Life

A New Beginning A couple of years ago - in 2016, I think - I stopped writing for various reasons. A significant one being I became a parent and found that I enjoyed devoting all of my free time to endless child-driven adventures. I also worked in Open Source, actively contributing to projects, and engaged with a globally distributed community. All of my itches were being scratched. A few years ago I wanted to start writing again but discovered a problem. The version my static site generator (Pelican) was pinned to was vastly outdated. I also had enough custom code that porting it to a more recent release felt overwhelming. ...

I am having a quiet evening tonight shuffling through imagery and thoughts of my past and wondering what is next. I didn’t sit down tonight with the intent to write this. It just felt right. This post is for me. Finally. “He was a wanderer on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. But time is the fire in which we burn. We are but a fleeting moment, a footprint at the edge of the rising tide.” Solitaire ...

We’re tired but feeling content after a great out-and-back trip to the sunny and remote South West. Erin, tallowen and I drove from Mountain View, CA to Durango, CO. Roughly ~1,000 miles to meet with Chris before Owen and I spent 6 lazily days floating down the lower San Juan river. While Owen and I were out on the river Erin visited family and got to hangout with our new nephew Colt. All told we floated ~60 miles; putting in at Mexican Hat and taking out at Clay Hills. The flow-rate was fairly low and the temperatures were quite high but this helped keep the river really quiet. If I remember correctly we saw only one other group for the entirety of the trip. ...

This summer I was able to telecommute for a month from Crested Butte, CO (aka CB) with long-time friend Jeremy Cerise. What a great summer of mountain living and trail tromping fun. Mornings were spent working from our apartment until we would head out the front door for lunch-time mountain bike rides. After work in the evenings we would lace up the shoes for hikes or more rides. While we were in CB I was really surprised to meet Bruce Eckel_ who is one of the locals. Of the people in the computing industry to meet, Bruce has had one of the more subtle and in hindsight long lasting influences on my life. I initially learned to program through the books he’s written (Jeremy has a similar story). ...

This isn’t actually a eulogy .. I just wanted to show Alex some visuals on the hardware that is running freecog.com. I’ve run my primary site from this little beast for years (previously on a PII box running FreeBSD). It wasn’t a problem until I started working at Mozilla. I now get enough page hits that the lights dim at my apartment and the special lady friend, my partner, complains that the Internet noticeably slows. This happens whenever I submit a post and more than a handful of people decide to read it. ...