Six months ago I retired after forty years of nursing practice. One of the things I was told when I retired was that I would get bored within three months.
Uh.
No.
As I told a former co-worker, I'm busier now than when I was working. The difference is that I'm doing what interests me, what...
Somewhere around noon on December 29, 2023 I logged out and powered down my work computer for the last time. After 40 years and 6 months of professional practice in nursing -- 20 in the clinical setting and another almost 21 in teaching -- I was retiring. Officially, I was to work until 4 PM that d...
A day or so ago I ran across an article where science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer had released his version of WordStar 7.0 for DOS, noting that it is now abandonware and, thus, he felt comfortable releasing it into the wild. What was interesting was that, as he noted, not only he, but several o...
For the past ten years I have worked from home. Although I interacted regularly with students and other faculty, those interactions generally took place by email (my preferred method) or, when interactivity was required, by phone, Teams, or Zoom. Actual face-to-face interaction was very limited. I...
Michael W. Lucas
No Starch Press, 2018
ISBN:1593278934
ISBN-13: 9781593278939
When I began looking around for information on FreeBSD, Michael W. Lucas' book, Absolute FreeBSD, seemed to be at the top of just about everyone's list of "must read" books...
I bought my first Raspberry Pi (RPI) in January 2014. I've since bought 3 others, the most recent being a Pi 3B in 2017. Aside from the novelty of the small, single board design the biggest draw for me was the low power consumption. These boards were ideal for running WeeWx weather software and o...
Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) generally serve three purposes:
Back in the late 1980's, when I first began working with computers, there were a fairly wide variety of devices and OSes from which to choose. TRS-80, Commodore (I had the C-128), MS-Dos based PCs, Apple, Amiga, and so on. The challenge was to determine which device worked best for your intended u...
I drove a 2000 Ford Ranger for over 20 years. I loved that truck and basically just wore it out. I think when I finally sold it in 2021 I had put over 250K miles on it. But, alas, all good things come to an end and as it got longer in the tooth it began to have more problems, with their associate...
In an earlier post I noted that my foray into Linux began when I started an intensive program in network administration, etc back in 2000. That's not precisely true. That course did not teach me anything about Linux. I don't even recall it being mentioned. What it did teach me was Unix....
It seems like people have jumping on the ChromeOS bandwagon in droves since the first Chromebooks debuted in 2011. The draw, as I understand it, was that the laptops were small and inexpensive and required little knowledge of computing. Boot it up, create a Google account (if you didn't already ha...
Somewhere back around 2011 or 2012 I moved from my ISP's email service to Microsoft Office 365 Business plan that offered access to MS Exchange server. I had previously toyed with using Gmail's services with my own domain name but didn't find that it met my specific needs. Too, I really didn't hav...
My journey with Linux started in the summer of 2020 when I enrolled in an intensive course in IT designed for a specific ISP (which no longer exists). The course was provided through a state university in cooperation with that company and in conjunction with a state level push to encourage tech comp...
Over the last ten years there have been a couple of preferences that have driven many of my technology decisions. One is a preference for using plain text rather than proprietary software. The other is a preference for flat files over databases.
My move toward plain...
In the acknowledgements, author and scholar Brian Hoffman notes that the idea for this book grew out of his own early experiences in a clothing optional home/community. He noted that as he grew older he became increasingly aware that what was normal in his own life was not nearl...
I became interested in drones in the spring of 2021. My wife was preparing to retire from her teaching gig and considering a new career in real estate. After 15 years in our relatively small town in the mountains of North Georgia, we were planning a move to a little larger to...
I swear some people can't keep track of reality.
While browsing Amazon for something to read in the vein of philosophy I ran across a book entitled The da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth is Stranger than Fiction by Robert M. Price. The book purports to debunk the "many misleading claims found in Dan...
I was watching a news report this morning about students using ChatGPT that asked whether this was considered cheating. That got me to thinking about how we encourage cheating in education..
Think about it: The purpose for education is to provide the student with the foundational knowledge they...
I recently read an article on Wired about Faruk Ozer, The CEO of Turkey's biggest Cryptocurrency business. That article outlines how tens of thousands of Turkish people were victims of Ozer's theft of their crypto wallets and all of their assets. The thing that stood out to me is how easy it wa...
Competency based education has gathered quite a lot of steam over the last few years. Many universities now assert that they are competency based and promote this as somehow better than traditional education. In general, it seems that competency based education is a way of expediting the education...
