Journeys 3.1

On the way home from the dentist after a cleaning and an all-clear checkup, I rewarded myself with lunch at Bde Maka Ska (lake). The vegetable curry, fried plantains, and dirty rice nicely suited the steaming hot day. The Park Board recently built this new pavilion after a fire and contracted the catering to a local vendor who specializes in Jamaican cuisine.

My friend and I started our bike ride a bit earlier than usual today to beat the afternoon heat. We paused here after cycling along Victory Memorial Parkway. The parkway and its surrounding area were created after World War I to honor the servicemen and nurses from Hennepin County who lost their lives in the conflict. As we were about to head back, we spotted something we’d never noticed before, partially hidden by the trees: a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln.

As we honor those who died defending freedom, I am reminded of when a federal force of 3,000 descended on our city, threatening our liberty and endangering American lives.

For over 30 years, I’ve installed irrigation drippers almost every spring. This year, I played sensei as I showed the leader of our building’s gardening club how it’s done across half a dozen planters on the pool deck without decapitating the plants. The tubing and dripper heads will vanish as the greenery grows. I plan to keep up the tradition, but it’s good to have a backup.

Recently, I integrated this WordPress website with Google’s AI and started looking for problems it could solve. Today, I used the AI to generate descriptive image alt text for screen readers for visually impaired users. It works well, as this example shows. (In yesterday’s micropost, I actually misidentified the produce, AI got it right!) Once I’m sufficiently comfortable with the system, I’ll set the AI loose on all 9,000+ photos in this site’s image library.

“Finally, grape tomatoes at the Asian supermarket!” I thought. A closer inspection, however, revealed they were actually kumquats. Tomatoes aren’t really a staple in much of Asian cuisine. On the walk home, I couldn’t think of a single Japanese dish featuring them. Back home, I looked it up and confirmed that tomatoes only started to catch on in Japan in the 20th century.

The first class this morning was interpreting. Two interpreters with decades of experience joined the classroom to answer questions from the adult learners and demonstrate wireless audio equipment used for simultaneous interpreting. The next classes were more familiar to me: writing, then a reading group.