Hello again. Nice to see you. It’s almost been a year.
I was supposed to do better on maintaining this site during 2023, but I didn’t really meet that goal. Some of the reasons were that I was tired and didn’t have much to say, but some of the reasons were largely technical.
Moving the Blog
As you can see, I’ve moved on from hosting this site at Medium. To keep a long opinion short, Medium has graduated into a clickbaity toxic mess of garbage. I’ve gotten to the point where I cringe anytime I’m directed to Medium by a search engine. I was subscribing to Medium for $5 a month and intended to build an audience there and write for pennies. That didn’t happen because using Medium has been challenging. Writing on it was painful, responding to some of the ridiculous comments was even more painful, and I just decided I wasn’t enjoying it any longer.
I thought about moving back to Hugo. Hugo is awesome and fantastic and fits my mentally pretty nicely. However, I’m getting old and lacking patience in doing git pull requests and CI/CD pipelines just to publish words. I needed to get back to the basics - where really all I need to worry about is writing down the words.
I used Wordpress many times in many places, but I always self-hosted it. I grew to dislike Wordpress because it was too big and too difficult to secure. I ended up looking back at wordpress.com to host the blog so I could try to boil things back to something I know and I’m familiar with and integrates well with all the technology I choose to use.
So here we are, back on Wordpress… but on wordpress.com.
It’s Been a Crazy Year
This year has been all about my family. My daughters have been super busy with Taekwondo, Dance, Dance Line, and Flag Football. My wife got a job more than a year ago but she still doesn’t drive. My son has been in college, but recently decided that computer science isn’t being taught well (more on that another time… in short, I agree with him).
All of these busy people are living their lives but the only one that drives other than me is my son. He’s been away at college so I’ve had to drive the wife and daughters every where they needed to go. This doesn’t sound as mentally taxing as it really is, but let me tell you, this is mentally taxing. I’ve really not felt like I’ve had time and energy to do anything for myself. I have plenty of things I used to enjoy doing but my cup was empty. I didn’t even feel like playing video games or watching movies anymore. I literally felt like doing nothing. This sent my mind into a pretty constant panic because I felt less productive (and hey, guess what, I AM less productive!) and felt like I needed to do something but just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
That’s a bad place to be. Finally, one of my daughters will be driving late in 2024 and my wife has her learner’s permit. I see light at the end of the tunnel on this, but for now it’s still too much.
I will admit that this ended up leading to some pretty bad health habits. Overeating, drinking a little too much when the time afforded it, and generally not taking care of my physical and mental health. I’m trying to do better.
Really, I’m trying.
This is supposed to be therapeutic, so I will at least try to be more communicative here. I’ve had lots of thoughts about the state of the world in general and lots of thoughts on tech. I’ll do my best to put them out there into the ether where you may someday read them.
For now, it’s nice to see you again. I hope to write more over the coming year - rather than a once a year update.