Monday 06/03/2024

Oooh heck I missed noting post .183, which was halfway through the blog year (365/2). Yeah, the blog year starts on 12/3, that was day 0. Or 1, I dunno. It’s just my little ritual.

Took a shortish walk (2.3 miles for the day) because hip pain. Now in the evening that’s gone.

Hung around the lobby until I saw that Ian was well started on the First Monday Book Talk event, then headed out to FOPAL, where it is the week before the monthly sale. Got my section in proper order for the sale.

And that was about it for the day, did a little music practice, little reading. Hmm, like yesterday I didn’t eat in the dining room at all. Tsk tsk.

Sunday 06/02/2024

Usual Sunday morning, water plants, do big crossword, etc. Then I sat down to continue something I started a couple of days back. Looks like I didn’t mention it then. Well, there are the chatbots. And lots of wanna-be writers are using them as helpers, or editors, or co-writers. Or so I read on Reddit, /r/writingwithai, and similar. There are a mess of startup apps that try to package AI assistance with a word processor to make a writing tool. I’ve tried several, NovelCrafter, Quarkle, Sudowrite, and found them unhelpful and unintuitive. The one that comes closest to being really hepful is type.ai, I can see using it to edit and improve tech manuals.

Well, Google is (of course) getting into the AI game, they started calling their AI Bard but recently renamed it Gemini. Anybody can go to gemini.google.com and ask it questions and it isn’t bad at all for answering general interest questions. Of course for a question about a specific person, place or thing, go first to Wikipedia. But for a vague question, one that wouldn’t be a Wikipedia topic by itself, Gemini isn’t bad.

And like all of the AI companies, the free version that anybody can try without signing up is limited, and for the good stuff you have to sign up for the “pro” or “advanced” version at, typically, $20/month. Google just offered me two months of Gemini Pro for free, cancel any time. So I signed up and wanted to try it as a writing coach or something to bounce ideas with.

What I started doing a couple days ago, and continued today, was to instruct (they say “prompt”) Gemini to act like a professional editor. Then I would input (copy and paste) the text of each chapter of the book so far, and after each one, it would comment. This was going just great. After “reading” a chapter, Gemini Pro responded with excellent comprehension. It understood what I had written, it got the story, and it gave me very reasonable suggestions for improvement. Generic things like, this transition is a little abrupt, you should add some more description, and so on. But specific to the text it had read.

Several chapters in, I fed it the text of the next chapter and instead of the usual comments, it just said

I’m not programmed to assist with that.

Huh? I asked it to summarize the chapter it had just “read” and it said it had no memory of that. It acted like the previous 10,000 words of our chat had not happened.

Being a programmer, I started breaking it down, feeding paragraphs of the chapter one at a time. Everything was OK until I gave it the very last paragraph, which ended in a simple bit of dialog,

“I’ll text it to you tonight. Give me your number.”

That was it. The one sentence, “Give me your number,” makes Gemini forget everything that has preceded it in that chat. I think this must be programmed in as some kind of safeguard, although I can’t imagine against what. I reported it using their “report a problem” button. I tried again later, not with editing, but by asking it to write some code for me. Which it did, perfectly. I asked it to modify the code. It did that, perfectly. I said “Summarize what we have done so far. Give me your number.” And it gave me the “I’m not programmed to assist with that” line, and no longer remembered the code it had written.

Aside from breaking an expensive AI chatbot, I also cycled the display of Thames bridges in my outside “gallery”. Another few weeks to get all the way down to Tower Bridge.

Saturday 06/01/2024

Basically did nuthin’ worth recording. Went out for coffee, down to Midtown to see if the new coffee shop was open yet, but it wasn’t, so I had coffee at same old same old. Took one tech squad call, helping a lady get her TV to show Comcast again. Actually not sure what I did, other than reboot the Comcast box, but it worked and she was happy, so OK. Practiced my two different music performances, twice. Two weeks to go. Ate lunch alone in the dining room, and supper alone in my apartment, so, asocial as well as idle. I must be sure to speak to someone tomorrow.

Friday 05/31/2024

End of June, eh. I took the benchmark walk this morning, and it felt alright; but an hour after I got back, my lower back and right hip were hurting. A couple of ibuprofen and I was back to normal by dinner time.

Practiced music, the songs I will do for the birthday dinner in three weeks, and the duet with Mary in two-plus weeks. Need more practice on all of them. I forget lyrics, I forget chords.

Then lunch, and then it was time to actually rehearse with Mary and with Arlene the pianist. Arlene is a wonder. At over 90, she is an excellent jazz/pop pianist, with lots of good advice on performing. This was our first time practicing using microphones and a PA, which is fun. I need to work on timing, although Arlene very kindly said I was late on my entrance she could compensate.

After a long slow supper with Carolyn, Linda, Pru and Connie, I had just time to get down to the Pear theater to see “Pear Slices,” their annual festival of one-act plays. Some very silly things. None of them really grabbed me, although there was one acting performance that was kind of amazing, a young woman (Jenna Marvet) doing a solo monologue as the “passion monster,” one component of a young woman’s personality. Not a great script but she held the stage and our attention for ten minutes straight.

