Computer Whisperer
So, one of the things I do regularly is markup PDF documents. Every time I add text I get the notice below:
No, I don’t need to have someone sign this. I know how to set up e-signing, I’ve done it literally hundreds of times. Quit bugging me, Adobe! I know what I’m doing. Argh! Nagging me every few seconds is, *ahem* annoying.
Yeah, I know, first world problems, but geez, trust your users to know what they’re doing.
One of my favorite things is listening to podcasts on my walks. During today’s walk (you can check that out on Strava, if you care) I listened to Saturday’s (June 8) Geekwire podcast: “How This Professor teaches AI and thinks about human creativity“. Featuring Léonard Boussioux, I appreciated his positive outlook on the potential that AI offers. I agree with those folks who think AI is in a hype-cycle. However, that doesn’t mean that there are no gains or innovations that will be coming out of this. I deeply believe this technology will be significantly transformative. However, I doubt it will be as destructive as some predict, nor as positive as others are thinking.
I also appreciate that they touched on the sustainability issues surrounding AI. Huge amounts of energy and water are part of this equation. These will be key elements for the efficacy of this technology.
I have a few ideas that I want to explore with AI tools. These tools will be critical ones to learn and master. I’m confident many jobs that will be replaced by AI, will create new roles on the other side of this equation.
They had a side discussion looking at the ethics of using AI to enhance photography, and what should be disclosed. Todd Bishop, one of Geekwire’s founders, used an AI tool to enhance (de-noise is the phrase they used) an image. When I first heard the situation, I thought that disclosing was unnecessary. Mainly, I don’t see any difference between “de-noising” and color-correcting, or cropping. As they went on and explored the issue, I shifted to thinking disclosure is the wisest course. As I respect the distrust many feel towards AI, so it makes sense to just be conscientious.
There’s so much that AI is challenging in our lives. I really appreciated this unique dive into it.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
I didn’t post yesterday, so I’ll post about the project I did yesterday and the one I did today. Yesterday, the project was for an Animated Countdown timer. Using CSS and JavaScript to create this animation was pretty cool. My consternation came from a bunch of mistyped elements in my code. Finding those little glitches (like typing “igm” vs “img”) gets wearying after awhile.
Today’s project was an Image Carousel. I only made one code error, but it was a sneaky one. The images would not sit well in their frame. Turns out, I tried to set the size to 500px, but I had a stray “1” in there (1500px…opps). Once I found that, viola!
These are rather small projects, where I’m mostly trying to refresh my understanding of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I want to be far better than I am, even if I don’t end up becoming a coder. I really enjoy this and want to grow.
I also am working on Google’s IT Support Professional and Project Management certificates. Both of these are valuable skills, and useful things to understand regardless of role in IT.
The news about big tech’s layoff woes are hard to miss. In my feed today came this article: “Job Cuts in Big Tech Continue Unabated“. Yeah, more glum news for those of us trying to make a career in tech right now. I really appreciate Sheharyar’s insights into what’s going on. Things like:
Big tech companies don’t seem to be struggling, though.
This all reinforces the notion that tech has simply overhired. The video below talks about that, too.
Of course, the billion dollar question is “how long will this last?” At what point do we expect these thousands of tech workers to get re-assimilated into the machine? Late in 2023, I was hearing pundits predict that 2024 was going to see the end of layoffs and a rebound in hiring. Well, that hasn’t happened…not yet, at least. Of course, we’re only two months in.
Also, I think that the notion of specializing might be less than optimal for your tech career. Building out as much complimentary skill as you can seems to be wise. And, in the short-term at least, developing skills with AI seems a solid bet for finding employment. Will AI find itself in the dust bin of the latest hypecycle? Hard to say, though it’s stayed the course stronger than crypto and Web 3.0.
What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Yesterday, I came across this video from an HR guy I follow.
Then I read this article this morning about more layoffs, specifically at Google.
