A few Measly Steps a Day

Ai, D, godaddy's first link needed to say all of that so you knew there was a follow-on step ... I could make a career out of straightening out initial instructions for these corporations ... where and with whom do they test these things?

Which I sort of know because I do user panel studies for chump change. By and large it's for start-ups, but once I did a user study for a large health insurer.

Also, good step to check back on completing your steps.

My own steps:
update my recordkeeping on finances DONE
deal with condo petty chores DONE as far as I want for now
draft with Chat GPT a response to get more funding for my work NEXT
Psyche myself into taking HOURS AWAY tomorrow by going to the Korean Spa. DREAMING

Revu2

Congrats on all the DONEs feels good, doesn't it.

GoDaddy might have included the info on the verification code, and I might have just missed it. I don't know and I'm moving onward.

Re rodents: I killed all the mice with poison, and then bought a sonic rodent repellant to hopefully keep any other mice and rats away. Yesterday, I got a postcard in the mail offering me $30 to give the gadget a five-star rating and to post a positive comment. I gave them a one-star rating and posted the info about the card in the comment section.

Yup. Allowed myself 3 whole days free of email with no excuses (or in the parlance of our day, apologetically). No lists to day, just flow from one thing to another. Taking up email again (a steady yuck) tomorrow.

Have a book to return to library and thinking of making an adventure out of it. Partner might want to come along, so maybe half an adventure.

Turning to the movies for a fresh framework to getting stuff done: pre-production, production, post-production.

Today, I've declared is a pre-production day. This means charts, mind maps, tables with blank cells, lists of contacts, pre-making the boilerplate for completing the meeting minutes I'm to work up later today.

Tomorrow, Production. A meeting cancelled so its open book, baby, and I'll bring my 1-person crew, talent, and director to the "set" and get mucho done.

Or so the current fantasy goes.

Revu

HI, R.

It was fun having square peg visit.

Last few days have been frustrating, but I think there's an end in sight. My two projects are setting up a website and editing, editing, editing. My friend gave me some good critique which I'm going to use, but it means rewriting the ending to Through Unfamiliar Waters. I also rewrote the ending to Refuge and Warm Tea. So more frustration ahead, but an ending in sight. July is a Nanowrimo month, I'll see how much I can get done then. Meanwhile, I'm in high production mode after two days of goofing off due to frustration.
A friend helped me set up my website. We used a Go Daddy promo and switched to WordPress to get a better website. The domain didn't switch to Wordpress. It took five techs at Go Daddy and two and a half hours to figure out the problem. - The promo didn't switch. I had to upgrade to get it to switch.
I'm willing to pay a fair price. I'm not trying to cheat Go Daddy, although it felt like that was what I was doing. My friend, and a You tube video said this was the way to do it. Here is a recount of my attempts to build a website:

Took a class on line. The teacher's power went out before she could really teach us something of value.

Tried it on my own. Didn't do too well.

Asked a friend's son to help with the website. The son died before anything happened.

Tried it on my own.

Hired a professional to build the website. The company was a scam.

Asked a friend to help me. See above for the details of that experience.

Should I keep trying or give up???????

I don't believe that the Universe sends us signs, but maybe?????

I don't believe that the Universe sends signs to us, but come on!

HI D,

Reading "the universe's" signs is a hard job. It this a sign to quit, or mere test of your mettle and how badly you want it? Gremlins at play? How come no tech knew the upgrade would be the trick? Think they're trained to make the sell.

Re all that rewriting. I wonder if you can find a few ways to enjoy flashes of fun in the process?

I'm on a quiet day after a dental cleaning and running some errands. Tomorrow I pick up a grant to write, this time with a group (not the best) but also with AI's help (might be the deciding factor). As I'm retiring from grant writing in December, this might be the second to last one I'll ever work on.

Revu

I make my own calendar/datebook. Got an offer to arrange almost a year's worth of appointments but I couldn't book past Dec.

