Grew up in fear ~

I grew up in fear. I've talked about it before here but I have a new experience with it.



I grew up being afraid of things. My parents taught me that there were bad people out there waiting to take my stuff as soon as I went out. They wanted to steal my money. They wanted to break into my car and take my stuff. They weren't very afraid of identity theft but I was scared of that.



It's taken me a long time to work through those feelings of fear. And get to where I don't think them as much as I did. But they're still hovering in the back of my mind.



I had an episode of that recently on some travel. My wife and I had gone to see our daughter and son-in-law and granddaughters. We had a great trip! On the way back we stopped to eat at a sit-down restaurant instead of grabbing something fast and driving. And the whole time that I was inside enjoying talking to my wife and the meal I kept thinking "Somebody's going to break into my car."



Did I lock the door? Somebody's gonna steal our suitcases. Somebody's going to steal my computer. Somebody's going to steal my chocolate, whatever. Sad, I know, but that's how I was raised, to be careful so that the bad guys don't get your stuff.



The only way to be careful is to think about it and double check and make sure that they don't have an avenue to steal from you.



Weird.



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Manual window cranks ~

I have a pickup truck. It's almost 20 years old. It's red. It has four doors and I enjoy driving it. I bought it so that I could join the ranks of people that could show up somewhere, throw stuff in the bed of the truck, carry it, and then unload it quickly and easily. No muss, no fuss.



The pickup truck has manual windows. Instead of flicking a button, I have to actually turn a crank to turn the windows down and then put it back up. If I'm driving, I'm probably not going to adjust the windows on the passenger side or in the back seat.



But there was frustration there because I have guards over the windows so that I can leave the windows cracked and let the heat out without rain getting in. The truck came with them and they work great.



When driving down the road the window crank was in the right place with the window up, but if I wanted to crack the window and let some air flow without rain coming in, the crank would be right where I put my left knee when I'm driving.



So I would end up rolling the window down on just a little bit further, get rain on my face or the side of my head and be aggravated. I finally made a note to look up how to change the position of the hand crank on my truck's window.



I found a YouTube video that made it very clear how to use a piece of paracord to pop a little clip on the window crank and then I could put it wherever I wanted and put the window crank back in as if it had been there the entire time.





The trick worked! The clip popped. I didn't lose the clip, and I got the window crank exactly where I wanted it.



I love YouTube. I love learning little tricks like that and then using them successfully.



Woohoo!



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Please be rude ~

I read an article this past week about how one of the big AI companies encourages people not to be polite to their AI because of the extra cycles it takes to process the please add thank you. Their reasoning was that we're already using gobs of electricity on everything else, Please cut it out so that we don't get into trouble for destroying the planet.



A computer processing company wants you to be rude or not polite in order to save the planet.



The urgency being driven there is so subtle and yet I can see where the people that are joked about as our tech overlords are trying to drive a certain behavior which is reduce consumption in order to quote unquote reduce the use of limited resources because we're going to use all the resources to dominate you.



Pretty funny.

Talking with my aunt ~

I remember being in the little house and talking to my aunt when I was a boy I don't remember what year it was, but I remember being in the kitchen of the little one-bedroom house that my aunt and uncle had built on an acre of property that my grandfather gave them.



My uncle divorced my aunt at some point. And she ended up living in that little house again for a little while. But because it was so far from the main house and because of her nervousness she didn't stay there for very long alone.



But I remember being in the kitchen of the little house with her. There was a radio playing and the song "Rhinestone Cowboy" was playing. It was in the 1970s, so that was a hot song.



I think she was talking about her husband and other things going on. And because I had learned to comment on things from my parents I made some sort of comment. I was 13 years old and so that means it would have been 1977.



I remember my aunt telling me that I was wise for my age. And that I knew a lot of good stuff.



In the mid-1980s I got to stay in that little house while I went to the University of Central Florida. Even later in my life that little house became mine.



Now I enjoy staying in the little house whenever my wife and I get an opportunity. I enjoy the rustic nature of it and the fun that we've had there. And I look forward to future fun and my children having fun there.



