Machine, Heal Thyself…
A brief word about imagery. I’ve never been a visual artist. The only ‘art’ I generate is code and prose. So, it pleases me to no end that I can actually generate interesting images through ‘prompting’ from within WordPress itself. The prompt that lead to the above image:
an image of a humanoid robot sitting under a tree. The robot has a tablet computer in their hands, which has a wire connected to the back o their head. They are clearly altering their own code, as they attempt to make improvements
I like that, because I can fiddle with the prompt a bit, and come up with an image that fairly matches the sentiment I was trying to capture in that moment. That’s as far as I have taken the usage of “AI” in my writing. I don’t use it to come up with outlines, or to fill in chunks of text. That’s still just my freeform mind doing it. But, for how long?
I Think I Dreamt Of Electric Sheep
We are in India, visiting family. While in Hyderabad, we thought it would be a great idea to invite 30 of our extended family on a vacation to Goa!! I mean, the sun and the sand, palm trees and all the fish and shrimp you can eat. What could be more heavenly?
Well, with that many people, flying was out of the question, so, we rented a bus, and took a 16 hour trip to paradise.
Now, if you’ve ever done extensive travel in India, you might be familiar with what a challenging choice this might be. The railroads would be smoother, but might take quite a long time, and flying would only be a 90 minute trip, but again, coordinating that for 30+ people on short notice is kind of hard, and expensive.
TechNomadic – Living in the Wild
Long Story short, my family of 4 hasn’t travelled internationally since the pandemic. So, now we’re on the road internationally.
Deciding to leave the cushiness of MSFT at the end of 2022 left me free to pursue my own adventures. With that comes the freedom of not being tied to one single geography. I mean, I moved to the Pacific Northwest in the first place, to join MSFT in 1998, then stayed, and returned for 24 years. With new kids in tow, the anchor is always something on the lines of “but the kids are in school…”. It took quite a while, but I was inspired by a neighbor to just hit the rod. That neighbor has 3 kids under the age of 10, and they’re doing “Semester At Sea”. We’re not doing that particular program, but I was inspired enough by their example to say “It’s ok to take kids out of school when they’re young. We can ‘home school’ on the road and give them great lifelong experiences to boot”.
So, here we are.
Musings of a 60 year old Tech Daddy
Well, I just celebrated the completion of 60 years on this planet.
That’s me on the left with the glasses. I use this picture, because my brother Stephan and I (on the right) started our first company ‘Adamation’ back in 1984. We were wild eyed, and ambitious, living in Silicon Valley, trying to make it big. Well, we didn’t become an Adobe, but we held our own, and our early journey is documented in the Computer History Museum of Silicon Valley: https://computerhistory.org/blog/meet-the-adams-brothers/
That history piece was done quite some time ago, and the story kind of leaves off with my time at Microsoft. But wait, there’s more…
This post is about reflections on roughly 48 years of coding, and being a ‘Technologist’ and ‘Futurist’.
Mastering SVG: The Paint-Order Attribute Explained
You would think that in this age of generative AI, that going deep into a subject is no longer en vogue. I mean, when you’ve got copilot and ChatGPT at your finger tips, aren’t you just supposed to prompt your way to coding nirvana?
Well, us humans still have something to offer to the intellectual pursuits of programming. I’m going to explore one such case in point. I will use the rendering of .svg as a backdrop. This is kinda technical, so if you’re not into that, you might want to avert your eyes now.