Tuesday 07/07/2026

For the writers meeting, with a prompt of “forgiveness”, I threw together something to read between 10 and 10:30. There were about 3 really well-written pieces, little homilies on the damage that resentment does. At the end I did a little presentation.

In the writers group, someone has the responsibility of coming up with a prompt each week, for the next week. Sometimes that is hard to do. Joanne had proposed that the writers group maintain a “prompt bank”, a list of good writing prompts that people could add to whenever they thought of one, or withdraw one when it was their turn and they drew a blank. But how to implement it?

There are basically two ways. Old school: someone volunteers to be the prompt banker, keeps the document, takes submissions and gives out prompts, via email. Or, I had found out about collaborative editing: a document that lives in the cloud and anybody who has the URL for it, can open it and copy or edit it. I demonstrated that right there: I shared my screen with the document open, and Joanne and Peter also had it open and each of them added a sentence to the document, their keystrokes appearing on my screen in real time. That way, nobody has to be the volunteer prompt bank holder.

So there was a little discussion and they opted to do it the old school way. No skin off my nose, I was just demoing the possibility.

After lunch there was line dance class. After that I joined a meeting of the AI interest group to hear from Rhonda. She had attended an invite-only banquet held by Stanford’s robotics school or department or whatever it is, and told us about what she had learned. Which was some interesting things happening that Channing House might get involved in.

I didn’t say there, but will opine here, that I have been highly un-impressed by progress in robotics. It has kind of gotten a tail wind from all the AI hype, and certainly AI progress will have a lot to do with future robots. But there is nothing on the market or near it that could be a practical aide to a nurse in a care facility. They are nowhere close to machine that can make a bed or administer a med. I’ve seen a demo of a robot that could fold laundry. It was fixed mounted to a table, but if you brought a basket of laundry close, it could fold the flatware into a pile. Whoopee-do. The little Chinese made robot dogs are around, I saw one at CHM a year ago, and another on University avenue last week. They walk and run very well, even on stairs. But they couldn’t bring you a beer.

Stanford wants to try having a robot act as a walking companion to a senior person. I’m dubious anything useful will come of that, either. But I’m just an old grouch.

Tonight the movie committee showed Stand By Me. I started watching it and it made me very uncomfortable. Rob Reiner did a great job of recreating exactly how my high-school peers talked and acted. I made me nervous. Plus I have seen it once, probably in 1986 when it came out, and I remember the ending was scary as well. So I left, about 20 minutes in.

Monday 07/06/2026

Got an early start, was at FOPAL by 8, and had my section in good shape for the sale weekend by 10:30. Came home in time to listen to a book talk, professor Patnode talking about Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar. So tragic.

Had lunch, and about 2, J and I walked down to Edgewood market, just for the steps (10,591, 4.4 mi). Back just in time for the 4pm meeting of Poetry Out Loud. My choice to read was Pablo Neruda’s “We Are Many”.

That was it, full busy day.

Sunday 07/05/2026

Quiet Sunday morning. I was supposed to have a rehearsal with Sandy at 11, but she forgot. We rescheduled.

At 1 I left for the Museum to lead the 2pm tour. Good tour, 25 people, nice hand at the end.

Helped Tom get set up to show the second half of that dumb 1776 movie. Did not stay to watch. Instead, Joanne and I watched the final chapter of Riot Women off Prime/Britbox. That was a fun show.

Saturday 07/04/2026

Started with a walk to cafe Zoe, coming back via University to deposit a check and walk through the farmers market.

Met with Joanne and Carolyn to eat at the CH barbecue, big serving line in the outside patio, then eat inside at a table.

In the afternoon I was in my bedroom fooling around with the guitar and glanced out the window and whoa! A plant that had been on a plant stand, had fallen off and the pot had smashed on the cement deck. This was a Plectranthus, grown from a cutting given me by Linda across the hall, and up to a huge and thriving bush of dark green leaves. It was in my prettiest pot, one that Marian had been fond of, which was now in pieces; and the plant was on its side with a root ball the size of a melon in the debris.

So I repotted it into an even bigger pot, and it’ll be fine I bet. Cleaned up the mess, mourned the pretty pot.

At 6:30 I went down and mentored Alice as she set up to show a movie. The party planners had decided that we really needed to see the movie 1776. Being 2:25 minutes long, they said to split it up and show half tonight and half tomorrow. Which was a last-minute PITA to the AV group. We had to find two volunteers to run the movie. I took advantage to make it a chance to up-skill two people who hadn’t run DVD showings before. Alice tonight, Tom tomorrow night. I didn’t stay around to watch after the first 5 minutes. Came back an hour later to help Alice shut down.

Then it was time to go up to 11 for the proper party, root beer floats and firework watching. Nature cooperated, providing a nice sunset.

Nice party as well. Too chilly to stand out watching the distant fireworks around the bay.

Friday 07/03/2026

Took the usual muffin walk with Joanne. On return, I did some gardening, planting out cuttings. One was a cutting from a nice begonia we saw walking through Town & Country; I just stole a little sprig and put it in my shopping bag. The other two were cuttings from the old dragon-wing begonias. I had divided those a year ago, and the divided plants have stayed alive but just don’t seem to thrive. So I thought I would try a complete restart of them from cuttings. Cross your fingers. A few months will tell.