Google Cuts Hundreds of Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
So, even more layoff pain in the tech sector as we launch into 2024. My heart goes out to my friends at Google, Meta, and Amazon. It’s a hard time to be in tech.
I wonder when we’ll see a rebound. I’ve seen some guesses about later this year, or 2025. That’s really hard to guess. It will, I’m sure. But what will the economy look like when that happens?
What I’m confident in, though, is that the market has changed and keeping up on those changes will be critical. I need to proactively manage my career. Which is a bit intimidating, but also liberating.
Anyway, onwards.
Yesterday I set up a YouTube livestream and, as part of that, needed to whip out a thumbnail. Canva is my go-to tool of choice for such work. As this is for a preschool choir, I searched templates for “youtube children choir”, and THIS shows up in the results:
I found this…fascinating…and absolutely hysterical. Maybe the global AI is just trying to brighten my day.
Now, though, as I’ve spent so much time becoming a web developer, and have built my own page over at GitHub, I think it would be great to have domain that ties in with that work. So, CarlSetzer.com has been a blog for ages. The whole thing started over at Blogger, then I ported the domain over the WordPress years ago. And it’s a WordPress site to this day. So, with those two things, I’m wondering what I should do regarding domains.
Should I create a new domain, say CarlSetzer.blog for this site and use CarlSetzer.com as a hand coded and tech/professionally focused site? I have a hundred business cards coming with CarlSetzer.com as the address, so it makes a lot of sense to shift the blog. Plus, it has solid SEO with my name.
So, what do you think? Change this here blog to CarlSetzer.blog and make CarlSetzer.com into more of a business/tech thing? Or register CarlSetzer.io or something like it for the tech-biz side of my life? I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
A friend of mine has one of the latest MacBook pros. It is a rather lovely machine! But it had a weird glitch when we tried to install Office. It threw this error:
“The installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.”
A remarkably unhelpful message, if I say so myself. First guess: corrupted download file. So I deleted the pkg file (it’s the Mac software installation package), redownloaded it, attempted to reinstall it, and got the same error.
Ok, delete the pkg file again, empty the trash, rebooted, downloaded it again, started the installation, got the SAME error message. Now I’m puzzled. So, time to google it. And, bless the google gods, I found this quickly.
Solution for “The installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail”
I was a bit suspicious, though, when the answer was a link to another site.
Control access to files and folders on Mac
However, this was spot on. It was a rather simple issue. I needed to grant access to the download folder to the Installer. Just a few commands to enter and, boom, Office was able to install.
I hope you don’t have this issue, but if you do, may this grant you peace after your frustrations.
Completed day 3 of the 50Projects in 50Days course, “rotating navigation”. This one rotates the whole page if you click on the hamburger icon in the upper left. Hard to imagine a use case, but it’s really fun.
I’ve been posting these to my recently re-done Github site. Again, I’ve done three of these:
With Expanding Cards, when you click on individual cards, they expand out, and the other ones shrink. For Process Steps, it’s like a progress indicator. Each time you press the “next” button, the line advances one over. And for Rotating Navigation, when you click on the hamburger icon, the web page rotates, showing the navigation buttons. For me, this is fun stuff. Which is good since it’s now 9:30 at night and I still haven’t eaten dinner yet.
Anyway, it feels good to refresh my knowledge and build out these skills. I feel it’s a critical part of my march into a tech career. Plus, the internet and web development are the future of tech. I intend to do one project per day every day, but we’ll see. I have a few things coming up that may cause a day or two to be lost. But I should have not problem keeping this moving forward.
Wish me luck!
I just finished my final in Enterprise Architecture. By successfully completing this class, I’ve completed the requirements for some additional certificates:
I also have applied for the following certificates:
I’m done being a student for the near term, but I think I’ve accomplished a lot during these past 2.5 years. I’m proud of all I’ve done and look forward to finding ways to implement all I’ve learned.
Another goal is to land a full-time role with a company that will pay for me to continue my studies. There’s so much more to learn! I plan to start a new role sometime around the end of this year, and then be able to start classes with that company in 2023.