This is a first post. There are many others like it, but this is mine.

In the beginning

After nearly two decades on the production side of newspapers, namely ad and page layout, I’ve reached a milestone.

In 2011, I was laid off from a newspaper job, back then my goal was to start a website production business. Nothing big, nothing complicated, I mainly wanted to do the kind of thing I’m doing with this personal blog. My goal was to come up with simple but elegant designs for image campaigns. My pitch was going to be: if you’re relying on websites like Facebook, the thing is, sometimes Facebook doesn’t show your potential customers your new content until days later, sometimes too late. I thought it’d be a cinch. One kid was already in school, the other a toddler. I’d crank out content during naptime! When I got rolling, it’d be time to get back to daycare!

Well, that was one energetic toddler. I did manage to do a little freelance here and there, but by and large chores, errands, and extracurriculars took precedence.

Flash forward to now: one kid has moved out, and the other will be off to college in a couple of years, and it’s high time I got to thinking about what comes next. I’m itching to explore new passions and interests - and I’ve decided to share this journey with you. On this blog, I’ll be concentrating mostly on tech stuff, primarily the things I’ve learned to keep things rolling over the years when the deadline is tight and the repair budget is $0. In spring 2001 I was a wet-behind-the-ears freshly-graduated greenie, and although I was in over my head back then, I like to think I learned a thing or two here and there. Mostly, my experience of

But I’m also wanting to get off of the Facebook train in particular. It’s only gotten worse. I see posts weeks or even months later, and there’s easily two crap posts–the divisive stuff created simply for low-effort engagement–for every post I actually want to see.

And so for that reason I’m going to try to a.) move my rants over to my own website, and b.) be more constructive than what we see on social media.

And I’m as guilty as anyone of not being productive on social media. I’ll admit it. But I think we can all do better, don’t you?

But there’s secondary motives

As I write this, it’s been about a month since I had a humeral head fracture in my right arm, and it’s been determined that I need surgery. This is the part of the humerus (arm bone) where the bone meets with the shoulder, where the ball is. So, after a month of immobilization and pain management…it’s time for a few more weeks of immobilization and pain management.

Yay.

(As a hilarious aside, it was the very first time I’d ever used a treadmill. So I broke my arm, at home, the very first time I’d used the thing. And it was a gift because the exercise machine we had, was causing my right elbow to hurt. Oof.)

So I need a project. All the projects I need to do around home, require two arms. Projects like a blog, though, I can type one-handed. Not very fast, but I can.

And so here it is, the new blog, since I let my old blog wither and then finally die after a house fire a couple of years ago.

Oh, right, the house fire

My very last post on my old blog was a post of the nice warm sunlight shining into my back room. Now I can look from my desk and see the concrete pad where that room was. Things have changed! It’s time to get caught up.

In terms of computer issues, the fire taught me that if your backup is in the same building as your computer, you don’t have a backup.

Onward

I think next I’m going to be writing about open source projects that’ve helped me while I’m (temporarily) disabled. Cross-platform typing by phone comes to mind, first.