Experiments in Anachronism

The Right To Vote

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2024, I left early to the polls planning to vote early before going into work. Every election we hear “is the most important election of our lifetime.” So I was really shocked when I heard word from the poll workers. “We’re sorry the machines are down.”

Our county uses some sorta tablet to validate voter IDs and determine registration. During “the most important election of my lifetime” (at least until the next Presidential election), I found myself unable to cast a ballot because “the machines are down.” I set an alarm in my phone and left. Later that day, the machines came back, and I voted.

A nagging thought in the back of my head – “did anyone hear the machines were down and not come back?” I set the idea aside. My vote was mostly ceremony anyway, “everyone knew” how the state would land. This being what the pundits call “a safe state.”

Fast-forward to today. I set my alarm for 5pm and go to the polls again. Years ago I registered 3rd party, mostly as a protest statement. I hadn’t thought of it much until today; I’m not very involved in party politics.

“We can’t give you a ballot, your party is listed as not participating in this election.” I ask for a provisional ballot. “Sorry, the computer says there’s no ballot available.”

I left the polling location at a bit of a loss. Fin and I navigated the internet, trying to figure out who on Earth to call. The clock was ticking – polls close at 7pm and it’s almost 6pm. Just one hour to figure out how to get the issue straightened out.

Fin found the KS Secretary of State’s voting hotline. Called. Talked to a person, transferred. Twenty minutes later, a car rolls up to the site and out walks someone to talk. I get a provisional ballot…

I voted today because I put in some effort. But at least one person didn’t because “machines are down.” I know that. I’m not sure what to do with it.

We need to start giving some thought to where technology is taking us.

Digital Conservation

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m capping off a fairly substantial project today. When I transitioned this blog off WordPress, the old posts vanished. Partially, the reason I left WordPress was pain in backing up posts. WordPress provides a nice XML export, but things get tough when you start worrying about artifacts. Unfortunately, over the years, a few of the transitions over WordPress versions and hosts didn’t preserve all the data. It was a lot of work, but I’ve restored the majority of 17 years of blog posts.

Let’s start with a couple big things I’ve done on the site:

Links section. One of the big deals to me was blog roll links and making “people” based services more discoverable. I’ve started a database of links and primed it with a few of the sites I used.
New theme. I was shooting for no weird Web2/Web3 crud – the theme is basic CSS and not much else. I found a hugo theme from a talented student. I’ve tweaked it a lot, but kept the no-JS minimal approach.

A few big notes on how I managed this all:

https://archive.org/ – was crucial for browsing old versions of the site and finding several images not included in the backups I saved.
https://github.com/lonekorean/wordpress-export-to-markdown – this tool made quick work converting a very problematic multisite + plugin heavy wordpress export into Markdown.

I worked through years of posts, updating images, updating meta data, and comparing against prior versions. It’s not perfect – 17 years of posts are a LOT to go through. While I used some python code to help search/replace update images, I did the work myself. I didn’t want to risk the magic AI box randomly swapping posts around. Spelling errors, typos, factual issues, all hopefully included in this restoration. Markdown is slightly less expressive, so some posts are missing formatting and details of the earlier versions.

While old deep links might result in 404 errors, most everything visible before can be found again. I have some ideas for next steps – there’s a lot possible now that the site is cleaned up and the data restored.

There’s a bit of an ongoing task to go through and update/repair/build more meta-information on posts. Expect some more refinement, but I promise to keep the content itself true to what was previously published.

Working the Artists Way

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A while back, Fin grabbed a copy of “The Artists Way” - a self-help book for “blocked creatives”. We’ve both looked at it a couple times, but over the last few months, I decided to actually make an honest go of working the program. The course itself is essentially a reframed “12-step” program for people “blocked” in their creative process. Despite the billing as creativity rehab, the course really shades heavily into the mental health world. After finishing, one of the last “tasks” is to share the book / experience. So, in keeping with that, I’m dropping my review here. TL;DR - I enjoyed it but with some caveats.

The Course #

The course book is organized as 12-week course with daily and weekly activities. Constant through the entire course is daily journaling, a weekly “Artist Date”, and a weekly check-in. Varying each week is a set of homework - various tasks to encourage creative introspection. The course text follows the same 12-week process with a chapter per week for reading. The format of the book lends toward wanting to read the chapters through the course, but I’d argue reading the entire book first is a good idea as some of the homework relies on previous chapters and other chapters might require some planning for their homework.

