Darkoshi

While shopping for bed slats (not for me), I found a set on the Kohl's website that says it is made "right here" in the USA from Canadian wood. But while checking out that brand's website, Continental Sleep, I belatedly realized the wording and grammar on their pages isn't quite right. So now I wonder, is the "Made in USA" claim a lie? Or do Chinese companies have factories in the U.S. making that kind of stuff? I could have sworn I saw that "Made in the USA" claim on one of their website pages too (for only that one product, which made it seem all the more dubious), but am not finding it anymore.

I looked up info on the company but found nothing other than a reference to "Continental Sleep Holdings", which was likely a different company, on a Wikipedia page about "Sleepeezee".

The reviews on the ContinentalSleep website seem fake too, with similar grammar and wording issues; not the kind Americans would make.

It's a bit surprising they haven't used an LLM to fix the grammar on their webpages. Once Chinese companies get better at doing that, there won't even be that tell to give them away.

I bought a FireTV stick and set it up today. Installed many apps. Mostly wanted it for some German news and shows, but also installed other apps to try out.

One app is iQIYI, and on it I watched the first episode of I Don't Want to Be Friends With You. It's a 2020 Chinese series, free to watch, with English subtitles. The first episode was cute, funny and entertaining. I don't want to spoil it for anyone by describing the plot, as I had no idea when I started watching it. But this page has some details if you want, and lists its genres as: Comedy, Romance, School, Youth, Fantasy.

I admit, one thing that appeals to me about the show is the androgynous appearance of the lead character, a teenage girl.

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Recently I installed the Audials Android app on my phone. It's got radio stations from all over the world. Unlike some apps, the radio links all seem to be up to date, no hunting just to find stations that will play ok. It also lets you record songs/shows to your phone. (This feels like taping songs from the radio to cassettes like in the old days, except it's to your phone instead.) That can be useful for stations that don't list which song is playing. If I hear a good song, I can save a clip to help in figuring out what song it was so I can later buy it and support the artists.

The "record songs" option didn't work for me when I tried it. With that, the software looks for distinct gaps between songs before it will record or save them. But the "record show" option worked fine - you can select that and then click to stop the recording whenever you want.

Now I find myself listening to our local college radio station WUSC more often again, as I can simply tap on my phone to start playing it.

I'm also getting to listen to college radio station WUML again. I used to listen to it in Massachusetts during my high school years, when it was called WJUL.

I got a strange voicemail in Chinese on my cellphone from the number 202-495-3793 (a Washington, DC area code). It's a short official-sounding recorded message in a female voice, with a simple musical tune in the background. (I like how the Chinese language, being tone-based, is itself melodic even without the music.)

I was curious as to what the message said, so I saved it to an audio file on my laptop. Then I opened Google Translate in the Chrome browser (the option for translating from audio / microphone input is only available in Chrome, not Firefox). The page's text input box has a microphone icon in the lower left that you click for it to start listening. But first you need to select the language; it won't auto-detect when using the mic input. Then I played the audio file.

The translating didn't work very well. I tried it several times. Mostly, it didn't recognize any words, and showed no output. A couple of times, it showed the following output. This is only a small portion of what was said:
Zhongguó zhù mei dàshi
Chinese Ambassador to the United States

But I'm not even sure that much of it is correct. In the audio, I can hear "Zhongguó zhù" at the very beginning, but not "mei dàshi" after it. Maybe that is from a different part of it. It's spoken so fast that I can't tell.. I do hear "shi" a few times but not sure about the rest.

I tried again and this time got:
Zhongguó zhù mei dàshi guan
中国驻美大使馆
Chinese Embassy in the United States

Zhongguó = China
dàshi guan = Embassy

I also tried playing back the recording at 2/3s speed, in hopes that would let Google Translate hear the words better. But it did not help.

Hum, this is sort of fun: Try to say Chinese sounding things and see what it translates to. But you have to click the mic to stop and restart in between, as otherwise it seems to output the same thing over and over again. ("No no no")

I seem to have learned how to say "China" (Zhongguó) pretty well! (But I doubt I'll remember it.)

Ah, in my trying to read "Zhongguó zhù mei dàshi guan", it instead translates it to "The beauty of life".

But I tested translating from me speaking German, and it translates that very well! I can hardly say anything that it doesn't understand! Even with my not-so-great speaking voice.

An electric shock to my brain.
It seems like it would require something strong like that to break through to me, so that I could feel, really feel again.

Once in a very long while, an experience affects me like an electric shock - but it doesn't last.

I am so disillusioned with everything.

I spend all my time doing things that don't really bring me any great satisfaction or happiness, just things that seem like they need to be done, or things that I feel like doing.

The skin on my hands is dry. My hands seem to look so much older than they did a few years ago.

I am not procrastinating doing my taxes; truly, I'm not. I just keep thinking of other things to do first. Surely I can still get them done tonight and still do my daily exercises too, and get to bed on time. Right?

I've started back up doing my daily exercises regularly. It's been about 2 or 3 weeks now. But my legs are still not flexible like they used to be, and I seem to have strained something in my right leg.

Screwing in light bulbs isn't all that easy. No really, I'm not procrastinating. I wanted to write that since yesterday.

The Chinese preserved plums actually taste pretty good. The Watermelon Frost Tea, I haven't tried yet... apparently watermelon frost is some white stuff (fungi?) that grows on watermelon rinds when the watermelon has been filled with Gluer/Glaubers? salt and buried in ceramic pots. The Chinese seem to have a culinary penchant for burying food and digging it up again... It must have been like a form of alchemy.

I am backing up the data on my hard-drive. I keep temporary files sometimes, and I was going through them, seeing which ones could be deleted. Old posts, emails, chats. Some of the more meaningful/affecting ones, I keep around a long time, even though surely I've archived them in my regular backup folders too. But reading one of them brought this post on.

I wanted to let the files copy to the flash drive, while doing my taxes. I had already started doing that this morning, but ran out of space on the flash drive, daggonit, because the files took more physical space on the flash than they did on the hard-drive.