The Consistency of Mid-Life

In more uplifting news, I reworked the irrigation so that the tomatoes will get sprinkler water now.


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The woman with the fake tan stepped into my office, sat across from my desk and lit a cigarette.
At least, she would, sometime in the next 20 minutes. Smelling the future has advantages, but precision isn’t one of them.


Optimizing The System

Currently, my favourite coffee in Adelaide based on taste is The Grind in the central markets. They are a treat, as the price is now $7 for a large flat white which must be noted contains a lot of shots of coffee that you will feel after sipping.

We filled up two backups with fruit and vegetables after that, for about $19 (which for future reference was quite good and would have been double at the supermarket).

Then we went to the supermarket and spent a lot of money on groceries like frozen berries, sugar free soft drink, and a royal flush of dog treats.

There's a lamb surplus in 2023, so lamb legs are now much cheaper by volume than excellent tasting coffee. Lamb is a good meat, but a pain to roast as it takes a long time. Today I experimented by searing it in a frying pan with salt, pepper, olive oil and garlic at about 11am and then putting it in the slow cooker on top of a cup of chicken stock and a few sprigs of rosemary. It was ready about 6:30 and I have to say it turned out extremely well for something I put very little effort in to. I even made a wheat-free gravy out of the leftover stock and some chickpea flour and despite being lumpy that was easy cooking too.

Hashtag

Less than three days after professing to having implemented a semantic search with a generative AI front end without any idea how I'd done it, I found myself in a conference room delivering a Powerpoint to about twenty people with authority on the same subject.

This wasn't actually bluster! If you stumbled upon this article due to keyword searching... Since Monday I not only learnt to understand RAG, Semantic Search and hosting models in the cloud a lot better, but I even implemented a Flask UI for one! That's how fast things move in the world of AI in 2023. Or perhaps a sign of how simplified some of these cloud services actually are thanks to the actual geniuses working for the AI and Cloud giants who I admire greatly. Also technically the AI generated the Flask UI for me.

I rode my bike home exactly 160 minutes before sunset. The weather was perfect. Blue skies, a couple of wispy clouds, golden light. I rounded the corner under the King William Bridge and into a panoramic view of beauty. Rowboats cutting through the water. Vibrant grass. Glass buildings shimmering. Water features bubbling. People out enjoying an afternoon beside the Torrens. It was nearly offensively beautiful. What right did I get to pedal my way through a scene like that. I mean the smell wasn't fantastic, but other than that, I felt blessed.


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Raggedy

I started this day having no idea how to implement an Azure hosted AI chatbot that used Retrieval Augmented Generation to incorporate my organisation's data into its response.

By the end of the day, I still have no idea how to implement it, but I'd done it!

Saturday Highs and Lows

Saturday started with a nice walk up Brown Hill with Alex, featuring views over the city and an excited dog.

And ended with watching the 36ers being demolished at home, where I also did not get close to catching a packet of noodles from cheerleaders led by a giant chicken.

Technically it ended with a Zooper Dooper and Luka highlights with Tim, but I didn't take a photo of that.

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