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Showing posts from 2023

Everything in Moderation...

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 You've probably heard it from a health professionals, in ads or from that local gym.  Can I eat some chocolate? How about a bag of chips? Everything is okay to to eat... in moderation.. right? I am fortunate have been born in a part of the world that values human rights and freedoms. One of these in particular is the 'right' to free speech. We have the right to say what we feel and think, positive or negative, to share our thoughts with others - this is an important aspect of society. Just follow one of the many tweets from Elon Musk, and you can see how much he believes in Free Speech, or for charges brought against others who have attempted to the hinder free speech of others In our world, we are constantly inodiated with information, with the free speech of those around us, and the responsibilities that come with it. There is a man I admire greatly, who gave a lot of talks over his lifetime - his name is Dr Wayne Dyer. He gives one speech about an orange, that truly cha...

Diabetes is not caused by eating too much sugar !!!

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 It makes me cringe every time I see a meme like this ! TLDR; -> Please help support finding a cure for Type 1 diabetes. I made this video for my local community Facebook page and it was rejected. I'm hoping you can help support the fight! To Donate:  https://jdrf.akaraisin.com/ui/jdrfwalk2023/p/1fc07cd8d6214688ad239471dfa31a88 ---- I worry, sometimes, that people really believe this is true, that eating a lot of sugar gives you diabetes. Suggesting that those that have diabetes are somehow 'responsible' for it because they ate too much sugar. This is utter nonsense ! ..and probably makes it hard to raise money to support finding a cure for diabetes - if the person is 'at fault' then why help them right? A person who chooses to smoke cigarettes, drink excessive amounts of beer, or engage in 'recreational' drug use, literally made a choice (in most cases) to put toxic chemical in their body - and yes I know people have addiction problems and need help - bu...

Programming Rant - Stop the Insanity!! - .NET 7 is not the successor to .NET 4.8

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  .NET 7 IS THE SUCESSOR TO .NET 6 .NET 6 IS THE SUCESSOR TO .NET 5 .NET 5 IS THE SUCESSOR TO .NET CORE 3 ...drum roll please... .NET 5 IS NOT THE SUCESSOR TO .NET 4.8 !! ! At the time of this blog their is no .NET path after .NET 4.8. Microsoft will continue to support, patch and update .NET 4.8 for the foreseeable future, though will likely not continue to 'add new' to it. (but they also said this about .NET 4.5.2 and have continued to update it so far to .NET 4.8..so take that with a bit of a grain of salt) Microsoft's "naming" policy of the .NET line and the .NET Core, and .NET Standard is rather foolish from a logical point of view, but it does have some good "salesman" characteristics. Software Development Companies can try to sell the idea in peoples minds to upgrade .NET 4.8 to ..NET 7 and make a bundle in the process - even though Microsoft itself fully admits it is not ending any support for .NET 4.8 This is based on the mistaken idea that a la...

So I started a Podcast ! - The G33k Dream Team .

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  *** HELP WANTED *** It was a dark and stormy night - okay well actually it was about 9AM on a Friday the 13th that I received a Facebook (messenger) message from Matt Gabrielson.. but the story starts a little earlier than that. About one year earlier, to be precise, on Jan 13th 2022, I sent Matt a message asking if I could write a guest blog on his site.  It took him over 1 year to respond - not because he wasn't fast at responding but because it took over 1 year for the message to show up in his Facebook Messenger. So we did an interview together for his YouTube channel it is called " What is GeekWisdom ", it was an opportunity to discuss GeekWisdom , how it started and what it meant. As of the time of this article, that video had more views then any of his other interview thus far, so when a few weeks later he contacted me as if I wanted to start a podcast with him, I jumped at the opportunity. The format is pretty simple, at least once a month (on the 4th), we are g...

Buy Local - the online way

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 This post is about buy local, but not the way you might think. It fact, it's more of a 'Think Local', and by that I mean supporting the 'small business' in the tech industry. We all know who the tech giants are out there, so not much point of me linking to them (and advertising them for free). You can get your social networking for free, your email for free. I'm willing to bet the very web browser you are reading this on now was guess what -- free! The internet, for all it's positives and negatives, is effective at bringing people together, at letting us communicate with others half way around the globe, like they were a neighbor in our own back yard. So when offered something for free many people jump on it downloading he latest free browser, signing up for free webmail, joining large social networks - and why not right? The thing is none of this is really for 'free' these big companies are in it for big profit, and they do it simply by selling you...

Software Tools - Productivity or Distraction?

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  I was looking for a file today on a Microsoft Teams site, so I go into teams, look under files, when all of a sudden I see a chat request from another member in another teams site, so I jump over to help answer their question. Feeling proud of myself I then head back to do some more work on my plate. Ten minutes later I realized, wait a minute - wasn't I just looking for that file? We live in a world, full to the brim of distractions.  One of my favorite perks of 'work from home' is at least people can't just 'walk into my cubicle' asking questions whenever they feel like it. I have much more time to focus on what I promised to deliver when I promised, and people really appreciate that. Software Tools should help us be more productive, and not provide us with new and novel distractions. But like most things in life, it's just not that simple! When my kids were young, I bought them some electronic toys, a robot for example that walked around made funny beep...

ChatGPT and Artificial General Intelligence

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 Recently on Twitter, there is an upcoming twitter space talking about Artificial General Intelligence and ChatGPT. The question posed is indeed interesting. In is important to note that this question occurs frequently throughout our history. One of the very first chatbots Eliza  stunned users into thinking it was possible to create an artificially intelligent machine.  The notion of "artificial general intelligence" wasn't even an idea in someone's mind. The term only needed to be added to our vernacular once it was agreed that the algorithms being created did in fact perform at a level beyond what human intelligence could do within a specific context. (eg: computer beats human at chess, at Go, at Jeopardy), software can interpret human speech, read handwriting, understand the context of a sentence, and even prove theorems, and produce new artistic  works never created or known before by humans.  All items only dreamed of only in science fiction a mere 50-60 y...