darkoshi | Entries tagged with memory

Qiao has four framed prints of birds (ducks, turkey, etc.) painted by Raymond Stokes Soubeyroux.

They've been hanging on the wall in my current bedroom for at least ten years, I think. I was the one who hung them up there.

One of the four prints depicts a pair of bobwhite quail. The female painted quail looks just like the one I saw in my yard last week (though I had no recollection of the painting then). So it was with surprise and amusement that I noticed it on the wall the other day. If it were not for the word "Quail" written at the bottom of the print catching my eye, I probably still would be oblivious to it.

Ways I currently have of checking the details of things in my past, when my memory does not suffice:

The notes I've written down in my "daily notes" file, about the things I do each day.
The notes I've written down in various other more specific files, like computer notes, etc.
The DW posts and comments I've written.
The emails and texts I've sent and received.
The photos I've taken.
The receipts from shopping in person (these may be photos, scanned PDFs, or text emails).
The spreadsheet detailing where/when I've gone shopping and what I've purchased (includes online purchases) along with the total prices.
My checkbook registers, bank and credit card statements (for purchases/payments/etc).
The call history on my phones.
My browser history.
Things I've written on calendars.
The daily notes I write down as part of my work.

[ probably various other things too ]

I don't remember hearing about the following Supreme Court decisions. I'm not sure if it's because I don't watch the news regularly and didn't happen to come across it online, or if it's due to my memory not being so good anymore (I hear and read so many things; how can I remember it all?) ...Based on my browser history, I did read about the 2020 decision, but possibly not the other one.

In landmark case, Supreme Court rules LGBTQ workers are protected from job discrimination (June 2020)

Supreme Court Decision on BOSTOCK v. CLAYTON COUNTY (June 2020)

Supreme Court gives victory to transgender student who sued to use bathroom (June 2021)

Yesterday, I showed Qiao the Right Up Our Alley drone video which I posted about before.

But the drone seemed to be flying so fast this time that it felt disorienting and unreal to me. Too fast for me to see much of the bowling alley or the people in it. I could barely make out the words spoken in the video as they went by so quickly too. Certain that the video wasn't playing correctly, I brought it up on another device, but it had (or seemed to have) the same problem there too.

Later that day I compared the video length displayed in the video to the amount of time it took to play; the numbers matched.

Today I had the idea to play back the video at 0.75 speed, and that way it feels and looks much better to me, like when I watched it the first time, though the audio sounds somewhat distorted at the lower speed. I'm still confused as to why the normal playback seems different to me now than before.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepping down as CEO and president

They look so young in that photo, I checked their ages.
Sure enough, they're both more than a year younger than me.

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This morning I saw a senior citizen discount offered to anyone 55 or older, and realized that would be me in a mere 7 years. Inconceivable. I still feel like the same young person inside, just with more experiences and a worse memory.

Been driving home from work in the dark after sunset. Been short on sleep, much as usual but maybe more so lately.

Yesterday I planned to stop by Home Depot on the way home, to buy some caulk. So I turned left onto a road that I drive on only occasionally, to get to the other road that the store is on. My mind was wandering, thinking about this and that. Then with a slight shock, I realized I didn't recognize where I was. In the dark, the road and environs looked totally unfamiliar. I remembered that I'd turned left on purpose... but which road was I on? Where was it going? I kept driving, disoriented. Weird, scary feeling to have a memory lapse like that. Somewhat further down the road, I started recognizing some things, and remembered where I was and why.

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Today I looked at some photos of me from two decades ago. If these photos weren't in my own folders; if I didn't have memories of having taken them, and of having looked at them various times before, I wouldn't recognize myself in many of them. They could be photos of a stranger. Yet besides the hair, I don't look extremely different than I do now. I still have the same mouth, the same eyebrows, the same kind of nose, the same kind of skin.

It's like comparing the faces in the different photos of a clothing store advertisement, trying to decide which ones are of the same person.

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This was the first year at work, where there was no mention at all of 9-11 on its anniversary. Not even in the corporate emails / newsletters.

