Musings about life in retirement from academe
About computers and computing
I’ve been an amateur programmer for more than 50 years but have never done enough to remain fluent in any language. That has required constant relearning. Now ChatGPT enables me to explain what I need and have working code generated or have my own coding errors corrected.
My good intentions failed again. I’ve been silent for months. Perhaps I’ll manage to do better next year.
Users experience systems differently from designers and operators. Problems are usually fixed only when they are known to exist.
Good intentions go out the window when life gets busy. I have been meaning to write here for ages and now attempt to explain why that has not happened.
I sometimes amuse myself by baiting would be scammers. This one was different – polite, plausible, and let down by his barking dog.
One of my recent/current tasks involves our younger daughter’s disused iMac. It’s a 2011 model which she mostly abandoned using some years ago (ca 2018) because the 512 GB HDD was full to the point where the system was complaining. She subsequently (early 2019) borrowed my MacBook Pro and liked that enough that I let her keep it and moved...
At various times since our granddaughter, Claire, was born with Cri du Chat syndrome in late 2010 I’ve been involved with the website for the Cri du Chat Support Group. Our first effort was built using Drupal hosted on Drupal Gardens (since defunct). That worked but seemed a little complicated for most members to engage with. One of the parent...
When I last set up a blog on wordpress.com (for our 2012 trip to the USA and Canada – since moved to our own site) the process seemed simple enough. Once the blog was created I had no problems with posting daily updates. That may have been partly due to prior experience but the interface was simple and the classic...
I have a regular reminder to post here but I’ve been slack for the past few months despite having good intentions and occasional ideas. A week or so ago we went to Brisbane to catch up with Majella’s sisters there. Over coffee Angela quizzed me about a few things on her new Macbook Air, including how she might blog upcoming...
That had me worried for a while. I thought for a moment I might have lost two complete blogs, this one and our travel blog, but luckily I was able to restore from backups and had an offline copy of the post that was recent enough not to have been backed up. It’s all back and working with some lessons...