re-org of files to make them smaller for less powerful devices

421 files changed, 4958 insertions, 11137 deletions

diff --git a/cheap-recipes.txt b/cheap-recipes.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 2fa6a59..0000000
--- a/cheap-recipes.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,82 +0,0 @@
-Black Beans and Rice
-
-http://earlyretirementextreme.com/day-3-grocery-shopping.html (48c per serve, 973 kj per serve)
-
-1 cup black beans
-3 cups cooked rice
-2 cloves garlic
-if any leftover meat, throw it in
-1 carrot
-2 c or so kale
-1/2 onion
-1 cup raisins
-1/4 cup soy sauce
-
----
-
-Salchipapas
-
-3 sausages or hot dogs
-5 potatoes, cubed and roasted
-
-salsa rosada:
-
-2T Mayo 
-1 sm can tom sauce
-
-This is not a very traditional version of this dish, but there are variations all up and down Latin America. Anyway, here's my variation. I roast the potatoes at 450 for 20 minutes or until they're done. About five minutes before they're done I start frying the sausage or hot dogs. If using the latter, add a little fat of your choice the pan. Once the meat and potatoes are cooked through, combine them, add some tomato sauce, salt, and paper to taste and you're good. Top with some salsa rosada and lime marinated red onion and tomatoes. 
-
-https://www.laylita.com/recipes/curtido-de-cebolla-y-tomate-pickled-red-onion-and-tomato-salad/
-
-American's might know this one as a variation on "poor man's meal", a depression era hot dog and potato skillet recipe. I like the south of the border version a bit more since it has some additional flavor from the lime marinated onions.
-
----
-
-Hoover Stew
-
-Ingredients:
-16 oz. box of noodles
-2 cans stewed tomatoes, undrained
-1 can corn, undrained
-1 can peas or beans (or both!), undrained
-1 package hot dogs
-
-Instructions:
-Cook pasta until it’s not quite done, then add sliced hot dogs and canned ingredients. Bring to a boil, then allow to simmer until pasta is done.
-
----
-
-Smoky White Beans and Ham
-
-Ingredients
-
-    1 pound dried great northern beans
-    3 smoked ham hocks (about 1-1/2 pounds)
-    3 cans (14-1/2 ounces each) reduced-sodium chicken or beef broth
-    2 cups water
-    1 large onion, chopped
-    1 tablespoon onion powder
-    1 tablespoon garlic powder
-    2 teaspoons pepper
-    Thinly sliced green onions, optional
-
-Directions
-
-    Rinse and sort beans. Transfer to a 6-qt. electric pressure cooker. Add ham hocks. Stir in broth, water, onion and seasonings. Lock lid; close pressure-release valve. Adjust to pressure-cook on high for 30 minutes. Let pressure release naturally for 10 minutes; quick-release any remaining pressure.
-    When cool enough to handle, remove meat from bones; cut ham into small pieces and return to pressure cooker. Serve with a slotted spoon. Sprinkle with green onions if desired.
-
-Nutrition Facts
-2/3 cup: 196 calories, 2g fat (0 saturated fat), 8mg cholesterol, 594mg sodium, 32g carbohydrate (2g sugars, 10g fiber), 15g protein. Diabetic Exchanges: 2 starch, 2 lean meat. 
-
----
-
-1 cup soy sauce
-1 cup granulated sugar
-1 ½ teaspoons brown sugar
-6 cloves garlic, crushed in a press
-2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger
-¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
-1 3-inch cinnamon stick
-1 tablespoon pineapple juice
-8 skinless, boneless chicken thighs
-2 tablespoons cornstarch
diff --git a/cooking.txt b/cooking.txt
index 78ddad0..00fdcd5 100644
--- a/cooking.txt
+++ b/cooking.txt
@@ -10,5 +10,87 @@ I end up cooking a few different ways.
 
 **Dutch Oven**: This is the latest one I've tackled. I haven't done a ton of dutch oven cooking yet, but what I have has been fun and not too difficult. The hardest part here is translating oven-based recipes to dutch oven with coals recipes. I'm still figuring out how many coals and at what stage of coal produces the best result. I also suspect that there is considerable variation between dutch ovens. Currently I have a [cheapo 10-inch Lodge dutch oven](https://www.amazon.com/Lodge-L10CO3-Cast-Dutch-4-Quart/dp/B00008GKDV/?tag=lxf0d-20){: rel=nofollow}. It works fine, but does not fill me with joy. I'm on the hunt for an older, better model.
 
+Cheap Recipes
 
+# Black Beans and Rice
 
+http://earlyretirementextreme.com/day-3-grocery-shopping.html (48c per serve, 973 kj per serve)
+
+1 cup black beans
+3 cups cooked rice
+2 cloves garlic
+if any leftover meat, throw it in
+1 carrot
+2 c or so kale
+1/2 onion
+1 cup raisins
+1/4 cup soy sauce
+
+---
+
+# Salchipapas
+
+3 sausages or hot dogs
+5 potatoes, cubed and roasted
+
+salsa rosada:
+
+2T Mayo 
+1 sm can tom sauce
+
+This is not a very traditional version of this dish, but there are variations all up and down Latin America. Anyway, here's my variation. I roast the potatoes at 450 for 20 minutes or until they're done. About five minutes before they're done I start frying the sausage or hot dogs. If using the latter, add a little fat of your choice the pan. Once the meat and potatoes are cooked through, combine them, add some tomato sauce, salt, and paper to taste and you're good. Top with some salsa rosada and lime marinated red onion and tomatoes. 
+
+https://www.laylita.com/recipes/curtido-de-cebolla-y-tomate-pickled-red-onion-and-tomato-salad/
+
+American's might know this one as a variation on "poor man's meal", a depression era hot dog and potato skillet recipe. I like the south of the border version a bit more since it has some additional flavor from the lime marinated onions.
+
+---
+
+# Hoover Stew
+
+Ingredients:
+16 oz. box of noodles
+2 cans stewed tomatoes, undrained
+1 can corn, undrained
+1 can peas or beans (or both!), undrained
+1 package hot dogs
+
+Instructions:
+Cook pasta until it’s not quite done, then add sliced hot dogs and canned ingredients. Bring to a boil, then allow to simmer until pasta is done.
+
+---
+
+# Smoky White Beans and Ham
+
+Ingredients
+
+    1 pound dried great northern beans
+    3 smoked ham hocks (about 1-1/2 pounds)
+    3 cans (14-1/2 ounces each) reduced-sodium chicken or beef broth
+    2 cups water
+    1 large onion, chopped
+    1 tablespoon onion powder
+    1 tablespoon garlic powder
+    2 teaspoons pepper
+    Thinly sliced green onions, optional
+
+Directions
+
+    Rinse and sort beans. Transfer to a 6-qt. electric pressure cooker. Add ham hocks. Stir in broth, water, onion and seasonings. Lock lid; close pressure-release valve. Adjust to pressure-cook on high for 30 minutes. Let pressure release naturally for 10 minutes; quick-release any remaining pressure.
+    When cool enough to handle, remove meat from bones; cut ham into small pieces and return to pressure cooker. Serve with a slotted spoon. Sprinkle with green onions if desired.
+
+Nutrition Facts
+2/3 cup: 196 calories, 2g fat (0 saturated fat), 8mg cholesterol, 594mg sodium, 32g carbohydrate (2g sugars, 10g fiber), 15g protein. Diabetic Exchanges: 2 starch, 2 lean meat. 
+
+---
+
+1 cup soy sauce
+1 cup granulated sugar
+1 ½ teaspoons brown sugar
+6 cloves garlic, crushed in a press
+2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger
+¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
+1 3-inch cinnamon stick
+1 tablespoon pineapple juice
+8 skinless, boneless chicken thighs
+2 tablespoons cornstarch
diff --git a/economics.txt b/economics.txt
index c0d69eb..e69de29 100644
--- a/economics.txt
+++ b/economics.txt
@@ -1,41 +0,0 @@
-Once people get over the big blue bus, two questions inevitably follow. 
-
-The first is, *so... what do you do?* This is the polite American way of saying, *how the hell do you afford to do this?* 
-
-The second thing people ask is what the kids do for school. That requires a much more complex answer. Let's stick to money. Money is simple. Well, compared to education. 
-
-### Set a Goal
-
-Before you figure out how you can afford to travel you need a goal. What is your goal? Is it to travel somewhere specific? Some specific means of traveling (e.g. RV, boat, AirBnB, etc)?Is it some specific amount of time (e.g. a few months between jobs, during a summer break, etc)?
-
-It's important to have a concrete goal in mind before you start trying to arrange your life in a way that carries you to that goal. I hate to sound like a life coach, but if you don't have a goal you'll never find your path. Without a clear path you won't go anywhere.
-
-For example, the first time I went on a long term trip I had general destination in mind (India and Southeast Asia). That allowed me to research to costs of getting to those places, the likely costs of life there, and then I could work backwards to figure out how much I need to save. I had a concrete number in mind ($10k, which I expected to last me 6 months), and I started saving until I had enough and I then I left. When it ran out I came home. I was young enough then that I just crashed on friends couches until I landed a new job, if that's not an option be sure to set aside a fund to re-enter normal life.
-
-This isn't the only way to do it though. I met several people on that trip who went the opposite direction, they saved up a chunk of money and then figured out where they could make it last the longest. That's another way to do it.
-
-And finally there is what I do now, which is working on the road. I only recommend this if your goal is to travel indefinitely. And for the record, neither I nor anyone I've ever met traveling left home planning to travel indefinitely. That tends to be something you decide when it comes time to end a long trip. You start thinking, *I want to keep doing this forever*, and that sudden pressure (the thought of going back) tends to lead to the creative thinking you need to develop if you do indeed want to live on the road.
-
-### Get Rid of Everything
-
-The first step to affording to travel is to get rid of everything you don't absolutely need. I actually think it would be easier to get rid of literally everything, head out the door and just buy things as you need them, but no one has ever taken this suggestion seriously so the best I can say is: if everything you doesn't fit in two bags, you're going to run into problems. 
-
-Get down to two bags. If you need to add things down the road, that's fine. For example, if you end up traveling with your home, like a van, RV, boat, or whatever, you're going to need tools, you can add those in later. But for the most part get rid of everything.
-
-This is important literally, as an act, but also as a process. It will teach you things. It will teach you how remote your wants are from your needs. Get rid of your wants along with all the debris those wants have brought into your life. Focus on what you absolutely need. If you want nothing you will not need as much money. Needs turn out to be pretty cheaply met. Find a dumpster and throw your TV in it. That alone will do more to get you on your way to having enough money to travel than anything else on this page.
-
-Don't worry if this is really hard or insanely time consuming. It's that way for everyone. I've written about this elsewhere, but it is astronomically easier to let stuff into your life than it is to get it out. 
-
-Stuff costs money and takes up space, neither of which you have future traveler. Life on the road is one of necessities (food and shelter) and great views, not endless wants fulfilled and Amazon deliveries. The less you want the better off you will be financially. Yes, you can take this too far, but very few people do so don't worry about that.  
-
-One trap to beware of, having less doesn't mean you have to have the best. I see things on the internet from people who profess to be minimalists because they have only one fork, spoon, and knife, but those utensils are $40. That's not what you're after. Let go of the need to impress if you can, it will save you a ton of money. And none of us out here traveling will be impressed anyway. 
-
-### Become Financially Self-Dependant
-
-I stole the phrase Financially Self-Dependant from the good people at Wanderer Financial because it captures something key that no other way of putting it does: you're in control. There are myriad ways this can be achieved depending on your skill set, but one thing I can absolutely promise you is that it won't mean having a traditional job. Can you travel with a full time job? Sure. I have several times. It sucks. It doesn't suck because you have set hours, though that's part of it, but mostly it sucks because you are not in direct control of your income. Worse, you only have one source of income. 
-
-Lose your job at home and it's a big deal.
-
-I hate to tell you this, but the truth is we saved up for a long time before we went traveling so that we would have a good cushion of money should anything go wrong. 
-
-Speaking of which, if you're like me you got no financial education. You're going to need to fix
diff --git a/essays.txt b/essays.txt
index 4455f41..3e81f31 100644
--- a/essays.txt
+++ b/essays.txt
@@ -1,7 +1,106 @@
-essays
+# Unpubbed
+
+## No Cavalry—what to do?
+
+
+
+
+Once you accept that there is no cavalry coming, or perhaps more conservatively, that you don't need a cavalry to come, or, at the very least make the decision that you want to life your life in such a way that you don't *want* to need a cavalry, the question arises: what then do I do? How do I get from where I am, to that state of mental, physical, and spiritual security? 
+
+Another way to put this would be: How do I begin to take responsibility for and become accountable for myself, my family, my world?
+
+I have no idea. Which is to say that I know what I am doing for those things, but I don't know what you should do—that's for you to figure out. If I told you what to do you'd just be dependant on me, no better off than being dependant on the cavalry. 
+
+No one can tell you how to get on the path to self-dependency because no one other than you knows what your path to self-dependency looks like. You have to find it. And you'll know when you have. Find it is the fun part. Don't worry if it takes a while. It took me the better part of two decades. But I know people who figured it out much quicker.
+
+So I am not going to prescribe some recipe for how you can take responsibility for your world, but I am going to tell you something that might help you figure out your own path: you first have to reclaim your time. One of the things that keeps us dependant on the cavalry is our perceived lack of time to do anything about it. How are you going to learn how to rebuild your leaf blower motor when you work 9-5 and spend an hour on each side of that commuting? From 8-6 you have no time for leaf blowers. Throw in breakfast and dinner and suddenly from 7-7 you have no time for anything else.
+
+
+
+How do you find time to build relationships with your neighbors when you spend 12 hours (or more) of your waking day working?  
+
+
+In the first essay on this subject I suggested that you stop using money to meet all your needs. That is, begin to build relationships with people such that you can begin to meet some of your needs by offering something of yourself to others. I don't know what that might look like for you, but here's a quick example: when we lived out in woods in South Carolina much of the land surrounding our house was leased to a hunt club. In exchange for keeping an eye on the area, we were free to hunt. Actually we were offered other people's deer, though we had to decline for lack of freezer space. 
+
+If you live in Manhattan this scenario isn't going to come up. But if you start trying to meet people, to listen to them, you will build relationships that lead to things like this. Perhaps not free food, perhaps it will end up being chess lessons or tk, but it will be something and your life will be richer, and slightly, ever so slightly less dependant on the system of The Machine.
+
+This will also give you agency. You are the one with the connection to others, nothing is mediating that. This is agency. Agency reduces stress. It helps you to see bad things, bad situations for what they are: bad situations. When you have agency and the self-confidence that it, along with experience, give you, you begins to see that with sufficient resources—time, effort, knowledge, money, etc -- any problem can be solved.
+
+
+
+## Buying Used
+
+I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks.
+
+Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model. 
+
+Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior.
+
+This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff. 
+
+Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something—that includes me—and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website.
+
+[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well.
+
+# OK Computer, Goodbye
+
+date:2024-09-14 17:42:40
+url:/essay/spirit/ok-computer-goodbye
+
+My laptop broke the other day. It was third laptop that's broken on me this year. Perhaps I am having a bad year. MOre likely laptops are. Most consumer gadgets are crap these days. Everyone knows this, I know it better than most given that I test consumer gadgets for a living. Did I have a bad run of laptops? Yes. But the more laptops you have, the more bad runs you're going to have because consumer gadgets are crap.
+
+Anyway after the third one died I did not have a backup. I was forced to borrow my wife's MacBook Air (which has outlasted 8 PC laptops[^1]. I am not a Mac person. I was, but then at some point I felt constrained by MacOS and switched to Linux, which let me do things my own way, however I wanted. Going back to the Mac was disorienting. The keyboard shortcuts are different, I needed to fix things I didn't on Linux. It was rough. 
+
+And, even once I did get things working inn a way that didn't drive me crazy, I was sharing the laptop. My wife tutors students 3 hours a day most days. During that time I had nothing to work with.
+
+And I loved it.
+
+I hate screens. I stare at one far too much. I have too. This is the compromise I make for the ability to live the way we do. It's a compromise I make knowingly, gratefully even, but it is still a compromise, with negative trade offs.
+
+What I did not realize is how much time I was spending staring at a screen when I did not need to be staring at a screen. It's deceptively easy to tell yourself you're working when you type a few words but then when you're done, you just "look something up real quick" and then next thing you know you've spent half an hour researching the best way to some weird thing you'll probably never do anyway. 
+
+This is my vice anyway. I know I have it. It's part of what makes me good at my job, but it also leads me to spend more time than I need to staring at screen. 
+
+This got me thinking about that old axiom, if you don't have it, you don't need it. Do I really need a laptop?
+
+## Once And Future Luddite
+
+I hated computers as a kid. Didn't like video games. Didn't really interact with a computer other than to type up school papers. That was true all the way through college. Even then, when all the nerdy people I knew were hanging out on the proto internets of BBS and tk, I just didn't care. I was out rock climbing, body surfing, writing, and playing music. Those were the things I obsessed over, screens didn't have any appeal. I wrote in notebooks. I recorded music to tape. Why would I need a screen?
+
+This continued until about 2001, when, through a variety of coincidences, blind luck, and, I've always assumed, some coffee spilled on keyboards in the offices of a place called Wired, I was made apparent to me that I might be able to make money writing about things that happened on screens. I happened to be standing outside a shoe store on Broadway in Manhattan when I realized this, which is an odd detail that I feel is somehow meaningful, though I haven't yet figured out how it's meaningful.
+
+Whatever the case, at the time this door swung open I was a chef running a restaurant, working 60-70 hours a week in a hot, stressful kitchen. I loved it, but it was a lot of work. The idea that I could make money without leaving the house was an absolute revelation. Sign me up.
+
+So I pulled out my then girlfriend's Macbook and started figuring out how to build stuff on the web. About as fast as I learned it, I wrote about it for Webmonkey. That was possible back in those days because there wasn't a lot to learn and there weren't that many people learning it. 
+
+The rest as they say, is history. I wrote for Webmonkey on a freelance basis for the next four years (while traveling the world for some of it), and weirdly, I started actually building things on screens. That became a second source of income, but it also because a kind of obsession. 
+
+At first it was just staying on top of what was happening, what I needed to write about for Webmonkey and what I could use to make this website better. I started off with shared hosting accounts, but before long I was working with real servers, both virtual and bare metal (clients). I kept going deeper down into the stack as it's known. I wrote about this recently for Wired if you're interested in that journey.
+
+Suffice to say that in the end I became quite capable of doing just about anything with a computer. The Luddite had succumbed to the screen.
+
+But the more I shared my wife's laptop, the more I realized I didn't care anymore. I don't want to think about technology anymore, my job no longer requires me too, so why am I? In the end it felt like an addiction. 
+
+Maybe that's too strong of a word, but it had compulsive elements, born of that weird combination of boredom and ease, that reminded me of drinking.
+
+What if... I just didn't get a new laptop?
+
+So that's what I did. Or didn't. 
+
+I got all the data off my hard drive onto an external SSD, which I plug into my wife's laptop when I need to edit photos or videos, which turns out to be pretty much the only time I need a laptop. 
+
+The rest of the time I am just writing. I’ve been writing more on paper, even for work. When it’s time to type things up, I use my $75 tablet or an old iPad we all share (and hardly use).
+
+The iPad is especially compelling for me to work on because I don't like it. There's no way to hack it. It's a highly managed, father-knows-best-style device that's the antithesis of what I liked about computers -- bending them to my will. Oddly enough, this makes the iPad perfect for how I want to live now, with less time spent on a screen, less time spent thinking about digital problems, and more time spent with my family, working on projects that exist in the real world. Projects made of wood and metal, governed by things like physical limitations and weather, requiring sweat and blood and maybe even bone.
+
+
+[^1]: Before you think, wow, this guy spends a lot of money on laptops, understand that I only bought 2 of those 8, the rest were loaners sent to me to test. But they all really did die in one way or another while the Macbook keeps going.
 
 # We'll Make It Work
 
+date:2024-06-16 11:06:28
+url:/essay/spirit/well-make-it-work
+
 The title of this post comes from my wife. I'd more likely say, *We'll Figure It Out*, but that's very different. Sometimes you do need to figure things out, but more often you have to take them as they are and Make It Work. 
 
 We'll Make It Work. This phrase, her way of thinking about problems essentially, is the only reason we're still out here.
@@ -26,13 +125,15 @@ What *We'll Make It Work* always means, more than anything else, is being flexib
 
 We'll make it work does not mean it's going to be easy. That's okay, the easy way is rarely [the way](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/path). The internet loves to make memes of Bruce Lee's dictum, *be like water*[^1], but few people think this all way through. Sure, water flows, water carves canyons with its patience, but water also doesn't only goes on its path. It never stays where it is and it never takes a route that it is not meant to go. Some routes that it does take mean it smashes into rocks and is pulverized until it becomes mist, barely water at all anymore. Then it slowly falls back, becomes flowing water again, but is different somehow, changed in unaccountable ways. You want to be like water? Be prepared for the world to turn you into mist at times. Make that work.
 
-Above all else, We'll Make It Work means that you have to have faith in yourself and whomever else you're with that you can make it work. You have to know it in your bones. You can (and should!) second guess yourself on the particulars of making things work, but know that you can. Everyone can. It just take faith and discipline. Learn to make your own choices and craft your own life. Commit to making it work and you will find a way to make it work.
+Above all else, We'll Make It Work means that you have to have faith in yourself and whomever else you're with that you can make it work. You have to know it in your bones. You can (and should!) second guess yourself on the particulars of making things work, but know that you can. Everyone can. It just takes faith and discipline. Learn to make your own choices and craft your own life. Commit to making it work and you will find a way to make it work.
 
 [^1]: I could write thousands of words unpacking this simple idea, because there is so much here, but I will spare you.
 
-
 # Simple Machines, Complex Tasks
 
+date:2024-05-15 17:56:42
+url:/essay/craft/simple-machines-complex-tasks
+
 I picked up my dad's Pentax camera sometime in the 1980s and was hooked from day one. By high school I was committed. I set off to college with the vague idea that I would major in photography, but I dropped out before that ever came to fruition.
 
 Like most photographers I made the jump to digital cameras some time ago. I sold my last film camera right before we left on this trip. It was a sad moment, but I hadn't shot with the camera (a Nikon F3) in years. I knew there were people out there still shooting film, and I wanted the camera to be used, not sit around gathering dust, so I sold it. 
@@ -69,176 +170,482 @@ I made an offhand comment in a post about [Pensacola's Navy museum](https://luxa
 
 What if that's what makes something a craft rather than a task that must be done? What if it's supposed to be, if not hard, then at least laborious, done carefully rather than rushed? Isn't that the whole point -- to do things well? And doesn't that usually mean doing them slowly, carefully? I think that's what film is trying to tell me: it's the complexity of the task, the difficulty of the task that makes it enjoyable, and more broadly, that the more I slow down, the more I can do carefully and consciously, the better life will be.
 
+# The Spirit of Craft
 
+date:2024-04-28 17:16:10
+url:/essay/spirit/spirit-of-craft
 
-# Do It Yourself
+> I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime <cite>--Henry David Thoreau</cite>
 
-It’s probably cheaper and easier to buy most things, but when I can I’d rather make things myself. What else are you going to do with your life if you aren’t making stuff? Watch TV? Stop buying stuff and hiring people for everything. Give yourself a chance to solve the problem first. Contrary to what it says on the label, professionals and experts aren’t necessary. They’ll do it faster and better than you will, but you’ll learn and improve every time you do it yourself.
+I enjoy making things. The things are often irrelevant, it's the making that I enjoy. It reminds me of traveling. When you make something you are completely absorbed in that process to the point that you forget everything else, forget the world, save this tiny part of it that you are reshaping. 
 
+Travel is the same way, there is only right now. A complete absorption, obsession even, with the world in front of you. The plantains and steak on the plate, the potholes in the road, the birds calling in the cold morning air. Wherever you are, there is only that, the rest of the world pales, ceases to exist. It's a state of ease, of relaxed absorption, of freedom. Realizing that you have nowhere to go, nowhere to be, nothing to do to maintain yourself in this world, save to be where you are, doing what you're doing. 
 
-# Safety Third
+This is freedom. Doing things. Making things. Same thing.
 
+Yet one of the current cultural ideals is getting others to do things for you. Outsourcing your life. Someone else mows the lawn. Someone else cleans the house. Someone else fixes the car. This is called success. 
 
-It seems axiomatic that fear of death is a natural outcome of materialist beliefs. If life is all there is, that is the material world is all there is, then death is the end. And no one likes endings. For our institutions and their leaders, death is the worst possible thing because it is the end. It is, from their point of view, the ultimate failure of man.
+I ran across Hegel's paradigm of servant and master the other day, which I don't think I've thought of since I dropped out of college in 1994. I was struck though at how well Hegel defines modern culture. If you're not familiar, in Hegel's story the master grows increasingly impoverished through idleness while the servant grows daily in skill and wisdom because he is doing things for himself. So one starts dependent on the other, the other ends up dependent. The pivotal moment of Hegel is when the servant realizes he no longer needs the master, what he needs is to perfect his skill further. 
 
-But why?
+We're in danger of becoming the "master", who is really master in name only. I'm not saying you have to get out and mow your lawn to achieve freedom, but I am not alone in thinking that in the pursuit of "freedom from" we're losing our "freedom to"... to do, to make, to say, to think. 
 
-As history's many brave atheists attest it does not require belief in the supernatural to make even the ultimate sacrifice of one's life, which would imply that even if death is the end there are many circumstances where it is still preferable to life, for example the preservation of others lives.
+It's not just that we're becoming masters of nothing, it's that we've lost the very resourcefulness that marks a truly free human being, one who is independent and capable of solving problems on his or her own, thinking for his or herself. Contrary to what marketers are selling, freedom is in doing, in making, growing in skill and wisdom.
 
-Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "safety mania and death phobia are signs of a **disconnection from purpose and passion**. If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose." (emphasis mine)
+The more often you can do this, the better life will be.
 
-In other words death phobia is a result of not knowing how to live. 
+Why? That's the question isn't it? 
 
-When you are disconnected from purpose and passion this begins to pile up because the death phobia drives the obsession with safety, which in turn makes us incredibly risk adverse, which in turn keeps us from exploring, potentially from finding our purpose and passion. On and on in a viscous cycle. 
+When making, your concentration becomes sharply focused on the task at hand and everything else that makes up you fades away. The chattering I that is usually busy thinking and analyzing is set aside while someone else drives the ship. It's an odd thing when you experience it. Something working through you. A kind of communion with the gods perhaps. The Greeks held this to be true of great craftsmen[^1], that Athena, or Hephaestus, or whoever governed the craft at hand was in fact working through the craftsman to create the work. In this sense the craftsman is no longer there. They become a conduit for the gods to move in the world.
 
-How do you get out? If you're reading this, chances are you aren't in that cycle, but I have an idea of how we get out at a cultural level: By playing without our helmets.
+Most people I know who are great craftsmen speak in these terms, saying that they do not know where their ideas come from, nor are they conscious of the particular skills they're using at any given moment, they simply do, they simply are, or are not in this case. As a skilled woodworker I know says, the key to being good at anything is to get out of your own way.
 
-If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play. If you can't play, you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. A helmet means supervision. We who play are unsuperviseable.
+This is how making things becomes a spiritual discipline, an act of letting the gods move the world through you. "For true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity, that is to say, by the warp of the world, by the stuff of creation itself," writes Cormac McCarthy in *The Stonemason*. "The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of God." 
 
-To play amidst a world full of rules is perhaps the most subversive act.
+[^1]: This is a gendered word where I do not intend a gender, anyone can be a creator, a craftsman, but English has no better term that I know of, sorry.
 
+# Review: UG Monk Analog Notecard Productivity System
 
-outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.
+date:2024-02-29 09:42:17
+url:/essay/tools/ug-monk-analog-notecard-productivity-system
 
+Every morning I do the same thing. Rain, shine, wind, snow. Doesn't matter. I get up, go outside, and either submerge myself in cold water (if we're near some) or use a bandanna to dowse myself in cold water. Then I do some spiritual exercises, between 200-400 kettlebell swings (depending on the day), and then make some tea and eat breakfast with my family. 
 
+This ritual forms an anchor from which I rarely deviate, but the rest of my day is not structured at all. My job requires flexibility. Some days I need to sit and write, other days I need to be out wandering around testing cameras, paddle boards, backpacks, and other things.
 
+To balance this out I recently added a second ritual at the end of my day thanks to a little wooden box called Analog.
 
-This I believe is how we remake the world: by playing.
+### Analog, a Japanese tea ceremony for your todo list.
 
-I know, that's not a Very Serious Solution that [Very Serious People]() can go out and implement, but that's the point isn't it? To remake the world any other way would end up right back here eventually.
+My work day usually starts around 9 AM. I pick up a note card that has the tasks I am focusing on that day and start doing them. I don't have to think about what I should do, spend any time planning what to do, and I don't for the love of god start my day by looking at my email. I don't even open my laptop. I pick up a notecard. At the top of the card today it says, *write about notecard ritual*. I start writing. 
 
+I have been doing this for decades. I wrote a [short blurb](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/#indexcards) about how I use note cards as a "planner" for my friend Medea Giordano's [guide to paper planners](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/). I was surprised by how much email I got from this little thing I contributed. Eventually I wrote a more extensive guide to [how I use note cards as a planning tool](https://luxagraf.net/essay/craft/getting-things-done-with-notecards). This led someone to email me and ask if I had tried something called Analog, from a company with the curious name of UG Monk.
 
+I wrote [a review of Analog for Wired](https://www.wired.com/review/ugmonk-analog-starter-kit/), so if you want more on the nuts and bolts of what Analog is and why I like it, read that. What I want to talk about here is something I only mention in passing in the Wired review, that is the potential usefulness of ritual in everyday things.
 
+Back to the notecard I picked up about 10 minutes ago, the one that said, write Analog review. This notecard which holds everything I need to do, gets filled out in the evening of the day before, when I stop working. 
 
+Before I got the Analog Starter Kit, this process was somewhat haphazard. For someone whose morning ritual is well honed, my afternoons are more chaos. Analog changed that to some degree. The process I go through did not change, but the way I did it and the focus I bring to it now is greater than before. Why? Because I have a beautiful walnut box now.
 
+Ritual is important because it it makes mundane activities sacred. Eating a cracker is nothing. The ritual of the Eucharistic makes the cracker more than a cracker. 
 
-safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears.
+I would never want anyone to think that going over the stuff you need to do is a religious ceremony, but if you can bring a little of that intensity to other things it can help. Ritual is both a way of focusing, and a way of reinforcing the behavior. Pick the right rituals, the right behaviors, and you can change your life. 
 
+I think ritual is important because if you look at something like Analog, which is $108 plus tax, it might seem like a lot to spend on something for your todo list. But if the money spent, the object acquired, raises the level of respect you have for what you're doing, if it helps bring a ritual aspect that inspires you to sit down and use them then $108 is nothing.
 
+This is why I say Analog is a Japanese tea ceremony for your todo list.
 
+If you're not familiar with a Japanese tea ceremony it's an extremely ritualized way of preparing and drinking tea (matcha). It started in the 16th century as an artistic hobby of the upper class and warrior elite, and eventually spread to wealthy merchants and others looking for formal ways forge and reinforce strong social ties. The ceremony itself is highly choreographed and to do it right requires years of study. It's usually done in a small room, modeled on a hermit’s hut, with room for four or five people. The point is to pull people out of the mundane world of their busy lives to temporarily focus on the tea and conversation.
 
-Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played before humans. One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun.[8]
+Creating a ritual around a todo list can have the same effect, helping you to withdraw from the busyness of actual doing, and focus on why you're doing anything at all, and what you hope to get out of it. Do you need this for everything? No, there are some things you just have to do and you know why, like the emails you need to send and phone calls you need to make. But then, why are making those phone calls and sending those emails? Uh, because I have a job. Okay, but why do you have *that* job? What do you get out of it that you don't out of any other job?
 
-Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9]
+These are the sorts of higher level questions that are worth thinking about on a regular basis.Not everyday, maybe not even weekly, but once a month it's worth reflecting on why you're doing what you doing, not just what you need to get done. This is what Analog has made me thing about more.
 
-Play is free, is in fact freedom.
-Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life.
-Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration.
+### Daily Reviews With Analog
 
+At the end of the day -- which might be anywhere from 3 to 8 depending on the day -- I sit down with my notecard and I see what I didn't get to that day. I decided if those things are things I am still committed to doing, and, if so, I write them on a card for the next day. I also mark them as deferred by using a >, which I think I stole from bullet journaling.
 
+Then I pull out the notecard that holds my weekly tasks, another with monthly tasks, and another with seasonal tasks (quarterly tasks if you prefer), along with a notebook that contains my longer term, strategic goals and list of projects. I review all these lists and make sure that tasks are getting done so projects are moving forward. Based on all this I write down my goals for the next day.
 
+Once I have the next day's todo list filled out, I put it on top of my Analog box and go do something else for the remainder of the day.
 
-Every culture passes through a materialist phase and every culture has its own form of fear or death while in that phase. You and I did not invent this, but we find ourselves living during this cultural phase, and I think it helps tremedously to remain conscious of that fact when trying to decide how risky any one thing is *to you*. 
+This little review ritual might sound complex, but it's not. It took longer to write it than it does to do it. I spend about five minutes on this each afternoon. Sunday mornings I spend about an hour going through the same process, but at higher level, looking at my longer term goals and figuring out what needs to get done in the next next season, next year, next five years.
 
+Analog does two things that I think are important. The first is physical -- it gives me a place to put my notecards. I put everything in the box, then I can put it away and my work day feels done. Pull it out again the next morning and I know it's time to focus. It's a good way to bookend my days, which is particularly helpful for people whose work varies from day to day.
 
-This is why blanket rules are ridiculous and ignored. The sign that says danger, no lifeguard on duty means little if you know how to read the water to avoid rip currents and are a strong swimmer. If you aren't a strong swimmer and don't even know what a rip current is, then the message of the sign might be important, but in the world littered with such signs that one is just so much more noise. You ignore it.
+The second is the ritual aspect. I think a lot of times I get caught up in rushing to do stuff without putting in the more difficult, higher level thinking that ought to precede putting items on your todo list. Why am I doing this? That kind of thinking comes out more when you turn your daily review into a kind of tea ceremony, which, at least for me, Analog very much helps to do. Everyone's job is different of course. I'm not sure a ceremonial ritual around my todo list would have been as helpful when I was running a restaurant. But it might have. It might have been a faster way to figure out that running a restaurant wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. So maybe I take that back. Maybe we could all use a little tea ceremony in our days. Whether Analog fits into that is your own decision, but it's definitely working for me.
 
+# The Nothing That Is
 
+date:2024-02-25 18:29:03
+url:/essay/spirit/the-nothing-that-is
 
+> For the listener, who listens in the snow, <br />
+> And, nothing himself, beholds <br />
+> Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. <br />
+<cite>-- [Wallace Stevens][1]</cite>
 
-I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
+Long leaf pine bark is a patchwork quilt of overlapping grays, reds, browns, flaking to leave bluish tinged valleys between them. It reminds me of the canyon country of the Colorado plateau, a miniature world of mesas and canyons turned on its side and drizzled with rivers of sap. 
 
-I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
+Some of the same forces of wind and water are at work on the pine as they are in the canyons of Utah and Colorado. An echo of the endless in the finite. 
 
+<div class="cluster">
+    <span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2024/2024-02-26_163406_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3910" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2024/2010-07-10_141628_dinosaur-national-park.jpg" id="image-3909" class="cluster pic66" />
+    </span>
+</div>
 
+The sound is the same. The rush of pine needles catching the wind. From damp maritime forests to box canyons in the southwest, the under story may change from palmettos to red-barked manzanita, but the over story remains the same. The pines are always singing.
 
+The breath of the world. Air rushing from one place to another, a force we can only see the effect of, never the thing itself. The nothing that is.
 
+On cool nights I leave the windows open to hear the wind. When we lived in a house I would sleep on the couch on windy nights. Only a few of our windows opened, the best was right next to the couch. I propped it open with a dowel and would fall asleep to puffs of wind on my face. 
 
+Before dawn, before the birds are up, there is only the sea and the wind. I lay awake in the 5 AM darkness, listening to the pines softly roar. The low music of the pines is joined by the dry rattle of oak leaves, the snap of a towel left out to dry over night. The wind like fingers tracing over the land, feeling their way through our small slice of the world.
 
+I think of going out into it. It is warm under the covers, but I always think of Marcus Aurelius, "what do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for -- the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?" I get up.
 
+Outside there is already a pink and yellow glow on the horizon. The wind comes in gusts, swaying pines, rattling oaks. I stand facing east, watching the sun. Just before dawn the wind dies down, the temperature drops noticeably, as if the world draws in a deep breath and holds. And then there is light.
 
-While I am not a fan of dualisms, I have only ever managed to come up with two solutions to the fear of death: deny death (very popular) or accept death (formerly very popular).
 
 
 
-don't forget evolution doesn't have a goal, it's simply a process of fitting the current environment. 
 
 
-https://twitter.com/ItsGoneAwry/status/1623675932899700736?s=20&t=oo4ys3gRccV2b9mhU-2Dfw
+[1]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45235/the-snow-man-56d224a6d4e90
 
-If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play and if you can't play you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. Play I could go on at some length about how play is actually the most threatening thing you can do these days, maybe I will eventually, but 
+# Developing Photos With Darktable
 
+date:2023-12-19 12:25:19
+url:/essay/craft/darktable-getting-started
 
+Ansel Adams said "the negative is the score, and the print the performance.” Were he shooting digital today, I suspect Adams would rephrase that to: ***the RAW file is the score, and the print the performance.*** 
 
-safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears.
+Today's RAW file is somewhat like a film negative. RAW files are considerably more malleable, but you get the idea. If you want more control over the final look of your photographs, you want to shoot RAW format images. These days nearly every camera can shoot RAW files -- even my four-year-old phone can do it. You may have to set your camera to shoot RAW though, most are only set to capture JPGs out of the box. Look through your manual or menus until you find "image format", which should have options for JPG and RAW. You want RAW. You can shoot in RAW *and* JPG if you want, but I tend to shoot just RAW.
 
+The problem with RAW is that they are the equivalent of film negatives. You have to "develop" them. As with developing film, the process of developing a RAW file takes time and skill. When you're first starting it can seem overwhelming, which is probably why you're here. Don't worry. Remember what Thoreau said, "nothing can be more useful to a man than the determination not to be hurried." I'm sure Thoreau would say "a person" if he were writing today, but the point is, relax, take a breath, there's no need to rush, it'll make sense eventually.
 
+There are several tools out there to develop RAW files, the most common is Adobe Lightroom. I used to use Lightroom, but found its tool limiting after trying Darktable, an open source RAW developer. Darktable bills itself as "a photography workflow application and raw developer... it manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them."
 
+There are a lot of great tutorials out there on Darktable. The problem I noticed as I was learning is that tutorials go out of date, especially video tutorials. Videos show you what to do better than words can sometimes, but they're a pain to re-shoot and keep up-to-date so hardly anyone does. When I was learning Darktable, I found it frustrating to watch good tutorials, but discover that the features described no longer worked the same way in Darktable. I am trying to avoid doing that here. Darktable is updated twice a year at the moment, so not that often, but things do change. And I find new tricks from time to time too. I will keep this guide updated to reflect both changes in Darktable and changes in my own workflow.
 
-Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played before humans. One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun.[8]
+Okay, ready? Let's get started.
 
-Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9]
+---
 
-Play is free, is in fact freedom.
-Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life.
-Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration.
-Play creates order, is order. Play demands order absolute and supreme.
-Play is connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it.[10]
+##### Table of Contents
 
+- [Setting Up Darktable](#setup)
+- [Learning Your Way Around Darktable](#around)
+- [Customizing Development Modules](#customize)
+- [Example Quick Edits (Video)](#example)
+---
 
+### Set Up Darktable {: #setup }
 
+The first thing to do is [download Darktable](https://www.darktable.org/install/) for your PC. Darktable is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. 
 
-Safety is largely illusory anyway.
+Once you have Darktable installed, open it up and you will get a blank library screen. Before you do anything else, let's check some settings to make sure we're all on the same page. Click the gear icon toward the top of the screen to the right side:
 
-Oscar Wilde once said “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”
+<img src="images/2023/darktable40-settings.jpg" id="image-3854" class="picwide" />
 
+Click the Processing tab on the left side of the settings panel and make sure that **Auto Apply Pixel Workflow defaults** is set to **scene-referred (filmic)**, like this:
 
-for what it really is and it has made me afraid.
+<img src="images/2023/darktable40-processing-settings_6cAuG3R.jpg" id="image-3849" class="picfull caption" />
 
+This will ensure that what's applied by default when you import an image is the same as what's applied to mine. This isn't necessarily the "right" thing to use, scene-referred (sigmoid) will also work, but it won't produce the same results as the rest of these tutorials. 
 
+We're done with settings. Hit escape to close the settings window and save your changes. Yes, that's weird way to do it, but that's the way it works in Darktable (on Linux at least). 
 
-I should probably make it part of [my code](/code).
+Let's add some images to our Library view so we can explore both that and the darktable view. To do that you want to open the import module in the upper left corner of the screen and click the **add to library** button.
 
+<img src="images/2023/darktable40-import_zzr1pfq.jpg" id="image-3851" class="picwide caption" />
 
+Naming and organizing your images is a topic onto itself. I am going to assume that you have a system for this and that you don't want Darktable to move or rename images. Because you don't, it's tools are not the best for that. 
 
+I have a custom shell script that renames my images for me, but you can do the same thing using [Rapid Photo Downloader](https://damonlynch.net/rapid/) on Linux. I'm sure MacOS and Windows have similar apps (if you have suggestions, drop a comment below and I will add them here).
 
+When it comes to organizing images, use what works for you. What I do is use a directory structure of a folder for the year, then within that folders that start with the month number, followed by the event name. So if I took some pictures at Edisto Beach in January of 2024, those images would live in `2024/01_edisto-beach`. Within that folder every image is named YYYY-MM-DD_HHMMSS_event-name.ARW. Which works out to a timestamp with the event name on the end so I can sort them by date taken in any application, including the file browser, but also know roughly what they are without opening them (thanks to the event name on the end). Anyway, this is what works for me, do what works for you.
 
+The Darktable import images dialog has a few options worth understanding. The "select only new pictures" option is a handy option if you regularly add more images to existing folders as I do. Darktable **WILL NOT** automatically add new images to your database. You must go and import them manually, even if the folder is already in Darktable. If you check the "select only new pictures" option, the new images will be automatically selected when you open that folder in the import dialog.
 
+The other option worth knowing is find new images recursively. I leave this unchecked because I never import a folder with another folder inside it, but if you do, this will tell Darktable to import all the images, no matter how many folders deep they might be buried.
 
-I think the safety first obession is the reason we had a worldwide panic over Covid, it's the reason so many young adults are meek and unable to handle the world, it's the reason our leaders are failing us, and it's a big part of the reason so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. 
+Also see the [relevant Darktable Manual entry for the import dialog](https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.4/en/module-reference/utility-modules/lighttable/import/#import-dialog).
 
-It's also a big part of the reason we gave up our independence to ["experts."](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming). Much of the reason we are told we must rely on "experts" is for our safety. 
+###Learning Your Way Around Darktable  {: #around }
 
+Now that you've got Darktable installed and few images imported, let's figure out what we can do. 
 
-From that initial reaction it's been further revealed that the rules we get handed when entering public spaces like parks are insufficient. 
+The main view is the Lighttable. This is modeled after the old lightbox we used to put slides on then stare at with a loupe until we were half blind. Fortunately in Darktable you can just zoom in and out. 
 
+I use a laptop and rarely get out a mouse, so I prefer to navigate Darktable mostly using keyboard shortcuts. There are some good built-in shortcuts, like using **`d`** and **`l`** to switch between **`d`**arkroom and **`l`**ighttable views. You can do that now if you want to see Darktable's other main view, the darkroom view which is where you actually edit images.
 
-Clearly, since people like us have been ignoring them.
+Switch back to Lighttable by hitting **l** again. 
 
-social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
-https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
-The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death.
+The first thing I do in Lighttable when I import new images is figure out which ones I want to spend time on and which are not worth the effort. I never throw the latter away, but I do tend to ignore them most of the time. 
 
+Darktable offers a "culling" mode to help out with the process. You can try it if you like, the shortcut is **x** which will change the view in put two images side-by-side so you can compare them. 
 
+I don't use this mode, it came along after I'd already figured out a way to do the same, so I've continued with my method, which is more complex, but adapted to how I shoot and process images.
 
-Whatever one’s opinion of the response to the disease, what is undeniable is that so many people of influence took for granted that safety must always trump social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
-https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
-The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death.
+Like most people I almost always underexpose my digital images. It's easier to recover shadows than highlights so this make sense in digital photography. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot of overly dark images to compare to figure out which are worth keeping. My solution to this was to create a quick way to lighten them, primarily using keyboard shortcuts. 
 
-The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien
+The shortcut I consider most essential is mapping Darktable's Exposure module to **`Shift+e`**. 
 
+This allows me to hold down **Shift-e** and flick my mouse scroll wheel (or trackpad) up and down to increase and decrease exposure. I don't have to futz with opening the Exposure module or anything else, I hit the shortcut and adjust. This saves tons of time when I'm developing images. 
 
+What I do is select the first image in the Lighttable view, hit "**d**" to enter darkroom mode, then I hold down **shift** and **e** and scroll up and down to adjust the exposure to a level where I can tell what's going on in the image. When I have it where I want it, I hit **shift + k** to move to the next image, and then repeat the process. Using this method I can run through a batch of images in a few minutes, lightening them up so I can see what's happening. I don't worry about getting the perfect exposure, just light enough to be able to cull them down to the "keepers".
 
+If you'd like to try this -- and I can't recommend the exposure shortcut enough, nothing sped up my workflow like that one -- here's how you set it up.
 
-Because our civilizational answer to “Why are we here?” has unraveled, many of us individually have trouble answering that question too, for the individual story draws from the collective.
+Open the preferences pane again. Choose **Shortcuts** in the left menu and then click the little arrow to open the **processing modules** section and scroll down to **exposure**. Click the arrow next to **exposure** and then double-click on **exposure**. After you double-click, Darktable is waiting for you to define the keyboard shortcut. Hold down shift, press 'e' and scroll your mouse. Now look below and you should see a line like what's in this screenshot:
 
-OK, I realize I may have risen to too high an altitude for the practical purpose of preventing the next bout of pandemania. So I will end with this: We can reduce our general susceptibility to fear-mongering by reducing the levels of fear current in society. A society ridden with fear will acquiesce to any policy that promises them safety. How do we reduce ambient levels of fear? There is no single answer. Besides, each one of us already knows how.
+<img src="images/2023/darktable40-exposure-shortcut.jpg" id="image-3852" class="picwide caption" />
 
-https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5
+**Note: As of Darktable 4.8.0/1 the scrolling no longer works with my trackpad. Or as far as I can tell, any trackpad, but I've only got two to test. Neither works. I haven't filed a bug yet, but I will if it isn't working in the current dev build.**
 
+If you want to move between images with the shift j/k shortcuts you'll need to set those up too. The method is the same, the action is image back/image forward, which is under **views >> darkroom**. By default the shortcuts there are space (forward) and backspace (back), but I don't like training my brain to it backspace so I went for the Vim-style j/k. 
 
-I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
+Hit escape to save and exit preferences. Yup, still weird, but now we're used to it. Next select an image, hit **d** to open it in Darktable view. Test your shortcut: hold down **Shift** and **e** and scroll up and down and your image should get lighter and darker. Awesome. If not, re-read the above. It took me hours to figure this out the first time I tried to set this up, so don't feel bad if it doesn't work right away. Re-read the above and try again. Remember Thoreau. Don't hurry.
 
-I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
+### Customizing Development Modules  {: #customize }
 
+As you saw above when we tweaked the exposure, Darktable adjustments are done in what are called modules, little tools that handle a certain type of adjustments. If you open up the actual exposure modules on the right side of the screen you'll see that it adjusts exposure, sets a black point and handles other things related to exposure. Darktable has enough of these little modules that I am overwhelmed by the full list even after using the app for eight years. When I counted just now I came up with 64 user-adjustable modules. That's a lot of options. Too many in fact. But you don't have to use all of them. 
 
-Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.”
+Of those 64 modules I use 9 on a regular basis and another 6 occasionally. Why so many options? This is the nature of open source software to some extent. Anyone with an itch can write some code to scratch it, and if the core developers are okay with including it in the app, it ships. I rather like that, even if most of it gets in my way. There's an easy solution: I narrow down the modules considerably by customizing which ones I see.
 
+If you'd like to do the same, here's what I suggest. These are the core modules where I spend most of my time:
+
+- **Exposure** (lighten or darken an image)
+- **Filmic RGB** (control how light the whites and how dark the blacks)
+- **Color Calibration** (set the white balance)
+- **Color Balance RGB** (enhance colors and color contrasts)
+- **RGB Primaries** (rarely, but color correction)
+- **Diffuse or Sharpen** (Sharpen)
+- **Crop**
+- **Tone Equalizer** (raise shadows)
+- **Retouch** (fix spots)
+- **Rotate and Perspective**
+- **Len Correction** (fix distortion in wide angle lenses)
+
+Then there are some others I use only occasionally but I like to have around, things like **denoise**, **chromatic aberrations**, and **LUT 3D** since I use a number of LUTs to speed up development. There are a couple others you can see in the screenshots below, but mostly I ignore the other 51 modules.
+
+To make them easier to ignore, I hide them. To customize which development modules are shown, click the hamburger menu at the top of the modules section (which is on the right side of the screen in darktable mode) and select **Manage presets**.
+
+That will bring up a huge screen with all the modules in columns. I suggest first clicking the preset drop down menu and selecting **workflow: scene-referred**. That gives you all the modules optimized for a scene-referred workflow. It's not important to understand what that means, but if you'll recall, we set up Darktable to apply the scene-referred presets when we import new images. This continues using that same workflow. We want to use those modules, but not all of them, so select duplicate and give your new module layout a name. Now you can customize this layout. I start by deleting the quick access column completely because I don't need it, nor do I find it quick. There's a checkmark at the top of the screen to disable it.
+
+Then I set up the other four like this:
+
+<img src="images/2024/darketable408-custom-modules.jpg" id="image-3989" class="picwide caption" />
+
+When you have things set up that way hit... wait for it... escape to save your changes. Still weird, but maybe less so after the third time. Or not. I still think it's weird.
+
+### Example Edits (Video)  {: #example }
+
+Okay, you now have Darktable set up just like I do. This may or may not end up suiting you, but for now it gives you place to start. To show you how I work within this setup, check out the video below and then you can jump to the next article in this series, which covers what each module does and how I use them (coming soon).
+
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2024/demo-01-screen.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="27" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2024/Darktable_Quick_Edits_With_Shortcuts.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2024/Darktable_Quick_Edits_With_Shortcuts.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0tkHYFaFqE">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
+
+# Getting Things Done With Notecards
+
+date:2023-11-29 20:00:49
+url:/essay/craft/getting-things-done-with-notecards
+
+I don't think anything I've written for Wired has generated so much interest as a throw away comment I made about notecards in our [guide to paper planners](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/#indexcards). Every time that article is updated I get more email asking for details. Here are the details.
 
 ---
 
+First, lets make sure we're all on the same page: if you want to accomplish things in life you need to make plans. 
+
+Not *a plan*, plans are useless. You need *plans*. 
+
+Many plans means you go through the process of planning. That's what's valuable, the process. Planning requires thinking deeply about life, your life, and what you're doing here. What you want to do here, what you were put here to do.
+
+I can't help you with that part, but after you've made some decisions about what you want do do, where you want to go, it's time to plan how to get there. That requires lists. Lots of lists. Lists of goals, lists of outcomes you're aiming for, lists of things you need to do to get from here to there, lists of what you did to get from where you were to where you are, and so on.
+
+If you step back a bit, you'll see that there are several levels of stuff you need to keep track of -- long terms goals, shorter term projects aligned with those goals, and day to day stuff you need to accomplish to complete the projects that get you to the goals. Life isn't nearly this simple or neat, but at a very broad level that's three things to keep track of: long term things, medium term things, short term things. There's one more important element: a way to record ideas as they come to you.
+
+I use notecards for two of these four things: to track day-to-day tasks and to capture ideas. Medium and long term planning I do in a notebook (more on that below).
+
+The notecard system started when I was in my early 20s and was pretty much spinning my wheels. Working in a restaurant, drinking too much, not sleeping enough, never working out. Living without direction. It's good for you sometimes, but I think I maybe enjoyed it a little too much and maybe spent a little too much time in this stage, but I digress.
+
+One of my good friends at the time, who lived more or less the same way I did, nevertheless managed to run a successful business, play in a band, and otherwise be a much more effective person than me. All while doing all the same bad things I was doing. I asked him one day how he managed get so much done. "I make a list of all the stuff I need to do," he said, "then I do it."
+
+That this was revolutionary to me tells you everything you need to know about me in my twenties. But it was. I asked him, okay, but like, what do you *do*? It turned out he took whatever paper was handy and wrote down what he needed to do. Then he did it. Naturally I focused on the first part: how he wrote it down. That was the easiest thing to copy. Actually doing stuff? That's hard.
+
+I wasted a week or so deciding what sort of paper to use for my lists. I chose index cards because they were small, cheap, fit in your pocket, and wouldn't get mixed up with other paper. The fact that they're small also meant my todo list would never get to more than twenty or so items. That's manageable. 
+
+Finally, paper decision behind me, I started writing things down on index cards. Then I had to do them. That was annoying. But there they were, on the list. Needing to be done. It turned out that crossing stuff off the list was fun. Almost addictive. It was like a game in a way. Could I get everything crossed off in a day? I got moderately obsessed with lists.
+
+One night at sushi with my then-girlfriend and her father (also a very successful person) I happened to mention my notecard system (see, obsessed, as in bringing it up at dinner). "I do that too," he said. "Every night before I go to bed I write down everything I have to do, and all the extraneous things I've been thinking about. I try to completely empty my head. Helps me sleep," he said. 
+
+Notice that he did not say anything about what sort of paper he used. Only idiots like me obsess over paper. Focus on the craft, not the tools.
+
+This idea made sense to me, so I took this craft and incorporated it into my life as well. I didn't even obsess over what sort of paper to use. I started writing out my todo lists in the evening, along with anything else that felt like it needed to get off my mind, which I also wrote on notecards since I had them around. These cards I threw in a shoe box and, to be honest, didn't do much with them, but they helped clear my head, which was the important part[^1].
+
+This system, tracking what I needed to do, and clearing my ideas at the end of the day, was far more powerful than I expected. The notecards themselves are incidental. Use whatever scraps of paper work for you, the point is the craft. The system works. I started getting more stuff done. Lots more stuff. To the point that I ended up going back and finishing college because I realized I had enough time in my day to do that, in part because I knew what I had to do each day. 
+
+Over the years I have experimented with other ways of keeping todo lists, including notebooks of various shapes and sizes, probably a dozen different digital methods, including two I wrote myself. None of them stuck. I keep coming back to notecards. They are the single most effective way to keep track of what you need to do without introducing unnecessary complexity. 
+
+This is a flexible enough system that I've used it as a chef, a computer programmer, a writer, a father, and more. I honestly think it would work for anyone in just about any job where you have to keep track of what you need to do.
+
+[^1]: When I had kids I kind of gave up on this habit to spend my time reading to them before bed. In practice it accomplishes the same thing -- it clears my head by sticking a story in it -- I just lose whatever ideas might have been rattling around. The only notecards I really use as a filing system anymore are reading notes.
+
+# Turn Your Own Wrenches
+
+date:2023-03-28 15:39:03
+url:/essay/craft/turn-your-own-wrenches
+
+There's no temperature gauge. That broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell trouble coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slipping in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know it's time to stop. This doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000-pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat.
+
+I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, and limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east, as far as I can see, the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward a desert valley floor, dust-swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Eastern California, between the Nevada ghost town where we camped last night and the top of the White Mountains. 
+
+So I stop right in the middle of the road.
+
+When the engine shuts off a quiet descends. No wind. No birds. No talking. We—my wife, three children, and me—just listen to the faint hissing of steam escaping the radiator cap, and then a gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade; the desert sun casts a harsh light on the road. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, “You want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2017-09-28_162046_bishop.jpg" id="image-3423" class="picwide caption" />
+
+As a child of the ’70s, I've spent a fair amount of time on the side of the road next to broken-down vehicles. This is what vehicles of those days did. The 1967 Volkswagen fastback, which managed to get us home safely from the hospital after I was born, was replaced by a 1976 mustard-yellow VW Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma, Arizona, on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents’ house in Tucson. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-250 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. It used to be more of a necessity to know how to fix a car. These days it is often, if not a luxury, a labor of love. 
+
+My father handed that F-250 down to me. I wanted to work on it, but the truth is I was intimidated. What if I broke something irreparable? What if I just couldn't hack it? I was a computer programmer then. In principle, fixing code is not so different from fixing an engine. But a computer will tell you what is wrong with your code. An engine—at least an older one—doesn't do that. When you work on an older vehicle, you are the computer. And I was one with no software.
+
+That made it hard to know where to start, and so I didn't. Instead I helped more knowledgable friends with their cars. In the process I discovered that, for me, solving mechanical problems brought a kind of satisfaction that digital ones did not. One weekend I was helping a friend bleed the brakes on his car, pumping the pedal while he was under the chassis turning the bleeder screws. As we worked I could feel the resistance building, a tactile feedback that I loved. I was hooked. I wanted to learn how to repair engines, but to do that I knew I needed a project of my own—one with higher stakes than the F-250.
+
+In June 2015, my wife and I [bought a 1969 Dodge Travco](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2015/06/big-blue-bus), a motor home that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. My kids called it the bus. Which was apt. When you say “motor home,” most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is a 27-foot-long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine, back when that was a marker of cool. Johnny Cash had one. So did John Wayne.
+
+We didn’t buy it solely so I would have a project. We bought it to make it our full-time home. We were tired of the suburbs, and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. I wanted them to know the difference between the South, where they were born, the Midwest, the West, the Northeast. I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of continuing down the road by your own sweat and effort. Out of a muddled sense of self-reliance born of stubbornness and ideals, I wanted them to know that anything worth fixing can be fixed, and anything that can't be fixed isn't worth having. But sitting there in the heat of the California sun on Highway 168 that afternoon, the bus felt more like a giant check my ego had written that my fumbling fingers and tools could not cash.
+
+In truth, I didn’t have much experience with cars, but I did grow up around repair and restoration. My grandfather worked for the telephone company and had a shed full of tools behind his house in Tucson. When he retired, he spent his weekends buying broken things at the swap meet and his weekdays fixing them to resell the next weekend. In the summer it was blazing hot in Grandpa’s shed, but my cousins and I didn't notice. We were too excited watching him tear things apart—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.
+
+My dad had a garage full of tools as well. I was playing with hammers and tape measures from the time I could walk, building model airplanes in grade school. As I got older, I started taking more and more things apart and trying to put them back together. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I came out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, perhaps misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools and a good mentor, anything was fixable. 
+
+Years later, a line in Matthew Crawford’s best-selling manifesto of the manual arts, *Shop Class as Soulcraft*, echoed the feeling my mentors had instilled in me. There is a type of person, he writes, who “hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging.” 
+
+[Going down swinging](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/10/going-down-swinging) is central to the culture of repair. You have to be willing to try. Yet in these days of high technology, products are often covered with stickers warning you that even undoing a screw will void the warranty or risk injury. Companies like John Deere have even restricted the owners of their machines from repairing them themselves or through a third party. Those stickers aren’t an accident. Manufacturers know that the best way to stop people from repairing things is to convince them that they can’t.
+
+But to be more than a consumer of stuff, to not be dependent, you must first believe that you can repair it. That willingness to try—in spite of, or to spite, the stickers—is where it starts, whether you’re trying to fix your laptop or replace your head gasket.
+
+There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but in June 2015, after a few months of haunting Craigslist, I found one for sale in the mountains of North Carolina, in the sleepy college town of Mars Hill. A couple who restored vintage trailers found the bus somewhere in Tennessee and tried their hand at fixing it up. Then they changed their mind and put it up for sale. A few days later I was standing there in the hills, looking over the bus. There was some obvious water damage, but nothing I didn’t think I could fix.
+
+I was blissfully ignorant about the engine. It was hard to start, but once it got running it seemed good enough to my untrained ear. I handed over the money and climbed into the cockpit.
+
+That first drive was nerve-racking. Strapping yourself into a 27-foot-long monstrosity is nothing like driving a car, especially when the monstrosity is in unknown condition and pointing downhill. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I finally managed to get her out on a four-lane road where she felt more manageable. After I had been driving, tensely, for a couple of hours I pulled over at a rest area to take a break.
+
+I’d barely come to a stop when two people came up to the bus to take pictures and ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it? Then they asked the question everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: What engine is in it? 
+
+The Travco is driven by a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A-series engine. This is the same engine type you could find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger V8s like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you’d find in a Dart, which would give the bus’s 318 more power. (I’ve done a little research and still can’t confirm or deny this. On the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada, it can certainly feel like I have the power of a Dodge Dart, with 8,000 extra pounds of weight on top.) On that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, all I knew was the engine’s name, and that it lacked the sensors, computer chips, automation, and complexity of modern vehicles. It was something I felt I could take a swing at. 
+
+The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time [rebuilding the interior](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2015/09/progress). For the bulk of 2016 it sat in our driveway with me inside, sweating through the southern summer, freezing through the winter. Our neighbors begin to give directions based on it: “We’re two houses after the big blue bus.” 
+
+<img src="images/2023/bus-work_2016-05-30_083439.jpg" id="image-3424" class="picwide caption" />
+
+
+I gutted the inside. I wanted to understand how all the systems worked, and to design and build out everything so I could fix it if I needed to. There are no backup cameras, no motorized awnings, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a water heater with a nonelectric pilot light system. Every time we reach camp, I have to get out and light it by hand—but the system will never fail. 
+
+A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Galactica, who famously wouldn’t let networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn’t that he was opposed to technology—his character commands a spaceship after all—but that he distrusted a particular kind of technology. In his case, networked systems opened the door to murderous robots bent on destroying humanity. Our case was a little less dramatic. We just didn’t want to have something break far away from the nearest place that could fix it. Every technology you use should be something you choose for a known benefit, with trade-offs you can accept.
+
+No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I think Adama would approve of the solar panels—they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses; it’s an unnecessary potential point of failure. Sure, it’s nice to be able to check our solar and battery status from my phone, but we don’t have to. To mitigate that vulnerability, I installed a shunt with a hardwired gauge. Should the Bluetooth fail (or, more likely, should I lose my phone), I can just look at the gauge. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology. I’m opposed to unnecessary technology and single points of failure.
+
+The late comedian Mitch Hedberg had a joke about how an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. In web design this is referred to as graceful degradation. How good your technology is depends on how elegantly it handles failures. A lot of modern design has taken exactly the opposite approach. In the name of convenience, complex systems are hidden behind deceptively simple user interfaces. But no matter how simple these things might seem when you use them, the complexity behind them is inherently fragile. 
+
+Sometimes inconvenience can even be a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you to pay attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, I found out I need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission. 
+
+Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning, the engine is cold, which makes it hard to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but when your engine is cold it needs more fuel than air. A computer chip controls this mixture in modern cars, but in older, aspirated engines like the 318, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire attached to the carburetor flap at one end, and a knob on the dashboard at the other. Pull out the knob and the flap in the carburetor closes, limiting the air coming in and allowing the cold engine to start up.
+
+Manual choke is archaic. But since ours was broken when we got it, I went even more archaic. Every time I start the engine, I lift up the engine cover, unscrew the air filter, and close the carburetor flap with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dashboard knob, took years of scouring eBay. By the time I found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year.
+
+The truth is, I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once a wire came off the ignition coil, and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting—which it wasn't—I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. But it was also very simple to fix. I found the wire and plugged it back in. The engine started right up.
+
+Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, connecting with it. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine before every drive; these days I am often just spending time with it.
+
+Car enthusiasts often get this way. It might seem irrational to be attached to a particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Now, driving around the country, when I see broken-down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships.
+
+The bus is very much a relationship. The five of us moved in and hit the road on April 1, 2017. My wife said that if it didn't work out, we’d just pass it off as a bad April Fools joke. It worked out. Though, as in any relationship, the bus and I have had some rocky moments.
+
+On April 2, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into a [campsite at Raysville campground](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/april-fools), still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I lay down in the dirt and slid myself under the engine. A thin, warm red liquid splashed onto my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission lines running into the bottom of the radiator where fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2017-04-01_163510_raysville.jpg" id="image-3422" class="picwide caption" />
+
+I didn't know exactly how to fix it, but I knew just enough about engines to recognize that this wasn't too serious. As long as I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. I didn't want to disrupt our new life on the road by taking the bus in for repairs on our third day out. Instead, I added a transmission fluid refill to my morning ritual.
+
+I went through a lot of transmission fluid those first three weeks. I topped it off every morning before we hit the road and every time we stopped for gas. Treating symptoms works for a while, but inevitably the underlying cause gets worse. We made it [down to the South Carolina coast](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/edge-continent) and then swung south, through the windswept marshes of the Georgia coast. Then we headed inland, across the [swampy pine flats of south Georgia](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/swamped) and into [the Florida panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/gulf-islands-national-seashore).
+
+I put off dealing with the leak in part because state and national parks frown on people working on their rigs in campgrounds. And we were heading to a friend’s [beach house on St. George Island](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/coming-home). Friends’ driveways are much more conducive to repairs. But the day we arrived, the leak got dramatically worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left. At this point, I felt overwhelmed by the problem; it seemed like too big of a task, but I also wasn’t sure I wanted to go down so soon. So I spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such an old, huge vehicle. I finally found one who was game. A few days later, my wallet lighter, the problem was solved. Yet every time I went to a mechanic I felt inadequate. Why didn’t I try to fix it myself? I made excuses (there wasn’t time, I wanted to play with my kids), but the truth is I was afraid I would fail. 
+
+We got back in the bus and on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through [Alabama](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/dauphin-island), [Mississippi](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/davis-bayou), [Louisiana](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/new-orleans-instrumental-number-1), into [New Orleans](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/new-orleans-instrumental-number-2), where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks. For two months it ran perfectly. But as we headed into the [June heat of Texas](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/austin-part-one), the temperature gauge began to climb. And climb. All the way into the red. We took to driving in the early mornings, which helped, but something needed to be done. 
+
+We stopped to [visit relatives in Dallas](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/06/dallas), and at yet another mechanic, we had the radiator re-cored. That eliminated it as the source of the problem. (Again, I chastised myself for taking it to a mechanic, but I had a good excuse—even experienced mechanics rarely re-core their own radiators.) Not an hour outside of Dallas, the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair shop. They replaced the water pump and thermostat. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. The temperature gauge climbed again. 
+
+Our [temperature problem](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/06/escaping-texas), and the brutal West Texas heat, was getting to us. I punted. In Amarillo we got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a while and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. That night, I paid way too much for a temperature gun at a local hardware store, and we hit the road again early the next morning. Every half hour, I stopped, got out, and took readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was within the operating parameters. We drove on into the midday heat and watched the temperature gauge climb again, but the readings done with the gun remained fine. I called my uncle back. “If I were you,” he said, “I'd pull the temperature sensor out of your engine and chuck it out in the desert somewhere.” I hung up feeling that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't know how to find the problems, let alone fix them. I don’t know when my uncle started working on cars, but he’s 35 years older than me. Thirty-five years chasing the spirit of inquiry teaches you a lot. 
+
+I took his advice. I unhooked the temperature gauge from the engine sensor. I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong. I wasn't happy thinking about the thousands of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be a faulty $15 sensor. I also wasn’t happy now that I could see the learning curve I faced. It felt insurmountably steep. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2017-06-16_080436_escaping-texas.jpg" id="image-3425" class="picwide caption" />
+
+Two months later, near the end of a summer [spent in cool pine forests](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/07/time-and-placement) in the Rocky Mountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000-foot pass near [Ridgway, Colorado](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/08/ridgway-state-park). We'd managed to get the bus over 9,600 feet before, and the pass we were headed toward was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile into the climb before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus —and saw the transmission cooler line leaking again. 
+
+We turned around, limped back to Ridgway, and found a side street to park on. I got under the bus again. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the end of the transmission line I could see that the metal pipe, which flares out to wrap over a metal fitting on the radiator, was not just cracked but missing a whole chunk. Instead of forming a tight seal over the metal fitting, fluid was shooting out the side. The transmission cooler lines are fitted tightly along the side of the engine. There is no slack. I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare, and reattach them. Even if I could have made it work, they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more than the transmission cooler ever cooled them.
+
+I was forced to reach out for help, again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the bus and eventually found one in Montrose, 30 miles away down the mountain. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the Ridgway State Park campground. We started repacking and gathering up what we’d need for [a few days of tent camping](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/09/aspen). 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2017-08-25_205350-1_ridgway-state-park.jpg" id="image-3426" class="picwide caption" />
+
+
+That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room in the campground, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. He stuffed his laundry in the machine, and we started talking. The conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked about the engine, he asked me something no one ever had, something that caught me off guard. Something that has haunted me since: “Do you turn your own wrenches?” I said I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. “You have to turn your own wrenches,” he said, shaking his head. “You can't have a vehicle like that if you don’t turn your own wrenches.” 
+
+I already knew that—I’d been feeling it for months—but it didn’t really hit home until someone else said it to me. You can’t have a vehicle like this if you don’t turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both. I vowed that this would be the last time I would resort to a mechanic. I took the bus to that mechanic in Montrose. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the shop found new transmission cooler lines and installed them. A couple weeks later, coming down through [western Utah](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/09/on-the-road-again), bound for [Zion National Park](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/09/zion), I stopped for gas—and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? 
+
+It was a Sunday in Utah. We pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was, like everything else on a Sunday in Utah, closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. Sure enough, the flare on the transmission line was cracked again. I knew what to do, but I didn't have the tools, and the hardware stores weren't open. 
+
+I climbed out from under and sat down on the Travco’s step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife was just asking me what we were going to do, when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street rattled and opened with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was there working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line, took it inside, cut off the cracked flare, and reflared it. Then he showed me where the last mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened the nut, crushing the metal onto the fitting until it cracked. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday, he told me.
+
+We were almost two years into our family odyssey with the Travco when we found ourselves beached in the [middle of the road on that desert mountain pass in Eastern California](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/10/trains-hot-springs-and-broken-buses). By then, I knew that an engine’s tendency to overheat isn’t really a thing that can be fixed. It’s what happens when a small engine tries to climb a big hill. Eventually old cars will teach you so much, including patience.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2017-09-28_121417__.jpg" id="image-3427" class="picwide caption" />
+
+
+I walked up the road to see what was beyond the next bend. Maybe the blacktop crested a ridge and dropped into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. But the curve didn't end. I kept walking but could never see more than the next few hundred yards; the road just kept climbing. I gave up and headed back to the bus. My wife and kids were back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine had cooled some, so we clamored in and decided to make another push up the mountain. But now we were starting from zero. On this kind of incline, I gave us a mile before we’d overheat again. (I’d never know exactly, because the odometer was broken.) After about five minutes I spied a pullout. I hadn't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the ability to get out of the road. 
+
+My wife and I talked about turning back. There was a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They had a sign out front that said no phone and not to bother them, but something told me they'd be OK with the bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It had been a long day of driving, and the kids were tired and hot. 
+
+Then we heard an unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, with the distinctive thump-thump heartbeat roar of a Harley Davidson, was rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike appeared and the rider pulled over. He asked if we were OK. We went through the usual talk about the bus. Then he told us we were only about a mile from the top. Suddenly we weren’t quite so tired. Making it over the mountains felt possible again. We thanked the rider, and he continued on his way. We gave the engine more time to cool off. 
+
+An hour later we tried again. It was a long mile, and we never got above 20 miles an hour, but after a while we crested a ridge and a spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opened up below. I could see the Sierra Nevada rising up out of the hazy valley. We were at the top. I had just a second to enjoy it before we passed a sign that read “Caution, One-Lane Road Ahead.” The Narrows, as this bit of highway is called, came up so fast we didn't have time to plan for it. We were just in it. Thankfully, nothing came the other way.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2017-09-28_162100_bishop.jpg" id="image-3428" class="picwide caption" />
+
+Coming down the steep grade we stopped to rest the brakes a few times. After about three hours of descending, we pulled into a campground outside of Big Pine, California. It was empty this time of year, and the road was full of ruts that had the bus lurching and creaking around. About 20 yards from the first campsite we heard a loud clang. My wife and I looked at each other. I pulled in for the night and shut off the engine for the final time with a deep sense of relief.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2017-09-28_181252__.jpg" id="image-3430" class="picwide caption" />
+
+The next morning we watched the sun light up the high peaks of the eastern Sierra Nevada. We had a leisurely breakfast and sipped our coffee well into the morning. We found a train museum up the road and thought we'd take the kids. 
+
+It was around 10 when I started up the engine and made my customary walk around the bus to make sure all the windows and hatches and vents were closed and properly secured while the engine warmed up. Everything looked good until I came around to the driver’s side. The rear wheels were oddly far back in the wheel well. Wheels don't just move around … that would mean the entire axle had moved. Oh shit. 
+
+I knelt down and peered under the frame. The rear axle, which supports about 5,000 pounds, is held in place by two mounts, one to the front of the axle, one to the rear of the axle. These hold the leaf springs in place. The mounts are secured by four welded steel pins, one at each corner, which hold the axle mount to the chassis. On the driver's side, the forward axle mount, three of the four pins were gone. The mount was hanging by one pin and had swung down and backward, shifting the entire rear axle about 6 inches backward.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2002-12-08_120000-27__.jpg" id="image-3429" class="picwide caption" />
+
+If that pin gave out while we were moving, the axle would come free and likely tear the back end of the bus off before dropping it on the ground. We weren't going anywhere. Suddenly, all the things that had happened until now, all the leaking fluids, excess oil, even overheating, seemed pretty mild compared to this. Then I thought of something my uncle had said to me over and over: “It's all just nuts and bolts.”
+
+Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is, though. It's in the problem-solving that happens in your head. That skill takes years, even decades, to develop. But there’s an infectious thrill when you hold some unknown in your head until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of thinking.
+
+It also requires asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of them helped me in some way, even if it was just an encouraging word, a congratulations on keeping it on the road.
+
+Yet, as I sat there staring at the axle dangling by a single pin, I had no idea what to do. So I texted my uncle a picture of the problem. A few minutes later my phone rang. My uncle happens to live about two hours from Big Pine, back over the state line in Nevada. Sit tight, he said. He was loading up some tools and would be there that afternoon. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2017-09-30_163027_bishop.jpg" id="image-3431" class="picwide caption" />
+
+We took the kids hiking down to a nearby river. (Making the bus “work” for us is as much about making sure the kids have space to run and play as it is turning wrenches.) Around three that afternoon my uncle pulled into our campsite with a truck full of floor lifts, jacks, and tools. He crawled under the bus with me. He didn't say anything, just lay there studying the situation. When he climbed back out he said, “I think we can fix that.” We made a run to a hardware store in Bishop, about an hour up the road, where we bought some grade 8 steel bolts, which are strong enough to hold. We then went to the store and grabbed some steaks and potatoes for dinner. Another lesson I've learned from my uncle: “Relax, and make sure you're having fun while you do this.”
+
+That night after dinner, around the campfire, he told me the plan. We'd use two jacks, one to hold up the bus should that last pin give out, and another to maneuver the axle mount back in place. Once it was close we'd use a flange alignment tool to line up the hole in the axle mount with the hole in the chassis. Then we'd slip in the grade 8 bolts. Once he said it, the plan seemed simple enough, obvious even. But I never would have thought of it on my own. I'd never even heard of a flange alignment tool, and I had no idea there were bolts strong enough to replace forged steel pins. 
+
+The next morning we started in, and the work took the better part of the day, but when we were done the axle was back where it should be. My uncle didn’t like the sound of the engine though. “Why don’t you bring it to my place, and we’ll see what we can do about that noise,” he said. 
+
+The kids got to see the train museum. We [swam in some hot springs](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/10/trains-hot-springs-and-broken-buses). Then, a few days later, we made [our way up to my uncle’s house](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/10/dialed-in) and I began to learn exactly how the engine worked.
+
+This is, in part, what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it six years later. It's all the people I know, all the people I've met, the people who've helped—some professionals, most not. We haven't stopped needing to fix things in the bus. In the course of writing this article I had to [rebuild the vacuum booster](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/03/more-adventures-travco-brakes) that powers our brake system. I had to [replace a head gasket](https://live.luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/10/going-down-swinging), several worn belts, a failed alternator, the voltage regulator, and a fuel pump, and I had to do all the routine maintenance, like changing the spark plugs, wires, and oil. No mechanics were consulted, though I still regularly text my uncle for advice.
+
+The bus will never not need fixing. But my relationship with it has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. Nor do I look at it with perfect, go-it-alone mastery. I know what all the parts do. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does. But I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches that I rely on; it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. 
+
+It isn’t just wrenches either. We are in the middle of a repair revival. Other repair gurus are out there helping the next generation. Sewing groups hold “mending days” where you can get your clothing repaired, and learn to do it yourself. A luthier friend of mine has apprenticed under a master and now helps others learn how to build and repair guitars. Another friend who started out buying and repairing bicycles for fun now regularly runs workshops for people to learn how to repair their own bikes. All around the country there are local fixing groups. Check the bulletin boards in your community and you’ll likely find someone organizing a repair group. 
+
+The community of people who repair things is an interesting group, perched on a curious dichotomy. We are, by and large, people who prize self-reliance. Whether that spirit grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or something else, it is essential to the ethic of repair. At the same time, the community is very hierarchical, which means those of us near the bottom must learn from those above. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either snobbish (if you think you're good) or intimidated (if you know you're not). The only way out of these predicaments is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place. In the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.
+
 # Everything is a Practice
 
