About

About

I am a father of two girls, grandfather of four.

Ex-Army and Ex-Coast Guard.

Was medically retired and then medically discharged.

I somehow earned a BS in Computer Science with minors in Mathematics and Physics and an MS in Computer Science.

I am more or less retired due to medical issues.

I am becoming proficient at crashing on my bike and injuring myself.

I am a bad cook, but enjoy it.

Struggling at gardening and dislike it, but am still trying to get better at it.

Keeper of Guppies, a Mystery Snail and an African Dwarf Frog.

Best friend of Ragnar, an awesome Shar-pei/Black Lab (or Pit Bull?) mix.

Attempting to learn guitar and the Russian language.

In short, a nobody.

Likes: Ruby, Elixir, Kotlin and when I am in the right mood, C. Algorithms, data structures, networking cyber-security, building computers, economics, art history, astronomy, fishing, hiking, bicycling, puzzles, and mathematics.

Dislikes: Java, Python, Rust, Perl, databases, web development - at least front-end stuff. Also, psychology and gardening.

Seething-Hatreds: PHP, the English language, and broccoli.

Self-Portrait Self Portrait

The original purpose of this site was self-improvement. An attempt to see where I went wrong and where to improve myself, so I would be fit for polite society.

That failed in spectacular fashion leaving it obvious that I have no options other than to be alone.

The reason that I posted it online was to force myself to try to have complete thoughts and write in complete sentences that are at least somewhat intelligible.

Now, this is focused on hobbies, interests and activities of mine in the hopes that I can help someone. I left the older posts up, again in hope that it may prove useful, or at least provide you with a good laugh and to remind me of my failures.

I have no one to talk to, so I am left to screech into the void.

Comments are open in the highly unlikely event that someone has something to add. Questions and topical comments are welcome as long as it is reasonably polite. They do not have to be on topic.

Insults will be deleted and are pointless. Trust me, I insult myself worse on a daily basis than you could ever do.

I am big into music, so I often embed music videos, most have little or nothing to do with the topic at hand, but they are there to make it more entertaining.

Sometimes, just sometimes, they do relate but often in ways that only my broken mind can see.


Google Analytics is not embedded in this site since Google is the devil.

I do use insights.io to count page views, it is a privacy-oriented web stats service. It actually follows your “do not track” browser settings.

It does use Disqus in case anyone wants to comment, and it has some social media buttons in the highly unlikely event that you want to share something.

Disqus does leave a cookie in your browser’s storage, this site does not, including insights.io.

Cloudflare does proxy this site and all I get from them is the number of unique visitors, requests and bandwidth per hour/day/week/month and sorts it by country only. Unless you live in a country with a population of one, I don’t know who you are.

If I embed a YouTube video, I use the privacy enhancing mode, which I am not sure if it actually does anything remotely privacy enhancing, unfortunately.

There are no ads on this site. Ads suck and I encourage everyone to block ads everywhere they can.


If I mention or link to a product, there are no affiliate links, and they don’t route through some scummy third party site to steal what information they can get. They are always direct links to the website or product in question.

If I mention or recommend something, I received no compensation for it. Even if I got enough traffic to make money on such things, I still wouldn’t do it.

Most of the images at the top of each post are from unsplash.com. There are one or two that are mine or came from a products site.