captainsblog | How to Train Your Virtual Assistant (Reply)

If there is one thing that is going to get me to upgrade to Eleanor’s newer generation of mobile phone, it will be finding out if the dictation feature on hers is any better than the crap version on mine. This entry is now an experiment after me making one minor setting change on my phone that might help. I’ve noticed that Siri always will assume just about anything I dictate is a contact name if I happen to have one anything close to it. She is also ridiculously alphabetical. For example: I frequently mention this person I am related to named Emilee.

No, not that one:P Emilee with a Y at the end as our daughter, but because I put our dog's former owner in as a contact, who has two ears at the end of her name, Siri just assumes that’s who I’m talking about, right?

(I’m just leaving all the other audio typos in to give you an idea of what I have to put up with.)

This is, in the land of Apple, a “known issue,“ but I can find absolutely nothing suggesting how to solve it. They did seem to be some thing down in “Siri and Search” that talks about allowing Apple to make “suggestions, when either sharing or listening." I’ve turned both of those off, but apparently Emilee is still here.

So my next step will be taking her phone with me on one of the dog's morning walkies, to see if the upgraded hardware helps with Siri's cognition and quirks. Of course, MY usual weird out-of-context contacts like Emilee and Metz and Bach and Banks won't override ordinary English words, but who knows which of her friends and pharmacies will show up? If they don't, or if Siri seems to have better senses of grammar and sentence context than my version does, I'll probably be talked into the upgrade.

Overall, we're happy with the phones and the service connected to them, and after much effort, the pricing seems under control. Yet it's a constant battle to keep things in line. Just in the month since we got Eleanor's new phone?

* A promise at the store that insurance on our entire plan would be lowered? Wasn't. It went up. It took three stops back at the store to get a new promise that it would be lowered from the $45 a month on the bill to the $10 a month that New York limits it to. I cannot find anything about our plan confirming the lowering.

* Another supposed reduction in some of the rest of our bill because Eleanor's an AARP member? (She gets her Medicare supplement through them.) Almost pulled two weeks after we "got it."

Yes, her "employer" was AARP. It took another round of multiple calls and logins to them to get "it" back.

* And just today, another lovely announcement: they previously gave us a $10 a month saving by agreeing to both going paperless and having the monthly bill autopaid. I picked a credit card for it to get the rewards points on top; we pay that credit card in full every month. Now, though, the discount goes down to $5 a month unless we switch the autopay to a debit card or direct bank deposit. Before long I suspect they'll start charging us to pay them.

What's the alternative, though?

I guess you could sit right back and you'll hear a tale....

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Actually, you will. The unfinished part of my Sunday Symphony about poetry and metatheft in an art gallery.

Nothing was actually stolen. I did wonder, though, if there was bad juju in my reading an e-book about art gallery thefts in an art gallery....

It's pretty good, and is reviewed in this piece. I didn't get far in it, though, because Bianca came up to welcome us and hand off to Ten Thousand, the afternoon's first reader, freestyling based on three words from the crowd (glass, cadaver- Eleanor's suggestion;)- and butterfly).

A few readers later, Ben came up, introduced with something of a Ghostbusters riff. This planted a seed for a "crossing the streams" poem I will introduce next week and maybe sooner here.

I didn't get all the readers' photos, but I did get this one of the couple in front- she, our friend Jessica, accompanied by earlier reader whose nom de poem is "Beef." I explained that they had become, well, my "Beef and Bill" of the afternoon:

But the longest story beyond a poem came from last week's roastee Justin, who had participated earlier in a tour of this gallery. So, about it: I had no idea it even existed. When Eleanor said "UB Art Gallery," I assumed Amherst, or maybe a building on the edge of Main Street Campus I vaguely remembered. Nope; it's several blocks off Main Street Campus, three streets removed from Main, at the terminus of a dead-end Martha Jackson Place. Before it was a UB gallery, it was a gallery gallery, converted from a closed Buffalo Public School and later donated to the University:

The building at 1 Martha Jackson Place was originally a Buffalo Public School, and later was purchased by gallerist David K. Anderson. Anderson studied business at UB and went on to work for his mother, venerated New York City gallerist Martha Jackson (1907–1969). With the intention of designing and building a gallery of his own, Anderson set about converting the school into a state-of-the-art exhibition space. The Anderson Gallery opened to the public as a commercial gallery in 1991 and operated it until 2000, when Anderson donated it to UB along with a collection of 1,200 works of art and extensive archives from the Martha Jackson and David Anderson Galleries, as well as a trust to assist with exhibition and gallery operations.

Anderson had a passion for design. He loved arches and round corners, which you can see throughout the interior of UB Anderson Gallery. He even designed his own font which you can see in use in signage today.

Among the curated works in there is this Dali, painted of his contemporary, Katharine Cornell:

The description adjacent tells its story, but only part of hers:

As I told Justin after the reading, and mentioned here recently, her name was one of the first I ever associated with Buffalo from watching nationally broadcast comedy specials from that North Campus Theater. WNED broadcast its national Mark Russell Comedy Specials from the in-the-round theater named for her in the middle of UB's Ellicott Complex as early as the mid-1970s. When I got here in 1981, that theatre WAS the university's Center for the Arts and would remain that way for years. In the few months in my first year of law school when I was carless, I would sometimes cut through Ellicott and pass that theater; even from outside, you could see in and, if Mark had a special scheduled, the piano onstage would be festooned with his trademark white-on-blue-field flag stars-

- like so.

Justin's poem had nothing about that. It began, "Hey Katharine!" and for this fan of both artists who go by 10,000, it evoked Kerouac as well as Salvatore.

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That gets us through the weekend. Yesterday, a dull Monday probably won't be reported on much, but I returned for still more music tonight, which will make it onto this page along with possibly some Siri-ousness dictated into a different phone....