I wrote about my medical shenanigans a way back, when I had an adenoma removed from the pituitary gland. I am happy to say that today's check-up (part of the aftercare) revealed no evil surprises, and all seems to be functioning as well as it should.

The only after-effect that I can really point out is that my nose feels slightly congested easier than before, which is a little annoying sometimes - but not too bad to live with. Having a lost or reduced sense of smell would have been much, much worse.

So I am good to go for another year and a half, until the next check. Hooray! 

It's gotten a good bit cooler here, though it's still plenty warm, and there's still a heatwave in the prognosis for next week - which is, well, not the best of things if you ask me.

The Forum mails have been sent out, there are the first registrations for the Forum coming in, and I am very profoundly relieved that this is running now.

The hose have arrived at the place where they are supposed to be, so all that remains now is to send off the paper with numbers on it (which has been prepared, and is ready to go out once I've finished blogging).

I am, however, still woefully behind on some other things, and I do need to do some more post packing today and early tomorrow. Unfortunately the Little Cat is still not really better; the infection has come back even though we have seen no obvious cause of extra stress. The last meds she had made her all drowsy and lose her appetite, which is not good, so now we are trying different meds and hope these will help. 

It's well possible that the heat was one of the factors, even though it wasn't a really obvious one. Whatever it was, we're now trying to give her some mussel powder that is supposed to assist with bladder issues, and lots of cuddles, and also sneaky treats to hide her pills in. 

To my great dismay, the ones that worked wonderfully last time still worked... until the package was empty. Then, alas, we bought a new one, but they smelled and looked differently, and the company must have changed the recipe sufficiently that she is not interested in them at all anymore. There we were, buying the other taste variant, same outcome. Meh all over.

Now, fortunately, we have successfully tested another snacky thing that is soft enough to hide a small pill in, and apparently tasty enough to be inhaled almost whole. Phew. So now we hope the new stuff does its job, and does it well, and she will be able to tolerate the meds sufficiently, and that we can get her stabilised afterwards. She is, after all, long past the generally expected lifetime for a little cat, which in general does not increase tolerance to stuff. 

No, not the video yet, I'm sorry. But you do get a screenshot... 

...and you only get this for a blog post today, because I was at a nice presentation with lunch afterwards, and the rest of the day slipped into this and that and now I'm sending out the info about the Textile Forum registration being online. Hooray! 

It really feels like summer currently - and it's definitely "thirsty weather". We've started placing a flat bowl of water outside every night when we stack the hedgehog snackhouse, and it has definitely been appreciated: 

Quite a few of the guys go for a snack, then a drink; some only come for the water. The Early Hedgehog, who turns up sometime between nine and ten, usually only eats and runs away, but it's quite possible that he has some other source of water.

The pointy guys are definitely enjoying their tiny pool, though! Some go on to drink for the full two minutes that the camera records at a time. By contrast, the birdbath that we installed already last year gets pointedly ignored...

I have received a mail today that my phone will not be receiving further updates. Meh. Big meh.

To be fair, I've had it for more than six years now. Fairphone, the manufacturer, originally promised support for five years after launch, and that was two years ago, so there was an extra two years bonus afterwards. I'm still rather miffed, as the phone is still fine and I am very much not looking forward to getting a new one ever. (The camera is iffy, but I've gotten used to that, and also I really dislike phone changes.)

To be fair even further, I've done some reading on it and apparently it's not just the laziness of the fairphone folks but also the fact that the chip manufacturers stop their support at some time, and voilà, there you go, everything gets harder. 

For now, though, things will still work for a while. After that I will have to see whether I need to switch to LineageOS, and if yes if my bank apps will still work on that. In any case, it's very much a case of meh, and I'm a little disappointed and a little sad. 

So much for my plan to watch a presentation that was available online after the fact - in contrast to the announcement, it was not recorded after all, and is thus not available. It would have been something on backstrap weaving, but due to time differences, the real thing would have been at three o'clock in the night hereabouts. My love for textiles runs deep, but my love for sleep is at least as profound, so I would have passed even if I had known that it will not be recorded. 

