The Boston Diaries

“There's a new Zuckerberg movie coming out!” “Yes, the ‘The Social Reckoning.’ It's an Aaron Sorkin film.” “Didn't he do ‘The Social Network?’” “Yes he did.” “I heard he asked Jesse Eisenberg to reprise his role as Mark Zuckerberg, but Jesse turned it down because he didn't want to play such an evil person again.” “Wait! Didn't he also play Lex Luthor?” “Yes.” “He's saying that Lex Luthor is less evil than Mark Zuckerberg?” “Seems so.”

In the past week, we've learned through multiple trips to the pharmacy that two of Bunny's medications have been discontinued and alternatives have to be found. And then it was phone tag and several lost emails to her doctor before she got replacement prescriptions. And it's those lost emails that are very annoying. It turns out that the doctor's office uses Microsoft Lookout for handling all their email. I run my own email server. I've sent email to that doctor before, but that was maybe last…

I came across this video (untitled) which is a protest against LLM-generated videos on Youtube (with a title that is pure link bait and not in any way true). I do wonder how effective this form of LLM protest will be on Youtube, as so far, this seems to be the only one of its type that I've come across. I wish them luck, but I'm not too optimistic about this.

The Star Wars prequel trilogy was more political than the original series. I mean, “Star Wars: The Phantom Menance” started the film with a blockade and trade negotiations. And I felt that the plot was more sophisticated than the original series, as the main protagonist, Senator Palpatine/Darth Sidious, arranged events to come out on top no matter what happened: By convincing the Trade Federation to blockade Naboo, his own homeworld, and coerce Queen Amidala to sign a treaty legitimizing the…

Bunny received a flyer in the postal mail claiming she could win “$15,000 Cash or Choose Your Cruise—Spain, Italy, Greece, and More!” There were just three simple steps to claim the prize: Pull the tab of the attached VIN Gauge Combination Box™ and your 5-digit number will light up. Scratch off the circle below. If the two numbers match, you are one of our GRAND PRIZE WINNERS. Immediately call the phone number below to find out which of the five prizes you won (see the prize list below). First…

It appears that someone is wrong on the Internet, and if Hacker News is anything to go by, that person is me! Or rather, it might Justin Prime who wrote that Stack Exchange post about Gmail's possibly buggy support for periods in the local part of an email address. But one thing not brought up in the Hacker News thread is that Gmail supports custom domains. So if some other Sean Conner were to have Gmail support email for example.org, then I would expect seanconner@example.org (our hypothetical…

I went out to get Bunny and I some lunch, and as I was leaving, as I used my fob to pop open the trunk to store the food for the trip home, I noticed that a car near my own honked briefly and flash its headlights. Odd, I thought. I then used my fob to unlock the car, and again, the nearby car honked briefly and flashed its headlights. I then used my fob to lock my car, but this time, the nearby car sat silent. I unlocked my car again, and again, the nearby car honked and flashed its lights. I…

I was reading the Lobsters thread about the article “A researcher bought noreply.net. Companies started sending him secrets” when I left a comment about my own struggles with receiving emails for other Sean Conners. That started a thread that swamped the comment section about other people who had similar stories, so it's nice to know that I'm not alone. Also, here's one of my favorite comments in that thread (for reasons that should be apparent): I was about to say, "I know a guy with a whole…

As I was mowing the lawn today at Chez Boca, cursing myself for letting it go a few weeks, I was reminded that it wasn't as bad as that one time at Casa New Jersey. I'm thankful for that.

[This is me reposting a comment I left on Lobsters about “Taste Is All That's Left,” a post about vibecoding. I think my comments works well enough on its own here as a post. —Sean] As I read this, I was reminded of two quotes. The first is about the taste gap from Ira Glass: Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just…

I use the Shunting Yard algorithm to handle precedence when parsing expressions in my assembler. It's great because not only is it simple to implement, but it simplifies the code in a hand-written recursive descent parser. The BNF is effectively: ; BNF per RFC-5234 expr = factor *(op factor) op = '*' ; just the basic ops for now / '/' ; adding more is just adding / '+' ; them to this definition / '-' factor = literal / var / '(' expr ')' literal = DIGIT+ var = (ALPHA / '_') (ALPHA / DIGIT /…

“The TV remote isn't working again!” “You need to really smash that select button.” “I am! See?” “Hmmm. Let me try … oh. There you go.” “The remote hates me!” “It seems so.”

