“The 405 Diaries”

Posted on by

Our friend Travis recently packed up and moved to Los Angeles (“Swimming pools and movie stars!”). He talked about keeping a journal of his adventures and yesterday, while drinking beer on my deck, I had an idea for a brief, video mini-podcast. Something along the lines of…

I asked Claude for some good names: “What would be some good names for a daily one minute video podcast chronicling the adventures of a middle age hipster who pulls up stakes and moves to LA?”

Some ideas, ranging from wry to punchy:

Self-aware/ironic:

  • Sixty Seconds of Reinvention
  • Midlife, Crisis Optional
  • The Relocation
  • Uprooted
  • New City, Same Guy

LA-flavored:

  • West of Everything
  • Palm Trees, No Plan
  • Traffic & Transcendence
  • The 405 Diaries
  • Sunset & Second Acts

Hipster-leaning:

  • Cold Brew Crisis
  • The Vinyl Relocation
  • Artisanal Adulthood
  • One Minute, One Life Reboot

Minimal/punchy (good for a daily short-form format):

  • Daily Reroute
  • The Minute Move
  • LA in 60
  • Stakes Pulled

If you want, tell me the tone you’re going for (deadpan comedy vs. earnest documentary vs. absurdist) and I can narrow these down or riff further.

[I suggested we shoot for “droll”]

Droll suggestions — dry, understated, the joke in the deadpan delivery rather than the wording:

  • Sixty Seconds of Reinvention — mundane phrasing for a big life upheaval, that’s the joke
  • New City, Same Guy — the punchline is in the shrug
  • The Relocation — flat, bureaucratic-sounding title for a personal odyssey
  • Traffic & Transcendence — deadpan pairing of the sacred and the sublime with LA gridlock
  • Uprooted — plays it straight, lets the visuals carry the humor
  • One Minute, One Life Reboot — self-important framing undercut by the format
  • Cold Brew Crisis — treats a latte order with the gravity of an actual crisis
  • Stakes Pulled — terse, almost military-sounding for a guy moving to chase vibes

(Claude’s) favorite for droll specifically: The Relocation or New City, Same Guy — both let the deadpan do the work without reaching for a joke.

Perplexity threads

Posted on by

My first blog post referencing ChatGPT was in September, 2023. Before I deleted my account in February, 2026 I had mentioned ChatGPT in 173 blog posts, and had saved twenty-eight “conversations.” I started doing this because a) the threads were (to me) so…fascinating and b) they were too long for a blog post. Even ones I knew nobody else would ever read. In those days I was a little fuzzy on how long the chatbots kept conversations so I saved them as PDFs.

In the ensuing years I settled on Perplexity as my AI of choice (and the only one I pay for: $200/yr) and have saved 28 threads to date:

  • Bruce Sterling quote on knowledge and civilization.pdf
  • Blog posts “Learfield”.pdf
  • Blog tag clouds graphis.pdf
  • Snapshots & Fragments Overview.pdf
  • Early blogging tools.pdf
  • Blog Profiles.pdf
  • Prior to 2016 I was an avid ready of Scott Adams’.pdf
  • Blog – RELIGION .pdf
  • BookBuddy Library Analysis.pdf
  • Perplexity analysis of new reading prescription.pdf
  • Perplexity on anxiety – 1-4.pdf
  • Did Social Media Kill Graffiti?.pdf
  • Nonduality/ How my view evolved.pdf
  • What I mean when I say “nondual”.pdf
  • Noticing What It Feels Like to Notice.rtf
  • The Philosophy of Alan Watts.pdf
  • Understanding Panpsychism.pdf
  • Digital Minimalism & Attention.pdf
  • History of Early Computing.pdf
  • The Illusion of the Self.pdf
  • Meditation and the Brain.pdf
  • AI and the Future of Writing.pdf
  • Exploring the Bootheel.pdf
  • Photography as Time Travel.pdf
  • The Evolution of the Web.pdf
  • Reflections on Aging.pdf

I figured out early on that nobody would ever read these but I was intrigued by the notion some future AI might find them and view them as early examples of how humans interacted with AIs. I share the list above as a pretty summary of how I use these AI platforms (services?).

PS: I’m a compulsive saver. Here’s a list of miscellaneous quotes from books, articles, etc. All or most of which should be included here at smays.com

Siri AI: Calendar search

Posted on by

It’s been a few years since I decided to move key elements of my online life from Google to Apple. I still have files in Google Drive and Google Docs but most of those are also in my Files app on my devices and in iCloud. As I recall, I wanted to have anything of importance in the Apple ecosystem.

With the arrival of the news and improved Siri AI, that has started to pay off. It’s early days but I’m impressed by what I’ve seen so far. Exhibit A: my Calendar app.

I spent hours entering every event (of any importance) in my Day-Timer’s to the Calendar app on my MacBook (The Great Calendar Project). Even attaching relevant PDFs when I had them. Don’t ask me why. Probably the same reason I’ve maintained this blog for 25 years. Siri AI now gives me a handy (fun?) new way to tap into this archive.

Pretty sure this is not what the Apple programmers had in mind as they worked on Siri AI. Most folks just want to know what’s coming up.

In the coming days and weeks I look forward to exploring what Siri AI can do with all of the data I have (obsessively) collected in various apps.

