Digital Ghosts
My mom recently had a free consultation from her electric company to assess replacing her propane water heater with an electric water pump heater. She forwarded the assessment report to me, and I spent some time reviewing and researching the program.
Despite living quite far away, I have been surprised by how much remote help I am able to do. Since my dad’s passing, I sometimes play the role of executive assistant and researcher.
I think as our parents grow older, our relationship with them changes. When I was young, my parents were more of a guardian figure telling me what to do. But around my university years, things began to change where I wouldn’t call them a friend, but it wasn’t the same dynamic as an authority figure.
After using copious amounts of ChatGPT to research the program for pros and cons, I discovered my mom was eligible for an $8,000 credit through the High-Efficiency Electric Home Rebate Act (HEEHRA) program which was passed as part of the US Congress Inflation Reduction Act. It is a bit odd, as I don’t really see the correlation between inflation, but hey, free money.
The HEEHRA program would allow residents to replace their air conditioners and furnace with a heat pump. Last September, I just happened to visit my mom during a heat wave where it was a 104°F (40°C) during the day and temperatures only slightly dropping at night. I then learned my mom’s air conditioner was broken when we tried to turn it on.
With the heat wave, every HVAC technician was booked solid through the next week, so I decided to open the air conditioner.
Looking at this, I was like huh, maybe uhh, the brown rusted thing is broken. After doing many YouTube, Google, and AI searches, I determined this was a capacitor and it was probably broken. I fed AI the user’s manual as I needed to order the capacitor with the right ohms, as I know nothing about hardware at all. One day later, with an Amazon package delivery, and doing some prayers while replacing the capacitor, the replacement worked!
Given my previous experience with the program, I was pretty heavily pushing my mom to take advantage of the program, as I was afraid the air conditioner may fail for different reasons in the future.
I began engaging with talking with contractors local to my mom, and they asked “are the power lines to the house over ground or under ground?”. I said I had no idea, and that I could look at Google Maps Street View.
After pulling my mom’s address, I began looking around, and saw a shadow of someone with a dog, and decided to zoom in.
It was a perfect snapshot of my dad and old dog going for a walk. I even looked around the parking area and saw my car there so I must have been home at the time. I would estimate that this photo was taken at least 15 years ago which is quite surprising since the Google Street View car hasn’t come back to update the photo.
After much time, I have pretty much finished digitizing all of the old physical media he had. There was a litany of insane formats like VHS-C, Video8, and mini-dv players. On Facebook Marketplace, I was surprised how many people offered digitization services which was helpful in saving me hours of working through a manual process.
On the one-year anniversary, I stitched together a highlights video putting together another compendium of his life I wasn’t able to put together in time for the funeral. Going through the process triggered quite a few memories as I was watching things occurring way back from 35 years to the near present.
Going through the videos led to one piece of regret. Back then when people used to send voice mails, he sent me a couple on my phone and I just deleted them. I wished I had kept them, because that memory is one specifically from him to me. Often, he would remind me to call mom for her birthday, or ask what I was doing when I didn’t answer the phone.
When my mom was cleaning out some old bank documents, she discovered my dad’s old journal. A lot of the journal talked about the difficulties and challenges and finding purpose after he left Vietnam for America. Others were more succinct such as
4/29/1972
“Today is my 28th year old birthday. 21 years in school, 7 years in the service.”
I want to ask my mom more about it, but I choose not to for the time being, as I can tell talking about it brings back a lot of memories.
In a way, all these digital fragments—videos, journals, old photos, even Street View ghosts—feel like little time machines. Some are clear, others fuzzy. But all of them, no matter how serendipitously they appear, are treasured reminders of the past.
Digital Wisdom
Recently I took a trip to attend a technical business conference about Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). The field of consulting has changed greatly since the pandemic. In a prior life, I would take a business trip to see customers maybe every 2-3 weeks to work in their office, but with online meetings now the norm, customers have a hard time justifying the expense.
Now we are about 2 years in from ChatGPT’s release, I have more concerns than before about Generative AI’s impact to the junior-level workforce, and eventually on broad swaths of the white-collar work population. The systems are getting better where they excel in deterministic based systems, meaning fields which are structured like coding. I advise my team that they need to work on their reading, writing, and speaking, because inevitably, AI will do some part of the engineering aspects of work in the future.
I randomly came across the book “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.” The author John Warner provides a slightly different stance of AI, as he approaches it from the perspective of an English teacher.
