Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Tentative Steps into AI

May 20, 2024 / / 0 Comments

A few weeks ago I mentioned starting a new project and the first night nerves associated with that experience.

The nerves have mostly settled down now, but spiked a little when I had a new application make its appearance on my desktop this week. Microsoft Co-Pilot!

To say there’s a huge amount of noise around AI, and how it will impact our lives in all areas is likely an equally huge understatement. I am not anti-AI, I just haven’t prioritized the time to really dive in and understand the implications.

I’m the type of person who learns best by doing something rather than reading about it, so I tend to prioritize time when I have something specific for that application. I didn’t think I’d reached that point with AI until I had to review several meeting recordings relevant to the projects I’m working on.

Each meeting was about an hour long and it promised to take me nearly two days to go through all of them. And then a colleague suggested using Co-Pilot. It took a while to work out how to use the interface, and request a summary of the first meeting.

There was a slight delay – maybe ten seconds – before a window popped up with a half-page of text that not only outlined the discussion, but also highlighted the action items. I listened to the first meeting all the way through and didn’t find anything Co-Pilot had missed. After that, it took less than an hour to get summaries of the other meetings.

I’m still not sure about AI and fiction writing, but I am very sure that if an application of AI saves me nearly two days of listening to meetings I didn’t attend, then sign me up for more!

About Labyrinths

May 13, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I first learned about labyrinths when I lived in San Francisco, and walked the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral. It was a difficult time in my life, and the slow measured pace as you wend and weave along the paths to the center was calming, and helped put some issues into perspective.

After I moved back to the east coast, I lost the habit of labyrinth walking until this past weekend. I’m not sure what motivated me to do a search, but I found an outdoor labyrinth here in Auburn at Village Christian Church, and decided to pay a visit.

Around ten on a Saturday morning, I was the only person walking through the trees to the clearing where the labyrinth is constructed. Stone walkways lined with brick to mark the way. It was surprisingly quiet given the busy road on one side and housing on the other side. I cleared my mind and decided to focus on one thought as I walked – something never easy for me at the best of times.

It worked, in a way, and for the first few minutes, I found myself having to forcibly slow done. None of the quick walk I usually have when going from one place to another. For me getting the most from the labyrinth experience is a slow measured pace with just the birdsong, the soft rustle of leaves in the light wind, and the occasional bark of a dog.

On the return circuit back to the entrance. I realized the sun dappled patches of light and shade were very much like our lives. We cycle from the good times in the sun to the darker times in the shade, and then back again. In my own life I’m feeling that transition from a dark time to good.

It’s wonderful to feel the sun again.

First Person or Third Person

May 6, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Toward the end of last week, I finished the latest Jacob and Miriam novel. This is the fastest I’ve written a novel, but not the reason for this post.

I write the Jacob and Miriam novels in the third person, and the Jacob short stories in the first person. It wasn’t a conscious decision to write that way, it just happened.

Once the novel was done, I put it aside and turned my attention to a short story – at least I think it’s a short story. It may turn out longer. It’s a Jacob story that came about from a throwaway line in the story A Cousin’s Outing that appears in the Thrill Ride issue Sisters in Arms.

In that story, Miriam makes a comment about a past event, and Gideon makes it a condition of his help to hear the full story about the event.

At the time, I had no idea what that event was, how it came about, or who was involved.

Well, the subconscious mind is a strange thing, and over the weekend, I opened a new Scrivener document and started writing about that event. After about 400 words, I came to a slow stop. Something didn’t feel right. I wasn’t sure what it was, so back to the top and reread from the beginning. As I did so, I found myself changing the viewpoint. With my head still deep in the novel, I automatically wrote Jacob in the third person. As I cycled back through the first paragraphs, I changed from third person to first, and then kept writing.

Because I started late in the day, I didn’t really expect to hit my daily word count, and was quite surprised when I looked up and had blown past it. I don’t think I would have been anywhere close had I persisted with Jacob in the third person. And I even have a title. Keep your eyes peeled for Unwelcome Competition!

