Getting Hearing Aids

I have noticed over the last couple of years that I have trouble telling what people are saying in noisy environments. In particular, cafes and restaurants, but also in class. I am lucky that I have some control over how much noise there is in the classroom, but it was still frustrating.

I looked around online for information about hearing aids, but I found myself not getting much closer to understanding what I might need and what it might cost. So I booked an appointment at a local Specsavers. The first test, with an iPad and headphones, didn't show any issues. But they mentioned a more thorough test so I chose to do that. It shows that I don't hear higher frequencies well in my left ear. It isn't in the range where most speech is, but it might have been contributing to my having trouble distinguishing one conversation from another.

So I ordered some hearing aids. I really only need one for my left ear, but the audiologist said they work best when you have them in two ears. I did have some odd mental resistance to needing hearing aids, but I pushed through it and I am really glad that I did.

I wear them almost all of the time, except when I am riding my bike since they are not good with a strong wind. And they make a big difference. I understand people much more often than I don't and we don't have to have the telly up so loud.

11:45 am, April 18, 2025

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Totes Adorbs

I want to start out by saying that most people, young and old alive, are lovely people almost all of the time. And me of them are genuinely a delight whenever you see them. I would love to be such a person, and I flatter myself that I am working towards it.

But every now and then, I encounter people who are just spoiling for conflict. Nicky and I went to see a play that had been filmed in England. At the start of the show the person next to me spend about five minutes finishing up this and that on his phone before turning it off. This was the tiniest bit distracting, but not worthly of mention. However, when Nicky's phone got a text message, he lost his shit and started ranting and raving there is his seat in the middle of cinema full of people who had paid to see this show.

And just today, I was looking for a Neil Finn record that came out for Record Store Day. It was really crowded and I asked the people around me if they knew how the records were ordered, because I wasn't sure if Neil Finn would be under N or F.

This little treasure from behind me chimed into tell me that it would be filed under S for shit. He went to tell me that the greatest album is history is Made with Butter by Milton and the Five from 1952, and that Nick Finn would never have made a record that good.

What-fucking-ever, dude.

So thank you, all your wonderful people, who are just pleasant and reasonable people. I want to be on your team.

02:04 pm, April 12, 2025

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Our New Dog: Trixie

Our much-loved greyhound Billy died a couple of months ago. He had been with us for a long time, and we have all missed him. Since he went, we have debated getting another dog, but have gone back and forth. Then, one day Nicky and I were walking Cricket in our local park and we met a women walking two smallish greyhounds. It turns out that one of them was being fostered and was almost ready for her new home. So we discussed it for a bit and decided to see how we went with her for a trial, since that it how the organisation - Greyhound Safety Net - operates.

The trial has not ended and we have adopted her. Trixie is very different to Billy, which is something of a surprise because we thought most greyhounds were pretty similar. She is cheeky and very active. Nicky calls her a choas goblin, and this is pretty accurate. But we are lucky to have her.

Sure, she is slightly destructive, so we'll need to walk her a couple of times a day, but I am sure it will all be fine.

08:57 am, April 6, 2025

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The End of the Locked Box Puzzle?

For some years now, I have been giving my students locked-box puzzles. They are like an escape room, but instead of solving puzzles to get out of a room, the player solves a series of puzzles to open a safe.

The genesis of the idea came from something I saw at a conference about a decade ago, which used a series of physical locks, but that seemed like an expensive way to do it, and limited in the sorts of puzzles you could present.

My first iteration involved Word documents that were locked with a password, and this worked well enough, but there were issues. Only one password would work for each document, and when I put in the wrong password when making it - which happened - then this would be hard to fix quickly.

So I made a web-based version, which is actually how I learned to code properly. And that works well. But what has changed is the emergence of generative AI. Some critics will tell you that AI only repeats what it has seen elsewhere, and it is true that AIs have been trained on existing text. But today's AI can and does solve novel problems. Problems like the ones that I present in the locked-box challenges. Even a year ago, you could google information, but you had to resolve the puzzle yourself.

But recently, it is hard to write a puzzle that a person can solve but that an AI can't solve quite quickly. I think that I can keep the format alive for a bit longer, by making more of the problem matching the solutions to the individual puzzle to where to enter that answer, but the end is in sight.

08:46 am, April 6, 2025

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