Blog Title

Blooms

2025-04-20T00:00:00Z

One of my favorite signs that spring has arrived is the blossoms on the magnolia trees. They are tender and easy for weather to ruin, so a bloom is a sign of the weather turning warm and staying mild. Sometimes we get a surprise frost that knocks the blooms off the tree, but this year we got a full bloom.

I love the feeling of anticipation that spring brings. New season, new life, new challenges.

Three springs ago I jumped into my current cybersecurity job, and two springs ago I found out I had brain tumors.

Last spring I had just finished radiation and was just learning what life after cancer treatment would be, and I started a garden and became a mentor at work.

This spring is no different. I've got new plants started for the garden that will be in the ground soon. It's my first spring as a dog owner. I've got new projects and mentoring relationships at work that are taking me across the state. I saw Second City for the first time.

So here's to being like a magnolia bloom - bursting into vibrant color to kick off a season of life and growth.

Dumpster

2025-04-15T00:00:00Z

There's a dumpster at my house right now.

Not because I'm doing some big kitchen remodel.

It's more of a personal remodel by decluttering.

See, I've got a hoarding impulse. Not enough to get me on a TLC show. But enough that the impulse to keep acquiring means I end up with things I don't need and/or won't need.

I come by it honestly, baked into my genes from economic downturns in generations past. Why throw something out that could be useful someday?

Most of the time a full curbie for the garbage truck is a sufficient antidote. But not always.

The dumpster has a couch in it that I used as a day bed in my office when I was sick from chemo or radiation treatment.

It has the broken post of a bat habitat from when my house was hit by a tornado.

It has the office chair of the pastor who used to live here, worn with years of use and impractical for my work-from-home career.

And there are so many boxes.

This is a chance to tell myself, I don't need that box to return or sell or transport this thing. I no longer have room for that worn out couch from my parents because I've put a treadmill there instead. It's okay to be grateful for a thing that had its season and let go of it.

This is a chance to resist the allure of consumerism. Buying and acquiring more has to face when there is no more room or time for that thing. The effort to release has a dialog with the desire to acquire.

And maybe the next time I have a piece of furniture that is end-of-life, I won't need a whole dumpster to get rid of it, because I won't have so much extra clutter in my life.

But today I'm filling up a dumpster.

Hello World

2025-04-14T00:00:00Z

After years of shared hosting powering my presence online, I'm trying something new - a static site generated by Eleventy.

It's not that Wordpress is bad at what it does, but I'm nostalgic for the simpler times of the Internet that I started learning to develop websites on, a quarter of a century ago.

I was making websites back when <table> tags were the only way to make a competent layout. Rounded corners were predrawn bitmaps and put in <td> tags that only existed to make a fancy border. Javascript frameworks like MooTools and jQuery were years away, and there was nothing terribly semantic about how we cobbled our code together.

And there was something so nice about typing in Notepad, saving a file with the right extension, and seeing it seconds later in Netscape or IE. No build steps required.

I wasn't using artificial intelligence to make my websites. Adobe Dreamweaver had its season but it was hardly generative AI.

In some ways it feels like that forgotten path is a better one:

This content is simple enough to live on the edge - literally the edge network of Cloudflare and its best of class CDN.
The simplicity means it's low impact in terms of financial and environmental cost.
I'm not playing whack-a-mole with CVEs because the static site is mere HTML, CSS, and JS. There are few things in life that carefree to a cybersecurity professional.

So here's a walk down that forgotten path. Before ads and algorithms ruled our lives, before blockchain and AI were all the buzz.

Thank you for coming along.