+date:2022-12-28 11:07:47
+url:/essay/spirit/everything-is-a-practice
+
 There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.
 
 **Everything is a Practice.**
@@ -249,21 +656,21 @@ Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possibl
 
 The practice leaves a path behind you to show you how far you have come and carves out a path ahead of you to show you where you can go.
 
-The practices of your life *are* your life. They form the path you follow, they are how you become what you want to become, they make you who you are and who the world wants you to be. You are not solely in charge of your practices or the path they form. The world gets a vote too. In the end that's part of the practice too—adjusting to feedback from the world, your body, your life, your family, your friends. All of these things are part of the practice, all of them inform it.
+The practices of your life *are* your life. They form the path you follow, they are how you become what you want to become, they make you who you are and who the world wants you to be. You are not solely in charge of your practices or the path they form. The world gets a vote too. In the end that's part of the practice too -- adjusting to feedback from the world, your body, your life, your family, your friends. All of these things are part of the practice, all of them inform it.
 
 The practice also informs the experimentation that expands it.
 
-The trick is to follow your curiosity. That often forgotten part of you that society tries to get you to repress. That voice that says, what would happen if... This is the way. Follow it. Follow it knowing you will likely fail, knowing that you're probably doing it the wrong way, but you're going to try it anyway... you'd be surprised what works. I've fixed loose battery wires with a bit of nail, held hoses on with zip ties, and countless other things that should not have worked, but did, at least for a little while. There's plenty of failures along the way of course. Those people always telling you it can't be done—whatever it might be -- are sometimes right, but wouldn't it be better to find out for yourself? 
+The trick is to follow your curiosity. That often forgotten part of you that society tries to get you to repress. That voice that says, what would happen if... This is the way. Follow it. Follow it knowing you will likely fail, knowing that you're probably doing it the wrong way, but you're going to try it anyway... you'd be surprised what works. I've fixed loose battery wires with a bit of nail, held hoses on with zip ties, and countless other things that should not have worked, but did, at least for a little while. There's plenty of failures along the way of course. Those people always telling you it can't be done -- whatever it might be -- are sometimes right, but wouldn't it be better to find out for yourself? 
 
-Now there are reasonable limits to this... I wouldn't go trying to repair a $4,000 lens on your first attempt at lens repair. I wouldn't pick a rare, difficult to replace engine for your first rebuild. Learn to manage risk. When you know you're headed off the map to experiment, pick things to experiment on and situations to experiment in where you can keep the risk level low. Whether that means using something cheap, or doing it at low speed, or making sure the water is deep enough before you jump. Whatever the case, learn to manage risk so that your lessons learned aren't so painful—financially, emotionally, physically --- that you forget what you learned and remember only the trauma of the learning.
+Now there are reasonable limits to this... I wouldn't go trying to repair a $4,000 lens on your first attempt at lens repair. I wouldn't pick a rare, difficult to replace engine for your first rebuild. Learn to manage risk. When you know you're headed off the map to experiment, pick things to experiment on and situations to experiment in where you can keep the risk level low. Whether that means using something cheap, or doing it at low speed, or making sure the water is deep enough before you jump. Whatever the case, learn to manage risk so that your lessons learned aren't so painful -- financially, emotionally, physically --- that you forget what you learned and remember only the trauma of the learning.
 
 In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother. You are building real world skills that you can use over and over. Every skill that you pick up transfers to other things too. Your practice will expand and keep growing.
 
 The experience you gain using a multimeter to untangle the rats nest of wires under the dash will come in handy when you need to figure out why the fridge suddenly stopped. That method of troubleshooting, following wires, testing voltages, making sure resisters are working, and so on, that method of inquiry you learned working under that dash transfers to other things. It's the same method of inquiry needed to figure out what's happening with anything electrical. There will be some differences between the fridge and the dash and the dishwasher and the vacuum, but the basic method is the same. From one small repair you gain an insight that makes countless future repairs that much easier. But only if you do it yourself.
 
-In this way everything you do is always building your skill set. You're always expanding your practice. This makes the path that much easier. You are that much more proficient at being human. The journey become easier, you are less reliant on others and you free up resources to focus on life's more interesting things. That way when the fridge dies at anchor in the San Blas, two days sail from the nearest repair shop, you don't worry. You fix the issues and get on with the dive you were planning to do that day. 
+In this way everything you do is always building your skill set. You're always expanding your practice. This makes the path that much easier. You are that much more proficient at being human. The journey becomes easier, you are less reliant on others and you free up resources to focus on life's more interesting things. That way when the fridge dies at anchor in the San Blas, two days sail from the nearest repair shop, you don't worry. You fix the issues and get on with the dive you were planning to do that day. 
 
-Skills transfer in unexpected ways too. It isn't all just troubleshooting methods that transfer. The experience you gain struggling at terrible sketches of birds will come in handy when you start staring at the engine, trying to make sense of what's gone wrong—you've trained your mind to pay attention to the little details of feathers, which is not so different than paying attention to the little details of how a machine is running or how the wind and weather are changing. It is all connected.
+Skills transfer in unexpected ways too. It isn't all just troubleshooting methods that transfer. The experience you gain struggling at terrible sketches of birds will come in handy when you start staring at the engine, trying to make sense of what's gone wrong -- you've trained your mind to pay attention to the little details of feathers, which is not so different than paying attention to the little details of how a machine is running or how the wind and weather are changing. It is all connected.
 
 I should probably stop here and point out that I am a miserable hack with very few skills. I am not a repair expert or wunderkind of any sort. I can barely fix my way out of a paper bag. I am writing this not because I have mastered it on some long journey of experience, but because I have lived a couple of these examples and when thinking about it later, realized, oh, I made that connection because of this other things that I didn't see as related at the time, but then it turned out it was. 
 
@@ -279,31 +686,31 @@ How do you find *your* practice? I don't know what you need to do or where you o
 
 The Webster's 1913 dictionary definition of practice includes as examples, "the practice of rising early; the practice of making regular entries of accounts; the practice of daily exercise." That's not a bad place to start: get up, get moving, and keep track of where your money is going. That can take you far. None of that is revolutionary. Ben Franklin is famous for saying roughly the same thing. You can find similar quotes going back to the very edges of written history, but it's still a solid place to start. Get up and get going. 
 
-What I think gets lost in our time—[the time of The Experts](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) -- is that there's not a single path, not a set of practices that work for everyone. We've been conditioned to look for prescriptions that fit everyone and that's just not how life works. You and I are different. You have to experiment and find what works for you. It might be nearly the same as what works for me, but it also might be totally different. I know people who are very much on their path who are vegans and do their best work late at night. You have to find your own way.
+What I think gets lost in our time -- [the time of The Experts](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) -- is that there's not a single path, not a set of practices that work for everyone. We've been conditioned to look for prescriptions that fit everyone and that's just not how life works. You and I are different. You have to experiment and find what works for you. It might be nearly the same as what works for me, but it also might be totally different. I know people who are very much on their path who are vegans and do their best work late at night. You have to find your own way.
 
 That said, I do have a suggestion on where to start: start with touching your nose.
 
 I know, that sounds stupid. If you're into making some kind of huge change in your life the last thing you want to hear is that you should start by touching your nose. What the hell is that going to do? The answer is: it's going to train your will.
 
-If you were out of shape, unable to do a single push up, but desiring to be able to knock out 100 push ups in two minutes you wouldn't start with 50, you'd start with one. But even then, there is a high risk of failure because the effort it takes to get from zero push ups to ten is more than it takes to get from ten to 100. There's a very good chance that you're going to give up before you get to ten—not because it's too hard, but because you aren't accustomed to forcing yourself to do things. You are not in control of your will.
+If you were out of shape, unable to do a single push up, but desiring to be able to knock out 100 push ups in two minutes you wouldn't start with 50, you'd start with one. But even then, there is a high risk of failure because the effort it takes to get from zero push ups to ten is more than it takes to get from ten to 100. There's a very good chance that you're going to give up before you get to ten -- not because it's too hard, but because you aren't accustomed to forcing yourself to do things. You are not in control of your will.
 
 It's not your fault. Unless you happen to have enlisted in the armed forces, practice a martial art, or have monastic religious training, you have very likely never even been taught that you can train your will, let alone how to do it. That's okay. 
 
 The good news is that, unlike the hypothetical arms in the push up example, the will is not weak. Your will is as strong as it was when you were a baby starting to crawl and you willed your entire body to do something it had never done before. If your will feels weak it is because it's divided against itself. The power of the will comes from disciplined focus. When you can focus your will on a single thing, and only that thing, you can do remarkable things. 
 
-Getting to that point is the hard part. That is the practice of the will. This is where all practices start. This is the metapractice that enables all the other practices to come into being. The will, directed, is the thing that enable you to turn words into ideas, ideas into action, action into skills. The will is what opens up the path in front of you and enables you to move forward. 
+Getting to that point is the hard part. That is the practice of the will. This is where all practices start. This is the metapractice that enables all the other practices to come into being. The will, directed, is the thing that enables you to turn words into ideas, ideas into action, action into skills. The will is what opens up the path in front of you and enables you to move forward. 
 
 When you say "will" though most people think of some miserable thing where you grit your teeth and bear some suffering. That's not the will, that's you fighting your will. When your will is focused following it is effortless, in fact you can't not follow it, you are directing it after all.
 
 The problem is that most of your life you've been told to do things you didn't want to do. School is the primary culprit here for most of us, though there maybe other things in your life. Schooling in the United States is almost universally designed to damage the will and leave you unable to do much of anything save serve the will of others. This is why most of us leave school and get a job. We literally go out to serve another's will. Our will has been so damaged we think that the thing we fight against when we "grit our teeth" or "just do it" is our will. 
 
-That's not your will, that's your will divided. Our wills know a bad deal when they see one, even if we don't. And so they fight it—they fight school, they fight our pointless jobs, they fight our uninspired cities and all the rest. And we fight our will. And we become convinced that this struggle against ourselves is what it means to direct our will. We become convinced that we're weak. 
+That's not your will, that's your will divided. Our wills know a bad deal when they see one, even if we don't. And so they fight it -- they fight school, they fight our pointless jobs, they fight our uninspired cities and all the rest. And we fight our will. And we become convinced that this struggle against ourselves is what it means to direct our will. We become convinced that we're weak. 
 
 That makes for a ton of emotional baggage wrapped up in our divided will. That why every New Year's when we vow to hit the gym and do those push ups, we fail. We spiral downward, further convinced we are weak.
 
-This is compounded by the fact that your will is the source of most of your emotions—when your will succeeds in the world, you are happy, when it fails you are miserable. If you have a lot of miserably emotions locked up in your will and you try to focus it... it doesn't work. By the end of February it's been two months since you went to the gym.
+This is compounded by the fact that your will is the source of most of your emotions -- when your will succeeds in the world, you are happy, when it fails you are miserable. If you have a lot of miserable emotions locked up in your will and you try to focus it... it doesn't work. By the end of February it's been two months since you went to the gym.
 
-That's why you start with touching your nose. This is a variation on what every religious training manual (and some of the better secular ones) I've read advices doing. Something silly. Something that doesn't matter. Something that you have no emotional attachment to. Something you will not fail to do because of years of damage to your will. Touching your nose is easy and has no emotional baggage for most people. 
+That's why you start with touching your nose. This is a variation on what every religious training manual (and some of the better secular ones) I've read advises doing. Something silly. Something that doesn't matter. Something that you have no emotional attachment to. Something you will not fail to do because of years of damage to your will. Touching your nose is easy and has no emotional baggage for most people. 
 
 So do it. Right now. Wherever you are sitting, reading this. Use your left hand and touch your nose ten times, returning your hand to your side or lap each time. Do it now before you read any further.
 
@@ -311,107 +718,115 @@ Congratulations, you unified your will and succeeded. This is the beginning. Thi
 
 Now you need to do that every day. Write "touch your nose!" on a piece of note paper and put it somewhere you will see it every day, ideally multiple times a day, ideally somewhere other people won't bother you about it. Then every time you see it, touch your nose ten times with your left hand.
 
-Congratulations. You have a new practice in your life. No, not touching your hose. The habit of doing something because you chose to do it. Not because some authority told you to or some unnoticed compulsion drove you to—you chose to do this. You do it. You direct your will. 
+Congratulations. You have a new practice in your life. No, not touching your nose. The habit of doing something because you chose to do it. Not because some authority told you to or some unnoticed compulsion drove you to -- you chose to do this. You do it. You direct your will. 
 
 That is the beginning of the practice.
 
+# Sunbeams
 
+date:2022-12-22 15:42:15
+url:/essay/craft/sunbeams
 
+Patrick’s Point is a beautiful place. When you can see it. Most of the time it's enveloped in cloud and mist. We [drove in on a broken alternator](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/10/through) (not knowingly, but it wasn't charging the battery) and ended up stuck. Our solar system was no good in a place where the sun really doesn't shine much. But one evening we were down the cliff from our campsite, on the seashore, and the setting sun conspired with the fog to let a few rays of light through. I made this image on the way back up the trail.
 
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2023/range-014-poster.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="26" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2023/Darktable_Edit_014.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2023/Darktable_Edit_014.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-v1dhFafnE">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
 
+In developing this all I really wanted to do was up the contrast and cut some of the haze to emphasize the sunbeams more, nothing too complicated.
 
-*Note: Some might object that I have told you to do this and therefore it is yet another example of you yielding your will to another. This isn't true. It doesn't have to be your idea to do something, you just have to choose to do it. That's your will, you are choosing what to do.*
-We are all in the process of maturation. Both as individuals and as a species. None of knows where this all goes, but I think we all know that the current stories don’t wash and it’s time for something new. I don’t know what that looks like for you, but for myself, for us out here, it looks like this. It looks like walks through primordial forests, long afternoons on windswept beaches, evenings around the fire.
-
-I believe that you’ll know when you are on the right path. You’ll feel it. Life will begin to feel like what it is, a gift, an adventure, a joy. You’ll feel connection, fulfillment, that deep sense of satisfaction at the end of the day that comes from knowing there is nothing else you would rather have done that day. That is the path. And if you manage to find it, don’t stray. Do the work. It isn’t always easy. It isn’t always beaches and campfires. Sometimes it’s engine repair and frustration and despair. But these moments are fleeting, they are the necessary growth, the twists and turns that reveal. Stay disciplined, stay focused, stay on the path. Let go of control and just walk the path. It will reveal itself slowly, only as much as you need to see, just keep on it, and see where it leads you. That’s adventure. That’s living.
-
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-What do you care about?
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-Who do you want to be?
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-What matters most to you?
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-What are the most important things in your life?
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-Who are the most important people in your life and what do they need from you?
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+# Safety Third
 
+date:2022-12-02 16:40:18
+url:/essay/spirit/safety-third
 
+If you land on luxagraf.net on an odd day of the month, you might notice the little tag line under the site title is "safety third". This comes from a sticker we saw on a pole outside the [Henry Miller Library](https://henrymiller.org) in [Big Sur, California](https://images.luxagraf.net/2017/2017-11-28_161158_monterey_picwide.jpg). Miller no doubt would have agreed. He might have ranked safety even lower in his decision calculus. I often do.
 
+<img src="images/2023/2017-11-28_161158_monterey.jpg" id="image-3319" class="picfull" />
 
+Every time we go to any sort of government park -- state, national, county, city, you name it -- we get handed a set of rules. I can tell which level of government land we are on by the number of rules, the more rules, the higher level government. These rules are invariably couched in terms of safety. 
 
-Your higher self is the part of you that continues from one incarnation to the next, that was around long before you were born and will still be aroung long after your current body dies. While you’re alive, unless you’re engaged in very intensive spiritual practices, your higher self is basically asleep and dreaming, and your life is its dream. The great secret of the higher self is that it’s you — the real you — and the personality you think you are right now is like the personalities you sometimes have in your dreams at night. When your current body dies, you’ll wake up out of the dream and say, “Wow, that was interesting,” and then go on to other things.
+They range from the ridiculous to the obvious, but almost never tell anyone anything they didn't already know. As we all know, these rules serve no purpose beyond heading off lawsuits. Go abroad to less litigious cultures (like Mexico) and you'll discover there are far fewer rules, yet somehow no radical increase in accidents.
 
-David BTL, nope. The mess that is your psyche is exactly what it should be: the raw materials you have to work with, the pieces of the kit you need to assemble. It just looks screwed up because you’re beginning to glimpse what it can become once you fit all the pieces together where they belong.
+The Safety Third sticker became our antidote to the endless rules of public spaces. It was a good family joke. Whenever we do something other people might frown on, one of us will invariably shout, "safety third!" before plunging ahead. 
 
-[^1]: The world in this case consisting of both material and other realities.
+Then the pandemic happened.
 
+Regardless of your opinion on the response to the pandemic, one overarching truth struck me early on: a very vocal and powerful segment of our culture believes that safety trumps everything. For some people I realized, all those ridiculous signs aren't ridiculous. They aren't a joke. They aren't just their to head off lawsuits. For some people these signs are words to live by. 
 
+What was more troubling though was that these people assumed that the rest of us would agree with their thinking, that nothing is worth risking life for, absolutely nothing. 
 
+I think we need to go back to the phrase itself and think about what we're really saying when we say "Safety First". If safety is truly first then love, joy, honesty, purpose, and a thousand other elements of human existence mean nothing once they conflict with safety. 
 
+We saw this in the pandemic when loved ones were forced to die alone isolated in hospitals because it would not have been "safe" for their families to be with them. Again, I don't care what you think of the disease, there is some fucked up thinking behind that "logic".
 
+Still, this thinking shouldn't have been surprising. It's the natural outcome of an obsession with safety. Our lives were already littered with the tools of safety -- rules, warning labels, helmets, straps, leashes, railings, walls, soaps, disinfectants, goggles, and so on. Who will object to a few more on top of that? 
 
+But I am not so much concerned with any new levels of safety mania, I'd prefer to cut it off at the root. I don't want to live obsessing over safety, and I don't want my kids to live that way either. I suspect most people don't. You probably don't.
 
-The One True Dictionary defines practice as:
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_160211_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3316" class="picfull caption" />
 
-    > Frequently repeated or customary action; habitual
-      performance; a succession of acts of a similar kind;
-      usage; habit; custom; as, 
+Safety is an endless positive feedback loop. The safer you think your are, the less risk you are willing to take. Once you get on that treadmill, it's nearly impossible to get off without knocking the whole thing over. People get trapped. Witness Howard Hughes, an extreme, but illuminating example. Cultures too seem to get trapped, with ours currently steaming up that lofty mountain of self-imposed isolation and madness that Howard Hughes pioneered.
 
+Before I get too deep it's probably necessary to point out that if safety is at one end of a spectrum and reckless idiocy is at the other, in rejecting an obsession with safety I am not suggesting the antidote is reckless idiocy. The opposite of one idea is invariably another bad idea. Sanity is in the middle.
 
-The three examples happen to all be practices I pursue
+There is a third option between the timidity born of fear and safety obsession, and cliff diving in Acapulco. It's called thinking for yourself. You can find a balance point between paranoia and recklessness, recognizing that other people will find different balance points than you and that's okay. 
 
-Not in human terms anyway. Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. Most things worth doing do not have a stopping point. There is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough. Everything is a practice. Embrace it. The practice is never done, which means you get to keep improving.
+This is what I mean when I say safety third. Not that you should be reckless, but that thinking of safety first isn't going to lead to a meaningful life. When you come to the end of your life, whenever that may be, I am confident that you are not going to be thinking "I wish I had been safer". Bonnie Ware's famous book, *The Top Five Regrets of the Dying* has [not one mention of safety](https://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/).
 
-[^1]: This would be a good example of 
+Life is not always safe. The sooner you accept this and move on, the happier you will be. Just getting out of bed is fraught with risk. Ask Hughes. He eventually stopped doing it. So if it's safety you really want, that's probably the way to go. 
 
-# No Cavalry—what to do?
+Still, I'd like to propose that things aren't actually nearly as risky as our ingrained safety-first mentality might make it seem. You may have noticed you weren't born wearing a helmet. In fact your skull was literally smashed as you were born and yet here you are. You then grew to have a reasonably strong skull, similar models managed to help the rest of your species survive lo these last 400,000 or so years. And, while you weren't born with knee and elbow pads, you were born with some pretty remarkable joints and an almost Wolverine-like ability to heal thanks to a very sophisticated immune system. All of which is to say that nature, god, whatever you like to attribute this state of affairs to, has provided you with a pretty good starting point. You've got a good system for avoiding and dealing with injury should you miscalculate risk in some way.
 
+Proponents of the safety-industrial complex will here likely note that you weren't born with a mountain bike or internal combustion engine at your disposal, and therefore all the defenses of nature are useless, which is true, to a point. 
 
+This is an important objection, we *have* made the world less safe for ourselves. Yet here we are. Enough of us somehow hanging on, just walking around breathing and doing stuff and not dying. 
 
+Ironically the one time it might be worth considering, for example, a helmet -- while driving 65 MPH down a highway -- no one does, and, more to the point, even the most ardent of safety-first supporters will look at you like an idiot if you strap on a helmet before climbing in their Prius.
 
-Once you accept that there is no cavalry coming, or perhaps more conservatively, that you don't need a cavalry to come, or, at the very least make the decision that you want to life your life in such a way that you don't *want* to need a cavalry, the question arises: what then do I do? How do I get from where I am, to that state of mental, physical, and spiritual security? 
+What we're left with then is a pretty good system for avoiding and coping with injury, and the notion that we're awfully bad at figuring out which activities are actually dangerous.
 
-Another way to put this would be: How do I begin to take responsibility for and become accountable for myself, my family, my world?
+It'd be easy here to point out some of the many other ironies this leads to, for example how padded playgrounds actually lead to children taking greater risks because the padding literally cushions them from life's little bruises, which then spectacularly backfires when they encounter the rest of life, which lacks padding. The whole reason you need to get hurt playing on the playground is so you come to understand what hurts, what you can do, what you can't do, and how to use the information to calculate which new activities you undertake might be risky and what you can do to mitigate risk. You don't understand risk until you take some and earlier you do that, the less painful your failures will be.
 
-I have no idea. Which is to say that I know what I am doing for those things, but I don't know what you should do—that's for you to figure out. If I told you what to do you'd just be dependant on me, no better off than being dependant on the cavalry. 
+But then our safety mania was never rooted in logic, it's not rooted in a concern for safety at all, but in a fear of death. 
 
-No one can tell you how to get on the path to self-dependency because no one other than you knows what your path to self-dependency looks like. You have to find it. And you'll know when you have. Find it is the fun part. Don't worry if it takes a while. It took me the better part of two decades. But I know people who figured it out much quicker.
+It seems axiomatic that fear of death is a natural outcome of materialist beliefs. Remember that we learned in the pandemic that, for our institutions and leaders, death is the worst possible thing. It is, from their point of view, the ultimate failure of man. It is the one limit no one can get around and therefore the thing to be most feared. But why? Why fear what is as much a part of life as the rest of life?
 
-So I am not going to prescribe some recipe for how you can take responsibility for your world, but I am going to tell you something that might help you figure out your own path: you first have to reclaim your time. One of the things that keeps us dependant on the cavalry is our perceived lack of time to do anything about it. How are you going to learn how to rebuild your leaf blower motor when you work 9-5 and spend an hour on each side of that commuting? From 8-6 you have no time for leaf blowers. Throw in breakfast and dinner and suddenly from 7-7 you have no time for anything else.
+Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "safety mania and death phobia are signs of a disconnection from purpose and passion. **If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose.**" (emphasis mine)
 
+In other words death phobia is a result of not knowing how to live.
 
+Disconnection from purpose and passion is where death phobia begins to feedback into itself, driving an increased obsession with safety, which in turn makes us incredibly risk adverse, which in turn keeps us from exploring and potentially finding our purpose and passion. On and on in a vicious cycle. 
 
-How do you find time to build relationships with your neighbors when you spend 12 hours (or more) of your waking day working?  
+It's a vicious cycle that infantilizes us further and further at every turn. The more we avoid for fear of our safety the more lose our ability to judge what is and isn't dangerous. Even those of us who grew up with the good hard ground under our jungle gyms can end up forgetting those lessons and come to see the world as a big bad place full of dangerous stuff. 
 
+How do you get out of the cycle? If you're reading this, chances are you aren't in that cycle, but I have an idea of how we get out at a cultural level: By playing without our helmets.
 
-In the first essay on this subject I suggested that you stop using money to meet all your needs. That is, begin to build relationships with people such that you can begin to meet some of your needs by offering something of yourself to others. I don't know what that might look like for you, but here's a quick example: when we lived out in woods in South Carolina much of the land surrounding our house was leased to a hunt club. In exchange for keeping an eye on the area, we were free to hunt. Actually we were offered other people's deer, though we had to decline for lack of freezer space. 
+If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play. If you can't play, you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. A helmet means supervision. We who play are unsuperviseable.
 
-If you live in Manhattan this scenario isn't going to come up. But if you start trying to meet people, to listen to them, you will build relationships that lead to things like this. Perhaps not free food, perhaps it will end up being chess lessons or tk, but it will be something and your life will be richer, and slightly, ever so slightly less dependant on the system of The Machine.
+This I believe is how we remake the world: by playing.
 
-This will also give you agency. You are the one with the connection to others, nothing is mediating that. This is agency. Agency reduces stress. It helps you to see bad things, bad situations for what they are: bad situations. When you have agency and the self-confidence that it, along with experience, give you, you begins to see that with sufficient resources—time, effort, knowledge, money, etc -- any problem can be solved.
+To play amidst a world full of rules is perhaps the most subversive act.
 
+I know, that's not a Very Serious Solution that Very Serious People can go out and implement, but that's the point isn't it? To remake the world any other way would end up right back here eventually.
 
+You beat the safety game by playing a different one. You play the personal responsibility and risk management game. You go slow, you learn your limits, but then you keep playing. You push your limits. You do things that scare you because they also call to you. You keep expanding and growing, and when the end finds you, you won't think, I wish I had...
 
 # The Cavalry Isn't Coming
 
+date:2022-10-19 14:26:28
+url:/essay/spirit/the-cavalry-isnt-coming
+
 The Cavalry isn't coming. This is the lesson 21st century America is trying to teach us. We are going to have to re-learn how to depend on ourselves and on each other. There is no one else. That's okay. We don't need anyone else.
 
 Self-reliance backed up by tight community bonds used to be the norm. You depended on yourself, your family, your community, because who else was there? So far as I can tell from reading history this was most people's outlook until roughly the middle of the 20th century. That's when a number of things happened that changed how people saw themselves and their communities.
 
-Around then things began to centralize and as they did the solutions people had always relied on weren't suddenly found wanting. Self-appointed experts stepped in to tell us how things should be done. How we should eat. How we should live. How we should love. Sometimes the experts had good ideas. But often they did not. And even when their ideas were good, there was an unintended consequence to listening to the experts: communal bonds were weakened, people were deprived of skills, people questioned their instincts. Soon people believed they needed experts for everything.
+Around then things began to centralize and as they did the solutions people had always relied on were suddenly found wanting. Self-appointed experts stepped in to tell us how things should be done. How we should eat. How we should live. How we should love. Sometimes the experts had good ideas. But often they did not. And even when their ideas were good, there was an unintended consequence to listening to the experts: communal bonds were weakened, people were deprived of skills, people questioned their instincts. Soon people believed they needed experts for everything.
 
 The world according to experts is a world that depends on those experts, the cavalry. The people we mean when we say "they'll think of something."
 
@@ -421,7 +836,7 @@ For four years we've been driving around the United States, passing through all
 
 It took me a long time to figure this out because this shift, from the local community as the hub of life, to there being no hub, happened long before I was born. That is to say, the disconnected lives we all lead, depending on experts to tell us everything from what to eat to how to fix our cars, was normal to me. It was the water I lived in and I never noticed it. What I did notice pretty early on was that some places were decidedly different. Northern Wisconsin. Okracoke. Parts of the Florida Panhandle.
 
-We were drawn to these places and continue to return to them in part I think because they resisted the shift to expert authority that happened everywhere else. Self-reliance, independent businesses, and close knit communities still thrive in these places. These places somehow escaped the chain-storification of the world. It was refreshing. It was different. These places felt like what I wanted the future to be.
+We were drawn to these places and continue to return to them in part I think because they resisted the shift to expert authority that happened everywhere else. Self-reliance, independent businesses, and close-knit communities still thrive in these places. These places somehow escaped the chain-storification of the world. It was refreshing. It was different. These places felt like what I want the future to be like.
 
 I have read enough books of the American road to know that everywhere used to be like this, but I never gave much thought to how or why that changed. I assumed that chain stores took over. And they did. But I think there's considerably more underlying that simple observation, and I think understanding how it happened, how we got into this mess, is going to help us get out of it.
 
@@ -461,15 +876,15 @@ I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking ma
 
 ---
 
-We eliminate our dependence on the cavalry by becoming the cavalry for ourselves, for our families, and for our neighbors. *Être fort pour être utile* *. Be strong to be useful.  
+We eliminate our dependence on the cavalry by becoming the cavalry for ourselves, for our families, and for our neighbors. *Être fort pour être utile*. Be strong to be useful.  
 
-Eliminate the central conceit of modernism—that there is a group of people you need to save you from... the world, yourself, your shortcomings, your neighbors, your neighbors' shortcomings and on down the line—by taking responsibility for yourself and the expanding that responsibility outward to your family, to your community. 
+Eliminate the central conceit of modernism -- that there is a group of people you need to save you from... the world, yourself, your shortcomings, your neighbors, your neighbors' shortcomings and on down the line -- by taking responsibility for yourself and the expanding that responsibility outward to your family, to your community. 
 
 The message of modernism is that you're helpless and you need saving. If you want to dig deep into the psychology of this I'd say it's about what you'd expect to get when a culture takes the gods out of its religion and replaces those gods with administrative systems. We're not the first. The Romans went down this path, so did the Chinese. Read Oswald Spengler or Arthur Toynbee if the history interests you. All you really need to know though is that there's a long history showing it doesn't work. Look around you, is stuff working? No, no, it is not.
 
-Everything requires high specialized skills and knowledge. This is a choice. Things don't have to be built this way. Culture doesn't have to be arranged this way. It didn't use to be this way. Even 100 years ago there were very few "experts" telling you how to live. Now even lightbulbs have to include instructions on how to change them. 
+Everything requires highly specialized skills and knowledge. This is a choice. Things don't have to be built this way. Culture doesn't have to be arranged this way. It didn't use to be this way. Even 100 years ago there were very few "experts" telling you how to live. Now even lightbulbs have to include instructions on how to change them. 
 
-Once you needed to be able to do a bit of everything yourself—help your neighbors build their homes, raise and butcher animals, preserve your food, fight fires, fix stuff, pull a tooth, deliver a child. All the things Robert A. Heinlein famously suggested a human being out to be able to do: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
+Once you needed to be able to do a bit of everything yourself -- help your neighbors build their homes, raise and butcher animals, preserve your food, fight fires, fix stuff, pull a tooth, deliver a child. All the things Robert A. Heinlein famously suggested a human being out to be able to do: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
 
 Prior to the coming of the machine age, we were able to do this stuff. It was no factor.
 
@@ -487,7 +902,8 @@ It's time we stopped listening to them and went back to fixing stuff ourselves,
 
 ---
 
-The question becomes, how do we get back to where our grandfather's were?
+
+The question becomes, how do we get back to where our grandfathers were?
 
 There isn't one answer to this. I am not here on high telling you how to find your path because that top-down model is what caused the problem. I'm not even going to tell you what I am doing because even in that I think there's a tendency to see it as a recipe.
 
@@ -501,268 +917,1032 @@ Find one problem, one thing, that you pay for now that you can either make/do yo
 
 Your great grandparents fixed things for people, made things for people, and were grateful to receive the same from others. This formed much of the basis of community that held life together before the coming of centralization. It isn't the only thing, but it's a place to start and that's what we need to do. Start. Remember, we don't want to change the world, that's the top down thinking that got us in the mess. The goal here is to change the only part of the world you can: you.
 
+# Rules for Screens, Part Two
 
-etc etc. suggestions
+date:2022-08-03 13:47:28
+url:/essay/tools/rules-for-screens-part-two
 
-Trust yourself.
+Last time we hurled our televisions out the window into a dumpster. If you actually did that, like I did once in college, you know that the sound of that crunch and exploding screen was awesome. Well maybe not, CRT screens aren't around anymore. Anyway, if you didn't actually hurl it out a window, well, hopefully you at least sold or gave away your TV. Remember, you can have a television or you can have a life.
 
-Get outside
+Televisions are not the screen everyone wrings their hands over these days though. That's a little odd to me because according to statistics on screen time, that's where most of us spend our time. But the evil de jour is phones. You phone is doing all kinds of things to you and will probably eventually be a direct contributor to the collapse of western culture if you believe everything you read. Which is sign you're using your phone too much.
 
-Talk to your neighbors
+I don't love phones, and I do think we should all use them less. If you've feel addicted to your phone, well, um, you're right. You are. Everything about the design of the apps on your phone is engineered to create dopamine pathways that make sure you experience physical withdrawal when you go without them. That's addiction pure and simple.
 
-Start walking
+But. Did you know that culturally we've been wringing our hands over the distractions in our lives for centuries? Meister Eckhart, writing around 1307, calls "distraction" the second most powerful thing preventing communion with God. In 1550s Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner worries that the printing press will worsen the problem of distraction with a "confusing and harmful" amount of data "unleashed on the unsuspecting." To pick a more recent, and revealing, example consider writer Italo Calvino's 1983 account of [his daily newspaper habit](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino):
 
-Find religion
+> Each morning I already know I will be able to waste the whole day. There is always something to do: go to the bank, the post office, pay some bills... always some bureaucratic tangle I have to deal with. While I am out I also do errands such as the daily shopping: buying bread, meat, or fruit. First thing, I buy newspapers. Once one has bought them, one starts reading as soon as one is back home—or at least looking at the headlines to persuade oneself that there is nothing worth reading. Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.
 
+Note the use of the phrase, "like a drug," which we're still using today to describe our latest and most powerful distraction, phones. 
 
+I point this out not to downplay the addictive, attention-steal nature of screens, but to remind you that being distracted is not new. Think of it slightly differently, the desire for distraction is not new. All that's happened over the last century is we've created ever more engrossing mediums to distract ourselves with. This strongly suggests that if we just reduce our exposure to the current symptom without addressing the underlying desire for distraction we're just switching one thing for another, like alcoholics chugging coffee and chain smoking at AA meetings[^1].
 
+And I bring up AA in part because I think that phones are a problem partly for the same reason alcohol is a problem: they're culturally acceptable. No one pulls our a syringe in the middle of four star restaurant and shoots up heroin, but no one bats an eye when someone orders a bottle of wine in the same situation. Both are addictive, destructive drugs (arguably alcohol is much worse on your body), but one is culturally acceptable and one is not. This makes a world of difference when it comes time to stop. You don't have to work hard to avoid heroin, but you'll run into alcohol, and screens, at every turn.
 
+Our phones aren't just addictive, they're also completely culturally acceptable in the west. No one cares if you pull one out in the middle of dinner. Well, I will. You might. But the cultural message seems to be that it's okay. In some places and some situations the cultural message might even be that you're an oddball if you're *not* staring at a screen.
 
+Let's assume though, that, like people who email me, you want to use your phone less. Here are some tricks to help with that, most of which I used to cut back on my own screen use. 
 
+**Luxagraf's Rules for Screens, part deux.**
 
+## Rule Five: Know Yourself
+
+If you want to use your phone less, you need to know how much you use it. There are some tools to figure this out built-in to both iOS and Android, but I never bothered to figure those out because I had already downloaded and used Your Hour ([Android App Store](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindefy.phoneaddiction.mobilepe)). Space appears to offer similar features and [works on iOS too](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/space-break-phone-addiction/id916126783). The app isn't really important, just get something that records how much time you spend and how often you unlock your phone.
+
+That will give you a baseline and let you know how much you use your phone. Personally I disabled tracking for maps and music/podcasts because although I'm using my phone, I'm not really staring at the screen. There's an element of gamification to these apps that's easy to get sucked into. I had Your Hour on my phone for about a week before I got pretty obsessed with how little I could use my phone in a day. 
+
+## Rule Six: Adapt to Yourself
+
+If, like me, you discover that you use your phone to check the time throughout the day, consider getting a watch. Or, if you hate wearing a watch, and live in a small bus with your family like I do, just encourage everyone else to wear a watch and ask them what time it is.
+
+The point is, most likely Rule Five will reveal some habits that you can break, but are too idiosyncratic to you for me to solve for you. My general advice is, if you have some behavior that involves the phone that could involve some analog thing, like a watch for instance, replace those screen checks with a watch. Not a smart watch or fitness tracker, just a watch.
+
+A few things I have heard of people doing include, putting your phone in a bag to make it more of a pain to pull out and use, using it as a coaster so you can't pick it up, and using a pen and paper to make notes rather than using your phone. 
+
+## Rule Seven: Turn Off All Notifications
+
+I think the reason we are bothered by how much we use our phones has to do with agency. We like to think we are the rulers of our days and are conscious of all our decisions and actions and phones are stark reminder that we are not that guy/gal. The best way to grant yourself back some agency is to get rid of all notifications. 
+
+Notifications are really just little serotonin agitators. Check your email when you feel like it, not when a notification badge agitates your serotonin level past the point of resistance. Turn them off, all of them.
+
+## Rule Eight: Practice Doing Nothing
 
+This does not mean meditating. It means doing nothing. Or at least do nothing productive. When you were a child you were probably happy to lie in the grass all afternoon doing nothing. At most you might pick out shapes in the clouds, but you were fine doing nothing. Or at least if you're over 35 and actually had a childhood then you might remember doing nothing. If not. Well, learn. Practice.
 
+Of all the rules in this list, this is the hardest for me. I have this need to always be making something. I am ill at ease doing nothing. I read a good bit, I also practice discursive meditation, but neither of those qualify. The only time I really do nothing, is lying in a hammock, so I make sure to get some time in the hammock at least a couple times a week.
 
+It might take some time to figure out the way you do nothing the best. If you do get stuck on this one, I highly recommend a hammock.
 
+## Rule Nine: Record Your Practice
 
+Write down when you do nothing. Write down when you don't do nothing. Write down how you miss notifications if you do. Write how you overcome your strange screen habits and most of all, write down when you still use screens. Don't judge yourself for it, step back, detach and just record what happened, what you did, and for how long. Try to be a disinterested observer of yourself, this will be much more helpful than berating or congratulating. 
 
+## 
 
 
+[^1]: This is not meant to disparage AA or anyone struggling with alcoholism. Most AA members I know are fully aware of the irony of swapping one addiction for another, but when alcohol has taken over your life to that point, it's not a bad trade to make.
 
+# Rules for Screens, Part One
 
+date:2022-08-02 17:14:59
+url:/essay/tools/rules-for-screens-part-one
 
-The solutions being proposed by the people who champion this idea are the same as they've always been: more technology, more bureaucracy, more centralized control (and not coincidentally more jobs for more experts).
+I have a strange page about [technology](/technology) buried on this site. Still, people find it. Something must link to it? I'm not sure how or why, but it seems to get a lot of traffic. Or at least it generates a fair bit of email. About a dozen people a year take the time to email me about the first line of that article:
 
-We know where these ideas get us and we're done.
+**The less technology your life requires the better your life will be.**
 
-It's popular these days to say that politics is downstream from culture, which is to say we get the politics of our culture. But as John Michael Greer often says, "it needs to be remembered in turn that culture is downstream from imagination." We have the power here because we are limited only by our imaginations and our bodies' ability to make our imaginings true.
+I get a mix of responses to this ranging from the occasional "who are you to judge me, how dare you tell me not to play video games" (which I don't usually respond to), to the more frequent, and thoughtful, "hey, I feel the same way but I can't seem to get technology out of my life". 
 
+In crafting a response to the most recent person who wrote some variation of that comment, I accidentally wrote a massively long post I am breaking into a three-part series, retracing how I came to use screens so little, despite editing photos, writing for this site, and working for an online publication, all of which do in fact require a screen. I use screens when it makes sense to do so, but the rest of the time I avoid them.
 
-https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/11/land
+We're going to start with the basic stuff. I did most of the steps in this part back in 2016 when we were getting ready to [move into the bus](https://luxagraf.net/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome). This is actually all the hardest things to do, because these will free up enough time that you'll find yourself staring into the void for the first time since you were a kid. Don't worry, it's good for you. Anyway, on with it.
 
+**Luxagraf's rules for screens, part one.**
 
 ---
 
-Virtues require cultivation, but our culture has left us with somewhat untended gardens. We have undisciplined minds, undisciplined debates, and undisciplined media consumption habits. 
+## **Rule One: Throw Your Television in the Nearest Dumpster**
+
+Yup, we're going to start with the hardest one. You'll notice that I am more sympathetic to not going cold turkey with other things below. Not this one. This is the absolute requirement. Kill your television. Now. Tough love people.
 
+But... but. Look. Here's the thing. You have this gift of life for, on average, around 73 years. 73 YEARS. You won't even last as long as the average hardwood tree. And you're going to spend that precious time watching television? No. No you're not. Not anymore. You're going to live. Find a dumpster. Put your TV in it. 
+
+Okay, you don't want to put your $1,200 TV in the dumpster. Then find an old sheet or blanket and cover it up. Put some low-tack painters tape on there, make it hard to take off. That'll work for now. But get ready to eBay that thing. Or find a dumpster.
+
+Now cancel Netflix, Hulu, or whatever other subscriptions you had. If you subscribe to two streaming services, that's just under $30 a month. That's $360 a year. That's $1,800 every five years. That's crazy. But now you have about $30 a month you can either save or spend on something you want. Something tangible. I mean, reward yourself if you really do this. At least buy some ice cream. 
 
 ---
 
+## **Rule Two: Make Something**
 
+If you watched television for 3 hours in the evenings, congrats you were already watching less than most people -- and you stopped doing that, so you have just reclaimed 15 hours a week. FIFTEEN HOURS! That's enough to get a part time job somewhere. It's enough time to do, lord, there's no limit to what you could do really. Start a business, write a book, read the entire canon of Russian literature. The paradox of choice can get you here and you'll end up watching YouTube for hours on your laptop. I know, I've done it. 
 
+You have to start creating something. I strongly suggest you create something real and tangible. Something you can hold in your hands. Cook yourself a fancy dessert if you like. Yeah you can even look up a recipe on a screen, don't worry about it. The internet is incredibly helpful for learning things. That's another idea. Find something you really love and learn more about it. Read everything you can about agates if that's your bag (it's my wife's bag). But do it by checking books out from the library, not by reading on your phone.
 
+Do what you want, but do something. Deliberately carve out some time to make something. And I know everyone says, I'm not a creative person, I don't know what to make. Start small. Write a card to your closest relative. Write a postcard if a card is too much. Make dessert for your family, your significant other, yourself, whatever. Just make something. Except maybe don't make a fancy dessert every night. That won't end well. If all else fails, just go for a walk. 
 
+---
 
+## **Rule Three: Delete Social Media Apps**
 
+Yeah, now we're getting real. I know it's going to be hard. But you know what, take easy, start small. You probably have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, a bunch of stuff in other words, on your phone. Just pick one and delete it for one week. You can always reinstall it so it's not like there's too much to lose here.
 
+But we're not done.
 
+Get a piece of paper and a pen. Fold the paper up so it's small enough to fit in your pocket. Put it in your pocket, or otherwise keep it on you. Now, every time you feel like checking whichever social network you deleted, instead of checking it, pull out your paper and pen and write down why you wanted to check it. It doesn't need to be an essay, just write like "wanted to see what Mark was up to" or whatever the source of the urge was. 
 
+Do that for one week. At the end of the week look back over what you wrote down and decide for yourself if those things you were planning to do are worth your time. If they are then re-install that app and be on your merry way. If they aren't, or more likely, if you aren't sure, do the experiment for another week.
 
+If you decide that giving in to all these urges to check social media wouldn't be the best use of your limited time on earth, repeat this process with the next social app on your phone. When you've deleted all the unnecessary apps from your phone you're done with this step. 
 
+Oh, and the ones you keep, don't feel bad about those. If you're feeling a sense of guilt about them still it might be worth repeating this experience, but if you really do enjoy them then don't feel guilty about them.
 
-I'll be honest, I don't have a lot to add that you can't find in the writings of Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, Wendell Berry and others who've been trying to warn us for over a century now (I also think Tolkein's Lord of the Rings is an overloked, very subtle critique of technological society that's well worth reading from that angle). If I do nothing else than inspire you to read them, I will call that success. However, I think that I'm in a somewhat unique position to observe things in a variety of places and make connections that others might not be able to see, and so here we are.
+---
 
+## **Rule Four: Track What You Do When You Use a Screen**
 
+A lot of our lives are lived in a kind of automated mode. Think back over everything you did in the last five minutes before you started reading this. If you're like me, you probably struggle to remember what it was you were doing or how you ended up precisely here at this moment. You were operating on autopilot. Some of this autopilot living is a good thing, especially, I've found, morning routines, but too much autopilot will strip away your agency. You will no longer be in control of your life. That's how I felt about screens. I could not stop using them until I became conscious I *was* using them.
 
+This step then is to keep track of every time you use a screen. It doesn't have to be a big thing, just remember to do it. Don't judge yourself for it, or chastise yourself, just note that hey, I am using a screen. That's all. Now if you're somewhat obsessive like I am you might want to write down whatever notes you can, about why you're using a screen. But you don't have to do that. Just note it in your mind.
 
+Unlike the steps above, this is not really a rule. It's an ongoing process that will probably never end, at least in my case. I like to be conscious of when I use a screen, so although I started doing this years ago, I still do it today, with varying degrees of success and failure.
 
-People in the United States ignore such proposals because we tried that experiment and found out just how badly it worked. In 1961, the new presidential administration of John F. Kennedy set out to improve US foreign policy by staffing the State Department with “the best and the brightest,” which meant in the context of the time a bevy of intellectuals fresh out of Ivy League universities, full of the latest fashionable ideas in international relations. Those experts promptly led America straight into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, while loading the military with a flurry of contradictory demands that made victory impossible and withdrawal unacceptable.
+That brings me to the final point I will leave you with: everything is a process. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you are not a thing, you are a happening. Which is to say, all of life is a never-ending process. There may be goals and other markers along the way, but it's not like you get to place where you're done, you win at life, you never have to do anything again. Well, I mean technically there is, it's called death, but that's not what I mean here. I just mean that everything is ongoing. The "goal", at least at this very basic level of using less screens, is to build systems and processes that will help you do things other than stare at a screen. 
 
-One of the precepts of the last couple of centuries is that there is one answer to every problem and it is the right answer and it is the answer you are going to choose like it or not. This is more or less the central premise of what is generally called liberalism or later, when people tried to distance themselves from the failures of liberalism, neo-liberalism.
+Okay, now go kill your television.
 
+# Birds, Sky
 
-I want to connect the story of taking apart the bus to the individualism and closed community of the west to the idea that we have to depend on ourselves and each other, not outside help coming from on high. The old order is collapsing and those of us farthest from its center are going to lose it first. The new world starts out here on the edges, the fringes the forgotten corners of the country where the old order has never held much sway.
+date:2021-11-11 21:46:20
+url:/essay/craft/black-sky
 
-I recently told a story about my decision to replace the bus engine's head gasket. It was a small thing really, when you consider the realm of human possibilities, but for me it was a big thing. Still, I didn't really want to do it. 
+My friend Mike and I took a quad ride through the country one weekend in San Miguel. It was a good trip, I wrote about it [here](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/11/lets-go-ride), but at one point we stopped for water and a huge flock of either ravens or crows came circling overhead. I like to think they were crows, since that would make them a murder of crows, but I couldn’t say for sure, I had no binoculars on me. I thought I'd maybe take a picture and see if I could zoom in later and figure out what they were. That idea failed, but I ended up with this picture which I really like. 
 
-In that piece I made a somewhat flippant comment about no one ever stopping to help us when we're at the side of the road out west. That's been true, but it doesn't mean no one has helped us. It helps to remember that the west was built on deceit. The original inhabitants were decieved with treats that have not been honored, the people who came after them were decieved by the government and the railroads who needed them to farm in a country both knew well would never support farming. They recruited people from all over the world, people to whome the notion of living alone in a vast landscape was appealing and then, when those people turned out to want to do their own thing, not what the government wanted them to do (shocking that these independant spirits who surviced out here didn't want to do anyone's bidding) they were deceived again. And again. Perhaps the most eloquent recounting of these desceptions is the book Bad Land. I think it is important to remember these things when you are out here.
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-013-poster.jpg" controls preload="auto" id="19" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-013-compressed.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-013-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgu1Bu9G_Ho">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
 
-That is I think, why no stops to help us. First and foremost, we are outsiders and in the current west there is more distrust of outsiders than anywhere else we've been. Justifiably I'd say. 
+On a whim I decided to see if I could figure out how to get dramatically black skies in Darktable using the newer workflow tools, and I thought of this image. I think it works better as black and white, especially with the dark sky. It's dramatic, but the moment was dramatic so for me at least, it works.
 
+# Bayside Sunset
 
-# Rules for Screens, Part One
+date:2021-11-05 20:49:10
+url:/essay/craft/bayside-sunset
 
-I have a strange page about [technology](/technology) buried on this site. Still, people find it. Something must link to it? I'm not sure how or why, but it seems to get a lot of traffic. Or at least it generates a fair bit of email. About a dozen people a year take the time to email me about the first line of that article:
+This was one of our favorite hidden spots in Florida. Unfortunately it's not hidden anymore, and last I heard it was closed to RVs, but it was pretty great when [we were there in 2018](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/03/green-sea-days). It was a small campground at the end of a dusty dirt road made of dried Florida red clay. We spent almost two weeks there and probably would have stayed longer, but we had plans to meet up with some people farther down the panhandle.
 
-**The less technology your life requires the better your life will be.**
+This image is the defining image of our time there for me. Every night after dinner we'd walk down the shore and watch the sun set over Pensacola Bay. Every night it was this spectacularly warm, slightly greenish light that I've never seen anywhere else. I didn't actually take many pictures of the sunset, in fact this is one of only three I could find, but this managed to grab everything about those nights, at least for me. I think it looks like my daughter is dancing here, but she actually tripped on a root and is about to fall on the sand. But even she had tried to revise history to say she was just dancing. Dancing it is then.
 
-I get a mix of responses to this ranging from the occasional "who are you to judge me, how dare you tell me not to play video games" (which I don't usually respond to), to the more frequent, and thoughtful, "hey, I feel the same way but I can't seem to get technology out of my life". 
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-012-poster.jpg" controls preload="auto" id="18" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-012-compressed.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-012-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_O81P7YCaA">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
 
-In crafting a response to the most recent person who wrote some variation of that comment, I accidentally wrote a massively long post I am breaking into a three-part series, retracing how I came to use screens so little, despite editing photos, writing for this site, and working for an online publication, all of which do in fact require a screen. I use screens when it makes sense to do so, but the rest of the time I avoid them.
+The campground is closed now and the Florida wildlife management won't say when it'll be reopened. I got the impression talking to the ranger the other day on the phone that the answer was never. That's fine with me, it would never be the same, could never be the same, best to leave it in photo form, and in memory where it can't be harmed.
 
-We're going to start with the basic stuff. I did most of the steps in this part back in 2016 when we were getting ready to move into the bus. This is actually all the hardest things to do, because these will free up enough time that you'll find yourself staring into the void for the first time since you were a kid. Don't worry, it's good for you. Anyway, on with it.
+# Pawnee Grassland
 
-**Luxagraf's rules for screens, part one.**
+date:2021-10-29 11:10:48
+url:/essay/craft/pawnee-grassland
 
----
+Colorado conjures images of mountains and pine forests, but that's actually only the Rocky Mountains. Most of the state is grassland and plains, wide open country with huge skies, dramatic storms, and nowhere to hide from them. It can be exciting.
 
-## **Rule One: Throw Your Television in the Nearest Dumpster**
+Most of it is farmland, but there are a few National Grasslands that have been set aside to preserve things as they were about 100 years ago. We camped here in the Pawnee Grasslands for about a week. I wrote about it in a post called, appropriately, [Grassland](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/grassland), which also has some more images if you want to see some of the storms. But I like the simplicity of this one, it captures how very small even a 26ft RV feels out here.
 
-Yup, we're going to start with the hardest one. You'll notice that I am more sympathetic to not going cold turkey with other things below. Not this one. This is the absolute requirement. Kill your television. Now. Tough love people.
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-011-screencap.jpg" controls preload="auto" id="17" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-011-compressed.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-011-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPU1xLici8">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
 
-But... but. Look. Here's the thing. You have this gift of life for, on average, around 73 years. 73 YEARS. You won't even last as long as the average hardwood tree. And you're going to spend that precious time watching television? No. No you're not. Not anymore. You're going to live. Find a dumpster. Put your TV in it. 
+In developing this all I really wanted to do was up the contrast a bit and correct the color balance, which was tending toward the green side with all that grass.
 