Still, funnily, it makes a difference somehow to be disappointed because it's in the middle of the night and one will not join in, or to be disappointed because it was announced to be recorded and then be told it was not, after all. Not that the outcome is any different. 

I am not complaining, by the way - something may have happened, technical or otherwise, to have things turn out like that. What I'd rather complain about (well, among many other things that are of a more political or social nature, but I am planning to do other things this evening as well and will thus not even get started) is how much AI has made searching for stuff on the 'Net harder than before. Back a few years ago, when I was looking for something, there was the occasional thing that was repeated on a few websites. Mostly it was easier to identify and thus fairly quick to sort out - but now, searching is much more cumbersome just due to the sheer amount of copy-and-paste stuff, and repetitions of things quite clearly written by AI. Add that to the fact that some things are hard to search for anyways ("spindle" can mean way too many things, for instance, and some other terms are, well, not advisable due to NSFW reasons) and it gets unpleasant.

Unfortunately, that does not look like a problem that will go away any time soon. This AI stuff is here for a while, and will most probably continue to spew shitty hallucinated texts all over the 'Net, and then gobble them up again to feed itself with the basis for even more, even wilder hallucinations.

You can clearly tell that I'm no fan of the AI boom. Yes, I know that there are some use cases where it's a real help, and I am using AI assistance for those as well. Such as translation help, so you don't have to look up every second word in the dictionary, and yes, I am old enough and old-fashioned enough that there were texts in my life that I had to tackle like this if I wanted to read them. Or programming assistance when it's a common software and a problem that you can very clearly describe, and very clearly describe how you want to solve it. My guideline these days is that if I could find the solution written out by someone (someone real, human, breathing and thinking) on the 'Net somewhere, it's something that may be solveable by AI. If not... nope. With a little nope cherry on top. It's basically a very, very large cross-language dictionary, and that is, in my opinion, all that it's good for, and all that it will be good for. It also has the desire to please you, so chances are high you won't get any solid or sensible advice. Which means... it's a large dictionary with a bias.

In addition, all that "free" use of AI comes at quite a cost - because these servers don't run themselves, and there is a considerable amount of energy and logistics going into them these days. Especially the image generation eats up quite a lot of resources, and with a lot of that being, more or less, utter crap, and also a lot of it being just for fun... well. Meh.

So. Rant over. For now. I'll now go and have a nice, analogue, non-AI (maybe even non-intelligent) evening.

Honestly, it's a disgrace - both the insane price differences between plane and train at some points, and the also insane booking procedures in some cases.

Imagine that you'd like to go to, well, let's say Cambridge. That's a bit of a way, yes, but... it would be perfectly possible to do it by train. Quite nice, even, if you happen to travel on a day where you can catch a night train. I'd go to Munich in the late afternoon or early evening, catch the night train there, sleep my way to Brussels. There a little breakfast maybe, then onto the Eurostar to London St. Pancras, and after that it's just a half-hour hop to Cambridge with National Rail.

Easypeasy. Except... well. I can even find the connection I'd like via the bahn.de portal (that is not always the case with more complicated connections), but I can't book it, probably because they are out of contingency tickets for either the ÖBB nightjet or the SNCF Eurostar. So I'd have to book everything separately, which means there's no automatic possibility to take a later train if one of the booked ones is delayed.

It also means making accounts at four different companies, and booking everything separately, which is probably (though not guaranteed) more expensive than having a single thingie. 

While on the other hand, if I'm to book a flight... that is done very quickly, very easily, even if it were with a change somewhere. And it is still ridiculously cheap (thanks to the still ridiculous minimal taxing done on some of the flight stuff). 

So not only is the plane much faster in this case, it is also cheaper, and you have actual hassle and trouble to book a train. Grrr. 

(As you can tell, I am not amused. Even though, in this case, it will probably end up being the plane anyways because of it being much faster, I would really like the two possibilities to be a little more evened up, regarding the ease of booking and the price.)