If there's anything you should take away from this week's episode, it's that bunny rabbits are really, really cute. Cue the theme tune!
Welcome to episode 23 of that's a free bee. MyPal2 says, in this week's episode, I'm going to talk about MyPal2, the toy that really made Christmas for me one year. I'm going to talk about using Descript to change sentences in this very podcast. I'm going to answer an AI question of the week about a book that deeply affected me.
We're going to talk about What the hell is going on in coffee shops?
We're going to continue our self care journey, and I'm going to tell you about some new music that I've been listening to. All that and more coming right up.
Some of you may have noticed in last week's episode that I made a few changes that you may not have noticed it, which is Ideally, what is expected, I'd like you to have not have noticed it, but I noticed it because obviously I knew that the change was there. So I'm curious if anybody else noticed it.
So what I started doing is I've started using a program called Descript to edit the episodes of the podcast. I've talked about Descript before, so this is nothing new but I really wanted to experiment with it and see if I could use it as a permanent way of editing the show, because it is a little bit easier, , I don't have to worry about being able to hear the audio correctly but I'm doing it because what you can do is basically you record the audio, you upload the audio to Descript. It creates a transcript of it, which is another thing that I've been wanting to do for a while anyway. Again, I've talked about that before and that transcript then becomes editable so you change the words in the transcript and if you delete a word, it removes the word from the timeline and as such, you're editing a podcast just by editing the text. It's a little bit easier than having to listen to it as you're editing it. So I could go for and make any major edits first of all, using Descript.
And then I can listen to the timeline for times when I may have made a mistake or something that I need to add it's been pretty good up to now, but one of the features it does have is it allows you to regenerate something. So. If I said something incorrectly, I could highlight the word, I could regenerate it, and I've recorded my voice into it and done a little bit of a training, , paragraph that you have to read and what it will do is it will replace the words that I've asked it to replace and regenerate, or overdub as they call it, , with an AI voice that's supposed to sound like me and then you end up with a sentence that I actually didn't say I meant to say something, let's say, because sometimes when I listen back to episodes of the show, I do think to myself that I wish I'd have said something slightly different or I realized that I said a word incorrectly. And it's a bit annoying because I don't want to go and record the entire thing again because for one, I want to get to the point where I'm not doing much editing, which I'm getting to that stage. I don't have to do as much editing as I used to do maybe just to remove things where I went on a little bit too long I'd be interested to know, if you think that there was any funky sound problems last week, did any of the sentences that I say sound a bit odd? Because I did replace some sentences that I didn't say incorrectly. I just replaced them just to see what it would sound like and just to see if I got any messages from people saying it was jarring and a bit weird.
You may have also noticed in last week's episode that the artwork was missing from the individual chapters.
That wasn't on purpose, that is an actual problem my podcasting host Captivate have made a few changes in the background that change the way you add album artwork or, more specifically, they've added the ability to do it directly on their platform instead of doing it in your podcast editor. Now, from what I gather, you can actually do it both ways, but for whatever reason it didn't work for me so at time of recording, I've reached out to Captivate to just try and get a little bit of advice on how I can make that work in the future, In the meantime, if you do want to see the artwork that was generated for that episode, you can just go to the Instagram page, which you can get on thatsafreebee.com or if you're in the Instagram app, just search for thatsafreebee because that's my Instagram username and you'll be able to see the artwork there. By the time this episode comes out, the issue might be resolved. If it is fantastic you'll be able to go back and see it. I did notice though, when I went back to that, the artwork for all the previous episodes is at loading either, the chapters are all there, But there's no artwork, and actually on the last episode, the Masters of the Universe episode, the chapters, even they don't show. So there are, again, there are chapters in there, it's just not showing for some reason.