-Okay, you don't want to put your $1,200 TV in the dumpster. Then find an old sheet or blanket and cover it up. Put some low-tack painters tape on there, make it hard to take off. That'll work for now. But get ready to eBay that thing. Or find a dumpster.
+# Alborada Festival
 
-Now cancel Netflix, Hulu, or whatever other subscriptions you had. If you subscribe to two streaming services, that's just under $30 a month. That's $360 a year. That's $1,800 every five years. That's crazy. But now you have about $30 a month you can either save or spend on something you want. Something tangible. I mean, reward yourself if you really do this. At least buy some ice cream. 
+date:2021-10-22 17:36:19
+url:/essay/craft/alborada-festival
+
+San Miguel de Allende's [Alborada Festival](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/10/alborada) starts at 4 AM. Actually it was closer to 2 AM. The main Jardin gets packed way before that, but 4 is when it kicks off. Mexicans are serious about their parties. I’ve been in quite a few large scale parties — Songkran, Chinese New Year, New Year’s Eve in New York. San Miguel’s Alborada deserves a spot among those, it’s a hell of a party and it lasts for four or five days.
+
+I won't pretend to understand all of it, but the highlight for me was a particular group of dancers, La Sagrada Familia. I ended up photographing them many times over the months. I am actually not 100 percent sure that this gentleman was part of that group, but his dress and face paint fits. This was a random shot grabbed in the blink of an eye and then he was gone. 
+
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2022/range-10-poster.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="21" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2022/Darktable_Edit_010.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2022/Darktable_Edit_010.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFDrQB3-tos">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
+
+I would like to have made a portrait, but I never did see him again during the festival or in the next nine months we called San Miguel home. Sometimes all you get is an instant.
+
+You can download the Darktable preset I used in this video [here](https://luxagraf.net/darktable/colorbalancergb_colorcontrastboost.dtpreset).
+
+# Black and White Badlands
+
+date:2021-04-23 20:50:08
+url:/essay/craft/black-and-white-badlands
+
+Late in the summer of 2018 we spent [two weeks camping in Buffalo National Grassland](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/range-life), on the edge of Badlands National Park. We only went into the park itself a couple of times, but this day rain was in the forecast and I already knew that without some clouds, the Badlands made for boring images (standing there looking at it was breathtaking, but sometimes that feeling doesn't translate into the image, and for me, in this case, it did not). I figured the storm would add some drama to the sky and make for better pictures. 
+
+Most of the black and white images I've done so far for *Range* were composed knowing I would develop them to be black and white. This one is different. I had in mind color. But then the other day I was searching through my Darktable library for an image that would lend itself to making the sky black (in black and white). I know how to get a black sky using Darktable's old channel mixer, but I haven't done it in the new color calibration module (which replaces the channel mixer). Anyway, this image isn't great for that, but when I saw it something said, *you should make that black and white*. So I did, and I like it much better than the color version.
+
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-009-poster.jpg" controls  preload="auto" id="15" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-009-compressed.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-009-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AviWkfPT8Yg">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
+
+I think this image is a good example of how a mundane image can be made much more striking in black and white. It's important to note this is not a great image even in black and white, but it serves my purpose here. Which is to illustrate that sometimes thinking in texture rather than color yields a more interesting image.
+
+# Lone House, Near Rutherford Beach, LA
+
+date:2021-04-09 09:19:22
+url:/essay/craft/lone-house-la
+
+Coastal Louisiana doesn't have many beaches. It's mostly marsh, cat tails and reeds populated primarily by herons, spoonbills, coots, and other water birds. It's a flat, almost featureless, world when you drive through it sitting high up in an RV.
+
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-008-poster.jpg" controls preload="auto" id="14" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/Range_008-compressed.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-008-1.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWcNMTsTx8U">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
+
+There are no houses on the ground. There's very little ground and almost all of it will be inundated with water several times a year at a minimum. Maybe that's why everything out here is called a "camp", it's a way of acknowledging the temporary, precarious nature of the structures.
+
+Nearly every house has a sign out front with a name. Camp Canal, Camp Dr. Herbert, Camp David, Camp Southern Leisure, Camp 12 Oaks, and my personal favorite, Camp Plan B. I even saw a single wide mobile home on 12 foot high stilts with a sign on it that read: Cajun High-Rise.
+
+We spent five days camping on the only beach around, Rutherford Beach. It's free and you can pull right up on the sand. It stormed a good bit and fog would roll in pretty much every night, hiding the lights both onshore and off, making it feel like we were all alone in the world.
+
+That's what I like about this photo and why I went black and white with it, it feels more stark, more isolating, more raw, which is exactly how the Louisiana coast felt to me. And unlike the last image, I felt like the grain worked in this one. I shot it while driving, so it had a bit more softness to it that lent itself to adding grain. It looks more like film with that little bit of softness.
+
+# Dragoon Mountains
+
+date:2021-04-02 08:44:07
+url:/essay/craft/dragoon-mountains
+
+Southeastern Arizona is one of my favorite places in the desert southwest. The nearest big city is Tucson, but even that's a couple hours away. It's a lonely area, I love it. The Dragoons Mountains are among my favorite spots in the area. I've spent a few weeks in and around them over the years, entering from both the east and west sides, as well as from the south on foot. The west entrance is my favorite, but that road is too rough for [the big blue bus](https://luxagraf.net/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome) so on this trip we came in from the east.
+
+The east is home to Cochise Stronghold, the place where Chihuicahui leader Cochise lived, later hid, and eventually died and was buried. As I've written elsewhere, [Cochise's presence is still easy to feel](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/ghost-cochise) in the Dragoons.
+
+On this trip we spent most of our time hiking and hanging around the campground. During the week we had the place to ourselves. There was a dry creek bed a few yards beyond our campsite and for the kids it was like having a giant sandbox to play in. 
+
+It was down in the creek bed, where I sat watching the kids, the birds, the world, when I noticed the way the sunbeams were coming through this yucca tree. I knew when I was taking it that the lens was going to flare, that's just what older lenses do, so I was thinking black and white from the moment I took it.
+
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-007-poster.jpg" controls preload="auto" id="13" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-007-compressed.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-007-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRmiNHFm7yk">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
+
+In redeveloping it using 2021 darktable, I ended up with almost exactly the same look at the original, which you can see [here](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/ghost-cochise). The difference is that this version, which uses the Color Calibration module, took about half the time as the original. It's slightly ironic perhaps but my favorite feature of the Color Calibration module is how easy it is to get the black and white look I want. 
+
+For this one I wanted to replicate the look of my favorite black and white film, Tmax 3200. Alas, the magic of Tmax 3200 is about more than grain and when I made this image grainy the result looked terrible to me. So if you're reading this on luxagraf.net and you notice the large image above doesn't have the grain that's in the video it's because I decided it didn't work. Tmax 3200 has something about it (softness perhaps?) that I just can't get out of Sony's sensors. That's okay though, I'm happy enough with this image. As with the rest, it's not a work of art, but it reminds me of the experience of making it, and it illustrated a part of the story I wanted to tell about the Dragoons.
+
+# Three Quick Edits
+
+date:2021-03-19 08:25:01
+url:/essay/craft/three-quick
+
+Someone emailed me after the last post and asked if I really spent 10 minutes or more on every photo I post. The answer is of course not. If I shoot 100 images, 95 of them go in the trash, three of them I edit much like I do the images in this video, and the remaining two, while I might like them, probably have something fundamentally wrong with them that takes me ten minutes per image to fix. 
+
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/poster_ay0K7aI.jpg" controls preload="auto" id="12" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-006-compressed.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-006-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_JE6lo33A4">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
+
+Also, please don't mistake me liking an image enough to post here with me thinking it's a good photo. I have studied photogeaphy enough to know what a good photo looks like. For the most part, I do not make good photos. Once every 5-8k images I produce one that's actually a good photograph. 
+
+But good photos aren't necessarily the point for me. I am almost always shooting to tell a story. My images are very rarely meant to stand on their own. I may not know the story when I am shooting, but I know there will be text and other photos involved, which is a very different way of thinking from someone who's making art images. At least I think so, I've honestly never attempted to make art with a camera. Most of these photos are a) images I like because of the story they are part of, and b) show off something I do in darktable that other people might like to know how to do.
+
+Anyway, I decided that I would make this video showing the faster editing process I use on the images that are part of the story, but don't need major help. All of these were shot within 100 meters of my front door last weekend, and processed in real time with a screen recorder running. I did no editing on this one.
+
+# Zion Canyon
+
+date:2021-03-12 16:22:35
+url:/essay/craft/zion-canyon
+
+This was a fun hike. It's on the way to a hanging canyon I used to hike to when I was a kid. Two of my own kids are with me, my son was riding on my shoulders, and I was hiking in flip flops. I mean, Zion is all paved trails and a little bit Disneyland these days, so why wouldn't you hike in flip flops? We got some looks though. We even got a few comments. I just ignored it. I wrote about it [once before](/jrnl/2017/09/zion).
+
+I think the kids were 3 and 5 at the time. We ended doing three miles round trip. It's steep hike, straight up, straight down, surrounded by this gorgeous red rock the whole time. It's really a shame Zion turned into the circus it is because it's an incredibly beautiful place. 
+
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="/media/images/videos/2021/range-005-poster.jpg" controls  preload="auto" id="11" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="/media/images/videos/2021/range-005-compressed.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="/media/images/videos/2021/range-005-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBbcvkH7Q5g">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
+
+Anyway, this photo. Mid afternoon sun with shadows in a canyon, one of those rare times I'm happy to shoot digital and not film. I knew there was no way I could get both, so I metered for the highlights and just hoped the shadows wouldn't be too noisy. I'm not fond of the sky in the final result, but I tried all kinds of ways to desaturate it and nothing worked. I can live with it. If you click the link in the first paragraph you can see the first time I developed it. Much happier with this result.
+
+# Trinidad Road
+
+date:2021-03-05 09:23:00
+url:/essay/craft/trinidad-road
+
+This is one of those images I wish I could go back and redo. I was in a rush, and it shows. My wife and three very cranky kids are in the car behind me. No one wants to be stopped. Everyone is hungry and tired. The water pump in [our RV](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome) had broken. We were on our way back from buying a new one, which turned out to be an hour drive each way, most of it on a very washboard dirt road. 
+
+The light on the grass in the distance caught my eye, the way it contrasted with the clouds. But I only had a couple of seconds to make an image. Which might be why I shot this at 640 ASA in aperture-priority mode and didn't stop down beyond f/5.6. Oops. Double oops with this lens, which has really soft corners until about f/11. Most likely I'd been shooting the evening before in a low light situation where those settings made sense, for example the [last image on this piece](/jrnl/2017/06/escaping-texas), and then I dashed out of the car, snapped this image, and that was it.
+
+The point is, this image, from a technical standpoint, is pretty much garbage. The composition is okay though, maybe not great, but it works well enough, and the light isn't too bad, so let's see what we can do with it.
+
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2022/range_004_poster.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="20" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2022/Darktable_Edit_004.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2022/Darktable_Edit_004.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5xpXUWBXQk">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
+
+My main goal was to convey a better sense of the light. Mountain light is the best light I've ever worked in, especially Colorado mountain light. Every place I've ever been has its distinctive light, in Colorado there's a strange mix of harsh and soft light that's always swirling around, spotlighting something and then moving it back into shadow. That ends up being the main thing I went for in this image, getting the light and tones right.
+
+Whether or not I did is debatable. If I were to do it again I'd probably ease off the vignetting fix a little, and I'd probably push the mid-ground highlights even more. I still remember how that green just beyond the road was glowing, almost iridescently. The print I have captures that pretty well, but this web version still falls a little flat if you ask me. 
+
+Of course everything could always be redone and made better. At some point you have to just say, good enough, and be done.
+
+# Ancestral Puebloan Dwelling
+
+date:2021-02-15 15:07:25
+url:/essay/craft/ancestral-puebloan
+
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range003-poster.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="9" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/Range_003.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/Range_003.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coM06JSQOMg">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
+
+I've traveled the Utah southeastern desert since I was two. This is the only time I have ever come across a restored kiva-like structure that was open the public. Not just open to the public, but the nearest ranger was a long, long way away.
+
+It was a unique and very special experience. I spent about half an hour down inside. I only took three photos though, this one, one of my kids looking up the ladder, and a self portrait. Mostly I just sat there and watched the shaft of light move across the floor and thought about all the other people who had sat there over the centuries and watched something similiar.
+
+I thought of this image recently because I was reading *[Photographs Not Taken](https://daylightbooks.org/products/photographs-not-taken-a-collection-of-photographers-essays)*, a collection of essays by photographers about images they didn't take. The reasons vary, but there are more than a few essays about people who felt like the camera was pulling them out of the moment in some way. I felt like that whenever I picked up my camera inside this structure. It just did not feel right.
+
+The famous big wall free climber Ron Kauk spoke once at The North Face when I was working there, and I remember him talking about how he didn't really like being photographed when he climbed. He accepted it as a price he had to pay if he wanted sponsorships and the rest of the circus that let him climb for a living, but I remember him saying that he felt like looking at those images later interferred with his memories, like the photograph crowded the memory out of his head. 
+
+I can relate to that, particularly with this image which, though I have spent hours on it, still doesn't match my memory of the experience of sitting on the floor of that kiva. And I wonder, if I did get it right, if the colors did map to what I can still see in my head, would it replace my memory? Would it crowd it out? Would I be left with nothing more than these ones and zeros encoded on this silcon?
+
+# Is This Water?
+
+date:2021-01-23 15:38:56
+url:/essay/spirit/is-this-water
+
+2021 has arrived. We're well beyond the future dates I used to idly try to imagine during boring high school classes. It's a strange feeling. We are further into the future than past me was able to conceive of -- where the hell does that put us?
+
+I don't know. What I do know is that hunting season is over. Deer season anyway. That deer season ends around January 1st is one of those factoids that I have always vaguely known, but never had a reason to care about. Now I do. 
+
+Most of the land surrounding our current home, the land I call the 100 acre wood, because, well, it's roughly 100 acres, isn't technically part of the property we live on. We live on three acres *surrounded* by those 100 acres of woods. Those 100 acres are leased to a hunting club, so we can't really do much exploring during deer season. But that's over now and we've been getting out there on the dry days, which has been nice. 
+
+About a half mile back behind the house there's a creek bed, never more than ten feet wide, but it's enough for the kids to get their feet wet and explore. I haven't tried yet, but I'm hopeful that my cellular hotspot will have some signal out there so I can work creekside when it warms up. I need a good portable desk. 
+
+Not really though. Really I don't need anything. I need less things. It's the time of year when I find myself taking stock of things and seeing what I can streamline, simplify, and do without. It's my form of a new year's resolution I think. Or perhaps some seasonally wayward attempt at early spring cleaning. Whatever the case this time of year is when I go through my life and think, what can I get rid of? What can I do without? What can I improve on? What is no longer necessary? 
+
+It's a fun thought process. I always change things up. Sometimes silly things, like the number of spoons in the drawer. Too many damnit. Out spoons, out. Other times I realize a don't need some tool I've previously considered indispensable. Some other tool I hardly pay attention to will turn out to do the job even better and I didn't realize it because I'd stopped thinking about the problem when I found the first solution.
+
+The problems is those first solutions are often ugly hacks, temporary patch jobs, but then you forget to go back and redo them. Or I do anyway. It's good to go back and check your old work, make sure there aren't any hack jobs left around.
+
+I don't do this annual taking stock to change my life, it's more of a cleaning out. It's a chance to pull off the rutted road for a few days and see what all is going on down there in the grooves. This is especially true when I get past the silly stuff like too many spoons in the drawer and start looking at my thought patterns.
+
+Any pattern of thought soon becomes transparent. That's part of what the pattern is for, and for many things that's good. I don't want to think *what should I do?* every morning. I want to make a cup of coffee and relax for a bit, like I always do. Still, I am sometimes alarmed to find patterns I didn't know I had when I step back and detach, and really *look* at myself.
+
+David Foster Wallace has a parable that I think is relevant:
+
+> There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
+
+Wallace's whole text is [worth a read](http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html) if you're not familiar (it was a commencement speech originally), but the salient point is, to quote Wallace's own explication: "the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about."
+
+I think "realities" is too vague. I don't know exactly what Wallace had in mind, but for me "realities" are the patterns of thought that govern my day.
+
+These patterns are hardest to see because they are the things that provide the framework in which we live. They're the things we decided way back when we couldn't even conceive of 2021 as a now that would eventually be *now*. They're the things we figured out so long ago we can't even recall exactly what we figured out. Still, they're there in the background informing everything we do. They're the water in which we live.
+
+When you see the water around you, you see yourself differently. Sometimes that means you find a few spoons you don't need. Other times it might mean something more. 
+
+So every year, around this time, I take a pen, a scrap of paper, and go for a walk. Woods are ideal for this, there's such a tangle of growth and life all around you that somehow the tangle of your own thoughts becomes less intimidating. From the tangle patterns emerge, pathways of thought through the trees. Somewhere in there I try to figure out what it is I am doing, where I am going, where I want to be going, and which patterns are going to close the gap between those two things. With any luck I find my way home before dark.
+
+# Bayou, Palmetto Island, LA
+
+date:2021-01-17 17:17:52
+url:/essay/craft/palmetto-island
+
+We stumbled on Palmetto Island very early on in our travels. It's a little state park south of Abbeville. It's not much, just a postage stamp plot of swampy land on Vermillion River, but it makes a good stopping point for exploring, Abbeville, Lafayette, and the surrounding rural areas. We've been several times, but this is from out very first trip and the only time I have seen the duck weed this thick (that's not solid ground, that's water with duck weed on it).
+
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/edit002-cover.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="8" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/Darktable_Edit_002.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/Darktable_Edit_002.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7hPytDCo7w">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
+
+This one was mostly about getting the colors right. It was incredibly green, almost chartreuse. It looked unreal, which is why I stopped. I love the A7ii, but sometimes greens go yellow and flat. Scenes like this make me miss Velvia 50, my second favorite film (after Kodachrome 25). 
+
+My goal here was to bring back that rich bright green in the trees, and maybe to get a more Velvia feel. I am not happy with the weird shadow effect up in the trees, but that happens a lot with this lens and I have yet to find a good solution.
+
+# Quay Wardlaw House
+
+date:2021-01-02 21:26:19
+url:/essay/craft/quay-house
+
+This is an image born of pandemic boredom. I was driving around the South Carolina countryside looking for something to do when I stumbled across this historic building in downtown Abbeville, SC. 
+
+<div class="self-embed-container">
+	<video poster="/media/images/videos/2021/poster_Qx3Wlkv.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="7" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="/media/images/videos/2021/Darktable_Edit_001.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="/media/images/videos/2021/Darktable_Edit_001_EpnvPjO.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGA0INA1sqs">Watch on YouTube</a>
+</div>
+
+I had a specific look in mind for this image. I shot it with the Fujifilm X100V, with the Acros simulation on, so I had a black and white JPG. At first I wanted to see how close I could get to that using darktable's new color calibration tools. I thought maybe I'd make a style or something. But then as I was playing with it, it ended up going in a different direction. 
+
+I like the end result better than the Fuji JPG, but it definitely isn't very Acros, which in my mind is most notable for its gradation and soft white-to-black fall off. I abandoned that in favor of this harsher, contrastier look, which I thought added some drama to an otherwise fairly boring composition.
+
+# The Best Shoes I've Ever Worn Are Hardly Shoes at All
+
+date:2020-11-19 08:14:09
+url:/essay/tools/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all
+
+The Z-Trail sandals from footwear maker Xero are true "barefoot" shoes. The [sandals](https://xeroshoes.com/shop/gender/mens/ztrail-men/) are so thin of sole, so minimal of strap, I routinely forget I'm wearing them. Which is the whole point: Instead of protecting your feet from the ground, barefoot shoes bring the feel of the ground through the sole to your feet.
+
+Barefoot shoes—a design that has gained a sizable following among runners and outdoors enthusiasts, particularly those of us inclined to believe that modernity creates more problems than it solves—take everything you think you know about shoes and inverts it. 
+
+A growing body of evidence [suggests](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090724091339.htm) that the padding in the modern shoe [isn't good for your feet](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24500535/). Allowing your feet to bend, twist, flex, stretch and otherwise do [what feet evolved to do](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08723) can reduce injuries and improve balance and agility. The more information your feet can convey to your brain, the better you can navigate the terrain.
+
+Still, there's something undeniably quixotic about paying real money for footwear with almost no support or cushion. While emerging science appears to be on the side of bare feet, for me the barefoot shoe is about something more than the purely physical benefits. I have had a lifelong love affair with being barefoot, because to be barefoot is to be free.
+
+Not free in any political sense of the word, but free in the way you were free as a child. Free to run and jump and play. Free of obligation. Free to do whatever you wanted for no reason at all because that freedom is the foundation of all human delight.
+
+Remember when school first let out for the summer? Your feet had been imprisoned in shoes all through the year and suddenly they were free. You'd head to the pool or the beach or the park and jump out of the car with bare feet, ready to play. Of course, it hurt. The burning hot asphalt singed your bare soles. But it hurt so good. Walking across the hot blacktop was nothing compared to the boredom of staring at a blackboard all day. That pain would be gone after a few weeks—your feet are remarkably adaptable body parts—but that sense of freedom remained.
+
+This carries into adulthood. What do we do at the end of the long day? We take off our shoes. If you're barefoot, it's unlikely you're working. (And if you can do your job barefoot, congratulations, you win.) If you're barefoot, you're also unlikely to have any pressing tasks. You're more likely to be in the backyard or at a pool or at the park or at the beach. You're probably outside and free, or at least doing something delightful.
+
+There was only one thing that ruined those barefoot summers. It was that sign you'd always see at the entrance to the mini mart: "No shirt. No shoes. No service." Ah, commerce, enemy of freedom.
+
+That's where the Z-Trails come in. I'm not ten anymore. I want my freedom *and* I want to go into the store. The soles of the Z-Trails are 10 millimeters thin, and the shoes are enough that I don't even notice them in my bag. (They're a favorite camp shoe among ultralight backpackers.) Walking around, I still feel like I'm barefoot. My feet stretch and flex and bend and roll the same way they would even if I wasn't wearing the sandals.
+
+While I had already tried a few barefoot shoes, I wasn't sold on the idea until I tried the $80 Z-Trails. Every other "barefoot" design I had tried felt too much like a regular shoe. Then Xero sent me a pair of the sandals to test for a barefoot shoes buying guide I'm working on. I distinctly remember putting them on and going outside to walk around the yard for a bit. I remember following my kids around the yard, and when they headed into the brambles at the back of the house, I hesitated. I thought I wasn't wearing shoes. Then I looked at my feet, and surprise, I *was* wearing shoes. I plowed right into the brambles. Twenty minutes later, I was on the Xero Shoes website buying myself three pairs. Since that day, I have worn next to nothing else on my feet.
+
+Barefoot shoe advocates would probably prefer I extol the science behind the benefits of barefoot shoes rather than sounding like a hippie chasing childhood memories down flower strewn trails, but you can discover that yourself by starting with the links I put at the top of this piece. I will also say that an increasing body of evidence shows that, while comfortable shoes make life easy on our feet, they make life much harder on the rest of our body. Balance and coordination decline over time, injuries become more likely.
+
+More compelling to me, the Xero Z-Trails are the type of shoes people have worn for most of human history. The materials may be new, but the design is very nearly as old as human feet. Put on these sandals and you will walk like your ancestors. Their tactility creates a positive feedback loop between your feet and your brain. You step on a rock, your brain tells your muscles to adjust. Your balance improves, you stumble less. Your feet grow tougher too.
+
+The benefits of barefoot shoes cascade over time, but if you decide to dive in, start slowly. *Very* slowly. Xero founder Steven Sashen suggests anyone curious about barefoot shoes should begin by going outside and walking about ten steps in bare feet. Yes, just ten. Then tomorrow, walk 20 steps. If there's no pain, keep increasing the daily step counts from there.
+
+I should probably say there may still be some circumstances where padded shoes are better. In October, I spent three days of hiking some of the most brutal, root-strewn, leaf-covered [rocky trails the North Carolina mountains](/jrnl/2020/10/walking-north-carolina-woods) have to offer with 50 pounds on my back and barefoot shoes on my feet. I chickened out and did not wear the Z-Trails backpacking. Instead, I wore [Xero's HFS road running shoe](https://xeroshoes.com/shop/shoes/hfs-men/). It doesn’t offer any more padding than the sandal, but since it's an actual enclosed shoe, it’s better at keeping your foot situated over the sole. Even though I was worried my feet would slide around too much in the Z-Trail sandals, the HFS turned out to be overkill. I missed my sandals.
+
+In fact, the only thing better is letting my bare feet free. That’s the point after all—to feel the world. So even if I haven't convinced you, and even if you never buy a pair of barefoot shoes, take a moment every now and then to delight in that child-like joy of feeling the ground beneath your feet, the earth between your toes. Your soles will thank you.
+
+# Waffle the World
+
+date:2019-08-31 10:15:59
+url:/essay/tools/waffle-world
+
+Everyone has some useless kitchen device they love. My parents love their mango peeler, I have a friend who swears one of those multi-edge brownie pans is the bomb. There's even an all-in-one breakfast sandwich device which, if Amazon [reviews](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C95O3DY/) are to be believed, is loved by many.
+
+Our version of this is the waffle iron. Except that The waffle iron is not the one trick pony you think it is. It's capable of making everything from burgers to hash browns to chocolate chip cookies. And of course, [chocolate](/jrnl/2017/07/happy-5th-birthday) [waffle](/jrnl/2018/07/six) [cake](/jrnl/2019/07/seven).
+
+<img src="images/2019/2017-05-22_150233_huntsville-tx.jpg" id="image-2058" class="picwide" />
+
+
+### Origins
+
+My first encounter with non-standard things in a waffle iron came at a campground. My family and I had recently moved into our [1969 Dodge Travco motorhome](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome) to live full time on the road. I gutted and restored the RV, but one thing I never got around to fixing was the oven. It was on my list of things to do, but honestly, living in a vintage RV, that's a perpetually long list and things like brakes tend to take precedence.
+
+One day in a New Orleans campground some fellow travelers, Taylor and Beth, [had us over for dinner](https://live.luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/new-orleans-instrumental-number-2). It was too hot to run an oven in you RV, so they served up cornbread waffles. I'm pretty sure if you'd been there you could have actually heard the ding that went off in my head when I saw the cornbread waffle. If you can make cornbread in a waffle iron, what else could you make?
+
+Traditionally, the waffle was a leavened bread-like thing, made from a dough rather than the runny batter we're used to now. It seems to have [grown out of a Greek tradition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle) of cakes cooked between two pressed together hot plates. From there, the idea of pressing batter between plates spread through Europe. Europeans started adding yeast to make a leavened dough, and eventually the hot plates found their modern grid pattern. The French were early waffle pioneers, though the Dutch soon dominated. Now, the word "waffle" is often preceded by the word "Belgian."
+
+We were not waffle traditionalists though, just a family without an oven looking for a good way to make cakes and cookies. After that first encounter with cornbread in a grid, we grabbed the cheapest waffle iron we could find and began to experiment.
+
+### Waffle Mastery
+
+We started with what we knew, replicating the cornbread waffles. We tinkered with the recipe until it was just right and then moved on. Our first homegrown success was chocolate waffle cake. The brilliance of cake as a waffle is that all those dents fill up with frosting. To this day, even when we have access to ovens, like in Mexico, my kids want chocolate waffle cake for their birthdays.
+
+After the cake success I was more or less satisfied. Corrinne however, has continued to experiment and come up all sorts of things. Banana bread (excellent). Chocolate chip banana bread (even better). Chocolate chip cookies (still searching for perfection here). Later she tried hash browns (tricky, but can be good), and became slightly obsessed with trying just about everything in a waffle iron. Remarkably, nearly all of it all has worked. Or possibly two years of ovenless life makes your palette more forgiving. 
+
+We quickly discovered that we were not the first waffle iron lovers. There was a blog, Wafflizer.com, now known as [Will it Waffle](https://willitwaffle.com/), which spawned a cookbook of the same name. There were other cookbooks, though we haven't tried any of them because experimenting -- especially with kids eager to learn to cook -- is more fun. 
+
+Often we discovered that companies themselves had recipes adjusted to work in waffle iron. We found a cornbread mix that mentioned that the secret to better cornbread waffles was more oil (this is actually true in a broad sense, though you don't want to get carried away).
+
+When I sat down to write this for WIRED I realized there's a whole internet world of waffling enthusiasts. Daniel Shumski, author of Will it Waffle, includes recipes for things as exotic as Miso-maple glazed salmon, waffled tamali pie, and even filet mignon. Honestly, we haven't tried any of those, though the tamali pie strikes me a potentially awesome.
+
+You probably have an oven, so why bother waffling? It's fun. Kids love the experimental, bending of the rules aspect to it. That said, if we had an oven we'd probably use it. Still, odds are you have a waffle iron tucked away somewhere in your kitchen, neglected and sad in the darkness of a far cabinet. Pull it out and put on the counter with pride. Try waffling something unexpected.
+
+# Why Live in a Vintage 1969 RV?
+
+date:2019-03-31 17:33:28
+url:/essay/spirit/why-a-vintage-rv
+
+Everything smells like grapefruit. 
+
+Out of the corner of my eye I can see the Colorado sunshine, but under here it's dark and cramped and it smells like grapefruit. The smell is transmission fluid, a slick, translucent red lubricant with an unpleasantly sweet citrus odor. I've been sticking my hands in it for months, over 4000 miles now, chasing a leak that won't stop. That leak caused the engine to overheat, leaving me on my back in the grass and gravel at the side of the road half way up Dallas Divide, outside of Ridgway, Colorado. There's blood on my knuckles, transmission fluid on my forehead and cheek, and I'm half on the ground, half off it, my torso twisted up into the engine, my face inches from an extremely hot radiator, wondering, not for the first time -- what in the world am I doing?
+
+It started three years earlier. My wife had just given birth to our third child and we were feeling dissatisfied with life in the American suburbs. We wanted to spend more time outdoors, more time together as a family. A raft of studies has shown that time outside makes us happier, healthier people. What's more, listening to the wind in the trees, feeling the sun on your face, the rain on your head, the more we experience these things as children, the happier we are as adults. We feel it in our bones, that peace that comes from being outdoors. 
+
+We could have moved to the country, we considered it, we may yet, but instead we decided to buy an RV and hit the road to see the whole country. And now, having lived this way for over two years, I can say that, for our family at least, the studies, the things we feel in our bones, are all absolutely right. The best part of the way we live is waking up in the morning and stepping outside. We live outside. We cook outside, we eat outside, we learn outside, we play outside. Only the weather drives us inside.
+
+But before we made the leap to life on the road it was all untested intuition. We knew we wanted to home school, which was an easy choice since my wife is a teacher. As a freelance writer and programmer, I've long worked from home. Those two things combined gave us a huge head start on our way to life on the road. Our main hesitation was that we wanted our three children to still have a place they could call their own. We didn't want to travel, we wanted to take our home on the road.
+
+The logical thing to do was to buy an RV. The problem for us was that modern RV design leaves much to be desired. Most RVs struck us as generic beige boxes, not unlike the suburban housing we wanted to leave behind. Worse, the construction is often very flimsy. 
+
+We wanted an RV that would make us smile when we saw it, something that was made of actual steel, and preferably something that didn't cost a fortune. That's a tough combo to come across. We were ready to give up on the idea when we discovered the Dodge Travco.
+
+To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it's a 27 foot long fiberglass container full of magic and joy. I have no idea what it is about it, I've owned it for four years now, lived in it for over two, and I still can't put my finger on it. Some objects transcend themselves. The Travco has that thing no one can put their finger on, but everyone feels it. 
+
+My wife was not 100 percent sold on the idea of living on the road until she saw the Travco. That combined with a trial trip to Florida added up to an afternoon where, over a couple beers in the sweltering Florida sun, we agreed, let's do this. 
+
+Two days later we bought a 1969 Travco and a few weeks later I went to get it. I fired it up, pointed it downhill, and we were on our way. The first time I stopped, at a rest area on I-85, a man was up at the driver's window asking if he could take a picture before I'd even taken off my seatbelt. "What is this thing," he asked excitedly, "it's the coolest thing I've ever seen". This would happen hundreds of times more over the years and eventually I realized no one really wants me to tell them what it is, the name doesn't matter, it simply exists and people want to acknowledge that it exists.
+
+I managed to get it the 200 miles back home, despite having no real idea the condition of the engine or brakes. I immediately started ripping out it's insides, re-wiring, re-plumbing, re-paneling, re-covering things to turn it into something livable for a family of five. The kids took to calling it the big blue bus, a name that has stuck with us ever since.
+
+It's only 27 feet long, small for an RV by today's standards, but big enough to sleep six and after two years of living in it we know it's all we need. 
+
+It took me nearly two years to fully restore the bus and even with all that work we left long before everything was done. 
+
+We sold our house and moved into the bus before we had working plumbing or propane. It wasn't until four months into our trip that I finally got around to installing a water tank. Two months after that we got our solar system working. We were more interested in getting on the road than having everything perfect. Even today, after two years on the road I've still yet to install a refrigerator. We've lived for two years with an ice box and small freezer. Sometimes that's been a pain. Texas in June, 115 degrees and 99 percent humidity will melt your icebox in a hurry. 
+
+That's been a big lesson of the road though -- you need very little to be happy.
+
+Stepping outside the traditional structures of modern life means re-evaluating things, especially that cornerstone of modern life -- comfort. Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort means having sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold rather than relying on air conditioning. 
+
+There are some things that make life easier, on the road and otherwise, but more things do not make life more easy. Quite the opposite I'd argue -- more things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them. Would it be easier to flip a switch from the inside? Yes, until that switch breaks. The simpler you keep things the less there is to worry about.
+
+Which doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about. Like anyone with solar panels, we worry about hail. We get skittish around storms. One afternoon we were headed out of Colorado, bound for Canyonlands. We were heading almost due west, but to the south was started as a gentle tufts of cumulus cloud had, by midday, built into something ominously dark, day turning to night. The distant mountains we were hoping to make camp in were swallowed into the darkness and we watched as lightning snapped out in front of the storm. 
+
+We stopped and consulted the map. To the northeast there was a small bit of state land that said it had a campground, but there was no further information. We decided to sit the storm out. We cut off the highway and followed an increasingly narrow dirt road -- always a good sign if you're looking for secluded spots -- and ended up with a campsite to ourselves with a canyon wall to one side and a bubbling river on the other. 
+
+We unfurled the awning, set up the mat and let the kids take off exploring. Instead of driving headlong into who knows what we spent the afternoon playing in the river, watching the thunderheads roll by far downstream. That even we found bobcat tracks and what might have been some mountain lion prints. The next day we met two women foraging herbs along the river. They told us about a canyon to the east that only locals ever visit, full of petroglyphs and ruins that became our next destination. In fact the next two weeks we explored leads that all came because we turned to avoid a storm. 
+
+But I've made it sound like we know what we're doing, which is not true. We have no clue. We make it up as we go along. We stumble along, following our noses as it were. We let the kids decide where we go. We spent a whole summer visiting the region in which Louise Erdrich's <cite>The Birchbark House</cite> takes place for no other reason than my daughters and I love the book.
+
+And then there's a grapefruit smell. The bus breaks down. We spend days at the side of the road. The kids have learned to roll with it. They play games at the table while Daddy mutters under the bus and Mommy searches YouTube for videos on engine repair. We don't know what we're doing, but we love doing it. 
+
+That particular day I wrapped a combination of duct tape and exhaust tape to stop the leak. I rolled out from under the bus, grabbed some water from in the bus and sat down on the guard railing. To the east the whole of the Cimarron Range spread out before us, it was September, the days growing shorter. I watched as the sun began to soften and light up Chimney Rock and other peaks and I remembered why we do this, why I don't mind stopping at the side of the road to fix something. There's nowhere to get to, we're already there. We limped back to Ridgway where I replaced all the transmission lines. I've never had a leak since.
+
+# Life in Chains: Del Taco
+
+date:2019-02-10 13:02:26
+url:/essay/spirit/life-in-chains-del-taco
+
+<img src="images/2019/deltaco.jpg" id="image-1866" class="picfull" />
+
+Del Taco has no beginning, no end. It is a continuous haze of orange. 
+
+It appears in my memory without clear origin and then slips away, slowly disintegrating over the years like a photograph bleaching in the harsh sunlight of adulthood until it is gone again. 
+
+Everything in the Del Taco of my memory is orange, the tables, the booths, the floor, the signs, the mop bucket tucked back behind the racks of orange trays, the mottled tile in the bathroom, even the grease leaking out the back of the burritos. All of it glowing like a sunburnt George Hamilton.
+
+I think of that orange whenever I'm home for a holiday, walking the gauntlet of fading family photos flanking the hallway walls on my way to the bathroom at my parents' house. I wonder if the photos look as strangely tinted to my children as they do to me, or if the novel notion that I was once a child overshadows the rest of the picture.
+
+My childhood shimmers like a dry desert lake washed in heat, but it is still capable of rushing up out of that wavering indistinct haze with a startling immediacy at the slightest provocation. R.E.M.'s Radio Free Europe, the original "Hib Tone" version, catapults me instantly back to Corey's puke green VW Fastback lurching and backfiring its way into the parking lot at Cappy's diner where we sought greasy yellow omelets awash in a sea of pinto beans and cheese. The smell of a highlighter still lives back behind the shelving cart in the library where Shelly first kissed me, her blond hair brushing lightly against my neck as my fingers let go of the book I'd been pulling out. And the orange photo wash of faded Kodachrome 64 summons a vision of Del Taco on a Saturday afternoon, ice skating the tile floor in scuffed Adidas soccer cleats.
+
+Del Taco's tables were pale orange, with molded plastic bench seats. There were three along the side by the drive thru, beneath the window. This was before SUVs, even the longest line at the drive thru could not block the view of the planes taking off from the airport, whose runway ended across the road. The notion of building anything next to a runway sounds quaint now, but there they were, giant lumbering planes roaring up into the sky while we sat in the molded white plastic and watched them.
+
+The booths themselves were slick from countless pairs of jeans sliding in and out of them. When the dry Santa Ana winds blew in from the desert the static electricity would build up as I fidgeted in the booth, a fuzzy softness against the plastic. When I had enough I would discharge it against the metal window sill with a satisfying pop and surge of adrenaline, like the sweaty, metallic jolt you got from sucking hot sauce straight out of the packet.
+
+Back then my father and I were burrito men. Burritos with fries. It sounds odd to me now, this notion of fries with a burrito. But it was California in the 1980s, many things from then sound odd to me now. David Lee Roth, Valley girls saying "like", the rat tail, New Coke, dolphin shorts.
+
+Occasionally my dad would get tacos, but neither of us really liked hard shell tacos. This was the first sort of food elitism I can remember, this vague unspoken notion that whatever a taco might be, it was not something that came in a hard, molded shell that crunched. Tacos did not crunch. 
+
+I don't know what ever propelled my family to Del Taco. My father says it was proximity. When I was very young I liked to watch the planes take off and land at John Wayne airport. Del Taco happened to be near the airport. We were hungry. We went once. We went again. A habit was formed. 
+
+I am not a particularly sentimental man, but I won't lie, I'd hoped for more meaning, some import to it all, which is a little odd since when I was younger I was fond of spitting Wallace Stevens' sentiment: "Sentimentality is a failure of feeling." I said this at parties for years without ever bothering to wonder, not *why* sentimentality is a failure, but why I used this statement as shield. Stevens was railing against the syrupy banality of so much Victorian poetry, but me? I was avoiding something. When I said it, what I meant was "feeling is a failure to evade the past."
+
+Why do I shrink from the past, preferring the standoffish distance, hiding behind a sarcasm I wear like dark sunglasses? I'm not sure. I do know that I would like for there to be more than proximity behind something that figures so large in my memory. But the world can be a monster. Who wants to walk around with naked feelings in a place like this?
 
 ---
 
-## **Rule Two: Make Something**
+The late 1990s. The Del Taco by the airport is still there, but it's remodeled, there's hardly any orange oil leaking out of the burritos. We've moved on. Corey sells the fastback. Shelly left town years ago. The world feels somehow smaller, diminished. 
 
-If you watched television for 3 hours in the evenings, congrats you were already watching less than most people—and you stop doing that you have just reclaimed 15 hours a week. FIFTEEN HOURS! That's enough to get a part time job somewhere. It's enough time to do, lord, there's no limit to what you could do really. Start a business, write a book, read the entire canon of Russian literature. The paradox of choice can get you here and you'll end up watching YouTube for hours on your laptop. I know, I've done it. 
+---
 
-You have to start creating something. I strongly suggest you create something real and tangible. Something you can hold in your hands. Cook yourself a fancy dessert if you like. Yeah you can even look up a recipe on a screen, don't worry about it. The internet is incredibly helpful for learning things. That's another idea. Find something you really love and learn more about it. Read everything you can about agates if that's your bag (it's my wife's bag). But do it by checking books out from the library, not by reading on your phone.
+Another decade passes. There is no orange oil left in LA. All I can find near the airport is a Chipotle. The burritos do not drip orange grease. They do not drip anything. Nothing in the entire place drips anything. There are no leaks, it is a white and glass world of perfection. There is no food here for the living, just some blue magic that began with Edward Bernays, passed through a brief phase of luminous orange, and ended in dry sawdust burritos, comfortable foam cushioned chairs, and a carefully engineered floor on which no cleats will ever slip.
 
-Do what you want, but do something. Deliberately carve out some time to make something. And I know everyone says, I'm not a creative person, I don't know what to make. Start small. Write a card to your closest relative. Write a postcard if a card is too much. Make dessert for your family, your significant other, yourself, whatever. Just make something. Except maybe don't make a fancy dessert every night. That won't end well. If all else fails, just go for a walk. 
+I ducked and dodged my way east, moving across the country to a tiny town with no Del Taco, but completely steeped in orange oil. I arrived in the evening to watch a wall of humidity swallow the sun out of the western sky, leaving behind an orange haze that never faded, but glowed from the street lights until the orange dawn rose again. Home.
+
+I let myself sink in to the orangeness of the place. I let JB's red-orange comeback sauce keep pulling me back into the parking lot next to the 40 Watt to soak up the alcohol. I let the orange tater tots linger in the grease pooling beneath my burger at the diner downtown. I let Weaver pass me plates of thick, gravy-smothered friend pork chops, collard greens and macaroni with orange cheese. I layered memory on memory until the sound of Innervisions slid me back in the door of Jimmy's '68 Falcon, jetting black through the humid night, sliver hood trim glinting in the streetlights of the university back roads where the cops and stops signs were fewer. I wrote at a table in the library, in front of a tall, narrow window looking out on the orange and red brick of downtown. I traded the Kodachrome for pixels. I drank coffee sitting on the rough pine porch of a converted church thinking at last I have a real religion.
+
+Wallace Stevens never ate at Del Taco. It would have been sentimental somehow. Not sentimental in the way things were sentimental when he railed against it, but sentimental in the way things are now, when we have replaced sentimentality with irony, the only sentimentality we can stomach, but a failure of the imagination nonetheless. A failure to be out there, raw nerves prickling against the rough edges of world, the raw elements without which the world is reduced, small and mean.
+
+We need orange grease leaking into the world. We need the dirt in the corner, a messy bathroom where we have to debate whether or not our hands will actually be cleaner after touching that sink. We need some modicum of risk to our lives, is this good for me? Does it need to be? We need wide open trays, vast arrays of jiggly food in badly lit underground cafeterias, not everything so neatly wrapped up and subdivided.
+
+It's been so long since the world was orange. Still those raw nerves are there. They tingle in the quiet spaces between, we seek them across parking lot oceans, wandering the stucco deserts of strip malls, thirsting for the feeling of cool water on our tongues. 
+
+I watched the world build a new world out of screens. They were blue, but somehow orange at first too.
+
+Jimmy sold the Falcon. The coffee shop in the old church closed down. I drifted across town, sitting outside a different coffee shop in the warm summer evenings, watching a cloud of restless spring insects circling the street light above Waffle House, thinking that perhaps this digital oil can save us, give the rawness somewhere to exist, let us pull these things out again and look at them in the light. But that hope fades with time. The same forces that homogenized the real world, homogenize the screen world too. Soon all the raw edges are wrapped up in a scroll of blue and white easily digestible nuggets of nothingness without so much as an orange pixel to be seen.
+
+Still the moths circle the light. Across the street a row of flycatchers sits, resting on the wire through which all these dreams pulse. It is easy pickings here, the birds so stuffed with moths they only watch now. Later, after the sun sets and the birds are asleep, what moths remain sometimes come to sip the salt from the tears lingering in the birds' eyes.
+
+It's not a failure of feeling. It's a failure to make room for feeling.
 
 ---
 
-## **Rule Three: Delete Social Media Apps**
+Last year I found myself passing time in a nameless suburb south of Oklahoma City, not unlike the one I grew up in south of Los Angeles. I went to do laundry one day and there it was, Del Taco. 
 
-Yeah, now we're getting real. I know it's going to be hard. But you know what, take easy, start small. You probably have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, a bunch of stuff in other words, on your phone. Just pick one and delete it for one week. You can always reinstall it so it's not like there's too much to lose here.
+I watched it while the washer ran, R.E.M. in my headphones. I stuffed the clothes in the dryer and walked down the street to see if it was in fact an endless sea of shimmering orange. I stood a moment on the sidewalk, looking at the black rimmed glass windows, thinking of the time I tracked down my great grandmother's tiny house, still bleaching its bones somewhere in the Arizona desert. I felt the same hesitation I had felt then. It wasn't my house. I was out of place, a stranger outside looking in. I backed up and turned around. I had time before the laundry was done. I went behind the stucco walls of the strip mall, down an alley and out another side street that led away from the chains, away from the clean bathrooms, the healthy burritos, the five star reviews, until eventually the street ended at a guard rail, the pavement gave way to open fields, and I kept walking, farther away, to some place where there is grass and sun and spring and green forever.
 
-But we're not done.
+# What's Missing Is
 
-Get a piece of paper and a pen. Fold the paper up so it's small enough to fit in your pocket. Put it in your pocket, or otherwise keep it on you. Now, every time you feel like checking whichever social network you deleted, instead of checking it, pull out your paper and pen and write down why you wanted to check it. It doesn't need to be an essay, just write like "wanted to see what Mark was up to" or whatever the source of the urge was. 
+date:2015-05-06 15:20:23
+url:/essay/spirit/whats-missing
 
-Do that for one week. At the end of the week look back over what you wrote down and decide for yourself if those things you were planning to do are worth your time. If they are then re-install that app and be on your merry way. If they aren't, or more likely, if you aren't sure, do the experiment for another week.
+Claire woke up in a sleeping bag. The familiar shimmer of nylon against her skin. The smell of creosote and dampness. Already the darkness was lifting off the desert in front of her. She rolled over on the chaise lounge and groped the ground until she found her headlamp.
 
-If you decide that this wasn't the best use of your limited time on earth, repeat this process with the next social app on your phone. When you've deleted all the unnecessary apps from your phone you're done with this step. 
+The little tuna can stove was back against the wall of the house. She stretched until she could hook it with a fingertip. She filled it with alcohol and lit it with a match. As the stove heated up she poured the water and grounds into the moka pot.
 
-Oh, and the ones you keep, don't feel bad about those. If you're feeling a sense of guilt about them still it might be worth repeating this experience, but if you really do enjoy them then don't feel guilty about them.
+She sat up, still in the sleeping bag, and sipped the inky black coffee. She thought of something an ex had once said to her, "Claire, normal people want to be liked and accepted. You don't seem to give a shit. All you seem to care about is your coffee in the morning and your drinks in the evening". More or less. She took another sip. But not really.
 
-## **Rule Four: Track What You Do When You Use a Screen**
+Little bubbles of the past had been welling up and bursting on the surface like that ever since the plane touched down yesterday evening. Every time she heard that horrid kitty litter crunch of someone walking on the endless gravel of Tucson, some bit of her younger self broke loose inside. 
 
-Far to much of our lives are lived in a kind of automated mode. Think back over everything you did in the last five minutes before you started reading this. If you're like me, you probably struggle to remember what it was you were doing or how you ended up precisely here at this moment. Some of this autopilot living is a good thing, especially, I've found, morning routines, but I do it far too much.
+She was facing west, but could tell that the sun had not cleared the horizon. Two Cardinals flitted in the Mesquite tree at the edge of the patio. Flashes of red amongst the blacks and greens. She listened to them talking, the thin chip of their song muted by the morning stillness.
 
-So I started keeping closer track of what I was doing and why. I'm not suggesting you do that. That's actually advanced level stuff, what I am suggesting is very simple: every time you use a screen, remember to do it consciously. Don't judge yourself for it, just note that hey, I am using a screen. That's all. Now if you're somewhat obsessive like I am you might want to write down whatever notes you can, about why you're using a screen. 
+The desert began to sketch itself in the morning light, watercolor hues of sand and rock that surged together over the rolling canvas until everything was a million rioting shades of pink sandstone that held the river plain like a cradle, the dark green Palo Verde and Mesquite groves nestled like some dark scars in the blushing sand. It seemed to extend forever, spreading out to the west until it climbed up and disappeared into the green, juniper and pine cloaked world of the Catalina mountains. 
 
-Unlike the steps above, this is not really a rule. It's a process. It's an ongoing process that will probably never end, at least in my case. I like to be conscious of when I use a screen, so although I started this years ago, I still do it today.
+It was wet. The rain she had dreamed was not just a dream. Everything beyond the few feet of solid patio cover where she had slept was dripping. The foot of her sleeping bag was wet. She slid out into the cool of the morning, gravel gouging at her heels, and hung the sleeping bag to dry from a hook on the patio cover. 
 
-That brings me to the final point I will leave you with: everything is a process. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you are not a thing, you are a happening. Which is to say, all of life is a never ending process, there may be goals, there maybe markers along the way, but it's not like you get to place where you never have to do anything again. The goal, at least at this very basic level of using less screens, is to build systems and processes that will help you do things other than stare at a screen. 
+She cupped her hand to the window and looked inside the house. Her grandfather was passed out in the recliner, fully reclined, just the way she had left him six or seven hours ago, when his eyelids had finally slid shut over the constellations of grief she had watched drift quietly across those dark expanses. The TV still flickered. Ever since she was a girl, the only way he had ever slept. 
 
-Now go kill your television.
+<hr />
 
+The late evening sun was just starting to temper its edge, take a little something off finally, maybe give a little respite from this goddamn heat, Ambrose was thinking when the entirety of the gravel station lot just outside the window was swallowed by a giant dust cloud that might, he realized, have somewhere in it a car, a customer, perhaps even customers, something he had not otherwise seen since much earlier in the day, back when it was hotter than Ambrose's repertoire of swear words could convey.
 
+He'd been wondering for some time if he'd need to expand that repertoire for the jungle. The Army was unclear on many things, especially to Guardsmen like Ambrose, not the least of which was how many words he might need to describe the heat of Panama.
 
-# Rules for Screens, Part Two
+He was still standing in the shadows of the garage wiping his tanned forehead with a greasy rag, trying to imagine humidity, or at least the idea of water, when he heard the door slam and the inevitable gravel crunch of footsteps coming his way. Squinting against the glare of the setting sun he was just stepping out of the shadows when a woman's voice startled him.
 
-Last time we hurled our televisions out the window into a dumpster. If you actually did that, like I did once in college, you know that the sound of that crunch and exploding screen was awesome. Well maybe not, CRT screens aren't around anymore. Anyway, if you didn't actually hurl it out a window, well, hopefully you at least sold or gave away your TV. Remember, you can have a television or you can have a life.
+"Sorry about the dust."
 
-Televisions are not the screen everyone wrings their hands over these days though. That's a little odd to me because according to statistics on screen time, that's where most us spend our time. But the evil de jour is phones. You phone is doing all kinds of things to you and will probably eventually be a direct contributor to the collapse of western culture if you believe everything you read. Which is sign you're using your phone too much.
+"That's all right ma'am."
 
-I don't love phones, and I do think we should all use them less. If you've feel addicted to your phone, well, um, you're right. You are. Everything about the design of the apps on your phone is engineered to create dopamine pathways that make sure you experience physical withdrawal when you go without them. That's addiction pure and simple.
+"We need some petrol and a place to stay."
 
-But. Did you know that culturally we've been wringing our hands over the distractions in our lives for centuries? Meister Eckhart, writing around 1307, calls "distraction" the second most powerful thing preventing communion with God. In 1550s Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner worries that the printing press will worsen the problem of distraction with a "confusing and harmful" amount of data "unleashed on the unsuspecting." To pick a more recent, and revealing, example consider writer Italo Calvino's 1983 account of [his daily newspaper habit](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino):
+"Okay. Well I'll fill it up for you. You can stay down to street at the Vida Court. I'm sure there's some rooms."
 
-> Each morning I already know I will be able to waste the whole day. There is always something to do: go to the bank, the post office, pay some bills... always some bureaucratic tangle I have to deal with. While I am out I also do errands such as the daily shopping: buying bread, meat, or fruit. First thing, I buy newspapers. Once one has bought them, one starts reading as soon as one is back home—or at least looking at the headlines to persuade oneself that there is nothing worth reading. Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.
+"I see."
 
-Note the use of the phrase, "like a drug," which we're still using today to describe our latest and most powerful distraction, phones. 
+Ambrose followed her back to the truck where two small boys and a teenage girl sat atop a pile of trundles and suitcases in the bed. He nodded to the boys and tipped his hat to girl who met his gaze directly, without flinching in the slightest, which brought a warm heat to his cheeks before he could stop it.
 
-I point this out not to downplay the addictive, attention-steal nature of screens, but to remind you that being distracted is not new. Think of it slightly differently, the desire for distraction is not new. All that's happened over the last century is we've created ever more engrossing mediums to distract ourselves with. This strongly suggests that if we just reduce our exposure to the current symptom without addressing the underlying desire for distraction we're just switching one thing for another, like alcoholics chugging coffee and chain smoking at AA meetings[^1].
+Ambrose turned his head away and busied himself with the gas pump. 
 
-And I bring up AA in part because I think that phones are a problem partly for the same reason alcohol is a problem: they're culturally acceptable. No one pulls our a syringe in the middle of four star restaurant and shoots up heroin, but no one bats an eye when someone orders a bottle of wine in the same situation. Both are addictive, destructive drugs (arguably alcohol is much worse on your body), but one is culturally acceptable and one is not. This makes a world of difference when it comes time to stop. You don't have to work hard to avoid heroin, but you'll run into alcohol, and screens, at every turn.
+"Heat brings the color to your cheeks." The woman was beside him again.
 
-Our phones aren't just addictive, they're also completely culturally acceptable in the west. No one cares if you pull one out in the middle of dinner. Well, I will. You might. But the cultural message seems to be that it's okay. In some places and some situations the cultural message might even be that you're an oddball if you're *not* staring at a screen.
+"Yes ma'am." Ambrose stared at the ground. "Been a hell of summer, if you'll pardon me."
 
-Let's assume though, that, like people who email me, you want to use your phone less. Here are some tricks to help with that, most of which I used to cut back on my own screen use. 
+"It's not always this hot?"
 
-**Luxagraf's Rules for Screens, part deux.**
+"It's always this hot, but not for so long." The woman said nothing, Ambrose glanced up at her. "Ma'am?"
 
-## Rule Five: Know Yourself
+"I was thinking, I was wondering if my grandchildren will have to endure this place."
 
-If you want to use your phone less, you need to know how much you use it. There are some tools to figure this out built-in to both iOS and Android, but I never bothered to figure those out because I had already downloaded and used Your Hour ([Android App Store](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindefy.phoneaddiction.mobilepe)). Space appears to offer similar features and [works on iOS too](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/space-break-phone-addiction/id916126783). The app isn't really important, just get something that records how much time you spend and how often you unlock your phone.
+"Ma'am?"
 
-That will give you a baseline and let you know how much you use your phone. Personally I disabled tracking for maps and music/podcasts because although I'm using my phone, I'm not really staring at the screen. There's an element of gamification to these apps that's easy to get sucked into. I had Your Hour on my phone for about a week before I got pretty obsessed with how little I could use my phone in a day. 
+"We're here for my husband. They said that the dry air would be good for his tuberculosis."
 
-## Rule Six: Adapt to Yourself
+"Mmmhmm. They say that." Ambrose studied his feet.
 
-If, like me, you discover that you use your phone to check the time throughout the day, consider getting a watch. Or, if you hate wearing a watch, and live in a small bus with your family like I do, just encourage everyone else to wear a watch and ask them what time it is.
+"I don't expect I will get to leave." She was staring off in the distance. "But I'd like to think my daughter might."
 
-The point is, most likely Rule Five will reveal some habits that you can break, but are too idiosyncratic to you for me to solve for you. My general advice is, if you have some behavior that involves the phone that could involve some analog thing, like a watch for instance, replace those screen checks with a watch. Not a smart watch or fitness tracker, just a watch.
+He waited a moment, but she did not say anything more. She paid him in coins and climbed back in the truck. The engine coughed back to life after a few sputters that Ambrose attributed to grungy spark plugs. Most people didn't know to soak them in gasoline, it was rare that they need to be replaced. He decided he liked the woman, she was maybe a bit odd, but the heat did funny things to you if you weren't used to it. He imagined she would endure, something about her seemed incapable of not enduring. At the very least he didn't feel like she should need to buy new spark plugs just yet. He would tell her as much tonight, after he went home to the Vida Court.
 
-A few things I have heard of people doing include, putting your phone in a bag to make it more of a pain to pull out and use, using it as a coaster so you can't pick it up, and using a pen and paper to make notes rather than using your phone. 
+He watched the truck crawl out onto Prince road. He followed it out, kicking a rock out the driveway into the road. He saw the brake lights at the end of the street. The truck lurched into the Vida Court. He thrust his hands in his pockets and walked back toward the office.
 
-## Rule Seven: Turn Off All Notifications
+<hr />
 
-I think the reason we are bothered by how much we use our phones has to do with agency. We like to think we are the rulers of our days and are conscious of all our decisions and actions and phones are stark reminder that we are not that guy/gal. The best way to grant yourself back some agency is to get rid of all notifications. 
+If she really didn't give a shit Claire reasoned, then she would not have come. People who don't give a shit don't abandon their lives half way around the world, book very expensive last minute plane tickets and come back to this godforsaken fucking desert.
 
-Notifications are really just little serotonin agitators. Check your email when you feel like it, not when a notification badge agitates your serotonin level past the point of resistance. Turn them off, all of them.
+Although, in truth, now that she was here, she missed this desert in some deranged way that made her half understand why people stayed in abusive relationships. Hate is just a perversion of love, but rage, rage is another thing altogether.
 
-## Rule Eight: Practice Doing Nothing
+She had left the desert in a kind of rage, a dull rage of unfairness wrapped up in punk rock and politics, and being born at the wrong time in the wrong place to the wrong people. The people who didn't stick around.
 
-This does not mean meditating. It means doing nothing. Or at least do nothing productive. When you were a child you were probably happy to lie in the grass all afternoon doing nothing. At most you might pick out shapes in the clouds, but you were fine doing nothing. Or at least if you're over 35 and actually had a childhood then you might remember doing nothing. If not. Well, learn. Practice.
+Claire found her aunt's cigarettes tucked in the side of her purse, which she had left next to the impossibly long telephone cord that connected the old push button land line her grandfather insisted on keeping around. She took two and ducked out the back door for walk in the desert. She wanted to get away from her aunts. 
 
-Of all the rules in this list, this is the hardest for me. I have this need to always be making something. I am ill at ease doing nothing. I read a good bit, I also practice discursive meditation, but neither of those qualify. The only time I really do nothing, is lying in a hammock, so I make sure to get some time in the hammock at least a couple times a week.
+Her mother's sisters both thought she didn't give a shit. They always had. All because Claire hadn't cried at her own parents' funeral. As if a six year old is aware of social decorums. 
 
-It might take some time to figure out the way you do nothing the best. If you do get stuck on this one, I highly recommend a hammock.
+They still hated her for it. Or, if not hated, at least thought she was strange, most likely a little dangerous and best studied in silence. That she insisted on sleeping outside, like animal she had heard her aunt say last night, only reaffirmed this belief. But outside was the only place the rage dissipated. Outside there was only the heat and the stillness and the relative cool of the evening and mornings. Coffee and cocktails were not so far off after all perhaps. 
 
-## Rule Nine: Record Your Practice
+There was also the rather insulting move of leaving the desert. Claire did what no one else in the family had dared to do since her grandmother stepped off the beat up flatbed into the cactus-strewn world of kitty litter. Leave. We are here to go she had said with the smirk and she disappeared over the horizon, traveling halfway around the world to do god knows what. Claire imagined how much they must enjoy talking about her when she wasn't around. Sometimes she thought she should sit them down and just tell them everything, but they had over the years made it pretty clear that they actually liked her better as an object of fascination than a person. Who was she to deny them such pleasure? 
 
-Write down when you do nothing. Write down when you don't do nothing. Write down how you miss notifications if you do. Write how you overcome your strange screen habits and most of all, write down when you still use screens. Don't judge yourself for it, step back, detach and just record what happened, what you did, and for how long. Try to be a disinterested observer of yourself, this will be much more helpful than berating or congratulating. 
+It was April, the edge of searing heat, more of a baking heat right now. The dry heat of spring in a place where somehow flowers still contrived to not just exist, but explode out of the seemingly dead soil. Claire looked down at the cigarette between her fingers. She'd quit years before, but somehow it seemed like something Emma would do. Now though, standing in the middle of a flame red cluster of Ocotillo flowers she realized Emma would never have lit the cigarette. Would never have even taken it. Would never have even come at all. She was never part of the desert the way Claire was, she had floated above it like a cloud.
 
-## Rule Ten: Get After It
+Claire watched a tiny dust devil gathering in the wash down the hill. The desert was where the earth's dust came from. Bits of the Sahara coat the Amazon every year. There is no escaping the desert. Even if you travel half way around the world your desert past will find you, grain by grain, dust to dust. Everything ends up back here in the dry desert plain where it settles and bakes in the heat until it's all as hollow as a corn husk. A little wind and it would all be off again, headed south down to the Mexican coast and out to sea.
 
+<hr />
 
+Emma had developed a peculiar fascination with chewing sand. It came to her mouth as a dry film licked off her lips. From western Oklahoma onward she had been chewing at the nothingness of sand. Now, after jumping down from the truck bed, she violently spat the contents of her mouth on a cactus and resolved to never chew sand again. 
 
+Except that it kept settling on her lips. And she kept licking them, out of habit. Perhaps, she thought, the whole West is just one thin dusty film settling over the world. Certainly the room at the Vida Court was saturated with fine grit. 
 
-[^1]: This is not meant to disparage AA or anyone struggling with alcoholism. Most AA members I know are fully aware of the irony of swapping one addiction for another, but when alcohol has taken over your life to that point, it's not a bad trade to make.
+Mother had laid Father out on the bed and was giving him a glass of water and some saltines. They were talking in low voices that Emma could not make out. She went outside to get her bag and have a look around.
 
-## Rules for Screens, Part Three
+The Vida Court was, Emma reasoned, better than sitting atop trundles in the back of the flatbed wedged between sweaty siblings and a mucus and blood-spewing father. And that was about all that could be said of it. 
 
-Did you know there's a Reddit for people who want quit staring at screens so much? Also a true story. 
+It was not, for instance, a ten-room farmhouse with three floors and a tornado cellar. Nor was it surrounded by endless acres of imported genuine Kentucky bluegrass with a semicircle of drooping cottonwood trees growing around the pond. There were no ponds for miles. Just a small, rusted copper tub full of sun-warmed water.
 
+It was only after she removed her stockings that she realized how thoroughly the sand had saturated her. Or perhaps, she thought, perhaps my thighs have tanned through these skirts. She climbed into the water and watched as the brown of her legs faded back to milky white, the dusty film of Oklahoma and New Mexico drifting across the water like great orange clouds moving from one end of the tub to the other.
 
+She could see the young man from the gas station through the chalky pink haze of the bathroom window, but only as a still, dark frame in a chair on the porch. It wasn't long before Emma found herself standing in the bathtub, dripping water, watching the shadowy porch for signs of movement.
 
-# Buying Used
+She put on a clean dress and evacuated the bungalow as fast as she could without raising undue suspicion. The sun was already gone, but the air still held the heat like a treasure of the day. She walked around the cacti and was tempted to touch the thorns. She reached out her hand and ran it from the center out and down the edge, careful to keep her hand moving with the hooked direction of the needles.
 
-I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks.
+"So y'all sold your farm, bought the truck and hauled your dad out here for some fresh air huh?"
 
-Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model. 
+His voice startled her enough that she almost leaned on the cactus for support.
 
-Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior.
+"Sorry?"
 
-This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff. 
+"You sold the farm, bought the truck and here you are, TB and all."
 
-Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something—that includes me—and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website.
+"Something like that."
 
