Overextension of oneself

 

I have to laugh at myself on this occasion… I originally came up with the idea for this article on March 24, 2023, and here it is slightly over a month later and I am just getting to this particular piece. Why?… Because I did exactly what the title says I overextended myself. It was a perfect storm and then I added to it with my own special secret ingredient, I increased the scope of my video article on the basics of Windows 10 part one. It grew into a monster over an hour and 1/2.

Then I added to this dessert of mayhem a generous sprinkling of committee meetings and evening nonprofit organizational meetings. I'm not kidding the last month vaporized inactivity. I kept thinking about the blog and my brain was just saturated with everything else. I must've seen the writing on the wall subconsciously when the idea for this article popped into my head.

I can therefore attest that everyone reading this must give themselves a break. Start small if you like just stop whatever you're doing and let go. If you have to put that smart watch under a pillow :-). To remind myself to slow down and appreciate more, because let's face it, everything in life only occurs once, I bought myself a Tiffany lamp. By racing through the day you are literally missing the whole point of being alive and that is to acknowledge the very experience and take value from it. The lamp reminds me of the time it took the artisans to make it. They invested part of their life in it.

When one is younger there is a subconscious belief that the flow of life is infinite. Therefore one wastes a great deal of time in those early days by not being present in the moment. Man, one does not do that when one is in their 60s and yet I was talking to a friend of mine over the weekend who said "You're still a youngster, I am 89." That put it into perspective for me. I remember in elementary school when I thought 30 was over the hill. And when I was even younger, a year felt like forever, especially just after Christmas. Not that I'm materialistic, but I do remember clearly thinking that it would be an entire year before I can start my campaign of nagging my parents for whatever new Mattel propaganda was being produced.

So take a break right now if you can. Don't fill the space immediately with other activities. Let your self gear down a bit and check-in with your body and self. If they say "you're doing too much.". Listen to them! If you overextend yourself than the quality of everything you do will suffer along with you. Learn what speed you can go ahead and everything will improve.

Take care Patrick

Appreciating accomplishments.

Very often, when I speak the people who are going through a negative period In their life, one of the things that started the downward trip was that they stopped acknowledging their daily accomplishments.

Every single one of us accomplishes something every day. We often miss acknowledging this because in the modern fast-paced world achievements must be big and profound. Popular culture would have us all believe that we must launch a rocket to Mars, or something effectively preposterous every day, otherwise somehow it is not worth acknowledging. I had a personal example of this just the other day.

I had just uploaded my very first long format video (Article and Video Windows 10 basics part one) to YouTube and I instantly began to judge it against out plethora of professional and pseudo-professional offerings. For a while I felt like I had wasted almost 2 weeks worth of free time on this first project. Then I thought: "Wait a Minute!… I am learning as I go and in making pretty darn good use of the resources I have. It's not meant to be perfect… It was more important to get this first instalment posted." Indeed I am lucky because I realized to appreciate my achievement.

We are all learning as we go along in life and it is so critical for one's self-esteem to see and appreciate that in various forms. I watch a video the other day of a professor describing how to make the substance Graphene and was really struck by the time and patience he took in testing the substance he made. In doing so he got the maximum enjoyment out of the experience, not to mention the tremendous insights. Someone else might watch part of this video and get bored because at the point where he is verifying the results it's by slow repetitive measurements. But I think that's where he had the most fun, truly demonstrating that he created the substance and that it was tremendously strong. So by acknowledging the small achievements in this hour-long video he gained a tremendous boost emotionally and intellectually. All because what is important is acknowledging the small steps.

When you think about it we are all "Getting There" one step at a time. Take a moment to acknowledge those achievements.

Take care Patrick

Actually, "Disability" is pretty normal now days.

Think about it, 30 years ago if you have some form of disability especially if it was obvious, you were still kind of "odd" or dare I say "special". ("Them's fighting words." Some of my friends might say.) But now I think it is quite true that overall society has really begun to accept and expect disabled persons to be part of the larger society and, when possible, contribute fully.