I have had an email address with Gmail for probably 20 years. I mean my email address is my name @ Gmail. No numbers, no weird abbreviations, no strange punctuations, just my firstnamelastname @gmail.com How long has it been since that was possible?
Three or four years ago I began receiving email...
I am, and have always been, a curious person so when I saw this book at the book store I had no choice but to select it.
Curiosity is a driving force that pushes us to learn more, understand more, and to find or create new things. Curiosity is also the foundation for creativi...
A common discussion in any of the technology forums is which platform is better. Some argue that Windows is best, others that Mac is and others, still, argue that Linux beats them all. What is my take? Well... it depends.
Truly, I am. I have all three operating...
The title of this blog is iamcuri.us. That title was chosen to reflect the many and sundry interests that I have and the drive I have to explore new ideas and to learn new things. While I think some of my posts here have reflected that, others seems to skew in specific directions that seem to narr...
I set as a goal in 2020 the ambitious aim to complete 50 books over 52 weeks. I didn't quite get there, but I did manage to complete 26. In addition, I read parts of four others and read probably a 100 or more journal and long-form magazine articles from a variety of sources. The four that I did...
In response to the coronavirus, many employers have shifted as many workers as possible to teleworking. That is, working from home. This can be a real challenge if you've not had experience with working from home. I've worked from home for the last seven years, so I think I have some pretty reaso...
So, I'll begin this treatise with a question: What is philosophy? And perhaps another, just to follow on that, why is philosophy important?
To take things in order, my simple answer to the question of what is philosophy is to say that it is, generally, the creed by which one lives one's life. I...
You've heard the saying "the definition insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." And I think you'll agree that this 'definition' is commonly true. But, what about those times when you do the same thing each and every time and get a different result?...
Had someone told me on the day of my high school graduation in 1977 that I would one day be an academic, in possession of a doctoral degree and teaching at the university level, I'd have warned them that whatever they were smoking was muddling their brain. Yet, here I am, forty years later, in posse...
I love to read and love to learn, so it is no suprise that one of my favorite pastimes is to wander through bookstores. I love perusing the titles, skimming a few pages of those that interest me and maybe marking a few to add to my reading list. It's a habit I developed probably thirty years ago.
O...
Virtually all businesses today are concerned about how the public perceives them. They recognize -- and rightfully so, in my opinion -- that customers who have a positive experience, who receive great service, or receive quality, tasty foods are more likely to be repeat customers. They also know t...
I've had several technology projects running for a while now and thought it was time for an update.
Back in February I set up a Nextcloud server and incorporated OnlyOffice. The concepts are pretty cool, but I have abandoned both of those projects. In all ho...
Throughout my junior high years I was a huge science fiction fan. One of my favorite authors of the time was Isaac Asimov. I was quite surprised to learn that Asimov not only wrote science fiction but had also penned books, short stories, and essays that ranged from religion (Guide to the Bible),...
For the past year or so my manager has
been after me to move into a management role. I managed to avoid doing so until
fairly recently, using my work on my doctorate as an excuse for not really
having the time to take on all the work of learning the role, learning the
courses I would manage and...
I have always been a curious person. I'm the kid that took toys apart to see how they worked (and was sometimes able to put them back together again, too!) I was the kid that enjoyed reading the WorldBook Encyclopedia because, well, just because. Learning about different stuff fascinated me. Even...
Every once in a while I get this notion that I need to move my data off of sites
like Dropbox, OneDrive, and so forth. When I do, I start playing around with
self-hosted services such as NextCloud, OwnCloud, and so forth. I'm currently in
one of those cycles and have been playing around a good bi...
There's a hint that bookmarks are going away. Services like Delicious that used
to provide great web-based book marking services have closed down. In their
place are the likes of Instapaper and Pinboard and the like that break stuff
into different types. Instapaper to store sites that you want...
Today I fixed a problem that has vexed me for some time. Reading through the
search pages, it seems it has vexed quite a few others, as well. I thought I'd
share my solution to this problem so that others might benefit.
What's the problem? I've setup a VPN server on my Ubiquiti Edgerouter-X...
There has been a lot going on the last few months. I have been struggling to
get my dissertation done. The biggest obstacle has been locating participants
for a qualitative study. I finally got responses to my recruiting efforts and
have been able to interview 7 people. That's not a great re...
