a man and his hoe

A new dawn, a new season, good bye to winter, hello to spring. Or so it seems. With each day winter fades away. Though it is still mid February, and we’ve seen March days in the past with snow piling on top of tulips blossoms.

February is a good month to gather fire wood. The trees don’t have their sap yet so they are quite dry already. And being out in the woods I see evidence of deer. Deer droppings here and there. Which makes me wonder if dogs are puzzled that they never see human droppings.

When dogs gather in a dog park do they have heated discussions about do humans poop? Do they ask each other, have you ever seen a human poop? With dogs and other creatures, they can walk along, see a dung pile and know which other dog or creature came by when and left that. Maybe human society would be different if we could walk along, see a pile, and say, “Hmm, Mary was by less than an hour ago. I wonder why she didn’t stop and say hello. Wow! She sure had a feast last night!”

The viburnum is in full bloom. These are great winter and early spring bloomers. I also saw forsythia sending out leaf buds. And on these spring dawns, song birds are starting to sing.

The chickens enjoy these early spring days. Most of the hawks are still off enjoying their tropical winter vacations. So the chickens can scratch through the leaves and grass without fear. Though the bobcat is around. I saw it along the road on the way home from the post office the other day.

And in this new spring, it seems we may be witnessing the dawn of a new era. I’d been reading articles about ChatGPT and how teachers are up in arms that students use it to write term papers. But then I read an article by a man who used it to write a WordPress plugin for his wife’s website.

WordPress is the software that this website runs on. About 40% of all websites run on WordPress. It is free software, written and maintained by thousands of volunteers around the world. Anyone can install it on their server and run it. It is designed so you can add plugins to add features you want. Thousands of people and companies around the world create these plugins.

And writing plugins that add features to WordPress is something that I dabble in from time to time. So I was curious. I logged into ChatGPT, gave it a paragraph description of the plugin I wanted, and the hundreds of lines of code for the plugin started appearing on the screen. Within a few minutes, it had spit out what would have taken me several hours of work to do. But what is intriguing about ChatGPT is that it is great at explaining things. Much of the code for WordPress is written in a programming language called PHP. And this is what is freaky or pleasing about ChatGPT. I asked it, “What is the origin of PHP?” And this is how it replied:

PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, and it was created in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf, a Danish-Canadian programmer. Lerdorf initially created PHP as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts to track visits to his personal website. Over time, he added more functionality to the language, and it grew into a full-fledged server-side scripting language that could be used to create dynamic web pages.

In 1997, two developers, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, rewrote the language's core, creating a new version of PHP that became known as PHP 3. This version of the language was more efficient and easier to use, and it paved the way for the widespread adoption of PHP as a popular web development language.

Today, PHP is used by millions of websites and is one of the most widely-used server-side scripting languages in the world.

That was an easy to read and understand answer. But what I quickly learned is that ChatGPT is a great programming teacher. Any line of code I don’t understand, I can ask what that line of code does, and it gives a good explanation. And it keeps in mind the conversation you had with it and references back to things you recently talked about. For example, this question, “What does => do in PHP?” elicited this response:

In PHP, the => symbol is used to define key-value pairs in arrays. It separates the key on the left side from its corresponding value on the right side. For example, in the code snippet you provided:
$statuses = [
	Email::STATUS_DELIVERED => __( 'Delivered', 'wp-mail-smtp-pro' ),
	Email::STATUS_SENT      => __( 'Sent', 'wp-mail-smtp-pro' ),
	Email::STATUS_WAITING   => __( 'Pending', 'wp-mail-smtp-pro' ),
	Email::STATUS_UNSENT    => __( 'Failed', 'wp-mail-smtp-pro' ),
];
The => symbol is used to define four key-value pairs in the $statuses array. The keys are the constant values from the Email class (e.g. Email::STATUS_DELIVERED) and the values are the translated string representations of the email statuses (e.g. __( 'Delivered', 'wp-mail-smtp-pro' )).

It’s like having a seasoned programmer at your shoulder explaining things as you go along. And if you want more detail, you can ask, “Go on,” and it will add to the explanation.

