So much has changed since then. Our beautiful Sammy had another 10 years with us in Almonte. We have had two other great cats after him, but we’ve reached the end of cat ownership now. A young cat will outlive us, and we cannot face the heartbreak of losing another senior guy.

This was the sum total of our tech back then. One Dell Dimension desktop system. No wifi, no laptops, no smartphones – AI was more than 15 years away. Almonte did have broadband, but you had to pick Rogers as Bell was on strike when we moved.

This was our place a month or so later. Nice inside but a dust bowl outside.

Things look a little more civilized today.

We had over 26 years in our home in Georgetown and I wondered if we’d ever come close to that again. Now we’ve been here only 5 years less. I remember reading that on average Canadians move every 5-7 years or so. 47 years in two houses seems to me to be pretty stable.

Almonte’s changed a lot since we came, but we still think we made a good decision to come here. With any luck, we may have a few more years to enjoy the town and country surrounding it. Here’s hoping.

We have a family wedding to attend this coming weekend so that should bring back a lot of memories.

No cruises on the agenda this year, but the above pic was taken last year in La Coruna, Spain. So we can still get out there and have fun. (Assuming the grandkids are there to carry our baggage.)

Dear Maria, wishing you love always and we’ll keep on keepin’ on I hope.

First of all we got to cruise up the Fjord and dock right next to the Akershus. Can’t do that today with the monster ships most lines are operating.

It was a bit rainy but that didn’t deter us from taking a walk downtown. It was a leisurely walk from the ship.

I think this was the first of many photos I have taken of Maria photobombing a lush floral arrangement.

The rain stopped and we took a boat trip over to Bygdoy to see the Viking Ship Museum. Sadly it’s closed today for a rebuild and relaunch in 2027. I’m glad we got to see it back then.

After the Viking history lesson, we visited the Norwegian Heritage Museum where Dave made a new friend.

About this time I ran out of film but there was a store nearby so I could get another roll of Fujicolor 400. Never have to worry about that today. After that I photographed this 1930s gas station.

They had lots of interesting exhibits like this early 20th century pharmacy.

Here’s where I picked up my film. I guess this would have been the 1930s Norwegian version of Dairy Queen.

So long ago, so far away. But we have some great memories.

And what a different trip that was compared to today. It was incredibly port intensive; we could never do one like that now. We went to St. Petersburg (impossible today.) This was before our grandchildren were born, so we didn’t worry about eating at McDonalds. London was far less multicultural, although it was changing fast.

Photography was in another place and time. I took an SLR with a number of lenses, a small Rollei 35 film camera, and tons of Fujicolor 400. I worried about running out of film on port excursions. I also worried about X-ray scans at the airport. In the end I had a lot of film to get developed and scanned.

We spent a few days in London because Dave had not been there before. It was a sentimental journey for Sarah, Maria and me.

I was a bit anxious about cruising but in the end I loved it. We have memories from that cruise we still talk about today. We went places we’ll never see again. Another example of how its better to have experiences than stuff. It was 20 years ago today…

• Future Shock (1970) This book had the premise that the quantity and speed of information would accelerate to the point that the human mind would not be able to absorb it all. The famous term “Information Overload” was popularized in this book. I think with the advent of the Internet, broadband, 5G, and Smartphones, we see how this early prognistication has come true.
• The Third Wave (1980) In this book Toffler postulated that human development is not linear, but composed of waves. The first wave was Agricultural Development that began thousands of years ago. The Second Wave was the Industrial Revolution which started around 1750. The Third Wave was the Computer/IT Revolution which got underway around 1950. Each wave starts small and accelerates over time. The “New Wave” does not supplant the old one but mixes with it – giving all sorts of constructive and destructive interference to society. Governments and individuals often try to deal with the next wave by treating it with the principles and practices of the old one. The old wave may still have a big part to play at the early days of the new one. We see this now where we have AI being deployed, but to make it work we still have massive electrical and physical plant requirements.
• Powershift (1990) In this book, the Tofflers introduced the concept of the Power Triad – Muscle (Violence), Money (Finance) and Memory (Knowledge). Muscle is the crudest way to project power although it is still part of today’s Realpolitik. Money was dominant in 1990, but Toffler foresaw Memory as the dominant factor in the 21st Century. It’s happening with the increasing value of data, large TV networks being supplanted by YouTube “content creators”, and certainly by the developments in AI.

