Blogger blogging near Seattle
Lessons learned about life; pearls of wisdom I’ve gleaned through pain, failure and honest reflection
On Twitter last week someone asked everyone to list “5 Jobs You’ve Had”. This is a random list of jobs, basically just what popped into my head.
Just 5 of many (take a look at my resume if you want to see more). Each one a piece of who I am now.
I love cycling. Sadly, making time to ride at this point in my life is challenging, to say the least. Right after I got out of the Navy, I spent about 10 years without a car. My bike was my main mode of transportation, next my feet, next the bus. Every so often, I either took a cab, borrowed or rented a car as there were places and times that didn’t work with this lifestyle. Mainly, those moments that either need to be somewhere fast, too far or too late for the bus or weekends.
When I went back to school, I planned to ride more. I planned that I would bike to and from campus, as well as for my errands. Covid messed all that up. After the first lock-down, I got out of the habit of exercise period. At this age, the degradation from inactivity happens with a frightening ferocity. Now I’m back to walking daily and am figuring out when to block time to ride. Increments…
I’ve been watching YouTube videos to get me back into the groove. Man, everything is on YouTube! And watching these rides does help motivate me to get back into the saddle.
Today I had this one (below) going while doing some work. A group of New York City-based cyclists on a ride just out of the city. Cool that they can just hop the train, get off, and ride.
I’ve started a playlist of these to inspire me. There’s a lot of variety from urban riders to bike tours to trials riders to mountain biking. I think you should check them out. If you get inspired, too, we can meet on the road.
Featured Image Photo by Alex Powell from Pexels
Mondays are pretty long for me. First, two of my classes tend to have 4, 5, or 6 projects due. And then I have a “class” from 6-8 pm, taking two hours out. There is value in the lectures, of course (else I would just skip and work), but I feel like I’m butting up against the “last minute” every week. I’m a little bit ahead today, which feels good. I actually got a little bit of what’s due tomorrow done. So, yay me!
My preferred state is to be at least a week ahead. Since two of my courses didn’t open until the first day of the quarter, and the third one opened up a day in advance, I hit the ground running, so to speak. And it’s felt like I’m squeaking by every week.
In reality, I am creeping ahead, slowly but surely. I just worry that one illness, or losing a day because of no power (yay Seattle winters!) will break everything. In the end, I guess I just work my way through everything. Do my best, learn every day, and drag myself forward.
Onwards!
I’ve been pretty successful at my coursework, and I attribute that to a few key tools. Here are the 4 I use every day, and would deeply struggle without.
Anyway, those are the main tools I’m using right now. I find these critical to my current life. What digital tools are part of your daily work? Whether you’re a student or not, I’m curious to know.
About the featured image: Photo by Andrew Neel from Pexels
If you’re engaged with me on Twitter, you might have noticed I have two Twitter profiles: CarlSetzer and SetzerDigitial. This is for focus. I read years ago that you should keep a blog focused as narrowly as possible.
@CarlSetzer is my oldest Twitter profile, which I started in 2007. I rambled over different topics over time, but for the past several years @CarlSetzer has been focused on my poetry, and mainly my daily+ haiku and regular contribution to the @Baffled Haiku Challenge, and tied to my poetry blog. It is growing solidly and has a fair amount of engagement. When I experiment with posting non-poetry, the engagement is dramatically less, and I slowly start to lose followers.
@SetzerDigital has been around since 2017, started as a part of my brief foray into geek blogging (you can see the remnants on my Tumblr page and this Facebook page), but I’m not engaged with that project at this point. (quick aside: I thought I LOVED geek things and was an expert. As I launched into this space, though, I discovered I wasn’t as deep into things as I thought.) I opted a few weeks ago to repurpose this for something tied with my new career focus. I felt that a new account made more sense than trying to shift gears with my main account. A big thing: I still love writing poetry and engaging with that community. Since I have at least another year of study before I’m trying to look for work, I have plenty of time to build out that community. And that work seems to be solidly underway. In the past 30 days, I’ve gone from 51 to 73 followers, which may not seem huge, but it is a >40% increase. I’m happy enough with that. I do, of course, reserve the right to nuke this whole thing and integrate my two accounts.
