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I seem to be mostly recovered? Fever is gone. My appetite has been gradually returning. I still have a nasty cough and walking up a flight of stairs leaves me winded. But that seems to be getting better as well. And as MrsGF pointed out this morning when I was complaining, it hasn’t even been a week yet since I was diagnosed and it’s going to take time to fully recover from this. I’m no spring chicken, after all.

The most troubling symptom I had were the panic attacks. I’ve had those before but never so often or as severe as they were during this bout with the flu and I wonder if it was due partly to the Tamiflu antiviral they had me on. Apparently there are some rather nasty and thankfully very rare neurological side effects to the stuff and one of those is an increase in anxiety issues with some people, including panic attacks, hallucinations and other nasties that nobody warned me about when they put me on the stuff. Within about 24 hours of stopping taking the stuff it was almost like someone flipped a switch. My thinking seemed to get more clear, the panic attacks began to disappear, I started to get my appetite back and generally started to feel like a human being again.

Can I absolutely attribute the panic attacks and other mental issues I was having to the drug? No. Of course not. But at the same time it seems more than just a coincidence that within 24 hours of stopping taking it there was such a drastic change.

But enough of that. I’m on the mend, nearly back to normal, and am enormously grateful to that and to MrsGF for putting up with me. So let’s get on with this.

Laser stuff: Needless to say I haven’t been doing any work with the lasers during this time. The last thing I needed was the possibility of stray fumes from the lasers getting into the air and irritating my already very angry lungs and respiratory system.

I do want to talk about CNC machines, though. Right before all of this nonsense started I picked up a cheap, desktop CNC machine. Emphasis on the “cheap” part.

I’d wanted to experiment with CNC machines for many years now but two things have held me back. First was the cost. A good CNC machine is not cheap. A decent ones were always several thousand dollars or more and I just couldn’t justify the expense. The second thing that held me back was the mess. These things spew dust and chips everywhere. It’s the nature of the beast and unless I could also afford to buy or had the ambition to build an adequate enclosure for it, I wouldn’t want one in the house because of the mess.

But these little fully enclosed desktop style machines take care of the mess, mostly. That left just the price. But that’s come down too. This little beast up there was only $400, cheap enough for me to be willing to take a chance on it.

Now that I’m starting to feel better I’ll have a chance to set this little beast up and play with it and see what we got here. From what I’ve seen online this little unit doesn’t seem too bad for the price. It is far, far from the best on the market. Not even close. But it’s probably going to be good enough to give me an idea if this is something I want to pursue without breaking my budget.

Now I need to start to catch up on all of the stuff I had to postpone while I was sick. I was supposed to get together with the owners of the brewery in Milwaukee to deliver a new batch of coasters and other goodies and that fell threw. I didn’t want to take the chance of passing this along to them. And in any case I wasn’t fir for human companionship for a while there.

I was cleaning out stuff and found a whole box full of wooden handled bottle openers. Where they came from I have no idea, but we’re thinking of doing some kind of promotional thing with those so we were going to discuss that. There is apparently another brewpub that wants to pick up my line of joke coasters so I need to see if they would object to that.

Damn, it feels good to being able to think straight again!

Friday night I was feeling tired, had the sniffles, nothing new for someone who has allergies like I have. Only these got worse. By saturday it had developed into an uncontrollable cough. A cough so bad it triggered an SVT episode necessitating a trip to the ER. And in between all fo the panic (on my part) by being hooked up to about 20 different electrical leads attached all over me to monitor my heart, not jujst one by 2 IVs. amd a blood pressure cuff, they’re telling me I’m just fine and I should just relax and try to get some sleep????

Hate to say this bue they ended up giving me a sedative because I was having such a bad panic attack it was screwing up all of their readings.

Somewhere along in there I was told I had influenza H3N2. Oh goody.

Well they got all that straightened out and then bright and early the next day I had another coughing fit that triggered another SVT episode and back to the ER we go…

They go what, him again? Yes, him again, my wife sighs. Well, chuck him into a wheel chair and bring him along. You know where to take him.

Say, I hear MrsGf saying under her breath. After yesterday maybe you should just sedate him right off the bat?

I was just thinking the same thing. We’ll load him up on benadryl…

Good thing they did. Probably saved me oe hell of a lot of panic and them having to deal with an old, fat man having having the raving staggers.

