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If at first you don't succeed, try different drugs
Well, maybe I'm going to write workweek & weekend posts for a while.
On Monday everything with my dad was terrible, and then on Tuesday he woke up. We are just bags of chemicals, y'all -- they were trying anti-psychotic drugs to break the delirium, and they switched a drug (from Seroquel to Haldol) and he basically came all the way back. It's crazy. I read so much about what it would mean for an AI to be conscious, and the growing scientific acceptance of the idea that animals are conscious (duh), and somehow we forget that we are only intermittently conscious ourselves. We are flickering things. What happens to us at night, hmm, where are "we" then? I think we don't exist. Our hardware can run in at least two states, and not all of them generate consciousness. At any rate, on Tuesday the man I will call "recent Dad" woke back up and I even talked to him on the phone. I was (and am) hugely relieved -- I did not want to get yanked off to Montana without even being able to plan, and now I'm not sure about going but if I do go, it seems likely I'll be able to plan it a bit. Dad's continued to improve since then, and has even stepped down from the ICU to a normal hospital floor.
Also on Tuesday, before all that, I got a mammogram and it was normal.
Wednesday and Thursday it felt really good just to be able to pay attention to life again and do things without tremendous friction. I worked late on Wednesday and was thrilled about it, just a long cool slide of answering emails and not feeling so behind anymore.
Friday my work laptop decided to die in an interesting way. It can't find its own screen display, which always stays black, but it does find the external monitor if rebooted with the HDMI cable connected, and that makes it usable. I lost time to re-validating my emergency Chromebook and being on chat with tech support, but I can work and there's a new laptop being shipped soon.
I haven't heard back from either the aptitude test people (who I poked on Friday) or the company that owns the second floor, though they said they'd get back to me. I wonder if the delay is a hopeful sign -- at least I didn't get an instant no. A yes would really help me solidify my plans for next year, but a no would simplify life now, so I can handle either branch.
On Monday everything with my dad was terrible, and then on Tuesday he woke up. We are just bags of chemicals, y'all -- they were trying anti-psychotic drugs to break the delirium, and they switched a drug (from Seroquel to Haldol) and he basically came all the way back. It's crazy. I read so much about what it would mean for an AI to be conscious, and the growing scientific acceptance of the idea that animals are conscious (duh), and somehow we forget that we are only intermittently conscious ourselves. We are flickering things. What happens to us at night, hmm, where are "we" then? I think we don't exist. Our hardware can run in at least two states, and not all of them generate consciousness. At any rate, on Tuesday the man I will call "recent Dad" woke back up and I even talked to him on the phone. I was (and am) hugely relieved -- I did not want to get yanked off to Montana without even being able to plan, and now I'm not sure about going but if I do go, it seems likely I'll be able to plan it a bit. Dad's continued to improve since then, and has even stepped down from the ICU to a normal hospital floor.
Also on Tuesday, before all that, I got a mammogram and it was normal.
Wednesday and Thursday it felt really good just to be able to pay attention to life again and do things without tremendous friction. I worked late on Wednesday and was thrilled about it, just a long cool slide of answering emails and not feeling so behind anymore.
Friday my work laptop decided to die in an interesting way. It can't find its own screen display, which always stays black, but it does find the external monitor if rebooted with the HDMI cable connected, and that makes it usable. I lost time to re-validating my emergency Chromebook and being on chat with tech support, but I can work and there's a new laptop being shipped soon.
I haven't heard back from either the aptitude test people (who I poked on Friday) or the company that owns the second floor, though they said they'd get back to me. I wonder if the delay is a hopeful sign -- at least I didn't get an instant no. A yes would really help me solidify my plans for next year, but a no would simplify life now, so I can handle either branch.
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