New Year's Eve Blurb 2023

 

This is going to be in ultrashort, "New Year's Eve Blurb". I'm wishing everyone who reads this no matter where there are the world to take a moment strictly for yourself. The world can get on for at least a minute on its own. Actually let's extend that to four minutes, and here's why:

Earlier today I was pondering how to start the new year off in my assistant living residence, which can always choose a little extra joy, a little play is good for the soul regardless of your age. So for no particular reason I put together this little video made up of photos from humble and the new James Webb telescope. All the material comes from either the Hubble website or NASA's Flickr account. (Details are in the end of the little video.

So without further ado, and wishing you a great new year. Here it is..... (Turns out it's too big to upload directly to my site. As an alternate this is a link on my Google Drive)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hAoNDQa7Dyf8yvFMj1TY67G-8XS-Va8i/view?usp=drive_link

All the best Patrick Clark

"Genius is the rediscovery of childhood."

 

Have you ever noticed that children between the ages of two, to lets say about years old, have unbridled enthusiasm. They simply light up like Christmas trees when ever they noticed something going on. They frequently enjoy the box a gift came in more than the do the actual gift.

They try the box on, if they can fit into it. Exploring every little facet of the thing (yes this may involve destroying it in the process :-)). They are little learning machines, and it is obvious watching them they are having great deal of enjoyment. What was it Einstein said, and I may be paraphrasing here, "Genius is the rediscovery of childhood."

You know for me, I think that is the biggest lesson we can learn from the festive seasons. Simply the rediscovery of the joy found in finding something new.

This is been but a short entry on this blog, because sometimes it doesn't take a lot of words to remember what really is important. The joy in learning something new and approaching it with enthusiasm and curiosity.

Challenge The Brick Wall.

Motivated people, and non-motivated people, why do these two groups exist?

Maybe a better way to phrase this question is: "Why are some people curious, and seek out answers themselves while others do not?"

Many times in the volunteer work I do it is mostly a process of problem-solving, and it is definitely something I like to do. What boggles my mind however is why some people do not. They seemingly hit a problem and it stops them in their tracks; they do not ask or explore how to fix it. Talk about a way to limit one's life because you end up being surrounded by perceived problems. An example:

The other day a friend of mine received a brand-new electric chair. Of course there was much jubilation because they could now zip around on their own. A few days later I heard through the local grapevine that things weren't going so well for this person, they had crashed into the walls of their suite, while learning how to control the sensitive joystick. When I heard this, I went to them and said, "All modern electric wheelchairs have an  indoor and outdoor modes, and it sounds like yours is set on outdoor." A look online quickly determined that yes this was the case, the chair did have multiple modes and it was set on "outdoor" making it too fast. But from the manual the joystick assembly didn't quite match so I told them to phone the store they bought from to find out exactly how to set it into indoor mode.

 The problem was thereby solved and my friend is now happily and safely travelling around. I got the distinct feeling however that if I had not suggested they phone the store or initially investigated further, they would've put up with their chair being in warp drive permanently and probably ultimately would've been injured at some point. Why didn't they have the initiative to simply ask the right questions or even the wrong ones?

This is something that completely confuses me because my friend and others in my building are intelligent. Yet I see this kind of behaviour from a wide variety people now days happening over and over. They usually don't take the incredibly obvious next step, rather they just accept the status quo and everything stops there. This is a quandary I have a no answers for yet. It is just an observation. If anyone reading this as an idea about why this situation exists please do let us know in the comments.

Why so many ads on the site

 "Why am I all of a sudden seeing so many ads on your site Patrick?"

Update: November 30, 2025

Well, after the initial experiment with AdSense I decided to leave Google Inc. pretty much in full control and give them a free hand as to where the advertisements would be placed. Slowly over time, the number of ads,and strange choices of positioning within articles has gotten out of hand. Today however I put a rather strict limit on the number of ads displayed. This may be shooting myself in the foot but in order to keep the site readable and loading material quickly it was necessary.

With Artificial Intelligence changing the landscape of the Internet so rapidly now the old rules of advertising and indeed the creation of original content have gone straight out the door. Let me know if the site is more useful to you.

By the way, there is more new content coming. Several articles are in production 😉

As always please continue to provide feedback and have a great day.

January 8, 2023:

For the next 90 days, since the beginning of January 2023, we are running an experiment in the hopes of finding the right balance between ads (a.k.a. revenue) and the amount of visitors. In short I am trying to strike a balance in the only way to do that is to run an experiment in which a certain number of visitors will see very few or no ads at all and other visitors will see a sliding scale.

There is so much information out there and a lot of it is contradictory regarding advertising benefits. I am also exploring other avenues of bringing you information by using some old technology in new ways. Namely the good old RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) mechanism. All Google products, including the blogger still generate RSS for software that wants to use it. However Windows 10 and 11 don't natively support the protocol anymore which is a shame because it means you have to acquire software to benefit from the feed. That's not hard to do there's lots of software and app still out there. But who wants to download software off the Internet now days? (See the article I posted for more information on that topic.)

Things are continuing to evolve on this site daily, and I'm really looking forward to this week's upcoming adventure (see:Voice assistances and disability)   as I assist someone else with their voice assistant technology.

Take care Patrick