Looking at Echo and Google Home

Today's not very conducive to blogging. Nevertheless.

Amazon and Google have been having a lot of sales lately for their Echo and Google Home products. I almost bought an Amazon Echo Dot(Alexa) for $19.99, but I didn't feel comfortable with it. Not for any logical reason. It was more like that little voice saying maybe not. I listened to it and did more research. This article has a small graph of accuracy measurements in a test of various digital assistants that were asked over 800 questions. Google was 87.9% accurate and understood 100% of the questions. Alexa was 72.5% accurate and understood 99% of the questions. Siri was irrelevant, since I never buy any Apple products whatsoever. I already have Cortana on my PC.

Cortana is the reason I was looking at digital assistants to begin with. I have Cortana. I like Cortana. I just can't get it to keep working. I rarely shut my computer down. My habit is to put it in Sleep mode instead, because I always have multiple browser windows with multiple tabs open. I like being able to pick up where I left off the night before. The problem is that Cortana goes into Suspended mode during Sleep and doesn't want to wake up even after restarting the Cortana process. I finally gave up. I need something that works.

Accuracy isn't the only factor. Digital assistants do more than answer questions and tell the weather. After a lot of reading, it kind of comes down to this. Alexa is great for people in the Amazon ecosystem who consume media and buy off Amazon and probably have Prime. Google Home is great for more informational type needs. Both are good for home automation, which is something I want. I have an air purifier and plugin heaters, etc., that it would be nice to be able to tell to turn on and off from another room. It would be nice to be able to control lamps with a voice command or have the lights come on as I'm coming up the driveway instead of having to leave a light on.

I ended up ordering a Google Home Mini 2-pack and one smart plug to test. Finding a smart plug without a lot of bad reviews was almost impossible. It seems quite a lot of them work for a while then die. This one had only 5% bad reviews, which is great for any product. I ordered it. We'll see. It should all arrive by the end of next week or early the week after, depending on holidays and how many orders there are and the perils of free shipping. I'll have more to say about how it works, assuming it works, in a few weeks.

Have a great weekend.

The Prime Directive

There's a two-story house I pass sometimes that used to be painted purple. It was for sale for a long time, and one night I looked it up. It was nearly half a million dollars and had 5,000+ square feet of space and an elevator. The road it's on is set lower than the house. You have to look up at it, when you drive past. Aside from its size and odd purple color it wasn't exceptionally remarkable.

One day someone finally bought the big, purple house. They painted it. I'm not sure if the purple is reflecting through the new paint or if the new color is deliberate. It's now flesh-colored. Whenever I take that route, the house looks like a huge box of skin staring down majestically over the road.

I used to watch Star Trek back in the day. I grew up watching reruns of the original series with Captain Kirk. I watched The Next Generation, when that came out, but it had too much left-wing preaching in it. BBC America occasionally shows Star Trek Voyager. I've seen a few of those lately. It was one of my favorites among the Star Trek shows. It had a lot of time travel and didn't preach like TNG. It was about exploration instead of politics.

Starting with TNG, the Prime Directive became a major plot device. According to the Prime Directive, Starfleet isn't supposed to interfere in the development of alien cultures, especially ones of lower technological levels. It was kind of based on advanced countries on earth who go to places where people live in huts and hunt with bows and spears. Driving up in a Jeep drinking a bottle of Coke with rock and roll playing on the radio supposedly damages those cultures.

The Prime Directive was actually in the original series. It just wasn't that important. Kirk was a real man not a politically correct diplomat. He nevertheless kept a copy of the Prime Directive close at hand. It was  printed on a 2-ply roll in his bathroom.

Have a great weekend.

Baseball Business

I've been watching the Braves and the Cubs for a number of years, and I think I've figured out how baseball works as a business. I'll tell you upfront that I don't have insider knowledge. This is based on years of observation.

