It’s a holiday so I get to do what I want, right? No imagination. I went down to the dining room to pick up my sack supper at 8:30. Then off for a walk to Midtown where I had a snack and walked back, so, 3.5 miles for the day.
Lunchtime was the dining services fancy presentation, with a table of little puff pastries and deviled eggs at the entrance, a glass of wine if you wanted it (I took sparkling cider instead), and a fancy menu. I had been invited to join Mildred, Florrie, and Phil and a couple others at a table. Phil, who lives at the opposite end of the 6th floor, has had a rough time lately. His wife has been in skilled nursing for some time, barely aware. Then a couple weeks ago Phil got Covid, which developed into pneumonia so he had to be in the hospital. He came back from the hospital three days ago to our skilled nursing, where I gather he was next door to his wife, who died in the night. Now he’s back in some degree of health and back on the 6th floor, at any rate. And seemed chipper enough at lunch.
At 3pm I was invited to a party on the 11th floor. This was mostly a big family bash for Gloria’s family. Gloria is Chinese so of course the majority of the guests were of Chinese extraction, but she had invited a lot of Channing House neighbors too. Of course the haoles all congregated at a couple of tables, but you know? Gloria could have worked harder at mixing people up, too. Anyway I stuck around for 45 minutes and made conversation and had a wine and a coffee, then split.
At 5:45 I took my sack supper down to the dining room and there were only four of us, total. I guess a lot of people had been invited out to family parties. Or just were partied-out.
Today I had an appointment with my cardiologist, Dr. DiBiase, at 10am. This was in part a routine checkup but since October I have been feeling occasional bouts of irregular heartbeats, which is of course concerning. I prepared for this in what — I realize in hindsight — was a rather nerdy way, but it was effective.
I take my blood pressure every morning and record it in a spreadsheet, with a column for a 14-day rolling average. For the last couple of months this has crept up by 5 or so, from 110/50 to 115/55, mostly due to occasional readings of 120. That bugged me, I thought the old monitor might be failing, so I bought a new blood pressure machine a few weeks ago (I can’t see that I mentioned it in the blog, which surprises me).
Anyway I splurged for the $200 one that also has an ECG readout. You pair your phone with it, and you hold metal contacts while the arm cuff is doing its thing, and you get an ECG trace on your phone. Which you can then export as a PDF and print out.
So one time last week that I was feeling my heart doing its bouncy thing I took an ECG, and then later in the day when my chest was being quiet as normal — it’s like most of the time I’m running on electricity but occasionally I switch over to diesel for a few minutes — I took another one. And exported them to PDF and printed them. So I sat down with the doctor and I could show her, see, this is when I feel normal,
and here’s when I feel peculiar,
What was obvious even to my untrained eye was, that the rhythm was not even in the second trace, there are short and long periods. She immediately said, Oh, those are PVC’s. I know the term (not polyvinyl chloride like PVC plumbing pipe, pre-ventricular contractions). I had a spell of those before, not sure when (but I would soon find out).
The short periods (two of them in the above trace) are early contractions. Then the heart gets some extra time to fill (the long periods following the short ones), which means it’s extra full when the next contraction comes, so you feel it as a heavy beat.
PVCs are not a serious issue, she said, unless there is too high a percentage of them. She’s typing away on her computer keyboard. So, I said, would we learn anything from me wearing a monitor? “I already typed in the order,” she said. So before I left the office I had this little button, a Zio monitor, adhered to my chest.
But thinking about this afterward — what kind of nerd am I, to go into the cardiologist carrying my own ECG readouts? How many of my neighbors here, including the retired college presidents and surgeons, could pair their phone with the monitor, take a reading, and then get the app to export the PDF and print it out?
Back home I read the Zio manual and following directions I download the Zio app. And I went to create an account, and it says, there is already an account for that email address. Really? I did the “forgot password” thing and logged in and sure enough, there are entries in the “diary” where you note any events. They are dated in March, 2019. So back into the old blog I go, and sho nuff, on Day 100 I picked up a Zio monitor and stuck it on. I have zero recollection of that. But reading that post, it sounds like that’s when I last went through a period of nervous-feeling noisy heartbeats, like now. So I may be an uber-nerd, but I am also a forgetful old codger.
I practiced RATCT and then spent a while trying to work out the chords for “Grateful”, and got some of them figured out.
Spent the morning before the writers meeting doing a job I’d been putting off, editing the video of Ian’s talk on AI, Sunday a week ago (day 5.352). Naturally I had nothing to read to the writers group. The prompt was “rivalry” and I really couldn’t find anything in my past to write about.
