750words

750 words: Stop with the tech-is-bad bs!

~ ihatetoast ~ Leave a comment

Possible ageism trigger warning.
I’m going to complain about older people. By older people, I also include people my age (50). It’s not about their age, but the generation and exposure to tech those generations had.

In 1987, I got my first Macintosh. At the time, I thought there’s be other apples to choose from. I was hoping I’d upgrade to a Granny Smith or Honey Crisp; however, Apple did not have my fabulous idea in mind. I was 19. I already knew how to touch type because my high school teachers made me take typing in order for them to read my essays. Some people were up in arms, thinking I’d head down the secretary path. First off, don’t be sexist. If I had become a carpenter, I’d have been praised for being tough, but a secretary? I think nothing is tougher than a secretary that has to put up with a sexist boss. I digress.

All through university, I used the computer and computer lab to print out my work. I have never gone back to pen and paper except for correspondences. I still write letters and postcards because I love stamps. I was not in a mass of people embracing the Mac and PC. Some refused. I think they had the same genes of those who thought that horseless carriage was craaaazy. The ratio of those who accept, embrace, and understand tech to those who are resistant change every year. Every year, younger people and more families get computers at home. I am thankful that the person who pushed tech on me was my mom, who is now 75 and killing it on social media, using reply all when CC-ed on conservative, scare-mongering emails, and changing her passwords frequently. She has had a mac every year since 1987, too. So the ageism here is a mindset ageism.

I am getting exhausted defending tech to older (mindset) people. Yesterday, I was paying with Oculus at a demo and enjoying going through a house to change the floors, cabinets, lamps. An older man (older than me by far) shook his head. “I don’t know. I just …” You know how this ends. I demoed a hands-free rubbish bin.
Our mini conversations:
“I would just use my hands”.
“Because you can, sir. Not everyone has both arms. Immunosuppressed people need to avoid germs as much as possible. A parent with hands full could use some help.”
WHAT IS THE BIG DEAL?!
“There’s a man at UT who has the code to 3D print a gun.”
“People are making affordable prosthetics in a tiny fraction of the time.”
I showed him the AR available with some companies’ apps where they can see their products in their home.
“Why not save time by knowing what will look good? Why buy something only to return it? Who has time for that? No one wants to go to a big box store more than once in a week.”

Darling, you can toss your TECH IS BAD at me, and I’ll fire back with tech is now and good. Keyhole surgery? How do they practice? AR and VR to train physicians? Yes, please! Programs to help Alexa understand sign language? Um. Yes! And truthfully, even older tech helped us. Did accountants really prefer pencil to paper over the speed of electronic spreadsheets? I am one who likes to handwrite letters, but that is another way of spending time with my friends. Handwriting out ledgers takes so much time, when Excel or Numbers could speed that up, save and edit without wasting time or paper so you could go outside with your family?

Look. Listen. Look and listen. Tech is no different than anything else:
TV. On all day or watch exactly what you want for the hour then turn it off. Watch fear and hate mongering news shows or watch a science show?
Books. Read hateful rhetoric or a playful fantasy novel?
Books, magazines, TV, movies, and tech are just those. Nothing more. They are good or bad, beneficial or harmful, a waste of time or great fun. They are made and used by humans. They are as good or bad as those who create and use them. To lump anything that is new as something bad is foolish, silly, and short-sighted. What is old and familiar to you was once craaaazy new. Germ theory? If you expect your surgeon to wash and scrub up before surgery, you’re embracing something that was once scoffed as new and crazy. Washing your hands before you eat? See above. Pretty much anytime you enter a hospital or doctor’s/dentist’s office, you need to shut up about tech.

It’s ok if it gets harder to learn. I get that. It sucks to get older. Our minds aren’t as sharp. Age gets everyone until death comes in. But our choices are to keep our minds sharp and open or to just close it and turn away. Maybe this is a message to me. Never be that person, Katy. As you get older and your mind gets duller, don’t repackage any wistfulness into jealousy. I hope to enjoy tech until I die and to use it for good. The only time I don’t want tech is after death. Just toss me into the woods for the wolves. I’m cool with that.

 

750 Words: Practice, Habits, Learning

~ ihatetoast ~ Leave a comment

(750words.com entry for today: 911 words, including metadata list,  stats)

To learn something (anything), one has to practice. The comic artist Sarah Andersen of Sarah’s Scribbles has a widely shared strip about what makes her great. It’s practice. No matter what anyone tells you, it’s practice. Practice is closely related to habit.

