This is a bit more of a sartorial topic than what I usually write about, although not the first time I’ve discussed clothing for travel. Yes, it’s been quite some time since I’ve written anything on my blog, but this is the topic that came to mind to discuss.

It’s been a few months since my last trip, however I have been doing a lot more business travel post-pandemic than I had been prior, when most of my travel as a digital nomad was to destinations I chose purely for personal reasons. As such, my travel wardrobe has gone through quite a bit of change, as I need to be presentable when giving talks at conferences, meeting with customers, or attending other business functions. That means no more flannel shirts and hiking pants made with technical fabrics, which while durable and great for travel are far too casual for my purposes now. For those of you who have spent some time with me, you also know I prefer to travel very light while not compromising in any way on quality, I truly want the best of everything.

Introduction

I’ve been using mechanical keyboards for nearly as long as I’ve been using computers. When I was a still a little boy, my parents got an IBM PS/1 with a 486, and most importantly the ubiquitious IBM Model M keyboard. I still have that keyboard and used it for years until I was no longer able to use a keyboard with a PS/2 connector. For as long as I’ve been using computers, part of the visceral nature of putting thought to page or writing code was connected with the tactile feel and clicky sound of a mechanical keyboard.

Analytics Doesn’t Require Tracking

As a very fast follow to my previous post, I’ve now ditched Google Analytics as well. As I noted there, I was interested in privacy-respecting alternatives, so I found quite a few interesting ones.

The options I considered were Plausible, Offen, and GoatCounter. I ended up choosing GoatCounter because it provides a free SaaS tier for strictly personal use websites, which this is. Plausible looks super slick, but is $4/mo even for my minimal traffic, which is almost what I pay every month for hosting. It’s just too much for a low-traffic personal website, unfortunately.

If You’re Not The Customer, Then You’re The Product

You’ve probably heard this statement before, and I don’t know that it’s always true, but it’s become something of an axiom in the web/internet space. It’s true enough in the ways that matter, though, and that brings us to the topic of the day.

Today a post made it to the front page of HackerNews written by Supun Kavinda on his blog entitled “Disqus, the dark commenting system”. Thanks to the comments on HN about this post, I found out that I had somehow missed an announcement that Disqus was acquired by an ad-tech company in 2017, probably while I was still traveling and actively updating this site. I was also apalled by how user-hostile the tracking behavior of Disqus is.

Introduction

This year definitely is operating under some new restrictions. With COVID-19 still looming and vaccinations not yet distributed widely, it’s important to keep in mind keeping social distance and staying out of doors. That said, I’m sure I’m just like many people in my desire to get out of the house. My girlfriend and I decided that instead of gifts this year we’d plan COVID safe experiences for Valentine’s Day.

Howdy all,

It’s been one year since I wrote my last update on the blog. I am hoping to become more active in the near-term future as I’m in progress (albeit slowly) of migrating my site to a new server so I can expand it by adding new sections to cover my interest in cars/racing and cooking. In the process, I’m also planning on reducing my time on social media and likely removing my Facebook account.

Howdy all,

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted an update to my blog. As you might have gathered from that I’ve been busy and kind of forgot about writing for awhile.

I originally had a huge post planned to kick things off again with all sorts of ideas, but instead I’m just going to write something that’s a bit word salad in the organization that comes to mind, and we’ll see how long it is when I get to the end.

Many of my fellow remotes have already written something about their experiences during the year and come to some conclusion about the meaning of it all. The honest truth for me though is that I don’t know what it means to me yet. My experience was very different from most of the people in our group, and yet I can’t help but see that some of the things I’m slowly coming to conclude align pretty strongly with others. I wasn’t at any of these epic parties mentioned in so many other posts, I’m absent from almost every group photograph, I even ended up missing the last day and the big farewell event. Yet, at the same time, I never felt like I was missing out. No FOMO at all. I explored the cities and countries we were in, met locals, broke far out of my comfort zone, and left with a bevy of stories which I will carefully hold to myself.

Happy New Years!

First of all, welcome to 2017. 2016 was an interesting year for me in many ways and a really positive experience, I hope the same can be said for all of my readers. I’m writing this from my apartment in Bogota, Colombia as I begin Month #8 of Remote Year - Darién.

When I think about last year and what sort of theme it represented in my life, I can only categorize it with the term “Discovery”. This last year I had started a new job, I had started remote working full-time for the first time, I had learned a new programming language, operating environment, and industry. In that mix, I also decided it’d be the perfect time to travel the world and meet a whole bunch of new people in places I’d never been before. In short, last year was largely about discovering the world, seeing things in a new light, and through that lens also discovering things about myself.

How’d I Pick fgallery Anyway?

Currently this site is being generated offline as a series of static images, HTML, CSS, and JS files that get served almost entirely out of cache through the CDN provided by Cloudflare. This is made possible by a piece of software called Hugo. Hugo takes a series of Markdown formatted text files, some HTML/CSS/JS templates, and a theme made of HTML/CSS/JS and generates this entire site each time I run the command hugo inside my site repository. This confers a lot of advantages over a more traditional approach such as using a CMS like Wordpress, such as: