Why Blog at this Late Stage of Life?

  Why would a 70+ year old wanna-be-coder bother to blog anyway? Time is short. The beach wave that this Baby Boomer rode in on is fast receding. Memories of its doings will soon be erased. A fresh wave of energized Gen Z'ers is rolling in, foaming with new life and excitement. They own the beach head now. They own the beach head now.Or so they think --until their underlying wave pulls them back into the oblivion of forgotten history.

So it's not for posterity that we blog. It's for the now. It's for journaling for journaling's sake. It's for putting to digital paper our current thoughts so that at least we might ponder on them even if no one else cares. Just the act of putting into words these thoughts might be therapeutic.

As one young medical student explains in the attached video to the right, it's about putting your thoughts out there for possible exposure. Who knows what may come of them? Maybe nothing. Maybe something significant. If you don't try, you'll never know ...








A more tech-savvy YouTuber named "Network Chuck" explains to the right why he started to blog and you should too. He talks fast and his content is laden with deep-tech jargon. But his bottom line is the same at the start: Put your stuff out there on the net and you might be surprised with the returns on investment (ROI). Network Chuck devises a complex method for automattically converting his Obsidean Notes into HTML by way of a Git Hub repository. (Too complicated for this geezer at this stage of the game.)

Some pundits assume that blogging should be only for making lots of money and drawing lots of eyeballs to your site. That's what is known as a logical fallacy, a false choice menu. It doesn't have to be that way. Just the act of writing can bring its own rewards. First, you get a chance to review your writing technique from afar and perhaps improve it. Second, you get a place to store your thoughts and reflect on them at a later day and usually from a new perspective. Third, you might make new connections with people who are interested in the same topics you want to now focus on. Fourth, you get to work on your HTML coding skills. All that is reward in itself.

By the way, if you are interested in the writing process, you might want to look at the You Tube located here and at further posts by the same author.

More to Explore
In the future I hope to include an end notes section like this which links to additional learning paths. But not just yet. Still learning how to navigate within the Google Blogger sphere

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Git-ten Up to Speed

Image
I'm learning by way of the school of hard knocks that even I, with my very simplistic self-imposed Python project, need help with version control. Let me back up. I created a very simple Python script that asks the user for opinions about various You Tube tutorials, and in the process of collecting answers to queries about the tutorial, starts assembling HTML plus CSS code for posting as a help Tab on my browser. The simple minded script asks the user questions like, 'How many out of 5 stars do you give to the overall quality of this tutorial?' and 'Please copy to the clipboard, the URL of the tutorial and its title'. All these little bits of information get assembled into an HTML/CSS tagged snippet that I want to append to a growing collection of reviews expressed in HTML code. 'Wait a minute,' I said to myself.  (Kudos to Meme-Gen'er) 'Every user input should be tested for validity.' 'And this issue will occur with every future program!...
Read more

True Confessions

Image
  CONFESSION: This is not my first attempt at learning to code. It's been years. And now that I'm over 70 years of age, the learning process is a whole different experience. Perhaps my shared frustrations will help others traveling up the learning curve in their later years. Back Story: Back in my 40's, I registered for a college night course to learn what was a new programming language for me. (They called it 'C' if you must know.)  The class demographics (mainly men) could have been neatly divided into three groups: (1) The 20-30 somethings, (2) The 40-50 ones, and (3) The over-the-hill 65+ elders. No sooner did the teacher start delving into C language syntax than the hands went up. Yup. It was the  65+ elders. " Could you repeat that ?"  " Can you go slower? " " I don't understand what you mean by that! " It was clear in that very first class session that we were going to have a crash and burn scenario for ou...
Read more

Obsidian is Not King of the Hill

Image
The King is dead. Long live the King.  Perhaps it sounds like blasphemy for all the Obsidian enthusiasts out there. But it's true. There are things higher up on the graph than Obsidian. " Learning " (item 150 in the figure below) is higher in the Hierarchy of Brain Management  (e.g. PKM) than Note/Graph-Making (164) or the use specifically of the Obsidian application (165). There are different categories of Learning (150), spanning from Beneficial (151) to Harmful (152) and including Benign (153), where the latter can include time-wasting distractions. A book could be written about the graph to the right. However that would be an example of distraction  because the title of this blog is "Old Man Learns to Code." The "Aging" process 100 can include both the upswing of cognitive capabilities from conception through birth as well as up into the age of 25 before it plateaus and then begins to decline as one progresses beyond 50 and towards the "golden...
Read more