It’s been a successful year and quarter for my return to work effort, and I like to believe I have had a positive impact at the company I work for ‒ Ambient Activity. While there have been challenges it’s been exciting to refresh and renew the technology infrastructure and product technology platform at Ambient Activity, with more in the works.
Things got even busier during the holiday season than I wrote in Busy, Busy, Busy, especially at work. We were quite fried, but we’ve survived.
Daniel F. Dickinson has been keeping extremely busy with employment, other technical activities - not the mention the snow removal that is required in Midland - and his self-motivated volunteering hours.
Sometimes what would be best practice to improve accessibility in a pristine space is changes. This can happen where standard practice in an existing endeavour mean that accessibility tools are less effective, or break, if not constructed to overcome barriers in the standard practise rather than those in the pristine space (which no longer exists).
In fact I am quite interested in what I am working on, and am happy to be learning new things. Unfortunately, not sleeping well, and other frustrations, have marred my enjoyment of my current circumstances. Still, I will prevail.
While it once might have been said that I had a few screws loose, nowadays I am not only getting things done, I am thinking clearly and coherently (except when exhausted of course, but that is to be expected). I’ve also been too busy to spend too much time on politics or news and all the things that I cannot change.
A little personal creativity diversion from the technical/professional content of this blog.
I finished the second week of my new job! Though I did contract work for the same company a week before the holidays, at a very needed moment. So, I will have worked with them for three weeks, now.
My personal reset has been a success. I’m back on track with my training, my contract is going well, and my web presence refresh is making good progress.
I have achieved CompTIA A+ · ce certification, which is step one of my return-to-work plan. I’ve also been making progress on other fronts.
Bing chat fails to reason about who owns Princes and Madmen blog (me) and outright lies and claims that “Princes and Madmen” is a book written by Matthew Weiner.
Since I forgot to mention it before: I am a recipient of a 2023 O’Reilly DEIJ scholarship. I am also very close to official tests of my knowledge. And no, technology really doesn’t change that much.
Some updates on my training and paid work opportunities. (They’ve come through!). Maybe even a little bit too much at once.
In code, choosing spaces over tabs creates accessibility barriers. The developer ‘Holy Wars’ ignore this, so this article explains the issue.
If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted in a long time: “I have been up to tech!” I’ve created and updated quite a few projects.
With browsers having built-in “Open link in new tab” functionality, it doesn’t make sense to break a basic web idiom (the back button) on a whim. Auto-opening link in a new tab/window breaks the back button and is unnecessary (because users have the ability to make that choice for themselves).
One of the lessons I’ve learned over the last few years is to relax and let others do what they do better than I.
… that got me interested in the question, “How long before one reaches the break even point on the purchase of a residence compared to a lease?”
Uses the basic principles of radioactive dating and combines them with advanced isotope measurements to obtain very precise results from small samples.
If my feed was showing me what ’engaged’ me why did I get fed up and leave? There are several parts to the answer, but an important piece is that Facebook’s algorithm is largely an uncontrolled ‘positive feedback loop’.
We need mandatory third party security and privacy audits to matter as much to directors and shareholders as financial audits.
A strange idea came to me in conversation the other day, namely that my schizophrenia helps me understand what it must be like to be Prince William.