computers

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Say to them “My Own Special Creation has sent me to you.”

I think I will really keep this post short today, because I think I may be coming down with something.  I’m not certain, but I have the beginning of that sort of systemic feeling of interleukins, interferons, and other cytokines and such hitting the system.  I sometimes don’t get a very clear early fever response to things because I almost always have NSAIDs on board, so it can be hard to tell.

If I remember to go according to plan, I will have set this to post at about 8 o’clock eastern time.  I don’t recall if it’s EST or EDT, because I honestly don’t really distinguish them.  It’s all arbitrary, anyway; as long as everyone in this time zone is calling it the same time, they can call it Eastern Nap Time if they want.

There must have been some decent-seeming reasons for creating the whole “daylight savings time” thing; I mean, Ben Franklin was involved, I think, and he was not a stupid man, though like everyone he had his limits.  But for the life of me, I don’t see why we keep using it.  I don’t think it has any residual benefits, if it ever had any at all, which I doubt.

Oh, well.  That’s not really important, and it’s a bit of a tangent.  The point I was making is that I will have set this to go up at about 8 am, my local time, to see if that has any effect on how many people read it.  I will also try not to be moody and morose*, because I don’t want to frighten any potential new readers away.

At least, I don’t want to frighten them with that kind of stuff.  If they are frightened by my would-be sense of humor, or my topics of interest, then there’s nothing much I can do about that.  Like Popeye and God and that character from La Cage aux Folles, I am what I am.  I’m not going to try to change who I am just to get attention, in case that’s not obvious.

In other news, well, I am not really going to talk about the news much, in general.  It’s generally boring and/or stupid.  Though the agent(s) breakout from OpenAI and hacking of Hugging Face** was quite interesting, and I’ve watched some videos, by people who specialize in such things, about what happened.  It’s quite fascinating.  I won’t try to comment on it, because I am not an expert, but I’ll embed a video from computerphile, featuring Robert Miles, and another one that goes over the whole thing by a new YouTuber I’ve recently encountered, both of whom have interesting insights into the situation.

Let’s see, what else is going on…

Well, I just checked my temperature, and I may just barely have a low-grade fever.  Then again, body temperature fluctuates throughout the day, and I haven’t often tested it at this hour.  In general, for most people, body temperature bottoms out around 3 am, but those people tend to be asleep at three.  I had already been awake for about two hours by then, after dropping off to sleep at maybe eleven pm.  It’s 4:30 as I am writing the first draft here, and the heck of it is that this is not an outlier.  It’s not significantly different than usual.

So, if people wonder why I tend to be grouchy or whiny or what have you, at least that gives me some leeway I would hope.

How’s the weather by you guys right now?  I know, you’re not all in the same place, but I would still be interested in your comments about your local weather.  Down by me it’s quite humid and slightly rainy, and quite warm/hot, though it’s better in the morning.  However, at this time of day, the air is often stagnant and still, which makes humidity rather more oppressive.  Still, this is not all that big a difficulty.  If I could be cured of my chronic pain but had to face muggy weather every day for the rest of my life, well…

…actually, I would have to think about it pretty carefully.  But it would be tempting.  Still, both problems can be addressed, at least to some degree, without making weird deals that trade one misery for another, trying to assess which is the lesser of two evils.

Even if there were some type of supernatural entity with which one could make such bargains‒and I do not believe in such a thing‒I don’t think I would try to seek its favors.  I don’t like owing debts to people, let alone gods or demons or whatever.

Okay, well, I’ve been a bit all over the place this morning, haven’t I?  I’ll blame it on being slightly ill, as if it were any different than how I usually am.

I hope you all are well and having a good day.

*Which sounds like a law firm.

**Why did they name their company after the larval form of xenomorphs?

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A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the blog of him that makes it

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again and time for another of my traditional Thursday blog posts*, though nowadays that’s embedded among the blog posts I write on all the other work days.  I haven’t written fiction in quite a long time, and the original reason for this (Thursday) blog was to promote my fiction.

But heck, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve even so much as picked up a guitar‒though I keep looking online at these parlor style acoustics, because they look like they’d be a good size for convenience and such.  But it’s just a bit of a pipe dream and a distraction to look at them.

