About

about the blogger

Your friendly proprietor splits his time between the suburbs of both Chicago and Boston, never far from the Lagrange points described by the gravity wells of family, work, and recreation. Interests include, but are not limited to, parenting, music, science and technology, politics, current events, sports, and travel. The mood tends toward pessimism, but perhaps not unrelentingly so.

dramatis personae

You’ll see references to the family here by their names, not some coy abbreviations or their ages. Meet Danny, Leah, and Sharon:

Also, Arlee:

(it’s very hard to get a good pic of a black dog who never stops moving)

about the blog

Everything old is new again.

I decided to go back to blogging in a more traditional format, and, in parallel, to step back from mindless consumption of the usual social media platforms. Write more, scroll less. Hopefully. This blog is the primary implementation of that decision. Deleting most of the apps with a blue icon from my phone is the rest.

At the moment, I have no plans to enable commenting or liking/rating systems. I have come to believe those mechanisms trigger and reward the worst behaviors we see online. If you’d like to share any thoughts about what you see here, there are plenty of contact icons up there to choose from.

If you’d like to receive new posts via email, that’s possible here.

Trigger warning: commas will be brutally misused, except Oxford commas, which are sacrosanct and will always be in place.

Housekeeping: some posts here are from old blogs; those are tagged “imported”. Any posts edited after initial publication (beyond trivial grammar/spelling issues) will be tagged “edited”.

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: nothing here should ever be construed as me speaking on behalf of my employer.

Nuts and bolts: I’m trying to do this fast, light, and cheap. It’s a static site powered by Hugo featuring the Vitae theme. The web server is lighttpd and I use GoAccess to look at the log files once in a while. It’s homed in lovely Oregon, USA, under the benevolent gaze of the world’s richest man. I’m not using any trackers or cookies or beacons or any other creepy shit that might follow you around the internet. Let’s just keep this between us.

last update: 2021-03-03