It's complicated to book something, of course, like setting it on a day my biorhythms show are suitable, avoiding conflicts, anticipating blocks of time I'll want though nothing is really bookable (like resting after a jag of intensive work), and so on.

Oddly enough, I got right on it, and See This ~ It's done.

I'm chasing watching all 4 films Elaine May directed. The one i watched last night, Heartbreak Kid (2nd she made) written by Neil Simon wasn't all that good. This was a year after her first film, and critics said she was more self-assured and not learning on the job as with the first one, according to the stories. It helped that Mr Simon was on set making changes and keeping watch on how the shooting went. One story is that May would rehearse with the script, allow the actors to improve, and then film back on script. I dunno, it went near 25 minutes with nothing funny, tho I think all were trying.

Want to watch the set in a week, so one per day or so, because I had to pay to borrow them from the nonprofit film archive store. Tick Tock.

Brings back memories. I think I was in college when I watched Heartbreak Kid. I think I liked it except that I figured out right at the beginning that the kid was shallow.

July is a Nanowrimo month. Yesterday, I went to Sizzler, stuffed myself silly, and edited 20000 words. That was fun. This Saturday, I'm sort of hosting a creativity group - my writing group meets my church group. (My writing group is petering out, and this is an attempt to revitalize it.

Re your comment about my website - I don't believe in gremlins either, but of the options you wrote, I choose gremlins as the most likely. Now maybe that's just asking for trouble. Maybe the gremlins don't want to be ignored. Maybe gremlins have feelings. Maybe they're tired of always being the bad guys. Maybe they'd like to be famous novelists. Or movie stars. I wrote a short story once about gremlins. I see another short story brewing. Gremlins phishing and cheating little old ladies out of their savings. Perhaps they live in Iceland and offer to build websites. (The scammers that offered to build my website live in Iceland..) And their cousins steal catalytic converters.

I guess that's it for me.

Good wishes.

Just watched Ishtar. Supposedly E May wanted to spoof the On the Road movies of Bing Cosby and Bob Hope. On location! With Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. Interestingly enough, the film opens with a pair of down on their dollars wannabee singer-songwriters comparing themselves to Simon and Garfunkel. But wait, what if S & G had been cast as the leads!? WB & DH each got $5.5 million with Beatty getting $.5 more to produce. Might have saved a mint and gotten some soundtrack worthy songs to boot!

Budget: $40 million. Box office: $14.4 million. The loss to the studio is even more, I believe, as it gets 60% the box office, or about $8.5 million.

I could barely get through the Cosby/Hope movies as a kid. It was clear they weren't taking anything seriously. The sets were back lot, painted backgrounds, the scripts couldn't find any cliches to leave out, and ever so often there would be some excuse for Bing to Sing.

Ishtar cheated in a Sinatra tune in the background a few times because B & H were not so good at singing.

Still, I did laugh a few times.
Revu2

Life was simpler back then, and were easier to please.

I'm on a roll. I'm mostly editing now, and I'm doing a bit of work on my website. By that, I mean, I'm creating what I want the pages to look like and what I want them to say. I got another offer to make a website for me. This through Facebook. A friend from a long time ago. But . . . I have people pretending to be my friends who have made it into my Facebook page. Smart or paranoid????? That is the question. I suggested meeting, and she agreed, but I haven't heard from her since then.

From stasis to roll, good thing all states flow through and reverse.

Working on what I hope is one the last grants I'll write this lifetime. When I've officially retired I can congruently say no. Right now, I quote fees so high they look elsewhere.

Except for my legacy client. So I sigh, moan, groan, and think up some fun skill or app to experiment with in small ways as a distraction on the way to Done. Gotta keep tricking the lazier side of myself.

Using Chat GPT for the first time on a paid project. Now there's also a competing AI service called Claude. Haven't used much yet as I only logged on yesterday, but plan to give them both the same text to work up, and compare. Meanwhile the work's getting done.

