April 2004 Entries
Some time ago, i wrote an entry about a chat bot. Here is another one. Mostly the same remarks go for this oine as for the other one: It doesn't have much memory, and relies mostly on smart tricks. Some of the tricks are very witty. At least this bot is honest. When it doesn't know what to say, it says:"I lost my train of thought." Unfortunately i seem to have crashed it just by saying my name...
A friend in a formerly communist country explained to me how things were in the communist days. Many members of her family had been in prison because they were priests. There was only one TV channel. On this channel, there was only one hour of TV per day: The speech of the dictator. On the birthday of the dictator, the people had to celebrate and pretend they were happy and loved the dictator, while in reality they were unhappy, afraid, and hated him. They proved this later when they killed the dictator...
The advantage of being in the software industry is that you have friends all over the world, and get to travel a lot. At least that's how it is for me, and i enjoy that very much. Last week, when i visited Transsylvania, the region in Romania where Dracula supposedly lived, one of my first remarks was that traffic is killing there. This soon became painfully true. I was in Romania to visit a friend and business partner. On friday evening we were going to meet some of his friends. But with this kind...
Since some time, i've been driving a different car. I had to change my parking permit to show the details of this car. The parking permit is what allows me to park the car in the city where i live. This means i had to deal with administration. I went to their office just to see that it had moved. They were kind and put the new address out for me to find it. So i went to the new address, and waited for 15 minutes to get my turn. They then told me that i had to bring the papers of the car. This was...