First Night Nerves

April 30, 2024 / / 0 Comments

This week, I started a new project. It was different from many others I’ve worked on over the past few years.

It isn’t the work, as that’s similar to many other projects I’ve worked on over the years. What is different is that this time, most of the people I’m working with are as new to me as I am to them. And being the new kid in town, is still a bit scary.

On one level, I know that in a couple of months, I will know have built relationships with the team, learned how the various systems work, where to find documentation and why we are using both Confluence and SharePoint, and the rules for putting documents in one or the other, or both!

I’ve done this many times before, and may well do it again in the future, so there’s no real fear there, It’s those usual first night nerves

An Empty Nest

April 22, 2024 /

Last month, I wrote a piece about the persistence of the birds who built a nest on the fan blades in our courtyard Ingenious Persistence – Richard Freeborn

We have watched the parents in their daily feeding cycles coming to and fro to the nest, and counted three chicks. We held our breath during a storm earlier this month, as it was a wild storm that led to the death of the chicks last year. This storm was nowhere near as bad and the chicks continued cheeping, chirping, and demanding more food.

At one point I thought we were down to two babies, and then this past weekend, they changed from scrawny spike-haired chicks too real birds. And there were four of them not three.

On Sunday morning we spotted one of them venturing out of the nest and onto the fan blade. There was a flurry of movement in our house as the cat and the dogs were bundled inside and all doors closed.

This was not a popular decision, especially with our cat, Roon, who despite closing in on 16 years still considers himself to be the rambunctious wild-child he was in his youth (don’t we all!).

Almost like that was a trigger, the first bird fluttered out of the nest and onto the ground. The others soon followed, settling on branches, guttering, or the top of the brick wall.

They spent maybe fifteen or twenty minutes getting the feel for their wings, making practice flights across the courtyard, and from the gutter to the ridge line of the roof.

And then they were gone. Off into the line of trees that follow the creek behind the house, and indistinguishable from all the other birds flocking and foraging for the afternoon.

There was a feeling of disappointment that they were gone, but also a sense of wonder. Days and weeks of nurturing and in twenty minutes they are gone and off to a life of their own.

I wonder if there’s a lesson there for humans?

A Geek Moment

April 15, 2024 /

It has been many years since I wrote software code for a living, and maybe ten since I last dabbled.

The dabbling was building a database of stock and futures prices using Groovy and the lightweight H2 database. I had a fairly robust application and a good block of historical data when I ran into a couple of problems. The goal of the database was to calculate the relative strength of a stock or future against its peers, as described by Tom Dorsey in his book Point and Figure Charting. At that time, I couldn’t find a Groovy or Java application that allowed me to calculate the results I needed – bad planning on my part as I couldn’t get my head round how to write the code. The second problem was that H2 changed their database structure and for the life of me I couldn’t work out how to migrate.

As a result, the project just sat there with nothing happening. I’m still collecting the raw price data, but right now it sits in flat files on my hard drives and backups.

About three years ago, I dusted off my coding gloves and used Python to manipulate some health care data for a project I was working on. Now Python as I suspect most reading this know, is incredibly powerful and has a host of open source libraries available to the developer. One of those libraries matplotlib has a whole set of finance utilities. I looked at the library, and put my notes aside but the thought of it never really left my mind.

This past week, I pulled out the old Groovy scripts and looked at migrating them to Python. I rethought exactly what I had been looking to do that first time and scaled back a lot of the calculations that weren’t really necessary. The refactoring ended up being much easier than I expected. And fast. Over 200,000 rows into a SQLITE database in about five seconds!

I also found some interesting and illuminating thoughts in Jeremy Du Plessis’s book The Definitive Guide to Point and Figure. I still need to think through the calculation routines based on his writing, but I may not need matplotlib after all!

iPad Revisited

April 8, 2024 /

It’s nearly two years since I wrote about my iPad purchase in the Brave New World post (May 2022 – Richard Freeborn).

