Ask an Old Person

2002-2026 I started blogging in 2002 as an outlet. As with other early-Internet technologies, the initial entrants were generally cool people doing the same. It was a lot of fun having cross-blog conversations with fine folks like Kiri, Debbie, Window Manager, and (John (and several other former bloggers). For me, blogging peaked around 2009, when the big social media players started taking root – Twitter (which was akin to shouting in a room) and Facebook. The real shock came when Google Reader was killed. (I tried dabbling with Newsblur and Reeder.) Now there was no reason to visit my site when you could go to Twitter/Facebook/etc. ...

After resisting it for a long time, I decided to plunge into using agentic AI tools to help me with various tasks. Here is a synopsis of where we are at in late March, 2026: Task: Update python code written 7 years ago to current libraries **Description:**one of my initial jobs at work was to write automation that would mash up data from various financial sources, do some baseline analysis, and produce a report, with charts alerting the recipient to specific market conditions. Although this has been running for seven years, there is some maintenance when sources change location or presentation of data. Recently, there has been interest in making its reporting available to an outside audience. As a result, I’ve had some interest in ensuring the code base is modernized. ...