Thursday 03/27/2025

Today being uncommitted I decided to do something I had been putting off: go shopping. A friend had recommended that I try to get some color into my wardrobe. What I wear during daylight savings time is polo shirts. (Long-sleeve turtlenecks are for standard time.) And the majority of my polo shirts are gray or black. So I decided to go over to Stanford Shopping Center and find me a couple of polos in non-black, non-gray colors. The shopping center web page let me list the stores that had men’s casual clothes. Well, I have a thing about Macy’s. I took Nordstrom off the list just because. But off I went.

At J. Crewe I found one nice polo in a sort of dark beige, well, better than gray. Off to The Gap. Nothing. Urban Outfitter? Lord, what a useless store that is! Finally one that I am not familiar with, an Italian place, Brunello Cucinelli. Obviously an upscale place; so upscale they don’t have anything like a rack, just individual garments spaced out on counters like museum artifacts.

I was helped by a very friendly young woman, Mona, who was sure they had a nice polo shirt I would like. She found a couple, and one I actually liked. Cotton, medium blue, looks and feels nice. “I’ll take that one, please” I say.

So off to the checkout counter and I ask Mona, “So how much is this one?” There’s no price visible. She says, “Oh, the price is here,” and she looks through all the tags on the garment and does not find a price. She goes over to a computer, and comes back and says brightly, “It’s a thousand.”

I said, “What, lira?” thinking she was making some kind of joke about Italian clothes.

“No,” she said smiling, “A thousand.”

“Dollars?”

“Yes, of course.”

“A polo shirt for one thousand dollars.”

“Mm-hmm,” she smiled.

So I very politely said sorry, I can’t do that. “Maybe I could pay a thousand for a tailored blazer? But not a polo shirt. Thank you for your time, Mona, you’ve been very helpful.”

So ended my shopping trip.

In the afternoon I played guitar for an hour, and played a video game for about the same length of time.

Wednesday 03/26/2025

Did the laundry. During the first load, I went down to the fitness room and put in 30 minutes on the treadmill, 3mph which is supposed to be the minimum for “aerobic” exercise.

I had been asked by marketing to participate in a photo shoot at 3pm. I have taken part in other ones. Back in October 2022 I was one of several CH residents who were shot walking around a local park. So I assumed this would be another such but in fact, it was a single-person deal, just me on a stool in front of a gray backdrop. Very professional, there were lights and a crew of three, and the photographer must have snapped 50 or more exposures, having me turn and smile and hold a book and so on. Then, I guess because I had said a couple of things that made them laugh, they asked if I was ok with being interviewed. Oh heck yeah why not. So they asked some softball questions about life at Channing House and I answered as charmingly as I could.

That was about it, a little guitar, a little reading.

Tuesday 03/25/2025

In the morning I wrote something for the writers group. The cue was “favorite time of day” and I wrote about my morning routine and how productive I am in the mornings. I also edited an old essay that Susan wants for the upcoming Scribble and Sketch.

At 3pm was the quarterly tech squad meeting. There’s quite a few people on the tech squad when you see them all in a room at once. The density of calls has dropped slightly, down to about 2/day, so each person gets dispatched a few times a month. Is this due to an increase in tech savvy among our residents?

After supper I went to the activity room and put the Computer History Museum event, “The Great Chatbot Debate: Do LLMs Really Understand?” on the big TV there. About 5 people from the AI interest group joined me to watch. It was a good show, although nobody really changed any minds. The vote on the web and in the room was, “No, but it doesn’t matter, they’re useful.”

Monday 03/24/2025

Took the standard walk in the morning. Then spent 2 hours at FOPAL processing 8 boxes of books. Not a good-quality donation; looked like the library of somebody who had been heavy into computers from the 70s to the 90s, so not much saleable today.

Practiced a little guitar. Then at supper I realized that the Palo Alto Library people were coming tomorrow morning. I wanted to meet with them because I had seen a problem trying to sign up for the Kanopy service, which is supposed to give access to many films for free by way of the library. Before, when I tried to register my library card number, it would say there was a problem, see your library. So, yay, the library was coming. So I signed up on the sign-up sheet.

