What I'm doing now

Reading

Currently I'm reading When the Clock Broke, a history of US politics in the early 1990s. It's very good. Unfortunately, the library yanked it back while I was reading it, and I went back on the waiting list for it, but I will finish it eventually.

Learning

For work, I'm completing the Google Project Management certificate and the Adobe Content Creator certificate at Coursera. I'm also taking an instructional design course from the University of Illinois at Coursera, and it's surprisingly good.

A confession: I am not a big fan of Coursera. As a hiring manager, I would not seriously consider a Coursera certificate as a legitimate credential, no matter what Coursera tells you. In fact, if you included it on your resume as anything other than "continuing education" or something similar, you would probably end up in the reject list. And I'm probably one of the more open-minded hiring managers out there. If your employer (like mine) pays for you to take Coursera courses, then go have fun and learn everything you can; but please don't present them as a serious professional credential.

For my hobby-coding, I'm going through LinkedIn Learning's PHP with MySQL Essential Training, which is an excellent course. It's helping me get my PHP up to date (especially with things like security) and fill in some things I never knew or have forgotten. I'm looking forward to part 2, which will cover some things about content management that I've been wrestling with and just can't seem to solve on my own. I highly recommend this course, even though it's a couple of years old and the version of PHP it teaches is no longer the most current one.

(Sl)activism

I write to one of my senators a couple of times a week. I also sometimes submit comments in the Federal Register to proposed measures that I feel are harmful.

What I would really like to do is some citizen archiving. If you know of good project that isn't too swamped to deal with newbies right now, please let me know.

Contemplating

The need for a good public resource of historical information that is not funded in any way by the US government, no matter who is in charge of it. Wikipedia is good at this, but I think it will take one more generation of teachers who know that Wikipedia is not inherently unreliable just because it's created and maintained by volunteers to get rid of that particular bias.