I'm hoping it'll be solved pretty quickly. , however, there was actually a secret hidden message I suppose in the artwork last week which you still would have seen because it was showing the episode artwork. You may have noticed if you were paying attention to your screen when listening to the podcast, which I know not many people would be doing because you're probably either in your car or your phone's in your pocket or whatever, but you may have noticed something different about the artwork for that episode, the main one. Go back and check it out. Let me know if you think you know what that might mean because it might mean something.
We are now into the third week of Christmas stories if you remember up to now, I've told you about Kitty Cat, which was my first stuffed teddy, I've also told you about the time that I got Castle Grayskull and Snake Mountain. If you didn't go to the show notes on those episodes. Do have a look because there are links to the old commercials for the castle and for Snake Mountain. They were great commercials. It even goes in the commercial it says you must put it together yourself because you had to put it together yourself.
You probably worked that bit out from what I said really. This week I'm here to tell you a slightly different Christmas toy story, because I technically didn't get it for Christmas, but it was a Christmas present. I'm a little bit older at this point. I'm into more technology related toys. computers, I like gadgets, so. I had been looking through the Argos catalogue, or back then actually, it wasn't the Argos catalogue. There was an Argos catalogue, but for me it was the Index catalogue. I don't know if you remember Index. They were basically the same as Argos. I think they were even around first, but eventually Argos bought out Index and then we had just one catalogue. But I always would look through the Index catalogue and I would see this toy in there and I really wanted it. I knew I was never going to get it in a million years.
It was If I remember rightly, it was about £70, and there was no way I was getting that for Christmas. So, I asked everybody that year for money if anybody said to me, what would you like for Christmas? I said, money because I want to buy this thing and I tell them all about it and they'd be like, yeah, all right yeah. I'll just give you money then. They didn't care, obviously, because it wasn't the toy that they wanted. It was what I wanted and the toy in question was called my pal two, right? My pal two was a robot. My first ever robot, actually thinking about it quite possibly my only ever robot. Yeah, I don't remember actually owning any more robots. It was a great toy, It was a, basically a little robot. You just stand it on the desk in front of you and it had games on it had buttons on its belly, it had a clear plastic head, it had an antenna. It had the ability to attach a basketball hoop to his belly, and then you could throw a little ball at the belly and everything was interactive.
It was one of the first, properly interactive toys that I ever had, and I think that I ever really saw. It was amazing. So you could press the buttons on his belly and it'd be able to play music. You could play My Pal 2 Says, and it would go, My Pal 2 Says, press red. My Pal 2 Says. Press blue. Press orange and then you press orange and you go, Ah, ah, ah, my pal 2 didn't say. Press orange. It was great, right? You got a hoop and you could throw the hoop over its antenna and when the hoop landed on the antenna, or over the antenna, it would go, Woo, yeah. It'd do the same when you threw the basketball, throw the basketball hoop as well. It was a great toy. I bought it just after Christmas with the money that I got as gifts for Christmas and that was, I think, the turning point where I started to get into toys that were gadgets.
For any new listeners to the show, each week I use chat GPT to generate a question and I read the question out. And I answer it, , live on air. I know it's not live. It's okay. but the important thing is I don't see the question beforehand. .
What I did just before I press record on this section, I generated the question, I copied and pasted it into my document. And then I read it just a little reminder for those people that might be new to the podcast, because I do seem to be gaining a couple of listeners each week, which is good. So thank you and welcome if I've not mentioned it before, while you've been listening, you can go to, thatsafreebee.com you can send me some feedback, you can ask me a question, I will answer the question on the show, let's dive right in with the AI question of this week.
this week's is think about a book or movie that deeply affected you. What was it and why did it have such an impact on you?
One thing I love, or I have loved for a very long time is reading or more importantly, or more accurately. I love stories. , I'm a big fan of thriller stories, , detective stories, ones where there's a mystery that needs to be solved, like the whodunit kind of thing.
