As my brief bio note states, I’m a husband, dad, New Orleanian, and Geek. Since I originally registered this domain back in 2000, my content has primarily about that last item. I started with Linux in 1995 though I’ve been deep into computers, coding, and networking since I was a kid with a modem and dial-up BBS’s in the 1980s. That hobby inevitably became my career starting at a small local ISP in 1999. Today I work as a Systems Engineer for the Commercial sector in LA and MS for Pure Storage. However, this is my personal site and my statements and opinions are my own and not necessarily those of Pure. I’m primarily an infrastructure guy focusing on the plumbing that runs the IT shops for businesses such as their servers, storage, etc. Of course you can just take a look at my resume linked at the top of the page.

I’m born and raised in New Orleans and this is where my wife and I are raising our son. I love the city, warts and all. I love the music here and the fact that we can go see live music every day of the week. I love the restaurants and love cooking. I love to travel when we can and explore the rest of the world.

Blog tools

This site is built on Hugo. As of v19 hugo allows me to write in org-mode using spacemacs . Moving from jekyll to hugo was surprsiingly simple. For now I host on amazon with S3, using cloudfront so the site is https by default with my own domain. I use ansible with an s3 module to push new posts to my s3 bucket. I like that what I generate is a static site, easily mobile and easily protected. I also like the Git revision control aspect.

Old stuff

I’ve had a personal site since 2000. The oldest, hand-edited and suitably ugly for the time period version of the site is here. Looking at my site analytics, people are still hitting and reading some ancient documentation archived there.

The second iteration was an actual blog starting in 2003. There’s some interesting bits from the Katrina-period and post levee breaks. I used blosxom to do that and rsync to copy the thing up. Blosxom is an old-school cgi to render text files. The methodology and approach is rather similar to this Jekyll-based blog.

The last iteration was a wordpress blog. It did the job, but I got tired of the “weightiness” of wordpress and the maintenance. Also, I wasn’t writing a whole lot, though that was in part due to my job at the time. I switched to jekyll for a bit but found the lack of built in orgmode support awkward once I started using it extensively for my note taking. There were several different ways of incorporating org into jekyll but there were a lot of steps. Also the ruby/rake dependency chain for upgrades I found to be a bit too cumbersome and sometimes brittle for my tastes.

Each of the above also retain links to older picture albums and the like. I guess I’m a bit of a pack rat keeping the old stuff around. And it’s interesting to me anyway to look at the older versions though of course archive.org is good for that as well.i