After lunch I walked the mile to Gamble Gardens where FOPAL was having a volunteer social. They had nice snacks but these occasions just aren’t a lot of fun for introvert me. I end up sitting at a table with 4 or 5 other volunteers, but nobody I have ever worked with so I don’t know them, and we try to make conversation. Anyway I had another appointment. At 2:45 I eased out and walked back just in time to join the Tech Squad for the monthly meeting. Calls have been slightly down (1.6/day versus 2/day), possibly because Lenny is doing weekly “bring your Apple device and get advice” sessions.
Then I finished editing the video and put it on dropbox and sent a link to Ian so he could approve it.
For supper I just ordered one of our kitchen’s best fallback dishes, the Fruit and Cottage Cheese Bowl, basically a big mound of cottage cheese surrounded by a cup and half of chopped up fruit of whatever sort they have. I had that for carry-out. Then because I have a doctor appointment tomorrow at 10, I had to do my laundry tonight, so I got that done between 6 and 8pm.
In between loads I fought with various kinds of music transcription software, trying to get usable sheet music of the song “Grateful” by Justin Young, as performed by Jake Shimabukuro during that concert Friday night. I really want to be able to play and sing that. Assuming I can figure out the chords, it isn’t that complicated a song. The big problem will be not breaking down and crying during it. The lyrics really encapsulate a lot of my thoughts about romance between seniors.
Despite steady light rain I took a walk this morning. I cut it a little short (but 2.9 miles for the day). At 11 I met with Alice and Mary R. in the music practice space. We practiced singing RATCT. Mary, former choir director, said we sound pretty good. We set up time for another rehearsal, which will be with John on piano, in the auditorium.
Then off to FOPAL. Only three boxes of donations to process, but several interesting things, including a small book by Steven Wolfram (well known math popularizer and computer scientist), What is ChatGPT Doing and why does it work. Good questions. I’m half way through and he admits that a lot of the things designed into ChatGPT do not have a theoretical or scientific basis, they are just tweaks and design tricks that work better than the alternatives. So the actual answer to “why does it work” is, “it just does.” There is no theoretical basis for why a many-layered neural net should reproduce a good simulation of human speech.
Trying to get through two tough-ish books. I’ve gotten to the point in Harari’s Nexus where he admits, the whole previous half of the book was prologue, establishing that human society is based on information networks. Now he will turn to the advent of computers and AI, and what to do about it, or expect from it.
Usual Sunday morning things. When watering the plants I found another infestation of whitefly.
Hate them little buggers. I spray them with “neem oil”, a sorta organic bug spray, and today I found my sprayer was nearly empty. So I headed out to the nursery to buy a bottle of it. Then to Ace hardware to buy some real poison, Sevin. That’s for another plant, my daphne, which got badly damaged by some kind of insect, not the white fly, but has a lot of new growth leaves starting and actually a few blossoms, yay. So I sprayed it good with the Sevin in hopes its new leaves can actually make it to size.
Then I went to the Apple store and bought a pair of Airpod Pro earbuds. I’ve been wanting these because, one, my old regular Airpods fall out of my ears, which is awkward when out on a walk. The Pro type have squishy fitted rubber tips so should stay in. Two, they have active noise cancellation which seems very effective. Three, these are the ones that Apple has released a hearing test for. So later in the afternoon I put on the new buds and ran the hearing test. And yay, Apple says I do not have significant hearing loss. My ears roll off pretty hard above 6Khz, yes, so I’m definitely missing out on the highs, but not enough to be missing conversations.
From there I drove down to San Jose to a big lighting store, Lamps Plus, and walked the aisles looking for a good bedside lamp. No luck. I’ve been trying to find one ever since my old one died a few weeks (months?) ago.
That was about it. Little music practice. Little reading.
In the morning I completed the light edit of Pelajis and got the format properly laid out in the Kindle Create app. I need to find some art work for at least the cover, but otherwise it is ready to be uploaded to Kindle. Sent a copy to Prue, our one published author of middle-grade books, for her opinion.
Then down to CHM to lead the 2pm tour. This went exceptionally well. I started with about 25 people and I managed to keep them all with me for the full hour, ending up with a very nice round of applause at the end.
Tried to practice singing RATCT and my voice had gone away somewhere. I guess an hour of lecturing did that? I don’t know; anyway I couldn’t sing worth, as someone I used to know long ago—John Snow?—would say, not worth sour owl shit. Why owl shit, I dunno.
Took the usual walk. The weather people claimed the “atmospheric river” that has brought multiple inches to the north bay was finally coming to the south bay, but I could tell from the radar map at 8am, there would be no rain on us for at least a couple of hours. So my walk was nice and dry. The rain finally did arrive after lunch. On the walk I saw a spectacular tree.