The book might be a bit niche, but it seems fairly popular in some circles. It was originally published back in 1992. Google claims it’s a “Popular Program” - but I don’t know that it’s something one would generally run across unless you happened upon a book club or creative clique where it was known. There’s a dedicated reddit and other random social media groups. I didn’t participate in any - but did run across them through web searches when I hit a couple “WTF?” moments while reading. I generally found the online communities a bit off-putting - I’ll leave it as “not my scene”. With so many using the book it’s easy to obtain new on Amazon, or you can grab a copy for a couple bucks on ebay from the many people that gave it a brief try before donating / selling the thing.

The Positives #

I’d argue the program actually works pretty darn well for stirring up the creative juices. The whole thing operates as basically a therapy tool with multiple of the recommendations / themes actually having an above average amount of research backed efficacy. For me, a lot of things operated as “permission to relax”. Several of the activities I had fun doing. A few I skipped. Many fell into the general camp of self-help book club fodder. If nothing else, it’s a good tool to get off the social media heroin.

The Mixed #

This book is rather heavy in the Judeo-Christian viewpoint of God. The author never invokes Christian faith directly, but there is a thread of God’s involvement in your life / working God’s plan for you through the course. Her treatment of God through the text is rather in the “Higher Power” sense that often lands in recovery groups, including her use of the idea of God as “Good Orderly Direction”.

The course also has a slightly ‘uneven’ feel to it - the work / balance week to week feels really random. I suppose this might be intentional, but the lack of pacing made it difficult to plan / fit in the ideas of the class each week. I wished a few times that I’d planned my start date to a more general calendar of the following weeks.

The Negatives #

The general vibe of this book is out-of-touch California trust-fund Hippy. There’s an inordinate amount of time spent on avoiding shitty people and updating your 5-minutes-out-of-season wardrobe. Cameron at one point gives example of ‘struggle’ as a daily cappuccino coming from your apartment’s machine. Or only buying one horse a decade. Many of her examples of ’things to do’ amount to impulse spending / shopping sprees.

I wish the tasks/reading was a bit more organized. Some of the homework is crazy general, some is specific, and sometimes it’s really unclear when a task might be reused or referenced later. A few asks are referenced multiple times throughout, so following the general online advice of “try to do most tasks” can result in gaps as you move through.

Final Words #

I actually had a lot of fun through this - enough that I might actually make another attempt at it after I get a bit of distance from this one. Two things I’ve found worth maintaining - the “Artist Date” and “Morning Pages” routines. They’ve definitely worked for me over the past several weeks.

20 Years Later...

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In April / May 2006, I moved across the country to Kansas City. Sadly, the exact date is lost to time. The best record I have is a handful of emails oriented around my job search and the birth of my niece. I’ve never really treated the anniversary as a special occasion. While I have given little thought to it for many years, this year feels different. More concrete and somehow more important. Realizing it’s 20 years since leaving my hometown gives me a new sense of urgency in life. Funny this all happens to land with a self-imposed deadline to evaluate my goals for the year.

This time of year means spring. And spring’s definitely happening: a fair number of rainstorms, Fin’s planting rounds, and several nice days that make you want to grab a lawn chair and sit outside while drinking a cold beer. And, of course, spring cleaning. Fin tagged much of the house and I tackled the depression den of an office. And with that nicer weather, we’ve also been trying to get out on the town a bit more.

Fin introduced me to Darcy and Jer via one such date night outing. The show was fun and I bought a copy of Darcy’s book when I realized how close to home some of his jokes on ADHD hit. (That and I’m a sucker for getting signed books at author events…) There’s probably better self-help out on the subject, but his story has a lot of tones that ring in my life as well. Hearing and reading the book, I couldn’t help but think maybe I should take recommendations on this ADHD thing a bit more seriously. Insert DUH! by everyone that knows me. Putting into practice a few of the oft recommended ADHD management techniques seems to be working for me pretty darn well.

I’ve come across the recurring theme of “neuro-divergent doesn’t mean lazy” from multiple sources beyond Darcy’s book over the past few weeks. Hearing that hits especially hard as I struggle with my office constantly drifting toward the state of an ADHD depression den. I’ve tried so many times to fix that damn room and never realized that I was actively fighting the way my brain works in trying to get it “done.” I really internalized the boomer advice of discipline-your-way-to-results and that just doesn’t work for me.

