I made some backend changes to my WordPress config. It seems to make the load time on this site a bit better.

It turned out that the caching setup I was using was, in effect, not caching. Go me. This should just be a temporary change, as I started migrating this whole site over to a static page generator which will host its pages off of an Amazon bucket.

I also updated the about page with my most recent situations and information.

I've had some time on my hands the last few weeks, as I'm currently between jobs. It's been pretty great to have some time off. I was working at Turner for 16 years, spanning four different properties, and a myriad of projects. I've really enjoyed spending time with my family, and focusing on what's important rather than immediate. I'm at the very beginning of my job search, and will likely post more about that here soon, as I need to do some work on my CV first. Turner is a very different place than the one where I started in 2003.

One project that I've put off for a very long time is moving this blog to more reliable and modern hosting. Additionally, I have wanted to finally move all the entries into a single CMS. With the 22nd anniversary of this site looming in a couple of weeks, now seemed as good a time as any to try and get this stuff squared away. The site has been on the current host since 2010, and with the advent of cloud hosting, I can actually reduce my cost and greatly improve the speed of the site, which is really terrible at the moment.

Previously, most of the entries that were before March 2000, when I switched the site over to Blogger/Radio Userland as a backend, were sitting in either a flat file, or on this server, which is still somehow up and running.

Over the last two weeks, I have manually been bringing those older entries over to this existing server. This will allow me to export everything from WordPress as a single set of combined entries. Unfortunately, there were a few hundred entries, and so it took quite a while.

Happily, I just finished this task. It meant having to read what the me from 20 years ago was thinking about, which was dreadful at times. It was also cathartic. I'm quite embarrassed by what younger me thought and the quality of my writing in the earliest entries was atrocious. Having said that, this won't keep me from leaving these entries intact. I think it's honest to leave them as is.

This migration poses some issues that still need to be resolved. For instance, most of the links in the very old posts are either dead, or resolve to domain squatters, or even to porn sites. I need to figure out a strategy.

In a similar vein, I would love for my old inbound links to all resolve to the right place, but I cannot think of a way to make sure that this will be the case in a new static generator CMS. With this entry, there will be a total of 2600 posts, so doing something manual is not really a good option. I may have to punt on that at this point.

Next up is making a version of the site with some cloud hosting, and a static CMS. This will be the part that I will enjoy the most, I am sure.

I continue to call this series of post "weekly" despite the fact that, based on actual data, it's really trimonthly. (Trimonthly is only defined as occurring every three months, unlike the confusing bimonthly.) I'm going to be stubborn about this in the hope that, over time, I will be able to make progress in making it more often.

I'm sure you've heard this from many others at this point, and, more than likely, you've already seen it, but, just in case, I can't recommend Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse enough. It's truly unlike any other superhero movie I've ever seen before, and I have seen just about everything.  The animation style, and techniques are so cool. Also, even if you have seen it, this Twitter Moment is worth checking out, Bagel!.  Every member of our family loved this movie, and I intend to watch it several more times.  I was also lucky enough to get a pair of the sneakers from the film before they sold out. 

I listen to many of the same podcasts each week, with only a rare few being "must listen" status where I never miss an episode. That's probably a good topic for a future blog post. One podcast that I have added to my rotation on a daily basis, however, is Techmeme's Ride Home.  This show is great in that, most days, they have pushed the daily episode before I get into my car to leave for the day. With the way Overcast works, this means that this is waiting and ready to be played when I start my drive. Each episode contains carefully crafted coverage of that day's tech news, and it's never longer than fifteen minutes. It's allowed me to stay up to date on several stories that are outside of my interest area. They do a really great job, and on a week like this one, with bucketloads of CES news, it helps me wade through the cruft to get to the interesting stuff.  The host, Brian McCollough, weaves his own humorous delivery into the stories, and that makes taking the medicine of tech news a bit easier as well.

I'm completely entranced by Reuben Wu's photography. He uses drones to create either objects made of light or to do the lighting for the photograph. This article by Ilana Herzig for Artsy does a good job of covering the basics of his vision and some of how he captures what he does. You may also be familiar with him from the music group Ladytron.  (Wishing that I could afford one of his works, but I'm on a budget at the moment.)