In that post I talked about the keyboard, and how, without email I was able to be quite productive. I am still using the iPad for writing, usually with Scrivener because that’s where my fiction lives these days, but there are a few differences.

About six months ago, I bought a Macally bluetooth keyboard. It’s a full size keyboard with a separate numeric keypad. I hadn’t realized how much I missed that numeric keypad until I had it back again. Another feature of the Macally keyboard is the ability to connect up to three devices and switch between them seamlessly, with just a quick hoy-key combination.

It was very easy to connect the keyboard to the iPad, and much as I still liked the Magic keyboard, being able to sit and type with the correct posture was wonderful. It’s on these occasions that I make use of the separate iPad mouse, which to be honest doesn’t get much other use.

What I haven’t managed yet on the iPad is a heavy editing session where I have two or three or more chapters open in panes on the screen so I can make updates and corrections – like putting consistency into hair or eye color. that’s pretty easy to do on the Mac Mini with a 20+ inch monitor. Not so easy on the iPad where you don’t have the ability to pop out and rearrange documents. To be fair, when I get into those big editing sessions, there’s usually a pile of papers strewn across the desk as well!

Overall though, I’m still very pleased with using the iPad as a dedicated writing device for places away from my office. And I’ve still avoided configuring email!

Rapid Response

April 1, 2024 /

Our homeowners association is in the process of having community owned street lamps replaced so they can be managed by the City and our local power company.

This afternoon, despite all the paint lines and marking flags, the contractors managed to hit a gas line, and I’ve never seen workers move so fast!

I called the gas company and reported the leak, and by the time I got off the phone, the fire department had two units in place and closed the road into our part of the sub-division. It wasn’t long after that the gas company arrived – four trucks and vans and lots of equipment. Within an hour or so, the leak was fixed. Work resumed on replacing the street lamp, and the fire department went off to do other things. Most of the gas company trucks remained, I’m guessing just in case there was another leak.

I often complain about utility and emergency service responses, but this time, they did a great job, and kept us all informed.

There are six more lamps to replace, and hopefully those last ones will go smoothly.

Sisters in Arms is now available

March 25, 2024 /

A short post this week to let everyone know Sisters in Arms is now available at all eBook retailers.

Women who put it all on the line when the shit hits the fan. Military, family, or thrown together by chance doesn’t matter. They join, they cooperate, and, when they run out of options, they fight.
Tales from feudal Japan to modern day Angola. A slink through the Parisien woods and a strut along the Seattle streets. A Babylon that we never knew to a war-torn hell we should all fear.
A baker’s dozen of stories about women owning their place in the world.

Sisters-in-Arms | Universal Book Links Help You Find Books at Your Favorite Store!

Ingenious Persistence

March 18, 2024 /

About this time last year, we returned from a trip to discover a pair of birds had nested on the blades of a fan on our patio. The nest was well established and one of the birds looked very comfortable, presumably keeping eggs warm.

I never managed to identify the birds, but the eggs hatched and we had three babies poking their heads up and cheeping urgently.

Unfortunately, we then had three days of rain, thunder, and high winds. The parents couldn’t get to the nest, and the chicks died. I also learned that sudden and loud noises can kill birds that young. And we had loud noises. My neighbor is still trying to fix electrical and plumbing issues after a lightning strike!

When it was clear the chicks were dead, and the parents weren’t returning, I removed the fan blade, and laid the birds to rest on an east facing slope.

This February, as we prepared to make a trip, I decided we didn’t need a repeat of last year, secured bird repellent spikes to the fan blades, and off we went.

We had been back about a week when I noticed a pair of birds ducking in and out under the roof toward the fan. Waste of your time, I told them smugly. And then I looked, really looked at the fan blades.

You guessed it. I had left about a six inch gap between the fan housing and the start of the spikes, and that was enough for the birds – I think they are finches – to build their new home. I don’t think they’ve laid eggs yet, but I am going to keep my fingers crossed we don’t have a repeat of last year’s rain and thunder.

Next year? I’m still working on that plan.

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