Another Academic Year ended and it has gone way too fast! Most of my and several of my staff’s attention has been on the upcoming Clapp Library renovation. We were off to a quick start last July, but then had to pause in December because of budget issues. Then we spent the first three months this year preparing programmatic enhancements ideas for the Trustees, which was approved in April and we have been back to the intense design phase, which is fast coming to a close. Now starts the real work of planning the move! We are excited and well prepared. Stay tuned.

I came back last Monday after a week in Southern Spain. My family and I rented a car in Madrid and drove to Cordoba, Granada, Malaga, Cadiz, Arcos de la Frontera, Seville and back to Madrid. It was a fantastic trip with so many things to see, but I was expecting to see more Moorish things than we were able to see. Food was a bit bland for my taste, but there were always the add ons 🙂

In terms of technology, Google Maps was our great friend, including alerting us to speed detection cameras on highways! It was amazingly helpful driving through some nooks and corners and helping find public parking lots. The car itself supported Android Auto, so I connected my phone to it and was able to view the maps in a much larger screen.

In some of the cathedrals, the explanatory texts were all in Spanish. No sweat. Google translate did the work. Not knowing Spanish, I have no idea how great a job it did, but it was pretty good based on the correlation between what it said and what we were looking at.

It is a common practice in Europe that in restaurants, they bring the credit card device to you rather than taking the card with them, processing and bringing it back, like in the USA. I am told that this is to avoid fraud. I was thinking about how India became essentially a cashless society so quickly and how they use mobile payment using a QR code. The brilliance of that is that the recipient of the funds, be it a street vendor or a restaurant does not need a physical device for either swiping a credit card or fitted with NFC (Near Field Communication) technology like in Spain or here. Anyways, we hardly needed cash to purchase anything or pay for anything, no matter how cheap it was. Pull up the plastic, touch the device and we were done.

Aer Lingus that we traveled in, because of convenient flights from Bradley International Airport in CT, lost our luggage and their technologies are pathetic. They do have a website that informs you of where the lost luggage is. It is terrible. It never had current information and it was frustrating. One would think, in today’s world, this can be done better. More importantly, one would think luggages don’t have to be lost!

I also have been playing around with Bard, Google’s AI model and is a competitor for ChatGPT. It has its limitations compared to ChatGPT (for example, you cannot go back to a previous conversation and see what happened), but it has been pretty good for what I have been using it for. I asked Bard to write a couple of PHP scripts and it did an amazing job.

Finally, I signed up for the experimental version of Search Generative Experience (SGE), a marriage of AI tools such as Bard with search. Honestly this is where the future is. When we search, we always have follow up questions. Usual search requires you to re-search and repeat the context. Whereas in SGE, it is conversational and it is brilliant. I think this will be a game changer. If you haven’t, I suggest you try this.

Looking forward to warmer days and a great summer. Wish you all a great summer!