Posts

A question I have to ask myself sometimes is why I write if I know no one is reading my work. And that’s a valid question, I think. The answer is actually pretty simple: I write for myself. I write to clarify my thinking. I write with the notion that something I write might find its way to a reader who needs the information or perspective I’m providing. I write to document my thinking at this moment in time, knowing that at some future date my thinking will evolve in new directions, just as my current thinking evolved from, and in some cases diverged from, my earlier thinking. I write because I want to and, to some extent, need to. ...

Where Do I Get My Writing Ideas? About a year ago I set out to start a Youtube channel. One of the challenges I faced then was conjuring up ideas to present on the channel. At first it seemed fairly simple but the more I started thinking about it, the more challenging it became and very soon I felt like I had no more ideas to address. Well, that’s not quite true. I had ideas but they weren’t fully formed and often didn’t fit into what I perceived to be my ’niche’. You see, I started out wanting to write about my experiences in retirement, but I realized a few months in that I didn’t do anything that seemed worthy of sharing. ...

The Downside of Homelabbing and Home Automation I love learning about home labbing and home automation. I’ve been homelabbing now for about 10 years. My fascination with home automation goes back even further to the late 1990s when I first ran across the X-10 technologies. Today you read and hear almost nothing about X-10, even though it is apparently still around.1 I didn’t do well with X-10 and at the time didn’t really have a lot of opportunities or money to play with the technology. More recently, though, I’ve gotten more into the home automation space. I’m by no means an expert: I just like to tinker. But as I’ve automated more and more of my home – lights, HVAC, garage door, etc – I’ve also begun to see a downside with all of this. I’ll get to that in a moment. ...

The Importance of Soft Skills and the Ignorance of Legislators There is a fairly significant body of research that shows that people who have strong “soft skills” are more likely to be successful in the workplace. Despite this evidence, too many lawmakers think that by doing away with the courses that actually teach soft skills (or create the conditions in which they can be developed) better prepares the student for success. That’s just plain hogwash and shows, in my mind, how poorly educated and simple minded these people are. Perhaps if they had paid attention in those courses they’d have a better understanding of the value of those courses. ...

My OpenBSD Experiment is Over Well, this is a day that I really wasn’t quite expecting. I had high hopes that I would be able to use OpenBSD for quite a while before moving on to another OS but, alas, that was not to be. I am writing this on Linux Mint, having returned to that after my experiment. To say that I’m a bit sad about this state of affairs is an understatement. ...

Ah the Fun of Growing Older Note, first, that I did NOT say “growing old”, I said “growing older”. I draw that distinction because I do not feel old. I’m in my mid 60s and feel physically and mentally much younger. I’m not sure who that old man in the mirror is (though he looks a bit too much like my grandfather!) But growing older is just part of living and is something that we all do, no matter what age we are. What prompted this short post, though, is that I recently found a growth on my left shoulder that turned out to be basal cell carcinoma. The “good” part of that is that basal cell is usually not a big issue. It does not pose any particular threat as it rarely, if ever, metastasizes to other areas and doesn’t generally lead to death. It’s easily treated by removal. And, once removed, is unlikely to recur – at least in that area. ...

Some Critiques of ‘Strong Female Character’ Yesterday I posted my book review of FernBrady’s memoir, Strong Female Character. After I did that, I thought it would be interesting to see what others had to say about the book. I know that people interpret and experience books differently based on their own experiences, expectations, values, and so on, so I was not surprised to find that not everyone thought as highly of the book as I did. ...

Using AI in Education I’ve read quite a number of articles recently about the use of AI in education. Specifically, there’s be a good bit of discussion around whether students should use AI in completing assignments. Strangely, it seems there’s a fair number of folks that believe that it’s perfectly fine for students to do this. I disagree. School work, whether homework or in-class work has one goal: to help the student to ingest and process information in a way that aids them in recalling and using that information later in life or in other situations. In order for this goal to be acheived, it is imperative that they use that information, recalling it, applying it to different scenarios, looking for links to related information, and so on. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, in their book make it stick (ISBN:978-0-674-72901-8) points out that using information in ways that matter is the key to effective, long-term learning. Using AI to complete a task bypasses that process so that in the end the student learns nothing, despite earning an “A” in the class. ...

Why Would Anyone Choose to be Attacked? I don’t remember now, what prompted me to think about this topic. It’s one that I actually jotted down some time ago in response, probably, to a news article or some other reading I had done at the time. But the question that I wanted to explore a little bit (this may be more a micro blog post rather than long-form) is in the title. ...

Learning Emacs Part 1 Emacs, if you’re unfamiliar, is a text editor that has been around since the 1970s. It was originally designed for editing macros in early computer systems. The most popular version, and the one that dominates the space today is GNU Emacs which was developed by Richard Stallman somewhere around 1976. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of its history but knowing that it has been around for nearly 50 years and remains a very popular editor, particularly among developers and others, like me, who are interested in exploring different technologies and appreciate the extensibility and utility of the program gives you a sense of why you might want to consider it. ...