My goal is 3 hrs a day, and I want to forward something tomorrow. 3 hrs is a stretch, and I woke up tired. Up to 2.25 hrs today and will allow a pause ahead of a work call in 40 minutes. This is for this client, so technically I'm over 3 by the end of the call.

If I don't get back to it, I tell myself I'm allowing the sentences "to sit around and gain weight" (Chekhov).

Revu2

I've not created an account on/with Chat GPT. It seems to require a mobile phone number. Perhaps it uses the cellphone for multi-factor authentication, but I don't want to give it out, especially to a firm that specializes in AI. Instead, I've tried YouChat and some Open Source AI platform that was just so awful that I didn't even bother to publish the transcript.

I do like Claude a bit better than YouChat. Claude did not object outright to checking out my blog and rendering an opinion on it the way YouChat did. But Claude was incorrect about saying that I was knowledgeable about "Palm PDAs, older Macs, and vintage gaming systems." I am not knowledgeable about that, I've never written about those items, and I think it might've made that up. It's also possible that it confused some advertising with legitimate blog content.

Well, here's an update on my telecom transition from metal wire to optical fiber...

The technician finally came out just before the July 4 weekend. He scoped out the site and said he couldn't do a thing because they'd need to bring the cable down from the pole and to the house. He looked at the existing wire, most of which was buried, but part of which was lying on the ground. He remarked that that type of wire is meant to be used only for aerial installations. I told the Customer Service agent who initiated the service call that my wire was buried. But she insisted that the service was aerial. Well, the street is serviced with overhead wires, that's true. But my house has all its utilities underground.

The technician initially said he'd like to put the "box" and router in the basement, but I said I wanted it in the "office" where the DSL modem is. But now that I think long-term, his suggestion is a better choice. Today, the modem is in an office. But once I'm gone, the room will be some kid's bedroom (if the house remains standing at all). I can clearly see the parents grumbling about the situation every time they need to reset the box. Or worse, the sulky teenager messes with it to annoy the rest of the family.

So I'll go along with a basement installation as long as the technician can assure me that the equipment will be impervious to mouse pee and poop.

Sorry I missed this, but wow what a disparaging set of events to get in the way of your creative process!

If you're comfortable with Wordpress, perhaps you can select one of their free templates and place your content into it. (I like WordPress -- I selected it for my wife's blog, although I use Blogger for my own.) WordPress can also provide the hosting and domain registration for you. You'd not need GoDaddy unless you already have the domain registered with them. (And perhaps not even then.) A church I go to was also having trouble with GoDaddy, so it might be good if you can eliminate them.

Good luck to you and with NanoWriMo!

Hi Team,

SPG, thanks for the comments on AI. there's a lot of commentary of the made up stuff. Likely because determining whether something is "true" or not is a hard skill. I read a while ago about a teacher flipping through sites looking up something and clicked out of one really fast saying not to use it because it was false or fake. His class stopped him with, "How did you know that?"

There's a lawyer being punished and sued because he submitted to COURT the results of his AI query as his own. Lots of made up cases and citations ...

To me, All AI is for my background use. And fixing spelling and grammar. What I love is that sentences come back correct for these little seeming things which take up far more time than their weight when proofing.

Good luck with the rewiring upgrade.
Revu2

Well, the guy is here right now putting down the cable. It's Sunday afternoon, and we've been having drenching, flood-inducing rain in this area, the likes of which haven't been experienced for 50 years.

I heard and saw him manually digging a trench with a flat shovel not too far from the coax for cable and the DSL. He assumed the fiber would be coming down the same pole as that service. But it won't be -- I directed him to the other pole and then showed him where on the house the technician wants to put the box. He was glad -- he can use his machine to dig the trench. That's the noise you'd be hearing now if you were sitting next to me.

His English is not good, so I wonder if he read the requisition that identified the utility pole and "Northwest corner of house." Or perhaps I'm wrong. We'll find out soon.

