Category: Uncategorized

Things have been quiet on my blog for years, but over the holidays, I cleared some cruft and did very light customization of the default template, which included adding an About page, with an image of your author.

Getting the image to a satisfactory place took me far longer than expected. I’m a neophyte in AI tools and workflows, but I was starting with the visual equivalent of Hello World. Or so I imagined.

Bottom line

• Claude (Pro) completed the task, but I couldn’t see the output file. Reported bug, after trying in desktop app, Safari, and Chrome.
  • Original prompt: “Remove background from this image of a person wearing a red t-shirt with lettering on it.”
  • See the whole Claude chat if you want.
• ChatGPT (free) didn’t work well at first, and went too far (see below), but one of the intermediate images is what I’ve published on the About page.
  • Original prompt: “remove background from this image”
  • See the whole ChatGPT chat if you want.

I’ll walk backwards through the process because I was surprised this took so long, and images are mildly amusing.

Final published version, 1 January 2026

Yes, it’s a PNG where I haven’t filled the transparency with a color. I may fix that in the future on the About page, so I’ll keep this as an artifact here.

Original

The crop I started with, as a JPG.

Claude attempt

Nothing to show; that’s the bug. Something to do, probably, with present_files or thereabouts. With no output visible I can’t judge the effort.

ChatGPT first try – Polar Express?

I hated this. The entire prompt was “remove background from this image” but somehow the default output was to do more, with a Polar Express vibe.

ChatGPT second try – abstract art?

My response: “That’s terrible. I wanted the existing image as is, without the background. Don’t alter the rest of the image.”

This was wrong in entirely different ways.

My feedback: “That’s not what I expected. The original image is of a man with a red t-shirt with white lettering, in front of another person, obscured in the background. The output you shared removes far more than the background, and altered the colors.”

ChatGPT third try – not sure anything happened

The more conservative attempt didn’t change anything. Not useful.

ChatGPT fourth try – worked

The response that accompanied the third try was long-winded and gave me several options to improve the outcome, and I chose this one (ChatGPT wording):

Remove the person behind him instead
This can be done cleanly and predictably.

The outcome from that option is what I decided to use. You can see it above. I gave this feedback in chat.

“This image matches my goal with the original prompt.”

ChatGPT fifth try – regression!

Despite my approval, ChatGPT recommended one more try, to improve, and asked me to make one more choice. I chose “A) Transparent background” from the options.

And, we’re back to abstract art. (At least my face isn’t blue?)

That’s enough.

I’ve limited my domain purchases in recent years, and even let some of my bought-on-a-whim domains go (wordplumbr.com) after years of paying for renewals without using them.

But I still went ahead with the purchase of pencoyd.app when Google opened up that new TLD.

No specific plans for the new domain, so for now, I’ll link it to this post. I’ll leave the other 1,500+ possibilities alone.

I did a double-take when I saw today’s New York Times headline “A Big Step in Roger Federer’s Comeback, but a Gantlet Awaits Him” because I always thought the correct word is gauntlet.

But I learned something new today, courtesy of Grammarist.

Gantlet was the original spelling of the word referring to a form of punishment in which people armed with sticks or other weapons arrange themselves in two lines and beat a person forced to run between them.

Both words are accurate, with slightly different contexts, although often used interchangeably now. The New York Times, of course, used the word properly.

Am I done learning today? Hope not.

As a new administration prepares to take office this month, I’m concerned about attempts to rewrite history.

The President-Elect is notably inconsistent in his opinions and stances over the years. And, in the few years he’s been on Twitter, he’s taken to deleting any inconvenient past posts. At the state level, in Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker’s administration is removing mentions of climate change from a state Department of Natural Resources website about (ahem) how the agency “would deal with warming planet.”

WhiteHouse.gov

All of which made me wonder about the history of WhiteHouse.gov. After literally wondering about this in the middle of the night, I researched enough to be able to sleep easier (on this front) going forward.

Digital history is being preserved, however imperfectly, and our responsibility as citizens to learn from our past enjoys a firm foundation.

The Obama Administration published a detailed guide to its digital transition, before the election. Here’s the section focusing on WhiteHouse.gov:

“Similar to the Clinton and Bush White House websites, President Obama’s WhiteHouse.gov will be preserved on the web and frozen after January 20th and made available at ObamaWhiteHouse.gov. The incoming White House will receive the WhiteHouse.gov domain and all content that has been posted to WhiteHouse.gov during the Obama administration will be archived with NARA.”

