Hello! For reasons that I don’t yet understand, I am going to start writing here. I think part of it is an itch to scratch (see below) but I’m sensing something deeper. Maybe I’ll find out in the course of doing it.

I had a website about twenty years ago (some of it was archived by the Wayback Machine and is still viewable …). It was hand-coded html with pictures, mostly from my travels. There were links and image maps for navigation and I had a lot of fun creating it. But then I stopped updating it, and I let the web hosting and the domain lapse, and that was that.

Part of the fun was figuring out how to do it. How to write HTML, how does web hosting work, how to do navigation with image maps, etc. I have scratched that itch in other ways over the intervening years. I run a webserver on my home network and use D3 to visualizate my running miles and my weight. I put together a Raspberry Pi temperature sensor to monitor a building at work and check if the furnace has quit. And lots of other small projects, mostly related to computer programming and mostly related to figuring out how to do something and then losing interest once that I figured it out.

And now I’m back to a public webpage. I’m building this with Hugo and trying to work out how to automate the updates with git. So more things to figure out. Let’s see how long I can keep this going after I’ve worked out the technical bits…

 

And now a few thoughts on things that I have read, heard, and seen:

Recently read: The Journey of Crazy Horse by Joseph M. Marshall III. What actions are worth doing in a time when a world is ending? And what things are worth saving? I went into the book expecting a straightforward biography, but it was a lot more than that. It was a window into a way of life and it gave me historical perspective as well as things to consider about my life in the present.

Recently watched: The Equalizer 3. There is something satisfying in seeing horrible people get their comeuppance. I’m not proud of this feeling and I suspect that it causes a lot of the troubles that we have in the world today… after all, who are the “bad guys”? And why are they on that path? And how should we respond to them? And isn’t restorative justice often a better path?