Josh and I lean more towards brick-and-mortar shopping, but there are a few things we buy online, usually ordering more than we need at the moment, so we won’t have to place another order for a few months. Last week, we submitted two such orders from two different businesses, and both orders arrived with chunks missing from the sides of the products.

Before you ask, there were no marks on the shipping boxes. They arrived without a dent. But when I opened the two boxes, one item in each box had a U-shaped hole on the side. In one case, it was hair gel that was now coating everything else in the box. In the other case, it was guinea pig baby food, which was luckily dry but had spilled out of its packaging inside the box.

In both cases, the company sent a replacement. (Though the AI bot suggested that we send back the oozing hair gel until Josh requested to speak to a human that said, “Uh, no, please DON’T send that through the mail.)

I sense that this is our future. Instead of human hands placing items in the box or even a human looking into the box to make sure the robot hands didn’t puncture the items, we will now receive packages of oozing gel and spilled-out guinea pig baby food — all in the name of technology. And companies will find it cheaper to replace the wasted items instead of employing a human to make sure the machine can do what the machine promises to do.

Call me frustrated.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Gewappnet” (Elaine ohne Kind)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ builds off Middle Girl’s idea that now is not the time for accomplishments. She explains: “There is so much I need to do, but at the moment, surviving with some sanity intact is about all I can manage. Remembering to breathe. Treading water. And that’s okay.” Accomplishments are relative.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled celebrated her 40th wedding anniversary. It’s an enormous accomplishment always — choosing one another year after year. Congratulations!

The roundup to the Roundup: I’m not ready for the robot overlords. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 4 – 11) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.

I’ll start this by admitting that I haven’t actually tried ChatGPT (or any LLM beyond trying to engage Pi into talking about books with me a few months ago), but the end statement of this essay summed up exactly how I feel: I would rather see a person’s prompt than the LLM’s output.

I would rather see how people are using the tool. I’d rather see people’s Google searches and see how they word them or use operators than see the answer. I am so curious to learn how to optimize the questioning, but I’m not really excited to read what the LLM finds.

I will get around at some point to checking out ChatGPT or another LLM — I’m not against it as a tool. But I find people’s usage of it more interesting than the tool itself.

Do you use an LLM? What do you use it for?

Quentin slid wildly into his toddler stage. One night he was a sweet, cuddly baby, happy to curl up on my lap and have his back stroked for an hour.

The next night, he was trying to popcorn on my lap. Popcorning is when guinea pigs jump up and down, which is how they express joy. He popcorns every night when it’s time for bed because he gets a timothy hay treat, and he’ll popcorn on the floor when we’re playing, but lap time has always been calm time. Until now.

He comes out to greet me every morning when I come downstairs, and he gets Zoomies before bed. (Bedtime is just very very exciting.) I really love this guinea pig, though I miss my Beorn still very much.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I am a sucker for any hack that takes any task that feels too big to begin and breaks it down into small pieces. Enter the Delete Week.

Someone posted this on LinkedIn. You set a timer and focus on deleting things from one space, such as email, social media, your phone, or camera roll. When the hour is over, you walk away. It won’t be perfect, but think about how much you can delete and space you can wrestle back.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

There’s nothing like a government official firing all of the C.D.C. vaccine panel experts from the advisory committee to get you to schedule your overdue shots. I had been moving “get my shingles vaccine” from to-do list to to-do list, putting it off because I didn’t want to feel crappy all weekend.

But this weekend was the perfect time to kick off a two-shot plan because I could get them Thursday morning, feel crappy by Thursday night, lose Friday to soft moaning from my bed, and then still have the rest of the weekend to feel weekend-y vs. achy. I will sacrifice a random weekend in September for the second part of the shingles shot.

In addition to the shingles vaccine, I layered in my pneumococcal vaccine, too. And I got blood drawn. I like to stuff as many dreaded tasks as possible into a single visit.

The shingles shot hurt going in (I didn’t feel the pneumococcal one at all), and then my arm hurt for a few minutes. Then, the pain went away by the time I was walking to the car. Then I got home and felt exhausted by noon, though that could also have been the fact that I was off-schedule with my coffee consumption. I worked late a few days that week to make sure that I had only easy tasks left for that day. I wasn’t up for a lot of thinking.

I took Advil at noon when my arm began to throb with pain. Treating the pain may have preemptively impacted other reactions. But in the beginning, I mostly felt… slow. I was thinking slowly. Moving slowly. I felt like I was mentally and physically moving through gelatin.

That all changed around 10 pm. I pulled on a sweatshirt in 90-degree weather because I was shaking from chills. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t stay asleep because I felt so terrible. I woke up on Friday feeling washed out from a lack of sleep, but overall fine. It set me up nicely for the moaning-from-bed portion of my plan. Until I started to actually feel terrible in the afternoon, dozed on and off, gave up and went to sleep at 9:30 pm, woke up a few times, but reset to normal by morning. Nausea + chills = horrible way to spend the weekend but happy I’m protected against shingles and pneumonia.

My main advice is to do the shot leading into the weekend or take off of work the rest of the day/next day. But do it. It’s a few hours of suck (10 pm to about 4 am, for the worst of it for me) for a lifetime-ish of protection from something much worse.