June, 2026:

Birthday Wander: 73 to 73

Jun 29th, 2026

74 today. Data from my family tree indicates that I’m doing all right by still breathing: I’ve lived longer than any man in my paternal line going back to one Johann Andreas Duntemann 1729-1808. He made it to 78. If I can log five more years, I’ll be the oldest guy in my paternal line going back as far as I can see, which (for now) is a man born in 1687, who died at 51. I’ve seen the names and lifespans of other, older Duntemann men here and there, but I can’t connect any of them to my own line.

That’s one way to look at a year that wasn’t…exactly…the best. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer last fall, had radiation treatment in January, and have recently been told by my oncologist that the radiation worked and my PSA is now 0.86. That was a big drop, let’s say. We need to keep an eye on it, but that’s part of what getting older entails: keeping an eye on all your various “health numbers” as I call them, to be sure nothing is severely out of line. In a blood panel some months back I found that my vitamin B-6 levels were literally off the chart on the high end. Doc told me to quit the B-50 supplements we’ve been taking for years and years. I did. Last Tuesday I gave them some more blood, and learned that my B-6 levels now are dead-center in the normal range.

Whew. (I think.) I’ve never heard of anyone overdosing on B vitamins, but a little research shows that it can happen. I have a mild neuropathy in my right foot, and I have to wonder if excess B6 (pyridoxine) had anything to do with it.

About a month ago we had to send poor little Dash back to his Creator. He was 17 and developing multiple serious symptoms all at once. He lived longer than any of the other six dogs we’ve had as a couple. So the Pack are all now in God’s green fields. We cried, sure. Who wouldn’t? We spent a lot of time with the Pack, and Dash retired from the show ring as an AKC Grand Champion. So he did very well, and we will always imagine him at his best.

There’s nothing like a cancer diagnosis to scramble your creative faculties, and I’m only just recently generating some new ideas and plot arcs for my (stalled) novel, The Molten Flesh. I did publish a new and significantly rewritten version of my 1971 short story “Whale Meat” and later on a new short story, “Morning Man,” about an AI disk jockey at a small-town AM radio station. Both are available for 99c on Amazon. The two stories were platforms to try using generative AI to create covers for short ebook fiction. Not great, not terrible, and I learned a few things in the process.

That’s all the bad stuff. Carol and I have never been closer. We bought a spectacular new car: a Subaru Crosstrek. I got a new mini-split AC installed in my garage/workshop/shack so it’s not always an oven in there. I found a bunch of ancient manuscripts at the bottom of an old box that I thought were gone forever, including parts of a story I wrote when I was 10, on the ancient typewriter my grandmother Sade gave me that year. I’ve made peace with Windows 11. We’re still doing strength training and enjoying it as much as ever.

Nonetheless, I now say 73 to 73. Forgive me if I don’t add ET CUL…

Odd Lots

Jun 25th, 2026

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Creatine not only helps you build muscle—new tests strongly suggest that it can help the body fight cancer cells. The tests are with mice, so there will need to be a lot of further research, but this is great news for anyone (like us) who take creatine on a daily basis.
Lazarus Version 4.8 is now available. It’s a bugfix release, compiled with FPC 3.2.2. Free and easy to update. Go get it!
IBM has created a 7 angstrom node for making extremely high-density chips. It’s done by stacking sheets of transistors vertically and bonding the transistors together in a way that makes logic gates etc, with potentially up to 100 billion transistors on a single chip. Screw flying cars. This is the future I had hoped for!
A guy who’s been blogging now for 25 years lays out a fascinating history of the technology he’s used along that timeline, and how it has evolved. I knew a lot of this (my blog is now 28 years old) but he puts it all in one place in a single well-written article.
It had to happen. I should have written an SF story about it back in the early ‘80s, but back then I didn’t drink wine. So don’t pop that cork just yet. Claude can act as your AI sommelier.
Broadcom and OpenAI have announced Jalapeno, a custom chip designed specifically to handle AI inference logic. It’s a sort of AI accelerator, and with any luck at all it will specialize the AI chip market so that the rest of us can afford system memory and SSDs.
Here’s a slightly weird AI-related site: In The Weights. It’s basically a leaderboard of names present in all the major AIs. I’m #148 on the leaderboard, with a score of 841. It found two hallucinations on me, one claiming that I was an American actor and comedian; the other an electronic/experimental musician. I’m dead certain (but not dead) that I’m the only Jeff Duntemann who has ever lived (yes, I have a third cousin Jeff Dunteman, one n at the end) and I have never done any acting or composing. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
Venezuela got hit by two violent back-to-back earthquakes, one Richter 7.2 and the second 7.5. Carol and I lived through the October 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which logged at 6.9, and the quake was one major reason we left the Santa Cruz area in 1990 for Arizona shortly thereafter.

