Today’s New Testament lesson is from the book of Jude, not a particularly well read or well liked book in the NT. Since I have been listening to Morning and sometimes Evening Prayer, my engagement with all Scripture has increased. Over and over again the critiques of the world as it is sound very familiar. This can be interpreted as depressing–the rich and powerful are still behaving badly. On the other hand, it helps. I am not living in a unique time. This has always been true. ...

Advent is about darkness, about living in darkness, about waiting for the light in the darkness. The dark is an uncomfortable place to be, especially in winter. The nights are cold. The sun’s rays in the daytime do not warm but only highlight the overwhelming presence of the dark. The nights grow ever longer until the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. Then there is light, the light that shines in the darkness. The light the darkness cannot overcome. The light that lights everyone, the light of life. But I am getting ahead of myself. Advent is about darkness, about living in darkness, about waiting for the light in the darkness. ...

I’ve been using Copilot to help with Elisp. Unfortunately, Copilot isn’t very good at writing code. It writes a function. I incorporate it into my init.el file and run it. It fails. I go back to Copilot and it explains the error and gives me new code. Rince and repeat. Over and over again! When I worked for IBM, some people said it stood for “It’s better manually.” I think some people are coming to that conclusion when writing code. It’s better to do it yourself!

Today we went on the bus to visit our friends Sara and Hulu. Hulu is going to stay a while with Sara. We thought she might have to go to the prison program right away, but it has been decided that she needs to stay outside for a while longer. We took a short walk around the neighborhood for practice. Nina was working on curbs and ramps, lining herself up properly and keeping me safe. Hulu was working on walking beside Sara and not being distracted by blowing leaves and noisy school children. She had to walk on a metal grate. Nina already knew this device and made a point of us going around it. ...

I can read simple bash scripts, but I needed Copilot to design one that is more complicated.

*** The Problem I didn’t have a great set up for spellchecking in Emacs. Ispell works, but often there are too many choices and Emacspeak does not read them out. So I investigated Flyspell and now I have a working solution. *** The Hook I now have flyspell working in all text and text-derived buffers by adding this hook: (add-hook ’text-mode-hook ‘flyspell-mode) This can be disabled in specific circumstances if needed but this is beyond the scope of this article. ...

Hulu has discovered the fun of splashing the water in the community water bowl with her front paws. It causes much human excitement and a tsunami in the dining room. The men at the prison are going to have to break her of this habit. You can’t tell a guide dog user “Your new dog will flood the area where you put her bowl.” Nina is unsure about water. This summer we introduced her to a wading pool. She will jump into it, bite the water, but she is not keen on sitting down and refuses to lay in the water. ...

Today we learned that our new friend, Hulu, will be leaving us sooner than we expected. Next week she is going off for a several month stint in a medium security prison where the men will drill her on her commands. Nina went there, too. We also learned that Therman celebrated his birthday with 11 other dogs at the school for the blind on the west coast. Therman was raised to be a guide dog, but he is too easily distracted by other dogs when he was in harness. Therman is both Nina’s half brother–they have the same father–and her cousin since their mothers are sisters. Therman looked very happy with his dog school friends. They were all sporting birthday gear.

I am setting up my blog with[[https:/github.combastibe/org-static-blog][org-static-blog]] which requires me to define a number of variables. The best way to do this is using .dir-locals.el. Not knowing how to code in elisp I tried to do this by hand with disasterous results. I next turned to our new friends Gemini, CoPilot and ChatGPT. This was better, but by no means perfect. I went back to the Internet and did some searches. Yay! There’s a command to add variables to the .dir-locals.el file. It keeps track of all the parenthesies. You invoke it with m-x add-direct-local-variable I think you need a file called ~.dir-locals.el in the directory already. You certainly need to be in that directory before executing the command. ...