Anyway it’s about 3 AM Monday morning now. At least that’s what the computer tells me. My own personal time sense is all over the place. Last night around 7 PM I thought it was 7 AM and was wondering why it wasn’t getting any lighter out. I just got done putting down a great pile of pills they’re having me take. I don[t know what most of them are but they seem to be working I’m actually feeling quite a bit better.

I’m on the third dose of Tamiflu and it really seems to be helping.

Feeling very weak, though. Even simple tasks like bending down to pick up a show leaves me out of breath. Takes me a minute or more to recover from going up ro down stairs. Dr. swears it’s one of the effects of the flu. they imaged my lungs and basically they’re the lungs of someone with a bad case of the flu. Haven’t eaten anything in something like two days. No appetite, but this morning I’m starting to feel hungry so that’s a good sign I thinK

I am going to warn you right up front that this is a rant. It’s gotten to the point where I just can’t stand it any more and if I don’t vent about this I’m going to have to get the dosage on my blood pressure meds increased.

What sparked this was that I recently had the misfortune of listening to a radio interview of some AI utopian nutjob evangelist waxing poetic about how AI is going to benefit the human race, free the human race from the drudgery of working, freeing us to indulge our creative impulses and engage with activities that actually interest us instead of slaving away at work. He was so excited about the “AI revolution” as he called it that I expected him to have to take a break to change is trousers after wetting himself. That the host of the show let him get away with all of that BS was downright embarrassing.

And yes, it was BS. It was, in fact, 100% pure, USDA Choice bullshit from start to finish. Every single thing he said during the five minutes or so he was on the air was utter and total garbage that only served to illustrate that he, like most of these AI evangelists, have no idea of what AIs are or how they work.

Fortunately people are beginning to discover the inconvenient truths about “artificial intelligence”. Independent research is starting to pull back the veils of hype that have hidden away the great, steaming pile of manure that is “artificial intelligence”.

A recent study by MIT showed that the implementation of AIs by corporations has largely been an utter failure. While the data set they used was admittedly limited, it tended to support what I’ve been hearing through reliable sources, and that is that AIs don’t actually work very well when implemented in large scale commercial settings. In the MIT study it was found that 95% of the AI projects implemented by businesses resulted in zero measurable returns. That’s right, zero. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. In some cases implementing AI actually cost the company more money than relying on traditional business methods. The CEO of IBM recently admitted that instead of AI allowing them to reduce the number of employees, they’ve actually had to hire more people than they had before AI was introduced. One company had started to replace its customer support people with AI. That went so badly that they had to scramble to hire back the people they’d just fired, offering abject apologies and bonuses to get them back.

And it doesn’t stop there. A study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism Review, found that more than 60% of the responses it got to news related questions contained erroneous information, referred to non existent sources, or were just flat out wrong. The best of the lot was Perplexity with a 36% failure rate, to a worst of all Grok 3 with a failure rate of a whopping 94%.

And speaking of Grok… My, how quickly we forget. It’s not all that long ago when Grok went 100% full Nazi, declaring itself to be the “Mecha-Hitler”. And after they “fixed” that, it started offering up unsolicited fake nudes of Taylor Swift.

(Oh, there are some areas where they have been successful. Some types of programming, especially lower level “grunt” work, so to speak, seems ideally suited to be done by AI. Remember how the Silicon Valley oligarchs and the sycophant politicians sucking up to them looking for bribes (uh, excuse me) “campaign contributions” went all gung ho about teaching children “coding”? It was coding this and coding that and coding camps and coding schools and coding requirements to “prepare” kids for jobs that largely don’t exist any more.)

These things have also proven themselves to be downright dangerous, especially to people who are facing mental health challenges. There are reliable reports that AIs have allegedly driven vulnerable people to suicide.

The dirty little secret about AI is that it is not intelligent. It does not think. It does not reason. It does not create. The only thing AI can do is regurgitate information that has already been fed into it. There is nothing new there, nothing creative, nothing thoughtful. The only thing these AIs do is spew back information that it has been literally stolen “harvested” from other sources.

