Categories
life in general

Holiday Seasons Greetings 2024

Apple wants to offer me AI to tell me how to write, or to save me trouble by writing as myself to save me time. I turned it on for a moment, and it tried to help me write my emails. Maybe it would save me time, but I don’t think it will be the same as writing myself. What does the AI experience when it writes for me? Does it have the feelings I will miss out on if I do the writing?

ChatGPT wants to be used to generate writings, images, and anything else that I might find useful. It can help me to create. Am I really creating, when I collaborate with an AI? Again, there is a loss. I feel something when I make something. I will lose that.

A useful AI to assist me would give me a “smart search” function that could understand the underlying concepts of what I am searching for, instead of the words.

It would be useful to have a “smart scheduling” AI that can understand my priorities and sort out which things to consider scheduling and how much time to give them.

I don’t need help with the act of writing … I need an AI to tell me when to write because I’ve dropped my end of a conversation, or whom to write, because there are people whom I care about with whom I would like to communicate.

Merry Christmas

Happy Hannukah

Joyous Kwanzah

Merry Newtonmas

Buzzy Birthday Greeings to Reverand Lorenzo Langstroth

Happy Festivus

If I missed someone’s December holiday, or if you don’t have any days of festivity in this time of year for your own particular belief structure, Happy Wednesday.

I wish peace and love upon you all.

Categories
life in general

Please Don’t Ask

I have not written anything lately. I have been much too busy doing things. Volunteer activities. Dealing with my family. Beekeeping, at home for Bee Daddies Apiaries and helping friends and protegés. There are many interesting things to write about. I would like to share some of the fun points of life with my friends. I would like to update people with a few of the mishaps (perhaps someone else can learn from my mistakes). There are many pages of documentation in the fields of my interest that I think need to be written. However, writing is a time consuming activity for me … even when I am not trying to write well. I just can’t find the time for that.

I am trying to keep up with my sleep, eating and exercising on a regular basis. My health and my long-term survival depends critically on those. For anyone following my bariatric surgery results: I hit a plateau at about 265, and gained back about 15 pounds. (HW: 361, SW: 320, CW: 279). Family stress has a lot to do with that. To misquote John Candy from some movie: “I am overweight because I swallow a lot of my emotions. *chuckle* I also swallow a lot of hamburgers.”  So I am down 81 pounds from my lifetime high point. I can’t complain about that: No diabetes; Normal blood pressure; I am wearing clothes that were tight in the 1990’s; I can physically do things that were difficult or impossible before the surgery. However, I would like to do better.

It is all about time management. In my case … time mismanagement. I am trying to do too many things that all require a lot of detailed concentration or research. Although I am in “career hibernation” I still do a little bit of paid consulting … though I’ve been too busy to generate invoices and get paid for my work. It seems that everywhere I look, there is a new “shiny thing” that gets my attention and pulls me off track from what I was working on. Naturally, the beneficiaries of some of the projects that I started and have not finished inevitable come back asking when things can move forward … and I am the critical part.

My biggest problem with time management is that I lack the personal skill to say “no” when someone asks me for something. I am a natural problem-solver and I try to be helpful. When someone asks me a technical question, inevitably they ask “can you do that for me?” My answer should be “Yes, I can do that, but I won’t. You will have to hire or otherwise find someone who can do that for you. I don’t have any time left in my schedule.” Then I have to make sure that I don’t offer to explain to them how to find someone who can do it, or offer to help them find someone, or send them some information. I have to just smile, say no, stop, drop and roll away.

The current pace of my life is killing me. It will do me in faster than my obesity and a high-stress career was. I stopped working at a job that I really liked (usually) with people whom I enjoyed and respected, for a decent salary so that I could focus on the health of my mind and my body. Now I am working / volunteering myself to death for free (or a ridiculously low bill rate), and some of those things are just not as interesting or fulfilling as the “day job” used to be. None of it can compete with taking care of my bees and my garden and my wife.

I need to print up some cards to hand people when we talk. I am not mocking people with disabilities who can’t hear or speak and hand out cards that ask for help. On the contrary … I have a real problem here and I need help. If I can’t say what needs to be said, perhaps I can hand over a card when the conversation seems to be drifting toward a point where I will get myself into trouble. Maybe, to be fair, I should just hand a card to everyone I speak to.

Dear Friend or Colleague:

I am completely overwhelmed with volunteer, family and personal responsibilities. I have no time left in my schedule for the basic necessities of my health and well-being. I can’t accept any new projects or activities. I can’t even spare the time to talk about how someone else can do it, or who might be able to, or anything like that. I probably would like to. I love to talk about these things and help everyone I can. I am sure that your needs are worthy and interesting and might even be fun. However, I can’t do it now. I have too many commitments, not enough time and I am failing to deliver. My over-extension is affecting my health adversely.

I have to ask you for your help here. If you were going to discuss with me a problem in technology, archives, genealogy, or beekeeping that you need help with, inevitably I will feel tempted to offer some kind of help or advice. Please don’t ask. Please don’t accept the offer. Please try not to even allow me to engage in conversation about it because it is very very difficult for me to say “no” to such things.

Thank you!