While this post started as an attempt to update on the goings on here, I couldn’t help but chuckle as I realized the relationship to my move so many years ago. Hilariously enough, when I kicked off the predecessor to this blog in 2007, my first post was New Year’s resolutions. Ha! For 20 years, the pattern has been constant self-flagellation on my lack of discipline even as I go on to do so many fucking cool things.

Visiting my goals again, that toxic boomer shittastic thinking shouts I’ve not done anything on the goal of building physical things. Then, I realize – I cleaned the damn office into a great workspace. I put together some small lego models. I’ve got a fun wooden gears model in progress. Again, my brain rebels and wants to argue such things as “not counting.” Not big / proper / whatever. Such bullshit. That same part of me counts anything less than superhuman results the same way.

It took 20 years of random blog posts, but it’s finally sinking in that celebrating accomplishments and planning is a lot different from the self-critical bullshit I’ve done so long. Now, to figure out how to apply this same logic to building my exercise routines…

Welcome to 2026

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Despite my best intentions for 2025, most of my goals for the year weren’t really executed upon. This year, my work-life balance has been a bit out of whack. Large work projects distract from things that matter at home and make it difficult to concentrate on personal projects with little energy left over for hobbies. Adding in the continual flood of near-existential crisis in about every aspect of life right now – and progress on any sort of “goal” metric slows down. I found a local club to engage with and have largely switched back to Linux for day-to-day computing. Those are huge wins, but many of the other 2025 goals were partially met at best.

I’ve kept this blog mostly out of a sense of tradition and belief that the internet should have content from individuals. It’s tough, with AI swooping in and gobbling it all up into the LLM machines. I’m staying here, mostly because I believe that little blog websites and organic social networking outside the algorithmic fueled insanity of the major sites are critical to open communication and human connection.

At this point, I’d usually break down into a big list of goals for 2026. This year, I’m going to keep it a bit lighter. Mostly, I’m giving a lot of thought on how to revitalize both this blog and connections to other blogs - so I’m going to shoot for something simple with just 3 goals.

4 posts this year reflecting personal progress and the goings on here. My hope is trying to make a bit of personal accountability and public reflection might help spurn some movement.
Focus on building some physical things. One per quarter so I can talk about it. This might be a home improvement project or random maker style build.
Build energy through accountability. The goal here is simple - just track my physical activity and excercise routines.

Stay sane out there, it’s getting tough.

Fighting Collective Insanity

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the past year, the cost of my multiple “life reboots” has hit really hard. Even a single change in work, change in city, or change in faith community costs friends and acquaintances. In many ways, my social network never recovered after my first “hard reset,” and the handful of soft reboots since haven’t helped the situation. Nor has the increasingly polarized political climate. I’ve found politics in general a cancerous subject that erodes friendships and minds.

Fin has been encouraging my search for groups outside the electronic world. I’ve been lucky enough to find a new family, but new friends have been hard to come by. Growing up in an insular community makes new connections tough, and I never really formed a healthy social network after leaving mine. I’ve intentionally avoided trying to use my professional life for connections, as my experience is these do not “stick” as one’s career shifts.

Let’s start with the big miss. Prior to COVID MeetUp.com helped me connect with a couple really cool hobby groups. Struggling with health issues and moving away from the city distanced me from these groups. Then COVID. Meetup is a shell of its former self, largely hawking Zoom courses. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be much movement in other social media encouraging people to meet in person.

I’ve not found many group hobby group meetings happening in person, and even fewer locally. I recently connected with a local amateur radio group and hope that the hobby might help me branch out a bit. I don’t know that I have a huge interest here, but it’s close enough to other interests that I’m hopeful to find some other drifters out there also searching.

Keep your friends close. They are hard to come by.

Belated New Years Resolutions

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When we started this blog - spun off from a Google blogger page - spun off earlier from my own private blog, we wanted to chronicle our adventures in more sustainable and interesting lifestyle. This week I took the time to write some blog entries offline, with the idea of transferring them here. Unfortunately, I managed to misplace said analog entries. That said, the first one (and very belated) one attempted to formalize my goals for the new year.

After finding myself looking back at last year and realizing I hadn’t managed to take any real time off for myself, I decided to schedule out all of my vacation for this year up front in January. The idea was that if I simply planned vacation time, I might better use the time over the year. My day job offers a “use it or lose it” yearly plan with an above average amount for most organizations. I generally want to “save” my vacation for some grandiose imagined plan which never materilizes while whittling away with an hour here and there when I’m simply not feeling the office. The result is several weeks of poorly spent vacation time.

