Apr
03
2007
I read today about MyCyberTwin, “a website that allows you to create virtual personalities that can chat for you online.” At first blush, it looks like it’s a system where you can set up what makes me think of a personalized Eliza (tho not necessarily with the therapist angle)…. an IM ‘bot of sorts that you can train to give canned answers to questions. From LifeHacker:
Web site MyCyberTwin lets you create your own personal IM chatbot that you can customize and teach to mimic your personality.
[snip]
After you create your CyberTwin, you can answer a series of questions to make it more like you through the MyClassroom section … A tool like this could come in really handy if it filtered the important questions to you and took care of the rest itself. I know, it’d be weird-ish, but as a site somewhat obsessed with chatbots, this idea has potential!
And from TechCrunch:
The company, which is based in Australia, creates an online “clone” of users based on a 79 question personality quiz and hundreds of additional training questions. Once it’s complete, a chat bot is created for that user, which has it’s own web page, can be embedded into MySpace or another website, or can log into Microsoft Messenger on your behalf and pretend to be you.
I wonder if this could be an option (and fun one) for libraries that want to offer IM services but don’t have staffing to cover all hours (how do they handle that sort of thing now?)….
Apr
03
2007
Ah, Maine, how I love ya and yer wonky weather. Things had been warming up lately; for the past week or so, we’ve finally seen the deer we’d been told would frequent the grounds - counted up to 14 at one point, all hanging out munching on the newly-revealed grasses. Saturday morning I discovered a woodchuck-looking critter scuffling around in a flower garden:
… staring me down through the dining room window before making a dive for a nice big hole in the ground at the base of one of the garden walls (lovely).
Yesterday it all changed. Wet flakes, colder temps. This morning I awoke to a winter wonderland:
Lovely scene, but for early April I’d prefer the mid-40s and 50s we saw over the weekend. Even North Carolina is conspiring against us… we’re taking a long weekend trip to the Greensboro/High Point and Asheville areas as a kind of celebration for selling our MA house (closing was a couple weeks ago, several months earlier than we had feared, yay!). The weather there yesterday and today? Near 80, sunny. The weather when we’re there later this week? Barely breaking 60 (and according to one forecast, not even hitting 50 over the holiday weekend). Fortunately Husband and I prefer temps at the 60-degree end of the scale vs. 80 degrees and up (one of the reasons we’re heading to NC in early April instead of later in the year)…. and I figure 60 degrees is still better than 38 degrees here in Maine. Plus, they’ll all have green grass and flowers at this point, too. Can’t wait!
