Aaron's Status

5:15 pm

Physical therapy works

As previously noted, I climbed yesterday and sent some at-grade stuff, including my “project V4” that I couldn’t send in the previous session (after several attempts). Doing it felt fine, but my back was really tired and sore after standing around the carnival for hours.

This morning I had a little pinch on one side, which never fails to convince me that it’s all going to hell, but after doing my PT exercises I immediately felt better.

Since getting cut loose from in-person PT, I was instructed to do the mobility and stretching work every day, and add in the strength movements three times a week, so I chose to do those on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Today being a Monday, I did the full gauntlet, and it really felt fine.

Boy do I ever have a lot of stretching ahead of me.

Google Notebook LM

Google rolled out an experimental, I dunno, “research assistant” tool called Google Notebook LM. Unlike other generative AI tools, this one requires you to feed source documents into it and it can then build summaries, tables of contents, answer your questions, and more, solely based on that content.

I haven’t done much with it, but I was intrigued by this feature called “audio overview,” which takes all of the stuff you’ve put in and generates a sort of “podcast” with a man and a woman speaking to each other about whatever is in your source material.

Summarizing a ton of text into something that looks like a casual conversation isn’t that new and isn’t that amazing, but what is amazing is just how real these voices sound. The intonation, the little vocal hiccups, the laughs… It’s kind of creepy.

This thing is a Google Labs project and they haven’t monetized it yet, so, give it a try, let me know what you do with it.

Micro-blogging my life

This is my 14th status update in September. I had a couple gaps in there but for the most part I’ve posted every day. My intent for this thing is mainly to crystallize my own memory, to make sense of the things that happen each day, and surface what seems important to reflect on.

How is it going? I think it’s working, I like doing it, I look forward to it, and having this outlet has prompted me to start keeping a little list of notes of what I want to expound on when I write this status update, which helps me to be mindful of what is happening.

What I like most about it is not having any expectations about it. These posts will be as short or as long as I feel like, I will write about whatever I think is important to me, and I don’t need to distract myself with the question of whether any of it is “useful.”

Back when Livejournal was a thing, I really enjoyed just writing for the sake of it. I used to write hilariously descriptive fictionalized accounts of current events in my life and that was, at least for me, enormously fulfilling. It’s good writing practice, too!

Most people could be better writers, myself included.