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Woodstock Halloween, 2025
Friday, October 31 2025
At 9:00am this morning I had an appointment at the dentist (he's over on the way to Woodstock) to get some work done. The idea here was that anything begun today would have to be covered by my dental insurance, even though I would be losing it tomorrow. So a tech gave me a mutation-inducing number of x-rays and then the dentist, an old timer who has a one-hit-wonder song to his credit, came and looked in my mouth. My biggest problem back in there was my left upper wisdom tooth, which now has a huge hole going into it axially. It's tender at the bottom of that hole, and today I found out why: that tooth had no root canal, so there are live nerves down at the bottom of that hole. He said the options for it were a root canal or pulling it out, neither of which he could do today. I asked him if he could put some temporary filling "crap" in it, and he said sure, and did so. The tooth felt much better for a few hours after that, but that filling soon disappeared and the tooth went back to being the hollow food-devouring pit it's been for weeks. As I was settling up with the woman at the front desk (who merely xeroxed my insurance card), I mentioned that I'd been "laid off" and that was why I was there to get some last minute benefit from my dental insurance. "It's yours!" she declared, "You should use it!" "You should too," I added slyly. I wouldn't mind if the insurer were billed for a whole mouth full of crowns so long as I don't have to do the co-pay.
On the way home, I stopped at the Hurley Ridge Hannaford to get a half gallon of oat milk and an impulse purchase of vegan sushi, which I ate the moment I got home.
I spent something like three or four hours today just trying to get my absurdly-difficult RAK4630 GPS tracker board to join my local Meshtastic channel. Work I'd done on it a few days ago (and an associated conversation with ChatGPT) had suggested that maybe this was an impossible task. But I'd since discovered that several things ChatGPT had told me about the board were untrue, including that I couldn't use its USB-C connector to upload its firmware (which made no sense, come to think about it; I'd been able to get data about its existing Meshtastic firmware over that interface). So today I was back asking ChatGPT how best to upload Meshtastic 2.7 to the board. Since the board is tiny and didn't appear to have any buttons, I thought I had to bridge two of its header traces to simulate a butto push. But when I did this, they had no effect, and ChatGPT was telling me I would have to use the Arduino IDE to... well, who knows, because while I was trying to set that up, I found a tiny momentary button on the board. This allowed me to put the board into something called DFU mode, which then allowed me copy a new firmware to a little drive that had appeared on the Windows machine it was connected to. And doing this finally allowed me to install Meshtastic 2.7, a prerequisite for communicating with all my other Meshtastic nodes. But then I ran into another long series of problems because the damn board refused to allow me to install the channel key necessary to allow it to join my channel. I tried all sorts of things, but none worked. ChatGPT thought I would have to use the phone app, but that was completely unresponsive. Eventually, though, after rebooting the phone multiple times and making it forget all its Meshtastic bluetooth connections, I managed to pair the new RAK4630 node with my phone (if ChatGPT hadn't come up with the PIN somehow, which was 123456, I would've never been able to do it). And with that, I was finally able to set the channel key. After that, it was in my channel sending data to my ESP8266 Remote Control backend. I was still a long way from getting it to work, though, because there was no GPS data in its packets. Instead it had something called a "payload" that proved impossible to decipher. ChatGPT made some heroic attempts to write me parsing functions in Python, but none of them worked. It then wanted to install a "turtles-all-the-way-down" stack of endless dependencies to get a parser working, and I had to give up for the time being.
Meanwhile, our neighbor A came over with Henry for a dog walk. We commiserated a little about us both being unemployed (it's not a great time to be an actor, it turns out).
Later Gretchen and I had a conference call with out investment advisor, who tried to talk us down about my increased concerns about a coming collapse of AI-related stocks once people catch on to the fact that AI rollout is not going to replace a vast number of jobs (once something I also was sure would happen). The reason for my change of opinion is the failure of current large language models to improve much after an exponential increase of consumed text. Maybe a technical breakthrough will solve that problem, but until it does, much more money is being consumed by LLMs than produced by them, and all that has to happen is for China to get aggressive towards Taiwan and Nvidia will lose its ability to produce anything. (All it makes is intellectual property, and it is entirely dependent on the cutting-edge fabs of TSMC, located in Taiwan.) For now, I just want to remove as much Nvidia as possible from our portfolio. The problem is that those stocks have increased 14X during the time we've held them and liquidating the produces a large tax liability.
Still later, that batty house sitter who had been knocking on our garage doors yesterday arrived. She's an older woman and cancer survivor, so she can't do much dog walking. But the plan is to have her run the house and we'll have friends like A and Nancy come over to do occasional dog walking. The house sitter is a bit marginal when it comes to finances after being wiped out by medical expenses related to her cancer treatments, so Gretchen paid her $200 up front so she can afford groceries. (The woman gets SNAP benefits, which are under jeopardy due to the ongoing government shutdown.)
This evening Gretchen and I drove past the Ashokan Reservoir (which is as low as I've ever seen it due to an ongoing drought) to Woodstock to attend its annual Halloween parade. We met our friend Lynn there and then wandered through the swelling crowd over to the The Golden Notebook where Gretchen works. The tradition on Halloween is for all the businesses to stock up on candy to hand out to kids, and the Golden Notebook had a lot of candy in the front window and Jackie (the owner) was standing there with little black dragon wings on her back to make sure nobody took more than three pieces. (I took a bag of Skittles because I was so fucking hungry, and it would be awhile before dinner.)
As more and more kids streamed into the store, we went out into the street to marvel at the many creative costumes, feeling a little left out because there weren't many like us who weren't in costume. Some woman walked past covered with folders marked "EPSTEIN FILES" and a very tall man was dressed as a giraffe. Then a little boy dressed as an airline pilot came through with a huge well-made cardboard jetliner around his waist. Its wingspan was at least five feet.
Soon thereafter the parade began, and the three of us made our way through the crowd to find a spot from which we could see it. (That giraffe guy had an inherent advantage here.) I was struck by all the work so many people had put into their costumes, some of which featured elaborate paper mâché heads and hands controlled by a small person down near the base holding onto sticks. One float made fun of Donald Trump's recent decision to tear down the east wing of the White House.
When Gretchen and I had had enough of being out in the wind and cold, we went into the Garden Café (which was very crowded) and ordered cappuccinos. Soon a table was found for us, and then Lynn and her husband Gregg joined us. True, the daughter of the owner, was our waitress, and she was dressed as a redneck, wearing an outfit seemingly made of American flags and a red had that said simply "'MERICA."
The most interesting part of our dinnner discussion concerned the things guests leave behind at the Woodstock house that Lynne and Gregg periodically rent out as an AirBnB. These things have included boxer shorts, shirts, a king-sized comforter, but never (for some reason) any phone chargers.
In terms of food, I ended up ordering a bowl of the red bean soup, fully expecting it to be amazing. But for some reason it wasn't as good as usual, and it was also a bit watery. I also got the black bean burrito, which is never great, but it has the advantage of not being greasy. I also had a glass of Montepulciano and a second cappuccino. And then Lynne and Gregg ended up paying for some reason.
That pilot kid with is undersized jet liner while a chimp and a banana look on. Click to enlarge.
A pair of pirates talking to a doric column during today' parade. Click to enlarge.
A scene across Tinker Street just before the parade. Click to enlarge.
A possibly-temporary Statue of Liberty atop one of the main corners in central Woodstock during today's parade. Click to enlarge.
A float concerning Trump's concerning actions against the house we loaned him. Click to enlarge.
This black dog on the floor in the Garden had been colored to look more like a skeleton. Click to enlarge.
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