His core observation which struck me was the statement “ChatGPT cannot write. Generating syntax is not the same thing as writing. Writing is an embodied act of thinking and feeling. Writing is communication with intention.”
There are times at work I can tell somebody has sent me an e-mail written with AI. The writing comes out as flowery non-offensive, where there are snippets of an ask nestled in between. Sometimes I get lazy and use an AI to reply back with a message, which makes me wonder, are just two AI systems talking to each other with minimal humans in the loop? Why are we doing this? Should we just write more succinct e-mails without the formalities?
During one of the morning sessions, a presenter gave her own opinion on AI. It was all pretty standard fare stuff, but one slide caught my eye on her opinion of AI. It stated the progression of AI was
- Data
- Knowledge
- Wisdom
- Analysis
- Synthesis
I sat there a little stunned and muttered to myself, “wisdom”? This bothered me a little bit, but I couldn’t articulate why exactly. After the session I spoke to the speaker outside about her slide deck and some of her management methodology as she brought up some interesting points in other parts of her presentation. During our conversation I was a little more confrontational than expected. The wisdom slide somehow set me on edge, and in retrospect what I should have done is asked her to explain what she meant by AI being wise and some examples.
Very often when we encounter people with a differing viewpoint, our typical tendencies are to stay in our box, and in our camps. But there is a benefit to having a cooler head, and being genuinely introspective in peeking into a viewpoint that is not ours.
What is wisdom? For me, growing up in the church, my definition is one that comes from God. With that context in mind, I think that’s where the whole AI and wisdom comment bothered me the most. Similar to Mr. Warner’s book, I believe AI will be disruptive and change the world in ways we don’t know, but for me, it is important not to anthropomorphize AI as having a soul and spirit.
Digital Tennis Matchmaking
With the summer in Vancouver I have picked up the frequency with which I played tennis. When I was living in Southern California where it was mostly sunny, I played tennis here and there (but did surf more). Vancouver is one of the most impractical places to play tennis as it rains a lot in the winter so you don’t get a lot of play outside.
A friend told me that there was this Vancouver Tennis group, where you can meet up with people and play pick up rallies or matches. How it works is you post
- Your level, roughly based off the tennis rankings, I consider myself self-rating wise around a 4-0-4.5
- The location you want to play
- What time you want to play
Meeting up with strangers to tennis is a bit weird, as you have to negotiate expectations up front. The general rule of thumb is you want to play with someone about your same level or a bit better. You don’t want to play with someone worse than you as it eventually drags your game down, or you don’t want to play with someone so good, you can barely keep up or drag them down.
Just to keep track, I have a spreadsheet of who I played with, and what I think their level is as well as some notes.
The 3.5 Player
I played with a 3.5 player on an early Sunday morning and when you come to the court you always warm up mid baseline. At that time, you get a chance to talk to the new person, and ask things like how long they’ve played etc.
As I was playing with her, she was doing okay, but when I would push the ball to the corners she had a hard time keeping up. To make sure we both had a good time, I held back a little bit. She said she had a non-existent serve so asked if we could play a game where we would play up to 11 points. Somebody would start a rally, and would hit softly twice, then try to hit a winner on third shot.
It was kind of a weird game, but sure why not? After about an hour we wrapped up and walked out of the courts. She immediately went, “hey when are you free to play next?” I kind of hesitated and told her I would have to check my schedule, and she followed up with, “I prefer you to be transparent, if you don’t want to play with me let me know, and we can move on. Sometimes some people have said I’m not good enough, and they eventually don’t want to play with me.”
The moment was kind of intense, and it felt almost like a “tennis friend date”, where expectations were being sorted out. I guess sometimes it is natural, and sometimes there is an explicit conversation.
The 4.5 player
I posted on the chat one day that I was looking for someone to play in Granville Loop. These courts are quiet, but have very strange quirks. They are two freshly resurfaced courts, but one court has a huge crack on it. When the ball occasionally hits the crack, it is as if a Super Mario mushroom power-up gets activated because the ball would fly crazy and higher than usual.
The second court is slanted so depending on which side you play on, the court would play slower or faster.
In Vancouver, I would say the most popular courts are the Kitsilano Beach Tennis Courts. There are 8 courts, and is by the beach and it is super beautiful. Only problem is they haven’t resurfaced the courts in a while, but it is a very odd mix of players who are very good, and players who are complete beginners.
Since it is in a prime area, these courts are super crowded. There is always somebody waiting for a court, and lots of beginners don’t know the rules, so they might just randomly walk behind you if you are playing a match. Somebody also is always playing loud music which is distracting.