If I want to improve upon a skill, I need to practice often and then that becomes a habit. A good one. With ADHD, it is hard to get a habit going. Unlike what some people assume, the distraction for me is not TV—it is other skills. Let’s reference another wonderful comic artist: Allie Brosh, the genius behind Hyperbole and a Half and the much-memed “All the things!” drawing. I’m not distracted by bad things. I’m distracted by other skills and topics within skills. I’m distracted by the newsletters that inform me of new tutorials and tutorials that teach me new frameworks. If I’m trying to break into web development, I’m working on HTML5, CSS3, preprocessors, JavaScript, JS frameworks and libraries, Node, etc. I’ll be focusing on one when an idea for another pops up. That is, while making an HTML/CSS technical document page for a FreeCodeCamp project, an idea for a fullstack app comes to mind. It takes incredible will not to change focus. This little blog post was started when I was thinking about what topic to write about for that technical document assignment.

I should add that this is a problem when flying solo. It’s another reason I love having a boss. I may have ADHD, but I also have anxiety about not doing my job and doing right by my team and manager. Not a sycophant in anyway, but I don’t slack if it means another person will look bad. Right now, I’m flying solo. I am my worst boss. Now, to give myself a break, as I look up job postings and read about what I have to know to be considered, I can’t help but add to my “Learn all the things” list. And to learn all the things, I have to practice. Practice and practice. Lather and repeat. Forget rinsing. I don’t think that works when I want to retain skills. No rinsing. Just keep lathering.

Here are the skills and habits I need to build. There’s no order. I’m writing this as they come to me. There’s never any order!
Skill: HTML5 + CSS3 mobile-first responsive web design.
Skill: JavaScript frontend fun—focusing on ReactJS, not forgetting little jQuery, and getting to know VueJS.
Skill: JavaScript backend with Node—getting endpoints and routing down pat, getting comfy with noSQL as well as SQL, ExpressJS myself.
Habit: Planning app in advance vs creating on the fly.
Habit: Addressing build/Gulp and testing/Mocha-Chai in every project.
Skill: Python—make more of a priority
Skill: Game Maker Language—for fun and for OOP practice.
Habit: GitHub—not working on the master, branches for every new thing.
Habit: Jobs—apply daily!
Habit: Own up—Tweet daily the #100daysofcode and blog the process (do not blog daily)
Skill: German—Refresh it. Listen to a YouTube video every day.
Skill: Art—Doodle on Sketch App to illustrate my own apps or just do my own doodles. Wacom, paper?
Habit: Read—Read before bed. Read fiction! Escape.
Habit: Craft—Attack the fiber stash.
Habit: Exercise—C25k, gym, and/or cycle. August is awful.
Habit: Healthy eating—This would be better labeled “Don’t let ADHD’s impulsivity affect your food choices”, but that is too long.
Skill: Writing—I don’t care if it’s handwriting and dealing with my illegible script or getting a postcard out. Just write.

If I kept track of the above with a bar graph, there’d be tall bars on the tech skills and smaller bars on skills and habits that have some distance from the laptop. I blame the job situation. Hard to put down the laptop and tech learning to read or attack the yarn stash when I am underemployed. I am ok with that. I can’t have this even. Once employed, I know the other things will get more attention. Right? Yes. Right … RIGHT!

What about the ethics? This gets me a lot. To learn, I watch tutorials, but if I just do their projects, it’s just follow the leader. I have to do my own. Tutorials, therefore, take a lot of time for me. I watch, rewind, then do. I do this until my own idea that applies this skill comes to my head. I create my own repo for a new app. For example, I’m doing Brad Traversy’s fullstack social media tutorial. I watch and listen, I do what he does. On my own, I’m applying what I’m learning to make a social media app for adoption groups so that they don’t have to always rely on Facebook for their volunteers to connect. I’m writing down other ideas for social media apps with the hope of every new social media app I do, I’ll refer less and less to the tutorial. Is it ok to do this? Am I plagiarising? Or is this like taking various illustrations to trace and trace and trace, then build your own style doing your own thing? I do not know. I just know that I have to practice. I need to copy someone. I’m by myself. I am not in a classroom or workspace where I can flesh things out with instructors and senior devs.

I’m winging it.

I’m still learning how I learn, Vern.

