A Little Over 20 Years Since My First Post

It just dawned on me that my first post on here recently turned 20 years old. Who’d have thunk I’d still be at it? If anything, I am much more active now than when I used WordPress. The website itself did exist in one form or another for years before I started blogging, although I did do something like blogging by hand-coded HTML at one point.

Switching from WordPress to Hugo and then Zola with a few quick stops in between has been one of the major changes here. For the most part the content is still intact, though. I can probably count on one hand the posts that I have removed. Mostly stuff I thought might make it easier to connect this to my real identity.

I am on my third domain name too because, to me, this one rings a bell more than the older ones did. The original felt awkward to type, and then the second one was too wordy and didn’t have much flow. This current one popped into my head about a year ago and stuck.

It is neat to me to look back at some of my older posts. Early on I did a lot of mundane shit and a few posts that had pictures from geocaching or other trips. I am still genuinely interested in weather and science, but I don’t post as much about that as I used to. Over time I feel like the posts have becomes more personal too. Mundane shit is fine to post about because it is my thought, and this is my place to voice it if I choose to.

My first post was about geocaching. Back then we had a lot more time to do it and chased numbers. Now we get out rarely, but if it’s planned, we choose where we are going and for which caches. The post was about Kelly’s Run. It is a great hike here in Lancaster County along the river hills, and I still recommend it!

This website has outlived all of my social media accounts, and so has the blog. The format has changed, but the core is still here. The layout has changed, and the software that runs it too. Hell, the website has outlived many of the websites I visited at one point or another. The beauty of it is as I have stated before. I can change what this site runs and what not but I still have my data, and I can still restore what I had. I can also keep those backups forever and restore them as I have time. When the big site shut down, it was gone.

A lot has changed in those 20 years. I have been through probably a dozen different hosts. Everything from cheap dedicated servers to cheap shared and VPS. I have gone from Linux to FreeBSD on the VPS.

Now I have 6 step-grandkids. I see my girlfriend’s two kids as if I would see them if they were biologically mine. Of course they are not, and I recognize that, but it’s just a technical detail. They also didn’t get my bad genetics.

I am the uncle of 6 and a great-uncle of one. Now I know I am technically a half-uncle. I went from being biologically a full brother to 3 to a half brother of 4 siblings. Being a half sibling is not something I accept; I see all of them as my siblings.

I have had cancer. Actually, I probably had that MTC all along if I understand it right, but I am not a doctor or specialist. I just pretend to understand what I read.

I stayed in the room with my dad that raised me when we disconnected life support over a decade ago. Now I have a whole additional layer of appreciation for him and for my mom.

In plenty of ways I have gotten a hell of a lot healthier. Other than when I was doing long hikes regularly with a friend, I was fat back in the day. Actually, I am now too, but I feel like I am on the verge of improving that again. I lift heavy. I exercise every day. When I can, I do a lot of HIIT . A ton of my posts these days are about my fitness journey.

I am mentally healthier than I have ever been. I have learned to let things go or at least try to and not let people who are not healthy for me in. It’s a learning process, but I am learning that I don’t care who they are. Treat me right and with the respect I deserve, or fuck off.

Google doesn’t index this site much anymore. They index the spammy, SEO ad-ridden rubbish instead. They sell the ads, so that’s what they want you to click on. I am sure they use it to train their AI, though. I’m not too overly concerned about that. They will do what they will do. I do miss the days when Google indexed everything and would show you obscure stuff instead of what AI thinks you want to see. For example don’t show me results specific to Linux of I am searching for how to do something in FreeBSD!

In many ways since the cancer diagnosis, I tend to live for today and let my weird ways shine. It was a reminder for me to get as healthy as I reasonably can and, more importantly, reminded me that tomorrow is not guaranteed. That doesn’t mean I don’t think ahead, but I do tend to do things now instead of later.

I have become much, much more open-minded. That I think is part of growing up. Very much so. I have become live and let live.

The Phillies have won one World Series in those 20 years. The Eagles have won two Super Bowls. I never thought I would see the birds actually win. One just never uses the negadelphia thoughts. You know that any Philadelphia sports team will find a way to fuck things up. It is just a fact of life.

Thus concludes the book I didn’t know I was going to write for this post.