News

Welcome to a brand new series of posts. This blog began as a continuation of my LiveJournal, and I am returning to my roots for this series called “This Week in Squirrels…” This blog went pretty quiet after Twitter really took off, but after the great “Eloning of X,” I never entirely took to Mastodon or BlueSky. Because of this, I miss blogging my thoughts. My goals are two-fold here. The first is to return regularly and share my thoughts and content, even if it’s just brief updates on what is going on in my life. The next goal is to get back into the habit of regularly deploying to my journal and build workflows for improved blogging. ...

This post is written in mourning. Today I lost one of the most colorful humans in my life. Steph was absolutely the most amazing, delightful, and powerful women I have had the opportunity to love. Since the early 2000’s with all those nights at nightclubs, to the nearly decade as partners, to her help with my transition, she has changed my life for the better over and over and over. ...

Another quick update for the website! While reading some articles about how to do cool stuff with sqlc I found yet another “Uses” page where the blogger shows off their list full of favorite tools and toys. Since I like to share cool tips and toys and tricks I thought i would make one too, now in the Uses Section of the sidebar. Mine isn’t as nice as this one, but I aspire to get it to that point eventually. Check it out if you want to know what cool stuff I am into these days.

I have updated my templates so that my RSS feeds are full text! There is absolutely no reason to drive you to this site if you can read it in the comfort of whatever reader makes you happy. Sorry it was not beforehand, it’s not the default for hugo.

What a dramatic title for this post! Let’s be honest. I didn’t use facebook that much to begin with. But this post is about life after Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and to a partial extent YouTube as well. I am letting go of Web 2.0. But Why? I am letting go of my “Web 2.0” social media and moving on to more decentralized things like my own hosted blog and Mastodon for several reasons. ...

Oh wow. I haven’t written in my blog since the pandemic hit. Yikes. A lot has happened since then. With social media having fallen apart for years I thought I would spend some time to build this blog back up. I am going to try to spend more time adding smaller things to it, and putting more notes up here instead of only in my Obsidian document. It’s going to be a rough next four years, might as well spend it contributing. ...

It’s been about a year since my last post, mostly frustrated with Chef as a beginner. Now I spend most of my day writing cookbooks and recipes. In fact I am even helping the Lead Dev at work learn Chef and got back from Chef conference. There I met a lot of amazing people and even offered to help maintain BSD support in chef. This post isn’t about that so much. It’s mostly about a behavior I noticed I picked up. When I worked for Stephens Media I spent a lot of my energy trying to contribute, in posts, open source, pull requests, ect. Then when I moved to Slickdeals.net my time was really sucked up. I drifted from working on Pelican and stopped doing as many pull requests. At some time I set up a personally hosted Stash instance. Then I locked that stash instance off behind a login. Then I started writing in my private confluence instead of here. Now all my projects these days are All Rights I noticed… hmph. ...

Actually I should have called this where have I been. This seemed catchier though. In short the answer is I have been at my new job at SlickDeals They have keep me as busy as can be. Because of this major shift I changed a lot of habits; I stopped writing here as much, I stopped actively contributing to Pelican,1 and I also stopped posting to github. Be not too afraid. I still write plenty of code and fiddle around with everything. I just stopped posting most of it to github. I mostly use my own private stash instance. There is some publicly accessible code for those who are interested. The reason is that stash is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper for my private repos so I just put most of my stuff there. I have been rethinking that lately since I miss a lot of the github community style. ...

I’ve been stalling a lot on writing this post. I guess I wanted everything to be perfect by the time I actually wrote about it however my willpower to finish these test cases is weak. The site has now changed, yet again. I decided not to wait 5 years between refreshes this time. The biggest change people should notice is at first glance you shouldn’t notice change. When you click around it should be easy to realize that the site isn’t WordPress based anymore though. I’ve switched over to Pelican. The project still feels very young and small, but it’s done in python and the developers are very active and open to submissions so I jumped in. ...

I haven’t posted in a while because I am working on redoing this site. Once I am done with the backend I will start updating regularly.