This does seem very different. It is more Hal like than Google, Duck Duck Duck Go, and other search engines. It’s like having a conversation with a pleasant person who never thinks any question you ask is too stupid, and who has all the patience in the world. Instead of handing back endless lists of websites to look at, I get back easy to understand paragraphs.

And it is the first search engine that ever apologized to me.

At one point it told me that the size of Washington State is 71,342 square miles. I saw other numbers from different websites. So I told ChatGPT, “You say that Washington State area is 71,342 square miles. However the US Census Bureau says it is 71,298 square miles. Which is correct?” And this is how it replied:

My apologies, you are correct. According to the United States Census Bureau, the area of Washington State is 71,298 square miles (184,827 square kilometers). Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Would Google ever apologize?

I see an address that starts with Heol Maes Yr Haf, and I can’t just let it go. What does it look like at Heol Maes Yr Haf? What kind of people live there? More interesting folk than us Bozos who live in Bow?

Fortunately, the internet makes it easy to go down such rabbit holes. So this is what it looks like on Heol Maes Yr Haf. A pleasant sort of place. And it translates to Summer Field Road.

• Heol = road,
• Maes = field
• Yr = the/of
• Haf = sun

And it is in Pencoed, Wales, which translates to Head Tree. Summer Field Road in Head Tree. Who wouldn’t want to live there?

So now I know and I can go on to doing other things, like celebrating the end of winter! Well, it feels like winter is over.

Daffodil shoots are up. As much as I take this as a sign that spring is here and our winter is over, last year the daffodils came out of the ground January 9 while there was still snow. And in late February, on the 21st, heavy snow fell, and a cold spell as brutal as any in Winterfell nearly wiped civilization off the face of Bow.

Here is hoping we don’t suffer a similar fate this year. It is so sunny and warm today with the spicy scent of Witch Hazel to enjoy, that it is easy to believe winter has said good bye.

One of these days I will venture to the arctic in winter time to see the Northern Lights, but the Morning Lights in Bow took my breath away the second of January. I stepped outside and the clouds to the southeast glowed spectacularly.

The clouds aren’t the blue and green of Northern Lights. Still the flaming orange of these clouds left me speechless.

The pink fringes of the clouds, can I call that hue Dawn Pink or Crimson Dawn? Or is it the color of morning fairies?

The spectacle lasted but a short time. Fifteen minutes at most. The sun rose. The colorful clouds faded to winter shades of slate and gray.

And what of the swans. What did they think of the morning lights? They are outdoors all the time and mornings when I sleep in and miss the morning lights, they must see them whenever they appear.

How many get to drive a windy road along a rocky cliff with stunning views on their way home from dentist? That I do is something I am grateful for.

Gray skies turned the bay a sheet of slate the day I drove home from the dentist. Still Samish Bay is worth stopping to enjoy the view. No matter when I travel this windy road, ships moor out in the bay, waiting to move. But who is on them? And are they grateful to be sitting calmly in Samish Bay and not tossing about in the North Pacific?

Another grateful moment, or should I say amusing moment, is discovering that Mormons believe God is dead. And I have proof. You often stumble onto startling revelations like this looking for totally other things, like Emmental cheese. A friend mentioned something about Emmental cheese which got me thinking about my Swiss ancestors on my mother’s side.

Which led me to the familysearch.org website, run by the Mormons. I did find many ancestors in Switzerland going back many generations, many in the Emmental region. Which led me to look into the ancestry of my husband’s mother, something that we didn’t know much about.

And while tracing lines of her ancestry into England, Netherlands, Germany, France, and up ancient lines of Scandinavian kings, I discovered that God is deceased. And here is the proof. It says so right on the record GJTK-QST for God on the Mormon run website:

My lineage came to dead ends in Switzerland and Germany mostly in the 1500s with one line going all the way back to 1060. But my husband’s lineage through his mother’s side, reached back many centuries, through various English and French kings, to unlikely sources such as Teispes 1st Persian King born in 705BC, Sceldwea Sceaf Longobard Koning der Asgaren born in Scani in 20BC, and along the way through Odin Woden Woutan The God of War, Death, Wisdom and Poetry in Norse Mythology! How is that even in a genealogical record?

I found several ancestors of his who were beheaded, and one, John of Gaunt, who was a close friend of Geoffrey Chaucer.

It’s all very amusing to read. And another thing to be grateful for.