Been a while since my last post. So here are some updates:

I’m no longer at Cozy. I’m at Squarespace now.

Speaking of web hosting, I finally moved this blog over to WordPress.com so I don’t have to worry about my WordPress site getting owned and all the updates and maintenance required to run a stagnant site. So for $50/year I’m hosting it over here for now. Yes, I work for Squarespace. Yes, I could host it there for free. It was *super* easy to migrate it to WordPress.com, so that’s what I did. 🙂

I’ve switched to using emacs as my primary editor. Those who know me would probably either be incredibly surprised (I’ve been a vim user for a very long time, and have made fun of, and still make fun of, emacs, regularly) or not even the slightest bit surprised (I have a habit of changing my mind on things and going all in on the new mindset). Mostly, though, I had another round of “I want to have Org-mode be part of my life”, and, with the help of a coworker and Spacemacs, I feel like it’s going to stick this time. The great thing about Spacemacs is it’s so familiar because it’s using evil-mode (vim keybindings) and so discoverable because it will throw up submenus when you hit keybindings, so very easy to explore functionality and such. It’s rad.

I have had a pretty lazy couple of years since I was on the trail in New Zealand, but I’m planning to get back on the trail for a bit this spring. Current plan is to hike a section of the AT, starting mid to late April, starting from Harper’s Ferry, WV for 2-3 weeks (depending on how much unlimited vacation I feel like burning and whatnot). I’m really excited about this because I haven’t been on the trail in a long time, and I feel like I really need to have more of that in my life! I thought about hiking more in Japan, but this year I kinda want to not have ridiculous long flights for vacations, as I’ve been doing a lot of long international flights the past couple of years and despite some of them being business class and such, it’s just a slog, and I think I’ll pass this year. Plus with Squarespace I’ll be flying to NYC periodically, which is a fairly long flight, as opposed to SF which is not, so I just don’t want to have so many hours of my life spent on planes.

Since my last post I have worked 2 Cycle Oregon Classic events. I have a very old draft in here of a write-up about the 2018 ride, and I have another one in my ham radio blog about the 2019 ride. I’m unlikely to ever publish either of them, but I do want to write up something about my vehicle setup for the event and the stuff I’m doing with mapping and my iPad for helping me during the event.

Speaking of mapping and iPad, Apple came out with PencilKit, a drop-in pencil drawing layer you can use for making apps with and let them do a lot of the heavy lifting regarding handling user input and rendering and whatnot. It’s pretty cool. I thought it would make my dream goal of having a mapping app a la Guru Maps with the ability to draw directly on the map with my Pencil almost a trivial one to obtain, but I’ve run into some difficulties with it and am having to take several steps back and learn more about iOS development and how UIKit works and such before I can step forward again and try to make it a reality. I am confident that I can make it happen, and am looking forward to learning everything I can along the way.

Speaking of ham radio, I launched a ham radio blog last year while I was doing net control duties for the NET net. I’ve got a few posts up there talking about Winlink and such, and hope to have more things up there soon. It’s kind of a dumping ground for things I’m doing with ham radio and maybe some howtos or guides or whatever for getting things set up. It’s been fun to have it at the very least.

I also bought a condo at the end of 2018! It’s a one bedroom with a nice sized basement (storage / workshop / laundry room sort of thing) and I’m really enjoying the place. I’m also now the president of my HOA which is crazy, considering I’ve been to maybe 4 HOA meetings ever, one of which I was the president of. Hah! But I stepped up because we didn’t have a president for a while and we have a huge huge huge renovation project going on right now that needs managed, and the 2 other members of the board were doing a lot of work with it and seemed like they could use a hand.

Anywho, I’m looking forward to 2020 and getting a bunch of things done in my life and some projects and all of that. It should be a good year.