And what is the source of most of that information it’s harvested? The internet, of course. The internet, a place where people literally believe Elvis was kidnapped by aliens, that Bigfoot is an interdimensional being from another universe, where pedophiles are kidnapping children and shipping them to Mars, where President Trump is really a lizard creature from the Andromeda Galaxy wearing a skin suit, where….

Well you get the idea.

And here is another thing to consider. What if that utopian wet-dream of that nutjob AI evangelist in that interview I heard is correct and AI and robotics takes over all of the mundane, dull jobs we all have to perform now to keep the world going?

If that comes to pass, you just ended civilization as we know it. Seriously.

Think about it for a moment. Our economy, our whole civilization, is based on the fact that human physical and mental labor has value. We exchange our labor for a token, money, which has value because it is tied to the labor we perform. We use those tokens to trade for products and services provided by others that we cannot provide for ourselves.

If this utopian wet-dream comes to pass, that whole system collapses, totally. Human labor, both physical and mental, no longer has any value at all. None. Now what? How are you going to obtain food, shelter, clothing…

Don’t be silly, the evangelist will say. All those things will be free!!!

Yeah, sure they will.

Yeah, I know. This one is bad even for me. Feel free to throw things at your computer screen.

Artemis Delayed Again:

Once again NASA has delayed the next launch of Artemis, the space agency’s program that is supposed to take astronauts back to the moon using what is one of the most complicated and, frankly, bizarre schemes that even NASA has ever come up with. Artemis, and the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

The Orion space craft that is supposed to carry astronauts is riddled with problems that include gas leaks and heat shield failures. (Nice job there, Boeing) It’s attempt to use it to send astronauts to the ISS ended in failure and when seirious leaks and other problems were discovered after it docked at the ISS and the astronauts were stranded had to wait for a flight from SpaceX to get back home. And the rest of the moon program is even worse. NASA still doesn’t have a lunar spacesuit, doesn’t have a lunar lander, doesn’t have the “mini” space station that will orbit the moon that it says it needs, doesn’t have… Well, it doesn’t have anything it needs to make this work, really. According to NASA’s original time table, the agency should already have astronauts on the moon or be nearly ready to land them there. In reality, we’re looking at mid-2026 before the Artemis is even ready to fly again thanks to numerous problems that have including gas leaks and issues with the heat shield, and it’s going to be years beyond that before anyone actually gets to the moon

And as for the SLS itself, it is so much over budget and will cost so much to launch, that no one knows how the program can even continue. I’ve seen estimates of as much as $2.5 billion per launch. Rumor has it that there’s about a 50/50 chance the whole program will be scrapped. Considering the progress SpaceX has made with its Starship program, it’s going to have similar heavy launch capabilities for a fraction of the cost, so why is NASA even dumping all that money into that black hole in the first place?

Apple AirPods Pro

I love music of all kinds and probably have spent way too much on speakers, turntables, albums, etc. in my life. I’ve had Apple’s basic AirPod headphones, one of the first versions, for a long time but didn’t use them all that often because I found them awkward to use, they fell out of my ears frequently, and while the sound quality was surprisingly good, it wasn’t anywhere near as good as what came out of my stereo system speakers. But along came Black Friday and there was a huge discount on the AirPod Pro. So I got a set for a Christmas present for one of my sons and at that price I couldn’t resist getting some for myself as well.

I’m no expert on headphones. As I said my only experience with these things were the original AirPods. So when I plugged these things into my ears it was quite a shock.

First I thought I’d gone deaf because suddenly I couldn’t hear anything. Not the kitchen exhaust fan, not the furnace fan, not the air filter, not the cat’s water fountain, nothing. There was almost utter, total silence. I hadn’t bothered to read the blurbs for the things because if I had I’d have realized that the Pro model comes with noise canceling technology. And it works so well it’s almost scary. Noise canceling can be turned off, or it can be set to let in some ambient sound and things like that. But at first I couldn’t believe how quiet it suddenly got.

Then I fired up Amazon Prime Music and started going through my playlists. Holy sh*t… I’d never heard anything quite like it before. How the hell do they get something that small to sound that good?

Then there the other goodies, like being able to take phone calls with the things (paired with my phone), interact with Apple’s Siri, and other goodies I haven’t had a chance to explore yet. There are built in microphones for phone calls. There are accelerometers that can sense when I nod yes or shake my head no to respond to Siri, pressure sensitive switch in one of the stems to switch modes or to pause music or switch to the next track.