Big fan of that kind of stuff. I read a lot of I say a lot of, I've read all of the Michael Connolly books, , which are based on the detective Harry Bosch, , and the Lincoln Lawyer. You might have, there's a movie about that, so you might have heard of that. It's actually a TV series on Bosch as well, which was okay i, didn't get into it, but I think it's cause I knew the majority of the stories there is one book that I think I could attribute my I suppose passion for reading, and now that I think about what book it is, it's, I mean, well, actually I was a lot younger at the time, so it makes sense that it would be this book, and that book is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
The reason why this sticks in my head so much is because, , the movies had come out. I'd watched the Harry Potter movies. I'd enjoyed the Harry Potter movies. I then went on to think, well, you know what? I'll read the books. So I read books one, two, and three. And just as I was getting ready to finish up book number three, sure enough, it turns out that book number four is due for release and it was Everywhere. It was Harry Potter mania it was constantly on the news it was advertised everywhere because it was the first book to come out since the movies came out. So that meant people wanting to know what the next part of the story was going to be, which I suppose is the truth with any book or any movie for that matter and I remember queuing up to buy the book. Weirdly, I queued up at Tesco of all places. I think it was just the closest , place to me. And I remember being outside Tesco, waiting for it to open at eight o'clock in the morning and I remember the doors opened. We all ran in and there's massive stack of Harry Potter books just there and the first thing I thought, and then I heard everyone else, it was. It's so thick because it was a pretty big book and we all went running up to the bookshelf.
It wasn't even a bookshelf. It was a giant cardboard box. We all went running up to the giant cardboard box, scoots up our copy and ran to the tills and there were, every till was open in this Asda and it's a Asda, Tesco. And it's a big Tesco, this one. And there were like 30 tills easily. And we all just ran to a different till so we could get through quick enough and ran home and then I couldn't read it straight away, I can't remember why I couldn't read it straight away all I remember is I started reading it in the evening. And I actually, I have no idea why I couldn't read it straight away, but for whatever reason, I couldn't read it that evening. I do remember all day the anticipation of finally getting to read it I didn't watch the news. I didn't do anything because I didn't want it to be spoiled, because we were interviewing people all day on the TV who had got the book and who had read it or where they were up to and all kinds of things like that so anyway, it came to the evening and I remember I just went to bed.
I just, ploughed through page, after page, after page after page. And then all I remember was. A lot of noise going on, and when I looked outside , the window, the bedroom window, the whole street was out like everybody from the, well, I say everybody, probably five or six houses, either side and across the road, they'd all come out of the house and when I went outside, I started talking to one of the neighbors, , Tony, he was called. I started talking to Tony and it turns out the house next door to him. there was somebody inside it who shouldn't have been inside it because they were on holiday and there was somebody in the house and Tony and his family had heard the people inside or the person inside the house and they weren't too sure what was going on because they've been asked by these neighbors to look after the house so they've been banging on the doors trying to get a response because they thought someone had broken in basically but they couldn't find any signs of a break in.
So they're banging on the doors going crazy, , shouting, we know you're in there. We're going to call the police and all that kind of stuff. Just leave. So I went out because yeah, you don't miss out on that kind of drama, do you? So I went outside and I found out what had happened, which was basically what I just told you.
So we all joined in a few people ran around the back to make sure that whoever it was didn't run away through the back. And basically the impression that we got was somebody broken into the house. They got caught because they'd been heard. And then they'd just hold up inside the house because they were scared.
They were trying to be quiet, thinking that we'd all just think they weren't there and go away. Anyway, this went on for a good hour. The police had been called. We called the police and it just took them ages to arrive. But actually an hour response time for the police isn't, isn't that bad by today's standards.
And this was probably, well, let's look it up quickly, actually. Year was Harry. Potter,
the Goblet of Fire, released. I'm not a fast typer, sorry. It was released in 2000 . So I would have been, at this point, twenty God, I couldn't work that out then. That's a really easy one to work out. And I know 20's an old age for reading the Harry Potter books. But they passed me by, and I don't care. It's Harry Potter.