I met the 4.5 player at the court, and first thing I notice is this person is very good. He has a lot of topspin and hits everything at baseline. I can kinda keep up-ish, but he’s good where all his shots are hard to hit.
After chatting around a little bit, I learn that he formerly played for his university and is just trying to get back into it. He had a trip to Asia, so I was going to message him a bit later if he was interested.
There is this odd thing also like, after you play a tennis match, how long do you wait before you message each other? You don’t want to be overly aggressive, but on the other hand summer is short in Vancouver so you do want to get as much play as possible.
I did reach out recently, and saw on Facebook messenger the message was read. But to this day, no response. Did I just get ghosted?
The 4.0 Player
I met up with a 4.0 player at my favorite tennis court (I’m going to keep that one a bit of a secret here) a second time, and he was flexible because he was in transition looking for a new job. I try to play in the middle of the day during my lunch break, because courts get really crowded after work. At 11am, all 4 courts were full. I was kind of surprised because it was a random Tuesday in a neighborhood court. As we played a second time, we were at about the same level, where both of us were better in different aspects in the game, so it was quite fun playing with him.
After the match, we caught up a little bit, and I learned he was looking for a job in the project management of the construction industry. I referred him to a friend, and said if he wanted to learn more he can follow up if he liked.
In life, we tend to help out our communities. One prime example is your alma matter. Typically when people see someone from their alma matter in a resume or an event, people try to help them out more than the ordinary person. I think it is human nature when you have a commonality to help out that other person.
Back in 2003, when I graduated there was a mini recession, so none of my friends in our computer science cohort got jobs. But as a group, we looked out for each other, and when one person got a job we helped other people get jobs.
I went through a string of job interviews without any results and was a bit depressed. I ran into a friend in the Ring Road Park during my university senior year, and she told she didn’t pass a job interview, but recommended I talk to that recruiter anyway.
About two months later, I actually got the job. And it was only because I was connected through my school in my computer science group.
I struggle with this a little bit though. I understand the power of networking, but I think there is a danger of being insular to not allow others in our community when ideally we should be as open as possible.
Maybe we shouldn’t play?
I was browsing through the False Creek tennis meet up group, when I saw a post,
“Looking for a 3.5-4.0 player, False Creek, Sunday morning.”
What I usually do is just like to scan their Facebook profile briefly. It’s more so just to make sure they are legit, but I try not to spy too much into their lives. My goal isn’t really to talk politics, but to play tennis.
I looked at this one profile and was like, hm, the name seems familiar to me. Scrolling down, I was like, yea based out of Vancouver, they went to a Yuja Wang concert – oh wait, this is one of my partner’s doctors.
Immediately I was like uhh, yea I’m not moving forward with this. I can imagine in a weird hypothetical scenario we did meet up, and it might go something like this?
“Hi, my name is Dan. “
“Oh yea I know who you are, I see you sometimes at Jason’s appointments. How is it going?”
I imagine in this hypothetical scenario I would set ground rules like not talking to him about my partner’s medical history. And what would happen if I beat him or he beat me in tennis? Would this affect how he treats my partner?
In this imaginary world, I have the ability not to pursue this, but what would have happened if he messaged me to play, with me knowing who he was? Should I ignore him? Should I instead say who I know he is and decline to play? Or should I play with him knowing he reached out to me first? Maybe I’ll avoid the False Creek tennis meet-up group for a while.
Rules are rules?
After I played with a 4.0 match one day, we were wrapping up, and a family wanted to play in the court next to us. The problem is they brought a soccer ball.
There are rules posted on the court which state:
“Tennis courts are for tennis only”.
“No dogs on court”.
It was a young kid with his parents. A part of me says, to decline them and say, “hey rules are rules.” But this kid was so young. I could imagine myself saying, “sorry kid, go play in the park outside.” And I further imagine that he gets traumatized from this experience from being rejected and dislikes tennis people forever.
Fortunately for me, I had an out as I was leaving, and said, “I’m actually leaving” and didn’t answer the question. At Granville Loop, weird non tennis things are always happening. It is either a pickle ball player or dog walkers who want to use the second court.
The other thing is I worry if I also set bad precedent, now I invite this kid to come into the court anytime.
It oddly reminded of church where we sometimes talk about the law and love. The law consists of rules from God, meant to protect you, but people don’t get attracted to church because of the law, but instead of the love of people.
Fortunately in this case I didn’t have to answer that question today.