Like I said, I’m no expert on headphones. Far from it. But damn, these things are good. I might write about them later after I’ve had a chance to use them more.

Pi5 SSD

If you’ve been reading grouchyfarmer for a while you probably know I love the Raspberry Pi computers. Basically the Pi 4 and 5 models are full blown computers costing less than $100, running a version of Linux. Just plug in a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and you have yourself a pretty darn nice little Linux computer that can do just about anything you need to do with a computer, except for things like hard core gaming, video editing, etc. that requires a huge amount of processing power and/or memory. Plus it’s easy to connect to the outside world to work as a controller for robotics and other goodies.

One of the biggest pains in the butt when it comes to the Pi computers has been its reliance on micro SD cards for booting/data storage. Micro SD cards are a serious bottleneck. They have a limited lifespan and for modern computing needs they’re woefully slow. But the new Pi5 can handle modern SSD drives with the addition of a simple plug in board, making it much, much more reliable and much faster. You can roll your own, or you can get one complete with a 250 gig SSD and the add on card, with Rasberian (the Pi’s version of Linux) already installed and ready to go from Canakit for about $200. And I got my hot little hands on one.

I only just started playing with it, so this is something I’ll probably bring up in the future once I have a chance to put it through its paces. But my early impression is that wow, this thing is neat. I wouldn’t have though it would be that much fast than the Pi5s I have that run off the SD card, but yeah, it is. Much, much faster. Using a real SSD instead of that micro SD card makes a huge difference.

Fake Milk

I’m not a big fan of things like almond “milk” and all that stuff. Most of it is, frankly, crap. Horrible taste, non-milk like textures, and the only reason they can claim it’s “healthy” is because the manufacturers shovel in vitamins and minerals from external sources because the tiny, tiny amount of actual real nuts in that “milk” have very little nutritional value.

But over the years I’ve become increasingly sensitive to dairy for some reason. I can’t eat ice cream any more, for example, without experiencing a great deal of gastrointestinal distress. Nor can I eat cold cereal with milk. A bit of cream in my coffee doesn’t bother me. Much. Cheese isn’t a problem. But drinking milk? No way in hell. My eldest son is even worse than I am.

I don’t normally make product recommendations like this, but I have to bring this one up.

So I’ve kind of been keeping an eye out for some kind of fake milk that is reasonably close to the same texture as real dairy milk, and I think I’ve found one. That’s it over there on the left. I picked it up as an impulse buy when I was at Walmart the other day.

The texture, mouthfeel and all of that is pretty similar to a rather rich whole milk. And while it doesn’t taste anything at all like dairy milk, the flavor is pleasant. And even more impressive, it’s a reasonably good substitute for the half and half I normally put in my coffee. And it’s good enough that I might even be able to start eating cold cereal once more. I told my son about it and he picked some up and he loves the stuff.

If you absolutely need to have some kind of milk-like substance for your cereal or coffee or cerealor whatever and can’t handle dairy milk, you might want to give this a try.

Weird Weather

It’s no secret that the weather has been weird for some time now. After the warmest winter we ever had last year, one of the warmest summers we’ve had, and one of the warmest autumns we ever had, temperatures abruptly dropped to well below zero for a few days with some light snow, then abruptly jumped up to 40° with rain… Then we had dense fog for a couple of days.

The brief period of cold resulted in a lot of lakes in the area developing a very thin layer of ice, and people being people, the DNR and the sheriff’s department has had to issue warnings to people to stay the hell off the ice. I’ve heard news stories almost every day of idiots venturing out onto ice that’s still way, way too thin, falling through and having to be rescued.

So, it’s October 29. Deep into fall. Frost on the pumpkin and all that.

About that frost thing…

It’s sunny, blustery, and about 78° and on its way to 82° the weather guy said and I’m tempted to turn the air conditioning back on. Wisconsin is known for it’s odd weather but this?

I have cilantro and tiny onions sprouting from seed out in the raised beds.

I have dill sprouting

And my parsley looks like this:

Oh, and the rose bush out front was starting to go dormant but has now decided it’s going to start flowering again.

This is just ain’t right.