Now

Practicing: music on the electric bass, taking lessons online with Ariane Cap. For playing and recording, I connect to a MacBook Air M1 running the Neural Amp Modeler. Twenty-five years ago I played guitar, then set it down to build a career. I’m returning, not starting over.

Studying: the Unix philosophy, Bell Labs and Plan 9. Simplicity and generality as design principles, not aphorisms. Foundations of good system design exist. They outlast hype. The more I study them, the deeper I see.

Building: my own services, on ‘old’ technology: m4, TCP/IP, DNS, SMTP, HTML, CGI, and BSD Unix. No dependency on any cloud, frameworks, or managed services. I do not advocate against them. But constraining my work to simple programs and open protocols do get me to be more creative. As a ‘side effect’, such independence lead to simpler and clearer systems and with better reliability.

Running: OpenBSD on a pair of ThinkPads T490. Also, exploring NetBSD on a X270.

Edited on September 2026. What is a now page?