Content-type: text/html Ray Manning

Monday, October 30, 2023 8:02 PM

End of October


On Tuesday I drive to the Del Amo train station, take the A train to downtown Los Angeles, the B train to K-town, and than catch a Lyft ride to Cedars-Sinai hospital. It took less than 60 minutes when google maps suggested that driving would be 90 minutes. I'm way early for my appointment but the oncologist/ontyrologist sees me early and is very happy as we discuss my progress, my difficulties, and my color, and weight. He doesn't even yell at me when I show the picture of me standing on a ladder with a chainsaw to trim the Juniper treees. He justs says, "You can hire someone to do that for you". It looks like if I really push things along I can get the teeth replacement going. I reverse my travel steps and get home quickly - nodding off intermittently on the A train. I have lunch with the MotoGP race and cannot stay awake and fall asleep in bed for tw hours. I'm blaming the need for extra sleep on lots of riding, two vaccines, and a long day of commuting.

On Wednesday I hit the snooze button a number of times and don't get out for cycling until almost 7am. Its a bit foggy down by the ocean but its a good ride today. At home I trim the roses, bring fresh blooms into the house, rake up the remainders of the four Juniper tree trimmings, sharpen the hedge trimmers (after only one use), and tighten the chain on the chainsaw. After a good shower I read the news and markets and have pasta while watching an hour of Netflix. Afterwards I remember the parametric neural network model performance that I wanted to study so I code that in. The model starts with 67 statistics and I had whittled it down to 30 variables using a regression r-Value threshold of 0.2. EVen when I use a threshold of 0.4, the neural network gives great performance with only 15 variables. But it is just as good using the r_Value threshold of 0.5 and 7 variables. This is extremely significant.

It is very foggy on Thursday (near the ocean as the weather people predicted). I do not get out cycling and instead go for an 80 minute walk which inlcudes a quick drop off at the post office and a few supplies from the grocery store. After getting cleaned up I work for a long time on the neural networks using different training/testing splitting, normalzations, number of neurons, and other factors. One may believe that artificial intelligence is justg a "hit a button and you're done" process, but it is not for real world problems. By the end of the day I've made good progress and think about future efforts as the baseball playoff games come on.

I'm out the door on the road bicycle at 6:10am with a mission. It is still dark and I have tail lights, but no front lights. Thus I was maybe a bit cautious starting the ride up the Los Angeles river trail. Today I feel good and strong and go a bit past the El Monte dam to the unnamed parking lot. And when I turn around I'm up one full gear and cranking like a madman. Even against an onshore headwind I'm cranking up at least one gear like a madman. It's only in the last few kilometers that I have no brain glucose but still have muscle glucose - so I'm cranking like a madman but I don't know what I'm doing. I make it home safely and stagger around a bit and trim roses and bring a couple fresh blooms inside the house. After a shower the day is a blur of FP2 for MotoGP from Australia, FP2 for Moto2 from Australia, and FP2 for F1 from COTA. I feel perfectly fine physically but I do not have any brain glucose to make any decisions to code or otherwise. Later I'm a vegetable in front of the baseball playoff games and its not until fairly late when I've eaten a ton of food that I've got some brain glucose to feel normal.

I drive t Liberty Park in Cerritos for a 90 minute run/walk. This is the longest I can currently g at this point: A one kilometer warmup walk, and then half walk/half run for the remainder of the time. I'm starting to recognize familiar faces and we have brief discussions as our laptimes intersect. At home I grab a quick shower and get to the grocery store to top up supplies. For the rest of the day, drained of energy, I just relax with MotoGP and F1 qualfyign, football games, and baseball games. But I do put together a list f artificial intelligence techniques that I've used and will try on this current baseball problem to see which works best: regression, neural networks, k-means clustering, principal coordiante analysis, and Gaussian mixtures. I've used all of these before but probably won't get serious about a one-to-one somparison until Wednesday after a couple more doctor's appointments.

