At 55, I’ve made peace with being a guy who doesn’t fit cleanly into any category the internet has invented for people like me. That peace took longer than it should have.

Flash, our Miniature Dachshund, lived 16 years in this house and left a hole that doesn’t make sense on paper. This is an honest account of what that actually means.

Any tech company that makes exporting your own data difficult, confusing, or impossible is telling you something important about how they see you. Listen to them.

I don’t use hostnames like SERVER01 or DESKTOP-A4F2C. Every machine on my network has a real name, a personality, and a reason it got that name. Here’s the system behind it.

After a long break from the gym, I’m back under the bar at 55 — and the thing that surprised me most wasn’t how much strength I’d lost. It was how honest the whole process is.

People hear “rural Georgia” and picture a guy fixing printers. The reality is a lot more complicated, and the gap between assumption and truth says more about the tech industry than it does about small towns.

Exchange Hybrid isn’t a migration strategy — it’s an architecture you move into and sometimes never leave. After 16 years managing it for a major health system, here’s what it actually looks like from the inside.

Systems engineers and developers aren’t just using different tools, they’re running different operating systems in their heads. The sooner both sides admit that, the better the work gets.

I run both Authelia and Authentik in production — not because I couldn’t pick one, but because I learned the hard way that they’re solving different problems. Here’s what the comparison guides won’t tell you.

Every shortcut I took setting up my homelab made sense at the time. Six months later, I was untangling decisions I barely remembered making — and that’s the real cost nobody talks about.