I’m writing this on a Sunday after taking my first planned week off. We didn’t manage to build any travel plans in time, and the end result was the greatly feared “time around the house”. However, this week we also decided - while I’d have a lot of free time - to cut out all forms of media and screen time. Today is the first day in several that I’ve spent any real amount of time on my laptop.

So, with 2 months already gone, here comes my attempt at setting some goals for 2025:

Revive Blogging for me Personally: I’ve had an internet presence / blog since the late 90s. That’s over 25 years of writing content. My earliest blog actually held the most useful stuff. Things that other folk found useful enough to archive and share. I’d like to see my writing flourish again, especially now, when it seems like social media has taken over the internet. One thing different here - no comments. I’m going to attempt to connect and revive my reader with what remains of other bloggers out there. I plan on adding links to active (defined at least 1 post within the past year) blogs out there. I hope to average at least 1 post a month here.
Move to Linux for all my daily driver non-work computing: Gaming here might be difficult, but truth be told, I’m not much of a gamer. I’m hoping to drop Windows and it’s more active attempts to scrape information and feed ads with something I have a bit more control over. This doesn’t mean eschewing the growing trend of AI assistants: Linux has amazing options for self-hosted AI that can be tailored to work more for you instead of training data for the continued destruction of our society.
Build nerd project from source to completion: I’ve got a couple things that I’ve started, but nothing that I’ve moved all the way through from ideation to done. The goal here is to simply do something cool that scratches my nerd itch and actually write about it and enjoy the thing. One thing I’ve realized with a media free week is how much I used to do versus do now.
Build more and renewed connections IRL: This might mean being more actively involved in local politics, finding some sort of faith community (despite my strong trend toward agnostic atheism), or maybe a musicians group. I’m not certain what, but I desparately need to get out and talk to some non-online people.
Find ways to stay in touch with Social Media contacts: There are a handful of people that I only talk to on social media that I’d like to talk to otherwise. This will be an interesting project, but one that I think more people need to consider. We used to talk to each other prior to Facebook and Tiktok, now we just talk at each other.
End the year with a sustainable excercise schedule: Us nerds don’t often appreciate the need to excercise our non-mental muscles as we sit atrophying in office chairs. As Fin and I have been doing a lot of things around the property, I’ve realized just how out of shape I am! One suggestion I’ve seen is scheduling out excercise time, and so I’m going to set the goal of simply having a weekly schedule at the end of the year, that I’ve hit at least 2/4 weeks for the prior couple months
Release another recording: I’ve made 2 recordings available (and that get some degree of playtime); I’d like to release another recording of piano - some piece I get to a performance level, and then maybe even go crazy and get some studio time for it. I’ve really let my playing languish since I started/finished my Master’s degree.
Make E-Mail useful again: At the end of the year, I’d like to have my email actually organized enough that it doesn’t take an AI assistant to find anything and I can actually respond / see messages that come across. I’d love it if I got a handful of messages through this blog, but that’s not even remotely possible right now with just how shitty my email hygiene is.
Complete Marie Kondo method for the house: This is something I’ll porbably be covering more of as time goes on, but Fin and I have started the process of “tidying” the homestead using Marie Kondo’s method. I think there are a lot of positives to write about here, and we’re not even 25% of the way there. We spent the past week doing a lot of this, and there’s a lot more worth doing.
Read 4 non-fiction and 4 fiction books: I’m shooting for 8 total books this year. Maybe I write about each one as they are done. We’ll see.

I doubt that there’s anyone really paying attention to this blog these days, and that’s OK. If someone finds this small corner of the internet, I’d be happy. If not, this will continue to exist for me. When I first started blogging, it wasn’t to see an audience. I’ve turned off comments here - and even my ability to look at view counts and metrics. RSS will stay, and I’ll be working to restore old entries to the new format. Stay sane out there, it’s an increasingly mad world.

Blog Reboot

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 11:37:55 -0600

Where did everything go?

I’ve found that maintaining wordpress (or purchasing a wordpress site) has become less and less about writing and more about maintaining wordpress. That comes with a side-order of concern for accidentally “loosing” content as Wordpress continues to move toward more of a generic CMS and less of a blog engine.

So - I’ve decided to switch things over to another piece of software and “simplify” the overall design to the bare minimum. There’s a lot I’d like to do with this site, and having a SIMPLE setup that I can easily backup (and nuke the hosting server) is proving more important as of late.