I want to ride long on Sunday, but I ride the mountain bicycle to the old yacht club and back to home - avoiding the runners from two separate 5k runs including one sponsored by a marijuana dispensary. At home I trim the roses, grab a shower, and start cleaning the hardwood floors as the MotoGP pre-race show plays in the background. Today's race is a fun race with five riders on different tire strategies all ending the race within a hair's width of each other - despite the soft tire riders flying away at first and trying to hang on and the medium tire riders "bedding" their tires in and coming on strong at the end. The winner, a very accomplished rider, wins his first MotoGP race in 160 tries and is just mobbed by supporters and competitors alike in the MotoGP spirit of celebrating EVERY win. I love MotoGP! I watch some football and later watch the nail-biting F1 race where a number of different strategies and drivers/cars could have won. It's not until a day later that I read that the two cars/driver combinations that I don't care for, were disqualified for a 30 year old rule infringement. I don't go back and look at the final results classification but only with that I was on an airplane to Mexico City now for next weekend's race (or on an airplane to Thailand for next weekend's BuriRam race).

My legs and entire organism are tired on Monday morning and I cannot answer the alarm for a bicycle ride. Instead I domore coding on various artifial intelligence algrithms - trying to bring some disparate algorithms into a unified package. Near 10 am I return a library book, get gasoline for the car, and visit my primary care physician. He's happy when he sees the picture of me on the adder with the chainsaw because it means life is getting back to normal. And I offer to do some tree trimming for him and he laughs with me. We decide to not meet again for a while until after some intense December activity on my mouth and teeth and we agree on a good complete blood test. At home I get a bit confused because the two primary Cedars-Sinai doctors have not scheduled an appointment for me until April and I don't want to wait until April t get replacement teeth in place. I try to calm myself down by lifting weights in the afternoon and watching football and baseball games. And just waiting to talk it over with the maxillo-facial surgeon (who contributed during the mandibulectomy and likes me because I practice Arabic with him) and see what his timetable suggests.

On Tuesday it takes me 100 minutes of driving to get the maxillo-facial surgeon's office. In addition to viewing the xray that I brought with me, he performs a CT scan and then we start talking. First, I seem to have a sinus stuffiness or infection and should try an over the counter drug. Funny, both my nose and eyes have been running/tearing in the last six weeks. The doctor loves everything that he sees in my mouth. Everything looks like it has healed solidly and he's in a state of shock when I tell him that I was on a bicycle three weeks after the surgery. We plan a strategy and this strategy involves me having replacement teeth possibly by the end of the year. (Replacement teeth only for the five that were removed due to the cancer. All others are solid.) I schedule a procedure with this doctor which is one of three that needs to be done for me to have a full mouth of teeth again (most real, some fake). It could get done by the end of the year. I leave the facility and it takes me 40 minutes to get home - that 60 minute difference due to Los Angeles rush hour traffic. And as I drive towards a freeway onramp, I see a Metro E line station that I vow to check out and see if I can ride an A and E train and a short Lyft ride to his office (as I did for Cedars-Sinai last week and is quicker and much less stressful.)

After Tuesday's meeting with the maxillo-facial surgeon, I'm in a much better mood than on Monday. This does not translate to better productivity though. A bottle of wine gets purchased on the way home alongwith a sinus infection medicine. And I start in on the bottle of wine. I do make progress on the principal component analysis (PCA) part of the AI toolset and it can be used with the other algorithms. I finish up the multi-output system architecture code wherewas before there was only one output allowed as a target to try and "predict". I watch a Moto3 race from Asutralie that happens before a wildy windy storm interrupts the full proceedings and then sit back for a game 7 of the baseball league championship series. I'm very intrigued by these games where the games, which usually go nine innings, utilize seven or eight pitchers per side. There's another decision to be programmed and studied with AI to see if there is a good answer.

I get in a good almost 70 kilometer bicycle ride on Wednesday. As I first start out the door I feel dampness in the air, but I haven't ridden for a couple of days and nothing is going to stop me. As I ride there are periods of dampness, dry, drizzle, slightly heavier rain, but nothing that cause me to look for shelter or turn back or think that conditions are dangerous. By the time that I've finished the day is dry but the wet weather gives me an excuse to give the road bicycle a nice wipe down and then trim the roses. After I get in a warming shower I watch a very col, wet, and windy Moto2 race from Australia that has to be red flagged before the end due to dangerous conditions. And you can see how cold it was in the post race interviews as the top three riders are all shivering and looking for clothes to put on. But they can't put anything over their race leathers or else their sponsors would be unhappy. So they shiver through the interviews and that's the week of MotoGP/2/3 racing. I have a slow Wednesday afternoon but then go work on a multivariable regression methodology but keep getting stymied because the standard Python package is not returning the data that its documentations describes. I get a bit frustrated that this has taken so long and go to read and sleep.

