Sunday 06/08/2024

With an event tonight that might need the head-mounted microphones, I suddenly remembered that the little reel of surgical tape, which we use to secure an over-the-ear mic to a performer’s cheek, had disappeared from the AV desk in the auditorium. So I set out to get a replacement, walking to CVS, and when they didn’t have exactly what I wanted, I took a Lyft to Midtown to look in the Walgreens there. While I was there I checked out the new coffee shop that has opened across the street from a very well-established coffee shop. It’s ok.

The event was a play, a one-hour condensed version of Little Women, performed by the G.I.F.T. group of teens. They have been here twice before (day 4.217 and 4.245) with other shows. They are always energetic, talented, and likeable. The director of this show (and the prior one), Rose, is an amazing leader, with complete control over her troupe of a dozen teens. I was startled to learn that she is only 17, too. Seventeen going on 35, as they say. Anyway I just had to set the auditorium sound system up and hand everything to Rose and her team to run the show.

Friday 06/07/2024

Put on the red shirt and went off to the museum to lead the 12:00 tour. Nice group of 20-somethings. First time in a while I’ve had a group none of whom had ever seen a slide rule. I asked the oldest-looking guy, probably in his 40s, what his first computer was, “PC-DOS”.

Anyway, got back and at 3pm met with Mary and Kay on the 11th floor to rehearse our duet. Kay, former high school music teacher, said we sound fine.

Supper with Patty, Jean, Gwen and Karen.

Thursday 06/06/2024

No public obligations today. Didn’t hardly do anything. Phone shows about 0.6 miles walking, and the hip feels better for it. In the afternoon I spent a couple of hours editing and uploading the video of the lecture event I ran last night. Had a very nice dinner a deux with Connie, talking about our respective writing projects. She gave me some useful insights on my stuck novel.

Wednesday 06/05/2024

Went for a medium walk this morning, still some hip oddness. Almost 3 miles for the day.

Did the monthly check of the various accounts comprising the Nest Egg; it’s still healthy.

Ran a lecture event tonight, speaker was Faith Bell, the present proprietor of her family’s book store, Bell’s Books, rather famous in Palo Alto. Oddly enough Marian and I almost never shopped there. Up until the turn of the century, we would make nearly weekly trips to Kepler’s in Menlo Park (after 2000 we were mostly reading online) but never to Bell’s in Palo Alto. It was primarily used books, and crowded and disorganized, not fun to shop in. But tonight Ms. Bell gave a very nice presentation on the 89-year history of the store. And the event came off very smoothly, patting myself on the back for that.

Tuesday 06/04/2024

Yeah, same old same old. Before the writers meeting at 10:45, I wrote a short essay. The prompt was, describe some kind of art that affected you. There were some really good submissions. One woman described the first time she saw Michelangelo’s Pieta in Rome. She was a young single mother at the time and her son was in some kind of trouble; the Pieta seemed to speak so directly to her concerns that she fell down and sobbed.

My essay was much more boring, about Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but it was well received, turns out several people in the meeting were also fans of it.

With nothing planned for the rest of the day, I went down to FOPAL and sorted for two hours. There was a family, mother, father and teenage daughter there sorting also, and we chatted.

Had a nice supper at a table with Bob, Barbara, and Joan. So, socializing.

Afterward, tried out yet another supposed AI writer’s assistant, Faible. It isn’t really designed for what I want to do.

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.