Harry Potter's great. I was 20 at this point. So. Back to the story so the police arrived in about an hour. So when they arrived and they're like, right, can I get you all to disperse? And we were like, yep, they're in there. And they're like, no, no, no. You go away, get back to your homes. And we're like, but you know, so we want to see what's going on.
And they're like, well, back off, back off anyway. Backed off, and we all sort of went and basically stood at the end of our garden paths. And the police went up to the door and they're banging on the door going, It's the police! Open up! Is there anyone in there? And then sure enough, the curtains at the top started twitching on the, on the top floor you could see that there was somebody peering out of them so we're like, look, there's definitely someone in there, we can see them peering out. And the police are banging and saying, shouting through the letterbox, all kinds of things, and saying, At this point, we know you're in there. If you don't come out, we're breaking the door down.
You've got to come out. And this went on for, again, another like 30 minutes or so. Because obviously if you didn't want to break the door down, they didn't even have any equipment to do it, but they just thought the fright of it would work. And then another police car turned up. So we're all like, Hey, here's the police with the battery ram.
But we're like excitement. They're going to knock the door down The other police car turned up and went to the first police car. What are you doing here? And they said, well, we were called out for this. And they're like, no, we were called out for this. And, and it went back and forth for a little while and then you could tell they thought, hang on, something's going on here. So they all, got together and they were talking huddled so that the rest of us couldn't hear what was going on. And they came back out and they were, they were all laughing. And it turned out right that we called the police on the person in the house then the police turned up, and the person in the house didn't believe that they were really the police. So they called the police to come and get the people they didn't think were the police. I've said police a lot. I don't even know what I'm up to with the polices at the moment. But basically, the police have been called two separate times for two separate incidents.
Us calling them on the person in the house, and the person in the house calling them on us. And it all turned out in the end that It was the niece of the person who lived in the house had basically broken up from her boyfriend, called the people that owned the house and said, Can I come and stay with you for a little bit?
And they've said, Oh, we're on holiday, but it's okay. You've got a spare key. You can go in. And she'd arrived late at night, 11 o'clock at night or something like that. And then the next door neighbors had obviously been told to keep an eye on the house. I think you can see where this is going.
Basically, so it turned out the person in there was supposed to be there. The person who owned the house didn't consider the fact that we might all think that somebody's broken into the house. So we eventually called the people who owned the house and said, just to double check, there's someone here who says they're your niece and they went, Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. They're supposed to be there. And so we explained what had happened and they were a bit like, Oh no, I can't believe that's happened and it turned out this whole time the poor woman inside the house was terrified because she thought it was her boyfriend that had come to smash the door down and then she thought he was pretending to be the police. And that is the reason why that book sticks in my head because after all that was over, I went back to bed and I finished the book. I just carried on reading the book and I didn't sleep at all that night. I got straight up in the morning. I was working at the time and I went straight to work and I was the most exhausted I've been all day and I remember my boss saying to me, he was called Colin and he said to me, are you okay? You don't look very well today. And I remember having to sheepishly look at him and say, I've been up all night reading Harry Potter and his response was, you're an idiot and I got no sympathy whatsoever because I didn't deserve any, I suppose.
But yeah, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the first book that I remember reading cover to cover. In one go, and it definitely ignited a passion in for me for books. These days, I'm more about audiobooks because I actually really enjoy the narration that you get from well, the people reading the book.
They're amazing. So I would suggest giving audiobooks a try. I just don't have time to read a real book anymore, unfortunately. I would love to. I'm also at the point now where I'm that old. I'm not really that old. I'm 43 but I'm old enough to the point now where when you, when, when you, when I read a book, I will fall asleep.
If I'm reading actual pages, I do it. If I try and read a website, I start nodding off. So I definitely don't have time for books anymore. And I don't have the ability to stay awake long enough to read a real book.