I received yet another email for Sean Conner but this time, it wasn't at Gmail! It was surprising because it was sent from my friend Lorie who currently lives in Pennsylvania, about the new Area Director for Toastmasters, which is funny, because I do not live in Pennsylvania, nor have I been involved with Toastmasters since the 5th grade (ages 9–10 for non-US people). I wrote her back about this, and I received the following back: Oh my word, I was trying to send to a different Toastmaster that…

Chris Siebenmann uses iPhone as an alarm clock, and his reasons are largely why I too, I keep my old iPhone (which is no longer supported by the Oligarchic Cell Phone Company) as an alarm clock (and why I don't have a new iPhone that is supported is a complicated story I'd rather not get into for my own sanity). And I use the iPhone for all the reasons that Chris does. But one aspect that Chris doesn't mention is the ability to change the alarm sound to prevent myself from being conditioned to…

Back when I added a factorial operator to my assembler, the code only applied it to numeric literals because the code that implemented it appeared in the same function as parsing a numeric literal. I only found the bug when I tried to apply a factorial to a subexpression in parenthesis, for example, -(2+1)!. The fix was easy, just move the code out of the numberic literal parsing routine rvalue() to rfactor() where the unary + and - occur, as well as handing subexpressions. But the fix lead to…

I know it was probaby inevitable, but I still found it surprising and rather upsetting to see that our television updated itself and that we had to accept the new terms of service. I'm not sure what would have happened had we refused. Would it have bricked itself? And what “service” has changed that required new terms? Sending back our watching habits to the mother ship? Watching one more ad ad we turn it off? Sigh.

You would think that now that Bunny was home now that we could relax for a bit. But nooooooooo! We had to call today to schedule a follow-up visit at the house. This follow-up visit is for tomorrow, then a scheduled visit to Bunny's general doctor on Thursday, and a follow-up visit to the orthopedist on Friday. I don't think she's ever had this many scheduled medical visits before. Nor so quickly. Geeze.

After nearly two months from breaking her shoulders, Bunny is finally released from the rehabilitation center. Her arms still hurt and she still has some range issues with her arms, but nothing that requires her to remain in the center. After signing a bunch of forms, we were able to walk out, and with no help, she was able to get into the car. We're home now. I still have a few observations about the habilitation center. Everyday I was there (and I was there every day) in the main hall I would…

I'm at the rehabilitation center where Bunny is rehabilitating her broken shoulders and all the TVs in the place shut down, and it's suddenly quiet. Maybe not as silent as Rachel, Nevada, or maybe when a Las Vagas casino lost power (talk about dead silence—it was weird!), but still, it's eerie.

While Bunny was otherwise occupied with a nurse I took the opportinity to look around outside. While there, I found this odd staircase off the side of a path: I'm not sure what the purpose of such a structure could be, perhaps a place to sit down? But there were benches along the path. Perhaps stairs to Narnia? Perhaps?

While I am known to some of the LLMs (link via Flutterby), my own score (or “strength” as the site calls it) is in the upper two digit range. It picked up that I'm a blogger, but it also confabulated that I worked on the Apache module mod_python. Heh … close, but no cigar!

Bunny is doing as well as can be expected, given that she really can't use her arms to get out of bed or a chair. But she does like looking at the finches they have in the main hall:

As my tires were being addressed at a local tire shop, I meandered across the street to have lunch and browse at some stores to kill some time. At a gaming store, I came across this little fellow defending this terroritory: He seemed very keen on keeping this corner of the store to himself. I let him be.

From the video “How Many Words Do You ACTUALLY Know?” comes this quiz VocabOwl: The Scientific Word Count, which claims to measure how large of a vocabulary you know. I took the quiz, which asks for the definitions of 100 words (twenty each from a basic list, intermediate list, advanced, export and grandmaster) and from that, estimates how many you know. I missed 6 out of the 100 words (two from the advanced category, and four from the grandmaster) and so, according to this quiz, my vocabulary…

Speaking of left-handed people, here's a video of why so many people are right-handed. An executive summary might be, beacuse of our brains and how parts of it specialize for certain tasks. It's worth a watch.

Up front, Bunny is still doing well at rehabilitation for her broken shoulder. As I was getting ready to visit her, my car complained about one of the tires being underinflated. Seriously underinflated. And looking at the in-car display showing the tire pressure, yes, that was at a level that I would not feel safe driving. But no problem, we have an air compressor and the adaptor to inflate tires for it. Okay, slight problem in that I have to dig it out from behind some stuff and set it up, and…

What a week! One week ago, Bunny was transfered to the rehabilitation center. The hospital had arranged for her to go to (what I'm calling) The Good Rehab™, but Bunny wanted another one that was much closer to Chez Boca. As in walking distance of Chez Boca (that is, if you ignore multiple fences along the way and the lack of a cross walk across a six lanes of traffic on a major road). So that's where she was transported to. But upon entering that place, it was clear it was a mistake. What…

The good news—Bunny will be discharged from the hospital tomorrow. The neutral news—she's going to a rehabilitation center near to Chez Boca. The bad—it was a rough day with the physical therapist. Oh was it a rough day.

I think I found the reason why the hospital parking garage was full. I arrive to the lobby to the sound of bag pipes. Down the hall was a Scottish pipe band making the rounds of the hospital. Had I known there would be a concert ongoing, I might have tried to come earlier for a better parking spot. I'm also surprised I didn't hear them in the parking garage. In other news, Bunny is doing well. It still hurts when she moves, but other than that, not much else to report, other than the doctors…

I arrive at the hospital parking garage. For the past few days I've been able to park on the second, maybe third level of the garage. But today is different. As I'm driving, there are no open parking spots that aren't reserved for doctors or handicapped people. I drive through the second level, the third level, I'm beginning to get worried as I drive through the fourth level, and by the time I hit the fifth and final level, I'm afraid I'm going to have to drive backwards down the parking garage…