On Thursday I hit the snooze button a number of times because it is too dark to ride yet and because I keep having a dream which continues across bouts of sleep and I want to know how it will turn out. It's not a scary or joyfull dream, just a dream that a small desk that I own had actually belonged to one of my my grandmothers and I'm looking for where she wrote or carved her name in the desk. It's a far-fecthed dream because grandma never visited California and yet this is where I bought it from a second hand store 30 years ago. When I get out of bed to go cycling I take the mountain bicycle to the old yacht club and back to home on a recovery ride. During today's ride there's a guy walking along and we make eye contact and I just say, as usual, "Have a nice walk". To which he replies, "I'm just looking for homeless people to give them some clothes". He is carrying a lot of bags of stuff so I point him in the right direction and say, "Along the river". He thanks me. I consider turning back and telling him to just donate to Long Beach's MultiService Center for the homeless, but I let him go on his path of discovery. At home I mow the front lawn, skip the backyard since it doesn't need mowing, get cleaned up and make a quick trip to the grocery store for supplies and read the news and markets. I watch some Netflix in the afternoon and avoid the regression analysis in case I'm the one making a silly mistake (despite the module documentation being wrong).

I'm out of bed quickly on a chilly Friday morning to go run/walk at Liberty Park. I see the usual people at this time of day. I get in a good 70 minutes and call it quits for a long Saturday bicycle ride. At home I grab a quick shower and get to Trader Joe's for my favorite vitamins and then I have the car washed. The car has not been washed since the middle of May and has not been waxed or claybarred since December 2022. So it's time for a good wash and wax job. I start in on the laundry and read the news and markets. There are end of month website updates to be made that I take care of a few days early. Since I spent extra time at the beginning of this calendar year (when I was in Thailand cooling down in air conditioned comfort during a very hot day) making these websites' calendar sections modular, the time spent updating each month is trivial. But it's coming up on a new calendar year where I have to invest the time to make 2024 modular. Then I sit back for FP2 for MotoGP and Moto2 from Buriram, Thailand. I swear I'm going to be there in person next year. I still stay away from the regression analysis to give it a quick break and later watch a raucus FP2 for Formula Uno from Mexico City. And I swear I'm going to be there next year (assuming they are not on the same weekend as they are this year). Late in the afternoon I wax abut a third of the World Rally Car and then relax.

SInce its dark and cold, I don't get out of bed until about 6:15am on Sunday and stillwait a bit before a recovery ride on the mountain bicycle to the old yacht club and back to home. Today there are three runs, fun-runs today: an Alzheimers, walk/run, the typical Long Beach Runners Club run, and another new run. But at leats the the running clubs and organizers have learned to keep runners on the running path and off the cycling path. Today a nasty Sanata An wind that has popped up during my ride gives me a good strength-type workout back up the Los Angeles river trail. After the ride I trim the roses whch have diminished blooms lately due to the season and warm up with a shower. I start watching football, but this is boring, so there's an exciting Tissot Sprint race from Thailand that re-excites my enthusiasm. Late last night I received a text message that somebody had tried to jump over their gate into th eproperty but somehow didn't make it and the police have been alerted. Thus I bring an ice hockey stick inside from the garage to use in case I need it. The rest f the day is fillwed with waxing a bit more of the World Rally Car, the F1 race from Mexico, and football. The only thing left for taking care of the Wordl Rally car is to get on my hands and knees and go wheel-to-wheel and wax the gold rims.

Monday is a planned leg day off. Instead I pick up the multivriable rgeression analysis that had me stumped and I find a few stupid errors that I was making and now it runs very well. I continue enhancing my catalog of methods with the principal coordinate analysis method to go along with the multivariable regression and neural network models. And soon I'll get back to k-means clustering and Gaussian mixture methods. When the chilly morning warms uop - the low last night was 49F - I get in a session with the weights and then get on y hands and knees and from wheel to wheel to finsih off waxing the World Rally Car. And tonight I get to watch MY Detroit Lions on national television.