This week's Gripe of the Week is a little bit me just being petty to be honest, but still, it annoys me. the gripe is when you go to a coffee shop and they don't stir the drink. Now I realise that's really petty and you can stir your own drink, that's not a problem. I don't have an issue with that whatsoever.
In fact, I don't expect anyone to stir the drink for me. Unless I am having a takeaway drink, because what happens to me, it might not happen to everybody else, but I'll get a drink and say I've got a syrup of some kind, I'm a big fan of hazelnut syrup, so I tend to get a hazelnut latte with no whipped cream.
And I'll get exactly that, it's fine. I'll go out, I'll start drinking it and I'll be like, I cannot tell that there's hazelnut in this drink at all. And then I get to the very end of the drink and there's a massive like wad of hazelnut in the bottom of the cup. it's not nice. It would have been nicer having that hazelnut flavor all the way through the drink and that's the point where you go, Oh, I should have picked a stirrer up I could have stirred it then. But what's worse in a lot of places, and I certainly find this in Manchester, I don't know if it's, everywhere else, a lot of places run out of stirrers all the time or if you're in some places and you say, can I have a stirrer? They look at you funny, like I just want to stir my drink. Obviously the expectation is that the drink should mix as it's being poured. Is poured the right word? I don't really know. The drink should mix as it's being made, but it just doesn't it's just a simple fact it doesn't and it's not really that I expect people to stir the drink for me, but I think it should just be, if you're having a takeaway cup, it should be pretty standard, it comes with a stirrer or at the very least, if you're having a syrup of some kind.
If you listened last week, you'll know that I am dedicating the pick of the week during the holiday period to self care.
Last week I concentrated on meditation and I spoke a little bit about my meditation experience. I gave you a couple of ideas on where to start your own journey on meditation and I posted some links in the show notes. I hope you got the chance to go and look at them if you feel like they will be useful to you.
This week, I want to talk about another quite useful part of self care now I am quite new to this myself this isn't something I've done at all before, but I've recently been looking into it for a specific reason and I'll go through that with you in a minute, but it's the actual topic is journaling.
Journaling is something that I've always been interested in, but I've never really been able to, replicate a method of it that is useful to me.
There's an app called Day One. There used to be an app called Memento. I don't think that exists anymore. I'm almost certain that Day One purchased it and bought it. I, I might be incorrect there. If it still exists, I'll add a link to it to the show notes.
I do remember Memento being my personal favorite over Day One but one of the problems I've had with journaling is I never really know what to write. I get a bit stuck and if it's digital, it doesn't feel like I'm really like, well, I'm obviously not. It doesn't feel like I'm putting pen to paper and actually writing things down. And I'm not really good at writing about what's gone on for the day and my thoughts and all that kind of stuff. I, I have a friend who journals and.
She fills page after page after page and it's seriously impressive. And it's a way of getting all of her thoughts and feelings out onto a piece of paper and out of her head, because sometimes that's what it is. Like she might have a problem going on and she'll just write about the problem and she won't think about necessarily what she's writing. She'll just write. And then if there's a part of the subject that's bothering her, that's different, and she suddenly thinks about it, she'll just start writing about that and it might not make any sense to somebody else, but when she does it, it makes sense to her when she reads it back. a lot of the time, she just writes it all down and then throws it away. And it's always been quite impressive that someone could do that to me and it's something that I've often thought that I'd like to be able to do, but I've just never been very good at it. I've always done this thing where I'll, I'll, I'll try it out though and , it, it brings in your photos from the day and you can write about what your experience was there and all that kind of stuff. And like I say, hasn't worked for me. I've recently discovered something called the theme system journal. Again, I'll add a link to it because, well, it'd be good to see for yourselves just exactly how it works, but it's, it's a little bit more structured or, or it can be, it doesn't have to be, you can use it however you want. But it also has a section in it with essentially checklists so you can help build habits. And that's one of the things that I would like to do is, is build certain habits. Like for example, I want to be able to build a habit of exercising and being more healthy and remembering to eat more fruit and veg and stuff like that and I know it's easy to just say, well, just eat more fruit and veg and be more mindful of it when you do it, which is absolutely correct, but sometimes building those habits is quite difficult, especially if you've had a lifetime of not doing that. Same goes with things like spending money. That's not necessary.
