Have a coffee… (sugar-free) vanilla latte with soy milk and a chocolate drizzle (it was too sweet, TBH, but it was a nice treat on a Sunday morning). Before Covid, I was one of those people who would leave the house every day in search of a coffee drink, and a place to sit and write. Fast forward to now, I prefer the coffee I make at home to the > $7 latte in an overcrowded coffee shop. It’s not like there’s anything special about the drink(s) — I brew my coffee in a moka pot on the stove, use soy milk from the grocery store, and have a couple of syrups to change things up once in a while. While the coffee drinks aren’t anything special, the beans are extraordinary: High Drive roast from Indaba Coffee, here in Spokane (10/10, highly recommend).

Even though there’s nothing terribly special about my coffee drinks, being able to make coffee I like takes some of the stress and busy-ness out of my daily routine, and I like that a lot.

In August, I finished another successful semester at school. MySQL is neat, and I would like to delve into it more deeply, but now I’m on to XML (starting week 4 this week), and I’m enjoying learning about it. We spent last week working on XPath, and it’s yet another thing I’d like more experience with, because it’s very useful for selecting data within XML documents. Of course, the way I’m using it right now is clumsy, inefficient, and not very effective, but it’s new to me, so that’s to be expected. (Newsflash: sometimes it’s actually fun to be really bad at something… I think that acknowledging limitations can actually make a subject more expansive and interesting — “ok, so I can’t do this thing (at least not yet), but is there something I can do in this subject area?” Also, perfectionism is exhausting, and I don’t have the brainspace for it.)

I’ve written about how I’m trying to think about AI and how to use it, and I still don’t have an answer that I’m comfortable with. I’ll be exploring the ethics of AI in a course a little later on, but I’m not finding everyday use for it yet. Convenience seems to be the selling point right now, but frankly, if I’m going to be spending a bunch of time confirming information, I’d rather double-check information from “primary” sources (even if they’re not technically the primary source, maybe they cited the primary source or have some other relationship to it) than information from an LLM (where the primary sources aren’t necessarily revealed or cited).

So I haven’t figured out how to effectively use AI for what I’m doing now, but there is a technology that I’m re-considering: social media. I love it (Threads, X, Instagram) for learning about people and/or events — I learned a lot from paralympians and members of the media who took the time to post about their experiences on Threads. It was amazing, because I don’t feel like I’ve ever had access to much information about the Paralympics. Also, I enjoy following artists and scientists and content creators, and it’s great to be able to curate your feed to see (mostly) what you’ve decided you want to see. It’s also not terribly difficult to just skip over content that I don’t find interesting or useful. There’s some amazing value there… if you (mostly) stay out of the comments.

I made the mistake of posting something about a frustrating experience I had with my primary care doctor. It was not a constructive thing to do. There was no simple remedy, and because it was a personal experience, there’s not much constructive for others to comment on.

There were many “you need to get a new doctor” comments, a couple of helpful comments illuminating the ins and outs of insurance, and some trolls accusing me of taking advantage of the system (“How dare you ask your doctor about a health concern that she’s treated you for in the past 10 months. What is wrong with you?!”). Of the trolling comments, my favorite was, “You’re a liar.” OK, commenter who doesn’t know me, has never met me, and wasn’t there… sure. Anyway, lesson learned. I walked into the rake, and have no one to blame but myself.

For the record, I respect and appreciate my primary care provider, but I suspect she’s really overworked. For the last few years, I have had concerns about the way that particular medical system is managed, and also the way my insurance works within that particular ecosystem. Bottom line: it’s probably time to figure out a different primary care situation. But that’s a daunting option, because there’s a distinct possibility that it may not be better anywhere else. American healthcare… sigh. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful to have access to medical care, and it’s a privilege to have insurance. Understanding that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s a frustrating system to navigate, and I suspect at least some of the confusion is by design.) So anyway, it’s difficult to adequately convey all of that — in a nuanced way — via a social media post; my attempt was an epic failure.

My *new* social media strategy is to use it only to post (or re-post) positive or interesting information, or to hype up other people who are doing great things (there are so many!). The rest of it has too much potential to be both unhelpful and toxic.

On that note, have a delightful day, and another fancy drink: strawberry matcha latte with homemade strawberry purée, soy milk, and ceremonial grade matcha.