LLMs really get me!

 Often I rely on autofill to browse to a site I go to frequently.  Then, if it doesn't work, the first search hit is usually what I am looking for.  Today I did this for this very blog.  Now, of course, sometimes you get an AI answer.  Well, look at this on-the-nose summary:

Little Miss Muffet

A new experience for me thanks to a gift from a former student (Thanks, JM!).  It was easier than making beer but fairly labor intensive.  

Scooping the curds from the whey

Pressing the curds into cheese in the background, whey soup in the front

Drying out the hunks of cheese

Cheese made this way is somewhere on the cottage cheese to mozzarella spectrum.  

So far, I've eaten the cheese plain, in a sandwich, on a hamburger, on a salad.... who knew?
 

I also have a lot of whey I need to make use of.  (Not a sentence I have ever constructed before)

Am I the outlier or am I just old school?

As long as I can remember, when writing down the time by hand, I write the hour big and the minute as a superscript to that.  I must have been taught this somewhere along the way?  But when I do this on the board for my classes, my students have to puzzle it out - sometimes only figuring out what those cryptic numbers are months into the school year.

Note:  my school has very odd start and stop times for our teaching periods.

Class starts at 12:48 and ends at 1:34!

When I am observed by administration they always note "Mr. Rideout has an agenda posted on his board: Great teaching technique!"  However, what they don't know is that I post the agenda for myself or else I might just tell stories from the Viscotek days or the vineyard all block!

School Projects, Old Blogs, Great Minds?

Recently, Isabelle shared a project she made for one of classes (the assignment was the make an accurate map using specialized software - the details are a bit fuzzy for me).  

In any case, as soon as I saw it, I thought - this reminds me of an old blog post of mine!

(for the record, she got an A and they asked if they could use it as an exemplar in future classes)

I am Iron Chef!

 I thought these words to myself as I victoriously incorporated the 'suprise' vegetables from our local CSA.

Not knowing beforehand is part of the fun!  The victorious feeling of a successful incorporation makes me feel powerful.

As I was designing dinner plans around the latest veggies, I realized I was living IRL a kind of version of the classic, OG cook-off show, "Iron Chef".

Although, I have not watched many (if any) of the subsequent popular spin-offs, we did watch the original, highly-stylized Japanese show when it was circulating here in the States (repeat shows dubbed over in the early 2000's?).

K-Drama Drama

 The other day I logged into my streaming app and got the following distressing news:

What is this??  Four days to find out if the Sovereign of the Spirit World is going to get back together with the mortal world's most dashing general??? How am I going to make it?

Technically this show is a C-Drama since it is Chinese not Korean, but I lump my J's and C's into K's.  I mean, if a show has the requisite moves, it's a k-drama to me:

-the wrist grab

-the camera pan-out (from multiple angles!) while the leads stand about 5 feet apart, stationary, gazing intensely into each other's eyes.

-a chaste piggy-back ride (usually gratuitous to the plot)

-a focus on food, especially the slurping of noodles

-a drunken confession

-a sudden, impulsive, un-signaled kiss which the other the other person unexpectedly melts into, only to have one of them push the other away in denial

-the 'hold your hand (or grab your arm) suddenly while I'm sleeping' move

-the over-arching stretching of the audience's emotions by thwarting the romantic pairing at the heart of the show because one (or both!) of the leads thinks they are not good enough or will ultimately hurt or put in harm's way the other one (with good reason such as:  they are from a different time period, a different level of society, they are undying and the other is mortal, they are an alien, a goblin, a grim reaper, sworn-to-kill-you-because-you-are-the-enemy (or the child of an enemy), they are in the middle of a body-swap incident and so not who they appear, they are actually a cat or a fox or something - in other words, the usual stuff we all have to deal with)

-over-the-top emotive soundtrack (examples here and here)

-the mandatory flashback sequence of 'all those signs I missed but the audience noticed' as well as always backing up a full scene at the start of a new episode

I remember my mother reading these derivative, unoriginal romance novels when I was a kid and then, many years later, my mother-in-law watching various C-Dramas (she even told me confidently once that I would like them).  I thought "what is wrong with them?" 

Over ten years ago, for reasons I can no longer recall, I secretly watched my first K-drama:

My First

My heart raced, I cried, I didn't understand what was happening, I stayed up all night binging episodes in the corner of the living room after the fam had gone to bed.  Little did I know it was just the start of my K-drama journey.

Now, I'm proud and out.  I've thought about doing a top 10 list for K-dramas but I thought I would first make this post and see how it sits with me.  Younger Ken mortified, Current Ken bemused for sure but what about Older Ken?  I'll have to ask him when he reads this post in a couple of years...

By the way, Younger Ken - don't be so quick to judge your own mother and mother-in-law!

My latest

Electric Field Aura?

The other day, I was doing the old 'disco-plasma-ball can use its electric fields to light a fluorescent bulb up' demo (probably my favorite demo of the year) when WH asked if he could snap a picture.  Later, I saw that he was using it as his screensaver on his phone.

You can't see it, but I am, of course, muttering an evil inflected 'Muh Ah Ah Ahh" (as requested).

The old day job can still be fun!