Siri AI: “It’s a phone-changer”

Posted on by

I’ve been playing with the new Siri AI and find myself more impressed with every little experiment. I think Apple finally got this right. In a recent Substack article (“125 Tests of the New AI Siri”), David Pogue calls it “a phone-changer.” (That will make more sense after you play with it a little)

It replaces most Google searches, most ChatGPT or Claude interactions, and cumulative hours of fumbling and searching and dragging and copying and finding and tapping and pasting. […] You can ChatGPT your own life […] The hardest part will be getting out of the habit of opening apps, and remembering that you have Siri.

It’s tempting to tell those around you, “Wow! Did you know Siri can…” but I’m going to resist that temptation. Here’s the thing… Android users (who all secretly suffer from Apple envy) will insist their phones have done xyz since the early 70s. The anti-AI crowd simply doesn’t want to hear about… anything AI related. So I’ll try to limit myself to sharing WHOA! moments here. Continue reading →

DirecTV AI support better than human

Posted on by

Yesterday my wife lost the picture on the TV in her bedroom and called DirecTV Customer Support on the phone. The call went on for quite a while (as such calls do) with the support person having my wife check various settings, changing HDMI port, look up serial number, etc.

As I listened I was impressed with how good this support lady was. Patient, polite (“thanks for confirming”), knowledgable. Maybe the best support call I’ve heard which I mentioned to my wife.

“It’s an AI,” my wife replied.

I was speechless (rare occurrence). I’ve been playing with AI for three years and have heard countless examples of AI “voices” and I’ve always been able to recognize them as such. I was completely fooled by the DirecTV AI.

“Are you sure?” I asked my wife. “Yes. ’She’ said so at least three times during the call.”

Still skeptical, I went to Claude for confirmation:

Voice AI for customer support has gotten good enough that many people can’t tell — that’s actually one of the selling points companies look for. A few things make it convincing:

  • Natural-sounding TTS— modern text-to-speech (services like ElevenLabs, or the voice layers built into platforms like Google’s Contact Center AI, Amazon Connect, etc.) captures pacing, intonation, and small imperfections that used to be a dead giveaway of “robot voice.”
  • Patience is actually easier for AI — it doesn’t get tired, frustrated, or rushed, so infinite calm is a natural byproduct, not a performance.
  • Scripted-but-flexible responses — large phone-support call trees have always been semi-scripted; an LLM just handles the branching more fluidly and can respond to unexpected phrasing.
  • DIRECTV specifically — AT&T (DIRECTV’s former parent) and DIRECTV have both publicly discussed using AI/virtual agents in their support lines, so it’s plausible your wife’s call routed through one, especially for a first-tier troubleshooting step before escalating to a human.

Tells that usually surface eventually: it struggles with a genuinely novel or emotional situation, it can’t access account-specific systems a human rep would casually reference, or the call abruptly transfers once the issue gets complex. If your wife is unsure, she could ask directly — some companies require disclosure now, some don’t.

Am I concerned that I can no longer tell when I’m speaking with a human or an AI? Not really. In my experience, humans are really shitty at this job. Bored/apathetic if not just plain rude. Slow. Everyone knows the drill.

iPod Touch

Posted on by

Barb found this relic while cleaning out a drawer. Perplexity took a stab at identification (with very little info):

“This appears to be an original (1st-generation) iPod touch, specifically the 16 GB version, made in the 2007–08 period. It is the first “iPhone without the phone” Apple ever sold—and it has become a genuinely evocative piece of early touchscreen history.

At the time, this was unusually advanced hardware:

  • A 3.5-inch Multi‑Touch display, the same basic form factor as the first iPhone.
  • Wi‑Fi for Safari, email, YouTube, and the iTunes Store—but no cellular service, phone calling, GPS, rear camera, Bluetooth stereo audio, or App Store at launch.
  • It originally ran a version of iPhone OS 1, before Apple renamed the platform iOS.
  • The App Store arrived for it with iPhone OS 2 in 2008; this model’s final official operating system was iPhone OS 3.1.3.
  • It used the large 30‑pin Dock Connector, not Lightning or USB‑C, and had a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

The original iPod touch was sold as an 8 GB or 16 GB model at launch; Apple added the 32 GB configuration in February 2008.

I think I purchased my first iPod (Nano) in 2005.

Treadmill headed for a new home

Posted on by

In 2016 Barb and I paid $1600 for this professional grade treadmill. It’s been in a dark little windowless room in the basement ever since and I’ve used it numerous times over the years. But having joined the YMCA recently, with access to newer better machines, it was time to find it a new home. My good friend Paul came by to pick it up and take it home to his mother (who is excited about having it.)The monster weighs 269 pounds.
Mechanical genius Paul was able to get it through a couple of doorways and up into the bed of his pick up truck.

So long, Mr. Groundhog

Posted on by


Relocated to an undisclosed location. I paid the wildlife guy 500 bucks to get rid of this guy and all he trapped was a raccoon. “What about the groundhog,” I asked. “It’s $500 for every critter trapped” explained our former wildlife guy.

Barb purchased this trap for $35 bucks. Tossed in some cucumber and voila. He (she?) now roaming free in an undisclosed location. Click the “critters” tag below to see my previous adventures.