A Miracle for Father’s Day

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

I’ve written about my father quite a bit here, but there is one story about my dad that I haven’t be able to tell before. On this year’s Father’s Day, I’m going to swallow my hesitation and tell you about the miracle my father worked for me.

Frank W. Duntemann was struck by advanced oral cancer in late summer 1968. He was 56. I was 16, my sister only 12. We watched our father fight cancer and consequent pain and disfigurement for 9 years, until it finally took him on January 16, 1978. I was 25; Carol and I had married in 1976. A few weeks after my father’s funeral, I was home alone, in bed, quite sick. I was getting stabbing pains in my abdomen that grew worse over the course of the day. It was hideous; the worst pain I had ever experienced in my life at that point. What had begun as intermittent twinges became continuous, and deepened.

By mid-afternoon I had begun to fear for my life. I pondered calling an ambulance, but 911 didn’t exist back then and I had no idea who to call. (Besides, the phone was in the kitchen.) I was doubled over and crying. Religion confused me back then for reasons I may or may not go into in future entries. Faced with that pain, however, I decided to ask God for mercy. I didn’t recite the usual prayers. I asked God straight out in plain talk to take the pain away, and if not, could He at least let me live.

I then quieted my mind, hoping against hope, and…nothing. The pain continued, if anything growing worse as minutes passed. I thought of my father, who had faced horrible pain for 9 years. And on an impulse I called out to him: “Dad, please help me and take this pain away! I don’t want to die!”

Die. At that word, the pain vanished. It didn’t waver and fade away. It stopped, so sharp and so suddenly that it felt like it had been cut with a knife…or an axe. My abdominal muscles began to relax, and by that evening I was feeling reasonably good and in no pain whatsoever.

Twenty years later, I threw a kidney stone. It was that same sort of pain, if perhaps not quite so severe. Carol called 911 for an ambulance. I had a 3 AM ride to our nearest hospital, writhing as I went. The docs gave me Demerol and the pain slowly faded out, emphasis on faded. So it was possible that my pain back in 1978 was just a kidney stone making its obnoxious presence felt. My atheist friends will doubtless think of it that way. But that would be too much to be a coincidence. I called out to my father, and the pain was cut instantly.

Frank Duntemann was a fighter. He was fiercely protective of his family. If he had confronted my kidney stone from his place in The Great Upstairs, let’s just say that I wouldn’t want to have been that kidney stone, heh.

Now, why haven’t I wanted to tell this story until now? I was afraid that people would think I made it up. I didn’t. It happened, just as I described above. It boggled my mind in 1978, but it also had another, more significant effect: It took away my confusion and doubt about religion, and pointed me back toward God. And I think that on that terrible day, God took my father aside and told him that his kid was suffering, and that as my father he had the power to end that suffering.

He did. End of story. But it’s not a story. Call it what you want. I call it a miracle.

Happy Father’s Day to everyone within reading distance, for fathers here or in The Great Upstairs. Fathers matter.

