So this blog has been more or less flat-lined for years now, but the mess that is Wordpress needed constant attention because it’s so riddled with gaping security holes. I recently started writing in Go for some projects at work and was introduced to the static site generator Hugo, and I thought why not give it a try? I get to write in Markdown instead of a never-quite-right in-browser editor, so I get to stay inside Vim, and my security concerns are as close to nothing as possible when just tossing this up in an S3 bucket as a static site.

I recently moved this blog onto DigitalOcean. For years it has been hosted on WordPress.com, and as a guy who writes software for a living, that’s kind of like cheating. I work primarily on the Microsoft stack, and I wanted to dabble in areas unknown. There were a few hosting options I considered. Just about any cloud platform can run WordPress, but I wanted to own and manage a box running on a Linux distribution.

It turned out to be a mostly clear evening to watch the Transit of Venus. Jen and I went to Holland State Park so we could watch from the beach and I brought my trusty binoculars and cardboard so I could magnify the sun without burning my retinas. It worked pretty well, though during the next transit, 105 years from now, I think I’ll invest in a tripod to mount the binoculars because holding it by hand is a bit too shaky.

My lovely wife bought me a Kindle as a gift and I’ve been playing with it the first few days. So far, I love this thing. I’ve been spending a few days hoarding free books that I can find all over the internet. Amazon has a bunch of free books on their site but also recommends other repositories. Project Gutenberg is pretty damn slick. Plus, today I found a totally free collection of HP Lovecraft’s works over at CthulhuChick.

I know it’s bad for me and the project, but every time I start programming something new, I jump into it without creating any unit tests. Even when I know that the code I’m updating could really benefit from being tested and in the long run, it would save me a lot of time and brainpower, I still start plowing through with my bulldozer of coding prowess. It’s always the same order of events.

One of the fun things about having a blog here on WordPress is that you get to see the various search terms people use to find you. I’m not out to win a vast amount of readership with this thing, but apparently people are stumbling across my words of wisdom. I’m currently number 8 on the list if you google the phrase classy ads to market strip clubs on billboards Impressive, no?

I’ve been working from my apartment for over a month now, and have been generally keeping an Eastern Time Zone schedule while working from the west coast. I did this since day one so I’m used to it, but there are mornings when I get up around 3:00 am so I can work at 3:30 to coordinate with some deployments back home, because that’s how dedicated I am. More so than you.