Wet Wednesdays and an Internet Outage

Rain happens. It is nature's way of moving life-giving water around the ecosystem. Untold generations have adapted to its regular apperance and the Scottish language has even evolved to describe its many forms, from barely a smirr all the way up the spectrum to stoatin'. But combine rain, 4 teenagers and an internet outage and you have the makings of a catastrophe of cataclysmic proportions. Fortunately the outage only lasted 20 minutes so the world did keep turning on its axis, but it was a close call.

Being confined to quarters for one day on a holiday is no bad thing. A chance to recharge the batteries and investigate alternative ways to stay amused. A chance to brush up on cue skills in the pool room, to play games round the kitchen table and to watch TV in the afternoon 😱. Taking advantage of the down time, we also brought forward the planned indoor Easter egg hunt by a day. At the planning stage I had wondered how old was too old to enjoy an Easter egg hunt and watching the kids searching all over the house, I decided that it must be somewhere over 18 as a minimum.

We did eventually venture out to an Italian restaurant in Ayr for dinner. These days in keeping with most of the big tech companies, Google offers an AI overview to questions up front of any factual information. I was slightly alarmed to be told Cecchini's was translated as snipers, marksmen or sharpshooters, before being reassured by conventional translation sites that it was a common Italian surname and as such a perfectly reasonable name for a restaurant. I think we dodged a bullet there.

On the same subject, Ben told me about AI that had been trained to distinguish between pictures of wolves and huskies. It performed well with about 80% accuracy until the programmers realised that in all the training images given to the AI, the wolves were pictured in a snowy landscape. It transpired that all the AI was doing was looking for snow in each picture and crying wolf if it detected any.

Despite the potential for flying bullets, our choice of restaurant was right on target and we had authentic Tuscan cuisine served by attentive and very pleasant waiting staff. OK, it was mostly spaghetti bolognese and pizza, but it was Tuscan spaghetti bolognese and pizza. And on the plus side, there was enough pizza left over to take home for lunch tomorrow. Nothing beats a lunch of cold pizza.

As a footnote to any concerned parents looking at the accompanying pictures, the girls were drinking mocktails, which will hopefully be reassuring if autocorrect doesn't change it back to cocktails again.Read more