End of 2015

As 2015 comes to a close, we're once again heading to Henri's for our usual end of year revelries.

It has been quite a year, with lots of changes. Let's hope 2016 proves to be positive for us all.

So once again, I wish you all a very happy, healthy, and successful new year.

Cheers

/misc | Posted at 18:44 | permanent link

Artificial Stupidity

Artificial Stupidity

In this age of ubiquitous technology and the Internet of Things, I must admit that I have quite a few misgivings about the rough edges of the technologies that we're introducing in our lives...

Some recent caveats:

• I had 4 winter tires installed on my BMW last Monday. By Sunday night, a warning popped up on my car's central display telling me that the pressure of all 4 tires was incorrect. The dealer's advice is "oh, just reset the warning... that happens frequently". Sigh, either the technology is not intelligent enough to take a wheel change into account, or their processes are in serious need of improvement.
• I had a 2014 Lexus ES 300h car with some sort of front collision avoidance feature. Well, twice in the one year that I owned the car, it interpreted a road surface anomaly (a metal plaque used by road repairs teams to cover up holes in the road during repairs) as an obstacle in the road and suddenly applied the brakes and locked the seat belts while normally driving/accelerating on the street. Nothing bad happened either times, but it was quite unnerving and could have been quite dangerous (I could have been rear-ended).
• When we moved into our new apartment last year, I installed new lamps (since our previous lamps from Europe didn't make the trip with us as they were 240V)... I couldn't resist installing a couple of WeMo devices so as to remotely control some of my fixtures. Well, having changed phones a couple of times since setting those up, I now have 'programming' in those controllers that I cannot edit anymore... indeed, one lamp turns on at 00:00 daily and apart from reinitializing the device from scratch, the only option I have found is to set up a separate program to turn it off at 00:01 daily... yuck.

So this gets me thinking about self driving cars and how often I disagree with our GPS's recommended routes. I foresee much annoyance/frustration ahead for all of us poor humans in the upcoming IoT controlled world.

Sigh. Good technology is tough to get right!

Still, I am an incorrigible tech-addict :-)

/tech | Posted at 19:51 | permanent link