I quite recently, actually over the last year, maybe two years, had to really rein in the amount of money I was spending. Not, not because we were running out of money. Well, we were running out of money. Obviously we run out of money every single month. That's. It's just the way life is for some people. And we are some of those people.
No, it's more that I was spending money that I could have saved for other things. And I wasn't, and sometimes I was like, ah, I forgot about that thing. And if I hadn't have just bought that thing, I would have had the money for that thing. Yeah. I'm really descriptive. I know just a side note right now. I can see the rabbit from where I'm sat and it's bathing itself and it's the cutest thing I've ever seen. I've never seen the rabbit do that before. It keeps dipping its hands in its water bowl and then rubbing it on its face and then it's, and then it's sort of rubbing its cheeks against its body.
It's really, really cute. Anyway, anyway, we'll, we'll, we'll carry on. It's really distracting though.
So the theme system journal helps you. It has a section in it to help you build habits. And it also has sections in it so that you can write down like things that you were grateful for the day. However you want that. The good thing is it's one of these journals where the fields are blank. So you don't have to follow their system necessarily.
You follow your own system. And the way they do it is they say you choose a theme. So your theme for the year. One of your themes for the year, you can have, I think there's. I think there's about five pages for different themes. I've not actually received it yet. I've ordered one. And you choose your, your themes for the year.
So your theme might be being more healthy and that can mean exercising, dieting, it can mean anything, but that your theme is to be more healthy. And then your other theme might be to be more financially responsible. And again, that could be things like ensuring that your bills are paid on time putting money into a savings account, however you feel being financially responsible is for yourself.
You add it to the, to the theme section, you write it down and at the end of the year, well, the end of the quarter, cause it's a quarterly journal. So you would, you would fill one out each quarter which is what I plan on doing. Now, the reason I'm bringing this particular journal system up is I, it's, well, it's something I've wanted to do for a while, but it's also a project for the podcast as well,
Because what I will do, I'll report on these things each quarter. So once I've filled it out, I will do an episode where I talk about my themes for the quarter and the, the habit tracking things that I've put in. And we'll see at the end of the, well, when I filled the. The journal, I'm not going to split it into specific quarters but when I filled the journal cause I might not do it every single day, although that would be the plan is to, to try and fill it in every day and at the end of it, I will then report back and do an episode on how everything went. So it might not be for you, but journaling can be quite useful. I've read quite a lot of journaling over the years and it does seem to help a lot of people out, so it's just another tool for you to pop into your self care toolkit and see if it's something that might be useful to you. If it's not, you can move on to the next subject or you can go back to meditation.
Whatever's better for you.
Well, I've had fun recording this episode, but we have reached the time where it is final story time.
Over the last few days, I've been trying to get a little bit more into listening to music. I don't really listen to a lot of music. Mostly because of the hearing problems that I have, I just can't really enjoy it as much as I would like to, if I'm listening to music and I've just got my hearing aids in, it doesn't, it's not necessarily that it doesn't sound right.
It's just, if it's too loud, it messes them up, the noise cancellations thing comes on and it, it's just not fun, and then if I've got my AirPods in, I'm probably listening to a podcast and I'm just much more into listening to podcasts anyway, so I don't know. I don't listen to that much music, but I used to when I was younger and I find that whenever I get to a point where say I've run out of a podcast, or I just want to listen to it does happen sometimes.
I just want to listen to music and I find that I just go to the same old stuff. I played the same bands over and over again, or the same album, and I never really branch out. So I've tried using some of the features that are built into the Apple music app, you know, it suggests music to you, and I found a new group that I actually really like listen to, they're called Cellophane.
They mainly rap.