18 years.

This morning I was trying to remember back then... I was at a family friend's house. I think he had 2 TVs back then in different rooms, but I couldn't even remember which TV we watched the news on. I remember the shocked feeling as I saw the first tower collapse live on the air... but not which TV I saw it happen on. For some reason, that seems strange to me as if I should remember. Instead, I remember sitting at his computer, checking message boards.

Why was I thinking about that this morning while trying to fall back asleep?

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In recent past years after big hurricanes with lots of damage, our company did matching fund drives for the affected areas. So after Dorian, rather than donating to the Bahamas relief efforts right away, I decided to wait. But the company still hasn't sent out any indication that they're doing a matching fund drive this year.

For many years, I've kept notes files on various things (house repairs, computer stuff, cellphone stuff, TV/electronics, elections, health/body stuff, people (mainly for things discussed verbally with other people, so I don't forget what was said), etc).

The notes are a great help. When Qiao's DVR loses its list of stored recordings, I can check to see how we fixed it the last time, so that fixing it the 2nd time around is a lot quicker. When I'm wondering "Does the HVAC filter need to be changed?", I can check to see when I last changed it. Stuff like that.

Since last year, I've also kept a daily journal-style notes file, to keep track of what I do each day. I don't have much time for it, so the stuff I write in there tends to be very brief and not really like a journal.

But even with all that, sometimes I try to find notes on something I did, and find nothing at all. Not even a brief mention of it.

So, for my own reference, here are other things I can check:
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My browser history. If I was working on something, there's a good chance I did internet searches on it. (I purposely save off my browser history, exactly for reasons like this. As I spend so much time on the internet, it's a detailed history of my daily life which I don't want to lose.)

Other notes files on the computer. Maybe I wrote it in down in an unexpected place. Today I discovered a "printerNotes" file. I'd have expected printer notes to be in the computer notes file; I forgot having split them out to their own file.

My Dreamwidth posts.

My photos, from both my camera and cellphone. If I was working on something, maybe I took photos of it.

Emails.

Cellphone texts.

Paper notes on the table & desk.

Am just now watching a CNN series on the 1980s.

The first part they showed was about MTV. I didn't know that MTV refused to play black artists in the beginning. Back then we were living in Germany, and the only American channel we got to watch was AFN, the Armed Forces Network. I didn't get to watch MTV until 1985 or later, when we were back in the U.S. But nonetheless, it seems like nearly all the music that was popular in the 80s is among my favorite music, even without me having seen the videos for those first years.

There was a segment about the space shuttles and the Challenger disaster on Jan 28, 1986.

I had a memory of being at home, listening to my radio in my bedroom, and hearing about the Challenger accident on the radio... as if I was hearing it live*, or right after it had happened. The apartment/bedroom of my memory matches the year, 1986. Both the year before and the year after, I lived in other places. So the memory must be at least partially true.

But I just looked it up, and the accident was on a Tuesday, at 11:39am in the same time zone as I was. So surely I would have been at school when it happened. I don't remember hearing about it at school though. If I was home that day, what could the reason have been? Even if the school day ended fairly early, it wouldn't have been that early. So surely I must have been at school, gotten home at the normal time, and then heard about it on the radio after the fact. Unless we had a half-day for some reason...

Surely if I had been home at the time of the launch, I would have been watching it on TV, not listening on the radio? Or were space shuttle launches not televised live back then? ...

When a national disaster unfolded live in 1986

If you were an American kid in 1986, you probably remember exactly where you were: That's because so many classrooms were watching the shuttle launch live via a special NASA satellite feed to showcase what would have been the first American teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe.

No, I don't remember watching it live in school. Gah, no way to verify my patchy memories.

*I do think it likely that I listened to the launch live, probably on PBS, because I was into astronomy and NASA and things like that. Maybe we didn't get CNN at the time, or maybe I didn't know it was being televised too. I remember listening to other launch attempts on the radio, including aborted ones. (But as this post shows, I no longer trust such old memories. Maybe I only heard replays, not live broadasts?)