-[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well.
-# Essay on Will
+"We get quite a few passing through these days..."
+
+"Oh we're staying I believe."
+
+"I'm Ambrose"
+
+He extended his hand and she stepped out of the cacti and took it in her own. 
+
+"Emma."
+
+"You know, Emma," he took another sip of the beer for courage, "that truck you're family is drivin... you need to pull the plugs and soak them in some gasoline. I can do it if you like."
+
+<hr />
+
+The funeral was over by four. Claire sat on the patio with her Grandfather, eating leftover Fancy Franks. 
+
+"These were her favorite," he said staring down at the last one in his hand. 
+
+"No they weren't, she hated little cocktail crap like this."
+
+He laughed and pitched the last one out into the desert. "You're right, she did."
+
+She watched a Brown Thrasher study the frank from a low branch of a Palo Verde tree. "Are you sure you're going to be okay?"
+
+"Have I ever not been okay?"
+
+"You wife just died Papa..."
+
+"She died three years ago Claire, her body stopped working recently is all. I'm old, she was old. People die. It's what we do Claire. Next time you come around here it'll be for me."
+
+"Don't take this the wrong way Papa, but I'm not coming back for you."
+
+"I know."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"Because when I'm gone there's no one to come back to."
+
+Claire smiled. "True, plus I'd hate to disappoint all of them. Everyone thinks I don't give a shit. If I show up here after you... well, that would seem like I gave a shit wouldn't it?"
+
+"Who thinks you don't give a shit? Give a shit about what? They don't think that."
+
+"About anything. And they do. Like everyone else has these complicated situations and feelings and worries and all this shit and I just float away on a bunch of merry red little balloons."
+
+Ambrose chuckled. "Who thinks this?"
+
+Claire gestured around her, "I dunno, everyone..."
+
+"Mmmhmm. Claire, you know better than most that there is no everyone."
+
+
+<hr />
+
+
+The rock sounded like a bomb against the window. She was a foot clear of her bed before she had even made sense of the noise. Then she heard his hissing whisper, "Emma..."
+
+She pulled the window up and crawled out, tumbling down into his arms. "Stop with the rocks, you scared the life out of me". 
+
+They crept through the sandy yard and down the banks of Palo Verde snarls to the edge of the river. He stopped suddenly and she crashed into his body. He started to say something, but she smothered his mouth with a kiss.
+
+Later they lay on their backs listening to the river. Ambrose told her the names of the stars that he could remember, making up the rest on the spot. 
+
+She asked about the stars in Panama and then suddenly, "you aren't going to get Malaria are you?"
+Despite all the words he had conjured for Panama this was one he had not thought of. The Army had not mentioned it either. "Do they have malaria in Panama?"
+
+"Of course. And snakes and worms and all sorts of nastiness. It's a jungle you know."
+
+"I know. It'll be beautiful, no desert, no dry cracking horridness."
+
+Emma smiled. "You've never felt humidity have you?" 
+
+"No, but I already know I love it."
+
+Emma laughed. "You might be the only person I've met who's happy to be going to war."
+
+"I'm not happy to be going to war, but I'm happy to get out of here. I've been trying to get out of here for years."
+
+She laughed again ans stroked his cheek. "You can always leave anywhere Ambrose, you just go. You just have to make sure you understand what you're leaving." She slid out of his arms and walked down to the water's edge. He watched as she crouched down at the river’s edge and skipped rocks out toward the middle. 
+
+
+<hr />
+
+
+The patio had a fan. It spun too slow to move the air much. It had always reminded Claire of a tape reel or a movie projector, except that it was broken and only spun backward. A tape reel forever rewinding. 
+
+The rain had started again off in the distance, a low cloud hung over the mountains, a black mist trailing down from it, filling the canyons and ravines with drops that would become a raging wall of water by the time it passed by here tomorrow morning.
+
+Inside the house Ambrose tilted back the reclining chair with a long angry sounding trail of ratcheting clicks. She could hear her aunts talking in the kitchen, their words muffled by the faucet and clatter of dishes. She heard the TV come on. They would be running the ticker tape at the bottom of television again tonight: Flash flood warning in effect. 
+
+Tomorrow the newspaper would want everyone to know that someone had died; that a new golf course is going to be built on the hillside above someone’s watery grave; that the threat of flood is the price we pay for sunshine; that the desert is a barren curse; that every place has its curse, that eventually all the curses will combine; that everything will be cursed; that the curse is not so bad; that loneliness is a curse; that loneliness is different than alone, that still, the coffee is quite good down at the....
+
+Claire slid her legs into the sleeping bag, enjoying the dry slipperiness of nylon against her skin. It felt like slipping between worlds, cool dry worlds where she could float on red balloons forever. Darkness closed in, the world telescoped down into blackness. The foothills faded, the dark splotches of river slipped into black. Eventually there was only the lone saguaro still glowing in the soft blue light of the television flickering behind her.
+
+# Comeback Sauce
+
+date:2010-09-08 15:17:01
+url:/essay/spirit/comeback-sauce
+
+<img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150908045114im_/http://one.longshotmag.com/media/images/jb.jpg" alt="bottle of comeback sauce" class="pullpicleft" />
+
+I met JB under a very short bridge nearly a decade ago. He was wearing a dejected look I would never see on him again—a momentary interruption in his universally good mood. I was new to the South, recently transplanted from Los Angeles, so when I stopped the car to survey the roadside scene, I wasn't expecting to find a massive overturned oil drum-style barbecue lying in the grass just beyond the crumpled mini trailer that was introducing worry to JB's spirited face.
+
+I helped him pull the trailer out from under the small railroad trestle bridge. The air felt so hot and still and thick that it was like trying to breathe underwater, and our shirts soaked through with sweat. I leaned on the tailgate of JB's truck while he tried to pound the frame of his trailer roof back into shape. It was the first time I remember ever noticing Kudzu, or hearing the throbbing, ceaseless drone of Southern insects lurking beneath. Everything was alive.
+
+I helped JB haul the enormous rusted grill pit back onto the trailer. My hands were black with charcoal and grease. JB tied the grill back down and thanked me, promising free sausages when he was back up and running. I smiled, assuming I'd never see him again. But this was not LA. "Oh you'll see me everywhere," he assured me with the knowing tone of a local, "I've got comeback sauce."
+
+Two weeks later I played a show at the 40 Watt club in downtown Athens, famous for once having been lit by a single 40 Watt bulb. It's a legendary club that helped put Athens on the music map. I was thrilled to play there. I drank gallons of beer, and met what seemed like hundreds of people. After closing time, we all stumbled out the front door looking for something to eat.
+
+And there was JB. Parked on the edge of the small crumbling parking lot, cooking up sausages for a crowd of drunk kids. I was shocked he remembered me and came through with free sausages, "with comeback sauce ya hear? Cause you'll always come back for more." He smiled. I walked away into the warm night and ate. The sausages were, well, sausages. But the sauce was something else.
+
+As I was walking home with my friends, JB drove by and then stopped and waited for us to walk up to his truck. "There's a party up ahead, ya'll want a ride?" We jumped on the trailer and rode up the hill. JB set up in the front yard of someone's house. He didn't ask. He didn't need to. This isn't LA, there are probably street food codes, but no one lets them get in the way of a good thing. It wasn't long before the party emptied out of the house and spilled into the street, everyone coming out for the comeback.
+
+For the next eight or so years I would pay a visit to JB's sausage truck at least once a month. I always came back. Sometimes even when I didn't really want a sausage. I found it difficult to walk by without buying something. Over time JB ceased to recognize me, my face blended back in with the rest of the drunken, if polite, crowds.
+
+A decade is a long time in a small town. I watched friends come and go. And come and go again. I moved away for a few years myself, lived in big cities, small ones, traveled around the world. But I always came back.
+
+Athens has it's own comeback sauce, something that draws people back to it like the moths and lacewings that form clouds around the streetlights on a warm summer night.
+
+It's been a long time since I've seen JB outside the 40 Watt. Sometimes there's a big silver truck serving a full menu. It probably meets city code. I haven't eaten there. I suspect they have no comeback sauce.
+
+I'm not sure what happened to JB. It wouldn't be to hard to find out -- Athens is still a small town when it comes to that sort of thing -- but I don't want to know. I prefer to keep coming back, hoping maybe one day I'll see that dirty old oil drum of a barbecue throwing smoke up into the thick summer air and hear JB telling someone, ya'll come back now, ya hear.
+
+# One Nation Under a Groove
+
+date:2005-03-25 14:35:18
+url:/essay/spirit/one-nation-under-groove
+
+The sky is falling again. The man outside the liquor store seems unconcerned. The sky seems to fall a good bit. Perhaps the man didn't notice. Perhaps the sky has fallen too many times now. Perhaps it's been falling for quite some time and we're just now noticing it. Perhaps its always falling. Perhaps it never has and never will fall. Perhaps we just really like to say the sky is falling. 
+
+This latest chunk of sky hurling down at us is a brilliant little piece of circuitry known as the iPod. Andrew Sullivan, writing for The London Times claims "[society is dead, we have retreated into the iWorld](https://web.archive.org/web/20060113045721/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-1501-1491500-1501,00.html)." A catchy headline no doubt, but it's basis in reality is questionable. 
+
+Echoing this trend is John Naughton's recent article for The Guardian "[a generation lost in its personal space](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/jan/23/comment.business)." 
+
+Joining these authors is Christine Rosen who has managed to parlay this topic into two separate articles, [The Age of Egocasting](http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-age-of-egocasting) and [Bad Connections](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/20WWLN.html?ex=1268974800&amp;en=fca8190266cc6b78&amp;ei=5088&amp;partner=rssnyt).
+
+The underlying implication of all these articles is that the iPod (and the cellphone and TiVo and the remote control and...) narrow our perspectives and, in case of the first two, make us oblivious to and in public spaces. 
+
+> The proportion of young people who never venture out in public without first putting on headphones is astonishing <cite>&ndash; John Naughten</cite>
+
+> Even without the white wires you can tell who they are. They walk down the street in their own mp3 cocoon, bumping into others, deaf to small social cues, shutting out anyone not in their bubble. <cite>&ndash; Andrew Sullivan</cite>
+
+I have owned an iPod since 2001 and I really enjoy my bubble. It's not so much that I disagree with any of the authors cited above, it's that I think the iPod is less a destroyer of worlds (public space in this case) and more a *response* to the destruction of personal spaces, the origin of which lies far deeper and farther away than a pair of white headphones.
+
+I was in a band a few years back and we were recording what would be our only production, a five song ep. For those that have never been in a recording studio and have this mistaken idea that it's all fun and games... well, it's not. Recording music is pretty boring actually. One evening the drummer and I were smoking cigarettes outside our studio and we got to talking about walkmans and the newfangled mp3 players that were just hitting the market. Nice we agreed, but what would be really cool I said, what I really want, is a way to put my entire collection of music in a device the size of a deck of cards. True story, 1995 or so. Buena Park California, sunset iridescent orange. High clouds lending a bit of purple. Swig of beer. Drag of cigarette. 
+
+The first few iPods were too small, 5 gigs and then 10, if I recall correctly from a billboard in Redondo Beach stuck in traffic and thinking, holy shit, they're gonna do it. And they did. When the 20 gig version arrived it seemed like plenty of space so I bought one. Unfortunately when I got done ripping all my cds it was almost full. Now four years later I have almost 35 gigs worth of mp3s and I'm needing a new iPod (holding out for the 80 gig model, which again seems like plenty...).
+
+I am far too much an audiophile however to settle for the cult of white ear buds and in fact have never used apple's provided headphones (too much time spent in the recording studio to trust my music to cheap speakers). No I am actually worse in Mr Sullivan's view, I use noise canceling earbuds from Sennheiser. Even if I turn off my iPod I am still deaf to your social cues Mr. Sullivan. 
+
+I will even confess that sometimes, when my iPod runs out of batteries, I leave the headphones in just to have an excuse to ignore social interaction. In fact, I find it really irritating when people fail to respect the message of headphones (don't talk to me) and insist that I remove them so they can ask me for a cigarette (no) or a donation (sorry, one step away from the breadline myself).
+
+###Space is the Place
+
+At the same time, as a writer, overheard conversation and snippets of other lives caught accidentally or through purposeful audio voyeurism are very important to me, invaluable even. This is the sort of accidental material that can put you where you ought to be -- where you least expected to be. 
+
+But at the same time I never knew I would feel quite like *that* as the winter afternoon glare crystallized the spires at the top of the Sixth Avenue Library to the sound of Grant Lee Buffalo's lament of New Orleans. I got the same juxtaposition of the familiar and foreign that I might glean from an unexpected snippet of the overheard. 
+
+So maybe, while it doesn't fit the binary choice narrative of our age, just maybe it's possible that both wearing headphones and not wearing headphones have their place.
+
+I like to be able to choose whether or not to involve myself in the public space. But the elective to remove oneself from the public is troubling for our iPod critics. "Walk through any airport in the United States these days and you will see person after person gliding through the social ether as if on autopilot," writes Sullivan. 
+
+Naughten even has the dystopia mapped out for us: "imagine the future: a crowded urban street, filled not with people interacting with one another, but with atomized individuals cocooned in their personalized sound-bubbles, moving from one retail opportunity to another. The only sounds are the shuffling of feet and the rock muzak blaring from the doorways of specialized leisurewear chains."
+
+It's funny to read this in 2019 and realize that in fact Naughten was close. I haven't been in a major American city in a few years, but last time I was his description would have fit perfectly. But are the "atomized individuals" the cause or the result? I'd argue they're the latter.
+
+It seems natural to me that people bombarded with advertising and the crass commercial commodification of public space at every turn would want an isolationist bubble to protect themselves. Naughten's vision, which turns out to be more or less the culture we have in the west in 2019, seems a perfectly logical extension of the culture we have created. 
+
+It's perfectly logical to string together phrase that, in 2005, would have sounded like something out of Infinite Jest: Meet me down at the Blockbuster Pavilion where we can catch the Verizon Wireless Presents show tonight and maybe afterward we can head to the Trojan Condom presents DJ Circuit City spinning at Club Walmart. Come on down, we'll have a grand time ringing in the new Year of the Depend Undergarment.  
+
+What Mr. Naughten seems to ignore is the second to last sentence of his own nightmare, one that has nothing to do with headphones and everything to do with cultural changes that precede the iPod -- *moving from one retail opportunity to another*. 
+
+This is the sum total of our public spaces. They are "retail opportunities". Our "public" space is not public at all, it's branded private space that views the public as little more than advertising targets. How long before we have advertisements beamed up into the night sky?
+
+Rather than contributing to this sort of corporate co-opting of public spaces, the iPod allows us an escape into private worlds of the imagination.
+
+Headphones are an attempt to avoid the homogenization of the "rock musak blaring from the doorways of specialized leisurewear chains". 
+
+Is it not the desire to escape the vulgar commercialism of our advertising-polluted culture that drives us to block out it's monotony? To seek something meaningful in one of the most intimately and meaningful realms, music and interject back the danger that once lurked outside the burlesque theaters and dance halls that seem to have closed just after Henry and June sneaked out the back door.
+
+### The New (Old) Danger
+
+The problem with the iPod for these authors, and for similar articles about phones in 2019, seems to lie in the shutting off of the public space in favor of the personal.
+
+As I've already pointed out we the public largely lost our collective spaces to more nefarious forces than the iPod. But, setting aside larger cultural issues like promiscuous advertising, what of the iPod's privatization of public space as these authors claim?
+
+Neither author gives any kind of reason as to why this is bad. They both get abstract and use the iPod as jumping off point for larger concerns, starting with Mr Sullivan who sees in the iPod the loss of, call it respect for music.
+
+"Music was once the preserve of the living room or the concert hall," writes Sullivan. "It was sometimes solitary but it was primarily a shared experience, something that brought people together, gave them the comfort of knowing that others too understood the pleasure of a Brahms symphony or that Beatles album."
+
+I don't know about you, but the music I listen to was never welcome in the living room I grew up in. 
+
+For some reason, my parents failed to relate to or appreciate *License to Ill* or *Nothing's Shocking*. Mr. Sullivan seems to think 'once upon a time' music was confined to the space where we expect it and now, good god, now it's everywhere and no one is sharing or bonding over it. 
+
+I for one would much rather everyone carried around a pair of speakers with their iPod and blasted them at 11 so music became a truly public space, but apparently I am alone in this desire and there are noise ordinances against this sort of thing. (If this notion intrigues you check out some of the Flaming Lips' experiments with hundreds of simultaneous playbacks to form textures of sound).
+
+Typical of a lazy essayist, Sullivan is really just aping statements made a generation earlier in response to the iPod's predecessor, the Walkman. 
+
+Far more reasoned and persuasive is Christine Rosen's piece in The New Atlantis. As Rosen relates in her essay, "music columnist Norman Lebrecht argued, 'no invention in my lifetime has so changed an art and cheapened it as the Sony Walkman.' By removing music from its context -- in the performance hall or the private home -- and making it portable, the Walkman made music banal. It becomes a utility, undeserving of more attention than drinking water from a tap."
+
+I suppose that's one way to look at it. But you could go back further. Swap "radio" for "Sony Walkman" and the argument still stands. Want to go further, gramophone works too. Yes, it's true, recorded music has never had a context. It has always existed in the abstract space of our heads more than any temporal location. We are not in the room as it as the music is played, we get only an abstracted representation of the music. 
+
+This is where to whole thing collapses for me -- so what? The notion that music has to have a context in order to understand it is only one way of approaching it. I'm not saying it's a wrong way, I agree music is more powerful in person, but the abstraction, the ability to summon up the music you love whenever you want is indistinguishable from magic, to me anyway.
+
+The notion that music has a natural space where it belongs is an extremely limiting definition of music. But even accepting that notion for a moment, applying it to recorded music makes no sense. If recorded music is located outside any temporal location, how can it have an appropriate place?
+
+So ultimately Rosen is arguing that personal space is invading public space, that is, headphones are narrowing our public cultural space, but also, that music (in said headphones) really ought to remain in a private performance space as well. At least I think that's what's she's saying, though it makes no sense.
+
+I for one don't think music should be consigned to where we feel comfortable and safe with it. Music is not safe. It should not be relegated to the living room or the concert hall, it should be played in the streets at top volume until the sky really does shudder and crumble. But that option has already been taken away by noise ordinances. So we have gone internal, put the speaker directly in our ear.
+
+If anything changes with headphones it's the attention devoted to the music. Music coming from speakers has a directional vector. It approaches you from some point and is blatantly external to the listener. Put on a decent pair of headphones and the music becomes omnidirectional and you are enveloped in it. Close your eyes and you can swim through it and pick out tiny bits of sound that you would never notice coming from an external speaker. For the listener on headphones the experience is both more intimate and more consuming than music from a living room stereo or even a concert hall stage.
+
+As for the loss of public culture to personal headphone cocoon, is not the mere recognition of white earbuds itself a form of cultural interaction? Even if it be only a nod and smile, is this not even closer to the truth of life, the mystery unfathomed but acknowledged? I know how you feel the nod says and it is good speaketh the smile. 
+
+### Its All Around You
+
+Neither Sullivan nor Naughton is content with the iPod as harbinger of doom, the end of social space, the isolationist future of automatons. Yawn. No, it does not stop there, this is the slippery slope down which we all slide into communism and cannibalism and [them russians and them russians](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49305/america-56d22b41f119f) and them earbuds and them earbuds and them them, damnit the sky is falling why don't you see it? 
+
+Rosen at least has a more reasoned argument that might actually be on to something.
+
+She believes that the personalization of media is leading to a narrowing of experience. That's a legitimate fear that the passing of time has shown to be very legitimate indeed. 
+
+Mr. Naughton in the Guardian article sounds a bit like Wordsworth calling us all back to the countryside. He even goes so far as to stake his critique partly on recently uncovered Edwardian era documentary films. These movies he claims reveal a society where, "men raise their hats to women; people stop to talk; groups congregate at junctions and street corners." The clear implication is that, for Edwardians, being out in public meant being on display and being sociable. It meant paying attention to what was going on around you, and acknowledging the existence of others.
+
+Beware all calls for a return to past glories. Still, assuming for a moment that people act naturally in front of a camera, and that they weren't in fact congregating to discuss the weirdos at the end of street pointing lenses at everyone, the Edwardians were more self-consciously aware when out in public. Does that make them role models of public behavior? They were also more elitist, racist, and classist as well; should we emulate those behaviors too while we're out for a Sunday stroll?
+
+In researching this little piece I found several nice rebuttals to Sullivan's piece. The best of which is by a man named Jerry Stratton in an essay entitled [society never ends, it just fades away](http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=92). 
+
+Stratton rightly cuts past the iPod intro of Sullivan's article and addresses what Sullivan really wants to talk about. "His most worthwhile observation was that iPod users sometimes accidentally break out into out-of-tune singing to whatever is on their pod," writes Stratton. "But [Sullivan] seems to think that it's bad, whereas I stand with Joni Mitchell that the more out-of-tune voices, the better. And that's the real point of Andrew's editorial. The proliferation of multiple viewpoints runs the risk of isolating individuals so that they hear only the viewpoints that they want to hear. We as individuals need more out-of-tune voices."
+
+This is also Rosen's concern in both of her essays, that our means of consuming information (for her the remote control, TiVo, and iPod) are narrowing our exposure to new ideas. By meticulously selecting content that we already know we like we are even less likely to discover the new stuff. Couple this with &quot;smart&quot; search algorithms that pick recommendations based on what we already like and our chances of encountering the shocking, the challenging or the potentially enlightening approach nil according to Rosen. 
+
+Without these sorts of jarring, chance encounters with the unknown we cease to think outside ourselves. This may well be true, but it's always been true. Conservative viewers are more likely to tune into Fox news because it fits their pre-existing worldview. Liberals read the New York Times and watch Woody Allen movies. This is nothing new. It has always taken conscious effort to find viewpoints outside your own reality tunnel of beliefs.
 
-If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals—think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. 
+I fail to see anyway in which the iPod contributes to this trend. In fact it may well go against it if only by virtue of its ubiquity. On college campuses for instance many students swap headphones to see what the other is listening to. The iPod's ease of use and the easy availability of mp3s make exploring new music simple -- hear a band on someone's headphones, go home and fire up a torrent search, grab the album, slap it on your iPod and be enlightened. Illegal? Certainly. Potentially life enriching? Certainly.
 
-but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. 
+### No Alarms and No Surprises
 
+When you come down to it, how is the iPod any different from other music devices that use headphones? It's not. It's just the latest harbinger on the chopping block if we mash our metaphors for a moment.
 
-If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting.
+At the same time, the targeted nature of new modes of consumption do raise some issues for thought. Is algorithmic content, narrowly selected constricting our exposure to the unfamiliar? Maybe, but as illustrated earlier there has always been a tendency to seek the familiar, the safe, the comfortable, the expected. 
 
+But even that doesn't always happen. The gravity of this potential danger, if we may call it that, that comes from targeted advertising depends greatly on the realm in which occurs. If we are talking about the realm of politics then this kind of marsupial burrowing is decidedly bad. If you bought Bill O'Reilly's book (presumably he has one) and the suggested &quot;you might like...&quot; stuff is more of the same, then yes your worldview remains narrow. But in the realm of art where the political statement is often less overt, less likely to be partisan, more likely to be complicated and often not there at all, then the suggestion might be welcome and can lead one far from the sources that suggested it.
 
+For example let's say you really like Jay-Z and so when the new album comes out you pre-order it on Amazon.com. The &quot;you might like...&quot; screen claims that people who like Jay-Z have also purchased Outkast. So you figure, what the hell I'll pick up this Outkast album. Turns out that those who purchased Outkast also bought both Stevie Wonder and Sun Ra. Hey, why not? You buy them too. If you're a fan of Jay-Z but have never ventured into Sun Ra territory, well, you're about to blow your mind.
 
+In my own experience, I find that I tend to read books that mention other books. So I read the other books and maybe they mention some other books and on it goes. I don't see a significant difference between that and the Amazon suggestions. Or potentially TiVo's suggestions or any other targeted marketing. In the realm of the arts nothing is so much the same that it cannot lead to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation" title="Theory of Six Degrees of Separation">something ever more different</a>.
 
+It seems that to a certain extent the authors in question here are specifically concerned with the potential narrowing of political capital, which is a concern given that democracy depend on the existence of a multitude of voices. Are we losing that? Well that's a larger question and one that does not necessarily relate to remote controls, TiVo or the iPod.
 
+### You Were Wrong When You Said Everything's Gonna Be All Right
 
-The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. 
+All three of these articles reveal more about their author's sentimentality for earlier times than anything else. If those kids took the headphones out of their ears, put down the remote, turned off the television and read a couple of books everything would be fine...
 
-One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home.
+In fact this notion of iPod=evil represents the same simplistic thinking that has landed us where we are in the first place. If easy prescriptions worked to solve our problems we wouldn't have the reactionary mess we have. And I don't mean that in partisan terms. I think we can all agree that America is somewhat of a mess right now. I don't think one political party or the other is as fault. We are all culpable. And we are all looking for solutions. 
 
-I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. 
+I don't believe in the techno-utopist future of completely wired life and peace through blogging, but I also don't believe in the techno-dystopist future where we all end up like the overweight blobs in floating chaise lounges ala Wall-E.
 
-Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything.
+Reality is much more complex and to avoid it authors like Sullivan resort to cheap, easy sentimentality."What are we missing?" he asks, answer ever at the ready: "That hilarious shard of an overheard conversation that stays with you all day; the child whose chatter on the pavement takes you back to your early memories; birdsong; weather; accents; the laughter of others."
 
-This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. 
+A lovely piece of sentimentality, it almost makes me want to take out these headphones and listen to the silence of the house.  But as Wallace Stevens' said "sentimentality is a failure of feeling." Sentimentality is false feeling, pseudo-feeling and affectation. Sullivan's quote is an embarrassing episode of mindless sentimentality, it fails to account for all kinds of complexity and depth ever-present in our lives.
 
-Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. 
+Sentimentality is the easy answer: the birds, the laughter, the children.... Real feeling involves complexity, it rejects the simple. To realize that there is more to it than unplugging, more to it than any technology, more to it than a sound bite you can pass off as heartfelt -- that is actually the very essence of the problem: the failure to engage your surroundings as anything other than a simplistic snapshot of what you wanted to see. 
 
-The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff.
+Does Sullivan acknowledge the ugliness? Never. He skips right over it and tells you what you wanted to hear. Sullivan's sentimentality does the very thing he accuses the iPod of doing -- he narrows your reality. 
 
-That's a habit you can break—going to all-in-one-place stores—but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. 
+Never for a second does Sullivan acknowledge that the birds might be endangered, headed for extinction, that the weather might be worsening with global warming, that the laughter of others might well be cynical and cheap or that the children are living below the poverty line, abused etc, etc. This the same sort of narcissistic thinking that gave us romanticism, is it any wonder that these authors look too fondly at the Edwardians? 
 
+Everything looks good from the lazy middle class intellectual point of view. Edit out the things you don't like and you too can narrow your reality to the point of irrelevancy.
 
+Please do not mistake me for a cynic though. I use this example merely to acknowledge that there are things below the surface that we can happily ignore if we are constructing the world to our own desires rather than recognizing the complexity that is inherent in it. 
 
-One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. 
+### ...And I Feel Fine
 
-Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus. 
+Perhaps the problem with the iPod is so ephemeral it's slipping through our fingers. Perhaps there is no problem with the iPod. No harm in headphones. No danger to run from save the desire to have a new danger to run from, a new evil to fight because the real one is just too big to tackle, a new threat to declare war on because the old one just bores us to death, a new something to rage against because the dying of the light seems inevitable and unvanquishable. Perhaps the new danger, same as the old, is our own failure, our own sentimentality that shows us the world not as it is but as we wish to see it.
 
+At the same time I encourage everyone, as Robert Anton Wilson put it, to change reality tunnels often. Find viewpoints you don't share, something outside your belief system, something you might even consider crazy. Listen to what these viewpoints are saying and think critically about why you do or don't agree with them. 
 
+There has never (not even yesterday) been a day in the history of humankind when you have had so much information at your finger tips. Take advantage of that and see where it leads you -- hopefully where you least expected. And hey, listen to music while you think.
 
diff --git a/essays/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt b/essays/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt
deleted file mode 100644
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--- a/essays/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,29 +0,0 @@
-The Z-Trail sandals from footwear maker Xero are true "barefoot" shoes. The [sandals](https://xeroshoes.com/shop/gender/mens/ztrail-men/) are so thin of sole, so minimal of strap, I routinely forget I'm wearing them. Which is the whole point: Instead of protecting your feet from the ground, barefoot shoes bring the feel of the ground through the sole to your feet.
-
-Barefoot shoes—a design that has gained a sizable following among runners and outdoors enthusiasts, particularly those of us inclined to believe that modernity creates more problems than it solves—take everything you think you know about shoes and inverts it. 
-
-A growing body of evidence [suggests](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090724091339.htm) that the padding in the modern shoe [isn't good for your feet](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24500535/). Allowing your feet to bend, twist, flex, stretch and otherwise do [what feet evolved to do](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08723) can reduce injuries and improve balance and agility. The more information your feet can convey to your brain, the better you can navigate the terrain.
-
-Still, there's something undeniably quixotic about paying real money for footwear with almost no support or cushion. While emerging science appears to be on the side of bare feet, for me the barefoot shoe is about something more than the purely physical benefits. I have had a lifelong love affair with being barefoot, because to be barefoot is to be free.
-
-Not free in any political sense of the word, but free in the way you were free as a child. Free to run and jump and play. Free of obligation. Free to do whatever you wanted for no reason at all because that freedom is the foundation of all human delight.
-
-Remember when school first let out for the summer? Your feet had been imprisoned in shoes all through the year and suddenly they were free. You'd head to the pool or the beach or the park and jump out of the car with bare feet, ready to play. Of course, it hurt. The burning hot asphalt singed your bare soles. But it hurt so good. Walking across the hot blacktop was nothing compared to the boredom of staring at a blackboard all day. That pain would be gone after a few weeks—your feet are remarkably adaptable body parts—but that sense of freedom remained.
-
-This carries into adulthood. What do we do at the end of the long day? We take off our shoes. If you're barefoot, it's unlikely you're working. (And if you can do your job barefoot, congratulations, you win.) If you're barefoot, you're also unlikely to have any pressing tasks. You're more likely to be in the backyard or at a pool or at the park or at the beach. You're probably outside and free, or at least doing something delightful.
-
-There was only one thing that ruined those barefoot summers. It was that sign you'd always see at the entrance to the mini mart: "No shirt. No shoes. No service." Ah, commerce, enemy of freedom.
-
-That's where the Z-Trails come in. I'm not ten anymore. I want my freedom *and* I want to go into the store. The soles of the Z-Trails are 10 millimeters thin, and the shoes are enough that I don't even notice them in my bag. (They're a favorite camp shoe among ultralight backpackers.) Walking around, I still feel like I'm barefoot. My feet stretch and flex and bend and roll the same way they would even if I wasn't wearing the sandals.
-
-While I had already tried a few barefoot shoes, I wasn't sold on the idea until I tried the $80 Z-Trails. Every other "barefoot" design I had tried felt too much like a regular shoe. Then Xero sent me a pair of the sandals to test for a barefoot shoes buying guide I'm working on. I distinctly remember putting them on and going outside to walk around the yard for a bit. I remember following my kids around the yard, and when they headed into the brambles at the back of the house, I hesitated. I thought I wasn't wearing shoes. Then I looked at my feet, and surprise, I *was* wearing shoes. I plowed right into the brambles. Twenty minutes later, I was on the Xero Shoes website buying myself three pairs. Since that day, I have worn next to nothing else on my feet.
-
-Barefoot shoe advocates would probably prefer I extol the science behind the benefits of barefoot shoes rather than sounding like a hippie chasing childhood memories down flower strewn trails, but you can discover that yourself by starting with the links I put at the top of this piece. I will also say that an increasing body of evidence shows that, while comfortable shoes make life easy on our feet, they make life much harder on the rest of our body. Balance and coordination decline over time, injuries become more likely.
-
-More compelling to me, the Xero Z-Trails are the type of shoes people have worn for most of human history. The materials may be new, but the design is very nearly as old as human feet. Put on these sandals and you will walk like your ancestors. Their tactility creates a positive feedback loop between your feet and your brain. You step on a rock, your brain tells your muscles to adjust. Your balance improves, you stumble less. Your feet grow tougher too.
-
-The benefits of barefoot shoes cascade over time, but if you decide to dive in, start slowly. *Very* slowly. Xero founder Steven Sashen suggests anyone curious about barefoot shoes should begin by going outside and walking about ten steps in bare feet. Yes, just ten. Then tomorrow, walk 20 steps. If there's no pain, keep increasing the daily step counts from there.
-
-I should probably say there may still be some circumstances where padded shoes are better. In October, I spent three days of hiking some of the most brutal, root-strewn, leaf-covered [rocky trails the North Carolina mountains](/jrnl/2020/10/walking-north-carolina-woods) have to offer with 50 pounds on my back and barefoot shoes on my feet. I chickened out and did not wear the Z-Trails backpacking. Instead, I wore [Xero's HFS road running shoe](https://xeroshoes.com/shop/shoes/hfs-men/). It doesn’t offer any more padding than the sandal, but since it's an actual enclosed shoe, it’s better at keeping your foot situated over the sole. Even though I was worried my feet would slide around too much in the Z-Trail sandals, the HFS turned out to be overkill. I missed my sandals.
-
-In fact, the only thing better is letting my bare feet free. That’s the point after all—to feel the world. So even if I haven't convinced you, and even if you never buy a pair of barefoot shoes, take a moment every now and then to delight in that child-like joy of feeling the ground beneath your feet, the earth between your toes. Your soles will thank you.
diff --git a/essays/comeback-sauce.txt b/essays/comeback-sauce.txt
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-#Comeback Sauce
-##An Ode to JB's Sausage Cart, an Athens, GA Institution
-### originally published by Longshot Magazine https://web.archive.org/web/20100904114555/http://one.longshotmag.com/article/going-for-seconds
-
-<img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150908045114im_/http://one.longshotmag.com/media/images/jb.jpg" alt="bottle of comeback sauce" class="pullpicleft" />
-
-I met JB under a very short bridge nearly a decade ago. He was wearing a dejected look I would never see on him again—a momentary interruption in his universally good mood. I was new to the South, recently transplanted from Los Angeles, so when I stopped the car to survey the roadside scene, I wasn't expecting to find a massive overturned oil drum-style barbecue lying in the grass just beyond the crumpled mini trailer that was introducing worry to JB's spirited face.
-
-I helped him pull the trailer out from under the small railroad trestle bridge. The air felt so hot and still and thick that it was like trying to breathe underwater, and our shirts soaked through with sweat. I leaned on the tailgate of JB's truck while he tried to pound the frame of his trailer roof back into shape. It was the first time I remember ever noticing Kudzu, or hearing the throbbing, ceaseless drone of Southern insects lurking beneath. Everything was alive.
-
-I helped JB haul the enormous rusted grill pit back onto the trailer. My hands were black with charcoal and grease. JB tied the grill back down and thanked me, promising free sausages when he was back up and running. I smiled, assuming I'd never see him again. But this was not LA. "Oh you'll see me everywhere," he assured me with the knowing tone of a local, "I've got comeback sauce."
-
-Two weeks later I played a show at the 40 Watt club in downtown Athens, famous for once having been lit by a single 40 Watt bulb. It's a legendary club that helped put Athens on the music map. I was thrilled to play there. I drank gallons of beer, and met what seemed like hundreds of people. After closing time, we all stumbled out the front door looking for something to eat.
-
-And there was JB. Parked on the edge of the small crumbling parking lot, cooking up sausages for a crowd of drunk kids. I was shocked he remembered me and came through with free sausages, "with comeback sauce ya hear? Cause you'll always come back for more." He smiled. I walked away into the warm night and ate. The sausages were, well, sausages. But the sauce was something else.
-
-As I was walking home with my friends, JB drove by and then stopped and waited for us to walk up to his truck. "There's a party up ahead, ya'll want a ride?" We jumped on the trailer and rode up the hill. JB set up in the front yard of someone's house. He didn't ask. He didn't need to. This isn't LA, there are probably street food codes, but no one lets them get in the way of a good thing. It wasn't long before the party emptied out of the house and spilled into the street, everyone coming out for the comeback.
-
-For the next eight or so years I would pay a visit to JB's sausage truck at least once a month. I always came back. Sometimes even when I didn't really want a sausage. I found it difficult to walk by without buying something. Over time JB ceased to recognize me, my face blended back in with the rest of the drunken, if polite, crowds.
-
-A decade is a long time in a small town. I watched friends come and go. And come and go again. I moved away for a few years myself, lived in big cities, small ones, traveled around the world. But I always came back.
-
-Athens has it's own comeback sauce, something that draws people back to it like the moths and lacewings that form clouds around the streetlights on a warm summer night.
-
-It's been a long time since I've seen JB outside the 40 Watt. Sometimes there's a big silver truck serving a full menu. It probably meets city code. I haven't eaten there. I suspect they have no comeback sauce.
-
-I'm not sure what happened to JB. It wouldn't be to hard to find out -- Athens is still a small town when it comes to that sort of thing -- but I don't want to know. I prefer to keep coming back, hoping maybe one day I'll see that dirty old oil drum of a barbecue throwing smoke up into the thick summer air and hear JB telling someone, ya'll come back now, ya hear.
-
-Upon re-reading this, I like it much less now than I did at the time. In my defense, I wrote this in about an hour, sent it off to Longshot and somehow it became the cover for the first issue. They even made a t-shirt out of the comeback sauce bottle artwork (not mine). Still, I'm not super fond of this story because I actually know JB and I don't feel like I did him justice. He deserves better. -sng, 2019.
diff --git a/essays/everywhere-piece.txt b/essays/everywhere-piece.txt
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-Everything smells like grapefruit. 
-
-Out of the corner of my eye I can see the Colorado sunshine, but under here it's dark and cramped and it smells like grapefruit. The smell is transmission fluid, a slick, translucent red lubricant with an unpleasantly sweet citrus odor. I've been sticking my hands in it for months, over 4000 miles now, chasing a leak that won't stop. A leak that causes the engine to overheat sometimes, leaving me on my back in the grass and gravel at the side of the road half way up Dallas Divide, outside of Ridgway, Colorado. There's blood on my knuckles, transmission fluid on my forehead and cheek, and I'm half on the ground, half off it, my torso twisted up into the engine, my face inches from an extremely hot radiator, wondering, not for the first time -- what in the world am I doing?
-
-It started three years earlier. My wife had just given birth to our third child and we were feeling dissatisfied with life in the American suburbs. It wasn't that we wanted to travel, we just wanted to spend more time with our kids. We didn't want to work two jobs and have a bunch of stuff, but never see each other. We realized that what was going to make us happier was spending more time together as a family and also more time outdoors. 
-
-A raft of studies has shown that time outside makes us happier, healthier people. What's more, listening to the wind in the trees, feeling the sun on your face, the rain on your head, the more we experience these things as children, the happier we are as adults. We feel it in our bones, that peace that comes from being outdoors. 
-
-We could have moved to the country. We considered it, we may yet, but instead we decided to buy and RV and live on the road, see the whole country. And now, having lived this way for over two years, I can say that, for our family at least, the studies, the things we feel in our bones, are all absolutely true. The best part of the way we live is waking up in the morning together, all in the same room, and immediately going outside. Because you don't really live in an RV, you live outside. We cook outside, we eat outside, we learn outside, we play outside. We live outside. Only the weather drives us inside.
-
-But before we made the leap to life on the road it was all untested intuition. We knew we wanted to home school, part of the spend more time together, made a much easier choice by the fact that my wife is a teacher. 
-
-As a freelance writer and programmer, I've long worked from home. Having those two things sorted from the beginning gave us a huge head start on our way to life on the road. Our main hesitation was that we wanted our three children to still have a place they could call their own. We didn't want to travel, we wanted to take our home on the road.
-
-The logical thing to do was to buy an RV. The problem for us was that modern RV design leaves much to be desired. Most RVs struck us as generic beige boxes, not unlike the suburban housing we wanted to leave behind. Worse, the construction is often very flimsy. 
-
-We wanted an RV that would make us smile when we saw it, something that was made of actual steel, and preferably something that didn't cost a fortune. That's a tough combo to come across. We were ready to give up on the idea when we discovered the Dodge Travco.
-
-To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it's a 27 foot long fiberglass container full of magic and joy. I have no idea what it is about it. I've owned it for four years now, lived in it for over two, and I still can't put my finger on it. Some objects transcend themselves. The Travco has that thing no one can put their finger on, but everyone feels it. 
-
-My wife was not 100 percent sold on the idea of living on the road until she saw the Travco. That combined with a trial trip to Florida added up to an afternoon where, over a couple beers in the sweltering Florida sun, we agreed, let's do this. 
-
-Two days later we bought a 1969 Travco and a few weeks later I went to get it. I fired it up, pointed it downhill, and we were on our way. The first time I stopped, at a rest area on I-85, a man was up at the driver's window asking if he could take a picture before I'd even taken off my seatbelt. "What is this thing?" he asked excitedly, "it's the coolest thing I've ever seen". This would happen hundreds of times more over the years and eventually I realized no one really wants me to tell them what it is, the name doesn't matter, it simply exists and people want to acknowledge that it exists.
-
-I managed to get it the 200 miles back home, despite having no real idea the condition of the engine or brakes. I immediately started ripping out it's insides, re-wiring, re-plumbing, re-paneling, re-covering things to turn it into something livable for a family of five. The kids took to calling it the big blue bus, a name that has stuck with us ever since.
-
-It's only 27 feet long, small for an RV by today's standards, but big enough to sleep six and after two years of living in it we know it's all we need. 
-
-It took me nearly two years to fully restore the bus and even with all that work we left long before everything was done. We sold our house and moved into the bus before we had working plumbing or propane. It wasn't until four months into our trip that I finally got around to installing a water tank. Two months after that we got our solar system working. We were more interested in getting on the road than having everything perfect. Even today, after two years on the road I've still yet to install a refrigerator. We've lived for two years with an ice box and small freezer. Sometimes that's been a pain. Texas in June, 115 degrees and 99 percent humidity will melt your icebox in a hurry. 
-
-That's been a big lesson of the road though -- you need very little to be happy.
-
-Stepping outside the traditional structures of modern life means re-evaluating things, especially that cornerstone of modern life -- comfort. Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort means having sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold rather than relying on air conditioning. 
-
-There are some things that make life easier, on the road and otherwise, but more things do not make life more easy. Quite the opposite I'd argue -- more things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them. The simpler you keep things the less there is to worry about.
-
-Which doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about. Like anyone with solar panels, we worry about hail. We get skittish around storms, but often that works out in our favor. One afternoon we were headed out of Colorado, bound for Canyonlands. We watched as some gentle tufts of cumulus cloud to the south built into something ominously dark, turning day to night. The distant mountains we were hoping to make camp in were swallowed into the darkness and we watched as lightning snapped out in front of the storm. 
-
-We stopped and consulted the map. To the northeast there was a small bit of state land which was labeled with a campground icon, but there was no further information and our map is ten years old. We decided to give it shot though, it beats driving through a big storm. We cut off the highway and followed an increasingly narrow dirt road -- always a good sign if you're looking for secluded spots -- and ended up with a campsite all to ourselves, a canyon wall to one side and a bubbling river on the other. 
-
-We unfurled the awning, set up the mat and let the kids take of exploring. Instead of driving headlong into who knows what we spent the afternoon playing in the river, watching the thunderheads roll by far downstream. That evening we found bobcat tracks and what might have been some mountain lion prints. The next day we met two women foraging herbs along the river. They told us about a canyon to the east that only locals ever visit, full of petroglyphs and ancient ruins. That became our next destination. In fact, the next two weeks we explored leads that all came about because we turned to avoid a storm. 
-
-But I've made it sound like we know what we're doing, which is not true. We have no clue. We make it up as we go along. We stumble along, following our noses as it were. We let the kids decide where we go. We spent a whole summer visiting the region in which Louise Erdrich's <cite>The Birchbark House</cite> takes place for no other reason than my daughters and I love the book.
-
-Then there's that grapefruit smell. The bus does break down sometimes. We spend days at the side of the road. The kids have learned to roll with it. They play games at the table while Daddy mutters under the bus and Mommy searches YouTube for videos on engine repair. We don't know what we're doing, but we love doing it. 
-
-That particular day I wrapped a combination of duct tape and exhaust tape around a hose to stop the leak. I rolled out from under the bus, grabbed some water from inside and sat down on the highway guard railing. To the east the whole of the Cimarron Range spread out before us, the southern Rockies painted in green and yellow and gray and white. It was September, the days were growing shorter, it was time for us to head south. 
-
-I watched as the sun began to soften toward evening. Chimney Rock slowly turned to amber as Precipice Peak behind it reddened, and I remembered why we do this, why I don't mind stopping at the side of the road to fix something -- there's nowhere to get to, we're already here. Eventually I fired the bus back up and turned around. We limped back to Ridgway where the next day I finally replaced all the transmission lines. We've never had a leak since.
diff --git a/essays/leica.txt b/essays/leica.txt
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-Leica's new M11 digital rangerfinder camera may as well come from an entirely different era. Don't get me wrong, it's plenty modern. The M11 has a high resolution sensor (a 60-megapixel backside-illuminated full-frame CMOS sensor to be precise), sophisticated metering tools, and even some of the usual digital accoutrements of cameras in our age. But it thumbs its nose at autofocus, and is perfectly happy to work with lenses that are decades old. 
-
-More than that though, the Leica M11 just *feels* like, well, an old Leica. 
-
-The M11 is very much true to the heritage of the M series camera. It looks like an M series. It's compact, understated, a box on which you attach a lens. The M11 doesn't make many promises, but those it does it keeps.
-
-The M11 is also true to M series when it comes to price, which is high. The retail price of $8,995 is more that most of us are ever going to spend on a camera. But even for those of us who will never own a Leica M11, I think this is an important device that deserves something more than a simple review. 
-
-The M11 is important because it shows that the engineers at Leica are keeping something alive, something that I think the rest of the camera world has forgotten—that the camera doesn't matter, the photographs matter. The camera is just a tool.
-
-Any tool is only as good as the person using it. A wrench is just a wrench. Some wrenches may be better made than others, but if you want to do anything useful with a wrench, you need a person with the skill to use a wrench. That skill might come in different forms and guises too. I know what I'm doing with a socket wrench in an internal combustion engine, but I have no skill at all in using a plumbing wrench on the pipes in the basement.
-
-In the same way, camera are tools. Put an outdated digital camera from the early 2000s in Sebastião Salgado's hands and odds are you'll end up with a great image. Put the Leica M11 in my hands and the odds of getting a great image are less in your favor. 
-
-The reason I say the Leica M11 feels more like a film Leica than a modern digital camera isn't because it isn't capable, but because it has been engineered to be used in conjunction with human skill, that is, your skills as a photographer. This is what makes the M11 so different.
-
-Cameras are increasingly designed to remove the human skill, or more importantly the lack thereof, from the equation. From autofocus to auto white balance to auto metering, the engineering skill of most camera manufacturers over the last several decades has gone into replacing the skilled individual with a algorithm that presents, not a challenge you must rise to or adapt to, but a series of options you can choose between. 
-
-This is the path of all technological advance in our consumer society, the abstraction of skill to a set of features which claim to have removed the need for skill. And yet. Some photographs are better than others. Some photographs tell a story that's independent of technical perfection. No amount of autofocus speed is going to make your image tell a story if you have no story to tell.
-
-The Leica comes from a time before photography became a means for social approval, and was about telling stories. Stories the world needed to hear, stories the world would not have been able to hear any other way. The work of photographers like [Sebastião Salgado](https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/sebasti%C3%A3o-salgado?all/all/all/all/0) brought the rest of the world into my sheltered high school photography class in a way that nothing else I'd ever seen did. I would sit for hours leafing though *An Uncertain Grace*, staring at the same photographs day after day until I knew every corner of them. Same with [Susan Meiselas](https://www.susanmeiselas.com), whose sometimes shockingly brutal images brought home the conflicts in Central America in a way that the circus of Oliver North on TV (which happened around the same time) never could, never would. TV was sanitized. Meiselas's photography was a collection of raw emotion seared onto the page in way that no one could fail to understand. These were the things that made me want to be a photographer.
-
-I don't want to give the impression that no one is doing the kind of work Salgado and Meiselas did. There are plenty of truly great photographers working today. In fact the winner of the [Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award for 2021](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQteG83kQqo), Emile Ducke, is a great example. You know what no one asks in the linked film about his work? What camera he uses. You know what no one asked Salgado back in those days? No one asked what camera he used. No one asked Meiselas what lenses she preferred because it didn't matter. The images are all that matter and we all knew that just owning a Leica M series camera, which it turns out both Salgado and Meiselas used, at least some of the time, wasn't going to get you those images.
-
-That's why I don't know if you should buy the Leica M11 or not. It's an opinionated camera. It's from a different time, when what mattered was the image. I shot with it as a loaner for one week. The highest praise I can give any tool is the praise I'll give the M11: It did what I asked it to do. It never failed. I failed plenty, but the tool kept on being the tool, waiting for me to rise to the occasion.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-Today Instagram is like the TV, it's sanitized photography. 
-
-
-
-lacks autofocus, or because it uses a rangefinger focusing systemmost of the engineering is going into trying to replicate human skill with digital smarts. 
-
-
-
-
-
diff --git a/essays/new-from-current.txt b/essays/new-from-current.txt
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-
-
-
-
----
-
-From Charles Eisenstein: It is not only systems and institutions that are crumbling. It is not only political parties, social patterns, and economic organizations that are in a state of crisis. On a deeper level, we face a crisis of sense, meaning, and identity. More and more of us have lost trust in the authorities we once trusted. We have come to doubt old standards by which to discern true from false. We don’t know what to believe. We don’t know what is real. We aren’t so sure even who we are. Our notions of progress and our faith in the future has been shaken.
-
-The collective response to Covid so far has been to deepen our immersion in the old story of Separation, fear, and control. Part of that story is that progress means advancing the human capacity to manage and control everything outside of us. Better security means controlling terrorists and criminals. Better living means controlling bad habits and addictions. Better health means controlling germs and our own bodily processes. At the present writing, it has become obvious that the regime of intensifying control will not bring its promised paradise. Paradise remains ever at the horizon no matter how quickly we race toward it.
-
-The resolution of this state of affairs, however, need not be a bifurcation. We are not in the world in order to leave it. We are here to anchor a more beautiful world the present one. How do we do that? Not through force of will alone. We need other people who share our vision, who have seen the same possibility that we have seen. Those people remind us that choices and perceptions that seem crazy in the old story, that seem naive or impractical or irresponsible, are actually both sane and necessary. In other words, enlightenment is a group activity.
-
----
-
-Of course, if there are things to be done, they should be done. But that does not mean we should rush around doing stuff, just because it seems better than doing nothing. Here is what Vinay Prasad has to say in his blog ‘Will science do better post COVID19?’
diff --git a/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt b/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt
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-That unmistakable vtwin sound of a harley davidson motorcycle climbing the grade.
-
-# Main
-
-There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat.
-
-I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Nevada between the ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. 
-
-When the engine shuts off a silence descends. No wind. No birds. No talking. We—my wife, three children, and me—just listen to the quiet hissing of steam escaping the radiator cap, and then a gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the Nevada sun casts a harsh light on the road. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 
-
-As a child of the 70s, I've spent a fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is what vehicles of those days did. The 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born, was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma, AZ on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. 
-
-I was no stranger to dealing with the sweat, the cursing, the money, and the occasional blood, required to keep old cars running. It used to be a necessity. These days it's a labor of love. There is something in the shape of these vehicles, something in the way they move, the way they were built, that is unlike anything on the road today. People connect to it in a way they don't with modern vehicles. 
-
-The labor of maintenance is the price of admission to the world of old vehicles, that's all. If you love the design of those vehicles, the aesthetics, the limits, of that era then you don’t hesitate to pay the admission. 
-
-I'll freely admit most people don't dive in as deep as we have. In June of 2016 my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. We bought it to make it our full time home. We were tired of the suburbs and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. And what better way to do that than in a 50-year-old motorhome?
-
-My kids called it the bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bright and bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. It hails from a very different era, one when the Right to Repair was the Need to Repair, and when the need to repair was an unspoken, accepted part of using technology. 
-
-
---
-
-The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. I wanted one from the first moment I ran across a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. 
-
-There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but after a few months of haunting Craigslist, in June of 2016, I found one for sale in the mountains of North Carolina, in the sleepy college town of Mars Hill. A couple who restored vintage trailers found the bus somewhere in Tennessee and tried their hand at fixing it up. For some reason, they changed their mind and sold it.
-
-I could have picked up where they left off, but I decided to gut it instead. I wanted to understand it, to design and build out everything in it exactly the way we would need it. Wood, sealant, metal, fiberglass, and all the things RV interiors are made out of are static. They just sit there, which makes them relatively easy to restore. I grew up around repair and restoration projects. My grandfather worked for the telephone company and had a shed full of tools behind his house in Tucson. When he retired he spent his weekends buying broken things at the swap meet and his weekdays fixing them to resell the next weekend. 
-
-In the summer it was blazing hot in Grandpa’s shed, but my cousins and I didn't notice the heat, we were too excited watching him tear things apart and put them back together again. It was miraculous to take these discarded things—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.
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-My father had a garage full of tools as well. I was playing with hammers and tape measures from the time I could walk, graduating to model airplanes in grade school, when I also started using more tools, taking things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then went and built them as best I could. I managed to come out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, and somewhat misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools, anything was fixable. 
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-So standing there in the hills of North Carolina, looking over the bus for about an hour, I was unfazed. There was some obvious water damage. I knew I’d have to tear out walls and replace them with new wood. And if you’ve got the walls off you might as well re-wire, re-plumb, and re-insulate. But looking around the interior I saw what I saw when I was sketching projects—the finished result. The only thing to do was do the work to make it look the way it already looked in my head. The engine I was blissfully ignorant about. It was hard to start, but once it got running it seemed good enough to my untrained ear. I handed over the money and climbed into the cockpit.
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-That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past cars, I've driven near 250,000 miles. But driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and pointing it downhill. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I finally managed to get her out on a four lane road where she felt more manageable. After I had been driving, tensely, for a couple of hours I pulled over at a rest area to take a break.
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-The engine wasn't even off before two people came running up to the bus to see it, take pictures, and talk about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked a question I would come to realize everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: what engine is in it? 
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-The Travco is driven by a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. I've done a little research, but still can’t confirm or deny this;  that said, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it can feel like I have the power of a Dodge Dart, with 8000 extra pounds of weight on top.
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-On that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, I knew next to nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked complex and intimidating and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer; part of what I was after, when we decided to live in a vintage RV, was less computers. 
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-I spent most of my free time that year completely rebuilding the interior. For most of 2016 it sat in our driveway, with me inside, sweating through the southern summer, freezing through the winter. Our neighbors begin to give directions based on it “we’re two houses after the big blue bus.” I gutted the interior down to the bare fiberglass walls. I redid all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I deliberately kept everything low tech. There's only one computer chip in the bus. There's no backup cameras, no motorized awnings, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we reach camp, but the system will never fail. 
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-A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously would let no networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, his character commands a spaceship after all, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposed. In his case networked technology opened to door to murderous robots bent on destroying humanity. Our case is a little less dramatic. We just didn't want to have to have something break when we're miles from the nearest place that could fix it.
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-No one is perfect though, and we do have one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. On the surface it doesn't seem so bad. Even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he would not approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. The Bluetooth network is an unnecessary potential point of failure. Sure, it’s nice to be able to check our solar and battery status from my phone, but it’s not necessary. To mitigate that point of failure, I installed a shunt with a hardwired gauge. Should the Bluetooth fail, or, more likely, should I lose my phone, I can just look at the gauge. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology. I’m opposed to unnecessary technology and single points of failure.
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-The comedian Mitch Hedburg tells a joke about how an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. In web design this is referred to as graceful degradation. How good your technology is depends on how elegantly it handles failures. This is a design principle I, and perhaps even Adama, can get behind. Unfortunately, a lot of modern design has taken exactly the opposite approach. In the name of convenience complex systems are hidden behind deceptively simple user interfaces. But no matter how simple these things might seem when you use them, the complexity behind them is inherently fragile. 
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-It's is hard to argue against such systems—certainly it is more convenient to flip a switch and have hot water, or to be able to check solar battery status from my phone—but the trade off in potential for catastrophic failure isn't worth the small gain in convenience, especially not when the nearest repair shop is hundreds of miles away.
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-What's more, sometimes inconvenience can even end up providing benefits. Inconvenience has a way of forcing you off autopilot and gets you paying attention, and engines this old need you to pay attention to them. It's part of the cost of admission. 
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-Modern user interfaces have hidden this from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, making it difficult to start. There are two important components in an internal combustion engine: air and fuel. When your engine is cold it needs more fuel than air. A computer chip controls this mixture in modern cars, but in older, aspirated engines like the 318 in our bus, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver with the choke cable. It's a cable attached to the carburetor flap at one end, and a knob on the dashboard at the other. Pull out the knob and the flap in the carburetor closes, limiting the air coming in, and allowing the cold engine to start up.
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-Manual choke is archaic. But since ours was broken when we got it, I went even more archaic. Every time I start the engine I lift up the engine cover, unscrew the air filter, and close the carburetor flap with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dashboard knob took years of scouring eBay. By the time I did find one, well I was used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The choke cable I bought has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for over a year now; and I still haven't installed it. I've had a choke cable for over a year now; I still haven't installed it.
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-The truth is, I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once a wire came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting—which it wasn't—I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. But it was also very simple to fix. I found the wire and plugged it back in. The engine started right up.
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-Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the engine, connecting with it. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine before every drive, but these days I am often just spending time with it.
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-Car enthusiasts often get this way. It might seem irrational to be attached to a particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Now, driving around the country, when I see broken down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships.
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-The bus is very much a relationship. The five of us moved in and hit the road on April 1, 2017. My wife said that if it didn't work out we’d just pass it off as a bad April Fools joke. It worked out. Though like any relationship, me and the bus have had some rocky moments.
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-April 2nd, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into our first campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slide myself under the engine. A thin, warm read liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission cooler cooler lines running into the bottom of the radiator where transmission fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.
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-I didn't know exactly how to fix it, but I knew enough about engines to know that this wasn't too serious. As long at I kept the fluid level topped off, it should be too much of a problem. I didn't want to disrupt our new life on the road by taking the bus in for repairs on our third day out. Instead I added a transmission fluid refill to my morning ritual of starting the engine. 
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-I went through a lot of transmission fluid those first three weeks. I topped it off every morning before we hit the road and every time we stopped for gas. Treating symptoms works for a while, but inevitably the underlying cause gets worse. We made it down to the South Carolina coast, and then swung south, through the windswept marshes of the Georgia coast, and then we headed inland, across the swampy pine flats of south Georgia and into the Florida panhandle.
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-Part of the reason I put off dealing with the leak is that we were staying at a friends beach house on St. Georgia Island. But then the day we were due to arrive the leak got worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left and I had just filled the reservoir two hours before. We unpacked for a week out of the bus and I made spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such and old, huge vehicle. I found one that was game and a few days later, with my wallet a bit lighter, we had the problem solved. 
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-We continued on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, right into New Orleans where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks as I drove through town. For those two months the bus ran perfectly. After New Orleans though, as we headed into the June heat of Texas, the temperature gauge began to climb. And climb. All the way into the red. We took to driving in the early mornings, which helped, but I knew something needed to be done. 
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-We stopped to visit relatives in Dallas and had the radiator re-cored, which would eliminate the radiator as the source of the problem. Not an hour outside of Dallas though the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair ship. They replaced the water pump and thermostat, more possible causes of running hot. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. And then, temperature gauge climbed again. 
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-That, combined with the brutal West Texas heat was getting to us. I punted. We got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a bit and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. I ran out that night and paid way too much for temperature gun at a local hardware store and we hit the road again early the next morning. I stopped every half hour and got out and took temp readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was well within the operating parameters. I drove on into the mid day heat and watched the temperature gauge climb. But the readings from the gun never changed. I called my uncle back. If I were you he said, I'd pull out that temperature sensor and chuck it out in the desert somewhere." I hung up thinking that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't even know how to find the problems, let alone fix them. 
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-I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong, and I unhooked the temperature gauge from the sensor so it wouldn't stress me out, but I wasn't happy thinking about the 1000s of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be faulty $15 sensor. How did my uncle know what to do without even being there? How did I learn to do that? I didn't realize it at the time, but I was on my way to learning these things the same way my uncle did, the same way everyone does: the hard way, by bashing my head against the problem until I gave up and turned to someone with more experience.
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-Two months later, near the end of a summer spent in cool pine forests the rocky mountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000 foot pass near Ridgway Colorado. We'd made it to about 9,600 feet previously, and this pass was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go, so I thought we should be able to do it. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile out of town before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus only to see the same transmission cooler line leaking again. 
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-We turned around and limped back to Ridgway. I found a side street to park on, in front of a mechanic's shop as it turned out. I got under the bus to see what I could. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the flare was not just cracked but missing a whole chunk. The transmission cooler lines are fitted enough that I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare and reattach them. They were too short for that, and even if I could have made it work they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more that the transmission cooler ever cooled them.
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-I was forced to punt again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the us and eventually found one in nearby Montrose. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the campground. That night we repacked and loaded what we needed for a few days of tent camping in a rental car. 
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-That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room at Ridgway State Park, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. After he stuffed his laundry in the machine, we started talking. Eventually the conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked which engine was in it, he took a different tack than most people. He asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard and has haunted me ever since. He said, "do you turn your own wrenches?" I told him I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." 
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-This I realized that night is an absolute truth. You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the mechanics Montrose tried to find new transmission cooler lines for the bus. Eventually they did and we were on our way again, but not for long. A couple weeks later, coming down western Utah, bound for Zion National Park, I stopped for gas and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? 
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-It was a Sunday in Utah. We tried to find a mechanic, but there was no one open. Nothing happens on a Sunday in Utah. In the end we just pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. This time the leak was from the back of the transmission line rather than the front. I unscrewed it and sure enough, the flare was cracked. I knew what to do, but I didn't have to tools and the hardware stores weren't open. 
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-I climbed out from under and sat down on the step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife had just asked what we were going to do when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street, rattled and then came flying up and open with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was still at the shop working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line and took it inside and cut off the cracked flare and re-flared it. We put it back on and he showed me where the previous mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened it and cracked the metal. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday he told me.
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-This is part of what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later—because we haven't stopped needing to fix things. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace two belts, change the spark plugs, and half a dozen other projects. The bus will never not need fixing. But the relationship has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do now. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with our fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. 
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-Sitting at the side of the road in Nevada though that community feels far away. It wouldn't do me much good even it was here though. The engine overheating isn't really a thing that can be fixed. It's what happens when a small engine tries climb a big hill. Whether its fixing it, or just deal with it's limitations, old cars will teach you patience.
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-Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. 
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-I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though, I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decided to make another push up the mountains. The problem is that now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give us a mile before we overheat again. I will never know of course because the odometer is broken, but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the pull out. 
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-My wife and I discuss turning back. There's a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They have a sign out front that says no phone and not to bother them, but something tells me they'd be okay with bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It's been a long day of driving and the kids are tired and hot. 
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-Then we here that unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, probably a Harley Davidson, is rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike is too us and the rider pulls over. He checks to see if we're okay. I tell him we are. We go through the usual talk about the bus, but he tells us we're only about a mile from the top. 
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-That changes everything. Suddenly we're not quite so tired. The prospect of making it over the mountains feels possible again. We thank the rider and he continues on up. We decide to give the engine another bit to cool before we try again. I am thinking about a conversation I had with some construction workers earlier in the day. We had stopped at the top of the first pass and had a snack. A road work crew we’d passed coming up the mountain pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass, the one we're sitting on now. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”
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-This conversation comes back to me now and I mention it, as casually as I can, to my wife. She does not seem thrilled, but we agree to try for the top. It's a long mile, we never get above twenty miles an hour, but about half an hour later we are at the top. A spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opens up below. I can see the Sierra Nevada mountains rising up out the hazy valley. I have just a second to enjoy it before we go flying past a sign that says, "Caution, One Lane Road Ahead."
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-The narrows come up so fast we don't really have time to even plan for it. We're just in it. Fortunately, nothing is coming the other way, but it is very much a one lane road. To this day I have no idea what happens if you meet another car coming the opposite way, especially if its one of the empty hay trucks that drive the rest of highway 168 at about 70 miles an hour. 
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-Coming down the mountain is easier than coming up, but we do still stop to rest the brakes a few times. We have a vacuum brake system that works extremely well, but long continuous down grades of 6-8 percent do require taking breaks. A few hours later though we pull into a campground outside of Bishop California. It's empty this time of year and the road in is full of ruts that have the bus lurching and creaking around. There's a loud clang at one point and my wife and I look at each other, but I keep going and pull into the first campsite. I shut off the engine for the final time with a sense of deep relief.
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-The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is very hierarchical one, which means those us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.
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-That's part of why we were at the side of the road that day in Nevada. We were on our way to visit my uncle. I didn't know it yet that day, but he would end up saving us just couple of days later. He would keep the bus going when it almost broke completely, in an irreparable way. But more than that, he would show me how to turn my own wrenches. He helped me rebuild my carburetor and exhaust system, and he showed me that there was no mystery to it. It's all just nuts and bolts he would tell me every time I got frustrated. Remember it's all just nuts and bolts. 
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-Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. Most of the work I do in keeping this engine running happens in my head. A mechanic isn't someone who blindly turns wrenches, anyone can do that. A mechanic, professional or otherwise, is someone who can listen to an engine and figure out, based on experience, which nuts and bolts need turning. It's the problem solving that happens in your head that separates those who can fix an engine from those who cannot. This is a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still very early on this journey, but it is infectious and exhilarating when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.
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-It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've been fortunate to have my uncle who knows more about engines than I ever will to help me out, but there have been plenty of others as well. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos in the past, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of it put together and you have perhaps the most important part of repairing anything: the community.
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-Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. 
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-I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though, I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decided to make another push up the mountains. The problem is that now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give us a mile before we overheat again. I will never know of course because the odometer is broken, but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the pull out. Sure enough when we stop the engine is overheating it's just low enough on fluid that it hasn't flooded. 
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-I shut her down and this time the initial silence is broken by the sound of an engine off in the distance. People. 
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-Nevada is a lonely place. The so-called loneliest road in America runs across it. I think the road we’re on is far lonelier, but it's not as long, so I guess it doesn't rate. We'd had a good drive until we turned onto this road and got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. We'll take it slow, stop when we need too. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in Nevada, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.
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-Up and over the first pass was not too bad, though it was the windiest road we'd been on. We stopped at the pass and had a snack. A road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I just stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”
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-The bus is all mechanical and easy enough to understand, which is why so many people do. Take the thermostat, part of the coolant system that had us at the side of the road climbing up the White Mountains. The thermostat is controlled by a piece of wax that melts when it's hot, releasing a spring that lets coolant into the engine. As the engine cools the wax hardens, closing the spring so that coolant stops flowing and the engine heats up again. 
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-The engine temperature system is controlled by a piece of wax. The carburetor jets, which control how much gas and air are pulled into the carburetor and sent on to the combustion chambers are just metal cones you tighten or loosen with a screw driver. There are almost no special tools required to fix anything in the bus. I carry a lot of wrenches, a few screwdrivers, and a wide array of spare parts. That's about all I need to keep it going.
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-This has become my guiding design principle, my philosophy of technology if you will, the technology must connect me with the machine in a meaningful way. It doesn't have to be rational, it doesn't have to make sense even, but it must create that connection. There is no technology for its own sake, no technology that abstracts function for convenience, no technology that removes the human interaction for "simplicity" or "ease of use". Ease of use means I can use it, as well as repair it and rebuild it if need be.
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-Eventually I was able to track down reprints of the original shop manuals for the Dodge M300 chassis, which is the basis for the Travco, as well as many other motorhomes of the era. From reading this in the evenings around the campfire, I know that the designers of the bus meant for it to be maintained by anyone. It's written in simple language, with clear instructions, and explanations of why you need to do something as well has how to do it. 
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-I used the same guiding principle when upgrading things to make it livable for a family of five.Limiting complexity was a concious decision by me, just as it was a conscious decision by the Dodge and Travco engineers in 1969. 
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-The bus is all mechanical and easy enough to understand, which is why so many people do. Take the thermostat, part of the coolant system that had us at the side of the road climbing up the White Mountains. The thermostat is controlled by a piece of wax that melts when it's hot, releasing a spring that lets coolant into the engine. As the engine cools the wax hardens, closing the spring so that coolant stops flowing and the engine heats up again. 
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-The engine temperature system is controlled by a piece of wax. The carburetor jets, which control how much gas and air are pulled into the carburetor and sent on to the combustion chambers are just metal cones you tighten or loosen with a screw driver. There are almost no special tools required to fix anything in the bus. I carry a lot of wrenches, a few screwdrivers, and a wide array of spare parts. That's about all I need to keep it going.
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-I haven't always kept it going though. That's not where I started. For a long time I was happy to understand how it worked, but still let others do the actual work. A mechanic in Florida flared new transmission cooler lines for us. Another in Colorado did the shocks. Another in Utah fixed the transmission cooler lines (again). Everything on the inside I rebuilt and repaired myself, but the engine, for all its apparent simplicity, was still intimidating to me.
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-One evening in the laundry room at Ridgway State Park just outside of Ridgway Colorado, while watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, another man came in and, after he stuffed his laundry in the machine, we started talking. Eventually the conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked which engine was in it, he took a different tack than most people. He asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard and has haunted me ever since. He said, "do you turn your own wrenches?" I told him I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." 
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-I knew he was right. I knew he was right before he said anything because I had come to realize that knowing is not enough. Knowing only becomes useful when you apply it by doing. I knew it was time for me to start doing more, to start doing everything. Sometimes I get sick of crawling under the bus to fix things. Sometimes I want to make it all go away, just tow it to a mechanic and make it all better, leave me free to spend time with my kids. But that's not how it works. If I wanted to really be in control, if I wanted to be responsible for my own home, I had to take ownership of it, all of it. I had to turn my own wrenches. I realized that evening that I was not living up to the goals I claimed I had. I had to do the work myself. The knowledge was nothing without the know-how and the know-how took getting in there and getting dirty.
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-That's part of why we were at the side of the road that day in Nevada. We were on our way to visit my uncle. I didn't know it yet that day, but he would end up saving us just couple of days later. He would keep the bus going when it almost broke completely, in an irreparable way. But more than that, he would show me how to turn my own wrenches. He helped me rebuild my carburetor and exhaust system, and he showed me that there was no mystery to it. It's all just nuts and bolts he would tell me every time I got frustrated. Remember it's all just nuts and bolts. 
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-Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. Most of the work I do in keeping this engine running happens in my head. A mechanic isn't someone who blindly turns wrenches, anyone can do that. A mechanic, professional or otherwise, is someone who can listen to an engine and figure out, based on experience, which nuts and bolts need turning. It's the problem solving that happens in your head that separates those who can fix an engine from those who cannot. This is a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still very early on this journey, but it is infectious and exhilarating when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.
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-It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've been fortunate to have my uncle who knows more about engines than I ever will to help me out, but there have been plenty of others as well. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos in the past, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of it put together and you have perhaps the most important part of repairing anything: the community.
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-The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is very hierarchical one, which means those us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.
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-Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. 
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-I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though, I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decided to make another push up the mountains. The problem is that now we're starting from well, zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give up a mile before we overheat again. I will never know of course because the odometer is broken, but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decide to take advantage of the pull out. Sure enough when we stop the engine is overheating it's just low enough on fluid that it hasn't flooded. 
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-I shut her down and this time the initial silence is broken by the sound of an engine off in the distance. People. 
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-Nevada is a lonely place. The so-called loneliest road in America runs across it. I think the road were on is far lonelier, but it's not as long, so I guess it doesn't rate. We'd had a good drive until we turned onto this road and got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. We'll take it slow, stop when we need too. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in Nevada, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.
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-Up and over the first pass was not too bad, though it was the windiest road we'd been on. We stopped at the pass and had snack. A road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I just stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”
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-Down the back side despite my best efforts at downshifting the brakes started to smell. We took a break to let them rest and enjoy the view. Of absolute nothing. Excepting perhaps some portions of route 50 (the so-called loneliest highway) route 168 is the most remote road I’ve ever been on. There’s no civilization for its entire run over the White Mountains. Just empty desert and one lone building set way back from the road with a huge sign that says “no telephone available.” The only other vehicles we saw were a few empty hay trucks driving way too fast for the road.
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-We said goodbye and hit the road again. Climbing the third pass I started to smell that sweet smell of radiator fluid and pulled into the next turn out. The bus sat boiling over for a bit, maybe a quart, and then it stopped. We climbed out to sit for a while and consider our options. Except that there weren’t any really. With no cell reception to call a tow truck, no real way to turn around, and no where else to go even if we did, we had to get over the pass. At one point an older gentleman on a Harley stopped at see if we were okay. We chatted for a bit and he told us the top of the pass was only about four or five miles ahead, which was encouraging.
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-This is something Matthew Crawford explores extensively in his 2010 book, Shop Class as Soul Craft. Crawford's book is an extended meditation on what it means to work with your hands and abide by the rules of mechanics. There are hard limits, hard realities in the bus's engine that don't exist in the rest of my life. If a few words in this essay are slightly off that's on me to be sure, and I don't look good, but, well, life goes on. If the cam shaft lobes in the 318 are mere millimeters off the entire engine will be nothing but a hunk of useless metal in short order. 
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-"As a group, they have quite varied educational backgrounds and careers. What stands out is how smart they are and how much they enjoy what they do. Most of them were fortunate to find a mentor who encouraged them early on, but they are also largely self-taught, picking up new skills wherever they can. They challenge themselves with new ideas for projects and often share the results via the Internet. Makers are practical, clever, and creative. - https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/correspondence-fall-2006
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-Problem solving seems fun after the problem is solved. During the actual solving it’s less fun. Food, sleep, these things seem unimportant when I have a problem that needs solving stuck in my head. I tend to get obsessed about things. Even when I don’t want to. It’s one of the reasons I don’t do much programming anymore. I never let things go until I solve the problem to my satisfaction. Of course breaking a web server doesn't cost much relative to damaging an engine, so with the bus the stakes are much higher, which means the sullen thinking phase I pass through is correspondingly more sullen and requires more concentration.
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-Something here about the exhilaration of figuring things out. Example with the fuel pump and then later with the exhaust manifolds
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----
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-Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. 
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-These are the first three [philosophical "rules" of the Python programming language](https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonPhilosophy), which happens to be the thing that allows me to live in a Travco, traveling full time. 
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-After finding out about bus, the engine, and that we live in it "full time" as RVers say, the inevitable next question is—how? The American version of this is *what do you do?*. The European version (about half the people we met in National Parks and other public lands between 2017-2018 were visitors from abroad) is *what is your job?*. I prefer the European version for its specificity. 
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-The answer is that, since I walked out of the last restaurant kitchen I ran in 2005, I have been a writer and programmer, working from home. For a long time, thanks to demand, I was able to limit my programming to Python (even more specifically, the Django web framework). 
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-After years of working at home it occurred to me that I didn't actually need a house to work (yes, I am a slow learner). 
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-I pointed this out to my wife one day and somewhere over some beers while on vacation in Florida we decided to try living in an RV. Two months later we had the Travco, 9 months after that we were on the road. 
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-Lest you think programming from an RV is somehow glamorous... well, it's not. The project that sustained our early travels involved building an inventory tracking system. We're not talking about building cool apps for hot startups that were going to IPO. I prefer to work for small, family-run businesses even if that means building inventory tracking systems, which, trust me, is not glamorous. 
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-There is one aspect of work though that very much informed  
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-Later when I knew enough to know what questions to ask, I went to YouTube where dozens of total strangers walked me through how to repair everything from faulty wires to brake adjuster screws. But the biggest single step after my uncle set me on the path to turning my own wrenches was to buy a reprint of the original shop manual. Here were the words of the engineers who made the bus. How to test systems, what to do when different problems arise. Even how to tune things just the way you want them.
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-There are still things I can't fix. I don't travel with an engine lift so I can't do a complete rebuild. But since that afternoon in the laundromat I've replaced or rebuilt the carburetor, the radiator (twice), the water pump, the alternator, the power steering pump, the fuel pump (twice), the brakes, the shocks, the transmission cooler lines, and a host of other little things I've long since forgotten about. Far more important than any single thing I've fixed though is that I know it's all just nuts and bolts. I given the right tools and the enough time, anyone can fix anything in this bus, including me. Which is exactly where I wanted to be when I bought it.
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-And yet, despite all that, despite all the wrench turning, here we are, at the side of the road in Nevada. Because older vehicles might be repairable, but they have other limitations most of us aren't used to facing anymore. This is another part of what I love about the bus. It's an adventure every time I drive it. Nothing has failed in the buses systems to leave us at the side of the road. There is nothing for me to fix. Nothing is broken. The bus is just overworked. It may not have the power to get over the mountain. That's a limitation we've pushed a few times and each time we've made it what gets us over the top isn't technical skills, spare parts, or engine savvy, it's patience.
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-This is just one moment. This is another one. They pass by whether we use them or not. This is what I tell myself while I sit idly throwing gravel down into a dry ravine, waiting. Patience. This is just one moment. The rest of the day has been amazing. 
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-We woke that morning in the ghost town of Gold Point. We headed west because for nine months of that's a much of plan as we'd come up with, let's go west. West today started on Highway 266, a little climb up into the hills, through another ghost town and down some more hills into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on highway 168 that we got some hints of our future. There was an ominous collection of road signs indicating steep, winding roads ahead. There was even a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a three digit state highway in Nevada, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I figured it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.
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-Up and over the second pass was not too bad. It was the windiest road we'd driven in the bus, but we made it over the second pass into a valley with nothing. Not even phone service. There was one lone building set way back from the road with a huge sign that read “no telephone available."
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-We stopped for lunch and a road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the final pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there’s one part we call the narrows, it's only one lane through there." I just stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" "Seriously." "Don’t tell my wife that."
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-The kids are headed back up. They have gNo fossils were found, though 
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-and pulled into the next turn out. The bus sat boiling over for a bit, maybe a quart, and then it stopped. We climbed out to sit for a while and consider our options. Except that there weren’t any really. With no cell reception to call a tow truck, no real way to turn around, and no where else to go even if we did, we had to get over the pass. At one point an older gentleman on a Harley stopped at see if we were okay. We chatted for a bit and he told us the top of the pass was only about four or five miles ahead, which was encouraging.
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----
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-Programming is a relatively new discipline and still believes that the ideal can exist in the real world. Mechanics know better. Programmers, Python programmers anyway, invent things like virtual environments and attempt to sandbox their programs from outside influence, they try to ignore the real world and it keeps failing. Programmers call these failures bugs and pretend they'll all be fixed one day. They won't. Ask any mechanic. That's not how it goes in the real world, and you can't mitigate or abstract away the real world. Eventually programming will figure this out and become a mature discipline that realizes perfection only exists on paper. 
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-Behind that question I've come to think there are several others worth asking, the first is, how did this thing last so long when so little else has? The answer to that is a long and twisting tale, but the short version is that the Chrysler 318 LA engine was made for a long time, and used in a lot of vehicles, which is to say a lot of these engines are out there in the world. That created a huge market for parts and so far, that market continues to exist though I have to imagine it's shrinking every year. For now though, I can walk into any parts store in America and have whatever part I need in a couple of days.[^1]
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-There is, however, I think another question the people who've asked me about the bus engine have in mind though when they say, what engine does it have in it, they are, almost universally, people from the time when many people could and did repair their own engines.
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-[^1]: This is still true even with post pandemic shortages, though I, and many others, have noticed a significant drop in the quality of part available.
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-Somewhere far up the road there are cool pinyon-juniper woodlands with sagebrush meadows and bristlecone pine forests. 
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-Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.
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-Of course they do. They barely notice when we break down. They half like it. It's a chance to get out stretch their legs, explore the desert. This is part of why we live this way, to do impromptu things like exploring the desert.
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-I unbuckle the lap belt and lean over to open the doghouse and make sure it's just the radiator overheating. We live in a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. Now almost no one besides us seem to want one. Ours is electric blue with a wide white stripe wrapped around it. 
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-Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.
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-Up and over the second pass was not too bad either, though it was the windiest road we’ve been on. Down the back side despite my best efforts at downshifting the brakes started to smell. We took a break to let them rest and enjoy the view. Of absolute nothing. Excepting perhaps some portions of route 50 (the so-called loneliest highway) route 168 is the most remote road I’ve ever been on. There’s no civilization for its entire run over the White Mountains. Just empty desert and one lone building set way back from the road with a huge sign that says “no telephone available.” The only other vehicles we saw were a few empty hay trucks driving way too fast for the road.
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-We had snack and a road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, “there’s one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there.” I just stared at him for a minute. “Seriously?” “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”
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-We said goodbye and hit the road again. Climbing the third pass I started to smell that sweet smell of radiator fluid and pulled into the next turn out. The bus sat boiling over for a bit, maybe a quart, and then it stopped. We climbed out to sit for a while and consider our options. Except that there weren’t any really. With no cell reception to call a tow truck, no real way to turn around, and no where else to go even if we did, we had to get over the pass. At one point an older gentleman on a Harley stopped at see if we were okay. We chatted for a bit and he told us the top of the pass was only about four or five miles ahead, which was encouraging.
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-Before it explodes you can smell it coming. A whiff of tk slips in through the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. 
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-That's when I start looking for a place to pull over. Not that I need one really. I haven't seen another car in four hours of driving. Most of the population of Nevada lives in Las Vegas, and we are not in Las Vegas anymore.
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-We are on highway 168 somewhere between a ghost town and the top of the White Mountains. 
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-I stop right in the middle of the road. Why not? 
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-No one speaks. We all, my wife, three children, and myself, listen to the hiss of the radiator boiling over. Then my wife turns around and says to kids, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" Of course they do. They barely notice when we break down. They half like it. It's a chance to get out stretch their legs, explore the desert. This is part of why we live this way, to do impromptu things like exploring the desert.
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-I unbuckle the lap belt and lean over to open the doghouse and make sure it's just the radiator overheating. We live in a 1969 Dodge Travco, 
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-The view under the doghouse is benign. The engine is fine. The Dodge 318 LA series motor is one of the most indestructible engines ever made. I could with a few simple tools pull the entire thing apart right here at the side of the road and fix anything in it. There are some parts in this beast that can't be replaced, but they aren't in the engine. I would like to avoid doing that of course. It's doubtful I'd get it back together in running shape anyway. When we left a year ago I knew next to nothing about engines. I've been slowly learning as I go, learning the hard way, by breaking down and then figuring out how to get it going again. One thing I have learned, it's damn near indestructible. A few mountains in Nevada aren't going to kill it, it just needs to rest every now and then. Catch its breath. The world of 1969 didn't have always-on technology. You took breaks. You rested.
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-The radiator has already stopped overflowing. In half an hour it'll be cool enough that I can open it and top it off with some water to maybe get us the rest of the way over the mountain. I head outside to see what the kids are up to. 
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-It's late September in the high foothills of the White Mountains. There's not much around. Tufts of creosote dot a moonscape of rock. There's a cluster of cottonwoods at the bottom of a dry arroyo just down the slope from us. It's the only shade we've seen in a day of driving. My wife and kids head down to play in the shade. 
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-get out to survey the scene. 
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-This isn't the first time we've overheated, it won't be the last. If you want to resurrect and live in a piece of 1960's Americana like the Dodge Travco, you have to be okay with overheating. You have to be okay with stepping back in time to an era when travel was more open ended. 
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-A thin thread of a smell, like bacon frying downstairs when you were a kid and it was too cold to get up until that bacon was ready. You know it's coming though, old RV engines overheat climbing mountains. It is what it is. 
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-We're bound for California and all we've got are paper maps. Which is good because there hasn't been phone service for days. 
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-More description of the Nevada desert. The kids go off to play. Corrinne looks for pottery and fossils, rocks.
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-Something about Henry Miller driving into LA. 
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-"optional sewage incinerator system, the “Destroilet,” a gas incinerator-type toilet that almost eliminated the need to empty holding tanks. There were problems to be sure: the 318-cubic-inch engine in the early models had to work very hard to go up any significant incline; there were stability issues because of the lack of anti-sway bars, and its low-slung body hampered tire changing"
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-Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I assumed it meant no passing lane. 
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diff --git a/essays/safety-third.txt b/essays/safety-third.txt
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-If you land on luxagraf.net on an odd day of the month, you might notice the little tag line under the site title is "safety third". This comes from a sticker we saw on a pole outside the [Henry Miller Library](https://henrymiller.org) in [Big Sur, California](https://images.luxagraf.net/2017/2017-11-28_161158_monterey_picwide.jpg). Miller no doubt would have agreed. He might have ranked safety even lower in his decision calculus. I often do.
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-<img src="images/2023/2017-11-28_161158_monterey.jpg" id="image-3319" class="picfull" />
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-Every time we go to any sort of government park -- state, national, county, city, you name it -- we get handed a set of rules. I can tell which level of government land we are on by the number of rules, the more rules, the higher level government. These rules are invariably couched in terms of safety. 
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-They range from the ridiculous to the obvious, but almost never tell anyone anything they didn't already know. As we all know, these rules serve no purpose beyond heading off lawsuits. Go abroad to less litigious cultures (like Mexico) and you'll discover there are far fewer rules. 
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-The Safety Third sticker became our antidote to the endless rules of public spaces. It was a good family joke. Whenever we do something other people might frown on, one of us will invariably shout, "safety third!" before plunging ahead. 
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-Then the pandemic happened.
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-Regardless of your opinion on the response to the disease, one overarching truth struck me: a very vocal and powerful segment of our culture believes that safety trumps everything. For some people I realized, all those ridiculous signs aren't ridiculous. They aren't a joke. They aren't just their to head off lawsuits. For some people these signs are words to live by. 
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-What was more troubling though was that these people assumed that the rest of us would agree with their thinking, that nothing is worth risking life for, absolutely nothing. 
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-I think we need to go back to the phrase itself and think about what we're really saying when we say "Safety First". If safety is truly first then love, joy, honesty, purpose, and a thousand other elements of human existence mean nothing once they conflict with safety. 
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-We saw this in the pandemic when loved ones were forced to die alone isolated in hospitals because it would not have been "safe" for their families to be with them. Again, I don't care what you think of the disease, there is some fucked up thinking behind that "logic".
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-Still, this thinking shouldn't have been surprising. It's the natural outcome of an obsession with safety. Our lives were already littered with the tools of safety -- rules, warning labels, helmets, straps, leashes, railings, walls, soaps, disinfectants, goggles, and so on. Who will object to a few more on top of that? 
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-But I am not so much concerned with any new levels of safety mania, I'd prefer to cut it off at the root. I don't want to live obsessing over safety, and I don't want my kids to live that way either. I suspect most people don't. You probably don't.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_160211_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3316" class="picfull caption" />
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-Safety is an endless positive feedback loop. The safer you think your are, the less risk you are willing to take. Once you get on that treadmill, it's nearly impossible to get off without knocking the whole thing over. People get trapped. Witness Howard Hughes, an extreme, but illuminating example. Cultures too seem to get trapped, with ours currently steaming up that lofty mountain of self-imposed isolation and madness that Howard Hughes pioneered.
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-Before I get too deep it's probably necessary to point out that if safety is at one end of a spectrum and reckless idiocy is at the other, in rejecting an obsession with safety I am not suggesting the antidote is reckless idiocy. The opposite of one idea is invariably another bad idea. Sanity is in the middle.
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-There is a third option between the timidity born of fear and safety obsession, and cliff diving in Acapulco. It's called thinking for yourself. You can find a balance point between paranoia and recklessness, recognizing that other people will find different balance points than you and that's okay. 
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-This is what I mean when I say safety third. Not that you should be reckless, but that thinking of safety first isn't going to lead to a meaningful life. When you come to the end of your life, whenever that may be, I am confident that you are not going to be thinking "I wish I had been safer". Bonnie Ware's famous book, *The Top Five Regrets of the Dying* has [not one mention of safety](https://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/).
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-Life is not always safe. The sooner you accept this and move on, the happier you will be. Just getting out of bed is fraught with risk. Ask Hughes. He eventually stopped doing it. So if it's safety you really want, that's probably the way to go. 
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-Still, I'd like to propose that things aren't actually nearly as risky as our ingrained safety-first mentality might make it seem. You may have noticed you weren't born wearing a helmet. In fact your skull was literally smashed as you were born and yet here you are. You then grew to have a reasonably strong skull, similar models managed to help the rest of your species survive lo these last 400,000 or so years. And, while you weren't born with knee and elbow pads, you were born with some pretty remarkable joints and an almost Wolverine-like ability to heal thanks to a very sophisticated immune system. All of which is to say that nature, god, whatever you like to attribute this state of affairs to, has provided you with a pretty good starting point. You're got a good system for avoiding and dealing with injury should you miscalculate risk in some way.
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-Proponents of the safety-industrial complex will here likely note that you weren't born with a mountain bike or internal combustion engine at your disposal, and therefore all the defenses of nature are useless, which is true, to a point. 
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-This is an important objection, we *have* made the world less safe for ourselves. Yet here we are. Enough of us somehow hanging on, just walking around breathing and doing stuff and not dying. 
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-Ironically the one time it might be worth considering, for example, a helmet -- while driving 65 MPH down a highway -- no one does, and, more to the point, even the most ardent of safety-first supporters will look at you like an idiot if you strap on a helmet before climbing in their Prius.
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-What we're left with then is a pretty good system for avoiding and coping with injury, and the notion that we're awfully bad at figuring out which activities are actually dangerous.
-
-It'd be easy here to point out some of the many other ironies this leads to, for example how padded playgrounds actually lead to children taking greater risks because the padding literally cushions them from life's little bruises, which then spectacularly backfires when they encounter the rest of life, which lacks padding. The whole reason you need to get hurt playing on the playground is so you come to understand what hurts, what you can do, what you can't do, and how to use the information to calculate which new activities you undertake might be risky and what you can do to mitigate risk. You don't understand risk until you take some and earlier you do that, the less painful your failures will be.
-
-But then our safety mania was never rooted in logic, it's not rooted in a concern for safety at all, but in a fear of death. 
-
-It seems axiomatic that fear of death is a natural outcome of materialist beliefs. Remember that we learned in the pandemic that, for our institutions and leaders, death is the worst possible thing. It is, from their point of view, the ultimate failure of man. It is the one limit no one can get around and therefore the thing to be most feared. But why? Why fear what is as much a part of life as the rest of life?
-
-Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "safety mania and death phobia are signs of a disconnection from purpose and passion. **If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose.**" (emphasis mine)
-
-In other words death phobia is a result of not knowing how to live.
-
-Disconnection from purpose and passion is where death phobia begins to feedback into itself, driving and increased obsession with safety, which in turn makes us incredibly risk adverse, which in turn keeps us from exploring and potentially finding our purpose and passion. On and on in a viscous cycle. 
-
-It's a vicious cycle that infantilizes us further and further at every turn. The more we avoid for fear of our safety the more lose our ability to judge what is and isn't dangerous. Even those of us who grew up with the good hard ground under our jungle gyms can end up forgetting those lessons and come to see the world as a big bad place full of dangerous stuff. 
-
-How do you get out of the cycle? If you're reading this, chances are you aren't in that cycle, but I have an idea of how we get out at a cultural level: By playing without our helmets.
-
-If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play. If you can't play, you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. A helmet means supervision. We who play are unsuperviseable.
-
-This I believe is how we remake the world: by playing.
-
-To play amidst a world full of rules is perhaps the most subversive act.
-
-I know, that's not a Very Serious Solution that Very Serious People can go out and implement, but that's the point isn't it? To remake the world any other way would end up right back here eventually.
-
-You beat the safety game by playing a different one. You play the personal responsibility and risk management game. You go slow, you learn your limits, but then you keep playing. You push your limits. You do things that scare you because they also call to you. You keep expanding and growing, and when the end finds you, you won't have to think... I wish I had...
-
-
-
-This is why blanket rules are ridiculous and ignored. The sign that says danger, no lifeguard on duty means little if you know how to read the water to avoid rip currents and are a strong swimmer. If you aren't a strong swimmer and don't even know what a rip current is, then the message of the sign might be important, but in the world littered with such signs that one is just so much more noise. You ignore it.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-To play is to be outside the lines of material culture. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It is outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly [^1]. 
-
-[^1]: I am indebted to Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga's book *Homo Ludens*, for this definition of play.
-
-
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-
-
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-
-Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9]
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
-
-I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
-
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-
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-
-Safety is largely illusory anyway.
-
-Oscar Wilde once said “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”
-
-
-for what it really is and it has made me afraid.
-
-
-
-I should probably make it part of [my code](/code).
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-I think the safety first obession is the reason we had a worldwide panic over Covid, it's the reason so many young adults are meek and unable to handle the world, it's the reason our leaders are failing us, and it's a big part of the reason so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. 
-
-It's also a big part of the reason we gave up our independence to ["experts."](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming). Much of the reason we are told we must rely on "experts" is for our safety. 
-
-
-
-
-Clearly, since people like us have been ignoring them.
-
-social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
-https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
-The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death.
-
-
-
-The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien
-
-
-
-
-Because our civilizational answer to “Why are we here?” has unraveled, many of us individually have trouble answering that question too, for the individual story draws from the collective.
-
-OK, I realize I may have risen to too high an altitude for the practical purpose of preventing the next bout of pandemania. So I will end with this: We can reduce our general susceptibility to fear-mongering by reducing the levels of fear current in society. A society ridden with fear will acquiesce to any policy that promises them safety. How do we reduce ambient levels of fear? There is no single answer. Besides, each one of us already knows how.
-
-https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5
-
-
-I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
-
-
-
-
diff --git a/essays/tnf.txt b/essays/tnf.txt
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-[<span class="small italic">I wrote this essay the night I found out that Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face passed away. I never actually met the man, but I did work for his company for a while and it remains one of the more memorable jobs I've had.</span>]
-
-In 1995 I dropped out of college for the first time[^1]. I had made it through three semesters, which I thought was pretty good. Especially considering how much college had been getting in the way of my life, which at the time consisted mainly of hiking, climbing, surfing and generally living outdoors. 
-
-It wasn't an expensive lifestyle by any means. I shared a single bedroom trailer a few blocks from the beach (location, location, location) for which my roommate and I paid, I believe, $220 each. Everything I needed, save the mountains and desert, was within walking distance.
-
-My biggest expense was gear. Rock climbing gear especially tended to be both expensive and, due to the often brutal conditions it existed in, short-lived. It was all good and well to live on bean burritos, but smart climbers did not try to overextend the life of ropes and cams. 
-
-Looking around for ways to fund this lifestyle I did what countless others before and after me had done -- I got a job at the nearest outdoor retailer that would have me.
-
-In my case that turned out to be The North Face[^2]. My girlfriend in high school had worked at the Gap so I knew the retail clothing drill more or less and I definitely knew outdoor gear. I ate, slept and breathed it. Aside from obscure punk bands, there was little I knew more about than outdoor gear. I turned in an application and after one short interview, got the job. 
-
-I was quite proud of myself. I had set out to do something and I did it. I won't try to unpack the privilege going on here, I was 19. I thought I had skills. I got some inkling of how little skills and how much unearned privilege I enjoyed later when my manager Kristine confessed to me over after work drinks that I was horrible at interviewing and she almost didn't hire me because I never looked her in the eye. But she thought I was cute, so I got the job. Skills my ass.
-
-I also go the job in part because it was nearly summer, which meant that half the regular employees would soon be departing for seasonal work around the west -- guiding white water trips, leading climbing expeditions and otherwise doing the sorts of things that people (and The North Face itself) expected North Face employees to do.
-
-This was back a bit, when The North Face (hereafter TNF) still appealed primarily to those spending their lives outdoors. I was selling gear mainly to fellow hikers, climbers and campers. Most of them didn't need the expensive gear they were buying, but then again nobody ever does until they do and then your life depends on it. Or so we all told ourselves. I originally wanted the job because I wanted one of the TNF four season tents. I dumped probably 25 percent of what I made back into gear and you know the one thing I never bought? A tent. Naturally. 
-
-Still, back then a job at TNF was a highly coveted thing for someone with my aspirations, which were basically to work as little as possible and spend as much time outside as possible.
-
-While the perks were good and the pay enabled me to get by and do what I wanted to do, the job itself was little different that what my ex-girlfriend had been doing at the Gap. It was retail clothing sales. It was boring and the pay was pretty shit. 
-
-There were a few things I enjoyed about it though. I enjoyed helping out the occasional thru-hiker calling from somewhere along the PCT in need of new gear or a warranty repair. The TNF back then had the best warranty in the business. If an item could be repaired it was repaired. If it couldn't be repaired, it was replaced. Very few questions asked. In fact employees like me could make the judgment call ourselves. For PCT thru-hikers I usually just sent out a new bit of gear, usually without even seeing their old one. They were out there doing it, I considered it my job to make sure they did it.
-
-Another part of the job I enjoyed was the gear testing. It didn't happen very often, but a few times, maybe four or five times in my nine months working there, the San Francisco headquarters would send out some prototype piece of gear they were thinking of making into a product. They'd send out a few tents to all the stores or a dozen jackets and the employees would take them out on their next trip. On one hand it was free gear, on the other it was possibly defective gear. It added a bit of spice to your trip.
-
-I have no idea how other stores did it, but at our store the gear shipments would generally come in on Thursdays. If there was gear for us to test we would all look over the schedule, see who had the weekend off, sometimes call unsuspecting fellow employees and try to switch shifts, and then make a group trip to the desert. 
-
-After work on Friday we'd meet up at the Goat Hill Tavern, a terrible, brightly lit bar with sawdust and peanut shells scattered all over the floor, chosen chiefly because it was across the street from the store. One unlucky soul would be the designated driver and the rest would proceed to drink themselves silly. When the bar closed we would all pile in Roy's wood paneled Dodge minivan and high tail it out to Joshua Tree National Park. 
-
-We'd get into the campground around three or four in the morning (yeah, we were those people), in varying states of exhaustion, bleary-eyed drunkness and sometimes already hungover. We would then proceed to do any tent testing. If anyone could get a prototype tent set up in the dark, it passed muster. We'd give it rave reviews. If we gave up and just threw our sleeping bags in the dirt the tent got a bad review while we got a few hours of sleep under the Milky Way before the blazing desert sun found us early the next morning. Then it was a full day of hungover climbing and a long drive back to the beach. It was a hard life.
-
-The other thing I remember about working at TNF was the incredible amount of downtime. In fact, if my memory is correct there were only about 100 customers the entire time I worked there[^3]. There were stretches on mid-week afternoons when no one would come in for four hours or more.
-
-There was a small climbing wall which we regularly reconfigured in a futile effort to challenge ourselves, but by and large we sat around reading books and magazines. I got a great many other things out of working at TNF, including things I would never have expected, like connections to the Mexican mob and an introduction to really good Thai food, Thai food so good I wouldn't taste better until I made it to Thailand.
-
-Great jobs are like that and despite the fact that TNF was essentially retail sales, there was something more there, something about the company itself that went beyond what my girlfriend did at the Gap. 
-
-Until one day all that stopped. 
-
-My good friend and manager was sent packing and replaced by a professional salesman fresh off a stint at Mervins. I quit the first day I worked with him and have never regretted it. Everything is grand, until it isn't.
-
-[^1]: I would drop out four more times from three different schools before finally graduating from the University of Georgia, 12 years and 3000 miles from where I started.
-[^2]: I had originally hoped to get a job at a privately owned shop named Adventure 16, but they were not hiring at the time I was looking.
-[^3]: This is no doubt a slight exaggeration. However the store I worked at did eventually close for lack of business and in fact entire shopping center did the same a bit later. Last time I was in the area it was largely abandoned and in the process of being converted into loft apartments.
diff --git a/essays/whats-missing-is.txt b/essays/whats-missing-is.txt
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-# What's Missing Is
-## A story (fictional) based on my grandparents and other bits of family history.
-### Originally published by The Cost of Paper https://web.archive.org/web/20150506051746/http://1888.center/scott-gilbertson/
-
-Claire woke up in a sleeping bag. The familiar shimmer of nylon against her skin. The smell of creosote and dampness. Already the darkness was lifting off the desert in front of her. She rolled over on the chaise lounge and groped the ground until she found her headlamp.
-
-The little tuna can stove was back against the wall of the house. She stretched until she could hook it with a fingertip. She filled it with alcohol and lit it with a match. As the stove heated up she poured the water and grounds into the moka pot.
-
-She sat up, still in the sleeping bag, and sipped the inky black coffee. She thought of something an ex had once said to her, "Claire, normal people want to be liked and accepted. You don't seem to give a shit. All you seem to care about is your coffee in the morning and your drinks in the evening". More or less. She took another sip. But not really.
-
-Little bubbles of the past had been welling up and bursting on the surface like that ever since the plane touched down yesterday evening. Every time she heard that horrid kitty litter crunch of someone walking on the endless gravel of Tucson, some bit of her younger self broke loose inside. 
-
-She was facing west, but could tell that the sun had not cleared the horizon. Two Cardinals flitted in the Mesquite tree at the edge of the patio. Flashes of red amongst the blacks and greens. She listened to them talking, the thin chip of their song muted by the morning stillness.
-
-The desert began to sketch itself in the morning light, watercolor hues of sand and rock that surged together over the rolling canvas until everything was a million rioting shades of pink sandstone that held the river plain like a cradle, the dark green Palo Verde and Mesquite groves nestled like some dark scars in the blushing sand. It seemed to extend forever, spreading out to the west until it climbed up and disappeared into the green, juniper and pine cloaked world of the Catalina mountains. 
-
-It was wet. The rain she had dreamed was not just a dream. Everything beyond the few feet of solid patio cover where she had slept was dripping. The foot of her sleeping bag was wet. She slid out into the cool of the morning, gravel gouging at her heels, and hung the sleeping bag to dry from a hook on the patio cover. 
-
-She cupped her hand to the window and looked inside the house. Her grandfather was passed out in the recliner, fully reclined, just the way she had left him six or seven hours ago, when his eyelids had finally slid shut over the constellations of grief she had watched drift quietly across those dark expanses. The TV still flickered. Ever since she was a girl, the only way he had ever slept. 
-
-<hr />
-
-The late evening sun was just starting to temper its edge, take a little something off finally, maybe give a little respite from this goddamn heat, Ambrose was thinking when the entirety of the gravel station lot just outside the window was swallowed by a giant dust cloud that might, he realized, have somewhere in it a car, a customer, perhaps even customers, something he had not otherwise seen since much earlier in the day, back when it was hotter than Ambrose's repertoire of swear words could convey.
-
-He'd been wondering for some time if he'd need to expand that repertoire for the jungle. The Army was unclear on many things, especially to Guardsmen like Ambrose, not the least of which was how many words he might need to describe the heat of Panama.
-
-He was still standing in the shadows of the garage wiping his tanned forehead with a greasy rag, trying to imagine humidity, or at least the idea of water, when he heard the door slam and the inevitable gravel crunch of footsteps coming his way. Squinting against the glare of the setting sun he was just stepping out of the shadows when a woman's voice startled him.
-
-"Sorry about the dust."
-
-"That's all right ma'am."
-
-"We need some petrol and a place to stay."
-
-"Okay. Well I'll fill it up for you. You can stay down to street at the Vida Court. I'm sure there's some rooms."
-
-"I see."
-
-Ambrose followed her back to the truck where two small boys and a teenage girl sat atop a pile of trundles and suitcases in the bed. He nodded to the boys and tipped his hat to girl who met his gaze directly, without flinching in the slightest, which brought a warm heat to his cheeks before he could stop it.
-
-Ambrose turned his head away and busied himself with the gas pump. 
-
-"Heat brings the color to your cheeks." The woman was beside him again.
-
-"Yes ma'am." Ambrose stared at the ground. "Been a hell of summer, if you'll pardon me."
-
-"It's not always this hot?"
-
-"It's always this hot, but not for so long." The woman said nothing, Ambrose glanced up at her. "Ma'am?"
-
-"I was thinking, I was wondering if my grandchildren will have to endure this place."
-
-"Ma'am?"
-
-"We're here for my husband. They said that the dry air would be good for his tuberculosis."
-
-"Mmmhmm. They say that." Ambrose studied his feet.
-
-"I don't expect I will get to leave." She was staring off in the distance. "But I'd like to think my daughter might."
-
-He waited a moment, but she did not say anything more. She paid him in coins and climbed back in the truck. The engine coughed back to life after a few sputters that Ambrose attributed to grungy spark plugs. Most people didn't know to soak them in gasoline, it was rare that they need to be replaced. He decided he liked the woman, she was maybe a bit odd, but the heat did funny things to you if you weren't used to it. He imagined she would endure, something about her seemed incapable of not enduring. At the very least he didn't feel like she should need to buy new spark plugs just yet. He would tell her as much tonight, after he went home to the Vida Court.
-
-He watched the truck crawl out onto Prince road. He followed it out, kicking a rock out the driveway into the road. He saw the brake lights at the end of the street. The truck lurched into the Vida Court. He thrust his hands in his pockets and walked back toward the office.
-
-<hr />
-
-If she really didn't give a shit Claire reasoned, then she would not have come. People who don't give a shit don't abandon their lives half way around the world, book very expensive last minute plane tickets and come back to this godforsaken fucking desert.
-
-Although, in truth, now that she was here, she missed this desert in some deranged way that made her half understand why people stayed in abusive relationships. Hate is just a perversion of love, but rage, rage is another thing altogether.
-
-She had left the desert in a kind of rage, a dull rage of unfairness wrapped up in punk rock and politics, and being born at the wrong time in the wrong place to the wrong people. The people who didn't stick around.
-
-Claire found her aunt's cigarettes tucked in the side of her purse, which she had left next to the impossibly long telephone cord that connected the old push button land line her grandfather insisted on keeping around. She took two and ducked out the back door for walk in the desert. She wanted to get away from her aunts. 
-
-Her mother's sisters both thought she didn't give a shit. They always had. All because Claire hadn't cried at her own parents' funeral. As if a six year old is aware of social decorums. 
-
-They still hated her for it. Or, if not hated, at least thought she was strange, most likely a little dangerous and best studied in silence. That she insisted on sleeping outside, like animal she had heard her aunt say last night, only reaffirmed this belief. But outside was the only place the rage dissipated. Outside there was only the heat and the stillness and the relative cool of the evening and mornings. Coffee and cocktails were not so far off after all perhaps. 
-
-There was also the rather insulting move of leaving the desert. Claire did what no one else in the family had dared to do since her grandmother stepped off the beat up flatbed into the cactus-strewn world of kitty litter. Leave. We are here to go she had said with the smirk and she disappeared over the horizon, traveling halfway around the world to do god knows what. Claire imagined how much they must enjoy talking about her when she wasn't around. Sometimes she thought she should sit them down and just tell them everything, but they had over the years made it pretty clear that they actually liked her better as an object of fascination than a person. Who was she to deny them such pleasure? 
-
-It was April, the edge of searing heat, more of a baking heat right now. The dry heat of spring in a place where somehow flowers still contrived to not just exist, but explode out of the seemingly dead soil. Claire looked down at the cigarette between her fingers. She'd quit years before, but somehow it seemed like something Emma would do. Now though, standing in the middle of a flame red cluster of Ocotillo flowers she realized Emma would never have lit the cigarette. Would never have even taken it. Would never have even come at all. She was never part of the desert the way Claire was, she had floated above it like a cloud.
-
-Claire watched a tiny dust devil gathering in the wash down the hill. The desert was where the earth's dust came from. Bits of the Sahara coat the Amazon every year. There is no escaping the desert. Even if you travel half way around the world your desert past will find you, grain by grain, dust to dust. Everything ends up back here in the dry desert plain where it settles and bakes in the heat until it's all as hollow as a corn husk. A little wind and it would all be off again, headed south down to the Mexican coast and out to sea.
-
-<hr />
-
-Emma had developed a peculiar fascination with chewing sand. It came to her mouth as a dry film licked off her lips. From western Oklahoma onward she had been chewing at the nothingness of sand. Now, after jumping down from the truck bed, she violently spat the contents of her mouth on a cactus and resolved to never chew sand again. 
-
-Except that it kept settling on her lips. And she kept licking them, out of habit. Perhaps, she thought, the whole West is just one thin dusty film settling over the world. Certainly the room at the Vida Court was saturated with fine grit. 
-
-Mother had laid Father out on the bed and was giving him a glass of water and some saltines. They were talking in low voices that Emma could not make out. She went outside to get her bag and have a look around.
-
-The Vida Court was, Emma reasoned, better than sitting atop trundles in the back of the flatbed wedged between sweaty siblings and a mucus and blood-spewing father. And that was about all that could be said of it. 
-
-It was not, for instance, a ten-room farmhouse with three floors and a tornado cellar. Nor was it surrounded by endless acres of imported genuine Kentucky bluegrass with a semicircle of drooping cottonwood trees growing around the pond. There were no ponds for miles. Just a small, rusted copper tub full of sun-warmed water.
-
-It was only after she removed her stockings that she realized how thoroughly the sand had saturated her. Or perhaps, she thought, perhaps my thighs have tanned through these skirts. She climbed into the water and watched as the brown of her legs faded back to milky white, the dusty film of Oklahoma and New Mexico drifting across the water like great orange clouds moving from one end of the tub to the other.
-
-She could see the young man from the gas station through the chalky pink haze of the bathroom window, but only as a still, dark frame in a chair on the porch. It wasn't long before Emma found herself standing in the bathtub, dripping water, watching the shadowy porch for signs of movement.
-
-She put on a clean dress and evacuated the bungalow as fast as she could without raising undue suspicion. The sun was already gone, but the air still held the heat like a treasure of the day. She walked around the cacti and was tempted to touch the thorns. She reached out her hand and ran it from the center out and down the edge, careful to keep her hand moving with the hooked direction of the needles.
-
-"So y'all sold your farm, bought the truck and hauled your dad out here for some fresh air huh?"
-
-His voice startled her enough that she almost leaned on the cactus for support.
-
-"Sorry?"
-
-"You sold the farm, bought the truck and here you are, TB and all."
-
-"Something like that."
-
-"We get quite a few passing through these days..."
-
-"Oh we're staying I believe."
-
-"I'm Ambrose"
-
-He extended his hand and she stepped out of the cacti and took it in her own. 
-
-"Emma."
-
-"You know, Emma," he took another sip of the beer for courage, "that truck you're family is drivin... you need to pull the plugs and soak them in some gasoline. I can do it if you like."
-
-<hr />
-
-The funeral was over by four. Claire sat on the patio with her Grandfather, eating leftover Fancy Franks. 
-
-"These were her favorite," he said staring down at the last one in his hand. 
-
-"No they weren't, she hated little cocktail crap like this."
-
-He laughed and pitched the last one out into the desert. "You're right, she did."
-
-She watched a Brown Thrasher study the frank from a low branch of a Palo Verde tree. "Are you sure you're going to be okay?"
-
-"Have I ever not been okay?"
-
-"You wife just died Papa..."
-
-"She died three years ago Claire, her body stopped working recently is all. I'm old, she was old. People die. It's what we do Claire. Next time you come around here it'll be for me."
-
-"Don't take this the wrong way Papa, but I'm not coming back for you."
-
-"I know."
-
-"How do you know that?"
-
-"Because when I'm gone there's no one to come back to."
-
-Claire smiled. "True, plus I'd hate to disappoint all of them. Everyone thinks I don't give a shit. If I show up here after you... well, that would seem like I gave a shit wouldn't it?"
-
-"Who thinks you don't give a shit? Give a shit about what? They don't think that."
-
-"About anything. And they do. Like everyone else has these complicated situations and feelings and worries and all this shit and I just float away on a bunch of merry red little balloons."
-
-Ambrose chuckled. "Who thinks this?"
-
-Claire gestured around her, "I dunno, everyone..."
-
-"Mmmhmm. Claire, you know better than most that there is no everyone."
-
-
-<hr />
-
-
-The rock sounded like a bomb against the window. She was a foot clear of her bed before she had even made sense of the noise. Then she heard his hissing whisper, "Emma..."
-
-She pulled the window up and crawled out, tumbling down into his arms. "Stop with the rocks, you scared the life out of me". 
-
-They crept through the sandy yard and down the banks of Palo Verde snarls to the edge of the river. He stopped suddenly and she crashed into his body. He started to say something, but she smothered his mouth with a kiss.
-
-Later they lay on their backs listening to the river. Ambrose told her the names of the stars that he could remember, making up the rest on the spot. 
-
-She asked about the stars in Panama and then suddenly, "you aren't going to get Malaria are you?"
-Despite all the words he had conjured for Panama this was one he had not thought of. The Army had not mentioned it either. "Do they have malaria in Panama?"
-
-"Of course. And snakes and worms and all sorts of nastiness. It's a jungle you know."
-
-"I know. It'll be beautiful, no desert, no dry cracking horridness."
-
-Emma smiled. "You've never felt humidity have you?" 
-
-"No, but I already know I love it."
-
-Emma laughed. "You might be the only person I've met who's happy to be going to war."
-
-"I'm not happy to be going to war, but I'm happy to get out of here. I've been trying to get out of here for years."
-
-She laughed again ans stroked his cheek. "You can always leave anywhere Ambrose, you just go. You just have to make sure you understand what you're leaving." She slid out of his arms and walked down to the water's edge. He watched as she crouched down at the river’s edge and skipped rocks out toward the middle. 
-
-
-<hr />
-
-
-The patio had a fan. It spun too slow to move the air much. It had always reminded Claire of a tape reel or a movie projector, except that it was broken and only spun backward. A tape reel forever rewinding. 
-
-The rain had started again off in the distance, a low cloud hung over the mountains, a black mist trailing down from it, filling the canyons and ravines with drops that would become a raging wall of water by the time it passed by here tomorrow morning.
-
-Inside the house Ambrose tilted back the reclining chair with a long angry sounding trail of ratcheting clicks. She could hear her aunts talking in the kitchen, their words muffled by the faucet and clatter of dishes. She heard the TV come on. They would be running the ticker tape at the bottom of television again tonight: Flash flood warning in effect. 
-
-Tomorrow the newspaper would want everyone to know that someone had died; that a new golf course is going to be built on the hillside above someone’s watery grave; that the threat of flood is the price we pay for sunshine; that the desert is a barren curse; that every place has its curse, that eventually all the curses will combine; that everything will be cursed; that the curse is not so bad; that loneliness is a curse; that loneliness is different than alone, that still, the coffee is quite good down at the....
-
-Claire slid her legs into the sleeping bag, enjoying the dry slipperiness of nylon against her skin. It felt like slipping between worlds, cool dry worlds where she could float on red balloons forever. Darkness closed in, the world telescoped down into blackness. The foothills faded, the dark splotches of river slipped into black. Eventually there was only the lone saguaro still glowing in the soft blue light of the television flickering behind her.
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-There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat.

-

-

-I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Eastern California, between the Nevada ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road.

-

-

-When the engine shuts off a silence descends. No wind. No birds. No talking. We—my wife, three children, and me—just listen to the quiet hissing of steam escaping the radiator cap, and then a gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the desert sun casts a harsh light on the road. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 

-

-

-As a child of the 70s, I've spent a fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is what vehicles of those days did. The 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born, was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma, AZ on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. 

-

-

-I was no stranger to dealing with the sweat, the cursing, the money, and the occasional blood, required to keep old cars running. It used to be a necessity. These days it's a labor of love. But most people don't dive in as deep as we have. In June of 2016 my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. My kids called it the bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne.

-

-

-We bought it to make it our full time home. We were tired of the suburbs and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. And I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of continuing down the road by the sweat and effort of fixing things, if not themselves, then at least by me.. 

-

-

-[[break]]

-

-

-There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but in June of 2016, after a few months of haunting Craigslist I found one for sale in the mountains of North Carolina, in the sleepy college town of Mars Hill. A couple who restored vintage trailers found the bus somewhere in Tennessee and tried their hand at fixing it up. Then they changed their mind and put it up for sale.

-

-

-I could have picked up where they left off, but as I looked it over, I decided I wanted to gut it. I wanted to understand the Travco, to design and build out everything in it exactly the way we would need it. Wood, sealant, metal, fiberglass, and all the things RV interiors are made out of are static. They just sit there, which makes them relatively easy to restore. 

-

-

-I grew up around repair and restoration. My grandfather worked for the telephone company and had a shed full of tools behind his house in Tucson. When he retired he spent his weekends buying broken things at the swap meet and his weekdays fixing them to resell the next weekend. In the summer it was blazing hot in Grandpa’s shed, but my cousins and I didn't notice the heat. We were too excited watching him tear things apart—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.

-

-

-My dad had a garage full of tools as well. I was playing with hammers and tape measures from the time I could walk, graduating to model airplanes in grade school. As I got older, I started using more tools, taking more things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward working with wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I came out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, perhaps misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools and a good mentor, anything was fixable. 

-

-

-In his 2010 book Shop Class as Soul Craft, Matthew Crawford sees the need to be capable of repair as more than just a desire to fix things. He sees it as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence on stuff. The more I began to work on the bus the more I understood what he meant. Your stuff will never again fail you because you can repair it.

-

-

-Yet these days of high technology, products are often covered with stickers warning you that even undoing a screw will void the warranty or risk injury. Companies like John Deere have even argued that it is illegal for the owner of their machines to repair them. This is creating a world of passive consumption devoid of personal agency. Crawford calls the person who wants to fix their own stuff, the Spirited Man. This figure becomes the antidote to passive consumption. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff." The spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging." 

-

-

-Since I first read Shop Class I have decided it’s better to go down swinging. It’s not just me either. I see this in the work of filmaker Van Neistat, who explicitly took the Spirited Man mantle and ran with it. But also in the thousand people without filmmaking skills who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves. The spirited man or woman doesn’t want to be passively entertained, or coddled. They seek to take part as co-creators in the world. We’re not along for the ride, we’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.

-

-

-

-

-break

-

-

-

-

-When I set off in the bus, I had no idea how the engine worked or if I would be able to keep it running, but I intended to go down swinging. Standing there in the hills of North Carolina, looking over the bus for about an hour, I saw there was some obvious water damage. I knew I’d have to tear out walls and replace them with new wood. And I figured if I got got the walls off I might as well re-wire, re-plumb, and re-insulate the thing. I was unfazed. With the interior, I could see the finished result. 

-

-

-The engine I was blissfully ignorant about. It was hard to start, but once it got running it seemed good enough to my untrained ear. I handed over the money and climbed into the cockpit.

-

-

-That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past cars, I've driven near 250,000 miles. But driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and pointing it downhill. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I finally managed to get her out on a four lane road where she felt more manageable. After I had been driving, tensely, for a couple of hours I pulled over at a rest area to take a break.

-

-

-The engine wasn't even off before two people came up to the bus to take pictures, ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked the question I would come to realize everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: what engine is in it? 

-

-

-The Travco is driven by a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. (I've done a little research, but still can’t confirm or deny this;  that said, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it can feel like I have the power of a Dodge Dart, with 8000 extra pounds of weight on top.) Still, on that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, all I knew was it had a 318 Chystler engine. Beyond that I knew almost nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked complex and intimidating and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer; part of what I was after, when we decided to live in a vintage RV, was fewer computers. 

-

-

-[[break?]]

-

-

-The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time rebuilding the interior. For the bulk of 2016 it sat in our driveway, me inside, sweating through the southern summer, freezing through the winter. Our neighbors begin to give directions based on it: “we’re two houses after the big blue bus.” I gutted the interior down to the bare fiberglass walls. I rebuilt all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I kept everything low tech. There's only one computer chip in the bus. There's no backup cameras, no motorized awnings, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we reach camp—but the system will never fail. 

-

-

-A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously wouldn’t let networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, his character commands a spaceship after all, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposed. In his case networked technology opened the to door to murderous robots bent on destroying humanity. Our case is a little less dramatic. We just didn't want to have to have something break when we're far from the nearest place that could fix it.

-

-

-(No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I think even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. That network is an unnecessary potential point of failure. Sure, it’s nice to be able to check our solar and battery status from my phone, but we don’t have to. To mitigate that vulnerability, I installed a shunt with a hardwired gauge. Should the Bluetooth fail, or, more likely, should I lose my phone, I can just look at the gauge. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology. I’m opposed to unnecessary technology and single points of failure.)

-

-

-The comedian Mitch Hedburg had a joke about how an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. In web design this is referred to as graceful degradation. How good your technology is depends on how elegantly it handles failures. (This is a design principle I bet even Adama could get behind.) A lot of modern design has taken exactly the opposite approach. In the name of convenience, complex systems are hidden behind deceptively simple user interfaces. But no matter how simple these things might seem when you use them, the complexity behind them is inherently fragile. 

-

-

-Sometimes inconvenience can even be a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you paying attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, I found out I need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission. 

-

-

-[[break]]

-

-

-Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, which makes it hard to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but when your engine is cold it needs more fuel than air. A computer chip controls this mixture in modern cars, but in older, aspirated engines like the 318, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire attached to the carburetor flap at one end, and a knob on the dashboard at the other. Pull out the knob and the flap in the carburetor closes, limiting the air coming in, and allowing the cold engine to start up.

-

-

-Manual choke is archaic. But since ours was broken when we got it, I went even more archaic. Every time I start the engine I lift up the engine cover, unscrew the air filter, and close the carburetor flap with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dashboard knob took years of scouring eBay. By the time I found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year.  

-

-

-The truth is, I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once a wire came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting—which it wasn't—I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. But it was also very simple to fix. I found the wire and plugged it back in. The engine started right up.

-

-

-Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, connecting with it. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine before every drive;  these days I am often just spending time with it.

-

-

-Car enthusiasts often get this way. It might seem irrational to be attached to a particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Now, driving around the country, when I see broken down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships.

-

-

-—

-

-

-The bus is very much a relationship. The five of us moved in and hit the road on April 1, 2017. My wife said that if it didn't work out we’d just pass it off as a bad April Fools joke. It worked out. Though like any relationship, me and the bus have had some rocky moments.

-

-

-April 2nd, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into a campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slid myself under the engine. A thin, warm red liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission lines running into the bottom of the radiator where fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.

-

-

-I didn't know exactly how to fix it, but I knew enough about engines to know that this wasn't too serious. As long as I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. I didn't want to disrupt our new life on the road by taking the bus in for repairs on our third day out. Instead I added a transmission fluid refill to my morning ritual.

-

-

-In the first three weeks, I went through a lot of transmission fluid. I topped it off every morning before we hit the road and every time we stopped for gas. Treating symptoms works for a while, but inevitably the underlying cause gets worse. We made it down to the South Carolina coast, and then swung south, through the windswept marshes of the Georgia coast, and then we headed inland, across the swampy pine flats of south Georgia and into the Florida panhandle.

-

-

-I put off dealing with the leak in part because State and National Parks frown on people working on their rigs in campgrounds. And we were heading to a friend's beach house on St. Georgia Island.. Friend’s houses are much more conducive to repairs. But the day we arrived the leak got dramatically worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left. At this point, I felt overwhelmed by the problem; it seemed like too big of a task. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down so soon, swinging or not. Instead I spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such an old, huge vehicle. I finally found one who was game. A few days later, my wallet a bit lighter, the problem was solved. Still I had these lingering doubts: how spirited was I, taking my engine to a mechanic without even trying to fix it myself?

-

-

-We got back in the bus and on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, into New Orleans where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks. For two months the bus ran perfectly. But as we headed into the June heat of Texas, the temperature gauge began to climb. And climb. All the way into the red. We took to driving in the early mornings, which helped, but something needed to be done. 

-

-

-We stopped to visit relatives in Dallas and had the radiator re-cored. That eliminated it as the source of the problem. (Again, those niggling doubts about taking it to mechanics, but even experienced mechanics rarely recore their own radiators). Not an hour outside of Dallas the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair shop. They replaced the water pump and thermostat. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. The temperature gauge climbed again. 

-

-

-Our temperature problem, and the brutal West Texas heat, was getting to us. I punted. In Amarillo we got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a while, and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. That night, I paid way too much for a temperature gun at a local hardware store and we hit the road again early the next morning. Every half hour, I stopped, got out and took readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was within the operating parameters. We drove on into the midday heat and watched the temperature gauge climb again, but the readings done with the gun remained fine. I called my uncle back. “If I were you,'' he said, “I'd pull the temperature sensor out of your engine and chuck it out in the desert somewhere." I hung up feeling that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't know how to find the problems, let alone fix them. 

-

-

-The problem with spiritedness is that, in the beginning, desire far outstrips skills. I don’t know when my Uncle started working on cars, but he’s 35 years older than me. Thirty five years chasing the spirit of inquiry teaches you a lot. 

-

-

-I did the best I could with what I knew. I knew he was smarter than me so I took his advice. I unhooked the temperature gauge from the engine sensor. And everything was fine. I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong; I wasn't happy thinking about the thousands of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be a faulty $15 sensor. How did my uncle know what to do without even being there? The learning curve felt insurmountably steep. 

-

-

-Two months later, near the end of a summer spent in cool pine forests in the Rocky Mountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000 foot pass near Ridgway Colorado. We'd managed to get to 9,600 feet before, and the one we were headed toward was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile into the climb before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus —and saw the transmission cooler line leaking again. 

-

-

-We turned around, limped back to Ridgway, and found a side street to park on. I got under the bus again. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the end of the transmission line I could see that the metal pipe, which flares out to wrap over metal fitting on the radiator, was not just cracked, but missing a whole chunk. Instead of forming a tight seal over the metal fitting, fluid was shooting out the side. The transmission cooler lines are fitted tightly along the side of the engine. There is no slack. I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare and reattach them. Even if I could have made it work they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more than the transmission cooler ever cooled them.

-

-

-I was forced to reach out for help, again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the bus and eventually found one in Montrose, 30 miles away down the mountain. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the Ridgway State Park campground. We started repacking,  and gathering up what we need for a few days of tent camping in a rental car. 

-

-

-That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room in the campground, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. He stuffed his laundry in the machine, and we started talking. The conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked about the engine, he asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard. Something that has haunted me since: "Do you turn your own wrenches?" I said I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." 

-

-

-I realized that night, I couldn’t keep relying on mechanics. I needed to understand how the 318 worked from the inside out so that I could get in there with my own wrenches. Still, I took it to the mechanic one more time. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the mechanics in Montrose tried to find new transmission cooler lines for the bus. Eventually they did and we were on our way again, but not for long. A couple weeks later, coming down western Utah, bound for Zion National Park, I stopped for gas and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both.

-

-

-It was a Sunday in Utah. We tried to find a mechanic, but nothing happens on a Sunday in Utah. So we pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. This time the leak was from the back of the transmission line rather than the front. I unscrewed it and sure enough, the flare was cracked again. I knew what to do, but I didn't have the tools and the hardware stores weren't open. 

-

-

-I climbed out from under and sat down on the Travco’s step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife was just asking me what we were going to do, when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street rattled and opened with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was there working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line, took it inside, cut off the cracked flare, and re-flared it. Then he showed me where the last mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened the nut, crushing the metal on to the fitting until it cracked.. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday, he told me.

-

-

-[[break]]

-

-Sitting at the side of the road in Nevada, almost two years in with the Travco, I knew that engine overheating isn't really a thing that can be fixed. It's what happens when a small engine tries to climb a big hill. Eventually old cars will teach you so much, including patience.

-

-

-I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though. I keep walking but can never see more than the next few hundred yards, the road just keeps climbing. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decide to make another push up the mountains. But now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, I give us a mile before we overheat again. (I won’t know exactly,  because the odometer is broken).  After about five minutes I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the ability to pull off the road. 

-

-

-My wife and I talk about turning back. There's a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They have a sign out front that says no phone and not to bother them, but something tells me they'd be okay with the bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It's been a long day of driving and the kids are tired and hot. 

-

-

-Then we hear an unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, with the unmistakable thump-thump heartbeat roar of a Harley Davidson, is rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike appears and the rider pulls over. He asks if we're okay. We go through the usual talk about the bus. Then he tells us we're only about a mile from the top. Suddenly we're not quite so tired. The prospect of making it over the mountains feels possible again. We thank the rider and he continues on his way. We give the engine some more time to cool before we try again. 

-

-

-An hour later we’re back in the road, trying for the top. It's a long mile, we never get above twenty miles an hour, but after a little while we crest a ridge and  a spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opens up below. I can see the Sierra Nevada mountains rising up out of the hazy valley. We are at the top. I have just a second to enjoy it before we pass a sign that says, "Caution, One Lane Road Ahead." The narrows as this bit of highway is called, comes up so fast we don't have time to plan for it. We're just in it. Thankfully, nothing comes the other way. I have no idea what happens if you meet another car coming the opposite way, especially one of the empty hay trucks that drive highway 168 at about 70 miles an hour. 

-

-

-Coming down the steep grade we stop to rest the brakes a few times. After about three hours of descending, we pull into a campground outside of Big Pine, California. It's empty this time of year and the road is full of ruts that have the bus lurching and creaking around. About 20 yards from the first campsite we hear a loud clang. My wife and I look at each other. I pull into the first campsite, and shut off the engine for the final time with a deep sense of relief.

-

-

-–

-

-

-The next morning we watched the sun come up on the high peaks of the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains.  We had a leisurely breakfast and sipped our coffee well into the morning. We found a train museum up the road and thought we'd take the kids. 

-

-

-It was around 10 when I started up the engine and then made my customary walk around the bus to make sure all the windows and hatches and vents were closed and properly secured while the engine warmed up. Everything looked good until I came around to the driver's side where I noticed the rear wheels were oddly far back in the wheel well. But wheels don't just move around... that would mean the entire axle had moved. Oh shit. 

-

-

-I knelt down and peered under the frame. The rear axle, which supports about 5000 pounds, is held in place by two mounts, one to the front of the axle, one to the rear of the axle. These hold the leaf springs in place. The mounts are secured by four welded steel pins, one at each corner, which hold the axle mount to the chassis. On the driver's side, the forward axle mount, three of the four pins were gone. It was hanging by one pin and had swung down and backward, shifting the entire rear axle about six inches backward.

-

-

-If that pin gave out while we were moving, the axle would come free and most likely tear the back end of the bus off before dropping it on the ground. It was clear we weren't going anywhere. Suddenly all the things that had happened until now, all the leaking fluids, excess oil, even overheating, seemed pretty mild compared to this. Then I thought of something my uncle had said to me over and over, "it's really not that hard, it's all just nuts and bolts."

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-Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. It's the problem solving that happens in your head. That skill takes years, even decades to develop. I am still early on this journey, but it is infectious when you hold something unknown in your head until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.

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-It also requires asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of them helped me in some way, even if it was just an encouraging word, a congratulations on keeping it on the road.

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-As I sat there staring at the axle dangling by a single pin, I had no idea what to do. So I turned to my uncle, texting him a picture of the problem. A few minutes later my phone rang. My uncle happens to live about two hours from Big Pine, back over the state line in Nevada. Sit tight, he said. He was loading up some tools and would be there that afternoon. 

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-We took the kids hiking down to a nearby river. I try as hard as I can to make sure that our adventures don't get in the way of letting our children be children. Making the bus "work" for us is as much about making sure they have space to run and play as it is turning wrenches. 

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-Around three that afternoon my Uncle[a] pulled into our campsite with a truck full of floor lifts, jacks, and tools. He crawled under the bus with me. He didn't say anything, just lay there studying the situation. When he climbed back out he said, "I think we can fix that." We made a run to a hardware store in Bishop, about an hour up the road, where we bought some grade 8 steel bolts, which are strong enough to hold. We also went to the store  and grabbed some steaks and potatoes for dinner. The biggest lesson I've learned from my uncle is, "relax, and make sure you're having fun while you do this."

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-That night after dinner, while we sat around the campfire, he told me the plan. We'd use two jacks, one to hold up the bus, should that last pin give out, and another to maneuver the axle mount back in place. Once it was close we'd use a flange alignment tool to line up the hole in the axle mount with the hole in the chassis. Then we'd slip in the grade 8 bolts. Once he laid out the plan it seemed simple enough, obvious even. But I never would have thought of it on my own. I'd never even heard of a flange alignment tool and I had no idea there were bolts strong enough to replace forged steel pins. No matter how spirited I wanted to be, I had a long way to go.

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-The next morning we did exactly what my uncle said we’d do. It took the better part of the day, but when we were done the bus was good as new. My uncle didn’t like the sound of the engine though. Why don’t you bring it to my place, we’ll see what we can do about that noise. 

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-We spent a few days exploring the area. The kids got to see the train museum. We swam in some hot springs. Then we made our way up to my uncle’s house and I began to learn how everything in the engine worked.

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-This is, in part, what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later. It's the people that keep me going. It's all the people I know, all the people I've met, the people who've helped, some professionals, most not. Because we haven't stopped needing to fix things in the bus. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace a head gasket, several worn belts, a failed alternator, the voltage regulator, a fuel pump, and do all the routine maintenance like changing the spark plugs, wires, and oil.

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-The bus will never not need fixing. But my relationship with it has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. 

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-[a]can you give us a physical description of him?
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-There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat.

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-I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Eastern California, between the Nevada ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road.

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-When the engine shuts off a silence descends. No wind. No birds. No talking. We—my wife, three children, and me—just listen to the quiet hissing of steam escaping the radiator cap, and then a gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the desert sun casts a harsh light on the road. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 

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-As a child of the 70s, I've spent a fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is what vehicles of those days did. The 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born, was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma, AZ on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. 

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-I was no stranger to dealing with the sweat, the cursing, the money, and the occasional blood, required to keep old cars running. It used to be a necessity. These days it's a labor of love. There is something in the shape of these vehicles, something in the way they move, the way they were built, that is unlike anything on the road today. 