COFFEE: 2
ENERGY: 6
FOCUS: 4
HAPPINESS: 7
LOCATION: home
STRESS: 6
AMPM: am
NONFICTION: t

 

750Words d5: the nomadic life (from prompt)

~ ihatetoast ~ Leave a comment

I started this blog ages ago. Years. It moved from Typepad and before that Blogger. It started as a blog to manage my history with the foster greyhounds I had. As my life changed, the blog did. Its subtitle is critters, coding, commuting, and chaos. As I search for a job and focus on a career change, this has been heavy on the coding side (sorry, but programming doesn’t fit my love of alliteration). Now that I’ve started my 750words challenge, I will have other topics. There are other sides to me, dammit! No. Not that side. Don’t look.

I believe this one covers commuting, chaos, critters, and coding, but more chaos and commuting:

Prompt: (not my words) If you could live a nomadic life, would you? Where would
you go? How would you decide? What would life be like without a “home base”?
I have often thought about selling my house and living in a van. I would never give up my critters, so I’d have some limitations, but isn’t a house just as limiting? I find myself struggling being anchored in Austin. I love Austin, but I know and love more people outside of Austin: Dallas, Minneapolis, Brisbane, Melbourne. Having a home means I can’t leave it without organising a petsitter or worrying about my stuff.

Stuff stuff stuff. I won’t be the hypocrite who bitches about stuff without remembering that she is encumbered with stuff herself. Thou shalt not be a twat. (By the way, I like the way Australians say it, rhyming with flat and not rot.) I have large dogs and want to continue to have them. I also have cats. I think it’s possible to have them with me. It requires discipline, but wouldn’t having a smaller place make that easier?

Where would I live and how? I think I’d use a travel trailer to allow me to drive into town or the city. Other things I would want to have and, yes, I feel are necessary:
bicycle
tent
motorcycle

I would want both a motorcycle and a bicycle. Maybe I’d have a truck to pull the trailer that would also have a place for me to haul the motorcycle. The bike would be also in the bed. Maybe not a truck but a strong SUV. I’d balance the eco hell that a truck or SUV would be with the bike and motorcycle, and also not using so much energy and water at home. I think a tent would be fun (a small one) for the times I’m where the night air is more pleasant than the trailer.

I’m too young to piss off and wander, so at this moment, I would want to be able to pick up and go to Dallas where my family is or leave Texas for other jobs that are short-term. Maybe use many addresses and be on many temp agencies and wander. I could not make this work without internet. First of all, I am trying to become a programmer. I can’t imagine being disconnected. I also would live the nomadic life to have fun, not to say “feckoff” to my friends. On a grimmer note, if I go missing, I’d want my stuff pinging like mad so that the police don’t find too gross of a Katy cadaver.

Clearly, I have no desire to go off the grid. I admire those who do, but I know my limitations. I am not skilled enough to fix things on my own. I’m also getting older and my knuckles would be furious with me.

I don’t think I have to wander to far away places just to live a nomadic life. Nomads lived together. They did not all live solo. They needed the skills the others had. I am sure I would park it as often in a metroplex as I would out west. Yes, west. I don’t see myself traveling east as often. Not never. Just not as often.

Honestly, I would be happy to live this way in Austin and not far from where I am now.

What would the inside of my trailer be like? Ok. This far into my writing, I now realise that I want to have a pick-up with four doors. I’d want my pets up with me. I’d want as much covered as possible. I’m hoping there are 4-door trucks that don’t make me look like a jackass. When moving, I’d want my pets up with me. Once hooked up, I think the cats and hounds would be fine in their little car-partment. You cannot tell me that the people in NYC don’t have cats and dogs. I have the hounds for it: greyhounds. The saluki would need more room to run, but choosing a place where a park is near is all that I’d need. They’d need walking, but so would I. Cats? They’ll be okay wherever. They have each other and lots of windows. It’d be fun to get them leash trained.

Eating is the easiest part. I keep it simple. I do not have this desire to make enviable meals nightly. I’m fine drinking my meals and going out here and there. Or keeping it simple at home with nearly ready-made salads.

These are the challenges I see:
workspace set up
crafts
books

The workplace would be solved with a decent coffee shop where I got wifi and wasn’t too far from where home was at the time.
Craft items would need to be in storage. That could help keep me focused. FINISH A DAMN PROJECT! Swap out as I do. Yarn squishes, so easy peasy.
Books are a bigger challenge. I’d have to let go of many of them. Keep ones by people I know. I’m sure I’d have a storage unit, but I’d hope one that is only 5 by 5.