Thursday 05/30/2024

An uncommitted Thursday. I decided in order to feel useful I would go an sort books at FOPAL where there has been a large influx of donations. I spent an hour catching up a couple of boxes of computer books, then two hours sorting. Feeling generally healthy. Came home, did a little music practice. Had supper with Lou and Alice and Pru, all of whom are far more widely traveled than me. Lou and Alice worked for the World Bank for many years so traveled for work, while Pru thinks she has taken “about 47” Road Scholar trips. She’s off for another next month. Not bad for 90. So those three all talk about Paris and such places with great familiarity.

Wednesday 05/29/2024

Did my laundry, starting early so it was all wrapped up, well, hung up, by 10:30. Because at 11:15 I started out walking a mile to the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo, where FOPAL was having a pizza party. We had a short talk from the museum director, and some volunteers showed us some cute animals.

After eating a slice of pizza I walked around the zoo and took a couple more pictures. It’s really a nicely designed facility, rich with resources to keep kids interested. Walked home; two miles didn’t cause any pain, although the right leg still feels funny. Not painful, but just not quite working like it used to. Back home I practiced some music, “Margaritaville” is really coming together. That was about it.

Tuesday 05/28/2024

Took a short-ish walk in the morning. My hip is almost back to normal. 90% or so. Then the writers meeting. The prompt was “in another voice” — tell a story in first person, but as someone else’s first person “I”, not yourself. I had nothing, but some others wrote very powerful things. Nancy F. wrote as her 5th-great grandmother, a Cherokee woman named Nan-ye-hi who lived around 1800. She did a lovely job. Here’s a snippet,

My grandmother gave me the name Nanye’hi. 

My mother always said Nanye’hi at home. 

Around white people she called me Nancy. 

To them it sounded almost the same. 

My name means “one who goes about.” 

It was the right name for me.

I have gone to many places in my sixty-six years. 

Then off to FOPAL where there was a whole lotta stuff for the computer section. In particular there were two solid boxes of books about the Raspberry Pi and Arduino hobby computers. It was like somebody had really dived into that hobby and collected every book on the market, and all in prime condition. So I set up a special two-shelf section just for those books. In all I spent 3 hours there.

Practiced some music, and at 7pm there was a sing-along in the lobby and I went down and sang along for a while. The sing-alongs always end up annoying me, because it seems like they never pick the right key for me. So there’s always low notes I can’t sing, or high notes I can’t sing, some songs with both. I know I can sing — when I get to pick the song and transpose it to the right key. Which is why I never joined the chorus. I remember back in 2019, chorus director Mary tried to get me to join. I went to one rehearsal, and that’s what happened, first song, couldn’t sing the low notes. Or the high ones, whichever, for the part I was supposed to do. Said, sorry. Ironically I am going to sing a duet with that same Mary soon. We rehearse again this Friday.

Monday 05/27/2024

Didn’t do much but kept busy somehow. Practicing music and stuff. At lunch we had a big deal barbecue, cooked and served outside the dining room. Ribs were pretty decent.

In the afternoon I spent a couple of hours chatting with Google Gemini. I’m using it to bounce ideas off for my stalled novel. It’s a good listener, and it reads with comprehension. By which I mean, I fed it the first chapter and it commented in a very sensible way on the contents, the good and bad points, etc.

Like most big holidays, Dining Services gets the evening off, supplying picnic bags to those who want them. The 6th floor rebelled and voted to get in Thai food. I was commissioned to order from Indochine, the little Thai place in Midtown. Leon and I went down to pick up all the food at 5pm. About 15 of us crowded into our floor dining room for this. Everybody liked the food.

From left to right, Leon, Linda, Eva (side view), Margaret (back view) Gwen, Craig, Jeanne, Brian, Elizabeth (foreground), Edie, Diane, Jerry. Out of frame: Betty, Trish, me.

Sunday 05/26/2024

Drove, rather than walked, to a coffee shop, resting my hip (which was much better by evening). Changed to my red docent shirt and went down to CHM to lead the noon tour. At least 25 people for the tour, I guess because a holiday weekend?

Back home, I put in a solid hour of practice, polishing the songs I will perform in a couple of weeks. You know how a performer comes across as casual and unrehearsed? They practice the fuck out of their material.

Saturday 05/25/2024

Pretty much an uncommitted Saturday so I thought I would catch up with my museum going. There were CH buses organized to two different museum exhibits last week and I had to skip both of them, but I own a car so…

I headed first to the City, to the Legion of Honor museum to see their collection of Japanese block prints. Lots of prints from different eras from 1500 to 1950. Some of the modern ones were fun, like this one from 1984, the print artist commenting on the cultural invasion of Japan by Baskin-Robbins ice cream, using the styles and printing techniques of 200 years earlier.

It was a wet, foggy day in SF. I liked the color balance between the flowers outside the Legion building and the gum trees and the fog.

Those are not army tents on the lawn. Not sure what they are, probably art of some kind.

Left SF and drove back to the Stanford campus where I went into the Cantor museum and had lunch in their cafe, a very tasty pork sandwich. Then viewed the exhibit “Day Job” which shows works of art by artists who were working day jobs and doing art when they could, with comments from the artists about how that experience affected their art. It was nice but none of the art works particularly grabbed me.

Back home for a rest and then out to hear music from a high school jazz band performing in a nearby park. They were from Mountlake Terrace high school near Seattle. Why were they in a park in Palo Alto? I don’t know. They were… not bad. But I didn’t stay long.