There is no lapcom involved in this post today.  I didn’t take it with me when I left the office last night, but there was no more “reason” for that decision than there had been for the fact that I brought it the day before.  There were causes, as there always are, but not reasons.

Although, now that I consider it, I did feel that yesterday’s post was a bit too long.  That didn’t consciously enter into my decision-making when I chose not to bring the lapcom, but I did think about it earlier in the day, after posting.  Most, if not all, of what happens in most decisions we make is unconscious, or subconscious**, or whatever word you might want to choose.  So I can’t rule out that there were actual reasons for me not bringing my lapcom last night, but whatever the facts of that matter might be, there were, and always are, causes.

In any case, yesterday I fell prey to my tendency to write quite a lot when typing on a lapcom or other regular keyboard, because it’s so fast and easy for me.  It’s faster than speaking for me, and it’s certainly faster than using the “smartphone”, even not counting all the typos that occur when using the latter***.

I continue to toy, from time to time, with trying to type a tome using Google Docs.  But its interfaces, while okay for writing blog posts, don’t feel quite right for writing fiction, at least not for me.  It’s probably a stupid notion anyway.  I don’t really expect ever to write any more fiction.  That’s not a good thing, but then again, very little is.

I’m actually getting irritated that my lapcoms and my desktop computer at work are beginning to show some signs of their ages, and I fear that they may need to be replaced soon.  Worse, my smartphone is getting a bit laggy, and I cannot upgrade it to the latest operating system so I can no longer use my banking app on it.

But I really don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and setting up a new phone (or computer).  It’s so irritating and so uninteresting.  I actually had the general, vague hope that I would not live long enough to need to upgrade my computer(s) or phone again.

Honestly, the constant displacement of entropy that comprises the process of staying alive at so many levels is just dreary and almost laughable.

Speaking of laughable, I’ve been thinking about trying a personal experiment:  I’ve been thinking about trying to go without laughing for a day or a week or something along those lines****.  I just wonder what effect that would have on my experiences.

I tend to overdo it with jokiness, and I tend to partake in a lot of comedy of various kinds, almost in a desperate way.  It could even be be considered an addiction, or at least like a substance abuse problem, including its own abstinence syndrome:  I used to have the experience that, after reading a Dave Barry book, I would crash and feel quite depressed and morose for a while, as if in withdrawal from laughing so much.

Perhaps laughter is one of my means to try to hide from reality, to hide from the present, to try to hide from me.  I haven’t committed to the idea, yet, but it does intrigue me.  Most of my literary heroes do not spend a lot of time laughing.  And I have few, if any, real world heroes, but such as I have, though far from agelastic, are not prone to joke about a lot or get giggly or silly, like I do.

Those facts may be irrelevant for me, of course.  I am a unique snowflake (just like all the other snowflakes), and I don’t necessarily have the same attributes as those I admire, especially fictional characters.   But it is intriguing as almost a kind of fast, but one in which I would abstain from laughing rather than from food or water.

I’ll keep you posted on my effort (probably).  If you want to give me your input, you’re welcome to do so.  In the meantime, I hope you have a very good day.  Don’t stop laughing on my account.

TTFN

[P.S., a thought just occurred to me, because the words of an old ABBA song (misheard, as I just realized) started going through my head:  If you think that there’s nothing you can’t do, that anything is possible, then all the troubles that continue in the world are implicitly your fault, because you could have solved them.  After all, there’s nothing you can’t do.  To be fair to them, ABBA was actually singing “there is nothing we can do”, which I had misheard and misremembered as “can’t” for decades.  Indeed, their song goes pretty well with parts of this post, especially the song’s first few lines.  Who would have guessed?]

*I almost said “my traditional Thursday podcast”.  How’s that for a weird mistake?  I’ve certainly toyed with the idea of a podcast at times, but that requires more time and editing and so on than my little five-minute or so snippets of audio.  But I do like to listen to podcasts, at least about topics that interest me.  Perhaps it was a Freudian slip.

**I accidentally typed “sunconscious” here, originally, and it seems like kind of a charming word, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really mean anything.  But one certainly doesn’t want a conscious sun, as the dubious Doctor Who episode “42” tried to warn us…or something like that.

***You might almost think that word means “one who lats”, but of course it’s not that kind of word and has close kinship with “later” and its ilk.

****I.e., a period of time.