The first public website for the White House was developed in 1994, during the Clinton administration. As noted in the quote above, the National Archives have versions of the Clinton website, both the final version and final version, but impressive collection of other versions and other historical documents is found within the Clinton Digital Library, with links to official government hosting. The final WhiteHouse.gov from George W. Bush, too, is hosted officially by the government at https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/.

In a smaller vein, the current White House keeps public versions of its privacy policy changes over time, although that page goes back only to February 26, 2010, within a single administration. We’ll see if version control and public accountability continues.

Other federal government digital data

I’m not surprised, but still pleased: the Internet Archive is leading a comprehensive effort across all U.S. government websites. More details on the project were published on December 15, 2016, but the goal is to make the End of Term Web Archive a comprehensive resource for all. (Note: HTTPS is not supported on the End of Term Web Archive, currently. Sigh.)

History and (even better) version control for laws and public documents of all kinds makes sense and helps us hold each other accountable over time. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, so I’ve made a small donation to the Internet Archive, inspired by what they’ve already achieved and to support more work here. You can donate, too.

Preserving my own digital history

I’m drawn to this subject not simply because of political shenanigans or concerns over how America holds itself accountable during the coming years, but because on a personal level I’m working to rehabilitate my previous years of blogging, currently offline in a WordPress XML archive. From March 2003 to January 2012, I published 1,465 posts at http://www.pencoyd.com/clock which are currently offline. I’m working on resurrecting that archive next. I’ll use https://clock.pencoyd.com/ as the blog home going forward.

Small irony, given my past work life: I needed to allow web.archive.org as a Proxy/Anonymizer in my OpenDNS parental controls to view the old versions of my blog.

Enjoyed cheering Matt on tonight as he turned 28 and seeing various other friends. More broadly, this celebration reminded me that sitting in my inbox (for too long now) are plans to re-start my own chronicle, right here with my WordPress install. Lots of other living to do, but I miss writing, too.

I made a purchase of some shipping boxes from ULINE.com today. There’s a nice touch, captured in this screenshot: an opt-in for getting an email reminder to repeat this order in the future. Set to one month in the future, the date is easily configurable. Well done, especially for a site that sells consumables.

I didn’t set a reminder, despite my appreciation of the design.

This business book was a freebie, and I got little more than what I paid for it. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing just isn’t new stuff after a decade-plus of different people (notably Seth Godin) telling us how marketing is changing.

I suppose the lessons and anecdotes presented are not obvious to all readers.

But I’ve been playing close attention and living in this world for too long to learn much from this book by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. That disappointed me, because I am interested, personally and professionally. Also, I wasn’t impressed that cattobark.com, the book’s website, responds with a Windows server error right now. That doesn’t quite match the internet expert persona put forth in their 2006 book.

(This is part of my end-of-the-year rush to capture my major media consumption before the year actually comes to a close.)

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson lay around the house for years before I read it this summer.

The subtitle “Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America” underlines the book’s strength and weakness. Larson is telling two stories, and I found his weaving a bit crude and forced. The first story, the history of the 1893 Columbian Exposition from inspiration to remarkable execution, fascinated me. The second story, bringing to life an early serial killer, is all too modern, despite the late 19th century Chicago setting. The urban growth goosed by the Exposition may have also given the murderer an increasing supply of victims, but I didn’t find them more than coincidental.

As a side note, which reinforces the point, Larson plays with the story of the Exposition’s main attraction. I didn’t know the Ferris wheel came from the 1893 fair, as a response to the Eiffel Tower of the last world fair. It sounds remarkable, but teasing out the punchline made the story a bit too much of a gotcha, as if Larson were revealing the #1 hit in a countdown of the year’s best.

Telling a great popular history is nothing to be ashamed of. Larson didn’t need to tart up the tale with a police procedural. Despite my concerns over the competing stories, I enjoyed the event enough that this general topic remains on my “to read” list.

(This is part of my end-of-the-year rush to capture my major media consumption before the year actually comes to a close.)

Another Doctorow paperback pickup, Eastern Standard Tribe thrilled me more than his earlier novel. With a simple yet imaginative idea, Doctorow makes corporate espionage seem like a new story. The concept — that allegiances and tastes run by time zone, not nation-state — is presented as fact, not explained…which is for the best. Just set the foundation, and then tell the story from that slightly skewed foundation and see where it goes. It doesn’t hurt that the protagonist is a user experience designer, and Doctorow gets in several jabs at the music industry’s shortsightedness.

I’ll have to read his third novel sometime.

(This is part of my end-of-the-year rush to capture my major media consumption before the year actually comes to a close.)