Then I thought, better try again so I can show them exactly what happens. And it didn’t happen. It took my library card number smooth as you please. I was able to browse the movies and showed myself one, a short film from Brazil? I think? Plus, I was able to “cast” the film from my phone to my 55-inch LG TV. So I had to go downstairs and cross my name off the sign-up sheet.

Then I found that after the phone stopped casting, the TV screen was full of a message about “you have no new notifications” and I couldn’t get rid of it. Took 20 minutes of screwing around to get the TV back to normal. Guess I can’t blame the library for that, thought.

Sunday 03/23/2025

For fun on a Sunday morning I decided to try a new farmers market. The SJ Mercury News published an annual “Best of Silicon Valley” supplement, and under the head of “best farmers market” they said Campbell. Campbell is a suburban town on the south-west corner of San Jose. And supposedly their Sunday farmers market was good. So off I went. It was a half hour drive. But a very nice market, about 150% the size of the California avenue one I often visit. Lots of ready to eat food including middle eastern and asian, and lots of fresh veg and fruit.

So I was walking around looking at the tasty-looking oranges and tangerines and I was hit by a wave of grief, first I’ve had in a year or more. For at least two decades, probably longer, it was Marian’s and my habit on a Sunday morning, to talk about the upcoming week and decide what we would cook for dinners. And we would make out two shopping lists, one of staples and meat for the grocery store, and a list of what we needed in fruits and veggies. Off we would go to the store, and then to one of the street markets to buy a week’s worth of fresh stuff. We always had fruit as part of supper, plus a veg, plus whatever we wanted for lunch or snack. So walking around this market just suddenly brought back that long-standing pattern of a life that is gone.

After lunch I put on my red shirt and went to the museum, thinking I was signed up for a large tour group. But there was no tour. I came home and worked it out: I am signed up to help with a large tour on the 29th. It’s even in my calendar on that day. But somehow at some point, I had thought, oh no I forgot to put that big tour in my calendar, and put it down incorrectly, for today. I’m not sure where I went wrong, but that’s what I did. So that was a wasted hour.

For supper I had been invited to share a birthday supper with Jerry and Betty. It’s Jerry’s birthday. He’s probably the youngest CH resident at 77. (I came into CH at age 77, 5 years ago.) Anyway by arrangement, John had brought his clarinet, Kay her flute, and I my guitar so we could actually sing happy birthday with instruments. It was nice.

Saturday 03/22/2025

In the morning I walked to Cafe Zoe, which is at least a change from my usual coffee places, and a nice walk. Spent some time working with my new writing pal Claude. Claude may be too good. It’s full of ideas but quite ready to reel out a few paragraphs of its own. I can see where unless I keep a tight rein I could end up with a story of which a significant fraction was not by me.

Practiced some music, read a bit, watched some videos. Not much of a day.

Friday 03/21/2025

In the morning I took the standard walk plus. The plus was to detour under the railroad tracks and over to the Town and Country shopping center. There at Trader Joe’s I bought a loaf of the special seedy bread which Joanne introduced me to a while back. Then had coffee and a roll before coming home. 3.5 miles for the day.

At 11 it was the monthly AI interest group meeting. I showed the beginning of my Claude Project. And we talked about other stuff. What a couple of people want us to focus on, is to find something where AI can be applied in a way that benefits Channing House. Problem is, that requires staff to get involved. We’ve urged that a staff person come to our meetings, but none have as yet.

After lunch I spent another couple of hours loading various notes and background documents into my project. Tomorrow I will start actually interacting with Claude over that material.

Thursday 03/20/2025

A pretty lazy day, never left the building. Played a little guitar, did some reading. But for 2 hours I worked with Claude. I read so much about programmers and others who are actually using the GPT-4, Claude, others, to do real work; I want to get serious and do something practical with an AI.