I’ve thought about this a lot, not just after finding a writing prompt. My mom is now living the van life and is somewhere in New Mexico. She uses my place as a homebase. I also see that it’s a lot of work the older the van. I am not sure I’d want to go that old. If I sold my house, I wouldn’t buy a new trailer and truck, but I’d get ones that were not as old. I also think that maintaining a truck and a trailer would be easier than an all-in-one, but that’s just me talking out my ass. Or typing out of it.

I think I could and really might do this. I can’t afford the kind of house in Austin I would love (midcentury or older). I also hate leaving my pack when I travel. I hate yard work. I don’t ever want to entertain more than an individual, and even then prefer to meet at the movies or a restaurant.

So what is stopping me?

750Words d1: Fitbit, Dancing, and the benefit of boredom

~ ihatetoast ~ Leave a comment

I’m done with my Daily CSS Images challenge and have found that I have missed writing. Following a link from a Medium post, I came across 750words.com and wrote my first piece. They tell you not to edit, so I didn’t. One thing I learned is that I did this in under 30 minutes. I can afford 30 minutes. I had assumed daily writing challenges would take longer. I love math; I love to write. This is perfect for me because of stats: Pretty graphs and yummy pie charts

750words Day 1

I know that some people look at my wrist and see the Fitbit and roll their eyes. I don’t care too much about counting my steps; I walk my dogs nearly every day and run every other day. I also do not care about opinions of others for the most part. What my Fitbit does for me is to remind me to get up and out of my 90-degree angles. While I’m underemployed and looking for a job, I am at my laptop coding, learning more about code, applying, and regretting. At 10 before the hour, my Fitbit rattles me to inform me to dance. Yup. If I’ve not done enough, I get reminded. I shout to Alexa to play 80s pop, and then I dance. I get more steps in with 5 – 10 minutes of dancing than I do walking around the block, AND I get to do this in an air-conditioned house. Sorry, Mme Ozone.
Where are the places to dance for the length of a normal song? I don’t want anything extended or remixed. I want the living room I danced in when I was a kid before I could go out. Where are those places? I do not have the attention span for a long dance-remix. I also want to hear the lyrics. I don’t mind remixes found in dance places; however, for me, those are better in spin classes when I need the distraction for 10 minutes. What I want is to dance for 3 minutes one way and change it up for another. Remixes are just hell for me. I’M DONE WITH THIS BEAT!
It’s not fun to dance alone, but I’m not. I have the unappreciative and wary audience of pets. I figure they look at me like a toy that is too big to kill the squeak. They track me, though. I see it in their eyes. They are entertained. No. I’m not anthropomorphising. They watch. They wag. When I’m done, they come up for attention. It’s change; it’s movement; it’s always different.
The other side of this Fitbit exercise is a graph I have kept in my head. I have become curious as to what songs get more steps in per minute. These are my steps and my moods. Obviously, this is not scientific in any way, but it’s fun. I’d be curious to compare the songs against others but also against each other and see if there are large variations.
I have found another benefit to the dancing: it clears my Etch-a-Sketch head. I am often following a tutorial or trying to apply what I’ve learned from the tutorial to my own code or following a daily challenge. With so many rules to follow, I don’t get to clear my head to just let the mind wander. Since I often choose 80s pop, new wave, or alternative playlists, my mind goes back to being a teen or young adult. I think about anything and everything that is not JavaScript, VueJS, NodeJs. Once I shake the code out, my mind wanders to other things. I come up with the ideas I can bring to life with code. I am a firm believer that getting bored is important. Most of the things we enjoy, need, and use came up while someone was staring off and let her or his mind wander and ask “What if …”. What is the point of learning to code if I can’t come up with ideas to solve problems? Even if I’m far too green to bring my ideas to life, coming up with them is more important to me. Who cares how great the dev team is if there are no fresh ideas coming to them? Get bored. It’s ok. It’s just not ok to “solve” the problem of being bored by whining about it. Get bored. Write. Wonder. And save. Even if it’s not about to happen, get it down and make like the English Beat and save it for later.
Did I mention save it? My grandpa was Paul Cassidy, a ghost writer for Superman in the late 30s. He left Supe for a better paying job as a teacher. I know. Don’t laugh. He also read history for fun and illustrated scenes he read. Where are those? Deep in a landfill. When he moved into his retirement home, he threw it all away. His right—I give him that—but what a loss for his family and others.
So while others may see another middle-aged woman with a Fitbit to count steps she thinks will counter what she eats, I know this buzzer reminds me to get up, dance, and let my mind wander. On that note, Cyndi Lauper is reminding me that girls still just want to have fun.