Chat-GPT-4

I signed up for Chat-GPT-4 ($20/month). Maybe I can figure out something to do with it. Maybe I can use it to write blog posts.  GPT-4 is made by OpenAI, which also sells the DALL-E image generator.    The publicity about GPT-4 led me to believe it integrated DALL-E, but, nope. I opened GPT-4 and uploaded  NANO.9, […]

All marketing text is worthless–unless somebody reads it.

All marketing text is worthless unless somebody reads it. If you make it easy to read, they will read it. I know, it sounds corny. All humans and search engines prefer easy-to-read, easy-to-understand text. The readability of text has nothing to do with the complexity or seriousness of the subject. Making it easier to read […]

Battling Elementor

Today I’m battling Elementor, the website builder overlay for WordPress. I need to fix my problem with headers. I have two different angles of attack to try. Elementor is still telling me that page so-and-so’s header is conflicting with a previously assigned header, HeaderXYZ, but that header has long since been deleted and extirpated. I […]

June 9, 2023

A local Santa Barbara web design shop asked me for a bid on a copywriting project. I looked at their site to see what they had to say about copywriting: not much, except that they were extremely good at it, just like they are extremely good at everything else. According to them. I’ve examined the […]

June 1, 2023

First thing every morning, I go to my Google Analytics account to see which pages on my site were visited yesterday. Today I saw that a visitor to colin.org looked at my recruitment brochure for Brooks Institute of Photography, a now long-gone outfit. It was another one of my “first person” brochures. I interviewed the […]

I made a flyer for an outfit called Keep Your Keys.

I answered a CraigsList ad asking for “flyer modification.”  I met John Shaver at a coffee shop in Goleta. He said he had a lot of responses to his ad but I was the only one who was truly local to Santa Barbara. He showed me his existing flyer (right). He wanted a better one.The […]

May 15, 2023

Interesting article about memory and creativity. https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/memory-creativity/ Part of it is about a study of Patient N.N. who had a memory impairment. He was unable to remember anything about his own personal life but retained information about everything else. Give him a list of words to be memorized and he could do it. A surprising […]

May 1, 2023

May 1, 2023 At the Writers Workshop Saturday I yakked with Brian for a few minutes before the meeting started. He’s a Brit trying to get his memoirs written about his adventures working in many different places around the world, now retired from his job as a technical writer at QAD here in Santa Barbara. […]

Our Chemical Eden

Our Chemical Eden explains the beginnings of life in the hydrothermal vents in the ocean deeps. This has long been my preferred theory and it was good to see it explicated in persuasive new detail. My previous sources for this theory are THE DEEP HOT BIOSPHERE (1998) by Thomas Gold and QUANTUM EVOLUTION (2001) by […]