Odd Lots

Jun 7th, 2026

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

Southwest Airlines has just banned “human-like” or “animal-like” robots from its flights. Oh—and in checked baggage too. The concern is about biggish lithium-ion batteries, which does make sense. There’s also the issue of whether robots are considered passengers, checked baggage, or carry-on baggage that carries itself on.
Interesting long-form piece about archaic homo sapiens, a genetic group close enough to modern humans to share a species name, but different enough to trace their rise and fall and eventual extinction. Modern humans carry some juvenile traits into adulthood, like friendliness, playfulness, curiosity and flexibility, in a similar way that our modern dogs carry puppy traits like playfulness and cuddliness into adulthood. Dogs are lifelong wolf puppies, and we’re lifelong cave-kids.
Beef is not the big health risk that Certain Influencers have long been yelping about. Well, we’ve known that for a long time. Eggs are good for you too. As are protein and fat. The arguments will continue as arguments generally do.
Keeping lithium-ion batteries on charge even after they hit 100% shortens the life of the batteries. I knew this, and don’t keep my phone or tablets on charge after they hit 100%, which I check for from time to time.
Duke University scientists have created a 20-legged robot that merrily rolls along the Duke campus. Watch the videos; I’m a long-time robot fan and I think they’re cool.
And if creating 20-legged robots isn’t your thing, consider scientists at ETH Zurich who have created (theoretically) perfect randomness using two superconducting chips cooled almost to absolute zero and connected to each other by a 30-meter long tube similarly cooled. I don’t quite understand it either (how do you prove a number is perfectly random?) but I have a hunch you could sell perfect random numbers generated with such a device and make a good buck. We’ll see.
USB-C cables and ports can do a lot more than just charge your phone or tablet. Here are a few such things worth keeping in the back of your head.
Well, this certainly wasn’t on my bingo card: A humanoid robot fashion show, where the robots and their, um, fashion models wear the same clothes on the runway.
Here’s a map of America’s favorite house paint color—along with some discussion on when and why vivid colors fled from everyday American life. I remember when cars were all kinds of colors. The kitchen I grew up in was hot pink for a fair number of years—and then bright blue. Sure, all that was (many) years ago. Multiple colors increase costs for just about any product line. Shame, that—but a pretty solid explanation. (h/t to Rich Rostrom for the link.)

Now Available on Kindle: “Morning Man”

Jun 2nd, 2026

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Amazon just messaged me that my latest Kindle title was now available. “Morning Man” is a 6,300-word short story with an interesting history. It’s about an AI DJ at a small farm-town AM radio station in Wisconsin. I wrote it in 1989. I never tried to sell it, but just threw it in a box full of old manuscripts, where it sat for the next 35 years or so.

Why didn’t I try to sell it? I couldn’t make the characters work. I’ve always been good with gadgets and world-building. Characters, well, I did my best, but the people in the story just didn’t sound especially real. Part of the problem may have been the fact that in 1989 we were preparing to launch PC Techniques and move to Arizona from Scotts Valley, California. My time and energy mostly went into that megaproject. By the time I retired in the teens and returned to fiction, I had mostly forgotten the story of Rusty the AI and his bewildered owner.

So I pulled it out, read it a few times, and rewrote it heavily. Now, having five novels and a couple of intense workshops behind me, I knew what I was doing. The characters now work. And you can have your own copy for 99c.

Well, AI DJs on broadcast radio are now real, and becoming common. Here’s one piece on the state of things as of 2025. Rolling Stone has another good piece on the topic, but it’s paywalled. My brief scan showed a few more, and if the topic interests you, you can probably find plenty.

I don’t expect the general public to believe that I predicted AI DJs in 1989. Nonetheless, I did. So take a look and see what you think. Reviews and ratings are always welcome; thanks in advance. And as I’ve said here more than once, I gotta go dig around in that box and see what else I wrote and then forgot about!