This morning, I stumbled upon something important. KALW's "Your Call" program hosted by Rose Aguilar featured an interview with Dr. VJ Periyakoil about the Stanford Letter Project, an initiative that provides templates to help people communicate their end-of-life wishes to loved ones and healthcare providers.

The conversation was both powerful and practical. Dr. Periyakoil explained how these structured letter templates help people express who matters most to them, what they value, and their healthcare preferences in a way that's accessible across cultural and language barriers. Rose Aguilar shared her own experience with her father's quick passing from pancreatic cancer, highlighting how these conversations are often postponed until it's too late.

As I explored the Stanford Letter Project website (https://med.stanford.edu/letter), I was excited to see they offered templates in multiple languages including Chinese, which would be particularly useful for my family. However, I quickly hit a roadblock: the links to these multilingual resources were broken.

Rather than just moving on, I spent this morning doing what I could to help. I crafted an email to both Dr. Periyakoil and the "Your Call" team, explaining the broken links and how I'd found archived versions on Archive.org that showed what should be there. To my surprise, I was quickly cc'd on an email from Dr. Periyakoil to her assistant requesting the links be fixed. Fingers crossed this small intervention helps make these valuable resources accessible again.

I've also been spreading the word through various channels:

• Sharing the episode on social media (Facebook, X.com, and Bsky)
• Bringing the idea to my fellow Ashby Village Tech Committee volunteers
• Considering organizing a workshop around these letters, possibly connecting it to National Healthcare Decisions Day on April 16

There's something deeply satisfying about these small acts of digital maintenance and community connection. The web is full of broken links and forgotten resources, but tools like Archive.org help us recover what's been lost. Similarly, end-of-life conversations are often overlooked until crisis strikes, but resources like the Stanford Letter Project provide a structure to recover those essential connections before it's too late.

I may be a proud Cal Bear, but I can certainly appreciate this valuable Stanford initiative. Some things transcend rivalries, and helping families have meaningful conversations about what matters most is certainly one of them.

Has anyone else used letter-writing or structured templates to facilitate difficult family conversations? I'd love to hear your experiences.

I'm fascinated that when I ask ChatGPT to speak French with English words embedded in the French, it stays in "French mode" and speaks the English words with what I recognize as a French accent for English. Does that accent come about as a happy byproduct of mapping English sounds into a French speech model -- that is, are "accents" just epiphenomena here? Or does ChatGPT actually have special accent handling?

I'm not sure what to make of the explanation that perplexity.ai gave in response to my musing. Is the answer correct?

Well, I'm going to stop this blogging series and declare success. I had applied to the Recurse Center for a 12 week stint between Sept 18 and Dec 7. When I was turned down, I decided that I still wanted to reserve that time to work on MyInfoNet. Since then, I've found that the other parts of my life demand my attention, and they are more important than MyInfoNet at this time. Sure, I can keep posting each weekday -- and I am proud of myself for doing so for six weeks, but clearly my heart wasn't in much of what I was writing. I'm happy to report that I have plenty of other projects for which I'm collaborating with other people. So back to my regular blogging. I'll post when I have something to say publicly.

Today, I helped the author of Bike to debug how licenses are renewed: Renew Bike License (website version) - Bike Outliner - Hog Bay Software Support

In response to my prompt

There are various "protocols" in Python -- interfaces involving the implementation of certain methods to fulfill a protocol. For example the iterator protocol is implemented via __iter and __next. Confirm what I just wrote and also tell me about other protocols. I understand there is a sequence protocol and a container protocol. True? What other ones?

I got the answer from perplexity.ai:

Yes, you\'re correct about the iterator protocol in Python. It is
implemented via the __iter__ and __next__ methods. An object is considered an iterator in Python if it implements these two
methods

In addition to the iterator protocol, Python also has other protocols
such as the sequence protocol and the container protocol.The sequence protocol is implemented by defining methods
like __getitem__ and __len__. The __getitem__ method is used to get an element at a specific index, and the __len__ method is used to get the number of elements in the sequence. Other methods that can be part of the sequence protocol
include __contains__, __iter__, __reversed__, and
more

The container protocol is less clearly defined in the Python
documentation, but it generally refers to methods that allow an object to store other objects and provide ways to access and manipulate them. This can include methods like __contains__, __iter__, and __len__, similar to the sequence protocol

There are also other protocols in Python. For example, the async
iterator protocol, which is similar to the iterator protocol but used
for asynchronous iteration. It is implemented via the __aiter__ and __anext__ methods

Another example is the protocol for numerical types, which includes
methods
like __add__, __sub__, __mul__, __truediv__, __floordiv__, __mod__, __divmod__, __pow__, __neg__, __pos__, __abs__, __invert__, __complex__, __int__, __float__, __round__, __trunc__, __floor__, __ceil__, and more. These methods allow an object to behave like a numerical value and interact with other numerical values in a meaningful way.There are many more protocols in Python, and they are a powerful tool for creating objects that interact with built-in Python constructs in a natural way. However, there doesn\'t seem to be a comprehensive list of all protocols in the Python documentation

I liked listening to how an expert GTDer is using OmniFocus to implement GTD on GTD Focus President Meg Edwards Returns - The Omni Show (Oct 23, 2023). I\'m still trying to get a good GTD implementation using Obsidian. I see larslockefeer/obsidian-plugin-todo -- but it\'s not been updated since Feb, 2022 -- so I wouldn\'t use it. (Obsidian plugins that aren\'t being regularly updated are probably not worth the effort to use.). There\'s the fascinating little Issues · saibotsivad/obsidian-gtd-no-next-step. Probably the key insight is that I should focus on time-blocking than diving into a complicated GTD setup right now.

I was delighted to get an email today saying that I was eligible to upgrade to a new version of Keyboard Maestro (a license for which I had just purchased a few months ago.) From Stairways Software: Press Releases:

The engine adds a new keyboardmaestro command line tool for triggering macros, modern JavaScript syntax, Apple Text Recognition option, a new palette to show active macro groups, enhanced scripting support, and more.

This morning, I learned about manzt/anywidget: jupyter widgets made easy. I\'m excited to figure out how to use it because I think it\'ll make developing custom widgets much easier.

As described in anywidget: Jupyter Widgets Made Easy | by Trevor Manz | Jupyter Blog:

*anywidget* is a Python library that makes it simple and enjoyable to create custom Jupyter Widgets that run in classic Jupyter notebooks, JupyterLite, JupyterLab, Google Colab, VS Code, and more.