Then I spent a couple of hours coding, following on from what I did a couple days ago. What I ended up with was a little program that is a complete chatbot. It prompts for a query, passes it to Claude, and displays the answer. From this exercise I learned something new. While you in a “chat”, all of your questions, and all of the bot’s responses, are being collected, and each time you hit Enter, the whole conversation, from the start, is passed to the bot.

This is what “context” actually means: the entire script of the conversation up to that point, questions and answers both, is passed in. When you start a new chat, that starts a new context. But as long as you continue a chat, the context gets longer and longer. Which is “tokens” of input and output to be charged.

Thursday 07/02/2026

First thing today was an early walk. Then at 10:30 I met Joanne in the garage and we drove to Sequoia hospital to have my renal cyst drained. This was the third time I’ve met with Dr. Tamrazi, the interventional radiologist, to siphon a half litre of pale yellow liquid out of the cyst in my left kidney.

Previous to this I had checked with one of the medical AIs. OpenEvidence.com, and it had indicated that normal treatment for renal cysts was to aspirate (drain) them and then to “sclerose” (scar) them with an infusion of alcohol to make the sides stick together. I mentioned this today and Dr. Tamrazi said emphatically no, he did not think that would work with my cyst, and he would not recommend it. So there, AI.

Later in the day I put the same prompt into four other AIs. The five different responses were all phrased differently and formatted differently (GPT-5 just loves bulleted lists) but were consistent on treatment of benign renal cysts. But I’m going with the actual doctor.

After my appointment we drove to Allied Arts in Menlo Park. This is a very nice garden restaurant and art gallery. We had an excellent lunch, really good food and service.

Then home where I did a bunch of stuff on the computer, mainly things that we had talked about over lunch. I told Joanne, “it’s great how I come away from these meetings with action items.” Well, she had some also.

Wednesday 07/01/2026

Walked with Joanne up to PAMF for an appointment she had; then coffee and a stop at Trader Joe’s.

At 11 I met with Andrew the IT Guy in the auditorium to go over some issues. We got Comcast working on the big projector screen, so the people who want to watch the US soccer match tonight will be happy.

About lunchtime I saw emails from people who were checking the Palo Alto Weekly website and found the article about us antique geeks. It was a week ago (Day 7.205) when we techies met with the reporter. Here is the story she wrote, pretty well written I think, with a picture of David Golden, David Greene, Bert, and me.

In the afternoon I edited yet another lecture video and put it up on Vimeo.

Tuesday 06/30/2026

A full and satisfying day. The first hours, up to 10am, were super productive. In that time I did all my laundry, and paid a couple of bills, and updated my financial status spreadsheet, and some emails.

Then it was time for the writers group. I didn’t contribute any writing but there was good stuff. Off to lunch; then after lunch the line dance class. There was no line dance the prior two weeks because the instructor was having a knee replaced. Well, she was back today, ten days after the operation, leading a class in dancing steps. Joint replacements seem are like outpatient surgery these days.

Met with Sandy to talk about the details of our upcoming duet. Then just for the heck of it, I rode along with Joanne as she ran a couple of errands in Fred.

After supper I set up in the 1st floor conference room with computer, to show a talk originating from the CH Museum. The talk was by Dr. Robert Wachter on his book A Giant Leap: How AI is transforming healthcare. I had got a free remote-access ticket to this talk and announced on our ResTech list that I would put it on the screen. Several people expressed interest. In the end there were 7 or 8 people in the room. It was a good talk.

Monday 06/29/2026

Early on, I went for my standard walk (3.8mi for the day). Then straight down to FOPAL. Processed four boxes and left my area nice and tidy.

A couple of people requested help in showing the US soccer match on Wednesday in the auditorium. I wanted to check that out because I recalled something about issues with shoing Comcast video on the big projection screen. So I went and checked it out and indeed there was an issue, it wasn’t working. I reported that in an email. Later Andrew the IT guy said the Comcast box had been powered off and it was now working. So I went and checked again, and yes, it will be possible to show the futbol but there were other issues. So I wrote some pleasant, detailed trouble report emails.

I was going to edit another lecture video but got sidetracked on another project. For this duet with Sandy I have the original accompaniment for “Jackson” but it doesn’t have a melody line, just guitar chords. So I spent like 3 hours getting a melody line played on a piano, changing the pitch and speed of that to match the original accompaniment, and merging the two sound tracks into a single one. And getting that off to Sandy.

Sunday 06/28/2026

Usual Sunday morning stuff. Except for the first time in many moons, I wasn’t able to complete the NYT big crossword. Very obscure and tricky clues. Or maybe I am losing it at last. Time will tell.

After lunch hopped on the bus to attend a play at the Pear theater. Twenty-one CH residents have season tickets at the Pear. The play this time was God of Carnage, Per Wikipedia, “It is about two sets of parents; the son of one couple has hurt the son of the other couple at a public park. The parents meet to discuss the matter in a civilized manner. However, as the evening goes on, the parents become increasingly childish and the meeting devolves into chaos.” The actors handled it very well. Felt like it should be funnier, but there were some laughs.