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-Most people don't dive in as deep as we have. In June of 2016 my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. We bought it to make it our full time home. We were tired of the suburbs and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. And I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of fixing something, of continuing down the road by the sweat and effort of, if not them, then at least me.

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-My kids called it the bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. I wanted one from the first time I saw a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. It looked awesome and it had one of the most common engines of the era, which meant we could figure out how to fix it on the road. We wouldn’t need to rely on anyone else to keep us going and safe.

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-There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but after a few months of haunting Craigslist, in June of 2016, I found one for sale in the mountains of North Carolina, in the sleepy college town of Mars Hill. A couple who restored vintage trailers found the bus somewhere in Tennessee and tried their hand at fixing it up. For some reason, they changed their mind and sold it.

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-I could have picked up where they left off, but as I looked it over, I decided I wanted to gut it instead. I wanted to understand the Travco, to design and build out everything in it exactly the way we would need it. Wood, sealant, metal, fiberglass, and all the things RV interiors are made out of are static. They just sit there, which makes them relatively easy to restore. I grew up around repair and restoration. My grandfather worked for the telephone company and had a shed full of tools behind his house in Tucson. When he retired he spent his weekends buying broken things at the swap meet and his weekdays fixing them to resell the next weekend. 

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-In the summer it was blazing hot in Grandpa’s shed, but my cousins and I didn't notice the heat. We were too excited watching him tear things apart—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.

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-My father had a garage full of tools as well. I was playing with hammers and tape measures from the time I could walk, graduating to model airplanes in grade school. As I got older, I started using more tools, taking more things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward working with wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I managed to come out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, perhaps misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools and a good mentor, anything was fixable. 

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-Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft captures this same feeling in a more articulate, philosophical way. Crawford sees the need to be capable of repair as more than just a desire to fix things. He sees it as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence on stuff. The more I began to work on the bus the more I understood what Crawford meant. There is empowerment in knowing how things work. Your stuff will never again fail you because if it does break, you can repair it.

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-Contrast this to the current world of high technology, which is often covered with stickers warning you that even undoing a screw will void the warranty or risk injury. Companies like John Deere have even argued that it is illegal for the owner of their machines to repair them. This is the opposite of empowerment. It is a world of passive consumption devoid of personal agency. It is a world that Crawford and countless others rail against. 

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-Crawford calls the person who wants to fix their own stuff, the Spirited Man. In his book this figure becomes the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance."

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-Crawford writes that the spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging." 

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-In the years since I first read Shop Class. I too have decided it’s better to go down swinging. It’s not just me either. I see this in the work of Van Neistat, who explicitly took the Spirited Man mantle and ran with it. But also in the thousand people without filmmaking skills who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves.

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-I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? The modern world offers precious little in response to this. The spirited man or woman rejects the answer often provided by the modern world: that we are here to be passively entertaine and coddled. Instead, the spirited man or woman seeks to actively attend to the world around them. To take part as co-creators in the world. We’re not along for the ride, we’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.

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-This was the spirit in which I set off in the bus. I had no idea how the engine worked or if I would be able to keep it running, but I intended to go down swinging. Which was why, standing there in the hills of North Carolina, looking over the bus for about an hour, I was unfazed. There was some obvious water damage. I knew I’d have to tear out walls and replace them with new wood. And if you’ve got the walls off you might as well re-wire, re-plumb, and re-insulate. But with the interior, I could see the finished result. The only thing to do was do the work to make it look the way it already looked in my head. The engine I was blissfully ignorant about. It was hard to start, but once it got running it seemed good enough to my untrained ear. I handed over the money and climbed into the cockpit.

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-That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past cars, I've driven near 250,000 miles. But driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and pointing it downhill. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I finally managed to get her out on a four lane road where she felt more manageable. After I had been driving, tensely, for a couple of hours I pulled over at a rest area to take a breather.

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-The engine wasn't even off before two people came up to the bus to take pictures, ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked the question I would come to realize everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: what engine is in it? 

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-The Travco is driven by a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. I've done a little research, but still can’t confirm or deny this;  that said, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it can feel like I have the power of a Dodge Dart, with 8000 extra pounds of weight on top. Still, on that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, all I knew was it had a 318 Chystler engine. Beyond that I knew almost nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked complex and intimidating and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer;[a] part of what I was after, when we decided to live in a vintage RV, was less computers. 

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-[[break?]]

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-The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time completely rebuilding the interior. For the bulk of 2016 it sat in our driveway, with me inside, sweating through the southern summer, freezing through the winter. Our neighbors begin to give directions based on it “we’re two houses after the big blue bus.” I gutted the interior down to the bare fiberglass walls. I rebuilt all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I deliberately kept everything low tech. There's only one computer chip in the bus. There's no backup cameras, no motorized awnings, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we reach camp—but the system will never fail. 

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-A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously wouldn’t let networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, his character commands a spaceship after all, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposed. In his case networked technology opened to door to murderous robots bent on destroying humanity. Our case is a little less dramatic. We just didn't want to have to have something break when we're far from the nearest place that could fix it.

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-No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I think even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. That network is an unnecessary potential point of failure. Sure, it’s nice to be able to check our solar and battery status from my phone, but we don’t have to. To mitigate that vulnerability, I installed a shunt with a hardwired gauge. Should the Bluetooth fail, or, more likely, should I lose my phone, I can just look at the gauge. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology. I’m opposed to unnecessary technology and single points of failure.

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-The comedian Mitch Hedburg tells a joke about how an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. In web design this is referred to as graceful degradation. How good your technology is depends on how elegantly it handles failures. (This is a design principle I bet even Adama could get behind.) A lot of modern design has taken exactly the opposite approach. In the name of convenience, complex systems are hidden behind deceptively simple user interfaces. But no matter how simple these things might seem when you use them, the complexity behind them is inherently fragile. 

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-Sometimes inconvenience can even be a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you paying attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, you need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission. 

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-[[break]]

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-Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, which makes it hard to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but when your engine is cold it needs more fuel than air. A computer chip controls this mixture in modern cars, but in older, aspirated engines like the 318, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire attached to the carburetor flap at one end, and a knob on the dashboard at the other. Pull out the knob and the flap in the carburetor closes, limiting the air coming in, and allowing the cold engine to start up.

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-Manual choke is archaic. But since ours was broken when we got it, I went even more archaic. Every time I start the engine I lift up the engine cover, unscrew the air filter, and close the carburetor flap with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dashboard knob took years of scouring eBay. By the time I found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year.  

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-The truth is, I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once a wire came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting—which it wasn't—I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. But it was also very simple to fix. I found the wire and plugged it back in. The engine started right up.

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-Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, connecting with it. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine before every drive;  these days I am often just spending time with it.

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-Car enthusiasts often get this way. It might seem irrational to be attached to a particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Now, driving around the country, when I see broken down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships.

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-—

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-The bus is very much a relationship. The five of us moved in and hit the road on April 1, 2017. My wife said that if it didn't work out we’d just pass it off as a bad April Fools joke. It worked out. Though like any relationship, me and the bus have had some rocky moments.

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-April 2nd, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into a campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slid myself under the engine. A thin, warm red liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission lines running into the bottom of the radiator where fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.

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-I didn't know exactly how to fix it, but I knew enough about engines to know that this wasn't too serious. As long as I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. I didn't want to disrupt our new life on the road by taking the bus in for repairs on our third day out. Instead I added a transmission fluid refill to my morning ritual.

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-In the first three weeks, I went through a lot of transmission fluid. I topped it off every morning before we hit the road and every time we stopped for gas. Treating symptoms works for a while, but inevitably the underlying cause gets worse. We made it down to the South Carolina coast, and then swung south, through the windswept marshes of the Georgia coast, and then we headed inland, across the swampy pine flats of south Georgia and into the Florida panhandle.

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-Part of the reason I put off dealing with the leak is that we were heading to a friend's beach house on St. Georgia Island. State and National Parks frown on people working on their rigs in campgrounds. Friend’s houses are much more conducive to repairs. But the day we arrived the leak got dramatically worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left, even though I had filled the reservoir two hours before. I felt overwhelmed by it. It seemed like too big of a task. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down so soon, swinging or not. Instead I spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such an old, huge vehicle. I finally found one who was game, and a few days later, my wallet a bit lighter, the problem was solved. Still I had these lingering doubts: how spirited was I, taking my engine to a mechanic without even trying to do it myself?

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-So we got back in the bus and on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, into New Orleans where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks as we drove through town. For those two months the bus ran perfectly. But as  we headed into the June heat of Texas, the temperature gauge began to climb. And climb. All the way into the red. We took to driving in the early mornings, which helped, but something needed to be done. 

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-We stopped to visit relatives in Dallas and had the radiator re-cored. That eliminated it as the source of the problem. Again, those niggling doubts about taking it to mechanics. But then even experienced mechanics rarely recore their own radiators. Unfortunately, not an hour outside of Dallas the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair shop. They replaced the water pump and thermostat. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. And then, the temperature gauge climbed again. 

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-Our temperature problem, and the brutal West Texas heat, was getting to us. I punted. In Amarillo we got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a while, and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. That night, I paid way too much for a temperature gun at a local hardware store and we hit the road again early the next morning. Every half hour, I stopped, got out and took readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was within the operating parameters. We drove on into the midday heat and watched the temperature gauge climb again, but the readings done with the gun remained fine. I called my uncle back. “If I were you,'' he said, “I'd pull the temperature sensor out of your engine and chuck it in the desert somewhere." I hung up feeling that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't know how to find the problems, let alone fix them. 

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-The problem with spiritedness is that, in the beginning, the desire far outstrips your skills. I don’t know when my Uncle started working on cars, but it was at least 40 years before me. He’s younger than his sister (my mother), but still 35 years older than me. Thirty five years chasing the spirit of inquiry teaches you a lot. 

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-I did the best I could with what I knew. I knew he was smarter than me so I took his advice. I unhooked the temperature gauge from the engine sensor. And everything was fine. I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong; I wasn't happy thinking about the thousands of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be a faulty $15 sensor. How did my uncle know what to do without even being there? The learning curve felt insurmountably steep. 

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-Two months later, near the end of a summer spent in cool pine forests in the Rocky Mountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000 foot pass near Ridgway Colorado. We'd managed to get to 9,600 feet before, and Dallas Divide was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile into the climb before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus —and saw the transmission cooler line leaking again. 

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-We turned around, limped back to Ridgway, and found a side street to park on, in front of a mechanic's shop as it turned out. I got under the bus again. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the end of the transmission line I could see that the metal pipe, which flares out to wrap over metal fitting on the radiator, was not just cracked, but missing a whole chunk. Instead of forming a tight seal over the metal fitting, fluid was shooting out the side. The transmission cooler lines are fitted tightly along the side of the engine. There is no slack. I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare and reattach them. They were too short for that, and even if I could have made it work they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more that the transmission cooler ever cooled them.

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-I was forced to reach out for help,  again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the bus and eventually found one in Montrose, 30 miles away down the mountain. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the Ridgway State Park campground. We started repacking,  and gathering up what we need for a few days of tent camping in a rental car. 

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-That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room in the campground, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. He stuffed his laundry in the machine, and we started talking. The conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked about the engine, he asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard. Something that has haunted me ever since: "Do you turn your own wrenches?" I said I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." 

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-I realized that night, this is an absolute truth. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the mechanics in Montrose tried to find new transmission cooler lines for the bus. Eventually they did and we were on our way again, but not for long. A couple weeks later, coming down western Utah, bound for Zion National Park, I stopped for gas and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both.

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-It was a Sunday in Utah. We tried to find a mechanic, but nothing happens on a Sunday in Utah. So we pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. This time the leak was from the back of the transmission line rather than the front. I unscrewed it and sure enough, the flare was cracked again. I knew what to do, but I didn't have the tools and the hardware stores weren't open. 

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-I climbed out from under and sat down on the Travco’s step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife  was just asking me what we were going to do, when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street rattled and then flew open with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was there working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line, took it inside, cut off the cracked flare, and re-flared it. Then he showed me where the last mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened the nut, crushing the metal on to the fitting until it cracked.. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday, he told me.

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-Sitting at the side of the road in Nevada, almost two years in with the Travco, I knew that engine overheating isn't really a thing that can be fixed. It's what happens when a small engine tries to climb a big hill. Old cars will teach you so much, including patience.

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-I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though. I keep walking but can never see more than the next few hundred yards, the road just keeps climbing. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decide to make another push up the mountains. But now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, I give us a mile before we overheat again. (I won’t know exactly,  because the odometer is broken).  After about five minutes I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the ability to pull off the road. 

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-My wife and I discuss turning back. There's a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They have a sign out front that says no phone and not to bother them, but something tells me they'd be okay with the bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It's been a long day of driving and the kids are tired and hot. 

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-Then we hear an unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, probably a Harley Davidson, is rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike appears and the rider pulls over. He asks if we're okay. We go through the usual talk about the bus. Then he tells us we're only about a mile from the top. Suddenly we're not quite so tired. The prospect of making it over the mountains feels possible again. We thank the rider and he continues on his way. We give the engine some more time to cool before we try again. 

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-As we wait, I think about a conversation I had with construction workers earlier in the day. We had stopped at the top of a pass for a snack. A road work crew pulled over nearby. I had asked them about the pass, the we're on now. They said we’d be fine, though one of them mentioned, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”

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-Now I mention this as casually as I can to my wife. She does not seem thrilled, but we agree to try for the top. It's a long mile, we never get above twenty miles an hour, but after half an hour,  a spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opens up below. I can see the Sierra Nevada mountains rising up out of the hazy valley. We are at the top. I have just a second to enjoy it before we pass a sign that says, "Caution, One Lane Road Ahead."

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-The narrows come up so fast we don't have time to plan for it. We're just in it. Thankfully, nothing comes the other way. I have no idea what happens if you meet another car coming the opposite way, especially one of the empty hay trucks that drive highway 168 at about 70 miles an hour. 

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-Coming down the steep grade we stop to rest the brakes a few times. After about three hours of descending, we pull into a campground outside of Big Pine, California. It's empty this time of year and the road is full of ruts that have the bus lurching and creaking around. About 20 yards from the first campsite we hear a loud clang. My wife and I look at each other. I pull into the first campsite, and shut off the engine for the final time with a deep sense of relief.

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-–

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-The next morning we watched the sun come up on the high peaks of the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. After the previous day we were taking it easy.  We had a leisurely breakfast and sipped our coffee well into the morning. We found a train museum up the road and thought we'd take the kids. 

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-It was around 10 when I started up the engine and then made my customary walk around the bus to make sure all the windows and hatches and vents were closed and properly secured while the engine warmed up. Everything looked good until I came around to the driver's side where I noticed the rear wheels were oddly far back in the wheel well. But wheels don't just move around... that would mean the entire axle had moved. Oh shit. 

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-I knelt down and peered under at the frame. The rear axle, which supports about 5000 pounds, is held in place by two mounts, one to the front of the axle, one to the rear of the axle. These hold the leaf springs in place. The mounts are secured by four welded steel pins, one at each corners, which hold the axle mount to the chassis. On the driver's side, the forward axle mount, three of the four pins were gone. It was hanging by one pin and had swung down and backward, shifting the entire rear axle about six inches backward.

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-If that pin gave out while we were moving, the axle would come free and most likely tear the back end of the bus off before dropping it on the ground. It was clear we weren't going anywhere. All the things that had happened until now, all the leaking fluids, excess oil, even overheating, seemed pretty mild in comparison to this. At the same time, I thought of something my uncle had said to me several times, "it's really not that hard, it's all just nuts and bolts."

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-Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. It's the problem solving that happens in your head. That’s a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still early on this journey, but it is infectious when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.

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-It also requires asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of them helped me in some way, even if it was just an encouraging word, a congratulations on keeping it on the road.

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-As I sat there staring at the axle dangling by a single pin, I had no idea what to do. When I am confronted with a problem that I can't solve in my head, I turn to my uncle. I texted him a quick version of the problem. I sent him a picture. A few minutes later my phone rang. It so happens that my uncle lives about two hours from Big Pine, back over the state line in Nevada. He told us to sit tight, he was loading up some tools and would be there that afternoon. 

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-We took the kids hiking down to a nearby river while we waited. I try as hard as I can to make surethat our adventures don't get in the way of letting our children be children. Making the bus "work" for us is as much about making sure they have space to run and play as it is turning wrenches. 

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-Around three that afternoon my Uncle pulled into our campsite with a truck full of floor lifts, jacks, and tools. He crawled under the bus with me and surveyed the situation. He didn't say anything, just lay there studying the situation, but when he climbed back out he said, "I think we can fix that." We made a run to a hardware store in Bishop, about an hour up the road, where we bought some grade 8 steel bolts, which are strong enough to hold. We also went to the store  and grabbed some steaks and potatoes for dinner. Perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned from my uncle is, "relax, and make sure you're having fun while you do this."

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-That night after dinner, while we sat around the campfire, he told me the plan. We'd use two jacks, one to hold up the bus, should that last pin give out, and another to maneuver the axle mount back in place. Once it was close we'd use flange alignment tool to line up the hole in the axle mount with the hole in the chassis. Then we'd slip in the grade 8 bolts. Once he laid it out is seemed simple enough, obvious even. But I never would have thought of it on my own. I'd never even heard of a flange alignment tool and I had no idea there were bolts strong enough to replace forged steel pins. No matter how spirited I wanted to be, I didn't have the knowledge or tools.

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-This is why the right to repair is a useless fight if there isn't a community of people who have experience to hand down to newcomers. The repair community is perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self-reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to the spiritedness of repair. At the same time, the community is a very hierarchical one, which means those of us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us. That isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of either of those states of mind is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.

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-The next morning we did exactly what my uncle said we’d do. It took the better part of the day, but when we were done the bus was good as new. My uncle didn’t like the sound of the engine though. Why don’t you bring it to my place, we’ll see what we can do about that noise. 

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-When spent a few days exploring the area. The kids got to see the train museum. We swam in some hot springs. Then we made our way up to my uncle’s house and I began to learn how everything in the engine worked.

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-This is, in part, of what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later. It's the people that keep me going. It's all the people I know, all the people I've met, the people who've helped, some professionals, most not. Because we haven't stopped needing to fix things in the bus. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace the head gasket, several worn belts, a failed alternator, a fuel pump, and do all the routine maintenance like changing the spark plugs and oil.

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-The bus will never not need fixing. But my relationship with it has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. 

