ever trying to find any solutions ;->
Not much else to add, I’m still in Italy, with no real plans to head back to the UK anytime soon (perhaps mid-March?). It looks like they are doing a much better job at vaccinating people than in the rest of Europe, so it will be worth going back just to get in line for my jab.
That’s all for today. Toodle-oo, pip-pip and all that.
I was asking myself, why would a date change make any difference to what is happening to us all?
I guess that while viruses are not aware of calendars, people are, and it seems that a lot of people are expecting a lot of change: the sheer force of these expectations will move something.
And some change is already happening. Brexit has already happened. Italy is preparing to spend a big chunk of EU money to try to reboot the economy. Trump is on his way out of the White House. It sounds like the new front of the identity politics battle is going to be vaccines. Change.
I have spent the last five days of 2020 mostly in bed with dizziness and nausea due to an inner ear disorder. No food, no talk, no screens and 18 hours of sleep a day. Time for meditation. People pay good money for this type of experiences!
Anyway, while still a bit off balance, I’m starting to feel better this year.
Fog captured by smoke tree flowers on one of my morning walks.
The UK seem to be heading for a long period of lock-downs, so I think I will stay in Italy a little bit longer than originally planned. I’m missing London, but there’s no point going through the whole process of travelling to another country and then still be missing London while confined in my flat in Ealing.
If 2020 taught me anything, it is that there’s little point in planning for the future and even less on dwelling on the past, but most of all the importance of having a positive view on the moment. I’m not any good at this, but I think I’m improving. Hey… right now I’m all dizzy, and I haven’t had a drop of alcohol yet. How cool is that?
You all stay safe, be kind, and enjoy this first day of a new year.
Just in case you were wondering… yep: one year later I’m still walking and meditating as frequently as I can (the fact that I have had the same number of walks and meditation sessions is a funny coincidence).
Disclaimer: this is not a New Year resolutions post. I just want to take post about a couple of new habits that I have adopted for the last couple of months. Will they last? I hope so.
The first one is walking. Working from home can bring laziness to amazing levels. When I realized that I was spending too much time sitting and decided that I needed to move. We live surrounded by a beautiful countryside, so all I had to do was get to the door and start walking.
I have been using RunKeeper to track my activities (I can tell you that since November 1st have have walked for 168Km). I’m not trying in any way to make my walking sound “sporty” or competitive. It’s just walking for 4-5Km every day. I do admire a lot all my friends who run. But I just walk. I do believe that a gentlemen will walk but never run. ;)
The real challenge is walking every day when I’m not travelling. Even when it rains, like yesterday. So far I have been pretty good.
The second habit is meditation. I had been interested in the subject for a while, then I followed a link posted by Loïc to an iPhone app named Headspace. I went through their free “10 minutes for 10 days” program, and I was hooked. After that I did “15 minutes for 15 days” and “20 minutes for 20 days”, and now I have just started the more advanced “Discovery” program. I’m pretty much recommending this app to everybody I meet.
Of course two months of walking and meditating can hardly put a dent in a life of laziness, fat, anger and stress, so while I can’t say that I’m seeing significant changes, I am enjoying the process very much. Which I guess it’s the whole point.
