Tales from the jar side: The Taylor Bowl, A couple of screen/podcasts, Gemini is partly here, UConn women's basketball, and the usual tweets and toots

I was once confronted by Duane Johnson outside a Hallmark store. There I was, caught between The Rock and a card place. (rimshot) (H/T @MostlyHarmless)

Feb 11, 2024

Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of February 4 - 11, 2024. This week I taught my two-day Functional Java course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform.

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The Taylor Bowl

Let’s take care of the most important issue right away:

Yup, she made it. For those few jarheads who aren’t aware, Taylor Swift had a concert in Tokyo on Saturday night, so the question was whether she could make it to the game in time for kickoff on Sunday.

I asked GPT-4:

My assumption was that the NFL would demand that the F-14s involved in the flyby at kickoff take a brief detour to pick her up and drop her off. That, I believe, qualifies as “prompt transportation.”

My favorite comment was this one:

Yes, Boeing can handle that. Unfortunately.

This is an unusual Super Bowl for me because I enjoy both teams and don’t really care who wins. I hope they both play well. But I’m really glad Taylor made it, mostly because of the people it annoys.

Whoever put up this sign, however, has a good sense of humor:

I DONT WATCH FOOTBALL SO I DONT KNOW WHO TAYLOR SWIFT IS BUT HE SOUNDS FAST

This one seems a bit over the top, but who can say?

Worth watching the halftime show, just in case. Speaking of halftime:

Her very presence is driving some people nuts:

Frankly, I think she and Kelce are adorable together, and I’m totally rooting for them. I don’t believe that they will do any attention-hogging stunts, win or lose, though. I think they’re both too classy for that, despite my prediction a few weeks ago that there would be a marriage proposal in the offing. Now I think he’ll wait until the afterparty, or maybe even until tomorrow. We’ll see.

They’re welcome to drop by my house. We’re having a Super Bowl party and have done so every year since the mid-90s (pandemic excluded). One of its most defining features is that very few guests actually pay attention to the game, other than me and whoever else happens to be looking in that direction. We do watch the commercials, even if they’ve been disappointing the last few years, with a couple of exceptions.

I do like this image, which I think is from one of them this year:

My wife and I are in the midst of our re-watch of the second season of ST:SNW (Strange New Worlds), which is just as awesome this time, so I’ll let Paramount+ do their props. Just to be clear: the entire Star Trek: Picard show never happened. None of the three seasons supposedly broadcast ever existed. It’s the only humane solution.

(I understand that he gets to wear a 1 because he’s the captain, but shouldn’t Riker be number 1? And maybe that helmet explains the first two seasons of his show that never happened.)

Gemini Is Here (Sort of)

Bard is dead, long live Gemini. Google released the updated Gemini version, called Gemini Ultra, which you can get if you subscribe to Gemini Advanced, which I’m not allowed to do in my business account because it’s a business account.

Seriously, Google, wtf? I’m a one-person business, and all my data is in Google docs/slides/sheets/gmail. Why can’t I use Gemini to access it (whenever that’s enabled)? I’m the administrator. I’m more than happy to grant whatever evil permissions you want, given that you’ve probably scraped all my data long ago anyway. Don’t you want your additional $20/month?

Oh, and btw:

That returns:
gemini-pro gemini-pro-vision

and no gemini-ultra in the REST API yet. I knew there would be a delay before they added that model, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.

I do like the new Android app, however. I asked it to take a look at the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel, and through its YouTube integration it was able to do so. I then asked how long before it becomes monetized:

I guess I’ll have to start creating high-quality content, optimizing my videos for search, and actively promote the channel. Two to three months, however, sounds rather optimistic to me, but then again that’s from Gemini Pro, not Gemini Ultra.

A quick couple of notes: Yes, that speaker button lets Gemini read the message out loud to you. Also, in case you’re wondering, the actual numbers are 1257 subscribers and 1469 public watch hours. Not that I pay way too much attention to that or anything.

Screencasts and Podcasts

This week I appeared on Greg Turnquist’s Pro Coder show. He arranged it so I could simulcast it on my channel as well:

Here’s a link to his channel, where he shows you how to become a pro coder. He sent me a shirt afterwards, which I’ll probably wear tomorrow when I record the video version of today’s newsletter. Thanks, Greg!

(I’ll also be wearing my new glasses, but that’s another story.)

A few months ago, I appeared on a really long screencast/podcast called stackd, and that came out this week as well:

Here’s the direct link to that. We had a lot of fun, not to mention I didn’t feel totally out of place with my bald head. :)

On an unrelated note, this popped into my Twitter feed:

That came as a surprise. I’m not sure how much I believe it, but I checked the linked page here and my book was 5th. Heck, I’ll take it, especially because it put me ahead of Venkat’s book (Programming Kotlin) at number 6. Of course, that may be further evidence the ranking is, shall we say, questionable, but come on LET ME HAVE THIS.

Moving on, I also gave a talk this week at the Computer Science Club (the student ACM chapter) at Trinity College. I know, pics or it didn’t happen, but I forgot to take any. Maybe one of the students can send me one.

My talk was about running large language models on your own machine, which was based on last week’s video Uncensored Java AI: Running AI Models using Ollama and Spring AI. I got to add some material about the Ollama WebUI project and the OllamaHub, which collects prompts and customized models based on open source LLMs. More about that in (hopefully) next week’s video.

The UConn Women Are … Okay

Speaking of sportsball, like everyone else in Connecticut, we are long-time fans of the UConn women’s basketball team. To give you some context, here’s Connecticut:

See that highway that splits the state east and west? That’s Rt 91, which follows the Connecticut river. The result is that west of the river you get Yankees and Giants fans from the New York influence, and east of the river you get Red Sox and Patriots fans from the Boston influence. (There are a handful of Mets and Jets fans around too, but nobody cares about them.)

That’s why I say we’re on the front lines of Red Sox Nation, because it’s easy to be a Sox fan in Boston, but here we have department store displays that have half Sox shirts and half Yankees shirts, and it’s not so easy to knock over half a display.

(At least I used to say that, before the Red Sox traded away Mookie Betts — arguably their best player since, oh, Freakin’ Babe Ruth — for nothing. Grr. I’m still mad about it.)

The only thing everybody in the state agrees on is, you guessed it, UConn women’s basketball. The men are good at random intervals (like this year, when they’re sitting at #1), but for the past two decades the women have been a juggernaut. My favorite team was the 2001-02 version, which started four seniors and a sophomore. That team destroyed everybody. They went 39-0, won every game (including the championship) by double figures, and here is how the WNBA draft looked afterwards:

The sophomore that started with them? A player named Diana Taurasi, who was the first overall pick her year and arguably the greatest women’s player ever.

The women’s team won their last championship in 2016 (Breanna Stewart’s senior year) and have fallen on hard times recently, relatively speaking. So of course this was the year my wife and I finally got tickets to see them in the Hartford Civic Center (or whatever they’re calling it now).

That was about a half hour before the tip. The team played … okay, but Seton Hall was much worse, and we won by a fair amount. (Today, however, they played top ranked South Carolina and got crushed, as they should have.)

Way too many stairs to get to our seats, and we had to watch out for low-flying planes, but we had fun anyway.