Show Overview
In this episode I reveal the technology that offers such great promise for boomers and their parents: digital personal assistants like Amazon’s Echo (Alexa) and Google Home. I outline three golden goals I hope to achieve for my own mom via this technology:
- Control over audiobooks
- Access to music, video and pictures shared with me and;
- Video calls using my flat screen display (TV)
The Saturday Night Live (SNL) spoof of seniors using the fictitious “Alexa Silver” is hilarious and actually provides some insight into what elders want from this technology that is, perhaps, of less importance to younger people. Controlling a computer with voice is something that amazed me in the original Star Trek, and again in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: a Space Odyssey (“Open the pod bay doors, HAL”). It only took us another 16 years to get there, but voice control technology is here now and it works…almost. In future Senior Moments I will show step-by-step how I achieve the three goals so that you can do the same for your family.
Detailed Objectives of the Three Golden Goals
Universal edicts:
- Content is to be delivered to any brand modern flat screen TV monitor.
- System is to be controlled by voice
- System components to be assembled from readily available off-the-shelf components. No coding! No obscure gadgets! No geeky hacks!
- System must be easily assembled by the average, non-technical person. If they can assemble a piece of Ikea furniture, they should be able to assemble this system.
- System must not disrupt the senior’s regular TV viewing habits.
- The system must must maintain four-sigma (99.38%) reliability (uptime).
Golden Goal #1: Control an audiobook
- Check out a book
- Play the book
- Pause the book and restart where it was left off
- Rewind the book by 15-30 seconds and replay
- Set a sleep timer
Golden Goal #2: Show pictures and videos sent by others, however they choose to send them (Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, email, app, etc)
- Show a video
- Show a photograph
- Show a slideshow
Golden Goal #3: Facilitate a two-way video-call
- See text messages sent by others
- Allow a two-way audio call (no video)
- Allow others to visually “check-in” on the TV owner (one-way viewing)
- Allow a two-way video call
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Presto and grazie!
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.