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2009-era artificial intelligence
Wednesday, October 1 2025
I had another surprisingly productive day in the workplace, fueled (in part) by pseudoephedrine. Initially I was looking at code trying to find something that apparently wasn't there. But then later I managed to track down and fix a vexing issue in Angular that had stumped me last week, and I ended the day with a triumphant pull request.
Back home in Hurley, I took Charlotte for a walk up the Farm Road so I could cache yet more pieces of bluestone to take to the Adirondacks this weekend. (Most of this bluestone is being used to improve the end of the Mossy Rock Trail nearest the cabin.)
After that, though, I experienced an unusually frustrating several hours as multiple things seemed to be broken, breaking, or otherwise dysfunctional at once. For starters, a parcel that was said to have been delivered was nowhere in sight. At first I expected it to be in the mailbox, but then it turned out it had been shipped by UPS and picked up by someone named "John." Huh? I managed to have UPS call me about this, but the human on the other end of the line had the cognitive skills of a 2009-era artificial intelligence. He had a light accent and couldn't seem to understand any of my questions. But he did provide the information I needed: that my delivered parcel had been delivered to someone on Main Street in Hurley. When I tried to get the customer service guy to take my address so it could be picked up from John and delivered to me, he said someone would be calling me back in an hour to get that information. "Why can't you take it now?" I asked, and he mumbled some English-sounding words that made no sense. Whoever was supposed to call never did, though my brother Don did (for the first time in over a week) and gushed about the Perseverance Rover Lego kit he is assembling. He'd bought one, lost a few pieces, and then bought another, and that was how we was able to do it. Bro does not apparently have a budget.
The other thing that was driving me nuts was microSD cards. I'd plug them into the card reader on Woodchuck, my main computer, and then nothing would change in My PC. My card reader has lots of slots, all of which have letters assigned to them, so I'd open each one to see if maybe the card got mounted there. But no, it would just hang for a distressingly long time and tell me to insert something to see a drive there. After a bit of this, the reader would lose the ability to read cards at all, even known good ones, and I'd have to restart it. Or the SDFormatter software I was trying to install would get confused mid-installation and refuse to do anything until after I restarted the computer for that. This sort of dysfunction drives me insane, and it's not long before I'm shouting at my computer. And then Lester the Cat, who cannot read a room, comes marching up wanting to be uncharacteristically friendly in the midst of all this and I find myself yelling at him too, shouting things like, "I don't want to do cat stuff!" But eventually after a reboot or two I managed to get my microSD card stuff sorted (I needed a new card for my cameras and I needed to set up another Raspberry Pi Zero W Meshtastic bridge), so I started calming down enough to make dinner.
Originally my plan was not to make dinner, since we have so much leftover soup from the dinner I made yesterday. But then Gretchen specifically asked for spaghetti, so I felt compelled to make that. We didn't have any onions, though, so the pan of chonkiness I fried up consisted only of mushrooms and tempeh.
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