the sunlight fading
while the grace of spring flowers
bursts upon the trees
Author: Carl Setzer
A blogger blogging from just north of Seattle.
Starting the day
awakened by self-doubt
criticizing all I've done
so I face within
resisting these words
embracing all that I am
keep moving forward
Today’s Haiku
This is a photo I took a few weeks ago on my Google Pixel, and the post below (Instagram) inspired me to write something today:
(third photo on the carousel)
It’s funny to me how I feel compelled to justify my work, my writing, photography, poetry. Really, I’m supposed to monetize EVERYTHING! If it’s not generating income, or promoting my business, then I shouldn’t do it. However, I know, in my heart, that I need to create stuff.
I feel compelled to post daily, but I’m hamstrung by the needs above, as well as the larger issues of imposter syndrome and all that.
So, I took the photo above and added the haiku in Canva. I do enjoy that, but I think I need to explore other tools besides Canva. Heck, maybe I need to start doing these in Photoshop again. Get those skills back up.
Tonight’s Haiku
every bouquet
begins with a single stem
blessings of springtime
This morning I went for a walk in Edmonds, one of my favorite things to do. I came across these daffodils, then came up with this haiku later.
Zines!
I really enjoyed Zines back in the 90s (their heyday). If your first thought is “what’s a Zine?”, check out this article.
My blogging colleague Bernie has started creating them again (inspired by Austin Kleon’s reboot of the genre). Take a look at Bernie’s blog post.
I had friends who invested a lot of time and effort into Zines. Sadly, I’ve lost touch with all of them. I do wonder what happened to them. It was all part of my life in downtown Seattle in the 90s. An amazing time, culturally. It was challenging in a good many ways, too. That Seattle is pretty much gone, though. Pretty much all the grittier apartments, for instance, are now condos occupied by wealthy tech workers. It’s a fascinating exploration of the City’s evolution.
Anyway, did you ever create zines? Care to share?
An evening haiku
streetlight’s reflection
ripples across the puddles
windchime’s gently tones
“Be myself? I’d rather die.”
Substack has a feature where they serve up posts that I might like. Not all of them have been been hits, much less home runs (wait…why the hell am I serving up sports analogies?). But this one was good! “Be myself? I’d rather die“, a post by psychologist Adam Mastroianni, and it looks at many things, but the focus that spoke to me was on the evolutionary value of conformity.
TLDR: social norms are one way we communicate our learnings about survival. He references cassava, which is edible ONLY when prepared correctly. Otherwise, it’s potentially lethal. Makes me think of the Hebrew proscription about pork, as an other example.
It’s rather eye opening to consider that social norms are often survival mechanisms. And, thus, that feeling of “needing to obey them”, even when they don’t seem to match make much more sense.
I want to remind folks, though, that as valuable as those learnings are, it’s the people willing to push through the norms and challenge are the ones that change things. I’m sure, at one point, no one ate cassava as it’s rather problematic until “treated”. Yet someone, somewhere, said, “I think I can eat this”, and, for whatever reason, we stumbled through it and the world was changed.
I appreciate the insights, especially on why the urge to conform is so damn powerful. However, I intend to live my somewhat contrarian life. I’ve enjoyed most of it so far.
An Atypical St. Patrick’s Day Song
Though this song has an Irish flair, this band is not Irish, rather, Canadian. I find this somewhat Celtic tweak on this old Bob Dylan tune.
Anyway, it’s my St. Patrick’s Day gift to you.
Forward Motion
I haven’t written about this much, but my current career development focus is on Data Analysis. To start with, I like working in Excel. I’ve found spreadsheets fascinating since the days of Lotus 123. In addition, as many of you know, I spent the Pandemic working on a degree in Web Application and Cloud Development at Edmonds College. During that, I spent a huge amount of time studying data: databases, database construction, SQL, database theory and design. That was some of my favorite coursework.
Recently, I discovered the role of data analyst. It looks like a fantastic blend of these elements. And it’s a growing field, which says a LOT in today’s economic climate! This looks like a way I can make a solid contribution now, and have lots of room to grow. It seems a great blend of my past, my studies, and where I am right now, in order to grow into the future.
Digging a bit deeper, I see some key areas for growth in the short-term.
- Data Visualization:
- I have not worked with Tableau or Power BI…or any of the other visualization tools. I have created presentations where I manually built visualizations (yay PowerPoint!), mostly graphs, but a few times with PhotoShop. I’m really looking forward to diving in deeper to what I can do with Power BI (which is my next series of course work on Coursera).
- Excel:
- I’m a solid user of Excel, having it used it extensively in pretty much every role I’ve had in the past 20 or so years. Budgets, project tracking, dashboards, project feasibility, and operations analysis, I’ve done all of these in Excel. But there’s always room to grow! And it’s an evolving product, so even more to keep learning.
- Statistics:
- I have only a rudimentary understanding of statistics. I want to expand that greatly. I think I’ll take statistics at Edmonds College soon.
These are the short-term learnings I’m planning on feeding myself with. I also think that the WGU BS in Data Analytics looks really interesting. And having that Bachelors will be valuable, and that knowledge critical.
During my studies at Edmonds, we touched on big data, data lakes, data warehouses, as well as No SQL based stored data. This all looks fascinating to me.
So, I’ve launched into the Data Analytics studies with Coursera’s Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Professional Certificate. I finished the first course yesterday, Preparing Data for Analysis with Microsoft Excel. It was solid review of my skills, which I appreciated. Now, I shift to Power BI, which will be new. I’m pretty excited for Power BI. And I’m excited at what my future holds.
I hope the same for you!
Ooohhh…this scam almost got me
I just got this email a few minutes ago, ostensibly from RyanAir:
Man, this one looks pretty legitimate. The things that caught my attention? #1, I haven’t booked any travel with RyanAir.
#2, the email is one I haven’t used in ages, but it is set to auto-forward to me main one. But it’s not one I would’ve used. Perhaps I used it in the past with RyanAir? Nope. Never flown with them.
But what if, maybe, just maybe, it was someone else, some other Carl Setzer, who accidently used this email that was off in some weird capacity. Hmmm…
Oh, well if someone made a mistake, I should click on this link, right? Be nice and help a chap out, right? Knowing how many people want to be nice, I opt to hover over this link, which leads me to the big ol’ red flag
Check out THIS url:
Yep, my friends: classic phishing!
Now, you don’t need to dig around like I did. I did so mostly for the academic exercise. My first impulse was to mark this as phishing immediately, but I just was too curious.
For most folks, just mark as spam and ignore these things. Do NOT click on any of the links!
So, the world of spams & scams is evolving. Be aware and be safe, my friends!