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My current job, and possibly all future jobs (I’m 53), involves a lot of WordPress. Ironically, when I was searching for a job I downplayed my WordPress experience because I was worried that it looked more primitive, but when I emphasized it I got a lot more attention. I don’t think I’d say I love PHP, though I do appreciate its usefulness. I might say I love JavaScript. In any event, I think there is enough demand in those fields to last the rest of my career, so I’m leaning in to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My hope for this project is that it will be an opportunity for me to improve my skills in React. I have done a little work in React, most of which was creating React modules within a WordPress plugin. I am excited about the opportunity, and to tell the truth I should have been doing it all along, but there’s nothing like a deadline and teammates to get me off my kiester. I hope that this will help me to become a more versatile web developer, and open up some opportunities for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am much older than the average college student. When I started school, I was worried about my ability to keep up. I decided to tackle this potential weakness with three habit improvements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- I stopped drinking altogether.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- I started meditating.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- I started exercising regularly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
I maintained the first two, but have struggled to have a regular exercise routine. When it’s light out I do walk every day. I have found it difficult to go from work -> school -> workout. It’s easier to do the first two then call it a day. I’m sure I would be better off if I exercised more, but the other two habits have been so helpful for my mental state that, if I had to choose, I’d take those two first. There have been several classes where I thought at some point that I would fail (I never did). I think meditating helped me to keep pushing through when I didn’t understand anything<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The walking where I live is very good<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n I love working with computers and software. I like to tinker. I have amused myself lately by automating my house. I use Home Assistant on a Proxmox server to control most of the lights and the music. My next project will be setting up my garage door so it will open when I approach the house in my car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AI has piqued my interest as well. I have only begun to use ChatGPT to see what I can learn and accomplish there. Mostly I ask questions that I could google, but I’ve been impressed with the quality of the answers. I have found it most useful for things that I could do myself but can’t do quickly, for example “put all us states into a json file with their 5 largest cities.” I could google that data, but it would take a while, and ChatGPT can do it in a minute:<\/p>\n\n\n
\n{\n "Alabama": ["Birmingham", "Montgomery", "Mobile", "Huntsville", "Tuscaloosa"],\n "Alaska": ["Anchorage", "Fairbanks", "Juneau", "Sitka", "Ketchikan"],\n "Arizona": ["Phoenix", "Tucson", "Mesa", "Chandler", "Glendale"],\n\nand so on and so on\n<\/pre><\/div>\n\n\nI have fiddled with using AI to modify photographs. This is a private passion, because nobody has been very interested in the images I’ve modified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Diego Reimagined<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Dall-E opens up new doors in that area, though–I’m a total novice but still fascinated. My attempts only consist of giving prompts to the AI. My son lost his young dog a few years ago, and he told me how he imagines that dog in a field chasing butterflies. Inspired by that I “made” the below image using Dall-E:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/osu-wams-blogs-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com\/blogs.dir\/6418\/files\/2023\/01\/IMG_2130.jpg\")
Max with his butterflies<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n I have enjoyed most of my classes at OSU, and of the ones I really really did not enjoy, I still think most of them were useful. At the same time, I’m glad to be almost done. I will graduate after the spring quarter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the spirit of starting with low expectations so I can exceed them, I have crafted the most boring title possible for this post. It’s all uphill from here. After a midlife career change, I decided that going back to college was the best way to become a better web developer, and enrolled at Oregon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13101,"featured_media":15,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/keechblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/keechblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/keechblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/keechblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/keechblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/keechblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/keechblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions\/19"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/keechblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/keechblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/keechblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/keechblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}