One of the questions with which I have wrestled for a while now is the question of what it means to be ‘educated’. The problem, of course, is that there is no one definition and that, I think, creates much of the problem in evaluating educational programs. The state of Georgia recently put on the...
So a few days ago I decided to use Jekyll to generate a static website to host
all -- well, most -- of my writing. Jekyll, I've learned, is a different beast
from most applications used for these purposes. I've found several themes that
I really liked, but they all had some sort of quirks that...
One of the goals on my bucket list has been getting my Ham radio license. I
don't remember, really, when it first landed on my list. I was a teen and it
most likely was the result of some movie I saw or book I read that extolled the
use and excitement of reaching out to the world through radio....
I've always loved gadgets. When the first Raspberry Pis came out a few years ago, I was pretty confident that eventually, I'd get one. About three years ago I decided I wanted to build a media server and the RPI seemed the perfect tool for the job. While it works, it didn't do all that I had hope...
One of the 'goals' of the nursing department is that we develop 'life long
learners'. What this means, I suppose is up for some debate but I think,
generally, that what is meant is that we prepare our students to learn how to
identify their professional learning needs and help them develop the s...
For the past 8 years I've managed a personal weather station consisting of a
Davis Vantage Pro and a Windows computer running the excellent Weather Display
software. Last December I decided that the inexpensive computer I was running
the scripts on may well be coming to its end-of-life and went...
Over the past nearly 10 years I've tried numerous times to maintain a
blog. I enjoy writing and figured it would be a good way not only to practice
the skill, but to share my thoughts with others. I don't really care whether
anyone reads my work, to be honest; I just want to write.
The probl...
I 'attended' a presentation by Story Musgrave, the astronaut, on "Designing your
life" or some such similar topic. While I wasn't overly impressed with his
general rambling presentation style, I was very impressed with the message that
threaded throughout his story. I took several keys away from...
One of the hallmarks of the well-educated person is, I think, the ability and willingness to explore all sides of an issue before making a decision. Unfortunately, it seems that few people, even those who are, in fact, well-educated, truly take the time to explore an issue before taking a stance on...
For some time now I’ve argued that colleges and universities have dropped the ball on one of the most important preparatory steps in attending college: Defining what a college education is all about.
Students often go to college without a clear conception of what they’re supposed to be getting fro...
Well, the title really says it all: I don’t like social media. The reasons, though, need some explanation.
I believe that social interaction and the sharing of ideas is an important part of life and, particularly, of learning. Engaging in thoughtful, thought-provoking conversations allows us to to...
I love to read. That’s a good thing, since I do quite a lot of it. After four years of forced reading as I progressed, first through my Masters degree and then the first three years of my doctorate, you’d think that I’d be tired of reading. Surprisingly, not only have I not grown tired of it, but I...
It’s been quite a while since I posted anything here. I’ve been quite busy working through the remainder of my didactics, writing (and passing) my comprehensive exams, and beginning work on my prospectus. But, I’m back trying to regain some semblance of order in my life that includes sharing some o...
The reasons why they may choose to do this are myriad. For some students, the BSN has long been a personal goal. For others, though, the decision isn’t internally motivated. Rather, they’re faced with either obtaining their BSN, or finding other employment. Now, for anyone outside of nursing, that l...
Okay, granted not the most original title, but the fact is I really didn’t realize it had been nearly four months since my last post. If you read that one, though, you might be inclined to forgive me — I’ve been a bit busy. But, today those crazy hours are behind me and only a single paper remains b...
About eight years ago I spent a couple of years teaching high school. Being a nurse, and coming into the experience with no real educational background it was quite an interesting, and eye-opening experience. Needless to say, I probably learned more than my s...
In the early 1990’s as I was preparing to wrap up my MBA I was informed by my advisor that I still needed to take a basic statistics course. Now, that would seem a reasonable expectation were it not for the fact that I had already completed two advanced statistics courses. Being a bit obstinate, I a...
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I had a wonderful opportunity to talk with a woman(we’ll call her Jane) who has accomplished several things that I have only dreamed of. She has developed a new approach to an old a...
Two recent articles about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) got my attention this week.
The first article brings to the fore the reality that only about 7% of those who start a MOOC course complete it. This is, of course, a major concern for educators, given that completion rates are...
Hello, and welcome to my little corner of the web … yes, I know that’s a bit cliché but … well, what can I say?
Anyway, I am a doctoral student in Education (Nursing education to be precise) and have decided to use a blogging platform as a means for storing ideas and thoughts related to topics tha...