How I See It: Reflections on spirituality, technology, and the art of everyday life

This week's update covers progress at work, upcoming dental treatment, and a significant development regarding my ongoing urinary issues. Things at work are going well. I'm making real progress on the project I'm currently working on, and it is encouraging to see things moving forward. My dentist contacted me this week to let me know that my new crown is ready to be installed. Unfortunately, my appointment is not until Thursday, so I'll have to wait a little longer before that work is completed. For several years I have been experiencing urinary difficulties, including frequent urination, occasional bladder control issues, and problems initiating urine flow. In 2022, I saw a urologist and tried several medications to treat the problem. At that time, my urologist wanted to perform a cystoscopy, an examination in which a small camera is inserted through the urinary tract to determine what is causing the symptoms. I decided to hold off on that procedure until the pro...

  Weekly Update 05/16/26 – 05/23/26 (Medical Week, Dog Fight, Hematoma Recovery) This week’s Weekly Update was dominated by medical appointments, an unexpected dog fight, and continuing problems with my right leg. Despite all of that, work is going well and there were at least a few reassuring medical results along the way. This has definitely been a medical week, but I managed to get through it. While I was in Irvine I was walking about four miles a day without pain. I returned to Vancouver on May 6th after a 2.5-hour flight. I did not notice anything immediately, but sometime during the following week, around May 10th–15th, I started noticing pain in my right calf. At first it felt somewhat like shin splints along the ridge of my leg below the knee. Since I thought it was a shin splint, I decided to take a day off from my usual one-mile morning walk to give the leg a chance to heal, but that same day the pain started getting worse. I checked with Astra (ChatGPT), and she sug...

 Well, the big news this week has all been around the arrival of the new puppy. I do not yet know the puppy’s name, as Dawn likes to give her dogs “special names,” like Boudica, Gurta, and Bouraged, and I cannot promise I will either remember or spell the name of this dog correctly. We picked the puppy up on 05/10 in The Dalles and drove her home to Vancouver. The puppy is what Dawn calls “dapple,” which apparently means having dappled spots on her coat. She is a nice little puppy and very affectionate. This brings the number of dogs we have up to seven, I think, not including the two puppies from Carolyn, who are now about four weeks old and growing fast. Unfortunately, on the evening of the 10th, Dawn noticed that the new little puppy was coughing a lot. It looks like the poor little thing has kennel cough, a highly contagious condition. So now we have the dogs broken up around the house and are quarantining the new little girl. Otherwise, it was a normal week of going to w...

Weekly Update 05/03/26 – 05/08/26 (California Business Trip, Alaska Airlines, Rental Car Problems) Sorry this is late. I did not have enough energy to write it on Saturday. Last week was an eventful week. This post is part of my ongoing Weekly Update series and covers my trip to Southern California for work, a visit with family, and a few unexpected travel surprises. It started Saturday morning as I was getting ready to go to the airport. I thought I would take a minute and empty the kiddie pool that had been sitting in the backyard for months. Dawn uses it to help sterilize branches she wants to use in the vivarium she built for her collection of geckos and other lizards. She fills the pool with water and Clorox and lets the branches soak for a few days. I thought I could simply lift one side of the pool and let the water spill out the other side. When I tried, I found it was too heavy, so I had a bright idea. I could lift the pool enough to create a wave that would splash over ...

This week’s update focuses on ongoing work progress, troubleshooting in FACTS ERP, and a practical example of how AI tools are improving development workflows.   This week has been focused primarily on work and preparing for my first visit to headquarters next week. I did run into an issue with my hearing aids. The right side stopped working, and I ended up needing to replace the speaker. Fortunately, the warranty covered the repair, so it was more of an inconvenience than a real problem. At work, I had a good example of how AI is starting to change the way I approach development. I created a new program in FACTS, where a significant portion of the behavior is driven by metadata files that define how the program operates. I used an existing program as a starting point and copied it to build the new one. However, when I tested it, the new program became stuck in an endless loop. I initially tried debugging it the traditional way, stepping through the code line by line, but i...

It has been an uneventful week. The big items have been my root canal, a new PCP (almost), and what I’m thinking of as the death of trust. To begin, on Wednesday, I had my root canal. I must admit I’m very impressed by how much anesthesia has advanced in my lifetime. I remember my first filling when I was a kid, my mother warning me over and over that I had to be careful after the procedure because the whole side of my face would be numb, and I could bite my cheek or my tongue without even feeling it. She was right. My whole face felt strange, and I had no idea what my tongue was doing. This time it was nothing like that. There was a little tingling around my eye, but not my whole face. The entire time I could feel my tongue and was never in danger of biting it. In fact, if it were not for the pain of the injection in the roof of my mouth and them testing the tooth they were going to work on, I would never have known that my sensation was gone. As for the procedure itself, I didn’t...