This morning I was lying in bed trying to figure out how long ago Qiao bought his house - was it 2 or 3 years ago? And how long ago was his accident? 2011 or 2012? And when was my brother living in my house? etc., etc. All that only within the last 7 years or so, and I'm already getting it all mixed up in my mind. At least now I have ways of looking up what happened when in my life. But not for 1986. I did occasionally write in a diary back then, but not about the space shuttle.

Update (7/10): I think I figured out why I was not at school that day. According to historical weather sources, it was a very cold day. In my area, it was under 20 degrees until 9am, and didn't go above freezing until the afternoon. Such weather is not usual in the South, and school was probably cancelled to keep kids from having to walk to school or wait for the school buses in such cold.

Back in high school, we had to choose a scene from Macbeth, memorize it, and later recite it to the class. I chose one of the shortest scenes I could find, because, while I was good at remembering things, I wasn't particularly good at memorizing long strings of words.

I'm not sure if I ever recited it to the class; as much as I dreaded having to speak in front of the class, I usually ended up not having to do so. I never volunteered to go first (or 2nd or 3rd, or ever), and so the class usually ran out of time before getting to me. (Though in retrospect it would have been good to have more practice at public speaking. And it probably was a tiny bit of a let-down, getting all worked up at having to speak, and then not having to speak after all.)

As with the few other things I've memorized, I remembered it for a long time, because every so often I would recite it to myself. I didn't remember it perfectly - over time, I may have swapped in some wrong words here and there - but could still recite most of it.

Lately I had noticed that I could hardly remember any of it, except the first line. But this week at work, while standing at my desk, for some reason I started reciting it in my mind, and I remembered the whole thing again! The words flowed without a break.

Weird.*

It's the part with the witches talking, Act 3 Scene 5, that starts with "How did you dare to trade and traffic with Macbeth in riddles and affairs of death..."

But actually, reading that link, it turns out that in the intervening years, I had completely forgotten the 2nd half of it. I thought it ended with "thither he will come to [meet] his destiny". But I used to have the rest memorized too. "I am for the air" ... "my little spirit, see, Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me." Yep, I liked those parts!

Heh. And now I learn that the scene I memorized probably wasn't even written by Shakespeare. The above link describes the scene as "un-Shakespearean". This page says: "Some literary critics believe that these [sic] scene is way too hokey to be Shakespeare's work..."

Heh, hokey! You stick your left foot in, you stick your left foot out, you do the hokey-pokey and you shake it all about!

And that's another example of me remembering something, but not remembering it quite right.

*It's like how sometimes people's names are easy to recall, and sometimes not.

Logging into the web page for my email account, I look up my password. (I don't usually have to remember it, as Thunderbird's Password Manager has it saved). And I wonder why did I ever set my password to *that*? There's no way I'd *ever* be able to remember it.

So I change it to something else that I'd at least have a chance of remembering, if I really wanted to.

Five minutes later I'm at the login screen of another site, whose password I usually have no trouble remembering. But due to me having used a particular word in the new password I set above, and due to this password also having contained that same word, I'm now completely flummoxed as to what the rest of this password was. So I end up having to look it up.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/646481.html

Watching this Star Trek Into Darkness Gag Reel, tempts me to believe I might enjoy the movie.

Before watching that clip, I wasn't sure if I had already seen the movie or not. I thought the "Into Darkness" one might have been the first movie that I watched with the new younger actors, which I hadn't enjoyed that much. But no, this is a different one. With Benedict Cumberbatch, even.

I have similar problems with the LOTR and Hobbit movies. I know I've seen at least 2 of the Hobbit movies. I think I've seen the 3rd, but after reading its plot on Wikipedia, I'm still not certain. The plot sounds like mostly a bunch of continuous strife, so maybe that is why it wasn't memorable to me.

Hmm, that's odd. There've only been 3 Peter Jackson LOTR movies, and 3 Hobbit movies. It sure seemed to me like there had been more than that. Like, wasn't there a 2-part non-animated Hobbit movie even before the LOTR movies, or something?

