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tooth cleaning, sushi, and bagels
Thursday, January 22 2026
I had a dental cleaning appointment for this afternoon, and before that I wanted to make a little more progress on my I2C bootloader project. It was clear at this point that I needed a better way to get more complex real-world feedback from the Atmega328 when it was in bootloader mode, and the serial port was proving too difficult to use. So I decided I needed an array of LEDs that I could attach to GPIO pins. That way I could communicate fairly complex data about where exactly within a nest of conditionals the code managed to reach. It's common in my programming style to echo, print, or otherwise log different string sequences depending on where the code ends up traveling, and I could do the same thing by lighting up different LEDs. Since I can imaginge a lot of uses for such an array of LEDs, I decided to make something solid that I could reuse. It would have eight pins attached to different LEDs through 470 ohm resistors that would all share a common ground, and I'd build it all on a little printed circuit board. Using eight LEDs salvaged from old equipment, I managed to make just such a device, though of course when I tested it, one of the LEDs wasn't working because I'd installed it backwards (it's sometimes hard to see which pin is the cathode; it's the one that swells into a bigger nub inside the plastic body of the LED). It was a pain in the ass to fix that problem, but I'd managed to do so just before I had to start preparing my mouth for the dentist. (You never want to go there with unbrushed teeth!)
Having my teeth cleaned is never a pleasant experience. The woman doing it today seemed to linger on the teeth of my lower jaw, particularly the narrow spaces between my lower incisors. Those teeth are tiny and the gaps between them are extremely narrow, so it always feels like the teeth are about to snap off whenever there are tools being jammed in there. Fortunately, though, the top teeth didn't take nearly as long. Dental hygienists are never happy with the state of my teeth and gums, but fortunately I wasn't berated too much today. In fairness to me, it had been years since I'd last had a dental cleaning.
On the way home, I stopped at the Hurley Ridge Hannaford to get items that Gretchen had compiled for me in a list: veggies, "breyad" (bread), various vegan milks, "nanners" (bananas), and cold breakfast cereal. I also got a few indulgences for myself: bagels and vegan sushi. One of the breads I got was a rye without caraway seeds, since I know that is how Gretchen likes her rye bread. She would be so excited when she learned of this that she would make herself a tempeh reuben. When I arrived, the Hurley Ridge Hannaford was mobbed by a wave of people stocking up before a massive winter storm predicted for this weekend, though that wave had strangely subsided by the time I reached the register.
I spent much of the rest of the day toiling with my I2C bootloader project. After using the new LED array to determine where my bootloader code wasn't reaching, I asked ChatGPT about it, and it confidently gave me some new code to try. But this new code, and subsequent versions of it, kept screwing up in various ways as various offsets within a 128 byte packet kept producing errors. I'd then tell ChatGPT the new error, and it would offer something else. This went on for hours. I could tell it was another LLM doom loop, but it was just comfortable enough to keep going with on the off-chance there would be a breakthrough. But there never was.
This evening after Gretchen came back from an animal rights movie showing in Rosendale where she'd sold six copies of her book Kind, we watched Jeopardy! and the second episode of The Rehearsal, the one where a simulation of being a parent is run for an irritatingly kooky religious lady who meets an even kookier, more irritating man with a pathological interest in prosaic numerical coincidences. Horrible people make for amazing television (thus the rise of Donald Trump!), and this was consistent with that.
Speaking of Donald Trump, for the past week or so (or, really, ever since whatever it was he did in Venezuela), he's been threatening to seize Greenland like Hitler had Poland (or Trump himself had the pussies of reluctant women). It had been looking increasingly (and depressingly) likely that Trump really was going to send our military to conquer that Danish territory. But by today it was looking like his plans had been thwarted by one of the few realities that cannot be glossed over by his orbiting shells of sycophants: the US bond market. It seems Denmark, Sweden and other European countries had started dumping US treasury bonds, resulting in an embarrassing collapse in their value. So by today Trump was backing off on his promised tariffs on countries sending defence forces to Greenland and posting things on his personal social network trying to make the most of an agreement that amounts to the status quo.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260122 feedback
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