Twitter is part of my growing marketing/branding plan. I know that my network will be key to landing my next role. I don’t think that dropping resumes on websites will be terribly effective, for me, at least. Twitter’s developer community is pretty awesome. Thus my community will be crucial in my work search. Having a group of people who know me, know my work, and understand this part of my passion.
What do you think? Oh, if you’re on Twitter, I’d love it if you’d pop on over, say “hi” and give me a follow.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Winter quarter started January 4th. This round, I’m taking 3 classes: one I’ve already talked about, “Web IV Joomla! and SEO”. I’m also taking Systems Analysis, and, lastly, but not leastly: JavaScript.
Web IV has been the most puzzling. Besides Joomla and SEO, the course also covers Amazon Web Services. All of these are cool, but, what a hell of a collection. I feel a bit of whiplash as I move through the week.
Systems Analysis is something I’ve been looking forward to. Understanding how to look at business systems in a strategic way excites me. I think this will be critical to my future career work.
Then there’s JavaScript. This is the grail! Yeah, this summer I coded in Visual Basic, which was fine and all, but JavaScript is what actual web developers use daily. So I’m delighted. But, code is a double-edged sword.
For several days last week/early this week, two of my projects were stuck. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the code to work. I went through all kinds of imposter syndrome stuff. Finally, grabbed one of my other classmates. It took both of us over an hour, but we figured it out: I was missing ONE curly brace (this thing: “}”). But as I’ve started interacting with the developer community on Twitter, I know this is not uncommon. Every keystroke is important, and variable names are case sensitive. Meaning “GetByID” is not the same as “GetById”. At one point in my career, I highly prided my typing skills. Back in the days of typewriters, that is. Spell check, autocorrect, and even simply being able to delete and re-write have spoiled me. Now my keyboarding kinda sucks. And just when it became critical.
And since I’m never happy unless I’m silly busy, I’m also filling in for a friend who’s on paternity leave. I’m “working” as a media coordinator for Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood, WA (unpaid, but that works fine for me right now). This mainly entails creating graphics, as well as editing videos. Nothing too dramatic. I’m doing some of the photo editing in Photoshop to keep my skills up, but a lot of the stuff I’m creating I’m doing in Canva. It’s a pretty slick tool that really speeds up some workflow. Videos are also pretty straightforward. Our church services are online, and we’re using a fair amount of pre-recorded music and such to keep the number of people in the space to a minimum. Mostly I’m trimming down the videos, adding fades and such, and also plugging some b-roll in so that the videos have more visual appeal.
Here are a few things I’ve crafted recently.
Featured image:
After a lovely day with my family where I got to feel joy and contentment, remembering happy moments at various times in my life, I received a reminder that not everyone reflects on their childhood with happiness. Surviving Childhood Trauma is a blog that, well, it’s title sums it nicely. And today’s post, Trauma & the Holidays serves as a reminder that not everyone’s memories are laden with love and joy. We need to honor our friends and neighbors who find the holidays to be times of horror, anguish, and pain. And, especially after the year that 2020 has been, many people are struggling with loss, sadness, despair, and loneliness. Those feelings should be honored, too. Such are the elements of grace.
May we all find peace, grace, and well-being this season. And here’s to a 2021 with less misery and more connection.
Featured Image by Olenka Sergienko from Pexels
This poem is my contribution to the Fandango Word of the Day Challenge, “outcome”.
in this time of rage
I seek an outcome of hope
living gracefully
Featured image by Lynnelle Richardson from Pexels
dawn moves through the clouds
hope ripples through the puddles
tea’s steam awakens
I love rainy Seattle mornings. Even in these insane times.
I have a few favorite tools that really make school more effective. One: I get my textbooks on Kindle. I have the Kindle app on my computer, plus I have it on my phone and iPad. Having my books wherever I find myself is great. Plus, I can hit ctrl+F and search the whole book quickly. This has been really helpful when I’m struggling to remember “that one command”.
Also, I have Grammarly’s app installed. Being able to spell and grammar check in the browser is a great time saver.
Lastly, I love using Evernote to take notes. I often use paper, and also the note feature within the Kindle apps. But I can scan the papers, and import the Kindle notes, so all of them are in Evernote. Again, being able to search is powerful, and being able to review whenever I have a few minutes of downtime is great.