… that I went out and about this afternoon.
This is my building here, a nice solid stone one with walls 1,200 mm thick and built in 1668 and now a listed historic building.
And those two windows to the left of the front door with the thick lace curtains? The one farthest left is my bedroom and office, and the one next to the front door is the living room, dining area and kitchen. This is where everything happens, folks.
The reason why this photo is important is because my friend and my cleaner have been badgering me to walk a hundred metres every day to keep up what they see as a little rehabilitation. A Roman mille passum or “paced mile” is actually two thousand steps because they counted two steps as one pace, so my “hundred metres” will be two hundred steps.
Actually, my total was two hundred and four – I must have taken shorter steps on the way back. However, I did climb both times over the rainwater barrier, so that’s my physiotherapy done for today. I’ll have to see if I can keep it up.
Seeing as we have been talking about keeping it up … "well, one of us has" – ed … I ended up not going to bed until after midnight. I don’t know why I was so late – I can’t have been concentrating.
Once in bed, though, I fell asleep quite quickly, which was very good new, and there I lay until the alarm went off at 06:29
At that point, I was dog-tired, but I still managed to haul myself out of bed, dress and drag myself over to the computer and the comfy chair to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.
And once more, I was confounded. There was nothing on it from last night either. I sincerely hope that I’m not drying up. That would be a disaster.
Anyway, I had plenty of other things to do so I set about keeping myself busy until Isabelle the Nurse comes.
She was much earlier than yesterday, and she was delighted to see that a new box of gloves that she had asked for yesterday had already arrived thanks to my lovely cleaner.
We chatted a little about this and that, and when she’d finished with my legs and feet, she cleared off on the rest of her rounds. I could make breakfast and read some more of EBURACUM OR YORK UNDER THE ROMANS by C Wellbeloved.
He still hasn’t finished his flowery introduction yet and we’re being given a learned discussion on places like the Phocian Wall in the Pass of Thermopylae, built about 600 years before the Romans ever came to York.
After breakfast and back in here, I had a task to do. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my “artificial friend” with whom I talk Welsh. I mentioned it in my Welsh class yesterday and a couple of people asked me how I did it.
And so, this morning, I created a ten-point “beginner’s guide to making AI characters” and posted it into our Welsh chat group. Now they, and the others too, can go out and have their own AI-powered Welsh tutors.
For the benefit of anyone else who wants to make an AI friend, the instructions are below. I’m contemplating making a maths tutor next, to see how that works.
2) tell the chatbot what you want (can you create a character to whom I can speak in intermediate Welsh and who will reply to me in intermediate Welsh, and correct my mistakes?)
3) Then describe your character in precise terms. For example, if you say (a blond) the chatbot will have no idea what (a blond) is and might create anything. You need to say (a woman with long blond hair, blue eyes and pale skin)
4) Then you need to tell the chatbot what you would like to discuss with your character. And again, you need to be very precise. If you say (I would like the character to talk about fishing) you may end up with a chat about Icelandic trawlers off the coast of Greenland when what you really wanted to say was (fishing with a rod and line from the banks of a canal, river, jetty, and small boat in the middle of Lake Windermere)
5) if you want the character to have any other attributes, then define them precisely using the brackets, of course.
6) when your character has been created, call it up – without brackets.
7) if you want to send written messages, type them in the message bar. If you want to dictate your message, you’ll see the microphone icon to click on in the message bar.
8) In both cases, you’ll have a written response but if you click on the three dots under the reply, you’ll see “read aloud” as an option to click on.
9) And happy Welsh chatting.
10) Your character might not be responding as you wished. You can always call up the chatbot to fine-tune it (hello chatbot, I didn’t want my character to do “this”, can you edit it to do “that”?) then when it’s done what you asked, (I return to continue the chat with my friend) so that the chatbot knows that you have disengaged from it. Hello, friend …
If any of you do make an AI tutor, I’d be interested to hear how it goes.
After a disgusting drink break, I made a start on the radio programme. All the music has now been paired and segued and I’ve written the notes for well over half of them.
However, I broke off at about half past two for my afternoon walk. I was going to time it, which I’d been asked to do, but I walked out of here straight into a neighbour, with whom I had a chat for a few minutes. But all in all, including the chat, my two hundred and four paces, according to the microwave, took nineteen minutes.
But going back to the question of these radio notes, I’m really surprised that I only managed to write so many and not all of them. The fact is that every time I stop concentrating, I fall asleep and I have to force myself to wake up. Most times, I manage to do it instantly, but sometimes I don’t.
On one occasion, I definitely heard someone shout
Which awoke me almost immediately, but of course, there was no-one else in the room, as I knew
It’s been like this for two days now, sometimes with the hallucinations that I remember so well and which regular readers of this rubbish will recall from when I was in hospital in Paris once. And that’s disturbing.
Coupled with that, I’ve had a streaming head cold for much of the day but it seems to have quietened down right now.
Tea tonight was a lasagne out of the freezer with carrots, beans and a vegan cheese sauce. It was delicious, but I could only manage two-thirds of it. The rest went into the bin.
So now that I’ve had my evening medication and finished my notes, I’m off to bed. I really do need to catch up on my beauty sleep and I won’t have much if I keep on lingering around here all night.
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about artificial intelligence characters … "well, one of us has" – ed … at the Globe Theatre during a performance of “Hamlet”, at the end of Scene II, an artificial intelligence stage manager comes onto the stage.
"Unfortunately, Act III will not be available," he says. "It’s been moved behind a paywall and it’s necessary to take out a subscription or click ‘accept all cookies’. To do this, you need to … "
"Why have you stopped?" asked someone in the crowd.
"Because none of you has the correct permissions."