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/632031.html

While thinking about the pronunciation of words starting with 'kn', I realized that in English the 'k' is always or nearly always silent. Whereas in German, both the 'k' and 'n' are spoken.

Then I thought about words starting with 'gn'. Again, in English the 'g' is nearly always silent (the GNU software term being an exception). Whereas in German, both the 'g' and 'n' are spoken.

And I was thinking, maybe that is why I always want to pronounce the 'g' in the English word 'gnome'.

Tonight I found a website that provides both British and American pronunciations of words.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnome

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnu

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnocchi

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnomic

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnawing

British, like German, seems to generally be spoken with a higher pitch than American English (or maybe it seems that way due to its vowels being spoken higher in the throat?).

I started mimicking the online pronunciations. You know, how when you say the same word over and over again, it gets funny?

Gnome. Gn^oem. Gnoume. Gneoum. Gnome. Nu. N^u Nu N^u... Nocky! Nokey. Nocky! No Key. No Key.
Nong. Noing. Nong. Noing!

Zorro didn't like it. She left the room.

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A few days ago while walking to my car, I realized that people's names and faces were coming very easily to my mind. I tested myself, thinking of more and more coworkers, even from long ago. There were only a few I couldn't easily name. It seemed quite surprising to me, as usually there's a significant pause between me thinking of someone and remembering their name (if I'm able to come up with a name at all).

A couple days later I tried again, but my memory seemed back to normal, ie. not easily remembering many names.

So I wonder, what could cause memory changes like that?

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Something else I've wondered: Where do slugs go in the daytime?
Google? Ah, ok. So I'm not the only one who has wondered that.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/619089.html

The "View - Reload" menu item has been removed from version 25 of Firefox. Apparently for quite a while already, "Reload" was only available when pressing "Alt+V" to view the menu. But now it's no longer there at all. I wonder why the Firefox designers feel the need to remove functionality from the menus, when the menus aren't even visible by default anymore.

Why do little changes like this bother me so much? Because it's like coming home to find that all your door handles have been removed and replaced by knobs, and furthermore, the knobs are on the top of the doors rather than in their hitherto-normal positions. Then you find out that for the last 10 years, 98% of other people have been using wireless mobilephone apps to remotely open all their doors, rather than using the door handles.

Now I have to remember to use either F5 or Ctrl+R to refresh the page when I don't have my hand on the mouse. I feel like I'm too old to learn new mnemonics. I can never even remember that Ctrl+Tab is for switching between tabs, even though I constantly use Alt+Tab for switching between windows. (I also can never remember the hotkeys for indenting or outdenting a block of text, in my email program at work).

Hmm. To press either F5 or a Control key combination, I have to look at the keyboard. Maybe that's why I find the menu mnemonics using the Alt keys easier to learn/remember. If I need to copy/paste something while typing, I still tend to use the Alt-Edit-Copy and Alt-Edit-Paste keys. My fingers however, know that Ctrl+Ins, Shift+Ins,and Ctrl-C can also be used.... but I don't use Ctrl-V much because how am I supposed to remember that V is for Paste?

Hmm. When editing text (as opposed to typing), my left hand is in the normal position, but my right hand is centered on the arrow keys. That lets me scroll through the text with my right hand, and also lets me do copy/paste/delete operations using the keys on that side.

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I've found that it is much easier to iron clothes while they are still damp from the washer. No need to first let them dry. No need to put water into the iron, nor to drain it out afterwards. Ironing damp clothes makes them dry faster too.

This makes me more likely to iron clothes right after I've washed them, avoiding an ever-increasing accumulation of wrinkled clothes waiting to be ironed. If I know that I won't have time to iron right after washing, I may not even put those particular items into the wash.

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I've been noticing a recent tendency to bite my lower lip while washing dishes, especially if I'm in a hurry. It's an odd subconscious thing; as if biting my lip will somehow make me get done faster. I have to consciously put effort into not doing it, as it's not a habit I want to have.