Welcome to my personal site, my professional works are not here. Here I will share things of a more personal nature and less about sorting linked lists and dealing with stateful workloads in Kubernetes.
Interests
- Technology – I love technology and I really thing that it has greatly improved our lives in so many ways. Ever since I got my first computer, a Tandy 1000, I have had a draw to technology. I used to ready old copies of PC Magazine that my grandfather got me, carefully writing out the QBasic games they included in every copy line for line. I would then begin tinkering with it figuring out how every piece of it worked. That was many years ago but that really has never changed – to this day I still love to learn new things about technology and tinker with everything I can. I self host (almost) every service that I can, learning how to properly manage and tweak it to suit my exact needs. Sometimes these projects end up with me realizing that they aren’t useful and getting shut down, but it’s that thirst for in the knowledge of how they work that has never gone away in me.
- FOSS – I’m a big advocate for using and supporting open source software. I regularly contribute code to open source projects where I can and have been donating whenever I can’t. Virtually all of the software I use on a day to day basis is open source and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The projects out there that people have created are really amazing and I am so glad to see FOSS world continuing to grow. Everything I write gets published to my Gitea instances here, though I will admit most of it is just hobby projects, websites or automation tools that I write.
- Privacy + Digital Rights – I have been a huge advocate for our right to privacy and digital rights for many years. I have watched the the internet grow from something small and quirky to the dystopian nightmare it is today. Huge mega-corps that gobble up every bit of data about you to sell to other companies. Companies like Facebook and Amazon have proven time and time again that they do not value your rights as a person and only as a means to make more money. Huge companies that leak massive amounts of information about you due to negligence and face nearly no consequence for it. Governments who opposed the will of the people by spying on it’s own citizens and continuously passing inept legislation that goes against us. I believe it’s time we start fighting back and an easy way to do that is by helping great organizations like the EFF.
- Modding – Skyrim and Fallout 4 have been like giant sandboxes to me. I have spent countless hours modding and tweaking them I’ve been dabbling a bit with some fundamentals of 3d modeling because I have some great designs in my head that I would love to try and create. Since I don’t use Windows I have been also working on documentation and tools around launching and modding these games in Linux. By themselves these games are really good but it’s the modding community that turns them from good to amazing!
- Gender Expression – I was born male and have always expressed outwardly as a male, however, ever since I was young I’ve expressed a desire to dress in feminine clothing. Most people call this cross-dressing and it’s something I’ve done on and off in secret my entire life. It wasn’t really until I was in my mid thirties that I finally braved up and told my wife about it. It was hard – and truthfully still is – as I grew up with it not being something that was as accepted as it is today. Truthfully it’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to accept in myself. I try to take baby steps each day when things permit and I try to tell myself that it’s okay – but I’ve still never braved going out in public. Here you will find a lot of writing about my coming out and self-acceptance on something that really shouldn’t be as big of a deal as it is.
- Self-sustainability – I am a big proponent of always driving to become more self sustainable. I think though sometimes the idea gets conflated with the principal that you have to do everything yourself though, and to me that isn’t the correct idea. Self-sustainability should being able to have a broad understanding while still building a community of skills. No one person can do everything and this lone-man mentality is just wrong. Society as a whole has driven so much towards globalization, especially in food production, that it is not sustainable. Food production itself needs to be moved closer to home and we need to stop trying to produce food for the world and focus on how we can improve food production in a localized way. This might be more idealist than realistic but it’s always good to try.