One thing that Chester and I did not foresee was that the ISP would increase the price of the other services I have bundled with the Internet. The ISP also provides VoIP (telephone service) and they sneak in a "Security Bundle," which I already said I wanted canceled.

This month's bill showed nearly a $10 increase over the previous month (from $116.78 to $125.12), even before getting the fiber in place! It looks like the extra is $2 from the Security Bundle and $5 from the VoIP. Each of these are taxed, so those taxes increase.

I'll still come out slightly ahead for a while.

Hi, Guys,
I landed in the middle of a happy story:

Twenty years ago, my daughter went to Russia, and stayed with a great family.
Six months ago, she got a phone call. The family had escaped from Russia and was in Florida. Of course, my daughter offered them a place to stay if they needed it. They are now staying with her,. Last night, they came over to my house for dinner, and we had the best time. I got to practice my Russian. (I am not fluent. ) I found karaoke songs in Russian, and we sang (English and Russian.) Sasha, the father, has a great voice. They still have a lot of hurdles to get over. - learning a new language, new customs, making new friends, getting a job. They have an eight year old boy who is not happy about learning a new language and making new friends.
Okay, I had a great time. I hope they did too.
There's so much garbage in the world today. I'm grateful that I got to see some of the good stuff.

Our employer is rolling out guidance on how to use AI in the work place. As well, they're working on hosting an AI service internally. I image the marketing people will be using it. I'm sure that the legal department is concerned that a public AI would infringe competitors' copyrights. Not to mention, such a tool would provide our content to a competitor!

Slipped on you, delightful, but glad I noticed it tonight, and I'm so happy for your daughter's Russian second family!

I did find that the AI ignored my incorrect use of "connotate" and replied with "connote," which is the word that I should've used.

D~, what a great good news story about your daughter and her reunion with her Russian hosts. I remember when you were debating getting the kareoke machine, and now you've turned it to great use over and over again. A good buy. What song would we cue up for that?

Speaking of the K machine, I'm invited to a party where there will be K singing. I style myself as "audience" for a reason. My party skill are eating the free food and small talk. Part panic/part fantasy now as I count down the days. I have to go to the bank today and the host is leaving town—hm, maybe I can bribe her not to force me to sing. Oh, should mention that I don't drink alcohol, so whatever I do is felt at full awareness.

Today measlies include

• scheming how to avoid traffic delays caused by bridge repairs,
• collecting free catered meals,
• going to the bank,
• attending a film discussion group (Elaine May's Mickey and Nikey on deck) &
• second day of four on some condo yucks.

And my philosophical puzzle: our Fisher kitchen shears have gone missing—do we make do and wait out their mysterious re-discovery or do we buy a new pair?

Revu2

R , Of course the shears will show up right after you buy a new pair. So I have no good answer for your philosophical question. Meanwhile, I am awed by your ability to try out new things. I just want to use what I'm familiar with. (I had to look up Claude on the Internet. AI is wonderful when it works, and it's a bear when it doesn't. I got a text from Xfinity saying that there was a problem with my WiFi, and if I answered yes to the techs, they'd send out someone to fix it. Of course I figured it was spam, because who ever heard of Comcast wanting to fix something? I got a text from Xfinity confirming a bill payment, and it came on the same number as the text about fixing the wifi. (my wifi is crumby.) So I answered the text. Xfinity then texted me with try these things first." Their comments looped over and over again. I do know how to reach a human. I'll use the phone number for new customers. They never send out the robots when they want you to buy something.

Hi AFMSAD. What new things am I trying out? Or, alternatively, I'm always doing tiny new things that show up. I guess I have to pick.

Tomorrow we're going to see an outdoor showing of a movie. Haven't done that! in the whole of our time together. Plays in the parks. Yup. Music in parks. Yup. Might be fun.

Off to the Jung Cafe to discuss the Handless Maiden fairy tale in the morning. Long and complex tale with lots of meaning for some people, especially women. I plan to listen. I always do, but then I get an idea.

Revu2