Every April, something happens at Augusta National that has nothing to do with birdies or bogeys. It’s the only place I know where the world actually gets quiet.

I’ve worn a lot of labels over the decades: hardware guy, IT veteran, self-taught coder, grandfather. None of them tell the whole story, and some of them are starting to feel like clothes that don’t fit anymore.

I got an AuDHD diagnosis at 54. Not because something was wrong, but because I finally had a name for everything that had always been exactly this way.

Job-hoppers talk about momentum like it’s the only currency that matters. What nobody tells you is what you actually gain when you stop moving long enough to become readable to the people around you.

Not every self-hosted service earns its keep. Here’s an honest look at the ones I spun up with good intentions, ran for a while, and eventually shut down without a single regret.

I had 70TB of storage across four NAS units and still felt like my family photos were one drive failure away from disappearing. Immich didn’t fix my storage problem — it fixed my trust problem.

The enterprise world is just now discovering what homelab people figured out years ago: renting compute you can own is a bad deal. We weren’t ahead of the curve. We just couldn’t afford to be wrong.

Chuck Norris wasn’t just an action star for Southern Gen-X boys, he was a confirmation of everything we were already being raised to believe. Losing him stirs something that goes a lot deeper than nostalgia.

Proxmox and TrueNAS get all the homelab hype, and I get why. I just don’t run either of them on my VMs, and it’s not because I don’t know what they are.

Seven Royal Caribbean cruises, and the hardest part was never the packing. It was figuring out how to be a person who isn’t useful for a week.