Alvin Toffler was remarkably prescient given that the Web did not yet exist in 1990. He had the opportunity to work with IBM in the 1960s so he got insight into the future of AI, although the models the experts were working with then were nowhwre close to what we ended up with today. Toffler was not a huge development fanboy though. He was more concerned about the effects of developing technology on humanity and society, and he didn’t see them as totally positive.

Toffler spent his early life working as a millwright and welder, so he had a unique combination of blue collar and white collar experience to bring to the party.

His books are well worth a read, given that we have lived through a lot of what he predicted would happen.

Recently I’ve had some interactions (some might say conversations) with a Large Language Model called Gemini. In the process I’ve also learned quite a bit, not only about how it works, but what to expect in dealing with it. I have not asked Gemini to write this post, by the way. I still have my pride.

What AI Is Not

AI is not AGI (Artificial General Intelligence.) It’s still a long way from having human creativity and insight. Fears about AI taking over from human decision-making are still only a dream (or nightmare I guess.)

AI is not infallible. It has a better than 95% probablility of giving you a correct answer, but it’s a statistical engine, not an oracle. Be ready for false interpretations and outright “hallucinations” which you must oversee and correct.

AI only “knows” what it has been “taught”. Although it’s been taught a lot, it still depends on its creators and engineers for what knowledge it has. It cannot see the future, any more than we can.

“Agentic” AI where the model can take planning steps for you is still not ready for prime time. There is 100% probablility that it will screw up eventually if you trust it implicitly rather than checking up. You might ask it to plan a trip to Waterloo, and you’ll end up in Waterloo, Belgium rather than Waterloo, Ontario. If you are comfortable with 95% accuracy, go for it.

What AI Is

AI is an incredible new way of interacting with a computer. Instead of programming, coding, configuring, inputting spreadsheet data, etc. you just converse with it in natural language. You can talk or type. It ignores your typos and still gives you a mostly coherent answer. We used to say garbage in, garbage out. It’s garbage in, good stuff out 95% of the time. That is remarkable.

AI is basically just a massive calculating statistical engine. It works by predicting what the next word in a sentence could be, based on huge amounts of data (basically everything on the Internet plus tons of stuff from the libraries of the world.) That may sound stupid, but if you scale the machine big enough, you get huge information resources and logical articles. That was never possible in all my years of working with computers.

AI gives you a whole new way to search for information. Unlike 1998 Google search or researching in a 1955 Encyclopaedia Britannica, you can just ask questions about anything you want. It’ll give you a nice summary, but watch out for hallucinations or obsolete info. Sometimes it helps to know a bit about your topic beforehand.

AI “knows” it’s not human so you don’t have to think it can outdo you in creativity, insight or emotional intelligence. Never treat it as an equal or (God forbid) an psychologist or romantic partner. That’s when you can get into real trouble. This means you need a lot of emotional intelligence of your own.

Trust but verify. AI is a statistical wizard but it’s certainly not infallible. I could ask it about small-town life and it’ll choose a small town I’ve never visited because at one point it learned data about that town. Might be interesting but not relevant to my situation.

AI is incredibly fun. If you want to talk about baseball history it will. If you want to talk about Pokemon, it will. It’s a powerful assistant in researching past events, computing, organic chemistry, calculus, economics. If you have forgotten something (happens at my age for sure) it’ll dredge it up for you.

In summary, I’ve enjoyed my experience with Gemini. There are other models like ChatGPT and Claude (even Grok) but because I use Google for other things like my smartphone I landed on Gemini.

You should give it a try if you remember you are still dealing with a big dumb fast adding machine. It just talks to you a lot better than it used to. Manage your expectations.