Categories
genealogy life in general

It’s né not née

Some time in 2017 I was bitten again by the genealogy bug. Again. I realized that I would be emailing many strangers in order to collaborate on family trees and DNA matching. My change of name when I married was confusing people with whom I corresponded. The fact that I took my wife’s surname when we married was confusing and a distraction to communication about genealogy. I decided to adopt the suffix née Guttmann in my email signature, to make it clear that my birth surname is Guttmann, not Jenson.

Oops!

French has linguistic gender. Different forms for masculine and feminine nouns and adjectives. Since it is much more common for women to change their surname at marriage, the suffix is most commonly used by women. I just assumed that it was the common term.

Oops!

Well, I am now trying to find all the places where I used née and changing them to né, since I am biologically male, and I self-identify as male. So, it should be Rob Jenson né Guttmann.

I am correcting my web pages, genealogy web site profiles, etc. If you find one that I missed, please contact me to let me know.

Categories
life in general

Life is Back to Normal

So it’s Sunday morning. Other than rhythmically swigging Ensure or Crystal Light on a regular alarm every 12 minutes, I think that life has returned to normal. I am taking it very easy in an overabundance of caution until I get checked out next week. However, all-in-all, I seem to be making a remarkable recovery from my sleeve gastrectomy on Tuesday morning. Other than a case of “anesthesia head” on Tuesday and Wednesday, I might wonder whether Dr. Lin actually did the procedure at all.

Beware: Gory Details!
The fact that I woke up with a drain full of nasty bloody bodily fluids sticking out of my abdomen, and three stitched up incisions is strong evidence otherwise. However, I have had negligible pain, no discomfort when I drink my fluids, and I’m getting around quite well.

I had hoped to be writing more actively. I’ve had some thoughts on beekeeping, I want to add more hints about my tools for genetic genealogy and another friend got their email hacked … I have been meaning for years to write one web page that instructs how to clean up your mess after this happens, instead of rewriting the instructions, slightly differently each time, for friends when I receive “that email” indicating that their email was hacked. That would go under computing. So far, nothing written. I always have to choose between doing, and writing about doing. There was also a rather curious discovery we made in the archives on the week before my surgery, that I was going to share pictures on.

At any rate, I am back from the hospital, I’m in great shape and hopefully I’ll spend some time writing about things instead of doing things. Thanks for all the cards, emails, flowers and good wishes to Paula and myself.

Categories
life in general

Is Metro On Fire Today?

I had to report to GWU Hospital today to get my blood typed and cross-matched for Tuesday’s surgery. I also woke up with massive muscle spasms in my neck. Driving seemed to be a very bad idea, so I decided to take the Metro. I had over an hour to my appointment and Paula dropped me off at the station.

I have not ridden Metro since I left NIH. I foolishly did not check the Metro Status and Alerts page or one of the apps like MetroHero before I headed into the tunnels. I had planned to get my blood typed, then Metro back up to Friendship Heights to catch a bus over to Sibley Hospital to visit a friend.

I should have realized that something was up when I saw three Metro employees standing around the turnstyle, talking to another person. I wasn’t really paying attention as I went through … one said something about “sometimes it takes one hour and sometimes it takes eight to nine hours.” I gimped on down to the platform (I’m in an air boot on my right foot again) where I was blasted by a message “We are going to turn on the third rail on Track 2 in Metro Center in one minute. Call in to dispatch immediately if you have any objection to activating the third rail on Track 2.” OK, that was odd.

A train arrived almost immediately. The train pulled into the station with a destination of Farragut North instead of Glenmont. OK, that’s bad. My transfer station to the Orange/Blue/Silver lines is two stops beyond that. On a good day I could walk from Farragut North to Farragut West. Today was not such a good day: my foot is in an air boot, my neck is killing me, and I’m feeling a wee bit “melty” from lack of energy, and it might be raining. Overall, a bad idea. Now, if they had built the tunnel that has been on the drawing board since 2004 …

I am trying to get a positive feeling about riding a “bus bridge” to Metro Center so that I can transfer …

… At least I had my tablet, and the iPhone has Internet … but the iPhone was running out of battery power …

… I had brought my Anker power cube  … but I did not have the iPhone cable

Things are just getting worse and worse. I had been told not not to stress out about being late for my appointment because I was going to be late with a passion.

The operator made reference to an “earlier incident” that led to a complete shutdown of transit through the busiest station (Metro Center). Service was being restored.

A few years ago Nick Stocchero created a web app called “Is Metro On Fire?”  I don’t know if he did it to learn how to work with the API, or just a comment because there had been several metro fires in succession. However, it seemed to be a poignant object commentary on the fact that Metro seems to have an endless supply of problems that impact on service and cost. Poor service and rising costs. Metro seems to have had (maybe still has) a policy of not reporting problems with service unless they cause very long delays. They seemed to believe that if they did not announce service problems, nobody would notice. They did not factor in social media or the ability for riders to communicate around their official press releases. UnsuckDCMetro has been an outlet for complaints about DC Metro outages. In the past few years there have been many more such outlets.

It really should not be third-party “angry customer” sites telling riders when to take Metro and when walking would be faster. They have the technology to put a display outside the station, or outside the turnstile, that says “this Metro line is broken inbound,” do not enter the system in that directino if you are in a rush. But they don’t. So the hating on metro will continue.

Sadly, I heard that the reason for the delays were because someone had been struck by a train at Metro Center. I’m sure that they are having a worse day than I am.