Monday 05/26/2025
Took an early walk to test out my modified shoes. I’ve been walking in Hoka walkers for a year plus now, and have always been bugged by the shoelaces. They were just a few inches too long. I’d tuck the ends into the shoe and a mile along the loose ends would be flopping around me feet. I was looking for shorter laces on Amazon when I spotted elastic laces that never need tying and which you cut to the exact length. Bought ’em, installed ’em. Now I have Hoka slip-ons. Only took like 18 months to finally do something about it.
Picked up my sack supper on return. Then sat down and paid my estimated taxes on-line. That’s a new thing for me, change from the years of carefully mailing the 1040-ES voucher and a check.
Then went out again to pick up a prescription at CVS. And then it was time for the big Memorial Day BBQ lunch. They actually did the ribs real nice and tender.
Peter had given me a DVD of a documentary about General Magic. I decided to watch it on the 11th floor, to test the Blu-Ray player that I had debugged a few days back. The player worked fine but I was horrified to discover that the user manual I had created had quite wrong instructions for using it. So I had to edit that and print it.
Ate picnic supper with the rest of the 6th floor gang. Conversation turned to AIs (not my doing) and this gang of 80-somethings were comparing AI search engines, arguing the merits of Google’s AI versus Perplexity versus Claude.
I watched the rest of the documentary after supper and replaced the bad page of the user manual. I’m pretty sure General Magic was the outfit I applied to back around 1996, after I left SGI and thought I would work a while longer. In the interviews with various people I mentioned my accomplishments, published books, columns in computer mags, manuals for Informix and SGI. Later the interviewer called me back to say they were not going to offer me a position. I asked why, naturally, and he said something like, “Oh, a couple of people commented you seemed a bit arrogant.” What can you say to that? I guess I just wasn’t a fit.
Codgerville 