The breakthrough for me is being able to have a large “context” that you share with the AI. When you just go to claude.ai or openai.com or perplexity.ai in the free mode, you can ask a question and get a reasonable answer, sure. But the answer is based off what the AI has been trained on, plus whatever info you include in your question. For example, a good use of any of the AIs is, if you receive an email that kind of smells like a scam but you aren’t sure. You can copy the text of the email. Go to the input field of an AI and ask, is the following email probably legitimate or a scam? and paste the email. And you’ll get a good answer, based on the email text and the AI’s training set.

But I heard about Claude “projects”. This feature is only available if you pay for the “pro” level of access. Then you can create a project which is a collection of whatever information you want the AI to have for reference, maybe hundreds of pages of stuff. So I paid for a year of Claude Pro, it wasn’t horribly expensive, and I started a project to work on a science fiction novel that I started and put on the shelf a year ago. I’m going to work with Claude as my writing partner, making suggestions. I will load the project with the 5 or 6 chapters I wrote already plus the pages and pages of background notes I have, and me and my buddy Claude can maybe make some progress on this.

So that was most of the afternoon.

Wednesday 03/19/2025

Joanne headed out today for a two-week trip to Sicily. Exchanged fond emails with her before she left. Then took the standard walk. I meant to try working with an AI today, but first I spent some time completing the clean up of the old iMac. Later I moved it to the gift shop’s 3rd floor furniture showroom where it will be part of a silent auction for the next week.

Then I spent time recovering my software development environment. It’s been years since I did any serious coding so the first thing was to get the latest version of my preferred code editor. Then, as I wanted to try its AI coding assistant, and it only works with GPT-4 from openai, I had to establish an actual paid account with openai.com. I already had a paid account with Anthropic (Claude), but the code editor doesn’t work with Claude, only GPT-4. Then I had to create a “project” and a “virtual environment” and whatever. With all that set up, just before supper time I was able to select a block of source code and have the AI “refactor” it. It did something that was pointless and inexplicable, so not a good first impression.

After supper I am attending a lecture from my room, being one of the lazy ones who don’t go down to the auditorium.

Tuesday 03/18/2025

Another day in which I didn’t leave the building. Not even to step out onto my balcony. Hmm. In the morning I finished editing another lecture video. Almost caught up. Then sat through the writers meeting. Initially I had nothing to contribute but halfway through I remembered something. Today’s prompt was “water, wetness”. I remembered that I had written something to a similar prompt — once. When? Took just a few seconds, really to find that in July 2021 (day 2.225) the prompt was similar and I had written about the childhood pleasures of playing in the ditch alongside the road past the ranch. So read that.

At 12:30 I joined a seminar or working lunch that Alice sponsored. She had brought a couple of guys from Stanford who want to start a platform that will let anyone talk 1:1, or in a group, with an academic expert in various fields for a fee. They are lining up academics who want to improve their communication skills. I was one of 6 residents Alice had rounded up to give them feedback. Interesting but not terribly productive.

And back to the same meeting room at 3 for the Car-Free group meeting. Where we heard a preview of a new Channing House program. Parking is really tight in our garages and parking lot, which impacts our employees who commute in from distant places. To encourage any resident who is thinking of giving up their car (and thus, freeing up a parking space), they are going to offer a cash stipend if you will do a 2-month trial of going car-free. Don’t move your car for 2 months, use Channing House’s transportation for medical appointments and Gogo/Uber/Lyft and other methods for your other transport, and you’ll get $200. My input was that it sounds like a good program but that $200 is way too low, it sounds stingy. Make it $400 or $500, so people would feel like their Lyfts were “free” for that time. We’ll see if I was heard.

In between the other stuff I started the process of wiping my old iMac. First I was going to try installing Ubuntu on it, and I did, but Ubuntu just couldn’t connect with the old Apple bluetooth trackpad. Plus it didn’t handle that huge 27-inch screen correctly, fonts too small etc. So I went back and reinstalled MacOS.