From what I've seen, most ballclub owners don't care about three things: a)winning and losing, b)the game itself or the c)fans. 

a)Winning isn't as important as having a winning record. The team needs to above .500, but that's only for business reasons. Fans pay money on a winner.

b)Timers are starting to creep into the game. The game itself isn't built for that. Think of all the basketball games where the last 2 game minutes take 15 or 20 real minutes to play. That's a flagrant abuse of the rules of the game of basketball. Football has similar rules abuses that drag those games out, too. If timers are put into baseball, clock abuse will come along with it. Timeouts will also come along with it. The games will end up taking longer to play just like basketball and just like football. The timers that have been put in need to be removed and the commissioner fired. The only reason I can see for the timers is so the commissioner can have a place in the history books. There's no game reason for them.

The game is about winning. When owners care more about profit than about winning, they don't care about the game. Allowing timers also tells me they don't care about the game.

c)From watching the Braves, I deduce that owners only care about fans to the extent that they have enough butts in the seats to look good on television. Modern stadiums have fewer seats than older stadium. It's easier to make the crowd look bigger and the stadium fuller that way. Other than that I think the fans are viewed as a commodity.

My observation has been that the players are traded like stocks on the stock market. Owners buy low and sell high to maximize profit regardless of the damage done to the team. I can't count the number of times I've seen the Braves develop a superstar like Andruw Jones and then dump him when the team needs him most for a younger, cheaper player. The excuse is always that's the player is just too expensive. Cue tears of sadness.

The Braves are very good at poor-mouthing. The announcers will talk about how the Braves are a small-market team with limited resources for buying players unlike those big, rich clubs. However, every time a key player gets injured, the owners open the checkbook to the tune of what could be scores of millions of dollars. The money is always there, and it flows freely whenever needed in complete contradiction of all the poor-mouthing. That tells me they have the money to buy the big players. They just don't want to spend it. They want maximum profit.

Fans will hang onto a loser for a long time, if there was a win beforehand. I've seen a pattern among owners. They'll fund a championship team and then sell off the good players to maximize profit. The players are basically stocks. The owners will then ride the afterglow of the post-season as many years as they can to maximize profits.

I could go on, but this is probably too much truth already. The basic strategy seems to be to buy low and sell high while stringing the fans along with big talk about the potential the team has this season.

The people who seem to care the most about the game are the players and the coaches. A great example is Brian Snitker who was named Manager of the Year for 2018. That man spent decades out of the spotlight working past the time when he could have retired. You don't spend that much time at a job unless you care about it. He finally got a chance at the big time and has made the best of it. A lot of players are the same way. Not all of them, of course, but I'll see players who sacrifice and do everything they can to play just a little bit longer that extra season or two. For those guys you know it's not about the money. It's about the game.

What baseball needs are owners who care about the game the way fans do and not owners who care more about money.

Have a great weekend.

A Couple of News Stories

There have been a rash of news stories about people being accused of things and then being immediately fired. It always makes me think the same thing: innocent until proven guilty. The farther back in time the accusation is the more proof I want to see that it actually happened.

The other day I ran across one of those stories that sounded horrific. A Facebook selfie saved this man from spending 99 years in prison. That guy was accused by a girl he hadn't talked to in two years of attacking her and cutting her chest with a box cutter. The police assumed he was guilty and arrested him. He wasn't given the details of the accusation until nine months later. That's when someone he was with at an event in a different city was able to clear him with a time-stamped Facebook selfie. The story has more details of how the accusation affected his life. What happened to innocent until proven guilty?

But it's not all bad news. I saw a feel good story from South Carolina. Woman kills jail escapee who kicks in her door. A couple of inmates escaped from jail and ran different directions. One of them kicked in this woman's door and tried to attack her in her bedroom, the same bedroom where she keeps her gun. Pickens County Sheriff Clark said, "I gave her a big hug. I told her how proud I was of her." Aw, and just in time for the holidays.

This is why we can't let the politicians take away our guns. Good people need them.

It's been fairly uneventful otherwise. I've been working on the non-fiction book. It's not as easy as fiction. There's a lot of research that goes into it. Fiction has research, too, but there's more flexibility in applying it. For the non-fiction it has to stand up to criticism I expect later. It's about the Bible. I can already imagine the Pharisees lining up.

Have a great weekend.