Blog

Musical Interludes Over This Week

Carl Setzer2 Comments
person doing tricks on cassette tape

Music plays a huge part in my life. One of my “gifts” is the ability to tie pretty much any phrase, event, or whatever with a song. I’ve had plenty of opportunities this week.

I’m currently working on a project with the Edmonds Waterfront Center. They have several musical activities over the course of each week. And I can hear these from my office. One of my favorites: a ukulele class. They play a wide range of songs, which often transforms me in place in time. The ukulele is a wonderful instrument that I delight in hearing. With this, I was explaining to a chum about some of the artists who have created albums with the instrument. The two that readily come to mind are Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam fame and Amanda Palmer.

Eddie has a great ukulele album titled, less creatively (I guess) “Ukulele Songs“. This is, perhaps, my favorite from that album.

Amanda Palmer has written some fun songs for the instrument. This one is my current favorite (FYI, not completely safe for work).

A few days later, a friend of mine mentioned her drink of choice was tequila. That always make me think of this song:

And, yesterday, while seeing article after article about AI, this song popped into my head.

Affiliating songs with events is not something I work at, just natural reflex. The results of my misspent youth, I guess.

Blogging Regrets?

Carl Setzer2 Comments
crop female freelancer using laptop at table at home

So, Fandango (I’m sure you’ve seen me write about him before) posted a few days ago about regrets he had during his blogging career (is it fair to call blogging a career?).

He, like me, started his blogging on Blogger. Now, Fandango regretted not starting on WordPress. I weighed all the options back in 2005 when I launched my blog. When Blogger was acquired by Google, I thought that this would be the BEST platform. And, well, I was wrong about that. I shifted over the WordPress years ago, and haven’t really updated my Blogger site (just a few random posts here and there). But Blogger gets far more hits than the WordPress site. Last month, Blogger got 1,008 hits while WordPress got 221. I expect the Blogger stats may be misleading, but I haven’t spent any time researching that.

Anyway, be that as it may. Stats are only so valuable. I get more engagement on WordPress, like the interface better, and find the ecosystem of plugins wonderful. So, though I don’t exactly regret my time with Blogger, I am glad I made the move to WordPress.

Vegan Cakes and Killing it as a Department Admin

Carl Setzer2 Comments

One of my favorite bloggers, Pooja over at Life’s Fine Wine had a great post today: A VERY HAPPY APRIL TO EVERYONE. One thing she mentioned was getting a vegan cake for her birthday. Years ago, one of my team members that I was the admin for, mentioned the he never eat any of the cakes I’d got for the team celebrations. His commitment to his vegan principles were challenged. So, for his next birthday, I made it a point to track down a vegan cake. Seattle had some vegan options, but they were pretty….inferior. I was not going to settle! I finally found a GREAT vegan bakery, with carrot cake that even non-vegans loved. My friend was delight. And he appreciated that we valued him enough to do this. I was quite proud of it.

Reasons to Celebrate “Tea for Two Tuesday”

Carl Setzer
photography of blue ceramic coffee cup

As a tea fan (yeah, I love coffee, too), I’m glad to have discovered “It’s More Than Tea” some time ago. Today Jill posted about one of those low-intensity holidays: Tea For Two Tuesday. I appreciate her wry take on all these marketing-driven holidays, but then how she dives into the benefits of taking moments to appreciate the “small” things. There are lots of benefits from taking a moment and having a cup of tea with someone. So, take a moment and give the post a read.

Cell Pic Sunday, March 12, 2023

Carl Setzer

Fellow blogger, Fandango, posted this response to another blogger, John Steiner’s “Cell Pic Sunday” prompt. I love prompts, so thought I’d dive in.

Approaching Rain

I took this photo a few days ago along the Edmonds waterfront (about 20 miles north of Seattle). I’m walking away from this squall (rather quickly, I might add) in an attempt to avoid getting drenched. Which was successful, though it was shifting from sprinkles to a steady rain when I got back to my car.

I’ve spent the majority of my life in this area. I walked this exact stretch of beach with my grandparents ages ago. I know the winds, the weather, yet sometimes get caught off guard. I was able to read the change before I got hit, while still meeting my step goal. I’ll take that as a win.

Oh, Lord…LastPass

Carl Setzer

I’ve used LastPass for several years now. Even through a couple of data breaches. But this latest saga, especially with the, *ahem*, lack of transparency in their communications eroded my trust in the app. After looking over several options (if you’re looking, check out PCMag’s list of Best Password Managers), I opted for NordPass.

With all that, yesterday, this video came into my YouTube feed:

If you’re still on LastPass, why!?

It’s a rather snarky rendition of how LastPass failed in their security controls. Anyway, it reminded me of my frustrations with them. I was willing to turn a blind eye to many of their issues due, well, laziness. Porting to a new provider was going to be a pain the…you know. However, a friend of mine’s information was released in this hack, and it was brutal. This was the tipping point for me, watching the impact of this for a friend’s business.

This finally motivated me to shift to Nordpass. It turned out that the transition was nowhere near as hard as I imagined. So, so far, I find the tool works fine and have no problem recommending them. It’s only based on a few weeks of experience, though. I’ll keep exploring it further.

Anyway, I hope you have great weekend plans.

Another #50ProjectsIn50Days Project

Carl Setzer
close up photo of person typing on laptop

Got back at it today and tackled the “Double Click Heart” project. This one counts the number of times you click on the featured image, along with a little heart animation. What impressed me the most on this one was seeing how the heart animation was mostly CSS. It’s also nice to feel my understanding of JavaScript settle in deeper.

I feel motivated to finish this course. Now I’m past the half-way point, and have blocked time to get this finished, I’m starting to wonder what I want to do next. There’s so much more I want to learn that choosing a path is challenging. Do I go deeper still into vanilla web development? Do I explore Angular or React? Or do I go a different direction and look to Python? I’ll write about that as I hash it out!

Also, I’m looking for a new role. Ideally, one that utilizes my tech skill set. However, it seems that more people want to talk to me about my admin skill set. Well, that’s fine. I will continue to grow and develop as a developer. It’ll be interesting to see where all this takes me. If you’re looking for either a web dev or a administrative assistant/project coordinator in the Seattle area, let me know!

Onwards!

Todays #50ProjectsIn50Days Project

Carl Setzer1 Comment
woman sitting while operating macbook pro

Today’s project, titled “Github Profiles“, is a tool that pulls information from Github (if you’re not familiar with it, it’s a site where developers load their code. We do that to show code samples, to share our work with others, and to work collaboratively). This tool uses Github’s API, where we can select whatever elements we want from the profile to display on our own site. For this project, we opted for our name, profile picture, bio, number of followers, number we’re following, the number of repos (repositories) we have, and then the 10 most recently updated ones. Check it out! And feel free to use my username to search by: carlsetzer.

Using APIs is really fun for me. And, in this one, Brad Traversy (the instructor), introduced us to Axios.

The amazing part to me is after learning so much, there’s just so much more to learn. That’s one of the reasons I chose this path: continuous learning! But there are times it gets overwhelming. Just dive in, move forward, and grow. So, onward!