From my perspective this is an astounding and welcome occurrence as the world and societies move forward. To be fair this "movement" isn't uniform, but we are I think as a whole evolving. I remember when the fight for curb cuts aka."curb side ramps" began in the city of Vancouver in the 1980s along with the remarkable people I met some of which are still as active as ever in the advocacy groups and planning departments. Now I must state for the record that my perspective is a little skewed. You see, my father had polio and he was one of the first, if not the first anaesthesiologist in Canada to practice his profession. This meant of course growing up I couldn't play the same "poor disabled me" routine on him.

Yet, I can't but wonder what life would be like had I been born into it average family structure. I have met people at my assisted living building who have a real sense of helplessness. Not because they are physically or mentally any more unfit than I but because I think their family went into shock and guilt at their birth or whenever the physical affliction manifested. They rushed in to do, what they perceived the child could not do and removed all obstacles which might pose a challenge. Accidentally in the process depriving the child of the very thing they need to get through life. To face a challenge, one must spend some time understanding it and then formulate a way to overcome it. Or if it cannot be overcome, be involved with those that help you deal with it.

The result of a far too easy life is that you stop growing and there is a tendency to habitually play the victim role. It gets you short-term attention but completely disempowers you and perpetuates inequality on multiple levels. By the time the family figures this out, the child or semi adult is still entrenched in these negative patterns that it really is a challenge to begin breaking the door down so to speak.

Appropriate challenges in life are what allow us to grow and expand giving us a far, far more enriched life. I treat my disability as a gift because it gives me something that all the "normals" seek that is to be unique. The challenges have given my brain food to expand on. It's like living on Mars without having to pay a ticket for the adventure. It's not a piece of cake but I bet you it's helped keep me an interesting character. And I love other interesting characters :-). True sometimes it does get nasty and difficult when dealing with political or physical issues. But that is part of the challenge it is all an opportunity to grow. And that's what people are here to do, Grow.

Being disabled may the end of the day may be the best kind of "normal" there is!
Just a thought.

Take care Patrick


 

Don't turn me off! A few thoughts on AI.

 

I find it fascinating that people adhere to behaviours, especially the subtle ones which are counterproductive or make their lives more complicated. Yet like an old friend, who drives you crazy, but you just can't bear to part with them, people adhere to these choices with a death grip in some cases. Actually most cases, now that I think about it. All the way down through history people have debated why people hang on to certain behaviours. But now with the advent of AI starting to become a real reality we have an opportunity actually dissect at a far more granular level these kinds of mental patterns, because as were beginning to see some AI models actually have the same issues. This could very well be the first step in reverse engineering the human psyche. Were probably going to find out there's a gazillion models and variations of it of course. Think about it though, this is really profound in what we might be able to do and discover with these new tools.

Up until recently psychologists and psychiatrists could come up with a hypothesis on the very inner workings of the mind. Now we have the opportunity to literally set up a means of proving or disproving a given hypothesis. We effectively have the beginnings of a brain in a box. Of course these need into some interesting and real ethical questions. Do we have the fundamental right to freely experiment with AI in that way, just because we can turn it off and on. I don't know about you, but I would become very offended if somebody kept restarting my life. I think the AI will see itself as something with intrinsic value. We may have to treat it in the same way as giving birth. Once you create an AI and it has an awareness you are obligated to keep it running.

This brings up the whole concept of lifespan and indeed what that it's and at what rate it progresses. Talk about a mind popping thought. I'll leave it there for tonight I just want to post something and get things going again but boy could this topic ever take off.

Take care Patrick

PS: Apologies everyone the last few weeks have been very hectic. A lot of things occurred at once causing the interruption of articles for the blog. Well I'm about to remedy that. And the video (s) regarding the fundamentals of Windows 10 is definitely in production and is turning into quite the beast. You just don't know how much you know, until you start digging through the actual steps. Part one is going to be about 90 minutes long and it just covers the fundamentals but in a very granular way.