Good stuff!



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Sucked in by AI ~

I'm reading more and more stories about how people are using the so-called "artificial intelligence" services to plan their lives and do all sorts of things. I hear a lot of good things about how people use it to generate letters and crank out reports.



But I'm also reading disturbing stories of people talking to these things and breaking with reality because they're believing that they're talking to a higher intelligence.



I'm shocked because this is kind of what happened before with computers. Salespeople would go around and if a salesperson had just papers and charts you weren't very impressed. But if a salesperson pulled out a screen and they showed the same sorts of things on a screen and used a keyboard to move through the pictures all of a sudden you felt like were dealing with somebody that was so much better and this was modern and much better than anything else.



I'm seeing similar things with the large language model artificial intelligences that are being marketed today. It's scary.



And then I'm reading stories about people as they use these things, starting to ask existential questions about spiritual things and life guidance and all that sort of stuff. And they lose their minds because they think that they're finally connected to the "higher consciousness" that New Agers have been selling all this time.



I do have some hope because I have started seeing stories about how people are pointing out that these things are probably just really fast pattern matchers, and it's not really intelligence, it's just really fast language matching.



And that's what computers do. We make decisions based on a lot of inputs that we don't even understand are happening in our own brains. We're basing them on smells and nerve endings that we don't even realize are feeding us data and we're fast.



And then when a machine is demonstrated to be able to make a yes or no decision a million times faster than we can, at least we think it can, all of a sudden we want to let it tell us how to run our lives and run our operations and do everything for us so that we can go and do other things.



But it's a computer. I'm a human. The computer doesn't rule me. Some people would argue about that too, but that's a different subject.



Large language model artificial intelligences are cool tools that are being adapted and used by early adopters and the rest of us are just kind of trailing along behind going, wow, how did they do that? And why did they do that?



Be careful out there. Remember what you're dealing with.



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Button batteries ~

Button batteries must be one of the biggest scams running in department stores ever. They charge huge amounts for these, but if you go online you can find the same exact batteries for five and ten packs that are half the price of a one or two pack in a department store.





Paying half price for three to five times more just makes economic sense. I actually buy button batteries in bulk and I keep them in a zip bag in my closet so that when my smart devices or my watches run out of battery every once in a while instead of going and paying outrageous prices I just pull out my pouch replace the battery and keep rolling.





Just search Amazon or any of the other online stores for the button battery that you need and you'll be amazed at the price savings you'll get. Check it out!

Plants on the deck~

This is my third year having the same plants on the deck. I have two pots of lemongrass that I rooted from lemongrass that I bought at a local Asian market. I have two flower box things with basil and rosemary in them. I tried cilantro in one and it did okay for about three weeks but the cilantro gave out and withered and died.



This is my third year of having a flower box of petunias right outside the kitchen window on the deck. They're red petunias and this time I bought jumbo red petunias. They're taller and the flowers are bigger. They get beat down by the sun so I water them and the basil and lemongrass every day. And then when the afternoon thunderstorms come the petunias get beat down by the rain and the blooms look terrible for a day and then they start blooming again and they look beautiful.



I have a grapevine in a pot that I started four five years ago now. I was so excited to try to grow a grapevine. I thought about the Bible and all the talk about grapes and grapevines and all that. The first year it did nothing. Then the second year it actually had grapes on it. They went full-term and we got nice purple grapes. When I bought the vine it didn't say muscadine, I don't know if it got cross-pollinated with muscadine grapes locally or if that's what they were to start. But I was so disappointed that they were that weird musty muscadine flavor grapes. I put it back up in its spot and I water it every day. I don't really get very many grapes off of it but it's fun to see the grape leaves and think about Greek dishes where rice is wrapped in grape leaves.



This year I'm trying a hydroponics experiment in 5-gallon buckets on the deck again. I put two cherry tomato plants in hydroponics buckets. No pumps, no fancy things, just nutrients in water and plants poking out of the side of buckets. They did well last year, we'll see how it goes this time.



I'm enjoying my plants on the deck. Fun!



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