Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

This evening I happened to catch a story on the NBC evening news about some students abusing "AI".  Very clearly, I have misunderstood the term.  Since it is entirely likely that I have been using "Artificial Intelligence" since about 1984 or so, I guess the rest of the world is finally catching up. That is, a group of high school students who are pretty far on the other side of the line when it comes to decency, ethical behavior, and care for their fellow humans, they took a picture from a young lady's Prom album which she posted on line, and they apparently photoshopped the student's face into their collection of porn images, then shared it amongst their fellow students. While I could blather about being grateful that I didn't encounter that utterly lacking amoral behavior, the bottom line is, in the world in which I was raised, that sort of behavior pretty effectively self-eliminated, because there were quite a few predators higher up in the food chai...

Yet another Monday this week, and one hell of a week, today. There are many days where things cross my desk and I think "wouldn't that make a great post..."  Nope.  There is no one standing over my shoulder monitoring what I think, do, or write here, so it's all my responsibility.  And frankly, I don't think I'd want anyone to read a third-party version of any of my rather stupid human tricks which end me up in the hospital. Today was a very busy not very good day.  There are some things I can share that don't infringe on anyone's privacy except for a software implementation person who has experienced an air-gap between brain and...  well, output. Very briefly - the job I do is to ask insurance companies that you pay if they will consider paying my employer for the services we provide you - that you being someone who has recently had a less-than-optimal outcome encounter with some form of germ that has caused them to get pretty terribly sick.  Sick en...

Everybody has a sort of home town.  My closest town was Sartell, which was where my grade school was located.  At the time, Sartell had two large industries, a public grade school, a private grade school, several churches, a new public high school, and up until I started high school, bars outnumbered both churches and post offices.  We also had one small store for a great many years, at the end of the bridge.  Rips, as it was known, was a prime location for candy and pop, but it was two miles from my home, so I did not go there alone, often.   I do not recall the exact year, but when they cleared the vacant lot next to that store and construction started, we got an almost-useful store.  We did not need to go into Sauk Rapids or St. Cloud for some of the basics, but there were limits.  However, it did carry outstate editions of the metro papers, which did become a bigger deal when my father and uncle's collaboration on a teach-science comic strip m...

There really isn't much going on around here.  I mean, I do get up every morning, putz a bit here, then head upstairs, feed the dogs, get them outdoors to do their morning deposits, in the case of Cheyanne, and sniff and eat much other animal poo, in the case of Freyja (Cheyanne gets her share), then back in, feed me, then head up to work.  After a shorter day than it had been over the past year, I finish that stuff, head downstairs, get the dogs out, feed myself once again, try to stay awake until it's time to feed the dogs again (7:30 pm, like clockwork, mostly), then putz along until 9 pm, when I get them out, around the parking lot once or twice (give or take, depending on weather, behavior, and etc.), then back inside, me to bed, rinse, repeat. I do keep an eye on the news and the world in general - mostly fearing the upcoming election, and then all the other gloom and doom noise.  There's very little point in me bloviating about the state of the ... well, that which...

It's been a busy week, or so...  I know, shocking. I had a good doctor appointment on Friday, where my blood pressure was low enough for the doctor to take me off some of my medications.  So I got that going for me.  I try to stay on the straight and narrow, the past few months have been a titanic struggle (yes, I'd been sinking), when it comes to my blood sugars.  They'd been averaging in the 160s.  As my goal is below 120, that's not good.  However, it turns out that due to my wife's job change last fall to a better insurance package, the change of one of my insulins was ...  Well, it was messed up. I had been using Lantus and Humalog - which I expect are someone's trademarks.  If they are, I apologize, they did me well for a decade and a half.  But my doctor changed me to the oh-so-trendy Ozempic and the insurance company required I use Baseglar.  The Ozempic claims to make it easier to control and reduce blood sugars, food cravings, ...

 I yam just too danged busy... Not really, but the bottom line is that I do end up running in several directions at once...  Kinda.  I do expect that this is something having to do with an aging brain.  That is, there's an awful lot up there...   I do recall Heinlein's suggestion that a fellow named Renshaw might come along and teach us all how to organize our brains.  I do not expect the Musk experiment to work all that well, I do hope that someone with a fairly good track record for bio-technological integration does end up stepping up.  What I do need is the Google Indexer working in there.  I have a lot of stuff I have known, both information and images, and it would be wonderful to be able to review it in any sort of fashion I'd like to review. But then again, I'm one of those folks who does tend to get attached to things.  Not things as in the items themselves, but far more the memories which the items provoke.  One of the ite...

Yep, it works.  On both the new AND old computers.   What's that?  Oh, I suppose there's another opportunity for me to go over the IT infrastructure here.  It's complicated.  Not at all. Seriously.   I have a computer which appears was made in perhaps 2007, is still running, and is, until recently, my primary computer.  It's limped along for a while now, having come out of the ... well, it works, but it was an addition to the family after 2009.  In pre-Pandemic days, there was a shop in Bloomington, Minnesota, known as "The Box Shop".  It was one of those wonderful little shops that used to be probably a donut or candy shop of some sort, because many of the original furnishings were there.  But most of the store was filled with bits of electronics.  Monitors, computers, both desktop and laptop, plus the occasional server here and there, and keyboards, mice, video cards, boxes of memory, cables, drives...  A few corpor...