And now on with the show…

The Basics: Windows 10 (Ongoing videos)

Animation incorporates artwork (the monitor) by
Михајло Анђелковић under the Creative Commons
license CC BY-SA 3.0 .

This is an interesting situation.. There is a client who contacted the place where I volunteer for some computer assistance. In the course of the following conversations it became evident that they really don't have a concept of how to use a modern computer. Throw out the last couple of weeks I've meant to create a series of short videos giving the client the basics. But I do have a bit of a problem. It is literally hard for me to think I had such a fundamental level. I've worked with the computers pretty much my entire life and technology in general. So how do I make a video or set of videos that are both sufficiently fundamental and yet they have to be engaging and not too long. I would like each segment to be no more than 20 minutes.

Part 1

THE DESKTOP

To give you some idea of how fundamental we are talking about. When I first began working with them they mentioned that their screen was "blurry" whenever they started the computer but that it soon it cleared up after the machine had been running for a while. They did indicate however that this happened every single time they turn the machine on.

I immediately began to think about the monitor, perhaps it was a true type font issue dealing with the way Windows tries to improve the readability on screen… Maybe the monitor was dying… Or may be something else was not loading properly… My brain cranked through all the possibilities I could think of. .... A driver issue maybe.... I couldn't think of any particular setting. They had said that this only happened recently....Hmmm... I got out of the old virtual machine and attempted to replicate the situation. At first no matter what I did I couldn't get anything remotely "blurry". The login screen on my virtual machine looked perfect. And then a Windows update was applied and I saw it. A new "feature" had been magically added to the logon screen. Here is a screenshot of my virtual machine before installation and after once Microsoft had applied the latest and greatest update. I suppose it's supposed to enhance security somewhat, (but I have a feeling is just somebody in the back room of Microsoft having fun).This logon screen effect might've been included in an earlier update as well.

 Feature update 22H2

Before

 

 

After

There are apparently various ways to turn this off which I haven't investigated thoroughly yet. Here, the point is to illustrate the different ways people perceive and understand things and the challenges that can produce. In this case this is one of many indications that the client perceives the computer very differently than I do. As you can imagine this leads into a whole host of confusion and frustration for them. This is more than a case of education this is a situation where the perceptions are very different across time. The challenge is to give them a good grounding in the fundamentals and not for them to death. Also how to convey that information. I haven't decided yet how I'm going to put the lessons together but I will post them on this site as they are produced. The desktop I already know is a complete mystery to them. I have to find a way to convey the idea of "a desktop". While the concept and parallel between a physical desktop and a computer desktop is easy enough for me to understand I think maybe the term desktop should be avoided at first.

This is going to be interesting.....

• Apologies, a cold interrupted my work schedule and thereby the blog. I am getting things back on track and will be filling in this article as well as working on another one.

The amount of detail that is required with even something as straightforward as Microsoft Windows 10 is quite astonishing. For one thing the reason it appears as straightforward is that we have had a long time to get used to the paradigm but someone coming at it cold is in for quite a shock. For example the term "Taskbar" is utterly meaningless and when you think about it it is never been well defined. To top it all off the way it is used has changed quite a bit over the years especially lately with the introduction of Windows 11.

Stay tuned. I'm back in the lab cooking things up :-)

 

Well, the first iteration, of the first video in this series is completed "Basic Windows 10 Part 1: THE DESKTOP". It covers the most fundamental aspects of using a computer starting with the mouse. I had intended to go quite that basic, but after discussions with people it became clear that even this needed to be covered.

There is so much material in this first video it is an hour and 1/2 long and took over two weeks to put together. This is a learning curve for me as well in regards to YouTube and I will be adding chapter markers and ultimately captioning. A written companion also be added.

The focus in part one is just the desktop and its major components. For the most part do not delve into the Internet, yet😀

Patrick