Earnestine Rides Again!

 

by Pa Rock

Collector of Tales

I've decided to name my ChatGPT bot "Ernestine," because, like Lily Tomlin's famous AT&T telephone operator, she knows how to get up in people's business.

The desktop on my iMac has a profusion of icons scattered across the screen in no particular order of sense.  Some represent personal things like my yearly tax materials, medication lists, and copies of correspondence, but an abundance of the often neglected and abandoned files relate to things I have written (usually efforts at one form of fiction or another) and matters related to genealogy - my family treee research - and they are strewn about the desktop in no particular rhyme or reason,  The entire scene resembles cat vomit on a field of purple and violet..

This week I decided that I might have time to complete one more major project before the Grim Reaper pulls his trash truck up the drive to collet me - and the project I chose, one that I have put off for years - is to try and collect all of my  genealogy materials into some semblance of order so that they may be of benefit to other researchers now and long after I am nothing more than an entry on an old family tree chart myself.

I had been hearing reports about how easy it is to create a homepage with one of those new-fangled AI bots, an avenue of organizing, preserving, and presenting complicated material which sounded perfect for my needs.  I knew a small amount about two chatbots:  Anthropic's "Claude," and the ChatGPT chatbot which, as far as I knew, had no name.  I tried Claude first, for a couple of evenings, but we could never seem to get in sync with each other's thought processes.  

ChatGPT and I meshed better, and I quickly became more comfortable with her.  (I chose a female pronoun because I felt like I was being guided by one of the old teachers back in my elementary school days - who were all female in that era.  She was very patient and careful with her explanations.  After just a brief amount of time, ChatGPT and I were able to produce that design I envisioned as the background for my homepage, something I was never able to convey to Claude.

But ChatGPT had a kink.  She only allowed me to do a limited amount of work and then would tell me that I had used up my "free" quota of images or other services for that sitting and would have to return to the project the next day.  The solution she offered was an upgrade to ChatGPT Pro for the amazingly low price of just $20 per month.  

I phoned my youngest son looking for sympathy and advice as to how to proceed, and he informed he that he subscribed to ChatGPT Pro  and found it be an invaluable aid in keeping his projects organized and on-task, and he further explained that I could afford $20 a month and should quit bitching.  

So I took the plunge - and in just a couple of more sessions, ChatGPT Pro (now known as "Earnestine" in my home office) and I have accomplished massive amounts of work - with plenty still left to tackle.  The homepage is up with links to eight different aspects of my genealogy work and materials - three of which already have materials attached to the links.  The rest of the process will take a few months to sort, proofread, and post before the page will go ""live," but there is an end in sight - perhaps by this spring.

The title of this electronic magnum opus will be "Rocky Macy's Roots, Branches, and Weeds," which is borrowed from the publicly-available family tree which I have posted at Ancestry.com.  Look for it soon on a desktop near you!

(Sooner or later artificial intelligence (AI) will reduce each of us to just a few terabytes of ones and zeroes.  I wanted to get a head start of the process of storing and sorting my own digits.   Immortality draws nigh, but our accommodations will be  in a data center!)