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-[a]then we'd massage this kicker if you rework the end of first section.
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-There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat.
-
-I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Nevada between the ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. 
-
-When the engine shuts off a silence descends. No wind. No birds. No talking. We—my wife, three children, and me—just listen to the quiet hissing of steam escaping the radiator cap, and then a gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the Nevada sun casts a harsh light on the road. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 
-
-As a child of the 70s, I've spent a fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is what vehicles of those days did. The 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born, was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma, AZ on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. 
-
-I was no stranger to dealing with the sweat, the cursing, the money, and the occasional blood, required to keep old cars running. It used to be a necessity. These days it's a labor of love. There is something in the shape of these vehicles, something in the way they move, the way they were built, that is unlike anything on the road today. 
-
-Most people don't dive in as deep as we have. In June of 2016 my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. We bought it to make it our full time home. We were tired of the suburbs and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. And I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of fixing something, of continuing down the road by the sweat and effort of, if not them, then at least me.
-
-My kids called it the bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. I wanted one from the first time I saw a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. It looked awesome and it had one of the most common engines of the era, which meant we could figure out how to fix it on the road. We wouldn’t need to rely on anyone else to keep us going and safe.
-
-There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but after a few months of haunting Craigslist, in June of 2016, I found one for sale in the mountains of North Carolina, in the sleepy college town of Mars Hill. A couple who restored vintage trailers found the bus somewhere in Tennessee and tried their hand at fixing it up. For some reason, they changed their mind and sold it.
-
-I could have picked up where they left off, but as I looked it over, I decided I wanted to gut it instead. I wanted to understand the Travco, to design and build out everything in it exactly the way we would need it. Wood, sealant, metal, fiberglass, and all the things RV interiors are made out of are static. They just sit there, which makes them relatively easy to restore. I grew up around repair and restoration. My grandfather worked for the telephone company and had a shed full of tools behind his house in Tucson. When he retired he spent his weekends buying broken things at the swap meet and his weekdays fixing them to resell the next weekend. 
-
-In the summer it was blazing hot in Grandpa’s shed, but my cousins and I didn't notice the heat. We were too excited watching him tear things apart and put them back together again. It was miraculous to take these discarded things—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.
-
-My father had a garage full of tools as well. I was playing with hammers and tape measures from the time I could walk, graduating to model airplanes in grade school. As I got older, I started using more tools, taking more things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward working with wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I managed to come out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly and misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools, anything was fixable. 
-
-Which was why, standing there in the hills of North Carolina, looking over the bus for about an hour, I was unfazed. There was some obvious water damage. I knew I’d have to tear out walls and replace them with new wood. And if you’ve got the walls off you might as well re-wire, re-plumb, and re-insulate. But withlooking around the interior, I could see saw what I saw when I was sketching projects—the finished result. The only thing to do was do the work to make it look the way it already looked in my head. The engine I was blissfully ignorant about. It was hard to start, but once it got running it seemed good enough to my untrained ear. I handed over the money and climbed into the cockpit.
-
-That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past cars, I've driven near 250,000 miles. But driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and pointing it downhill. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I finally managed to get her out on a four lane road where she felt more manageable. After I had been driving, tensely, for a couple of hours I pulled over at a rest area to take a break.
-
-The engine wasn't even off before two people came running up to the bus to see it, take pictures, ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked the question I would come to realize everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: what engine is in it? 
-
-The Travco is driven by a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. I've done a little research, but still can’t confirm or deny this;  that said, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it can feel like I have the power of a Dodge Dart, with 8000 extra pounds of weight on top.
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-On that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, I knew next to nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked complex and intimidating and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer; part of what I was after, when we decided to live in a vintage RV, was less computers. 
-
-[[break?]]
-
-The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time that year completely rebuilding the interior. For the bulk of 2016 it sat in our driveway, with me inside, sweating through the southern summer, freezing through the winter. Our neighbors begin to give directions based on it: “we’re two houses after the big blue bus.” I gutted the interior down to the bare fiberglass walls. I rebuilt all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I deliberately kept everything low tech. There's only one computer chip in the bus. There's no backup cameras, no motorized awnings, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we reach camp—but the system will never fail. 
-
-A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously wouldn’t let networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, his character commands a spaceship after all, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposed. In his case networked technology opened to door to murderous robots bent on destroying humanity. Our case is a little less dramatic. We just didn't want to have to have something break when we're miles from the nearest place that could fix it.
-
-No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I thinkAnd I believe even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t not approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. That network is an unnecessary potential point of failure. Sure, it’s nice to be able to check our solar and battery status from my phone, but we don’t have to do that. To mitigate that vulnerability [[OK? To avoid repeating point of failure 3x]] point of failure, I installed a shunt with a hardwired gauge. Should the Bluetooth fail, or, more likely, should I lose my phone, I can just look at the gauge. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology. I’m opposed to unnecessary technology and single points of failure.
-
-The comedian Mitch Hedburg tells a joke about how an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. In web design this is referred to as graceful degradation. How good your technology is depends on how elegantly it handles failures. (This is a design principle I bet, and perhaps even Adama , can could get behind.) A lot of modern design has taken exactly the opposite approach. In the name of convenience, complex systems are hidden behind deceptively simple user interfaces. But no matter how simple these things might seem when you use them, the complexity behind them is inherently fragile. 
-
-It's not easy to argue against such systems—certainly it is more convenient to flip a switch and have hot water, or to be able to check solar battery status from my phone—but the trade off in potential for catastrophic failure isn't worth the small gain in convenience, especially when the nearest repair shop might be hundreds of miles away.
-
-Sometimes inconvenience can even beend up  as a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you paying attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, you need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission. 
-
-[[break]]
-
-Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, which makes it hard tomaking it difficult to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but when your engine is cold it needs more fuel than air. A computer chip controls this mixture in modern cars, but in older, aspirated engines like the 318, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire attached to the carburetor flap at one end, and a knob on the dashboard at the other. Pull out the knob and the flap in the carburetor closes, limiting the air coming in, and allowing the cold engine to start up.
-
-Manual choke is archaic. But since ours was broken when we got it, I went even more archaic. Every time I start the engine I lift up the engine cover, unscrew the air filter, and close the carburetor flap with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dashboard knob took years of scouring eBay. By the time I found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year.  
-
-The truth is, I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once a wire came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting—which it wasn't—I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. But it was also very simple to fix. I found the wire and plugged it back in. The engine started right up.
-
-Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, connecting with it. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine before every drive;  these days I am often just spending time with it.
-
-Car enthusiasts often get this way. It might seem irrational to be attached to a particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Now, driving around the country, when I see broken down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships.
-
-—
-
-The bus is very much a relationship. The five of us moved in and hit the road on April 1, 2017. My wife said that if it didn't work out we’d just pass it off as a bad April Fools joke. It worked out. Though like any relationship, me and the bus have had some rocky moments.
-
-April 2nd, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into aour first campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slidslide myself under the engine. A thin, warm redread liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission cooler cooler lines running into the bottom of the radiator where transmission fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.
-
-I didn't know exactly how to fix it, but I knew enough about engines to know that this wasn't too serious. As long as Iat I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’tshouldn’t be too much of a problem. I didn't want to disrupt our new life on the road by taking the bus in for repairs on our third day out. Instead I added a transmission fluid refill to my morning ritual. of starting the engine. 
-
-In the first three weeks, I went through a lot of transmission fluid those first three weeks. I topped it off every morning before we hit the road and every time we stopped for gas. Treating symptoms works for a while, but inevitably the underlying cause gets worse. We made it down to the South Carolina coast, and then swung south, through the windswept marshes of the Georgia coast, and then we headed inland, across the swampy pine flats of south Georgia and into the Florida panhandle.
-
-Part of the reason I put off dealing with the leak is that we were heading tostaying at a friend'sfriends beach house on St. Georgia Island. But then the day we arrivedwe were due to arrive the leak got worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left, even though and I had just filled the reservoir two hours before. We unpacked for a week out of the bus and I made spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such and old, huge vehicle, and finally and after a few days, . I found one whothat was game. AA few days later, . and a few days later, with my wallet a bit lighter, we had the problem was solved. 
-
-So we got back in the bus and We continued on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, right into New Orleans where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks as weI drove through town. For those two months the bus ran perfectly. But as After New Orleans though, as we headed into the June heat of Texas, the temperature gauge began to climb. And climb. All the way into the red. We took to driving in the early mornings, which helped, but I knew something needed to be done. 
-
-We stopped to visit relatives in Dallas and had the radiator re-cored. That, which would eliminated ite the radiator as the source of the problem. Not an hour outside of Dallas though the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair shoip. They replaced the water pump and thermostat, more possible causes of running hot. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. And then, the temperature gauge climbed again. 
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-Our thermostat problemThat, andcombined with the brutal West Texas hea,t was getting to us. I punted. In tktk where?We got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a while,bit and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. That night, I I ran out that night and paid way too much for a temperaturefor temperature gun at a local hardware store and we hit the road again early the next morning. EI stopped every half hour, I stopped, and got out and took temp readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was well within the operating parameters. WeI drove on into the mid day heat and watched the temperature gauge climb again. But the readings from the gun never changed. I called my uncle back. If I were you he said, I'd pull out that temperature sensor and chuck it out in the desert somewhere." I hung up feelingthinking that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't even know how to find the problems, let alone fix them. 
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-[[we need to see you following his advice then, because reader isn’t clear if he’s joking or not. And, we now need to know something about your uncle, so we can sense the relationship/his help, more clearly. Maybe something like:
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-My uncle, though, did. He was a [[TKTK what/who is he/what does he do? ]] [[Also is he your mom’s brother or your Dad’s? A little tiny bit of bio//and show him to us? What does he look like?] So I took his advice. ]
-I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong, and I unhooked the temperature gauge from the sensor. And everything was fine. I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong;  so it wouldn't stress me out, but I wasn't happy thinking about the thousands1000s of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be faulty $15 sensor. How did my uncle know what to do without even being there? How did I learn to do that? The learning curve felt insurmountably steep. I resigned myself to learning the hard way: by bashing my head against the problem until I gave up and turned to someone with more experience.
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-Two months later, near the end of a summer spent in cool pine forests in the Rrocky Mmountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000 foot pass near Ridgway Colorado. We'd previously managed to get to 9,600 feet before, and tk pass was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go. I thought we could do it. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile out of town before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus —and saw the only to see the same transmission cooler line leaking again. 
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-We turned around, and limped back to Ridgway, and I. I found a side street to park on, in front of a mechanic's shop as it turned out. I got under the bus againto see what I could. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the flare was not just cracked but missing a whole chunk. The transimission cooler lines are fitted enoughenugh that I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare and reattach them. They were too short for that, and even if I could have made it work they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more that the transmission cooler ever cooled them.
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-I was forced to reach out for help, get helppunt again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the bus andus and eventually found one in nearby Montrose, TK miles away. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the Ridgway State Park campground [[right?]the campground, and we started. That night we repacking, ed and gathering uploaded what we needneeded for a few days of tent camping in a rental car. 
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-That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room in the campgroundat Ridgway State Park, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. HeAfter he stuffed his laundry in the machine, and we started talking. TheEventually the conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked about thewhich engine was in it, he took a different tack than most people. He asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard. Something thatand has haunted me ever since: . He said, "Ddo you turn your own wrenches?" I saidtold him I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." 
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-This I realized that night, this is an absolute truth. You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the mechanics in Montrose tried to find new transmission cooler lines for the bus. Eventually they did and we were on our way again, but not for long. A couple weeks later, coming down western Utah, bound for Zion National Park, I stopped for gas and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both.
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-It was a Sunday in Utah. We tried to find a mechanic, but nothingthere was no one open. Nothing happens on a Sunday in Utah. SoIn the end we just pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. This time the leak was from the back of the transmission line rather than the front. I unscrewed it and sure enough, the flare was cracked. I knew what to do, but I didn't have theto tools and the hardware stores weren't open. 
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-I climbed out from under and sat down on the Travco’s step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife had just asked was just asking me what we were going to do, when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street rattledstreet, rattled and then flew opencame flying up and open with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was therestill at the shop working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line, and took it inside, and cut off the cracked flare, and re-flared it. Then heWe put it back on and he showed me where the lastprevious mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened the TKTKit and cracked the metal. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday, he told me.
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-This is, in part, of what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later. We—because we haven't stopped needing to fix things. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace two belts, change the spark plugs, and half a dozen other projects. The bus will never not need fixing. But mythe relationship has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do now. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my our fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It’sIt isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. 
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-[[SG, seems like we want to actually go to the fact that you, at this point, knew that the engine didn’t need fixing, but cooling. I’d skip the link to that community, OR, make it more explicit that you and them would know, this  isn’t a thing that can be fixed. So here are two suggestions:
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-Sitting at the side of the road in Nevada, TK YEARS in with the Travco, I knew that though, that community feels far away. It wouldn't do me much good even it was here though. The engine overheating isn't really a thing that can be fixed. It's what happens when a small engine tries to climb a big hill. OldWhether its fixing it, or just deal with it's limitations, old cars will teach you so much, including patience.
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-Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. 
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-I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though., I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decidedecided to make another push up the mountains. ButThe problem is that now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give us a mile before we overheat again. (I won’t know exactly, will never know of course because the odometer is broken). , but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about TKTK minutes [[because we already used “a mile”]]what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the ability to pull off the roadpull out. 
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-My wife and I discuss turning back. There's a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They have a sign out front that says no phone and not to bother them, but something tells me they'd be okay with the buswith bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It's been a long day of driving and the kids are tired and hot. 
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-Then we hearhere anthat unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, probably a Harley Davidson, is rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike appearsis too us and the rider pulls over. He askschecks to see if we're okay.  I tell him we are. We go through the usual talk about the bus. Then, but he tells us we're only about a mile from the top. 
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-That changes everything. Suddenly we're not quite so tired. The prospect of making it over the mountains feels possible again. We thank the rider and he continues on his wayup. We decide to give the engine some more timeanother bit to cool before we try again. 
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-As we wait, I think aboutI am thinking about a conversation I had with some construction workers earlier in the day. We had stopped at the top of athe first pass forand had a snack. A road work crew we’d passed coming up the mountain pulled over nearbyinto the same turnout we were in. I hadtook askedthe opportunity to ask them about the next pass, the one we're sitting on now. They saidseemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them mentioned,them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”
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-NowThis conversation comes back to me now and I mention thisit, as casually as I can, to my wife. She does not seem thrilled, but we agree to try for the top. It's a long mile, we never get above twenty miles an hour, but after half an hour, we make it to the topafterabout half an hour later we are at the top. aA spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opens up below. I can see the Sierra Nevada mountains rising up out the hazy valley. We are at the top. I have just a second to enjoy it before we passgo flying past a sign that says, "Caution, One Lane Road Ahead."
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-The narrows come up so fast we don't really have time to even plan for it. We're just in it. ThankfullyFortunately, nothing comesis coming the other way., but toit is very much a one lane road. To this day I have no idea what happens if you meet another car coming the opposite way, especially if its one of the empty hay trucks that drive the rest of highway 168 at about 70 miles an hour. 
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-Coming down the steep grade mountain we is easier than coming up, but we do still stop to rest the brakes a few times. We have a vacuum brake system that works extremely well, but long continuous down grades of 6-8 percent do require taking breaks. After TK hours, A few hours later though we pull into a campground outside of Bishop, California. It's empty this time of year and the road in is full of ruts that have the bus lurching and creaking around. About TK how far along, we hearTherew's a loud clang at one point and mMy wife and I look at each other. I, but I keep going and pull into the first campsite, and s. I shut off the engine for the final time with a sense of deep relief.
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-–
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-tk broken axle story and fixing the bus with my uncle.
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-[[will pick up the rest/work through the rest in morning]]
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-Which wasisThat's part of why we were at the side of the road that day in Nevada. We were on our way to visit my uncle. I didn't know it yet that day, but he would end up saving us just a couple of days later. He would keep the bus going when it almost broke completely, in an irreparable way. But more than that, he would show me how to turn my own wrenches. He helped me rebuild my carburetor and exhaust system;, and he showed me that there was no mystery to it. It's all just nuts and bolts he would saytell me every time I got frustrated. It’sRemember it's all just nuts and bolts. 
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-[[Scott, here’s a suggested tightened up version (I kept your full original below). It felt like we could be stronger if shorter, tighter:]]
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-Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. It's the problem solving that happens in your head. That’s a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still early on this journey, but it is infectious when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.
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-It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. And there’s my uncle, who knows more about engines than I ever will.
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-The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self-reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to the spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is a very hierarchical one, which means those of us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.
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-Original:
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-Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. Most of the work I do in keeping this engine running happens in my head. A mechanic isn't someone who blindly turns wrenches, anyone can do that. A mechanic, professional or otherwise, is someone who can listen to an engine and figure out, based on experience, which nuts and bolts need turning. It's the problem solving that happens in your head that separates those who can fix an engine from those who cannot. This is a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still very early on this journey, but it is infectious and exhilarating when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.
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-It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've been fortunate to have my uncle who knows more about engines than I ever will to help me out, but there have been plenty of others as well. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos in the past, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of it put together and you have perhaps the most important part of repairing anything: the community.
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-The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self-reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to the spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is a very hierarchical one, which means those of us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.
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-things I’ve cut:
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-[[TKTk like:]] But it wasn't the look that got me. [[Then something like]] I felt that it was important to be able to repair our home, on the road, TKTK keep me and my family safe. [[then]]
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- violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. It hails from a very different era, one when the Right to Repair was the Need to Repair, and when the need to repair was an unspoken, accepted part of using technology. 
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-The labor of maintenance is the price of admission to the world of old vehicles, that's all. If you love the design, the aesthetics, the limits, of thosethe vehicles of that era then you don’t hesitate to pay feepricethe admission. 
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-The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. I wanted one from the first time I sawran across a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. 
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-There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat.
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-I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Eastern California, between the Nevada ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. 
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-When the engine shuts off a silence descends. No wind. No birds. No talking. We—my wife, three children, and me—just listen to the quiet hissing of steam escaping the radiator cap, and then a gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the Nevada sun casts a harsh light on the road. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 
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-As a child of the 70s, I've spent a fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is what vehicles of those days did. The 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born, was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma, AZ on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. 
-
-I was no stranger to dealing with the sweat, the cursing, the money, and the occasional blood, required to keep old cars running. It used to be a necessity. These days it's a labor of love. There is something in the shape of these vehicles, something in the way they move, the way they were built, that is unlike anything on the road today. 
-
-Most people don't dive in as deep as we have. In June of 2016 my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. We bought it to make it our full time home. We were tired of the suburbs and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. And I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of fixing something, of continuing down the road by the sweat and effort of, if not them, then at least me.
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-My kids called it the bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. I wanted one from the first time I saw a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. It looked awesome and it had one of the most common engines of the era, which meant we could figure out how to fix it on the road. We wouldn’t need to rely on anyone else to keep us going and safe.
-
-There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but after a few months of haunting Craigslist, in June of 2016, I found one for sale in the mountains of North Carolina, in the sleepy college town of Mars Hill. A couple who restored vintage trailers found the bus somewhere in Tennessee and tried their hand at fixing it up. For some reason, they changed their mind and sold it.
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-I could have picked up where they left off, but as I looked it over, I decided I wanted to gut it instead. I wanted to understand the Travco, to design and build out everything in it exactly the way we would need it. Wood, sealant, metal, fiberglass, and all the things RV interiors are made out of are static. They just sit there, which makes them relatively easy to restore. I grew up around repair and restoration. My grandfather worked for the telephone company and had a shed full of tools behind his house in Tucson. When he retired he spent his weekends buying broken things at the swap meet and his weekdays fixing them to resell the next weekend. 
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-In the summer it was blazing hot in Grandpa’s shed, but my cousins and I didn't notice the heat. We were too excited watching him tear things apart—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.
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-My father had a garage full of tools as well. I was playing with hammers and tape measures from the time I could walk, graduating to model airplanes in grade school. As I got older, I started using more tools, taking more things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward working with wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I managed to come out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, perhaps misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools, anything was fixable. 
-
-Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft captures this feeling well. Crawford defines this need to be capable of repair as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence. What he calls the Spirited Man, who is capable of repair, becomes the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance."
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-In the years since Shop Class was published in my own head I have seen the convergence of two worlds, the collision of the spirit of book inquiry with the spirit of real world inquiry. The former seeks to learn, that latter seeks to make and between then I have found a balance that seems to work. It’s not just me either. I see this in the work of Van Neistat, who explicitly took the Spirited Man mantle and ran with it. But also in the thousand people without filmmaking skills who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves.
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-I think this goes the heart of the question of existence... why are we here? Are we here to optimize our days in service to some unknown thing? Are we here to be entertained? Or are we here to understand the world around us, to take part in the co-creation of our world? Are we along for the ride or are we standing at the helm, trimming the sails and pointing the bow into uncharted territory? 
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-Crawford writes that the spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging." 
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-This was the spirit in which I set off in the bus. I had no idea how the engine worked or if I would be able to keep it running, but I intended to go down swinging. Which was why, standing there in the hills of North Carolina, looking over the bus for about an hour, I was unfazed. There was some obvious water damage. I knew I’d have to tear out walls and replace them with new wood. And if you’ve got the walls off you might as well re-wire, re-plumb, and re-insulate. But with the interior, I could see the finished result. The only thing to do was do the work to make it look the way it already looked in my head. The engine I was blissfully ignorant about. It was hard to start, but once it got running it seemed good enough to my untrained ear. I handed over the money and climbed into the cockpit.
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-That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past cars, I've driven near 250,000 miles. But driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and pointing it downhill. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I finally managed to get her out on a four lane road where she felt more manageable. After I had been driving, tensely, for a couple of hours I pulled over at a rest area to take a breather.
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-The engine wasn't even off before two people came up to the bus to take pictures, ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked the question I would come to realize everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: what engine is in it? 
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-The Travco is driven by a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. I've done a little research, but still can’t confirm or deny this;  that said, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it can feel like I have the power of a Dodge Dart, with 8000 extra pounds of weight on top. Still, on that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, all I knew was it had a 318 Chystler engine. Beyond that I knew almost nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked complex and intimidating and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer; part of what I was after, when we decided to live in a vintage RV, was less computers. 
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-[[break?]]
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-The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time completely rebuilding the interior. For the bulk of 2016 it sat in our driveway, with me inside, sweating through the southern summer, freezing through the winter. Our neighbors begin to give directions based on it: “we’re two houses after the big blue bus.” I gutted the interior down to the bare fiberglass walls. I rebuilt all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I deliberately kept everything low tech. There's only one computer chip in the bus. There's no backup cameras, no motorized awnings, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we reach camp—but the system will never fail. 
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-A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously wouldn’t let networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, his character commands a spaceship after all, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposed. In his case networked technology opened to door to murderous robots bent on destroying humanity. Our case is a little less dramatic. We just didn't want to have to have something break when we're far from the nearest place that could fix it.
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-No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I think even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. That network is an unnecessary potential point of failure. Sure, it’s nice to be able to check our solar and battery status from my phone, but we don’t have to. To mitigate that vulnerability, I installed a shunt with a hardwired gauge. Should the Bluetooth fail, or, more likely, should I lose my phone, I can just look at the gauge. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology. I’m opposed to unnecessary technology and single points of failure.
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-The comedian Mitch Hedburg tells a joke about how an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. In web design this is referred to as graceful degradation. How good your technology is depends on how elegantly it handles failures. (This is a design principle I bet even Adama could get behind.) A lot of modern design has taken exactly the opposite approach. In the name of convenience, complex systems are hidden behind deceptively simple user interfaces. But no matter how simple these things might seem when you use them, the complexity behind them is inherently fragile. 
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-Sometimes inconvenience can even be a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you paying attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, you need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission. 
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-[[break]]
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-Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, which makes it hard to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but when your engine is cold it needs more fuel than air. A computer chip controls this mixture in modern cars, but in older, aspirated engines like the 318, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire attached to the carburetor flap at one end, and a knob on the dashboard at the other. Pull out the knob and the flap in the carburetor closes, limiting the air coming in, and allowing the cold engine to start up.
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-Manual choke is archaic. But since ours was broken when we got it, I went even more archaic. Every time I start the engine I lift up the engine cover, unscrew the air filter, and close the carburetor flap with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dashboard knob took years of scouring eBay. By the time I found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year.  
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-The truth is, I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. I might not be able to fix it, but often I can. Once a wire came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting—which it wasn't—I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. But it was also very simple to fix. I found the wire and plugged it back in. The engine started right up.
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-Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, connecting with it. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine before every drive;  these days I am often just spending time with it.
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-Car enthusiasts often get this way. It might seem irrational to be attached to a particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Now, driving around the country, when I see broken down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships.
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-—
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-The bus is very much a relationship. The five of us moved in and hit the road on April 1, 2017. My wife said that if it didn't work out we’d just pass it off as a bad April Fools joke. It worked out. Though like any relationship, me and the bus have had some rocky moments.
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-April 2nd, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into a campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slid myself under the engine. A thin, warm red liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission lines running into the bottom of the radiator where fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.
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-I didn't know exactly how to fix it, but I knew enough about engines to know that this wasn't too serious. As long as I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. I didn't want to disrupt our new life on the road by taking the bus in for repairs on our third day out. Instead I added a transmission fluid refill to my morning ritual.
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-In the first three weeks, I went through a lot of transmission fluid. I topped it off every morning before we hit the road and every time we stopped for gas. Treating symptoms works for a while, but inevitably the underlying cause gets worse. We made it down to the South Carolina coast, and then swung south, through the windswept marshes of the Georgia coast, and then we headed inland, across the swampy pine flats of south Georgia and into the Florida panhandle.
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-Part of the reason I put off dealing with the leak is that we were heading to a friend's beach house on St. Georgia Island. State and National Parks frown on people working on their rigs in campgrounds. Frien
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-tk broken axle story and fixing the bus with my uncle.
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-The next morning we watched the sun come up on the high peaks of the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. After the previous day we were taking it easy.  We had a leisurely breakfast and sipped our coffee well into the morning. We found a train museum up the road and thought we'd take the kids. 
-
-It was around 10 when I started up the engine and then made my customary walk around the bus to make sure all the windows and hatches and vents were closed and properly secured while the engine warmed up. Everything looked good until I came around to the driver's side where I noticed the rear wheels were oddly far back in the wheel well. But wheels don't just move around... that would mean the entire axle had moved. Oh shit. 
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-I knelt down and peered under at the frame. The rear axle, which supports about 5000 pounds, is held in place by two mounts, one to the front of the axle, one to the rear of the axle. These hold the leaf springs in place. The mounts are secured by four welded steel pins, one at each corners, which hold the axle mount to the chassis. On the driver's side, the forward axle mount, three of the four pins were gone. It was hanging by one pin and had swung down and backward, shifting the entire rear axle about six inches backward.
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-If that pin gave out while we were moving, the axle would come free and most likely tear the back end of the bus off before dropping it on the ground. It was clear we weren't going anywhere. All the things that had happened until now, all the leaking fluids, excess oil, even overheating, seemed pretty mild in comparison to this. At the same time, I thought of something my uncle had said to me several times, "it's really not that hard, it's all just nuts and bolts."
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-Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. It's the problem solving that happens in your head. That’s a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still early on this journey, but it is infectious when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.
-
-It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of them helped me in some way, even if it was just an encouraging word, a congratulations on keeping it on the road.
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-As I sat there staring at the axle dangling by a single pin, I had no idea what to do. When I am confronted with a problem that I can't solve in my head, I turn to my uncle. I texted him a quick version of the problem. I sent him a picture. A few minutes later my phone rang. It so happens that my uncle lives about two hours from Big Pine, back over the state line in Nevada. He told us to sit tight, he was loading up some tools and would be there that afternoon. 
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-We took the kids hiking down to a nearby river while we waited. I try as hard as I can to make sure the our adventures don't get in the way of letting our children be children. Making the bus "work" for us is as much about making sure they have space to run and play as it is turning wrenches. 
-
-Around three that afternoon my Uncle pulled into our campsite with a truck full of floor lifts, jacks, and tools. He crawled under the bus with me and surveyed the situation. He didn't say anything, just lay there studying the situation, but when he climbed back out he said, "I think we can fix that." We made a run to a hardware store in Bishop, about an hour up the road, where we bought some grade 8 steel bolts, which are strong enough to hold. We also went to the store  and grabbed some steaks and potatoes for dinner. Perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned from my uncle is, "relax, and make sure you're having fun while you do this."
-
-That night after dinner, while we sat around the campfire, he told me the plan. We'd use two jacks, one to hold up the bus, should that last pin give out, and another to maneuver the axle mount back in place. Once it was close we'd use flange alignment tool to line up the hole in the axle mount with the hole in the chassis. Then we'd slip in the grade 8 bolts. Once he laid it out is seemed simple enough, obvious even. But I never would have thought of it on my own. I'd never even heard of a flange alignment tool and I had no idea there were bolts strong enough to replace forged steel pins. No matter how spirited I wanted to be, I didn't have the knowledge or tools.
-
-This is why the right to repair is a useless fight if there isn't a community of people who have experience to hand down to newcomers. The repair community is perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self-reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to the spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is a very hierarchical one, which means those of us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us. That isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of either of those states of mind is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.
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-This is, in part, of what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later. It's the people that keep me going. It's all the people I've met, the people who've helped, some professionals, most not. Because we haven't stopped needing to fix things in the bus. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace the head gasket, several worn belts, a failed alternator, a fuel pump, and all the routine maintenance like changing spark plugs.
-
-The bus will never not need fixing. But my relationship with it has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my our fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches.
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-[[TKTk like:]] But it wasn't the look that got me. [[Then something like]] I felt that it was important to be able to repair our home, on the road, TKTK keep me and my family safe. [[then]]
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- violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. It hails from a very different era, one when the Right to Repair was the Need to Repair, and when the need to repair was an unspoken, accepted part of using technology. 
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-The labor of maintenance is the price of admission to the world of old vehicles, that's all. If you love the design, the aesthetics, the limits, of thosethe vehicles of that era then you don’t hesitate to pay feepricethe admission. 
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-
---
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-The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. I wanted one from the first time I sawran across a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. 
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diff --git a/essays/wired-version.odt b/essays/wired-version.odt
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diff --git a/friends.txt b/friends.txt
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-# Sketches
-
-# Published
-
-## 001 - Cold, No Snow, Trees
-
-Greetings Friends!
-
-In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at [luxagraf.net](https://luxagraf.net/newsletter/friends/) and you can unsubscribe just as easily, no hard feelings, there's a link at the bottom of this email. 
-
-Hello from the early days of December, where it is finally, genuinely cold. What we call cold around here anyway. 
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-My desk is just to the right of the front door, which no one uses, and there's a window next to the door that I look out. But it's cracked and leaks cold air. It's 26 degrees F outside. There's a good chance it's colder wherever you are, but here in South Carolina, that counts as cold.
-
-It's strange how relative temperature is though -- there were days when I lived in Massachusetts when 26 F would count as warm. Cold depends on what you're used to. Most things depend on what you're used to. Habit is a force to be reckoned with. 
-
-I should really do something about the cracked window. The wafts of arctic air are terrible for the monthly electric bill. Right now though, I rather enjoy it. The cold keeps me more awake, gives me that slight discomfort that reminds you you're a human, in a body. Best not to forget that. 
-
----
-
-<img src="images/2020/DSC03568_O1GZTQr.jpg" id="image-2526" class="picfull" />
-
-Earlier today I did something I have never done in my forty-five years of living: I cut down my own Christmas tree. 
-
-It was like temporarily living in a Norman Rockwell painting. We traipsed through the forest in search of an appropriate tree. There was no snow, but it was suitably cold at least. We ended up cutting down a tree much larger than we needed and then just using the top. Small trees turn out to be scraggly things, unless they're spruce or fir, neither of which grow around here. 
-
-It sounds simple enough when I write it, but imagine it would have been hilarious to watch.
-
-The only hand saw I have is a mitre saw, which is terrible for cutting down trees. It took an embarrassingly long time to get through a 6-inch diameter tree trunk. Then you'd have seen us dragging and pulling, grunting and sweating our way out of the forest and back to the house where we quickly realized it was still far too large. We have 12-foot ceilings here, but even with that I had to go back at it with the saw, taking off another foot or two from the base. 
-
-Then we dragged it in the front door and tried to stand it up only to realize it was still way too tall. I cut another foot off right in the living room, sawdust piling on the floor. Tried to stand it up again. Still too tall. Sigh. More sawdust.
-
-Eventually we got it down to size, but it's still so tall I can't reach the top of it.
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-Somewhere in the midst of all that sawing I started wondering how it was we ended up cutting down trees for Christmas anyway. Rituals that involve destruction of the natural environment around you tend to make for short-lived civilizations. Just ask an Easter Islander. 
-
-It turns out Christmas trees are a relatively recent ritual. At least cutting them down. That habit was imported by the Germans about 150 years ago. Decorating with evergreen boughs -- a more sustainable approach -- goes all the way back to Greek times, possibly further. Of course the Greeks were celebrating the Winter Solstice, not Christmas.
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-Massachusetts, place of bitter cold and, historically, bitterness, once outlawed any Christmas celebration other than a church service. A win for sustainability and trees, but a loss for, well, everything else. People were fined for hanging evergreens or decorating in any way. Because who wants all that joy around them? Not Massachusettians of days past. Christmas trees were too much fun for Puritans. Or maybe they just hated trudging out in the woods to get one. There were witches in those woods.
-
-We don't have any witches in our woods. So far as I have been able to observe anyway. Still, I wonder about these rituals we stumble through. I suspect they're far more important than we give them credit for. These stories we tell ourselves about ourselves shape us, they determine our behavior, our destiny to some degree, perhaps to a large degree. They feel like the kinds of things we should spend more time considering, but we don't. Or I don't. Not often anyway.
-
-That's what gives them their power. Those stories are there, shaping our existence whether we stop to consider them our not. For me it usually takes something to jar me into questioning my habits, like being tired of sawing. Why am I sawing again? What are we doing out in this forest full of witches in the (relative) freezing cold? 
-
----
-
-Technical note: the software that I wrote to generate, mail, and archive these letters may be a bit rough around the edges, for which I apologize in advance. I am sending this a week late because I needed to fix some last minute issues. But if you see anything completely, bizarrely wrong looking. Or you get 300 copies. Please do let me know. 
-
--s
-
-## 002 - Is This Water?
-
-Greetings Friends!
-
-In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at [luxagraf.net](https://luxagraf.net/newsletter/friends/) and you can unsubscribe just as easily, no hard feelings, there's a link at the bottom of this email. 
-
-Well 2021 has arrived. We're well beyond the future dates I used to idly try to imagine during boring high school classes. It's a strange feeling. We are further into the future than past me was able to conceive of -- where the hell does that put us?
-
-I don't know. What I do know is that hunting season is over. Deer season anyway. That deer season ends around January 1st is one of those factoids that I have always vaguely known, but never had a reason to care about. Now I do. 
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-Most of the land surrounding our current home, the land I call the 100 acre wood, because, well, it's roughly 100 acres, isn't technically part of the property we live on. We live on three acres *surrounded* by those 100 acres of woods. Those 100 acres are leased to a hunting club, so we can't really do much exploring during deer season. But that's over now and we've been getting out there on the dry days, which has been nice. 
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-About a half mile back behind the house there's a creek bed, never more than ten feet wide, but it's enough for the kids to get their feet wet and explore. I haven't tried yet, but I'm hopeful that my cellular hotspot will have some signal out there so I can work creekside when it warms up. I need a good portable desk. 
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-Not really though. Really I don't need anything. I need less things. It's the time of year when I find myself taking stock of things and seeing what I can streamline, simplify, and do without. It's my form of a new year's resolution I think. Or perhaps some seasonally wayward attempt at early spring cleaning. Whatever the case this time of year is when I go through my life and think, what can I get rid of? What can I do without? What can I improve on? What is no longer necessary? 
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-It's a fun thought process. I always change things up. Sometimes silly things, like the number of spoons in the drawer. Too many damnit. Out spoons, out. Other times I realize a don't need some tool I've previously considered indispensable. Some other tool I hardly pay attention to will turn out to do the job even better and I didn't realize it because I'd stopped thinking about the problem when I found the first solution.
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-The problems is those first solutions are often ugly hacks, temporary patch jobs, but then you forget to go back and redo them. Or I do anyway. It's good to go back and check your old work, make sure there aren't any hack jobs left around.
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-I don't do this annual taking stock to change my life, it's more of a cleaning out. It's a chance to pull off the rutted road for a few days and see what all is going on down there in the grooves. This is especially true when I get past the silly stuff like too many spoons in the drawer and start looking at my thought patterns.
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-Any pattern of thought soon becomes transparent. That's part of what the pattern is for, and for many things that's good. I don't want to think *what should I do?* every morning. I want to make a cup of coffee and relax for a bit, like I always do. Still, I am sometimes alarmed to find patterns I didn't know I had when I step back and detach, and really *look* at myself.
-
-David Foster Wallace has a parable that I think is relevant:
-
-> There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
-
-Wallace's whole text is [worth a read](http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html) if you're not familiar (it was a commencement speech originally), but the salient point is, to quote Wallace's own explication: "the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about."
-
-I think "realities" is too vague. I don't know exactly what Wallace had in mind, but for me "realities" are the patterns of thought that govern my day.
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-These patterns are hardest to see because they are the things that provide the framework in which we live. They're the things we decided way back when we couldn't even conceive of 2021 as a now that would eventually be *now*. They're the things we figured out so long ago we can't even recall exactly what we figured out. Still, they're there in the background informing everything we do. They're the water in which we live.
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-When you see the water around you, you see yourself differently. Sometimes that means you find a few spoons you don't need. Other times it might mean something more. 
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-So every year, around this time, I take a pen, a scrap of paper, and go for a walk. Woods are ideal for this, there's such a tangle of growth and life all around you that somehow the tangle of your own thoughts becomes less intimidating. From the tangle patterns emerge, pathways of thought through the trees. Somewhere in there I try to figure out what it is I am doing, where I am going, where I want to be going, and which patterns are going to close the gap between those two things. With any luck I find my way home before dark.
-
-Until next month.
-
--s
-## 003
-Greetings Friends of a Long year Subscribers-
-
-In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at [luxagraf.net](https://luxagraf.net/newsletter/friends/) and you can unsubscribe just as easily, no hard feelings, there's a link at the bottom of this email. 
-
-The end of February brought strange, warm weather to our woods. The rest of the country was swathed in snow, ice, extreme cold, power outages, frozen pipes, and worse. Our relatives in Dallas lost power for days, their goldfish froze, their pool was a solid block of ice. Meanwhile, in the shire, as my Wired colleagues call this place, it was sunny and 75.
-
-We took advantage of the warm dry weather and hiked down to the creek, exploring the woods and river bottoms on the way. The creek isn't huge, and its flow doesn't seem to fluctuate much even with rain, but there are some knee deep pools here and there and the water is remarkably clear. The water is so clear that it acts like a magnifying glass for the pebbles and rocks slowly making their way to the sea. What caught my eye one sunny day was the amount of tiny gold sparkles in the water.
-
-It turns out we're in a geologically interesting area. Normally I am a birdwatcher, I leave the rocks and fossils to Corrinne. But it's winter, which means bird life is largely limited to the mixed flocks of chickadees, titmice, and wrens that inhabit the southern Appalachian woodlands this time of year. There is a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that's been working on the large pecan tree that hangs over the bus for months now, and I saw a flash of yellow I couldn't identify at the top of the same tree this morning, but the flood of migrants that really gets birdwatchers like me up in the morning hasn't started yet. 
-
-So rocks. In streams. I need a hand lens. And a lot more knowledge about geology than I currently possess. But I do know we're in a borderland, geologically speaking,  which is always the place to be -- edges are where everything gets interesting. 
-
-We're between the Appalachian foothills, which you can see on a clear day if you get out of the forest, and what gets called the low country, the part of the state below the Fall Line, where the Piedmont foothills and Atlantic coastal plain meet. We're technically in the upcountry, but at the very edge of it. We're where everything washes down to, where the waters slow, meander, and the rocks start to collect.
-
-This is a land of low, rolling hills with geologically complex things going on beneath the foot or so of red clay that's so hostile to growing carrots. Under that clay layer there's a mish-mash of [schists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schist) that bubble up everything from quartz to [amphibolite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibolite) to, ahem, [gold](https://www.dnr.sc.gov/geology/pdfs/Publications/GGMS/GGMS3.pdf). 
-
-Alas, it's tiny specks of gold. Also not our land. But, details. 
-
-I always tell the kids they can keep all they can pan, but they never take me up on it. They're more interested in good-looking rocks with skipping potential.
-
-Originally I didn't think the shiny golden flecks I saw in the stream bed could be gold because where I grew up anything you thought, hoped, prayed might be gold was absolutely not gold, ever. But then if you grew up in the 1970s and 80s you inevitably watched too many westerns with too many lonely, sun-baked, half-crazed gold miners to ever totally abandon the notion that you too might find some gold one day. If you just kept looking.
-
-One day I spent an hour or two on the [SCDNR Geological Survey website](https://www.dnr.sc.gov/geology/) and discovered that indeed, there is quite a bit of gold in them thar hills. Enough in fact that the flecks we find in the rocks of our tiny stream probably *are* gold.
-
-I haven't been back to the creek since I found out it might actually contain gold. The sunshine and warm weather didn't last. Well, the warm temperatures did, but the clouds rolled back in and we've had a week of rainy, foggy, dreary days. The red clay has turned to red mud, making hiking difficult. 
-
-I'm ready for more sunshine. I've had to settle for warm rain, which I will take over cold rain, even if it is decidedly odd to have warm rain in the winter. There was a thunderstorm two nights ago. It's not even March. Strange times in the shire. Maybe Spring will come a little early. Or maybe that's just a February fantasy, like the gold in the creek. 
-
-
-In March of 2006 I was in Austin Texas, at SXSW eating pulled pork with WIRED's then main music writer and my editor (who is vegan, but very polite about these things, and also, still my editor). We were eating, but actually do something that at that time was rather unusual: we were watching everyone in the building stare at their phones. The iPhone did not exist yet. Twitter had been around for a little while at that point, but SXSW, this particular day as I remember it, was when it really took off. I think about this moment from time to time and try to make sense of it.
-
-Now a restaurant full of people staring at their phones is so common we don't even think about it, but back then it was so unusual we talked about doing an article about it. I can't remember if we did or not, but I remember talking about it because I remember that nothing about the scene felt particularly prophetic. It didn't even feel like something from the future, it felt like something anomalous.
-
-We were talking about feedback loops. How short this one was. This was back when Twitter was mostly SMS-based. That feedback loop is even shorter now. 
-
-All communication happens in loops. This is the start of a loop. I say something. You say something back, I respond to that response. The conversation begins, a loop is opened.
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-Most online communication these days consists of loops measured in minutes, hours at the most. I find those loop overwhelmingly short. I am convinced that loops this short are only meant to be experienced in the body, in person. That kind of immediacy requires intimacy, closeness of physical space. Without that you get... the culture we have. 
-
-How long is the loop? That's the question to ask before you devote your time and energy to something. Is it the right length for me to be heard? Is it the right length of me to be able to listen to what you're saying? I find that the longer the loop is, the better the communication. Perhaps it's as simple as more time to think. Perhaps it is something more. This is just me of course. For all the talk of how awful social media is, I know several people who love it, would be devastated to lose it, and are otherwise happy, functional people.
-
-My website is near the opposite end of this communication loop spectrum. I still get email asking about things I published nearly two decades ago. I have no idea how people find these older articles since Google generally ignores Luxagraf (as it ignores every small site), but they do. So I get to communicate with people in loops that span decades from my point of view.
-
-
-## 004 Internet Bloom
-
-Greetings Friends —
-
-It is I, Scott, maker of stuff, including this. You signed up for this newsletter at luxagraf.net. If that does not ring a bell there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this letter.
-
-Spring has arrived down here. Earlier this month we had two solid weeks of glorious weather, 75 and sunny, flowers coming up, everything was wonderful. Then the pine trees decided it was time, and great clouds of yellow green pine pollen began to descend like a hazy fog from the heights of the forest. The wind shifted and dumped the vast majority of it on our house. Great swirling clouds come rolling off the tree tops in the mornings to coat everything and choke you the minute you step outside.
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-It's a small price to pay for private access to the 100 acre wood, but it is still a price.
-
-Just before the great pollen cloud began I made a trip to Athens to visit a friend, in person. It is odd to me that we, that I, feel compelled to say, *in person* as if there were some other way to visit people. We caught up a bit, talked about what we had been up to, as you do, and at some point he asked if I was still making luxagraf. I said of course I am. Once I start something I am generally too foolishly stubborn to stop.
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-Then he asked, "why?"
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-There was an awkward pause in which I think he was thinking I had no answer, but actually I was sorting through about fifty different answers I have to that question and trying to pick one. The one I picked for him, which is my favorite one, is, "because it's wildly profitable."
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-Just kidding. I told him I do it because I enjoy making it. It's fun to build something that's your own. 
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-The strange thing is he was back to building his own site too. He's the person I learned to build websites with many many years ago. He's also more realistic so at some point he stopped. It never was profitable. That might have been what made it fun. 
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-But these days everyone says you need a website to promote your business or build your brand or whatever. I almost never hear people say you should build a website because it's fun. I try to encourage people to build their own stuff, but it could be that I'm one of the few who enjoys it. It's certainly still not profitable.
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-I once calculated the total cost of domain registration and web hosting for luxagraf.net, which has been online since 2002. I blocked out the number afterward, erased it from my mind. It was surprisingly large though. 
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-It reminded me of a story my grandmother used to tell me and my cousins, that she was sorry she hadn't set aside $1 a day for all us grandkids starting when we were born. She would then proceed to explain compound interest to us, and by the end all of us cousins would look at each other like, wait, what? Grandma could have made us rich? But she just now thought of it? Well, damn. 
-
-I'm still not totally sure what she was up to with those stories, they were like seedlings I think. One thing I believe grew of them for me is a life long habit of multiplying out small monthly payments to form staggering, intimidating numbers at the end of the axis of time.
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-The point is, to have your own space online is not cheap, either in terms of money or time. It is an investment. One that seemed worth it to some of us. The internet has regressed dramatically since I started making this site, but once upon a time everyone made their own website and it was fun. It took some work, but all fun things do in my view. You had to learn how everything worked. You spent a lot of time looking up HTML tags and trying to make things look the way they were supposed to, but somehow never actually did. But that was part of the fun. Just like it would be no fun if the engine started the first time you tried to fix it. Where's the adventure in that?
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-*Aside: This is a curious thing though, because you have to be careful not to go seeking adventure. That would be asking for trouble. You have to *hope* the engine starts the first time. When it doesn't. Well, now you have an adventure.*
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-It turns out a lot of people don't think tinkering with engines or HTML is much fun, so sealed engines and MySpace came along to flatten out the learning curve. MySpace also showed you could make real money from the things people put online. And at that moment fun and adventure left the building. 
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-The web regressed from a fun, adventurous thing floating out there somewhere in the ether to a real thing with accountants. Statistics, money, and attention are harbingers of death for anything you love. They're good if you're looking to pay the bills, but still harbingers of death. 
-
-In 2004, when the internet regressed and everyone became a blogger and slapped ads all over their websites and started rolling in the dough, I was too busy to do it. I never turned my website into anything more than something I did for fun. And so in 2011 when all that money dried up and everyone abandoned their sites in favor of social media, I didn't. I was still having fun. It wasn't that I thought all the ads and stuff was a terrible thing (although in hindsight I do), it's just that I never did. For me this remained a fun thing I like to do in moments like this, at 10:30 on a Sunday evening when I probably should get some rest.
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-The point is, I totally missed the memo about the transition of the web from a fun place where we all made crazy weird websites into this horrible shrieking pit of existential despair where you *still* can't find the phone number of the restaurant on the restaurant website because why the fuck would you want useful information when you could have a poorly lit close up of last season's entrees, and so consequently, I still have fun making my website. 
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-So much fun in fact that I keep adding to the site. I recently started putting photos online again. Like Instagram, but on my own site. I actually started it a while ago, but forgot to tell anyone about it. Anyway, you can sign up for [Range](/range/), as I call it, if you're interested. If not, that's fine, I'll still have fun doing it.
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-And grandma, wherever you may be, know that I did eventually figure out how I could use compound interest to my advantage. I haven't always done it, but I do think my habit of taking the very long view of things might have it's roots back there in those stories.
-
-Until next time friends...
-
--s
-
-## 005 June Letter
-
-Greetings Friends —
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-It is I, Scott, maker of stuff, including this. You signed up for this newsletter at luxagraf.net. If that does not ring a bell there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this letter.
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-Things have been pretty quiet in the woods lately. We've watched the world wake up from winter, turn green, [pollen-saturated](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2021/03/springsville), and lately we've been getting an early taste of the summer heat and humidity that's still to come. 
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-First though, thanks to the two people who emailed to say those blue flowers are grape hyacinth, I do believe you are correct. They're not native to this area, so I'd like to hear the story of how they ended up here, though I doubt I ever will. I'll also probably never get to know why there's a line of daffodils running though the woods not far from the house (old driveway? Original house? Caretaker house? Slave house?), or what the various mounds of bricks we've found wandering through the woods could have been, or how/why the rusted machinery came to be left where it rusts. There are so many stories all around us all the time. As a writer it's daunting to try to pick one.
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diff --git a/published/2003-09-12-farewell-mr-cash.txt b/jrnl/2003-09-12-farewell-mr-cash.txt
index 7122090..7122090 100644
--- a/published/2003-09-12-farewell-mr-cash.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2003-09-12-farewell-mr-cash.txt
diff --git a/published/2004-10-10-art-essay.txt b/jrnl/2004-10-10-art-essay.txt
index 310c253..310c253 100644
--- a/published/2004-10-10-art-essay.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2004-10-10-art-essay.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-02-24-farewell-mr-hunter-s-thompson.txt b/jrnl/2005-02-24-farewell-mr-hunter-s-thompson.txt
index 8e38b4b..8e38b4b 100644
--- a/published/2005-02-24-farewell-mr-hunter-s-thompson.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-02-24-farewell-mr-hunter-s-thompson.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt b/jrnl/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt
index e013d9c..e013d9c 100644
--- a/published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-05-12-new-adventures-hifi-text.txt b/jrnl/2005-05-12-new-adventures-hifi-text.txt
index a16df6c..a16df6c 100644
--- a/published/2005-05-12-new-adventures-hifi-text.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-05-12-new-adventures-hifi-text.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-10-08-new-luddites.txt b/jrnl/2005-10-08-new-luddites.txt
index a734353..a734353 100644
--- a/published/2005-10-08-new-luddites.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-10-08-new-luddites.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-10-19-tips-and-resources.txt b/jrnl/2005-10-19-tips-and-resources.txt
index 66dd19a..66dd19a 100644
--- a/published/2005-10-19-tips-and-resources.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-10-19-tips-and-resources.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-10-20-twenty-more-minutes-go.txt b/jrnl/2005-10-20-twenty-more-minutes-go.txt
index cdb6ba5..cdb6ba5 100644
--- a/published/2005-10-20-twenty-more-minutes-go.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-10-20-twenty-more-minutes-go.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-10-24-living-railway-car.txt b/jrnl/2005-10-24-living-railway-car.txt
index 9794697..9794697 100644
--- a/published/2005-10-24-living-railway-car.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-10-24-living-railway-car.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-10-28-sainte-chapelle.txt b/jrnl/2005-10-28-sainte-chapelle.txt
index 423ef46..423ef46 100644
--- a/published/2005-10-28-sainte-chapelle.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-10-28-sainte-chapelle.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-11-01-houses-we-live.txt b/jrnl/2005-11-01-houses-we-live.txt
index 0736887..0736887 100644
--- a/published/2005-11-01-houses-we-live.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-11-01-houses-we-live.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-11-06-bury-your-dead.txt b/jrnl/2005-11-06-bury-your-dead.txt
index d8fe7e5..d8fe7e5 100644
--- a/published/2005-11-06-bury-your-dead.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-11-06-bury-your-dead.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-11-08-riots-iraqi-restaurants-goodbye-seine.txt b/jrnl/2005-11-08-riots-iraqi-restaurants-goodbye-seine.txt
index cfd5b73..cfd5b73 100644
--- a/published/2005-11-08-riots-iraqi-restaurants-goodbye-seine.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-11-08-riots-iraqi-restaurants-goodbye-seine.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-11-11-vasco-de-gama-exhumed.txt b/jrnl/2005-11-11-vasco-de-gama-exhumed.txt
index 33d5ce9..33d5ce9 100644
--- a/published/2005-11-11-vasco-de-gama-exhumed.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-11-11-vasco-de-gama-exhumed.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-11-15-backwaters-kerala.txt b/jrnl/2005-11-15-backwaters-kerala.txt
index b7f1dff..b7f1dff 100644
--- a/published/2005-11-15-backwaters-kerala.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-11-15-backwaters-kerala.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-11-20-fish-story.txt b/jrnl/2005-11-20-fish-story.txt
index 541a907..541a907 100644
--- a/published/2005-11-20-fish-story.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-11-20-fish-story.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-11-24-anjuna-market.txt b/jrnl/2005-11-24-anjuna-market.txt
index 2517c7b..2517c7b 100644
--- a/published/2005-11-24-anjuna-market.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-11-24-anjuna-market.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-11-27-living-airport-terminals.txt b/jrnl/2005-11-27-living-airport-terminals.txt
index b56491c..b56491c 100644
--- a/published/2005-11-27-living-airport-terminals.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-11-27-living-airport-terminals.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-11-28-city-palace.txt b/jrnl/2005-11-28-city-palace.txt
index 36841d2..36841d2 100644
--- a/published/2005-11-28-city-palace.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-11-28-city-palace.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-11-29-monsoon-palace.txt b/jrnl/2005-11-29-monsoon-palace.txt
index 7e4562a..7e4562a 100644
--- a/published/2005-11-29-monsoon-palace.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-11-29-monsoon-palace.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-11-30-around-udaipur.txt b/jrnl/2005-11-30-around-udaipur.txt
index 13b0db5..13b0db5 100644
--- a/published/2005-11-30-around-udaipur.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-11-30-around-udaipur.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-12-02-majestic-fort.txt b/jrnl/2005-12-02-majestic-fort.txt
index d8eb942..d8eb942 100644
--- a/published/2005-12-02-majestic-fort.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-12-02-majestic-fort.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-12-05-camel-no-name.txt b/jrnl/2005-12-05-camel-no-name.txt
index a9dfd85..a9dfd85 100644
--- a/published/2005-12-05-camel-no-name.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-12-05-camel-no-name.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-12-09-taj-express.txt b/jrnl/2005-12-09-taj-express.txt
index bbe6f30..bbe6f30 100644
--- a/published/2005-12-09-taj-express.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-12-09-taj-express.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-12-10-goodbye-india.txt b/jrnl/2005-12-10-goodbye-india.txt
index eb381f1..eb381f1 100644
--- a/published/2005-12-10-goodbye-india.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-12-10-goodbye-india.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-12-15-durbar-square-kathmandu.txt b/jrnl/2005-12-15-durbar-square-kathmandu.txt
index e362997..e362997 100644
--- a/published/2005-12-15-durbar-square-kathmandu.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-12-15-durbar-square-kathmandu.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-12-15-pashupatinath.txt b/jrnl/2005-12-15-pashupatinath.txt
index 1b0b067..1b0b067 100644
--- a/published/2005-12-15-pashupatinath.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-12-15-pashupatinath.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-12-17-sunset-over-himalayas.txt b/jrnl/2005-12-17-sunset-over-himalayas.txt
index 2737887..2737887 100644
--- a/published/2005-12-17-sunset-over-himalayas.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-12-17-sunset-over-himalayas.txt
diff --git a/published/2005-12-25-merry-christmas-2005.txt b/jrnl/2005-12-25-merry-christmas-2005.txt
index 957d171..957d171 100644
--- a/published/2005-12-25-merry-christmas-2005.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2005-12-25-merry-christmas-2005.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-01-01-are-you-amplified-rock.txt b/jrnl/2006-01-01-are-you-amplified-rock.txt
index 937e3b9..937e3b9 100644
--- a/published/2006-01-01-are-you-amplified-rock.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-01-01-are-you-amplified-rock.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-01-03-brink-clouds.txt b/jrnl/2006-01-03-brink-clouds.txt
index 2c5eeba..2c5eeba 100644
--- a/published/2006-01-03-brink-clouds.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-01-03-brink-clouds.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-01-05-buddha-bounty.txt b/jrnl/2006-01-05-buddha-bounty.txt
index 2c7fcb5..2c7fcb5 100644
--- a/published/2006-01-05-buddha-bounty.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-01-05-buddha-bounty.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-01-12-you-and-i-are-disappearing.txt b/jrnl/2006-01-12-you-and-i-are-disappearing.txt
index 1ade480..1ade480 100644
--- a/published/2006-01-12-you-and-i-are-disappearing.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-01-12-you-and-i-are-disappearing.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-01-17-down-river.txt b/jrnl/2006-01-17-down-river.txt
index f57acca..f57acca 100644
--- a/published/2006-01-17-down-river.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-01-17-down-river.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-01-17-king-carrot-flowers.txt b/jrnl/2006-01-17-king-carrot-flowers.txt
index 9bf053b..9bf053b 100644
--- a/published/2006-01-17-king-carrot-flowers.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-01-17-king-carrot-flowers.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-01-19-hymn-big-wheel.txt b/jrnl/2006-01-19-hymn-big-wheel.txt
index d9ca4fd..d9ca4fd 100644
--- a/published/2006-01-19-hymn-big-wheel.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-01-19-hymn-big-wheel.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-01-21-i-used-fly-peter-pan.txt b/jrnl/2006-01-21-i-used-fly-peter-pan.txt
index fc3a3fd..fc3a3fd 100644
--- a/published/2006-01-21-i-used-fly-peter-pan.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-01-21-i-used-fly-peter-pan.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-02-04-lovely-universe.txt b/jrnl/2006-02-04-lovely-universe.txt
index 3e744cb..3e744cb 100644
--- a/published/2006-02-04-lovely-universe.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-02-04-lovely-universe.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-02-10-water-slides-and-spirit-guides.txt b/jrnl/2006-02-10-water-slides-and-spirit-guides.txt
index 30092f2..30092f2 100644
--- a/published/2006-02-10-water-slides-and-spirit-guides.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-02-10-water-slides-and-spirit-guides.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-02-14-everyday-fourteenth.txt b/jrnl/2006-02-14-everyday-fourteenth.txt
index d9deed1..d9deed1 100644
--- a/published/2006-02-14-everyday-fourteenth.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-02-14-everyday-fourteenth.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-02-18-safe-milk.txt b/jrnl/2006-02-18-safe-milk.txt
index b5def62..b5def62 100644
--- a/published/2006-02-18-safe-milk.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-02-18-safe-milk.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-02-24-cant-get-there-here.txt b/jrnl/2006-02-24-cant-get-there-here.txt
index 19a2a3a..19a2a3a 100644
--- a/published/2006-02-24-cant-get-there-here.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-02-24-cant-get-there-here.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-02-28-little-corner-world.txt b/jrnl/2006-02-28-little-corner-world.txt
index c763848..c763848 100644
--- a/published/2006-02-28-little-corner-world.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-02-28-little-corner-world.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-03-07-ticket-ride.txt b/jrnl/2006-03-07-ticket-ride.txt
index 9c737dc..9c737dc 100644
--- a/published/2006-03-07-ticket-ride.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-03-07-ticket-ride.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-03-14-blood-tracks.txt b/jrnl/2006-03-14-blood-tracks.txt
index e00d593..e00d593 100644
--- a/published/2006-03-14-blood-tracks.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-03-14-blood-tracks.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-03-16-beginning-see-light.txt b/jrnl/2006-03-16-beginning-see-light.txt
index 93af448..93af448 100644
--- a/published/2006-03-16-beginning-see-light.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-03-16-beginning-see-light.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-03-18-wait-til-it-blows.txt b/jrnl/2006-03-18-wait-til-it-blows.txt
index 1d3e724..1d3e724 100644
--- a/published/2006-03-18-wait-til-it-blows.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-03-18-wait-til-it-blows.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-03-21-angkor-wat.txt b/jrnl/2006-03-21-angkor-wat.txt
index d99f7c8..d99f7c8 100644
--- a/published/2006-03-21-angkor-wat.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-03-21-angkor-wat.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-03-26-midnight-perfect-world.txt b/jrnl/2006-03-26-midnight-perfect-world.txt
index 779c40d..779c40d 100644
--- a/published/2006-03-26-midnight-perfect-world.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-03-26-midnight-perfect-world.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-03-31-book-right.txt b/jrnl/2006-03-31-book-right.txt
index 8fcb733..8fcb733 100644
--- a/published/2006-03-31-book-right.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-03-31-book-right.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-04-11-going-down-south.txt b/jrnl/2006-04-11-going-down-south.txt
index 4cdad29..4cdad29 100644
--- a/published/2006-04-11-going-down-south.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-04-11-going-down-south.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-04-22-beginning-end.txt b/jrnl/2006-04-22-beginning-end.txt
index e6c74e3..e6c74e3 100644
--- a/published/2006-04-22-beginning-end.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-04-22-beginning-end.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-05-01-closing-time.txt b/jrnl/2006-05-01-closing-time.txt
index d69dc60..d69dc60 100644
--- a/published/2006-05-01-closing-time.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-05-01-closing-time.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-05-10-london-calling.txt b/jrnl/2006-05-10-london-calling.txt
index 0c170b0..0c170b0 100644
--- a/published/2006-05-10-london-calling.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-05-10-london-calling.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-05-11-refracted-light-and-grace.txt b/jrnl/2006-05-11-refracted-light-and-grace.txt
index e397946..e397946 100644
--- a/published/2006-05-11-refracted-light-and-grace.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-05-11-refracted-light-and-grace.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-05-16-blue-milk.txt b/jrnl/2006-05-16-blue-milk.txt
index a7728da..a7728da 100644
--- a/published/2006-05-16-blue-milk.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-05-16-blue-milk.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-05-18-feel-good-lost.txt b/jrnl/2006-05-18-feel-good-lost.txt
index d47404e..d47404e 100644
--- a/published/2006-05-18-feel-good-lost.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-05-18-feel-good-lost.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-05-19-ghost.txt b/jrnl/2006-05-19-ghost.txt
index 8b2863e..8b2863e 100644
--- a/published/2006-05-19-ghost.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-05-19-ghost.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-05-22-king-carrot-flowers-part-two.txt b/jrnl/2006-05-22-king-carrot-flowers-part-two.txt
index eb0c075..eb0c075 100644
--- a/published/2006-05-22-king-carrot-flowers-part-two.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-05-22-king-carrot-flowers-part-two.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-05-25-inside-and-out.txt b/jrnl/2006-05-25-inside-and-out.txt
index d983cd3..d983cd3 100644
--- a/published/2006-05-25-inside-and-out.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-05-25-inside-and-out.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-05-26-four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds.txt b/jrnl/2006-05-26-four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds.txt
index 7a62e3c..7a62e3c 100644
--- a/published/2006-05-26-four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-05-26-four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-05-27-unreflected.txt b/jrnl/2006-05-27-unreflected.txt
index 72790e8..72790e8 100644
--- a/published/2006-05-27-unreflected.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-05-27-unreflected.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-05-28-i-dont-sleep-i-dream.txt b/jrnl/2006-05-28-i-dont-sleep-i-dream.txt
index 8036e28..8036e28 100644
--- a/published/2006-05-28-i-dont-sleep-i-dream.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-05-28-i-dont-sleep-i-dream.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-06-06-cadenza.txt b/jrnl/2006-06-06-cadenza.txt
index d4402d3..d4402d3 100644
--- a/published/2006-06-06-cadenza.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-06-06-cadenza.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-06-09-homeward.txt b/jrnl/2006-06-09-homeward.txt
index 62548fc..62548fc 100644
--- a/published/2006-06-09-homeward.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-06-09-homeward.txt
diff --git a/published/2006-12-25-give-it-or-turnit-loose.txt b/jrnl/2006-12-25-give-it-or-turnit-loose.txt
index 48eba6f..48eba6f 100644
--- a/published/2006-12-25-give-it-or-turnit-loose.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2006-12-25-give-it-or-turnit-loose.txt
diff --git a/published/2007-01-11-sun-came-no-conclusions.txt b/jrnl/2007-01-11-sun-came-no-conclusions.txt
index cf3ddab..cf3ddab 100644
--- a/published/2007-01-11-sun-came-no-conclusions.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2007-01-11-sun-came-no-conclusions.txt
diff --git a/published/2007-01-31-catologue-raisonne.txt b/jrnl/2007-01-31-catologue-raisonne.txt
index 9ff554d..9ff554d 100644
--- a/published/2007-01-31-catologue-raisonne.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2007-01-31-catologue-raisonne.txt
diff --git a/published/2007-02-03-everything-all-time.txt b/jrnl/2007-02-03-everything-all-time.txt
index 7cd7b0d..7cd7b0d 100644
--- a/published/2007-02-03-everything-all-time.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2007-02-03-everything-all-time.txt
diff --git a/published/2007-03-01-goodbye-mother-and-cove.txt b/jrnl/2007-03-01-goodbye-mother-and-cove.txt
index 83b7f5f..83b7f5f 100644
--- a/published/2007-03-01-goodbye-mother-and-cove.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2007-03-01-goodbye-mother-and-cove.txt
diff --git a/published/2007-06-15-sailing-through.txt b/jrnl/2007-06-15-sailing-through.txt
index 8c55a1b..8c55a1b 100644
--- a/published/2007-06-15-sailing-through.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2007-06-15-sailing-through.txt
diff --git a/published/2007-06-17-being-there.txt b/jrnl/2007-06-17-being-there.txt
index e8350a6..e8350a6 100644
--- a/published/2007-06-17-being-there.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2007-06-17-being-there.txt
diff --git a/published/2007-07-23-other-ocean.txt b/jrnl/2007-07-23-other-ocean.txt
index aec702e..aec702e 100644
--- a/published/2007-07-23-other-ocean.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2007-07-23-other-ocean.txt
diff --git a/published/2007-11-14-fall.txt b/jrnl/2007-11-14-fall.txt
index c871eea..c871eea 100644
--- a/published/2007-11-14-fall.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2007-11-14-fall.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-01-01-new-years-day.txt b/jrnl/2008-01-01-new-years-day.txt
index 0271944..0271944 100644
--- a/published/2008-01-01-new-years-day.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-01-01-new-years-day.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-03-30-ring-bells.txt b/jrnl/2008-03-30-ring-bells.txt
index 9ff3be8..9ff3be8 100644
--- a/published/2008-03-30-ring-bells.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-03-30-ring-bells.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-04-02-return-sea.txt b/jrnl/2008-04-02-return-sea.txt
index 27ea074..27ea074 100644
--- a/published/2008-04-02-return-sea.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-04-02-return-sea.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-04-05-little-island-sun.txt b/jrnl/2008-04-05-little-island-sun.txt
index 11b7bda..11b7bda 100644
--- a/published/2008-04-05-little-island-sun.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-04-05-little-island-sun.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-06-07-love-with-a-view-vagabonds-responsibilty-living-we.txt b/jrnl/2008-06-07-love-with-a-view-vagabonds-responsibilty-living-we.txt
index 7a9b30b..7a9b30b 100644
--- a/published/2008-06-07-love-with-a-view-vagabonds-responsibilty-living-we.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-06-07-love-with-a-view-vagabonds-responsibilty-living-we.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-06-26-returning-again-back-little-corn-island.txt b/jrnl/2008-06-26-returning-again-back-little-corn-island.txt
index 5746131..5746131 100644
--- a/published/2008-06-26-returning-again-back-little-corn-island.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-06-26-returning-again-back-little-corn-island.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-06-30-you-cant-go-home-again.txt b/jrnl/2008-06-30-you-cant-go-home-again.txt
index 3fa2413..3fa2413 100644
--- a/published/2008-06-30-you-cant-go-home-again.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-06-30-you-cant-go-home-again.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-07-03-tiny-cities-made-ash.txt b/jrnl/2008-07-03-tiny-cities-made-ash.txt
index 37fba3e..37fba3e 100644
--- a/published/2008-07-03-tiny-cities-made-ash.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-07-03-tiny-cities-made-ash.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-07-06-our-days-are-becoming-nights.txt b/jrnl/2008-07-06-our-days-are-becoming-nights.txt
index a38ac3b..a38ac3b 100644
--- a/published/2008-07-06-our-days-are-becoming-nights.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-07-06-our-days-are-becoming-nights.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-07-27-rope-swings-and-river-floats.txt b/jrnl/2008-07-27-rope-swings-and-river-floats.txt
index 0a4c5d4..0a4c5d4 100644
--- a/published/2008-07-27-rope-swings-and-river-floats.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-07-27-rope-swings-and-river-floats.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-10-31-elkmont-and-great-smoky-mountains.txt b/jrnl/2008-10-31-elkmont-and-great-smoky-mountains.txt
index 7280fd3..7280fd3 100644
--- a/published/2008-10-31-elkmont-and-great-smoky-mountains.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-10-31-elkmont-and-great-smoky-mountains.txt
diff --git a/published/2008-12-09-leonardo-da-vinci-and-codex-bunnies.txt b/jrnl/2008-12-09-leonardo-da-vinci-and-codex-bunnies.txt
index b54762e..b54762e 100644
--- a/published/2008-12-09-leonardo-da-vinci-and-codex-bunnies.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2008-12-09-leonardo-da-vinci-and-codex-bunnies.txt
diff --git a/published/2009-04-13-strangers-on-a-train.txt b/jrnl/2009-04-13-strangers-on-a-train.txt
index d46f612..d46f612 100644
--- a/published/2009-04-13-strangers-on-a-train.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2009-04-13-strangers-on-a-train.txt
diff --git a/published/2009-05-03-how-to-get-your-butt-and-travel-world.txt b/jrnl/2009-05-03-how-to-get-your-butt-and-travel-world.txt
index b26bf98..b26bf98 100644
--- a/published/2009-05-03-how-to-get-your-butt-and-travel-world.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2009-05-03-how-to-get-your-butt-and-travel-world.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-03-13-so-far-i-have-not-found-science.txt b/jrnl/2010-03-13-so-far-i-have-not-found-science.txt
index 2f6fad7..2f6fad7 100644
--- a/published/2010-03-13-so-far-i-have-not-found-science.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-03-13-so-far-i-have-not-found-science.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-04-24-death-valley.txt b/jrnl/2010-04-24-death-valley.txt
index 52c2a2d..52c2a2d 100644
--- a/published/2010-04-24-death-valley.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-04-24-death-valley.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-05-17-los-angeles-im-yours.txt b/jrnl/2010-05-17-los-angeles-im-yours.txt
index 4610af9..4610af9 100644
--- a/published/2010-05-17-los-angeles-im-yours.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-05-17-los-angeles-im-yours.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-07-05-begin-the-begin.txt b/jrnl/2010-07-05-begin-the-begin.txt
index cd6af3d..cd6af3d 100644
--- a/published/2010-07-05-begin-the-begin.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-07-05-begin-the-begin.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-07-08-dixie-drug-store.txt b/jrnl/2010-07-08-dixie-drug-store.txt
index 0babb97..0babb97 100644
--- a/published/2010-07-08-dixie-drug-store.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-07-08-dixie-drug-store.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-07-11-legend-billy-the-kid.txt b/jrnl/2010-07-11-legend-billy-the-kid.txt
index f058f71..f058f71 100644
--- a/published/2010-07-11-legend-billy-the-kid.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-07-11-legend-billy-the-kid.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-07-15-why-national-parks-are-better-state-parks.txt b/jrnl/2010-07-15-why-national-parks-are-better-state-parks.txt
index 8bc9a48..8bc9a48 100644
--- a/published/2010-07-15-why-national-parks-are-better-state-parks.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-07-15-why-national-parks-are-better-state-parks.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-07-16-comanche-national-grasslands.txt b/jrnl/2010-07-16-comanche-national-grasslands.txt
index 6922418..6922418 100644
--- a/published/2010-07-16-comanche-national-grasslands.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-07-16-comanche-national-grasslands.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-07-17-great-sand-dunes-national-park.txt b/jrnl/2010-07-17-great-sand-dunes-national-park.txt
index 00a5313..00a5313 100644
--- a/published/2010-07-17-great-sand-dunes-national-park.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-07-17-great-sand-dunes-national-park.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-07-22-backpacking-grand-tetons.txt b/jrnl/2010-07-22-backpacking-grand-tetons.txt
index aeaf85e..aeaf85e 100644
--- a/published/2010-07-22-backpacking-grand-tetons.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-07-22-backpacking-grand-tetons.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-07-25-endless-crowds-yellowstone.txt b/jrnl/2010-07-25-endless-crowds-yellowstone.txt
index 935ec28..935ec28 100644
--- a/published/2010-07-25-endless-crowds-yellowstone.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-07-25-endless-crowds-yellowstone.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-07-28-dinosaur-national-monument-part-one-echo-park.txt b/jrnl/2010-07-28-dinosaur-national-monument-part-one-echo-park.txt
index 46482a2..46482a2 100644
--- a/published/2010-07-28-dinosaur-national-monument-part-one-echo-park.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-07-28-dinosaur-national-monument-part-one-echo-park.txt
diff --git a/published/2010-08-02-dinosaur-national-monument-part-two-down-river.txt b/jrnl/2010-08-02-dinosaur-national-monument-part-two-down-river.txt
index 4c8a0ef..4c8a0ef 100644
--- a/published/2010-08-02-dinosaur-national-monument-part-two-down-river.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2010-08-02-dinosaur-national-monument-part-two-down-river.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-01-18-charleston-a-z.txt b/jrnl/2011-01-18-charleston-a-z.txt
index e3620b2..e3620b2 100644
--- a/published/2011-01-18-charleston-a-z.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-01-18-charleston-a-z.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-01-26-world-outside.txt b/jrnl/2011-01-26-world-outside.txt
index df906ea..df906ea 100644
--- a/published/2011-01-26-world-outside.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-01-26-world-outside.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-03-28-we-used-wait-it.txt b/jrnl/2011-03-28-we-used-wait-it.txt
index 1ee5b2c..1ee5b2c 100644
--- a/published/2011-03-28-we-used-wait-it.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-03-28-we-used-wait-it.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-05-29-from-here-we-go-sublime.txt b/jrnl/2011-05-29-from-here-we-go-sublime.txt
index f53f564..f53f564 100644
--- a/published/2011-05-29-from-here-we-go-sublime.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-05-29-from-here-we-go-sublime.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-06-04-language-cities.txt b/jrnl/2011-06-04-language-cities.txt
index c8a8cb9..c8a8cb9 100644
--- a/published/2011-06-04-language-cities.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-06-04-language-cities.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-06-06-new-pollution.txt b/jrnl/2011-06-06-new-pollution.txt
index 9b9901b..9b9901b 100644
--- a/published/2011-06-06-new-pollution.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-06-06-new-pollution.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-06-07-forever-today.txt b/jrnl/2011-06-07-forever-today.txt
index 422c36b..422c36b 100644
--- a/published/2011-06-07-forever-today.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-06-07-forever-today.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-06-10-natural-science.txt b/jrnl/2011-06-10-natural-science.txt
index 5e46efd..5e46efd 100644
--- a/published/2011-06-10-natural-science.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-06-10-natural-science.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-06-14-cooking-rome.txt b/jrnl/2011-06-14-cooking-rome.txt
index d3cef4b..d3cef4b 100644
--- a/published/2011-06-14-cooking-rome.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-06-14-cooking-rome.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-06-16-motor-city-burning.txt b/jrnl/2011-06-16-motor-city-burning.txt
index 59a1214..59a1214 100644
--- a/published/2011-06-16-motor-city-burning.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-06-16-motor-city-burning.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-06-19-temple-ceremony-ubud.txt b/jrnl/2011-06-19-temple-ceremony-ubud.txt
index 8db2e43..8db2e43 100644
--- a/published/2011-06-19-temple-ceremony-ubud.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-06-19-temple-ceremony-ubud.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-06-23-best-snorkeling-world.txt b/jrnl/2011-06-23-best-snorkeling-world.txt
index 649cae8..649cae8 100644
--- a/published/2011-06-23-best-snorkeling-world.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-06-23-best-snorkeling-world.txt
diff --git a/published/2011-10-17-worst-place-on-earth.txt b/jrnl/2011-10-17-worst-place-on-earth.txt
index b2de5f6..b2de5f6 100644
--- a/published/2011-10-17-worst-place-on-earth.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2011-10-17-worst-place-on-earth.txt
diff --git a/published/2012-03-31-street-food-athens-georgia.txt b/jrnl/2012-03-31-street-food-athens-georgia.txt
index 1e4475b..1e4475b 100644
--- a/published/2012-03-31-street-food-athens-georgia.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2012-03-31-street-food-athens-georgia.txt
diff --git a/published/2012-05-20-things-behind-sun.txt b/jrnl/2012-05-20-things-behind-sun.txt
index 6434a55..6434a55 100644
--- a/published/2012-05-20-things-behind-sun.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2012-05-20-things-behind-sun.txt
diff --git a/published/2013-05-22-consider-the-apalachicola-oyster.txt b/jrnl/2013-05-22-consider-the-apalachicola-oyster.txt
index 9e510e8..9e510e8 100644
--- a/published/2013-05-22-consider-the-apalachicola-oyster.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2013-05-22-consider-the-apalachicola-oyster.txt
diff --git a/published/2013-05-26-all-the-pretty-beaches.txt b/jrnl/2013-05-26-all-the-pretty-beaches.txt
index 92120da..92120da 100644
--- a/published/2013-05-26-all-the-pretty-beaches.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2013-05-26-all-the-pretty-beaches.txt
diff --git a/published/2013-05-29-oysterman-wanted.txt b/jrnl/2013-05-29-oysterman-wanted.txt
index c263eac..c263eac 100644
--- a/published/2013-05-29-oysterman-wanted.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2013-05-29-oysterman-wanted.txt
diff --git a/published/2013-05-30-king-birds.txt b/jrnl/2013-05-30-king-birds.txt
index 7da6427..7da6427 100644
--- a/published/2013-05-30-king-birds.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2013-05-30-king-birds.txt
diff --git a/published/2014-11-01-halloween.txt b/jrnl/2014-11-01-halloween.txt
index eaf3bf1..eaf3bf1 100644
--- a/published/2014-11-01-halloween.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2014-11-01-halloween.txt
diff --git a/published/2014-11-09-memorial-park.txt b/jrnl/2014-11-09-memorial-park.txt
index a49b9e6..a49b9e6 100644
--- a/published/2014-11-09-memorial-park.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2014-11-09-memorial-park.txt
diff --git a/published/2014-11-16-muffins.txt b/jrnl/2014-11-16-muffins.txt
index 772dbfb..772dbfb 100644
--- a/published/2014-11-16-muffins.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2014-11-16-muffins.txt
diff --git a/published/2014-11-22-colors.txt b/jrnl/2014-11-22-colors.txt
index b791ed1..b791ed1 100644
--- a/published/2014-11-22-colors.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2014-11-22-colors.txt
diff --git a/published/2014-11-27-creamed-corn.txt b/jrnl/2014-11-27-creamed-corn.txt
index b74ab97..b74ab97 100644
--- a/published/2014-11-27-creamed-corn.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2014-11-27-creamed-corn.txt
diff --git a/published/2014-12-18-bourbon-bacon-bark.txt b/jrnl/2014-12-18-bourbon-bacon-bark.txt
index f30351f..f30351f 100644
--- a/published/2014-12-18-bourbon-bacon-bark.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2014-12-18-bourbon-bacon-bark.txt
diff --git a/published/2014-12-19-night-before.txt b/jrnl/2014-12-19-night-before.txt
index 684e4de..684e4de 100644
--- a/published/2014-12-19-night-before.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2014-12-19-night-before.txt
diff --git a/published/2014-12-19_night-before.txt b/jrnl/2014-12-19_night-before.txt
index 0eba09a..0eba09a 100644
--- a/published/2014-12-19_night-before.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2014-12-19_night-before.txt
diff --git a/published/2014-12-29-1969-yellowstone-trailer.txt b/jrnl/2014-12-29-1969-yellowstone-trailer.txt
index 877cf42..877cf42 100644
--- a/published/2014-12-29-1969-yellowstone-trailer.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2014-12-29-1969-yellowstone-trailer.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-01-02-hoppin-john.txt b/jrnl/2015-01-02-hoppin-john.txt
index 52debb4..52debb4 100644
--- a/published/2015-01-02-hoppin-john.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-01-02-hoppin-john.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-01-17-sunrise.txt b/jrnl/2015-01-17-sunrise.txt
index 9ab8e2e..9ab8e2e 100644
--- a/published/2015-01-17-sunrise.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-01-17-sunrise.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-01-22-purcell-wooden-toys.txt b/jrnl/2015-01-22-purcell-wooden-toys.txt
index ea53730..ea53730 100644
--- a/published/2015-01-22-purcell-wooden-toys.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-01-22-purcell-wooden-toys.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-02-16-walking-in-the-woods.txt b/jrnl/2015-02-16-walking-in-the-woods.txt
index 45a86eb..45a86eb 100644
--- a/published/2015-02-16-walking-in-the-woods.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-02-16-walking-in-the-woods.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-02-26-ice-storm.txt b/jrnl/2015-02-26-ice-storm.txt
index 377fcb2..377fcb2 100644
--- a/published/2015-02-26-ice-storm.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-02-26-ice-storm.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-02-26_ice-storm.txt b/jrnl/2015-02-26_ice-storm.txt
index 82c13dc..82c13dc 100644
--- a/published/2015-02-26_ice-storm.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-02-26_ice-storm.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-03-15-schoolhouse.txt b/jrnl/2015-03-15-schoolhouse.txt
index bd12903..bd12903 100644
--- a/published/2015-03-15-schoolhouse.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-03-15-schoolhouse.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-03-22-pig-roast.txt b/jrnl/2015-03-22-pig-roast.txt
index 1d732ea..1d732ea 100644
--- a/published/2015-03-22-pig-roast.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-03-22-pig-roast.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-04-13-down-the-river.txt b/jrnl/2015-04-13-down-the-river.txt
index ef40521..ef40521 100644
--- a/published/2015-04-13-down-the-river.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-04-13-down-the-river.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-04-18-the-poison-youve-been-dreaming-of.txt b/jrnl/2015-04-18-the-poison-youve-been-dreaming-of.txt
index 7be9463..7be9463 100644
--- a/published/2015-04-18-the-poison-youve-been-dreaming-of.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-04-18-the-poison-youve-been-dreaming-of.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-04-19-coming-home.txt b/jrnl/2015-04-19-coming-home.txt
index cec77d0..cec77d0 100644
--- a/published/2015-04-19-coming-home.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-04-19-coming-home.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-05-07-were-here.txt b/jrnl/2015-05-07-were-here.txt
index 6a71b12..6a71b12 100644
--- a/published/2015-05-07-were-here.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-05-07-were-here.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-05-15-tates-hell.txt b/jrnl/2015-05-15-tates-hell.txt
index ae8d82b..ae8d82b 100644
--- a/published/2015-05-15-tates-hell.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-05-15-tates-hell.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-05-18-big-long-week.txt b/jrnl/2015-05-18-big-long-week.txt
index 84b7001..84b7001 100644
--- a/published/2015-05-18-big-long-week.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-05-18-big-long-week.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-05-20-ode-outdoor-shower.txt b/jrnl/2015-05-20-ode-outdoor-shower.txt
index 926cd6c..926cd6c 100644
--- a/published/2015-05-20-ode-outdoor-shower.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-05-20-ode-outdoor-shower.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-06-10-big-blue-bus.txt b/jrnl/2015-06-10-big-blue-bus.txt
index c21b33a..c21b33a 100644
--- a/published/2015-06-10-big-blue-bus.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-06-10-big-blue-bus.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-07-02-elvis-has-left-building.txt b/jrnl/2015-07-02-elvis-has-left-building.txt
index cbf787a..cbf787a 100644
--- a/published/2015-07-02-elvis-has-left-building.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-07-02-elvis-has-left-building.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-09-22-progress.txt b/jrnl/2015-09-22-progress.txt
index 2391cff..2391cff 100644
--- a/published/2015-09-22-progress.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-09-22-progress.txt
diff --git a/published/2015-12-18_tools.txt b/jrnl/2015-12-18_tools.txt
index 9d915cd..9d915cd 100644
--- a/published/2015-12-18_tools.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2015-12-18_tools.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-01-01_pilgrim-happiness.txt b/jrnl/2016-01-01_pilgrim-happiness.txt
index b051265..b051265 100644
--- a/published/2016-01-01_pilgrim-happiness.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-01-01_pilgrim-happiness.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-02-08_8-track-gorilla.txt b/jrnl/2016-02-08_8-track-gorilla.txt
index 9137619..9137619 100644
--- a/published/2016-02-08_8-track-gorilla.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-02-08_8-track-gorilla.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-02-24-up-in-the-air.txt b/jrnl/2016-02-24-up-in-the-air.txt
index 79e31da..79e31da 100644
--- a/published/2016-02-24-up-in-the-air.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-02-24-up-in-the-air.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-03-27_another-spring.txt b/jrnl/2016-03-27_another-spring.txt
index efea7fb..efea7fb 100644
--- a/published/2016-03-27_another-spring.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-03-27_another-spring.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-05-15_root-down.txt b/jrnl/2016-05-15_root-down.txt
index 3f6f31a..3f6f31a 100644
--- a/published/2016-05-15_root-down.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-05-15_root-down.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-05-24_back-from-somewhere.txt b/jrnl/2016-05-24_back-from-somewhere.txt
index 2bf380e..2bf380e 100644
--- a/published/2016-05-24_back-from-somewhere.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-05-24_back-from-somewhere.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-06-06_engine.txt b/jrnl/2016-06-06_engine.txt
index 5188086..5188086 100644
--- a/published/2016-06-06_engine.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-06-06_engine.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-07-12_what-are-you-going-to-do.txt b/jrnl/2016-07-12_what-are-you-going-to-do.txt
index a6e70cf..a6e70cf 100644
--- a/published/2016-07-12_what-are-you-going-to-do.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-07-12_what-are-you-going-to-do.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-08-20_change-of-ideas-the-worst.txt b/jrnl/2016-08-20_change-of-ideas-the-worst.txt
index 05b342a..05b342a 100644
--- a/published/2016-08-20_change-of-ideas-the-worst.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-08-20_change-of-ideas-the-worst.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-09-15_autumn-bus-update.txt b/jrnl/2016-09-15_autumn-bus-update.txt
index 0284a16..0284a16 100644
--- a/published/2016-09-15_autumn-bus-update.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-09-15_autumn-bus-update.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-09-19_cloudland-canyon.txt b/jrnl/2016-09-19_cloudland-canyon.txt
index bd0b4ff..bd0b4ff 100644
--- a/published/2016-09-19_cloudland-canyon.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-09-19_cloudland-canyon.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-09-22_equinox.txt b/jrnl/2016-09-22_equinox.txt
index 7dca287..7dca287 100644
--- a/published/2016-09-22_equinox.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-09-22_equinox.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-10-15_useless-stuff.txt b/jrnl/2016-10-15_useless-stuff.txt
index a04ee01..a04ee01 100644
--- a/published/2016-10-15_useless-stuff.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-10-15_useless-stuff.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-11-16_halloween.txt b/jrnl/2016-11-16_halloween.txt
index 92e84ca..92e84ca 100644
--- a/published/2016-11-16_halloween.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-11-16_halloween.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-11-19_nothing-finished-nothing-perfect.txt b/jrnl/2016-11-19_nothing-finished-nothing-perfect.txt
index 6a95888..6a95888 100644
--- a/published/2016-11-19_nothing-finished-nothing-perfect.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-11-19_nothing-finished-nothing-perfect.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-12-19_waiting-sun.txt b/jrnl/2016-12-19_waiting-sun.txt
index 6114103..6114103 100644
--- a/published/2016-12-19_waiting-sun.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-12-19_waiting-sun.txt
diff --git a/published/2016-12-21_happy-birthday-sun.txt b/jrnl/2016-12-21_happy-birthday-sun.txt
index 0970596..0970596 100644
--- a/published/2016-12-21_happy-birthday-sun.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2016-12-21_happy-birthday-sun.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-01-15_wilds-of-winder.txt b/jrnl/2017-01-15_wilds-of-winder.txt
index d2be989..d2be989 100644
--- a/published/2017-01-15_wilds-of-winder.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-01-15_wilds-of-winder.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-03-24_the-mooring-of-starting-out.txt b/jrnl/2017-03-24_the-mooring-of-starting-out.txt
index b6059ad..b6059ad 100644
--- a/published/2017-03-24_the-mooring-of-starting-out.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-03-24_the-mooring-of-starting-out.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-03-30_watson-mill.txt b/jrnl/2017-03-30_watson-mill.txt
index 6d2f327..6d2f327 100644
--- a/published/2017-03-30_watson-mill.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-03-30_watson-mill.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-04-01_april-fools.txt b/jrnl/2017-04-01_april-fools.txt
index 6d4ed52..6d4ed52 100644
--- a/published/2017-04-01_april-fools.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-04-01_april-fools.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-04-04_the-edge-of-the-continent.txt b/jrnl/2017-04-04_the-edge-of-the-continent.txt
index 3a8d236..3a8d236 100644
--- a/published/2017-04-04_the-edge-of-the-continent.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-04-04_the-edge-of-the-continent.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-04-06_storming.txt b/jrnl/2017-04-06_storming.txt
index b295a1f..b295a1f 100644
--- a/published/2017-04-06_storming.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-04-06_storming.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-04-12_swamped.txt b/jrnl/2017-04-12_swamped.txt
index 0d25ca0..0d25ca0 100644
--- a/published/2017-04-12_swamped.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-04-12_swamped.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-04-18_coming-home.txt b/jrnl/2017-04-18_coming-home.txt
index 935df1f..935df1f 100644
--- a/published/2017-04-18_coming-home.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-04-18_coming-home.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-04-24_gulf-islands-national-seashore.txt b/jrnl/2017-04-24_gulf-islands-national-seashore.txt
index 2b8faa3..2b8faa3 100644
--- a/published/2017-04-24_gulf-islands-national-seashore.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-04-24_gulf-islands-national-seashore.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-05-08_davis-bayou.txt b/jrnl/2017-05-08_davis-bayou.txt
index ec43a40..ec43a40 100644
--- a/published/2017-05-08_davis-bayou.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-05-08_davis-bayou.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-05-11_dauphin-island.txt b/jrnl/2017-05-11_dauphin-island.txt
index 59676e2..59676e2 100644
--- a/published/2017-05-11_dauphin-island.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-05-11_dauphin-island.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-05-12_new-orleans-instrumental-number-1.txt b/jrnl/2017-05-12_new-orleans-instrumental-number-1.txt
index 00e9d1c..00e9d1c 100644
--- a/published/2017-05-12_new-orleans-instrumental-number-1.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-05-12_new-orleans-instrumental-number-1.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-05-15_new-orleans-instrumental-number-2.txt b/jrnl/2017-05-15_new-orleans-instrumental-number-2.txt
index bc4a9de..bc4a9de 100644
--- a/published/2017-05-15_new-orleans-instrumental-number-2.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-05-15_new-orleans-instrumental-number-2.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-05-18_palmetto-island-state-park.txt b/jrnl/2017-05-18_palmetto-island-state-park.txt
index e446753..e446753 100644
--- a/published/2017-05-18_palmetto-island-state-park.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-05-18_palmetto-island-state-park.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-05-19_little-black-train.txt b/jrnl/2017-05-19_little-black-train.txt
index 2f397fa..2f397fa 100644
--- a/published/2017-05-19_little-black-train.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-05-19_little-black-train.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-05-23_keeps-on-arainin.txt b/jrnl/2017-05-23_keeps-on-arainin.txt
index 2ac80b4..2ac80b4 100644
--- a/published/2017-05-23_keeps-on-arainin.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-05-23_keeps-on-arainin.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-05-30_austin-part-one.txt b/jrnl/2017-05-30_austin-part-one.txt
index 0792927..0792927 100644
--- a/published/2017-05-30_austin-part-one.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-05-30_austin-part-one.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-05-31_sprawl-austin-part-two.txt b/jrnl/2017-05-31_sprawl-austin-part-two.txt
index 4217fba..4217fba 100644
--- a/published/2017-05-31_sprawl-austin-part-two.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-05-31_sprawl-austin-part-two.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-06-07_dallas.txt b/jrnl/2017-06-07_dallas.txt
index 4ebe7fe..4ebe7fe 100644
--- a/published/2017-06-07_dallas.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-06-07_dallas.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-06-12_escaping-texas.txt b/jrnl/2017-06-12_escaping-texas.txt
index 8b3e895..8b3e895 100644
--- a/published/2017-06-12_escaping-texas.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-06-12_escaping-texas.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-06-18_the-high-country.txt b/jrnl/2017-06-18_the-high-country.txt
index d8ee8fb..d8ee8fb 100644
--- a/published/2017-06-18_the-high-country.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-06-18_the-high-country.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-06-21_happy-solstice.txt b/jrnl/2017-06-21_happy-solstice.txt
index 6979d7f..6979d7f 100644
--- a/published/2017-06-21_happy-solstice.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-06-21_happy-solstice.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-06-28_arc-of-time.txt b/jrnl/2017-06-28_arc-of-time.txt
index 53688c8..53688c8 100644
--- a/published/2017-06-28_arc-of-time.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-06-28_arc-of-time.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-07-06_junction-creek.txt b/jrnl/2017-07-06_junction-creek.txt
index 468a184..468a184 100644
--- a/published/2017-07-06_junction-creek.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-07-06_junction-creek.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-07-17_mancos-and-mesa-verde.txt b/jrnl/2017-07-17_mancos-and-mesa-verde.txt
index 5847690..5847690 100644
--- a/published/2017-07-17_mancos-and-mesa-verde.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-07-17_mancos-and-mesa-verde.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-07-24_time-and-placement.txt b/jrnl/2017-07-24_time-and-placement.txt
index 07bae0d..07bae0d 100644
--- a/published/2017-07-24_time-and-placement.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-07-24_time-and-placement.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-07-30_mancos-days.txt b/jrnl/2017-07-30_mancos-days.txt
index 268a305..268a305 100644
--- a/published/2017-07-30_mancos-days.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-07-30_mancos-days.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-08-01_canyon-ancients.txt b/jrnl/2017-08-01_canyon-ancients.txt
index 481879f..481879f 100644
--- a/published/2017-08-01_canyon-ancients.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-08-01_canyon-ancients.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-08-10_dolores-river.txt b/jrnl/2017-08-10_dolores-river.txt
index 9d09c41..9d09c41 100644
--- a/published/2017-08-10_dolores-river.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-08-10_dolores-river.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-08-24_ridgway-state-park.txt b/jrnl/2017-08-24_ridgway-state-park.txt
index 674aa5e..674aa5e 100644
--- a/published/2017-08-24_ridgway-state-park.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-08-24_ridgway-state-park.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-09-06_aspens.txt b/jrnl/2017-09-06_aspens.txt
index d8e429f..d8e429f 100644
--- a/published/2017-09-06_aspens.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-09-06_aspens.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-09-06_breakdown.txt b/jrnl/2017-09-06_breakdown.txt
index e87fda2..e87fda2 100644
--- a/published/2017-09-06_breakdown.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-09-06_breakdown.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-09-08_canyonlands.txt b/jrnl/2017-09-08_canyonlands.txt
index ac29a91..ac29a91 100644
--- a/published/2017-09-08_canyonlands.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-09-08_canyonlands.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-09-16_on-the-road-again.txt b/jrnl/2017-09-16_on-the-road-again.txt
index 1d22110..1d22110 100644
--- a/published/2017-09-16_on-the-road-again.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-09-16_on-the-road-again.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-09-19_zion.txt b/jrnl/2017-09-19_zion.txt
index debe43b..debe43b 100644
--- a/published/2017-09-19_zion.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-09-19_zion.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-09-25_valley-of-fire.txt b/jrnl/2017-09-25_valley-of-fire.txt
index 7b32a86..7b32a86 100644
--- a/published/2017-09-25_valley-of-fire.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-09-25_valley-of-fire.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-09-30_ghost-town.txt b/jrnl/2017-09-30_ghost-town.txt
index 110f066..110f066 100644
--- a/published/2017-09-30_ghost-town.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-09-30_ghost-town.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-10-06_trains-hot-springs-and-broken-buses.txt b/jrnl/2017-10-06_trains-hot-springs-and-broken-buses.txt
index 0310286..0310286 100644
--- a/published/2017-10-06_trains-hot-springs-and-broken-buses.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-10-06_trains-hot-springs-and-broken-buses.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-10-21_dialed-in.txt b/jrnl/2017-10-21_dialed-in.txt
index a7d3f49..a7d3f49 100644
--- a/published/2017-10-21_dialed-in.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-10-21_dialed-in.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-10-26_shadow-lassen.txt b/jrnl/2017-10-26_shadow-lassen.txt
index 7c9e1a5..7c9e1a5 100644
--- a/published/2017-10-26_shadow-lassen.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-10-26_shadow-lassen.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-10-28_pacific-sense.txt b/jrnl/2017-10-28_pacific-sense.txt
index 2cc5f7a..2cc5f7a 100644
--- a/published/2017-10-28_pacific-sense.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-10-28_pacific-sense.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-10-29_through.txt b/jrnl/2017-10-29_through.txt
index c31a3da..c31a3da 100644
--- a/published/2017-10-29_through.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-10-29_through.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-11-03_halloween-and-big-trees.txt b/jrnl/2017-11-03_halloween-and-big-trees.txt
index 6b03a64..6b03a64 100644
--- a/published/2017-11-03_halloween-and-big-trees.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-11-03_halloween-and-big-trees.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-11-08_the-absense-of-glass-beach.txt b/jrnl/2017-11-08_the-absense-of-glass-beach.txt
index 37decc0..37decc0 100644
--- a/published/2017-11-08_the-absense-of-glass-beach.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-11-08_the-absense-of-glass-beach.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-12-02_the-city.txt b/jrnl/2017-12-02_the-city.txt
index 073aae8..073aae8 100644
--- a/published/2017-12-02_the-city.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-12-02_the-city.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-12-10_aquarium-kings.txt b/jrnl/2017-12-10_aquarium-kings.txt
index 34c3be1..34c3be1 100644
--- a/published/2017-12-10_aquarium-kings.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-12-10_aquarium-kings.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-12-14_terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week.txt b/jrnl/2017-12-14_terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week.txt
index d577135..d577135 100644
--- a/published/2017-12-14_terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2017-12-14_terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-01-05_escaping-california.txt b/jrnl/2018-01-05_escaping-california.txt
index d3c05f8..d3c05f8 100644
--- a/published/2018-01-05_escaping-california.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-01-05_escaping-california.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-01-10_youre-all-i-need-get-by.txt b/jrnl/2018-01-10_youre-all-i-need-get-by.txt
index 0981d34..0981d34 100644
--- a/published/2018-01-10_youre-all-i-need-get-by.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-01-10_youre-all-i-need-get-by.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-01-17_ghost-cochise.txt b/jrnl/2018-01-17_ghost-cochise.txt
index c2b3ba7..c2b3ba7 100644
--- a/published/2018-01-17_ghost-cochise.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-01-17_ghost-cochise.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-01-24_eastbound-down.txt b/jrnl/2018-01-24_eastbound-down.txt
index b5e0776..b5e0776 100644
--- a/published/2018-01-24_eastbound-down.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-01-24_eastbound-down.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-01-31_almost-warm.txt b/jrnl/2018-01-31_almost-warm.txt
index 70323da..70323da 100644
--- a/published/2018-01-31_almost-warm.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-01-31_almost-warm.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-02-05_hugging-the-coast.txt b/jrnl/2018-02-05_hugging-the-coast.txt
index 565c4dd..565c4dd 100644
--- a/published/2018-02-05_hugging-the-coast.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-02-05_hugging-the-coast.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-02-07_on-the-beach.txt b/jrnl/2018-02-07_on-the-beach.txt
index ef08262..ef08262 100644
--- a/published/2018-02-07_on-the-beach.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-02-07_on-the-beach.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-02-08_on-avery-island.txt b/jrnl/2018-02-08_on-avery-island.txt
index f9b0cc4..f9b0cc4 100644
--- a/published/2018-02-08_on-avery-island.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-02-08_on-avery-island.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-02-12_mardi-gras-deux-facons.txt b/jrnl/2018-02-12_mardi-gras-deux-facons.txt
index e62bf21..e62bf21 100644
--- a/published/2018-02-12_mardi-gras-deux-facons.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-02-12_mardi-gras-deux-facons.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-02-21_vermilionville-grand-isle.txt b/jrnl/2018-02-21_vermilionville-grand-isle.txt
index 6d128ba..6d128ba 100644
--- a/published/2018-02-21_vermilionville-grand-isle.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-02-21_vermilionville-grand-isle.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-02-28_trapped-inside-song.txt b/jrnl/2018-02-28_trapped-inside-song.txt
index 829a5f0..829a5f0 100644
--- a/published/2018-02-28_trapped-inside-song.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-02-28_trapped-inside-song.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-03-07_island-sun.txt b/jrnl/2018-03-07_island-sun.txt
index f41d4ab..f41d4ab 100644
--- a/published/2018-03-07_island-sun.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-03-07_island-sun.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-03-14_green-sea-days.txt b/jrnl/2018-03-14_green-sea-days.txt
index b76bea8..b76bea8 100644
--- a/published/2018-03-14_green-sea-days.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-03-14_green-sea-days.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-03-21_stone-crabs.txt b/jrnl/2018-03-21_stone-crabs.txt
index 6123355..6123355 100644
--- a/published/2018-03-21_stone-crabs.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-03-21_stone-crabs.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-03-24_old-school.txt b/jrnl/2018-03-24_old-school.txt
index 6f71fda..6f71fda 100644
--- a/published/2018-03-24_old-school.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-03-24_old-school.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-03-28_forest.txt b/jrnl/2018-03-28_forest.txt
index 77c5919..77c5919 100644
--- a/published/2018-03-28_forest.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-03-28_forest.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-04-12_st-george.txt b/jrnl/2018-04-12_st-george.txt
index 9c6477d..9c6477d 100644
--- a/published/2018-04-12_st-george.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-04-12_st-george.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-04-16_migration.txt b/jrnl/2018-04-16_migration.txt
index 1dd5882..1dd5882 100644
--- a/published/2018-04-16_migration.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-04-16_migration.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-04-26_too-much-sunshine.txt b/jrnl/2018-04-26_too-much-sunshine.txt
index aa997a9..aa997a9 100644
--- a/published/2018-04-26_too-much-sunshine.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-04-26_too-much-sunshine.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-05-18_keep-on-keeping-on.txt b/jrnl/2018-05-18_keep-on-keeping-on.txt
index 8ec25a5..8ec25a5 100644
--- a/published/2018-05-18_keep-on-keeping-on.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-05-18_keep-on-keeping-on.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-05-30_thunder-road.txt b/jrnl/2018-05-30_thunder-road.txt
index 8c24e49..8c24e49 100644
--- a/published/2018-05-30_thunder-road.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-05-30_thunder-road.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-06-02_alberto-and-land-between-lakes.txt b/jrnl/2018-06-02_alberto-and-land-between-lakes.txt
index d91b18f..d91b18f 100644
--- a/published/2018-06-02_alberto-and-land-between-lakes.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-06-02_alberto-and-land-between-lakes.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-06-07_st-louis-city-museum.txt b/jrnl/2018-06-07_st-louis-city-museum.txt
index b4133e8..b4133e8 100644
--- a/published/2018-06-07_st-louis-city-museum.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-06-07_st-louis-city-museum.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-06-14_illinois.txt b/jrnl/2018-06-14_illinois.txt
index d98e31e..d98e31e 100644
--- a/published/2018-06-14_illinois.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-06-14_illinois.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-06-24_wisconsin.txt b/jrnl/2018-06-24_wisconsin.txt
index b4e998e..b4e998e 100644
--- a/published/2018-06-24_wisconsin.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-06-24_wisconsin.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-07-02_trees.txt b/jrnl/2018-07-02_trees.txt
index 630b3bd..630b3bd 100644
--- a/published/2018-07-02_trees.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-07-02_trees.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-07-07_shipwrecks.txt b/jrnl/2018-07-07_shipwrecks.txt
index f9ede42..f9ede42 100644
--- a/published/2018-07-07_shipwrecks.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-07-07_shipwrecks.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-07-13_six.txt b/jrnl/2018-07-13_six.txt
index 79a9768..79a9768 100644
--- a/published/2018-07-13_six.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-07-13_six.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-07-19_lakeside-park.txt b/jrnl/2018-07-19_lakeside-park.txt
index 9be1258..9be1258 100644
--- a/published/2018-07-19_lakeside-park.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-07-19_lakeside-park.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-07-23_house-lake.txt b/jrnl/2018-07-23_house-lake.txt
index cdd2289..cdd2289 100644
--- a/published/2018-07-23_house-lake.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-07-23_house-lake.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-07-30_crystal-lake.txt b/jrnl/2018-07-30_crystal-lake.txt
index 27e1dde..27e1dde 100644
--- a/published/2018-07-30_crystal-lake.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-07-30_crystal-lake.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-08-02_island-golden-breasted-woodpecker.txt b/jrnl/2018-08-02_island-golden-breasted-woodpecker.txt
index b568b2c..b568b2c 100644
--- a/published/2018-08-02_island-golden-breasted-woodpecker.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-08-02_island-golden-breasted-woodpecker.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-08-05_northern-sky.txt b/jrnl/2018-08-05_northern-sky.txt
index 4fc93ff..4fc93ff 100644
--- a/published/2018-08-05_northern-sky.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-08-05_northern-sky.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-08-14_superior.txt b/jrnl/2018-08-14_superior.txt
index c259bf2..c259bf2 100644
--- a/published/2018-08-14_superior.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-08-14_superior.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-08-18_west-to-wall-drug.txt b/jrnl/2018-08-18_west-to-wall-drug.txt
index 8f6dd6d..8f6dd6d 100644
--- a/published/2018-08-18_west-to-wall-drug.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-08-18_west-to-wall-drug.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-08-22_range-life.txt b/jrnl/2018-08-22_range-life.txt
index 2c16b35..2c16b35 100644
--- a/published/2018-08-22_range-life.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-08-22_range-life.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-08-27_grassland.txt b/jrnl/2018-08-27_grassland.txt
index 3d9e18b..3d9e18b 100644
--- a/published/2018-08-27_grassland.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-08-27_grassland.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-09-25_southbound.txt b/jrnl/2018-09-25_southbound.txt
index 8e6551a..8e6551a 100644
--- a/published/2018-09-25_southbound.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-09-25_southbound.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-09-29_big-exit.txt b/jrnl/2018-09-29_big-exit.txt
index 3dfb1b5..3dfb1b5 100644
--- a/published/2018-09-29_big-exit.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-09-29_big-exit.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-10-06_alborada.txt b/jrnl/2018-10-06_alborada.txt
index 71cddfd..71cddfd 100644
--- a/published/2018-10-06_alborada.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-10-06_alborada.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-10-23_como-se-goza-en-el-barrio.txt b/jrnl/2018-10-23_como-se-goza-en-el-barrio.txt
index bb564d5..bb564d5 100644
--- a/published/2018-10-23_como-se-goza-en-el-barrio.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-10-23_como-se-goza-en-el-barrio.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-11-03_friday.txt b/jrnl/2018-11-03_friday.txt
index ef479fb..ef479fb 100644
--- a/published/2018-11-03_friday.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-11-03_friday.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-11-17_lets-go-ride.txt b/jrnl/2018-11-17_lets-go-ride.txt
index 381b63d..381b63d 100644
--- a/published/2018-11-17_lets-go-ride.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-11-17_lets-go-ride.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-11-26_food-table-tonight.txt b/jrnl/2018-11-26_food-table-tonight.txt
index a750c5c..a750c5c 100644
--- a/published/2018-11-26_food-table-tonight.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-11-26_food-table-tonight.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-12-14_mary-wild-moor.txt b/jrnl/2018-12-14_mary-wild-moor.txt
index f8dd25d..f8dd25d 100644
--- a/published/2018-12-14_mary-wild-moor.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-12-14_mary-wild-moor.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-12-22_four.txt b/jrnl/2018-12-22_four.txt
index a263fa9..a263fa9 100644
--- a/published/2018-12-22_four.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-12-22_four.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-12-28_sparkle-city.txt b/jrnl/2018-12-28_sparkle-city.txt
index e42d016..e42d016 100644
--- a/published/2018-12-28_sparkle-city.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2018-12-28_sparkle-city.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-01-03_these-walls-around-me.txt b/jrnl/2019-01-03_these-walls-around-me.txt
index bc31939..bc31939 100644
--- a/published/2019-01-03_these-walls-around-me.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-01-03_these-walls-around-me.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-01-11_sounds-san-miguel.txt b/jrnl/2019-01-11_sounds-san-miguel.txt
index ba2f673..ba2f673 100644
--- a/published/2019-01-11_sounds-san-miguel.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-01-11_sounds-san-miguel.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-02-04_candlelaria-in-san-miguel.txt b/jrnl/2019-02-04_candlelaria-in-san-miguel.txt
index 5f1094f..5f1094f 100644
--- a/published/2019-02-04_candlelaria-in-san-miguel.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-02-04_candlelaria-in-san-miguel.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-03-03_cascarones.txt b/jrnl/2019-03-03_cascarones.txt
index e4caf41..e4caf41 100644
--- a/published/2019-03-03_cascarones.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-03-03_cascarones.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-03-17_around-san-miguel.txt b/jrnl/2019-03-17_around-san-miguel.txt
index 55fda94..55fda94 100644
--- a/published/2019-03-17_around-san-miguel.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-03-17_around-san-miguel.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-03-27_visa-run.txt b/jrnl/2019-03-27_visa-run.txt
index 1ce566b..1ce566b 100644
--- a/published/2019-03-27_visa-run.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-03-27_visa-run.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-04-07_koyaanisqatsi.txt b/jrnl/2019-04-07_koyaanisqatsi.txt
index 0e7acf1..0e7acf1 100644
--- a/published/2019-04-07_koyaanisqatsi.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-04-07_koyaanisqatsi.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-04-22_semama-santa.txt b/jrnl/2019-04-22_semama-santa.txt
index 2b3031f..2b3031f 100644
--- a/published/2019-04-22_semama-santa.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-04-22_semama-santa.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-04-30_horses.txt b/jrnl/2019-04-30_horses.txt
index c572ad1..c572ad1 100644
--- a/published/2019-04-30_horses.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-04-30_horses.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-06-03_hasta-luego.txt b/jrnl/2019-06-03_hasta-luego.txt
index ca6ee64..ca6ee64 100644
--- a/published/2019-06-03_hasta-luego.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-06-03_hasta-luego.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-07-13_seven.txt b/jrnl/2019-07-13_seven.txt
index 24c3ae1..24c3ae1 100644
--- a/published/2019-07-13_seven.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-07-13_seven.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-07-28_summertime-rolls.txt b/jrnl/2019-07-28_summertime-rolls.txt
index df8bb56..df8bb56 100644
--- a/published/2019-07-28_summertime-rolls.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-07-28_summertime-rolls.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-08-25_georgia-road-trip.txt b/jrnl/2019-08-25_georgia-road-trip.txt
index 02cc98c..02cc98c 100644
--- a/published/2019-08-25_georgia-road-trip.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-08-25_georgia-road-trip.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-09-12_hanging-around-town.txt b/jrnl/2019-09-12_hanging-around-town.txt
index 5227ab1..5227ab1 100644
--- a/published/2019-09-12_hanging-around-town.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-09-12_hanging-around-town.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-09-25_old-growth.txt b/jrnl/2019-09-25_old-growth.txt
index 133367e..133367e 100644
--- a/published/2019-09-25_old-growth.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-09-25_old-growth.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-10-09_bird-watching.txt b/jrnl/2019-10-09_bird-watching.txt
index 3b81b39..3b81b39 100644
--- a/published/2019-10-09_bird-watching.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-10-09_bird-watching.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-10-16_back-to-raysville.txt b/jrnl/2019-10-16_back-to-raysville.txt
index 39546b1..39546b1 100644
--- a/published/2019-10-16_back-to-raysville.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-10-16_back-to-raysville.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-10-23_elberton-county-fair.txt b/jrnl/2019-10-23_elberton-county-fair.txt
index efd60ee..efd60ee 100644
--- a/published/2019-10-23_elberton-county-fair.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-10-23_elberton-county-fair.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-11-06_halloween.txt b/jrnl/2019-11-06_halloween.txt
index 316e19a..316e19a 100644
--- a/published/2019-11-06_halloween.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-11-06_halloween.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-11-13_land.txt b/jrnl/2019-11-13_land.txt
index 620588f..620588f 100644
--- a/published/2019-11-13_land.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-11-13_land.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-12-22_birthday-beach.txt b/jrnl/2019-12-22_birthday-beach.txt
index 95d7273..95d7273 100644
--- a/published/2019-12-22_birthday-beach.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-12-22_birthday-beach.txt
diff --git a/published/2019-12-31_holiday-island.txt b/jrnl/2019-12-31_holiday-island.txt
index 33cfc63..33cfc63 100644
--- a/published/2019-12-31_holiday-island.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2019-12-31_holiday-island.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-01-08_walking.txt b/jrnl/2020-01-08_walking.txt
index ad60dc0..ad60dc0 100644
--- a/published/2020-01-08_walking.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-01-08_walking.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-01-22_traveling.txt b/jrnl/2020-01-22_traveling.txt
index 68fd475..68fd475 100644
--- a/published/2020-01-22_traveling.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-01-22_traveling.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-02-05_learning.txt b/jrnl/2020-02-05_learning.txt
index 813a6d1..813a6d1 100644
--- a/published/2020-02-05_learning.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-02-05_learning.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-02-19_snow-day.txt b/jrnl/2020-02-19_snow-day.txt
index 05e3ced..05e3ced 100644
--- a/published/2020-02-19_snow-day.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-02-19_snow-day.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-03-04_high-water.txt b/jrnl/2020-03-04_high-water.txt
index 3fabcb2..3fabcb2 100644
--- a/published/2020-03-04_high-water.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-03-04_high-water.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-03-11_distant-early-warning.txt b/jrnl/2020-03-11_distant-early-warning.txt
index 41027e8..41027e8 100644
--- a/published/2020-03-11_distant-early-warning.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-03-11_distant-early-warning.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-03-18_pre-apocalyptic-driving-adventures.txt b/jrnl/2020-03-18_pre-apocalyptic-driving-adventures.txt
index 53b52e9..53b52e9 100644
--- a/published/2020-03-18_pre-apocalyptic-driving-adventures.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-03-18_pre-apocalyptic-driving-adventures.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-04-18_reflections.txt b/jrnl/2020-04-18_reflections.txt
index a4d11a4..a4d11a4 100644
--- a/published/2020-04-18_reflections.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-04-18_reflections.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-06-25_hands-on-the-wheel.txt b/jrnl/2020-06-25_hands-on-the-wheel.txt
index 910d7d5..910d7d5 100644
--- a/published/2020-06-25_hands-on-the-wheel.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-06-25_hands-on-the-wheel.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-07-01_wouldnt-it-be-nice.txt b/jrnl/2020-07-01_wouldnt-it-be-nice.txt
index d955164..d955164 100644
--- a/published/2020-07-01_wouldnt-it-be-nice.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-07-01_wouldnt-it-be-nice.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-07-08_windfall.txt b/jrnl/2020-07-08_windfall.txt
index dcc2b7c..dcc2b7c 100644
--- a/published/2020-07-08_windfall.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-07-08_windfall.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-07-15_eight.txt b/jrnl/2020-07-15_eight.txt
index 4181d9a..4181d9a 100644
--- a/published/2020-07-15_eight.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-07-15_eight.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-09-23_summer-teeth.txt b/jrnl/2020-09-23_summer-teeth.txt
index df550db..df550db 100644
--- a/published/2020-09-23_summer-teeth.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-09-23_summer-teeth.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-10-01_light-is-clear-in-my-eyes.txt b/jrnl/2020-10-01_light-is-clear-in-my-eyes.txt
index 7d95e47..7d95e47 100644
--- a/published/2020-10-01_light-is-clear-in-my-eyes.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-10-01_light-is-clear-in-my-eyes.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-10-28_walking-north-carolina-woods.txt b/jrnl/2020-10-28_walking-north-carolina-woods.txt
index e69ffa1..e69ffa1 100644
--- a/published/2020-10-28_walking-north-carolina-woods.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-10-28_walking-north-carolina-woods.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-11-04_halloween.txt b/jrnl/2020-11-04_halloween.txt
index 34263c6..34263c6 100644
--- a/published/2020-11-04_halloween.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-11-04_halloween.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-11-21_invitation.txt b/jrnl/2020-11-21_invitation.txt
index 9ac6cab..9ac6cab 100644
--- a/published/2020-11-21_invitation.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-11-21_invitation.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-12-02_learning-to-ride-bike.txt b/jrnl/2020-12-02_learning-to-ride-bike.txt
index b08d4be..b08d4be 100644
--- a/published/2020-12-02_learning-to-ride-bike.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-12-02_learning-to-ride-bike.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-12-20_six.txt b/jrnl/2020-12-20_six.txt
index de3bdc4..de3bdc4 100644
--- a/published/2020-12-20_six.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-12-20_six.txt
diff --git a/published/2020-12-23_solstice-strange-land.txt b/jrnl/2020-12-23_solstice-strange-land.txt
index 296ee3a..296ee3a 100644
--- a/published/2020-12-23_solstice-strange-land.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2020-12-23_solstice-strange-land.txt
diff --git a/published/2021-01-30_down-by-the-creek.txt b/jrnl/2021-01-30_down-by-the-creek.txt
index 13bd43e..13bd43e 100644
--- a/published/2021-01-30_down-by-the-creek.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2021-01-30_down-by-the-creek.txt
diff --git a/published/2021-02-18_oak-grove.txt b/jrnl/2021-02-18_oak-grove.txt
index 5472abd..5472abd 100644
--- a/published/2021-02-18_oak-grove.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2021-02-18_oak-grove.txt
diff --git a/published/2021-03-24_springsville.txt b/jrnl/2021-03-24_springsville.txt
index 079a25a..079a25a 100644
--- a/published/2021-03-24_springsville.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2021-03-24_springsville.txt
diff --git a/published/2021-05-23_may-days.txt b/jrnl/2021-05-23_may-days.txt
index a93c13d..a93c13d 100644
--- a/published/2021-05-23_may-days.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2021-05-23_may-days.txt
diff --git a/published/2021-11-25_back-to-the-life.txt b/jrnl/2021-11-25_back-to-the-life.txt
index d1ee40a..d1ee40a 100644
--- a/published/2021-11-25_back-to-the-life.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2021-11-25_back-to-the-life.txt
diff --git a/published/2021-12-19_perfect-from-now-on.txt b/jrnl/2021-12-19_perfect-from-now-on.txt
index 19ef3b1..19ef3b1 100644
--- a/published/2021-12-19_perfect-from-now-on.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2021-12-19_perfect-from-now-on.txt
diff --git a/published/2021-12-26_edisto-holidays.txt b/jrnl/2021-12-26_edisto-holidays.txt
index 48e6822..48e6822 100644
--- a/published/2021-12-26_edisto-holidays.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2021-12-26_edisto-holidays.txt
diff --git a/published/2021-12-29_southern-summer.txt b/jrnl/2021-12-29_southern-summer.txt
index b3c8d94..b3c8d94 100644
--- a/published/2021-12-29_southern-summer.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2021-12-29_southern-summer.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-01-03_on-the-path.txt b/jrnl/2022-01-03_on-the-path.txt
index dc3464f..dc3464f 100644
--- a/published/2022-01-03_on-the-path.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-01-03_on-the-path.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-01-08_hunting-island-storms.txt b/jrnl/2022-01-08_hunting-island-storms.txt
index d7a0670..d7a0670 100644
--- a/published/2022-01-08_hunting-island-storms.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-01-08_hunting-island-storms.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-01-12_hunting-island-sunshine.txt b/jrnl/2022-01-12_hunting-island-sunshine.txt
index 26968a3..26968a3 100644
--- a/published/2022-01-12_hunting-island-sunshine.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-01-12_hunting-island-sunshine.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-01-17_a-tale-of-two-huntingtons.txt b/jrnl/2022-01-17_a-tale-of-two-huntingtons.txt
index 40bee00..40bee00 100644
--- a/published/2022-01-17_a-tale-of-two-huntingtons.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-01-17_a-tale-of-two-huntingtons.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-01-23_huntington-beach-birds.txt b/jrnl/2022-01-23_huntington-beach-birds.txt
index 352f41f..352f41f 100644
--- a/published/2022-01-23_huntington-beach-birds.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-01-23_huntington-beach-birds.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-03-13_more-adventures-travco-brakes.txt b/jrnl/2022-03-13_more-adventures-travco-brakes.txt
index d3f348f..d3f348f 100644
--- a/published/2022-03-13_more-adventures-travco-brakes.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-03-13_more-adventures-travco-brakes.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-04-06_all-wright-all-wright-all-wright.txt b/jrnl/2022-04-06_all-wright-all-wright-all-wright.txt
index a133386..a133386 100644
--- a/published/2022-04-06_all-wright-all-wright-all-wright.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-04-06_all-wright-all-wright-all-wright.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-04-13_cape-hatteras.txt b/jrnl/2022-04-13_cape-hatteras.txt
index 41aa055..41aa055 100644
--- a/published/2022-04-13_cape-hatteras.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-04-13_cape-hatteras.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-04-30_ferryland.txt b/jrnl/2022-04-30_ferryland.txt
index cb270fc..cb270fc 100644
--- a/published/2022-04-30_ferryland.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-04-30_ferryland.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-05-11_ocracoke-beaches.txt b/jrnl/2022-05-11_ocracoke-beaches.txt
index dfe39e2..dfe39e2 100644
--- a/published/2022-05-11_ocracoke-beaches.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-05-11_ocracoke-beaches.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-05-18_separation.txt b/jrnl/2022-05-18_separation.txt
index bd65560..bd65560 100644
--- a/published/2022-05-18_separation.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-05-18_separation.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-05-30_seining-with-val.txt b/jrnl/2022-05-30_seining-with-val.txt
index b251c65..b251c65 100644
--- a/published/2022-05-30_seining-with-val.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-05-30_seining-with-val.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-06-12_long-way-around.txt b/jrnl/2022-06-12_long-way-around.txt
index 1c061ce..1c061ce 100644
--- a/published/2022-06-12_long-way-around.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-06-12_long-way-around.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-06-19_prairie-notes.txt b/jrnl/2022-06-19_prairie-notes.txt
index 6871b76..6871b76 100644
--- a/published/2022-06-19_prairie-notes.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-06-19_prairie-notes.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-06-22_illinois-beach.txt b/jrnl/2022-06-22_illinois-beach.txt
index 6591a5f..6591a5f 100644
--- a/published/2022-06-22_illinois-beach.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-06-22_illinois-beach.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-07-01_hello-milwaukee.txt b/jrnl/2022-07-01_hello-milwaukee.txt
index 30d7127..30d7127 100644
--- a/published/2022-07-01_hello-milwaukee.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-07-01_hello-milwaukee.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-07-06_4th-of-July-2022.txt b/jrnl/2022-07-06_4th-of-July-2022.txt
index 8ddcae9..8ddcae9 100644
--- a/published/2022-07-06_4th-of-July-2022.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-07-06_4th-of-July-2022.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-07-10_washburn.txt b/jrnl/2022-07-10_washburn.txt
index 72581d0..72581d0 100644
--- a/published/2022-07-10_washburn.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-07-10_washburn.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-07-13_ten.txt b/jrnl/2022-07-13_ten.txt
index 91d6507..91d6507 100644
--- a/published/2022-07-13_ten.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-07-13_ten.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-07-20_around-washburn.txt b/jrnl/2022-07-20_around-washburn.txt
index 883819a..883819a 100644
--- a/published/2022-07-20_around-washburn.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-07-20_around-washburn.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-08-24_august-jottings.txt b/jrnl/2022-08-24_august-jottings.txt
index 689d6e2..689d6e2 100644
--- a/published/2022-08-24_august-jottings.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-08-24_august-jottings.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-08-31_grandparents.txt b/jrnl/2022-08-31_grandparents.txt
index 15ee223..15ee223 100644
--- a/published/2022-08-31_grandparents.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-08-31_grandparents.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-09-06_porcupine-mountains-backpacking.txt b/jrnl/2022-09-06_porcupine-mountains-backpacking.txt
index d4a0e20..d4a0e20 100644
--- a/published/2022-09-06_porcupine-mountains-backpacking.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-09-06_porcupine-mountains-backpacking.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-09-14_goodbye-big-waters.txt b/jrnl/2022-09-14_goodbye-big-waters.txt
index 648b894..648b894 100644
--- a/published/2022-09-14_goodbye-big-waters.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-09-14_goodbye-big-waters.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-09-21_ease-down-the-road.txt b/jrnl/2022-09-21_ease-down-the-road.txt
index e72fad2..e72fad2 100644
--- a/published/2022-09-21_ease-down-the-road.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-09-21_ease-down-the-road.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-09-28_under-the-bears-lodge.txt b/jrnl/2022-09-28_under-the-bears-lodge.txt
index 8504063..8504063 100644
--- a/published/2022-09-28_under-the-bears-lodge.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-09-28_under-the-bears-lodge.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-10-05_broken-down-in-lamar.txt b/jrnl/2022-10-05_broken-down-in-lamar.txt
index 117e81d..117e81d 100644
--- a/published/2022-10-05_broken-down-in-lamar.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-10-05_broken-down-in-lamar.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-10-19_rodeos-and-fur-trading-posts.txt b/jrnl/2022-10-19_rodeos-and-fur-trading-posts.txt
index 45b0d89..45b0d89 100644
--- a/published/2022-10-19_rodeos-and-fur-trading-posts.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-10-19_rodeos-and-fur-trading-posts.txt
diff --git a/published/2022-10-26_going-down-swinging.txt b/jrnl/2022-10-26_going-down-swinging.txt
index 7217cd7..7217cd7 100644
--- a/published/2022-10-26_going-down-swinging.txt
+++ b/jrnl/2022-10-26_going-down-swinging.txt
diff --git a/maps.txt b/maps.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 29eb106..0000000
--- a/maps.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,13 +0,0 @@
-It was a bit of an odd child. I loved map shops. I am old enough to remember when there were stores that sold nothing but maps, and I wanted all of them, but especially USGS 7.5 topo maps of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. I would beg my parents to take me to take me and then spend all my lawn mowing money on maps. 
-
-Then I'd go home and piece them together to plan hiking and climbing trips around the Sierras. While I'd been hiking in the high sierras since I was born, it was my first multi-day backpacking trip the summer after eighth grade that really got me into maps. I got some books from the library, taught myself basic navigation and map and compass reading skills and eventually planned my first trip for later that same summer after eighth grade. 
-
-From then on I became the trip planner among my friends. I quickly learned two things. The first was that while I could look at a map and immediately and easily translate it to a three dimension model that I could then spin around and contemplate in my head, um, turns out this is very difficult for many people. I realized most people looked at the topo and saw a lot of lines and nothing more.
-
-The second thing I learned was more profound, and I had to learn it the hard way, by underestimating just how close together those lines on the topo were. It's one thing to look at the map and see that something is steep. It's a whole other thing to stand at the base of a long uphill climb and watch the trail zigzag its way up the exposed, bare granite peaks above timberline. 
-
-The reality on the ground is always different than the elegant simplicity of the map. Always. Everything turns out to be steeper, longer, hotter, and much harder than it looks on the map. 
-
-The map is just that, a map. A representation of reality. Not reality. After experiencing this a few times I learned what those densely clustered lines really meant, not that it was steep or difficult, but that it was going to be a hard, hot slog. Years later, when I read Jorge Borges and came across his rather famous remark, the map is not the territory I knew first hand exactly what he meant. 
-
-That the maps is not the territory is one those rare truths that applies both literally and metaphorically to nearly everything.
diff --git a/motivational.txt b/motivational.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 73f76cd..0000000
--- a/motivational.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,21 +0,0 @@
-At the risk of sounding like a motivational poster, I feel like these days call for a reminder that it's okay to be happy.
-
-It's been a very different year, a terrible one for some people. But it's possible, it's okay to have sympathy for those people, while still being happy yourself. Happiness is not a zero sum game, you being unhappy on someone else's behalf does not make them any happier.
-
-In fact, about the only thing I can say for sure is that sitting around bemoaning the state of the world doesn't help anyone or anything. If you're not happy that's okay, but sit down and figure out why. Then see if there's something you can do about it. Unless you're reading this from prison, there's probably something you can do to make yourself feel better. It might be something really simple, like petting your dog or making raspberry studdle bars, but there's probably something.
-
-If you're like a lot of people I know, you're probably in a kind of shock that the world took a turn you weren't expecting. I feel you. This year has actually been pretty good to me, but the world took several turns in 2019 that I was not expecting and frankly, did not like. No, they sucked. I did not like those turns. I opposed those turns. A year ago I was spending most of my time feeling like people I know are feeling right now. 
-
-I was probably worse though. I was whiny and feeling bad for myself because the future arrrived and did not look at all like I planned for it to look.
-
- that assuming the future will be whatever it is we want it to be has always been an unwise, baseless assumption. The future will be whatever it damn well pleases, our task is to navigate it.
-
-
-I feel like these days call for a reminder that it's okay to be happy. 
-
-
-Sometimes when I start writing I don't really have a plan about where what I'm writing will end up, this is one of those pieces I considered putting on Wired, but thought no, wrong, albiet much larger, audience. Sometimes it's better to reach the right 10 people than thousands of the wrong people.
-
-I got an ad the other day that instead of back to school, said back to learning. As if learning were a thing that didn't happen all the time. And sure, it's just an ad, ads exist to make you feel bad about yourself in some way so that you'll buy something to try to assauge that pain. That said, it's a sad slogan.
-
-When I said that living in a bus didn't help prepare us for a pandemic, I did acknowledge that working from home and homeschooling our kids definitely *did* helpi
diff --git a/news.txt b/news.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 622c1ca..0000000
--- a/news.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,5 +0,0 @@
-Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. -- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964
-
-As an experiment, one that was easy at the time since we'd just started traveling, in 2017 I stopped watching all forms of visual media. In the time since I have allowed myself to watch a few short instructional videos (e.g., engine repair, 18th century cooking, sailing), but by and large I continue to avoid visual media. 
-
-Interestingly, in the same time I became interested in creating short form visual media myself.
diff --git a/publicity-sites.txt b/publicity-sites.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 94ddbff..0000000
--- a/publicity-sites.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,5 +0,0 @@
-http://goodiegoodiegumdrop.com/inside-a-travelers-walls-patrick-schulte/
-http://tinyhouseblog.com/
-http://www.vagablogging.net/
-http://www.adventure-journal.com/
-
diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt
index 971af95..3cd1af1 100644
--- a/scratch.txt
+++ b/scratch.txt
@@ -30,61 +30,6 @@ The good and the true are convertible with being, they are fundamentally the sam
 
