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five glasses of opening wine in Woodstock
Sunday, December 7 2025
This morning as a fire flickered in the woodstove, I drank tea while fluttering between my usual web haunts on my 2011-era MacBook Pro (that's become my living room laptop, and I like that it's a bit more functional than a Chromebook).
Later I made good (but slow) progress implementing commands to use the serial port on an Arduino I2C slave. Getting the part working where it could transmit data via the serial port was easiest, though eventually I ran into freakish timing issues trying to get the slave to slurp data from its serial port. These are the sorts of problems that make getting microcontrollers to do what you want to do feel a little more like art or even voodoo than deterministic engineering. Of course, when you consider what I was trying to do: pull data from the serial port of an Arduino that is connected via I2C to the microcontroller requesting that retrieval, you realize we're a long way from getting an LED to blink.
Another fun thing I did today was to upload a picture of myself (taken in Costa Rica back in February of 2023) to ChatGPT and ask it to make me a picture where I am receiving the Ronald McDonald Physics Prize from Ronald McDonald himself. This was, of course, to mock Donald Trump's receipt of the first (and only) "FIFA Peace Prize" from the worldwide football association, a ghastly participation trophy crafted explicitly to exploit Donald Trump's huge disappointment that he didn't (for some reason) receive the Nobel Peace Prize. I've generally had poor results giving AIs prompts to make pictures, but ChatGPT really came through this time. It even filled in missing details from my NASA teeshirt (which works well with the theme). Since I know my face very well, the version in this picture looks off, and it's because my face was (for some reason) made smaller relative to my head. See what you think:
Me receiving a McDonalds Prize for Physics. Click to enlarge.
The original photo this was based on, when I was in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica back in 2023. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?251207 feedback
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