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.
Codgerville 