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I was talking with my boss about this the other day. I use Chat-GPT all the time to do the dirty work of research for me. I ask it a question, it searches the internet, parses results, and presents me with information I could never get from a search engine. I haven’t used Google in…

Going back many years, I had never actually worked with someone from India but I read about how information services were being outourced to companies in India where they could get an Indian engineer for a fraction of the cost of one in the US. I’ve always felt a little threatened by offshoring, regardless of…

I ponied up for the monthly membership for Chat-GPT Plus and it’s worth every dime. It’s teaching me new things. I have an ongoing conversation with it about containers as I learn how to work with those and Kubernetes. It helps me find errors in my shell scripts. As long as I know what I’m…

1. Choose songs you know the words to, or at least most of the words. I like to learn them all, so I practice at home. 2. Stay in your vocal range. I cannot sing just any song. There’s a song by Whitesnakle I’d love to do but I cannot hit the high notes. I…

I’ve poo-poo’d the very idea of artificial intelligence as just another marketing scheme to get people to buy something. But after using X’s Grok (now behind a paywall) and Chat-GPT (hello, new friend), I’ve finally come around to admitting that it really is some impressive technology. Is it actually “intelligent”? It doesn’t seem that way….

It just occurred to me as I was sitting here drawing a picture: learning new a skill isn’t always a good thing. In fact, it can be a real waste of valuable time. I was thinking to myself, “why am I drawing?” I’m not an artist nor do I want to be. It’s just because…

I don’t know if I could stomach living on another planet that doesn’t have an oxygen-rich atmosphere like our own. Hell, I’m afraid to get on an airplane, I couldn’t imagine a spaceship. Maybe a valium or three for the trip. So I asked X.com’s Grok about what Elon Musk’s vision is for colonozing Mars,…

I’m hearing people sing the praises of “AI” services like ChatCGP and Grok2. Tech companies, including my own employer, are pushing this idea that their products contain “artificial ingelligence”. It’s the new marketing buzzword. I’m a systems engineer and I help manage hundreds of servers. They’re nothing inherently intelligent about any of them. They’re just…

In politics, it’s easy to criticize the opposition but I have always lived by a simple rule: give credit whenever it’s due. Joe Biden has (so far) accepted the landslide Trump win and has been quite gracious in the early transfer-of-power. I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that Biden warned Iran that a threat…

I feel like a kid on Christmas morning. A second Trump term is truly a gift from God. Here’s to 4 years of greatness and preparing JD Vance to be our NEXT president!

Never again will I give my phone number to a political campaign. Truth be told, it’s too late. I’ve had the same phone number for 20 years and I don’t intend to change it. However, all the political text messages make it tempting. Political text messages have always been annoying but this year, it’s worse…

As the stoic philosophers taught, I can do nothing about the past and my influence on the future is minimal. All I can fathom is the present. Time is so fleeting. It’s a crime that the youth never seem to realize this, taking for granted that they’ll wake up the next day to do it…

Although I’ve been monkeying with computers since i was a tike, I didn’t make a career out of it until I was in my mid-40s when I graduated from college with a degree in computer information systems. One thing they didn’t teach me was basic troubleshooting, which is probably one of the most basic skills…

What a movie. I know, I’ve been alive long enough that I should have seen it decades ago. I think I did, but I was so drunk at the time that I didn’t remember any of it. As a rabid Sopranos fan, I decided it was time to sit down and watch all three. It…

I was watching a YouTube lecture the other day given by a phychiatrist who claimed to be one of only ten physicians in the country who are willing to see and prescribe for…  potential (and active) sex offenders. We all know there are people living among us who do terrible things to children and we…

Modern architecture is so boring, I hate it. When I first moved to Dallas, TX in 2004, it was my first real exposure to a big city. I loved the downtown skyline. I’m also a student of WWII and I enjoy watching old war footage. One thing that strikes me about those old films is…

In 2011, I gave Ubuntu a try. I didn’t care for the Gnome GUI but I did like KDE and XFCE. I started using Xubuntu as my daily driver and in 2013, I kissed Windows 7 goodbye for the last time as I deleted its partition and never looked back. The more I experimented and…

I arrived in Heaven just yesterday. I think it goes without saying that I was amazed, dumbfounded by everything I saw and heard on that first day. The flowers, the angels, my ancestors, everything was quite surreal. The strangest moment was when I met a man from Germany named Adolph. I was a student of…

I like the ruby and python programming languages because of their simplicity. Sometimes it feels like I’m cheating, with all those built-in functions. But there is one terrible flaw to both of these – versioning. My software is versioned, but my programming language should be stable. I shouldn’t have to juggle multiple versions of Ruby…

I’ve never understood the appeal of Apple Macbooks as a developer platform. Sure, it’s “Linux-like” in some respects with it’s BSD kernel. It’s often chosen by developers because of these similarities. As for me, I’d rather use a real Linux machine. All of my PCs and servers run some flavor of Ubuntu (I prefer KDE)….

“Try knocking on the door.” – Harry Callahan – Magnum Force