Two books

I'm having a stab at writing another book.

Actually, two more books.  One is an outgrowth of the presentation that I have been preparing for the past two years, (possibly for the last thirty years? since I started researching the basic topic back then), which started life talking about NFTs, of necessity spent expanded to cryptocurrencies and blockchain, and is now extending to pretty much the whole of decentralized finance (aka DeFi), and everything else that goes along with cryptocurrency related topics.  The presentation is getting pretty full, and the presentation only barely touches on some topics.  So I am writing up the missing material, and extending it in certain ways.  I don't have a lot of background in the more technical areas of the cryptographic protocols and algorithms, and analyzes of the strengths, and weaknesses, of those areas.  So I'm making tentative explorations of getting a co-author who can cover some of those areas.

I have also been asked, a number of times in recent years, to write an autobiography or memoir.  I don't know what the difference is between an autobiography and a memoir.  I have the feeling that a memoir is just an autobiography that isn't as rigorous as it should be.  In any case, I have finally started to try and put one together.  I'm collecting stories for the most part, from various times in my life.  I don't know if it's exactly career advice, because I could never advise someone to take the career path that I have, but it might serve as some guidance, in some areas, or encouragement for those who wonder if they're life path is going in the right direction.  I have never been able to tell, in advance, what direction my life was going to be going in.

I'm facilitating the creation of these two books using Google's Gboard soft keyboard.  Generally speaking I really hate soft keyboards.  The first time that Gloria and I were convinced to get phones capable of even doing texting on a more extended basis, I got phones that had slide out keyboards.  Even those tiny physical keyboards were better than the soft keyboards that are available.  I don't care whether it's a tap soft keyboard or a slide soft keyboard or a swipe around soft keyboard, all of them are annoying to use and difficult.  Gboard has one huge advantage over all the rest of them: it provides for dictation capabilities.  (As long as you have a data connection. Gboard has to be able to contact Google's servers in order to do the actual speech recognition and transcription.)

Gboard very definitely is not perfect.  It makes an awful lot of mistakes.  Some of them I really cannot figure out.  Particularly when dictating acronyms and saying each letter, or saying a name a word that sounds like the acronym, Gboard will come up with a bewildering variety of variations on what you said.  Sometimes it will get it right, sometimes it will break it into multiple words, sometimes it will create something completely bizarre.  Gboard can also correctly identify and transcribe words like "egregiously," but then stumble and completely collapse over some very simple words.  (At the moment, Gboards seems to have decided that when I say "again," I actually mean "a game."  Pretty much every time.  Weird.)  However, overall, it allows me to get some dictation done, and therefore get the bulk of the material for the books into email messages to myself so that I can correct them, edit them, and put them into a document later.  As I say, it's definitely not perfect, but it is a help, even with all the massive amounts of editing that I have to do later.  (Such as the fact that Gboard decided that the word "even," earlier in the previous sentence, was supposed to be "he wasn't."  Go figure.)  (Sometimes I have to do the editing on the fly while I'm dictating, since Gboard can make such egregious mistakes that I will never figure out, later on, what it was that I was trying to say.  [For example, I said "a poke," and Gboard decided I meant "Apple."  Tech bias, there?])