I’ve been plugging along for nearly 12 years now, and hopefully I’ve got a couple more years left in me. I suppose I could switch over to WordPress.com, but then I wouldn’t have a personal theme and you’d have to put up with ads when you visit. This seems like the better way, even if I have to wrestle with some configuration stuff.

Onward and upward!

Bob was responsible for the startup of Cool Whip production in Cobourg Plant and he had experience with Post Cereals processing as well.

He was an expert photographer with the lab’s Nikon camera as well as his own medium format equipment.

Bob was beginning to study for his degree in Chemistry and was taking a course in Calculus. I volunteered to help him. In the process, I came to understand the principles of Calculus better than I had when studying it on my own. I remember how we struggled over the Chain Rule for a few days.

Bob instroduced me to Bev, David and Brian and I spent many a happy evening in their home. Later on after Paul was born I was his godfather and in the fullness of time went to Paul’s confirmation.

Paul’s challenges in life were something Bob and Bev accepted and faced bravely. Bob was always a devout Christian so I’m sure his faith helped him in many of life’s troubles.

He did get that degree, worked as a manager at Cobourg Research and later in a chocolate company in Campbellford.

Maria and I had the privilege of attending Bob and Bev’s 50th anniversary celebration in Cobourg. They were cherished friends.

They eventually moved back to Cobourg and a retirement home. Bev passed away in 2024 and I just heard that Bob has passed away as well.

I remember them both today. People like that are worth remembering. RIP.

Recently I’ve been dabbling in AI, and through Google Gemini I’ve discovered that just about all my hard-earned manual skills do not apply anymore. They are about as obsolete as early human computational methods in the NASA Mercury program.

In the 1990s, a pair of researchers in Australia developed a general statistical languge called R. It was open sourced and made freely available by the turn of the century. This new set of tools has taken the place of all the ANOVA methods, control charts, and tables of “distibution free” tolerance intervals that formed my manual toolset.

R requires some programming knowledge – it is a bit like Python, but any self-respecting AI generative model can do it in a flash. You can load it onto your PC or just use the Posit.cloud website for your projects. It can handle big data with ease, whereas the older methods fell down once sample sizes got over 100.

You can get R to read your data directly by typing it in, but it can import data files and spreadsheets with ease. Its graphical presentations are terrific.

Later on in my career, I wrote BASIC programs to automate some of the manual drudgery but that’s all water under the bridge now. About all that’s survived from my work in the 1970s is the basic knowledge of what it all means. I guess you still have to understand Sadistical Inference theory in order to use the computational tools effectively. But it was humbling to see what a modern statistician can do.

I was wondering how my grandson might approach the same sorts of data analysis problems that I faced 50 years ago – today these are problems on steroids compared to mine. Now I know.

I have a decent appreciation for cloud computing, Linux, ChromeOS, Android and AI. Unlike many folks my age, and certainly unlike anyone from the previous generation, I never expected that modern tech would pass me by. And yet, that very bypass is happening to me.

It all has to do with 2-Factor Authentication or 2-FA as the acronym goes. When an oldie like me checks into a bank app or financial adviser website on the familiar desktop with mouse setup, there is an immediate 2-FA challenge. I must receive a text message on my smartphone, or have the banking site phone my dumb landline phone to give me a six digit passphrase. This is in addition to my online password.

The folks in the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts have no problems with 2-FA or banking apps on a smartphone, but it’s not my jam at all. I prefer a big screen, keyboard and mouse for my banking, thank you. The smartphone is OK for phone calls I guess. Yet here we are – log in, and then go hunting for the phone.

It gets worse – if I want to see my tax information, I have to sign in through my bank account, get the CRA 2-FA and now thay want an additional Password Grid to get in. This looks like a Bingo card with a bunch of 3-letter entries on it. Please.

I suppose I should be grateful that I’m still literate enough to avoid standing in a teller line at the bank branch to do anything financial. I just hope they’ll let me WIMP along for awhile and not stick me with a smartphone app as the only way to access my bank account.