At 11 I met with Alice and we practiced singing RATCT, getting to sound pretty decent.
Then I sat down to do some work on a project that dates back to July, 2021 (day 2.214 and prior). That was when I “published” my children’s (actually middle-grade if you want to be technical) SF novel, Pelajis, on the then-new Kindle Vella platform. Where it sat with nobody reading it for 3+ years. Recently Amazon announced they were taking Kindle Vella down. They advised all authors that they could download their work and were welcome to re-publish it as a Kindle ebook. So I started that process today. Downloaded the book, imported it into the Amazon proprietary Kindle Create app, and began a light editing pass. It’s a darn good little story if I do say so. Anyway I need to finish editing it, also find something to use for cover art and maybe a couple of interior illustrations. The whole Generative AI thing has happened since then! I will try using Midjourney or maybe Gemini to generate art for it.
I saw where SFJazz was streaming a concert by Jake Shimabukuro tonight. Whoopee I thought, he’s great, and I announced on CHBB I would put it on the 11th floor TV. Only a few people turned up, which was a good thing, as Jake was not up to the level of virtuosity I remembered. The first half of the show was pretty boring, in fact. But he did perform one song I’d never heard but think I should probably learn, “Grateful“.
Yay, an uncommitted day. I ended up doing all sorts of things. Paid a couple of bills, tidying up my desk. Took a tech call, user with a Mac couldn’t send email. Wrote various emails and talked to people about AV scheduling. Read some from the book I’m working through Yuval Harari’s Nexus. Met with the Good Times committee to finalize the song selection for the February show. It appears I am down to perform “Annie’s Song” by John Denver. Not sure about that one. I checked the music and I will definitely not be playing it on the guitar. Anyway, somehow the uncommitted day went by with no gaps.
There is severe weather all up and down the West Coast (Laurel, in Kent, is hunkered down with no power; I-5 is closed at the Oregon border; heavy rains and flooding in Santa Rosa and so on. So I had the weather radar map open all day, and the picture was quite remarkable: all the green and yellow precip keeps streaming in and across the North Bay, sometimes sprinkling on San Francisco, but our streets stayed dry all day. Supposedly we will get an inch of rain tomorrow, excuse me but I’ll believe it when it happens. Planning on a normal morning walk but I will carry an umbrella.
I had planned to go on a group walk led by Joanne, but at 8am she emailed the group calling it off because of the forecast rain. There is heavy rain north of the Golden Gate, the southern fringe of a major storm in the Pacific Northwest, but in fact there’s been not a drop south of the city. I looked out and decided to chance it, so I took an umbrella and headed out on the usual route, and all was fine. Gusty winds but dry.
At 1pm it was the monthly FOPAL zoom meeting. The sale this month netted over $19K. Some other info about procedures and rules, whatevs. At 2:30 I went to the Activity Room to set up for the Car-Free group, an interest group that shares info on getting around after, or in some cases if and when, you get rid of your car. Today they wanted to have a presentation by a person from Waymo, zoomed in on the big TV there. I set that up, then I had to stay around because I was nervous. Rachel, the Waymo rep, planned to show a video. That can be a fraught thing when sharing a screen on Zoom.
Thing is, I had scheduled the AV team meeting for the dining room at 3:30. So when at 3:32 Rachel’s video started, and had sound and looked ok, I could scoot off for that. I had assumed we could use Quad IV for our meeting, it is usually deserted between meals, but I had forgotten this was the monthly Birthday Dinner day, and they had already set up all the tables in that Quad with white linen and wine glasses etc. We couldn’t use the auditorium because the drama group was rehearsing. So we squeezed into the Quad 1 area where the Wednesday afternoon coffee hour was going on, for our meeting. Also some of our members were late because they had been in the Dining Services Committee meeting at 3. Somehow, Wednesday afternoon is hectic. Stopped for tea with Dr. Margaret and Gwen to relax.
In the morning I drove out to buy a few things at the market. Did a little guitar practice. Then the writers meeting. I had nothing to share, but others had interesting takes on the topic “bucket list”. I’d really given it some thought and had nothing. I don’t have a bucket list, any unattained achievements. Shows a lack of ambition, I guess.
I spent the whole afternoon doing something I hadn’t done for years: coding. And installing UNIX software, issuing command lines in the Terminal app to create directories and so forth. All this because I want to try using one of the large language models, Claude, via its programming interface, rather than via the simple web page at claude.ai. Why? I have a vague sort of idea for an application. We’ll see. Anyway I opened an account and then accessed Claude via running simple program I wrote in Python. Took several hours and forced me to recall a lot of UNIX trivia that had moved to the back shelves of my mind.
Codgerville 