 The counter argument is that God should not be constrained by his own nature. Therefore something is good because god wills it. (voluntarism). But this then leads to the idea that Not the nature of a thing, its being goodness and truth, determine reality, but the sheer act of a will. e.g. Schopenhauer. The problem is overemphasis on the will leads here, where we are divorced from the world as it really is. If I decide entirely what is true, then I can decide what is true then I can weigh 600 pounds and declare myself healthy. I can say I'm a cat and force my employer to provide a litter box. 
 
-#OK Computer, Goodbye
-
-My laptop broke the other day. It was third laptop that's broken on me this year. Perhaps I am having a bad year. MOre likely laptops are. Most consumer gadgets are crap these days. Everyone knows this, I know it better than most given that I test consumer gadgets for a living. Did I have a bad run of laptops? Yes. But the more laptops you have, the more bad runs you're going to have because consumer gadgets are crap.
-
-Anyway after the third one died I did not have a backup. I was forced to borrow my wife's MacBook Air (which has outlasted 8 PC laptops[^1]. I am not a Mac person. I was, but then at some point I felt constrained by MacOS and switched to Linux, which let me do things my own way, however I wanted. Going back to the Mac was disorienting. The keyboard shortcuts are different, I needed to fix things I didn't on Linux. It was rough. 
-
-And, even once I did get things working inn a way that didn't drive me crazy, I was sharing the laptop. My wife tutors students 3 hours a day most days. During that time I had nothing to work with.
-
-And I loved it.
-
-I hate screens. I stare at one far too much. I have too. This is the compromise I make for the ability to live the way we do. It's a compromise I make knowingly, gratefully even, but it is still a compromise, with negative trade offs.
-
-What I did not realize is how much time I was spending staring at a screen when I did not need to be staring at a screen. It's deceptively easy to tell yourself you're working when you type a few words but then when you're done, you just "look something up real quick" and then next thing you know you've spent half an hour researching the best way to some weird thing you'll probably never do anyway. 
-
-This is my vice anyway. I know I have it. It's part of what makes me good at my job, but it also leads me to spend more time than I need to staring at screen. 
-
-This got me thinking about that old axiom, if you don't have it, you don't need it. Do I really need a laptop?
-
-## Once And Future Luddite
-
-I hated computers as a kid. Didn't like video games. Didn't really interact with a computer other than to type up school papers. That was true all the way through college. Even then, when all the nerdy people I knew were hanging out on the proto internets of BBS and tk, I just didn't care. I was out rock climbing, body surfing, writing, and playing music. Those were the things I obsessed over, screens didn't have any appeal. I wrote in notebooks. I recorded music to tape. Why would I need a screen?
-
-This continued until about 2001, when, through a variety of coincidences, blind luck, and, I've always assumed, some coffee spilled on keyboards in the offices of a place called Wired, I was made apparent to me that I might be able to make money writing about things that happened on screens. I happened to be standing outside a shoe store on Broadway in Manhattan when I realized this, which is an odd detail that I feel is somehow meaningful, though I haven't yet figured out how it's meaningful.
-
-Whatever the case, at the time this door swung open I was a chef running a restaurant, working 60-70 hours a week in a hot, stressful kitchen. I loved it, but it was a lot of work. The idea that I could make money without leaving the house was an absolute revelation. Sign me up.
-
-So I pulled out my then girlfriend's Macbook and started figuring out how to build stuff on the web. About as fast as I learned it, I wrote about it for Webmonkey. That was possible back in those days because there wasn't a lot to learn and there weren't that many people learning it. 
-
-The rest as they say, is history. I wrote for Webmonkey on a freelance basis for the next four years (while traveling the world for some of it), and weirdly, I started actually building things on screens. That became a second source of income, but it also because a kind of obsession. 
-
-At first it was just staying on top of what was happening, what I needed to write about for Webmonkey and what I could use to make this website better. I started off with shared hosting accounts, but before long I was working with real servers, both virtual and bare metal (clients). I kept going deeper down into the stack as it's known. I wrote about this recently for Wired if you're interested in that journey.
-
-Suffice to say that in the end I became quite capable of doing just about anything with a computer. The Luddite had succumbed to the screen.
-
-But the more I shared my wife's laptop, the more I realized I didn't care anymore. I don't want to think about technology anymore, my job no longer requires me too, so why am I? In the end it felt like an addiction. 
-
-Maybe that's too strong of a word, but it had compulsive elements, born of that weird combination of boredom and ease, that reminded me of drinking.
-
-What if... I just didn't get a new laptop?
-
-So that's what I did. Or didn't. 
-
-I got all the data off my hard drive onto an external SSD, which I plug into my wife's laptop when I need to edit photos or videos, which turns out to be pretty much the only time I need a laptop. 
-
-The rest of the time I write on my $75 tablet or using the family iPad.
-
-The iPad is especially compelling because I don't like it. There's no way to hack it. It's a highly managed, father-knows-best-style device that's the antithesis of what I liked about computers -- bending them to my will. Oddly enough, this makes the iPad perfect for how I want to live now, with less time spent on a screen, less time spent thinking about digital problems, more time spent with my family, working on projects that exist in the real world. Projects made of wood, and metal. 
-
-
-
-
-
-[^1]: Before you think, wow, this guy spends a lot of money on laptops, understand that I only bought 2 of those 8, the rest were loaners sent to me to test. But they all really did die in one way or another while the Macbook keeps going.
-
-
 ## 7 years on the Road
 
 themes: 
@@ -626,7 +571,48 @@ People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun.
 
 
 # Stories to Tell
+## economics
+Once people get over the big blue bus, two questions inevitably follow. 
+
+The first is, *so... what do you do?* This is the polite American way of saying, *how the hell do you afford to do this?* 
+
+The second thing people ask is what the kids do for school. That requires a much more complex answer. Let's stick to money. Money is simple. Well, compared to education. 
+
+### Set a Goal
+
+Before you figure out how you can afford to travel you need a goal. What is your goal? Is it to travel somewhere specific? Some specific means of traveling (e.g. RV, boat, AirBnB, etc)?Is it some specific amount of time (e.g. a few months between jobs, during a summer break, etc)?
+
+It's important to have a concrete goal in mind before you start trying to arrange your life in a way that carries you to that goal. I hate to sound like a life coach, but if you don't have a goal you'll never find your path. Without a clear path you won't go anywhere.
+
+For example, the first time I went on a long term trip I had general destination in mind (India and Southeast Asia). That allowed me to research to costs of getting to those places, the likely costs of life there, and then I could work backwards to figure out how much I need to save. I had a concrete number in mind ($10k, which I expected to last me 6 months), and I started saving until I had enough and I then I left. When it ran out I came home. I was young enough then that I just crashed on friends couches until I landed a new job, if that's not an option be sure to set aside a fund to re-enter normal life.
+
+This isn't the only way to do it though. I met several people on that trip who went the opposite direction, they saved up a chunk of money and then figured out where they could make it last the longest. That's another way to do it.
+
+And finally there is what I do now, which is working on the road. I only recommend this if your goal is to travel indefinitely. And for the record, neither I nor anyone I've ever met traveling left home planning to travel indefinitely. That tends to be something you decide when it comes time to end a long trip. You start thinking, *I want to keep doing this forever*, and that sudden pressure (the thought of going back) tends to lead to the creative thinking you need to develop if you do indeed want to live on the road.
+
+### Get Rid of Everything
+
+The first step to affording to travel is to get rid of everything you don't absolutely need. I actually think it would be easier to get rid of literally everything, head out the door and just buy things as you need them, but no one has ever taken this suggestion seriously so the best I can say is: if everything you doesn't fit in two bags, you're going to run into problems. 
 
+Get down to two bags. If you need to add things down the road, that's fine. For example, if you end up traveling with your home, like a van, RV, boat, or whatever, you're going to need tools, you can add those in later. But for the most part get rid of everything.
+
+This is important literally, as an act, but also as a process. It will teach you things. It will teach you how remote your wants are from your needs. Get rid of your wants along with all the debris those wants have brought into your life. Focus on what you absolutely need. If you want nothing you will not need as much money. Needs turn out to be pretty cheaply met. Find a dumpster and throw your TV in it. That alone will do more to get you on your way to having enough money to travel than anything else on this page.
+
+Don't worry if this is really hard or insanely time consuming. It's that way for everyone. I've written about this elsewhere, but it is astronomically easier to let stuff into your life than it is to get it out. 
+
+Stuff costs money and takes up space, neither of which you have future traveler. Life on the road is one of necessities (food and shelter) and great views, not endless wants fulfilled and Amazon deliveries. The less you want the better off you will be financially. Yes, you can take this too far, but very few people do so don't worry about that.  
+
+One trap to beware of, having less doesn't mean you have to have the best. I see things on the internet from people who profess to be minimalists because they have only one fork, spoon, and knife, but those utensils are $40. That's not what you're after. Let go of the need to impress if you can, it will save you a ton of money. And none of us out here traveling will be impressed anyway. 
+
+### Become Financially Self-Dependant
+
+I stole the phrase Financially Self-Dependant from the good people at Wanderer Financial because it captures something key that no other way of putting it does: you're in control. There are myriad ways this can be achieved depending on your skill set, but one thing I can absolutely promise you is that it won't mean having a traditional job. Can you travel with a full time job? Sure. I have several times. It sucks. It doesn't suck because you have set hours, though that's part of it, but mostly it sucks because you are not in direct control of your income. Worse, you only have one source of income. 
+
+Lose your job at home and it's a big deal.
+
+I hate to tell you this, but the truth is we saved up for a long time before we went traveling so that we would have a good cushion of money should anything go wrong. 
+
+Speaking of which, if you're like me you got no financial education. You're going to need to fix
 ## The Good Life
 
 I was recently talking with my editor about my decidedly low ambitions at work. Writers often have trajectories. They start at small publications, write that one big story, then move to a larger publication, write that one big story, then move on to a larger publication, and so on. I have never had any interest in that. I've spent my entire writing "career" primarily at Wired. I've been writing for Wired in one form or another since 1999. In all that time Wired has never rejected a pitch[^1], why would I want to write for anyone else?
@@ -1009,3300 +995,6 @@ https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/grill-and-smoker-setup-and-fi
 
 https://www.vagabondjourney.com/you-cant-get-lost-anymore/
 
-# jrnl
-
-## Ferne Clyffe
-
-If you look at a map of the U.S., there's a few routes that will get you from Pensacola FL to Wisconsin. They all have one things in common: they pass through Illinois. Unfortunately, there isn't much camping in Illinois, and what camping there is... is generally not great. We've stated in [small town](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/06/prairie-notes) [city parks](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/05/going-up-north) the last couple times through, which were nice enough for a night, but not someplace you'd want to spend any time.
-
-But nothing is all bad either. We call the route we take Maximum Illinois since it enters at the southernmost point and exits at the northern most. Somewhere in there we knew there were great places and we were going to find them damnit. 
-
-One of the things we figured our very quickly in our travels is you should never camp within 20 miles of the border in a state where marijuana is legal. This is where every meth head from the surround states will camp when they come to get their weed. The campgrounds will be run down, trashed, sketchy, and full of meth heads. That's just how it goes these days. Cross those off the list. If you do that for Illinois (and you should because this is absolutely the case in Paducah, Rockford, and anywhere around Lake Michigan) you're not left with a lot of camping options. 
-
-We considered harvest hosts, but those are generally only for 24 hours. We needed somewhere to stay while a snow storm (hopefully the last!) dumped a foot or more where we were headed in Wisconsin. This is how we ended up at Ferne Clyffe State Park, which had never quite fallen at the right mileage point for stopping. This time we did an extra long day and made it. It's good we did because Ferne Clyffe is without a doubt the nicest place we've been in Illinois. 
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-24_144552_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3975" class="picwide caption" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-26_120937_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3977" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-25_121141_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3976" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-26_122646_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3978" class="picwide" />
-
-
-We pulled into a nearly empty campground, which was fortunate because we hadn't even thought about making reservations ahead of time. I can't tell you the last time we did that. I loved the place already. 
-
-It was still very much winter when we arrived the last week in March. The tree limbs were still leafless, skeleton arms scratching at the still-wintery sky. But Ferne Clyffe was lush with lichens, moss, and ferns growing in clusters wherever water leached out of the limestone cliffs and beautifully carved canyon walls.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-24_152848_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3981" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-24_145021_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3979" class="picwide" />
-
-After six weeks in the tightly-policed, don't-even-think-about-climbing-it "nature" of [Fort Pickens](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2024/01/microcosm), the kids were eager to get climbing all over Ferne Clyffe. Happily there were no signs telling them not too, and no one around to tell them otherwise. We pretty much had the place to ourselves and climb they did.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-26_121249_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3982" class="picwide" />
-
-There seems to be a fundamental human need to climb. I don't mean technical rock climbing, I mean getting to the top of things. I have no idea why. To add to Edmund Hilary's famous quote about climbing Everest, the best I can think of is, *because we're alive, and it's here*. But then asking *why?* rarely leads to interesting experiences, *why not?* is a more rewarding guide to life. 
-
-Whatever the case I've noticed that when there are rocks or trees to climb our kids are happy. Almost all their favorite spots, like [Valley of Fire](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/09/valley-fire), [Zion](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/09/zion), and [the place in Utah I never named](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/08/canyoneering) among others, all have rocks or trees to climb.
-
-Ferne Clyffe had a network of trails running through the various canyons (one main canyon with a couple of offshoots). It's not a huge place, but it was enough to keep our days filled with hiking and climbing and birding.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-24_151148_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3980" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-24_145656_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3984" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-26_122605_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3988" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-I got the kids loupes as part of [a larger project](https://www.theprivateeyestore.com), for observation and sketching. The endless moss and lichens of Ferne Clyffe gave them a chance to use them. Studying moss through a loupe you quickly discover that the form of the surrounding forest is repeated in the carpet of moss. What we call moss is in fact tiny forests living on the rocks and fallen trees, living at a different scale, but nearly identical means.
-
-"Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking," writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book [<cite>Gathering Moss</cite>](https://bookshop.org/p/books/gathering-moss-a-natural-and-cultural-history-of-mosses-robin-wall-kimmerer/8632077?ean=9780870714993). "A cursory glance will not do it. Straining to hear a faraway voice or catch a nuance in the quiet subtext of a conversation requires attentiveness, a filtering of all the noise, to catch the music. Mosses are not elevator music; they are the intertwined threads of a Beethoven quartet."
-
-We looked and listened, hiked and climbed. 
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-25_121551_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3986" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-25_121543_ferne-clyff.jpg" id="image-3985" class="picwide" />
-
-
-## Mobile Bay
-
-
-Welcome to all the new subscribers. I'm not sure how so many new people came across the site lately, but welcome. I'm in the process of catching up, so this entry steps back in time a couple of months, when we were still down south. Anyway, please, enjoy.
-
-We maxed out our time at Fort Pickens. After six weeks, it was time to move on. We had planned to go to New Orleans, and then up into the Ozarks, before heading back up to Wisconsin for the summer, but given how mild the winter turned out to be, we decided to press north sooner than usual. 
-
-Our first stop was not far away, Mobile Bay. We've driven by Meaher State Park a dozen times by this point but we'd never stopped. This year we decided to see what it was like. We were a little early for bird migration, which is one of its claims to fame, but it's right in the middle of Mobile bay, so it had great views.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-12_185010_mobile-bay.jpg" id="image-3967" class="picwide" />
-
-It's also right down the street from the battleship Alabama.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-16_093900_mobile-bay.jpg" id="image-3968" class="picwide" />
-
-The USS Alabama was a lot like the [battleship North Carolina](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/12/winter-storm), but without the cool paint job. 
-
-What it did have, was the nicest ice cream bar of any of the three battleships we've toured. All things considered, the kids decided the Alabama was the best place to be stationed. Not only did it never take any significant hits in its lifetime of service, the ice cream situation was unmatched in the Navy. So far as we know.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-16_103719_mobile-bay.jpg" id="image-3972" class="picwide" />
-
-The mess hall on the other hand left much to be desired.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-16_103556_mobile-bay.jpg" id="image-3971" class="picwide" />
-
-Like the North Carolina, the Alabama's main gun turrets were open to explore.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-16_094147_mobile-bay.jpg" id="image-3969" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-16_094333_mobile-bay.jpg" id="image-3970" class="picwide" />
-
-We'd planned to check out the city of Mobile too, but the weather conspired against us with rain and thunderstorms most of the time we were in the area. We never did make it to downtown, but one of the great things about living this way is you don't really have to worry about missing something, you can always come back. 
-
-Despite what you often hear, I've come to feel like the road is long, that life is long. There's plenty of time, and no reason to rush. That feeling that we need to hurry up comes from living in the future. We're in a rush to get to the futures we imagine. There's nothing wrong with planning for the future, but I try to make sure I'm living in the here and now and not rushing through today to get to tomorrow.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-03-18_071347_dewayne-hayes.jpg" id="image-3974" class="picwide" />
-
-
-
-
-We split up after Mobile, Corrinne and the kids went to visit her parents just south of Atlanta, while I went north, bound for Wisconsin. 
-
-
-A week later we met up in Alabama and pushed on up to Illinois.
-
-
-
-
-## Fly Navy
-
-The one upside to [getting kicked out of Fort Pickens for a storm that never hit](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2024/01/microcosm), was meeting the pilot. 
-
-The bus, wherever it goes, is conspicuous. It is especially conspicuous in the middle of an otherwise empty parking lot. Next to the parking lot was a collection of condos, and several people came over, curious about the bus. One, who was walking two dogs, stopped to let the kids pet them. 
-
-We got to talking and mentioned that we were headed to the recently re-opened Navy Air Museum, and he said, "oh, a couple of my old planes are in there." Say what? It turned out that had he been a Navy pilot and flight instructor at NAS Pensacola for many years.
-
-Elliott is currently fascinated by war, as I think most young boys are at some point, but he's especially fascinated by planes, which is why we were headed back to the Navy Air Museum. Knowing that he was talking to someone who had actually flown the planes he has models of was almost too much for him. 
-
-Later the pilot brought out some of his old flight logs for Elliott to look at, and then, when we were leaving to go back to Fort Pickens, he gave Elliott a pair of his Navy wings. It will be some years I imagine before the significance of that sinks in, but I put them in a safe place in the mean time.
-
-We [went to the Navy Air Museum](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/03/island-sun) once before, but the kids were young enough that they don't have many memories of it. We tried to go back last year, but the base has been closed to the public since the [shooting in 2019](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Air_Station_Pensacola_shooting). This winter the museum finally re-opened to the public. After a couple of days back at Fort Pickens we had to leave for 24 hours (you can't stay on federal land for more than 14 consecutive nights), so we went over to Big Lagoon State Park, which is just down the road from the Navy Air Museum.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-10_123004_navy-air-museum.jpg" id="image-3959" class="picwide" />
-
-Like most men my age, I wanted to be a naval aviator. After Top Gun came out, who didn't? I went so far as to apply to the Naval Academy. I even met with my congressman to get his endorsement (required as part of the application process). I was pretty sure I'd be accepted, but unfortunately, junior year in high school, when I was doing all this, it became apparent that I wasn't going to be able to hide my less than perfect vision. 
-
-I ended up with glasses and my dream of flying for the Navy went away as soon as I put them on. I couldn't think of anything else I wanted to do in the Navy, so I dropped my application to the Naval Academy and moved on to other things. But I never lost my awe for flying, or my love of naval aviation history.
-
-The Navy Air Museum has an immense collection of planes spread across three huge buildings, with a few outside as well. It's the best collection of navy planes I've ever seen, and to have someone we knew tell use where his planes were made it that much more fun.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-10_135512_navy-air-museum.jpg" id="image-3962" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-10_121845_navy-air-museum.jpg" id="image-3957" class="picwide" />
-
-At this point I think I sound like a broken record, but what makes the Navy museum great is what makes any museum great: letting people actually touch things. The Navy Air Museum has plenty of cockpits to climb in, fuselages to crawl through, and even a presidential helicopter where you can sit down inside.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-10_122704_navy-air-museum.jpg" id="image-3958" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-10_135330_navy-air-museum.jpg" id="image-3961" class="picwide" />
-
-There's some good historical information too, including a few of my favorite museum displays, the diorama.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-10_130239_navy-air-museum.jpg" id="image-3966" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-10_112558_navy-air-museum.jpg" id="image-3964" class="picwide caption" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-10_112458_navy-air-museum.jpg" id="image-3963" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-10_124335_navy-air-museum.jpg" id="image-3960" class="picwide caption" />
-
-The dioramas, and more broadly, history according to the Navy, would lead you to think there was nothing so exciting as war. My first thought was that that's ridiculous, but the more I walked around the museum, the more I wondered if maybe the Navy is right. 
-
-While some people would like to deny it, there is a part of human beings that seems genetically hardwired to enjoy fighting. Every culture I'm aware of has produced a warrior element dedicated to fighting. And yes, many people in those warrior elements like it. I understand that feeling. I feel it in JuiJitsu. It's satisfying to submit someone, I imagine the satisfaction is even greater the higher the stakes get.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-10_113958_navy-air-museum.jpg" id="image-3965" class="picwide caption" />
-
-
-The kids were drawn to the dioramas because they gave a glimpse of life as it used to be, from wooden huts of the world wars, to a Vietnam era berth on an aircraft carrier. I'd be lying if I said those glimpses of life didn't look appealing. I'm sure sitting around drinking wine in a wooden hut in France, circa 1917 *was* fun when nothing else was happening. The part where people came and dropped bombs on you, killed your friends, possibly killed you, that's the part left out of the diorama. But what if that part only served to make those moments of peacefulness more valuable? What if you need struggle to appreciate the lack of struggle?
-
-What if when we're looking back at earlier times and finding them more appealing than our own, we aren't looking at history through rose-colored glasses? What if what appeals to us isn't the so-called simpler times, but the opposite, harder times? What if hard is good, struggle is good, and that's why the past is so appealing?
-
-
-
-## Microcosm
-
-We sprinted across Florida, from St. Augustine to the far end of the panhandle in two quick drives. We stopped in the middle at the Tallahassee Car Museum, an odd little museum with a few campsites out front (not everything on Harvest Hosts is a farm). 
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-23_145543_car-museum.jpg" id="image-3944" class="picwide" />
-
-The kids and I wandered around the museum for a while, checking out the cars and other antiques, but the extremely dry air was weird and uncomfortable. I understand the reasoning there, but it's a bit much to go from tropical Florida humidity to Arizona desert dry in the span of six feet.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-23_152131_car-museum.jpg" id="image-3945" class="picwide" />
-
-The next day we were at Fort Pickens, part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore and one of my favorite, and least favorite, places in all our travels.
-
-Fort Pickens is an oddball spot because the natural aspects, the beach and dunes, the crystal clear water, it's hard to really say anything bad about the place. Who can argue with this?
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-02_155549_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3946" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-21_151247_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3954" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-18_174813_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3950" class="picwide" />
-
-The problem with Fort Pickens is that it's the most mis-managed public park we've ever encountered. Everyone sees it, except the managers of course. From the park employees to people camping with us, everyone feels it, but we put up with it because of the location. 
-
-I think this year will be our last for a while though. I can deal with asshole camp hosts, rangers who do nothing but yell, but when the park shuts down at the hint of a storm, with no warning, no refund, and nowhere to go that just doesn't work.
-
-We were lucky because some locals told us the sheriff wouldn't care if we spent the night in a nearby state beach parking lot. That's where we waited out the oh-so-dangerous storm. That never showed. But I felt bad for the people who'd driven a thousand miles and now either had to spend $400 a night on a hotel room or just go home. Either way, your vacation is ruined.
-
-I tend to take a philosophical view of these things, since the alternative is, well, there isn't an alternative I can see. We've reached the stage of civilizational collapse where you get what you get and there's nothing you can do about that. So I take the philosophical, or perhaps abstract view is a better way to put it. 
-
-To me Fort Pickens is a microcosm of the collapse of our national government. The distant park managers, ensconced in their posh homes in Atlanta, 350 miles away, attempt to decide what's best for the park, for the visitors, from a distance that makes it impossible for them to know what's actually happening. That's if their intentions are good. I am unconvinced they are. Much as we don't like to admit it, some leaders suck at leading. Some are just in it for the status and power. 
-
-Sound familiar? It's how you get this.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-03_152735_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3947" class="picwide caption" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-04_140807_ft-pickens.jpg" id="image-3948" class="picwide" />
-
-The storm was supposed to come in on Friday, but of course no one who makes decisions about these things works the weekend, so once the park was closed, it wasn't opening again until Monday at the earliest no matter the weather. Never mind that the storm never hit, and the sun never stopped shining. The TPS reports required to re-open weren't done until Monday. And then the park forgot to send out an email and tell everyone it was open. We only knew because we were sitting there watching the gate. 
-
-The sheriff I talked to (who was very nice about letting us stay in the parking lot for the weekend) had a few choice words for the feds, they were accurate, but I won't repeat them here. Just don't forget that we, my fellow taxpaying American, we own this place.
-
-And it is a beautiful place.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-18_185157_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3953" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-24_132218_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3955" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-13_132218_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3949" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-18_175850_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3951" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-02-24_151247_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3956" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-This is why I call it a microcosm of the nation. America is a beautiful place, the land, the cultures, the people. Unfortunately we've let a very small, selfish, malignant minority take it over. And no, I am not a democrat, or a republican (I see no difference), a leftist or a rightist. They're all the same. The solutions to the problem won't come from the people who created the problem. The current managerial class is out of ideas, that's all. Eventually they'll collapse, some one new will step in with some answers and the process will repeat itself. As it has, for millennia. 
-
-In the mean time, I try to keep my children in mind. They're going to live further down this timeline than I am. It may get considerably rougher, it may not, who knows. All I know is that I want to hold their hands for as long as I can, and show them some beauty before more damage is done.
-
-
-
-
-## Fortified
-
-From Edisto we worked our way south, stopping off a Hunting Island for a few dismal days in the cold and rain, camping in a site that was just a smidge above actual bog. We escaped that dreariness for the much more uplifting Fort McAllister, the first of a string of forts we wanted to check out on the Georgia and Florida coast.
-
-This area is a bit different than the [Low Country](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2024/01/low), it's still coastal marshes, part the sea islands, a string of over a hundred barrier islands along this stretch of the Atlantic coast from the mouth of the Santee river, just south of Myrtle Beach, all the way down the coast of Georgia into Florida, but the land upstream is different, and the culture that's grown up here is different as well.
-
-We've spent quite a bit of time in the South Carolina barrier islands, but we never made it here to the Georgia coast until this year. Despite living in Georgia for over a decade, I'd never been to St. Simons or anywhere else around here.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-10_153025_fort-mcallister.jpg" id="image-3921" class="picwide" />
-
-The Georgia coast lacks any of the maritime forests like you'll find in some sheltered spots in South Carolina, but makes up for my having quite a few more forts, which makes it a great place to explore early American history.
-
-Fort McAllister is a civil war era fort, built by the Confederate army to defend Savannah against Union forces coming upriver to attack. There were three forts defending the river leading to Savannah, Fort McAllister was the first as you came up river.The interesting thing about the fighting here and at Fort Pulaski just up river (more on that in a second) was that this was where both armies tested their latest and greatest innovations in both naval armament and coastal defenses. Right here, war fighting around the world changed forever in 1865.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-09_135557_fort-mcallister.jpg" id="image-3916" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-09_135148_fort-mcallister.jpg" id="image-3914" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-09_064057_fort-mcallister.jpg" id="image-3912" class="picwide" />
-
-For most of the war the main enemies here were heat and disease, but toward the end the Union navy came, and it came with some of the first iron clad gunboats. No less than four ironclads with huge 15-inch cannons bombarded the fort for 5 hours... and did next to nothing. The earthenware walls absorbed them and men rushed out and shoveled the dirt back in place. The fort shelled the ironclads and also did little. The shells bounced off the ships, though that had to be incredibly loud to those inside.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-09_135213_fort-mcallister.jpg" id="image-3915" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-09_141743_fort-mcallister.jpg" id="image-3917" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-09_065944_fort-mcallister.jpg" id="image-3913" class="picwide" />
-
-Eventually the fort fell, but not because of the navy, because the army swung around south, bypassing Savannah to attack McAllister first. McAllister fell with very little fighting and the navy advanced to our next stop, Fort Pulaski, which I think of as The Last Fort.
-
-Fort Pulaski was made of brick and withstood an incredible amount of shelling during the war. You can still see the pockmarks and shell scars on the walls of the fort.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-10_133437_fort-mcallister.jpg" id="image-3920" class="picwide" />
-
-Pulaski held up until it met the new rifled cannon. At that moment the day and age of the fort ended. The rifled shell was too accurate and too devastating. The commander of the fort quickly surrendered before the magazine was hit and everyone in the fort killed. The rest of the world took notice. Very few forts were built after the shelling of Fort Pulaski.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-10_125446_fort-mcallister.jpg" id="image-3918" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-10_132701_fort-mcallister.jpg" id="image-3919" class="picwide" />
-
-After Pulaski we moved south again, and it turned extremely cold for a few days, but we managed to find a nice day to explore Fort Frederica, a pre-revolutionary war fort on St. Simon's island. Frederica was the southern most outpost of the English colonies and responsible for holding off the Spanish, who controlled Florida at the time. It did its job under Oglethorpe, twice if I remember correctly, after which the Spanish gave up.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-15_111727_crooked-river.jpg" id="image-3922" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-15_112052_crooked-river.jpg" id="image-3923" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-15_112110_crooked-river.jpg" id="image-3924" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-15_133250_crooked-river.jpg" id="image-3927" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-15_133407_crooked-river.jpg" id="image-3928" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-15_123942_crooked-river.jpg" id="image-3926" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-15_123601_crooked-river.jpg" id="image-3925" class="picwide" />
-
-
-
-For the kids this one was definitely the highlight thanks to a room full of dress up clothes and games they could play. I was more intregued to see something I'd read about in William Bartram's journals. Bartram passed through in 1774 and it was already in ruins, which makes it kind of amazing that there's anything here at all, but you can still see the stone outlines of most of the buildings in the town.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-16_131348_crooked-river.jpg" id="image-3929" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-20_070543_crooked-river.jpg" id="image-3930" class="picwide" />
-
-After Fort Frederica we packed up and headed south, bound for a place that's been on our list for a long time, but we just never seemed to make it: St. Augustine, FL. St Augustine was built around the fort, Castillo de San Marcos, which has been restored and is now a national monument. Sidenote, did you know National Parks/Monuments no longer take cash? The government won't take the currency of the nation at the national monument, tells you everything you need to know about the future of that currency. Anyway, we paid. With a card. And walked around the fort, which was monolithic in way that showed its Spanish origins. Spain was a genius with stone in this era. You see it all over Mexico too. Massive stone churches, government offices, forts, everything was stone and hugely overbuilt. It looks overbuilt to this day. It's magnificent.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-21_120702_st-augustine_vkbq782.jpg" id="image-3934" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-21_120819_st-augustine.jpg" id="image-3935" class="picwide" />
-
-We really liked Castillo de San Marcos, unfortunately we made the mistake of venturing across the street to see what the town was like and things went downhill. 
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-21_122717_st-augustine.jpg" id="image-3936" class="picwide" />
-
-I was going to say, we're not really fans of tourist towns, where every experience is carefully curated and managed by someone, but, then, is anyone a fan of this? You might argue that since this exists all over the place, that people must like it, and perhaps this has some merit, but we've also reached the stage of civilizational decline where it doesn't really matter what we want, this (whatever this is) is what we're getting.
-
-Whatever the case, we spent about 10 minutes wandering around St. Augustine and were ready to head back to the bus.
-## Low
-
-Oak leaves shimmer and dance in the wind. Morning sunlight filters in through the trees, the rays fighting their way through wisps of Spanish moss.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-01_074904_botany-bay.jpg" id="image-3908" class="picwide" />
-
-You can find this scene anywhere in South Carolina below the fall line, a vague geographic boundary that runs along the southeastern part of state, where the hard rock of the mountains gives way to the softer sand of the coastal plain. This is what they call the lowcountry. Marshes and ribbons of water. A place where everything is a little bit different. Dolphins in rivers, moss in trees.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-01_074556_botany-bay.jpg" id="image-3907" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2024-01-01_072800_botany-bay.jpg" id="image-3906" class="picwide" />
-
-We've been coming here off and on for decades. Always in the off season. Usually to Edisto, a small island at the edge of the world. A small island that is slowly, inexorably being pulled into the new world that has previously ignored it. 
-
-Nearby Charleston swells. Eddies of retirees swirl in from New England, the mid Atlantic, all weary of winter. The old southern culture is sinking like the land, pulled under the rising tides of something new.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2023-12-24_134109_botany-bay.jpg" id="image-3905" class="picwide" />
-
-People like to say they want to go somewhere different, but it's been my experience that most people, the minute they get there, set about making it just like the place they left behind.
-
-One day all that will remain of the old lowcountry culture will be like the dead, weather-worn trees on the beach at Botany Bay, making a lonely stand against the inevitability of the waves.
-
-<img src="images/2024/2023-12-24_120641_botany-bay.jpg" id="image-3903" class="picwide" />
-
-For now there are still pockets to be found. Hidden places. If you know where to look. 
-
-<img src="images/2024/2023-12-24_120157_botany-bay.jpg" id="image-3902" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2024/2023-12-24_132113_botany-bay.jpg" id="image-3904" class="picwide" />
-
-Don't ask me. I'm not from here. I have no secrets to give. I am just passing through.
-## Winter Storm
-
-The afternoon of the day we decided to leave the Jeep behind a ranger stopped by to tell us they were closing the campground the next day due to a large storm front that was headed our way. Winds were expected to be in the 50 MPD range, with gust even higher. We've sat out a storm with [winds like that in New Mexico](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/eastbound-down). It wasn't fun, but we're still here. But that wasn't an option this time. Fortunately we were planning to leave the next day anyway.
-
-We crammed all the backpacking gear and misc stuff from the Jeep in the back of the bus and hit the road the next morning. We cut inland and headed south for somewhere to sit out the storm. Driving the bus in the rain sucks and I wasn't about to do it with everyone on board.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-16_114717_driving-wilmington-battleship.jpg" id="image-3880" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-16_114721_driving-wilmington-battleship.jpg" id="image-3881" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-16_134123_driving-wilmington-battleship.jpg" id="image-3882" class="picwide" />
-
-I also wasn't crazy about camping anywhere with pine trees when the forecast was for days of soaking rain followed up by high winds. Unfortunately nearly every campground on the Carolina coast is full of pines and oaks. I've seen too many trees come down in too many campgrounds to risk it when I don't have to. We found a hotel south of Wilmington and booked two nights.
-
-The storm came on slowly. The first morning not much happened. I decided we probably had time to check out the nearby battleship North Carolina before the brunt of it hit us. The kids and I grabbed an Uber over to the battleship. We had the place to ourselves, which was fun. We wandered around below decks for a couple hours, getting hopelessly lost a couple of times, but having fun nonetheless. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-17_103934_driving-wilmington-battleship.jpg" id="image-3889" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-17_101816_driving-wilmington-battleship.jpg" id="image-3888" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-17_094154_driving-wilmington-battleship.jpg" id="image-3883" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-17_104335_driving-wilmington-battleship.jpg" id="image-3890" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-17_101451_driving-wilmington-battleship.jpg" id="image-3887" class="picwide caption" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-17_100800_driving-wilmington-battleship.jpg" id="image-3886" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-17_094901_driving-wilmington-battleship_HJI4PiJ.jpg" id="image-3885" class="cluster pic66 caption" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-17_105724_driving-wilmington-battleship.jpg" id="image-3891" class="picwide" />
-
-
-By the time we came back out the parking lot was starting to flood and I was a little worried about getting a ride back. It took a bit, but eventually we found someone as nutty as us and made it back to the hotel safe and sound.
-
-I alternated between hanging out in the hotel, taking the kids to the indoor pool, and checking on the bus. Just to the south of us North Myrtle beach took a beating, and up to the north of us Wilmington flooded. The outer banks had plenty of overwashed roads and high winds as well, but nothing nearly as bad as had been predicted. Curiously, where we were, other than a good steady rain for 24 hours, nothing much happened.
-
-The next day we hit the road again bound for Edisto, winding our way through Charleston and then the marshland to the south.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-18_150107_driving-bus.jpg" id="image-3892" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-18_151035_driving-bus.jpg" id="image-3894" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-18_150251_driving-bus.jpg" id="image-3893" class="picwide" />
-
-Two days later Elliott turned nine and I turned forty-nine.
-
-It was a very revolutionary war themed birthday -- army men, books, costumes, anything at all related to the revolutionary war. His sisters' carved him wooden figures as well, two british and two patriots. The only non-revolutionary war gifts he asked for were bacon and chocolate.
-
-
-
-
-## Repair Fail
-
-One of the most underappreciated, least talked about aspects of repair is the hierarchy. There are repair wizards and there are newbies and there are the rest of us, somewhere between those two poles. This hierarchy of skill and experience requires that you earn your way to the top. Experts in repair are experts because they have done it, not because they think they can do it, or they say they can do it. There's no way to fake expertise in car repair. The thing either starts or it doesn't.
-
-It's a long road to expert. The more experience you gain, as you work your way up that hierarchy, the more you see the summit recede in front of you. You start to know how much you don't know. It's one thing to be able to do basic things like [replace a head gasket](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/10/going-down-swinging), it's a whole other thing to be able to listen to an engine and know a head gasket needs replacing. The latter is a kind of total understanding of the system that takes years, possibly decades to obtain.
-
-<img src="images/2023/jeep.jpg" id="image-3871" class="picwide" />
-
-To really understand a system all the way from top to bottom is to hold a total cognitive model of the thing in your mind and be able to access it intuitively. To get that is a hard won process with a steep learning curve. You will fail. You will fail over and over until you learn. I find this dynamic interesting because those are two things I truly dislike -- failure and asking for help. Both are essential if you want to repair things.
-
-I hate asking for help more than I hate failure, so for me, learning to repair anything is a trial and error and error and error and error and error and give-up-and-ask-for-help process. 
-
-This process is important. You can't shortcut it. You need those moments of crushing failure and ineptitude. Otherwise your sense of yourself can outstrip what you're capable of, which is usually referred to as "having an ego." Or worse that self-image becomes so fragile you avoid situations that might force you to alter it, and when it is inevitably punctured you go all to pieces, which is worse than ego -- no ego.
-
-Fail early, fail often. 
-
-Still, it's one thing to understand this process intellectually. It's another to live it.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-11-29_125854_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-3872" class="picwide" />
-
-About two weeks into our stay in the outer banks the Jeep started acting funny. There was no definitive thing I could put my finger on, just an intuition that something was wrong inside the engine. Deep inside the engine according to my hunch. I did what anyone would do. I ignored it. Until one day it became audible on the way home from the grocery store. Thunk thunk thunk when I accelerated. 
-
-For a long time there had been a tapping sound that I somehow instinctively knew was a bent rod. Despite two mechanics telling me it wasn't. I took off the valve covers and sure enough, there was a bent rod. But that wasn't all, I ran the engine with the covers off and realized one of the exhaust rods was no longer lifting the tappet. This was on one of the two cylinders that always had slightly sooty spark plugs when I checked them. So far it all made sense. I ordered some rods and some new lifters. 
-
-Unfortunately the heads on the AMC 360 engine do not allow you to extract the lifters. I had to pull the intake manifold off. I didn't want to do that at a campsite in the sand dunes so I rented a storage unit to work on it and had it towed up. 
-
-It took me two days to unhook everything and get the intake manifold off. I pulled out the lifter in question. The bottom of it, which rides the cam lobe, was worn down a good 3/16th of an inch. It was then that I realized my original hunch was right, the problem was deeper, I was treating symptoms. The nagging suspicion that I was out of my depth and plain wrong began to set in. 
-
-Since I was waiting on new lifters I thought I might as well take off the passenger's side head. The Jeep had always leaked oil toward the rear of the engine on that side. It was almost impossible to see where the leak was coming from, but I thought maybe the head gasket was bad. It turned out I was wrong. Fail number one, but that one was minor, a wasted morning and $40 for a new head gasket. I put the head back on and torqued it down.
-
-At that point I'd spent the better part of three days hanging out alone in a storage unit, talking to my GoPro as I recorded everything I did. Still, I was optimistic, I was having fun. We weren't due to leave for another five days. I had time.
-
-Then the parts got delayed. Thoughts about opportunity costs started to creep in. I spent a day thinking about all the other things I could be doing. Everything has opportunity costs. I could be playing with the kids in the dunes, visiting with friends, writing things I wanted to write. Instead I went back and forth between the storage unit, the mailbox to check on parts, and various parts stores. Still, I was optimistic.
-
-Long before I ever did any vehicle repairs I rationalized not doing them by saying that I could earn more money working the hours I'd be working on the vehicle, so it "made more sense" to pay someone else to do it. This kind of "sense" only really makes sense on a spreadsheet though. The truth is I was scared to try repairing anything because I didn't have a clue how to do it and knew I'd probably screw it up.
-
-I started to think about that rationalization from the opposite direction though -- does it make sense to spend this much time working on a vehicle when what I really want to do is enjoy a warm day with my family or taking pictures of the dunes at sunrise?
-
-One day I was sitting in the storage unit drinking coffee and I realized, I am done with this. This isn't the way I want to spend my time, my family's time. The Jeep is an incredible vehicle and I love it. If we lived in a house and I could work on it when I felt like it, it'd be perfect. But that's not how it works on the road. There's the added pressure of time, the need to move on. The outer banks was getting colder every day. We were waking up to frost on the windows and clouds of breath in the air. We needed to be in Edisto for Christmas. We're supposed to spend January on the Georgia coast. All of these things felt like they might be slipping away, and for what? So we could drive the Jeep? Is that what we're doing here? 
-
-And yet, the Jeep is by far the best car I've ever driven. It is an absolute joy when it's running well. The kids love it. We all love it. I hated to give up on it. 
-
-The lifters finally arrived and I put everything back together. I left the valve covers off so I could make sure the new lifter was working. The kids came with me that day, and I let my daughter start it so I could watch the engine. It turned over and caught. But the thunking noise was still there. And that was when I realized oil was only coming out the rod that I'd replaced. Not out of any other rods. That's when I knew something else was wrong. I was out of my depth. I had failed. It hadn't even occurred to me that oil should have been shooting out of all the rods all the times I'd started it with the valve covers off. That should have been extremely messy and it never was, something else was wrong. My uncle suggested the oil pump was probably dead. Either way, I was out of time, we had to get moving if we were going to make Christmas down south.
-
-I punted. I called the mechanic I'd almost called to begin with. He said he didn't have room for it on his lot and couldn't get to it until after the holidays. Damn. I called some other mechanics, none of whom really grabbed me but I had to do something. I settled on one, called a tow truck, and sat down to wait for it. The original mechanic called me back. He said he'd make room, bring it on by. I took that as a sign, redirected the tow truck and dropped it off. 
-
-I took everything out of it, somehow found room for it in the bus and we hit the road with everyone in the bus, something we haven't done in years. It's fun to travel that way, but not terribly practical for us right now.
-
-A few days later the mechanic called with bad news. The engine was a mess, the cam was blown and half a dozen other things had gone wrong. It needed to be completely rebuilt. Corrinne and I talked. Then we talked some more. We love the Jeep, but in the end, it was just too much to keep going with our life on the road. One engine to repair is enough. We decided to move on and put it up for sale. I'd like to see someone else rebuild it. It's a great car. But it's not for us right now. I'll miss the Jeep, but it's time to get back to what we do.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-## In The Dunes 
-
-> Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.<cite>&mdash;Henry David Thoreau, Journal, March 22, 1842</cite>
-
-Mornings grow colder with every passing day. The sunrise edges a little further south every time I crest the dunes to watch. The wind howls most mornings, a biting cold that cuts through the layers of wool I pile on in a futile attempt to keep warm. But the sunrises. Never the same, always spectacular.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-10_065437_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-3862" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-11-20_062538_oregon-inlet-nikonzf.jpg" id="image-3856" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-11-16_060729_oregon-inlet-a7crii.jpg" id="image-3855" class="picwide" />
-
-In the popular imagination, living in an RV -- or #vanlife as my editors at Wired insist on calling it -- is one of leisure and relaxation. We all spend hours drinking coffee in the sunshine, reading in hammocks, doing yoga on the beach, or in my case, hanging out with my wife and kids.
-
-I have been known to spend a while drinking my coffee in the sunshine, and our family is together almost all the time, but by and large, this is not how I've been spending my days lately. It *should* be how I spend my days. It should be how we all spend our days, lingering over the things we love, but life has a way of finding other things to eat up our time.
-
-I get to the point where I feel antsy whenever I am not doing something. Maybe antsy isn't the right word. I feel like I *should* be doing something whenever I am *not* doing something. That creates a low grade stress that permeates life. When you're feeling like you should be doing something else it pulls you out of whatever you're trying to do and you end up doing nothing. 
-
-I did not use to be this way. I remember, and I have even written about, finding peace in [doing nothing but listening to the rain](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/07/time-and-placement). 
-
-What happened? I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Somewhere in the last five years I lost touch with that ability to relax into any situation, an ability I think is the key to traveling well. How did I lose touch with something so essential? 
-
-I don't know exactly, but I know that these days I feel like there is always something that needs to be done: a meal that needs to be made, an engine that needs to repaired, a child that needs attention, a thing to write, a thing to edit, a thing to call in. Something always needs to be done that keeps you from doing what you want to do.
-
-That probably sounds a lot like your life as well. That's why I am writing this, to let you know that the solution to feeling overwhelmed is not buying an RV and hitting the open road. Modernity will find you, and try to hurry your life along, even out here.
-
-This is where Thoreau comes in. "Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried." I'm sure if he were writing today, Thoreau would say "person" rather than "man", but the point is that it takes *a determination* not to be hurried. Thoreau wrote that in March of 1842, in case you were thinking hectic lives were a recent phenomena.
-
-I dug through a 1906 copy of Thoreau's complete journals to see if there was any additional context to that thought, but there isn't. It's a single line set off by itself, no connection to any of the ideas around it. It stands on its own though I think.
-
-Something about Thoreau's phrasing, "a determination", made me realize that not only was I hurried by things that should not be hurrying me, but that this state, this feeling of always needing to do something, was a state of existence I had *allowed* myself to fall into. I lost the awareness of it that you must have to resist it -- because if you aren't *determined* not to be hurried, you will be. You are in charge of how your mind works. It's your responsibility to stop the hurrying.
-
-That's why I like Thoreau's particular phrasing here. It takes work, determination, not to be hurried. If you aren't working at it, life is going to rush you along with no time to appreciate the sound of the rain or enjoy that coffee in the sunshine. I find it both heartening to know that Thoreau had this problem, and somewhat depressing that Thoreau had this problem -- despite being nearly 200 years on, life seems to be no less noisy. Same as it ever was.
-
-It was around this time that I started running out over the dunes to watch the sunrise every morning. It was driven mostly by a desire to see what was over the hill from the bus. From the bus all I could see was the sky and I would wonder, what does the sea look like? So I ran over the dunes nearly every morning. Sometimes with a camera, sometimes not. I had to see what was on the other side.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-05_065850_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-3861" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-11-20_063355_oregon-inlet-nikonzf.jpg" id="image-3857" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-03_105455_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-3859" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-12-03_104959_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-3858" class="picwide" />
-
-After I did my morning rituals out there I would sit down and watch the sunrise. It was rarely the relaxing sort of reverie you might be thinking, this is the Outer Banks after all, and it's nearly December. Usually the wind was blowing at least 10 knots and the temperature was rarely above 40. Mostly I sat with my teeth chattering, desperately wishing I was back in the warm bus, unable to feel my toes, but there to watch the sun rise and do nothing else. To force on myself the unhurriedness of sitting still, observing the world.
-
-It took a while to work. At first I was trying to hard to get something out of it. That doesn't work. It wasn't until it became routine that I started to find my way back to the relaxed kind of energy I was seeking. 
-
-The key turned out to be bringing my notebook with me, not to write down some profound insight, I had none of those, but to write down all the things that were on my mind instead of the sunrise in front of me. It's not until you clear all the hurriedness out of your mind that you can begin to relax. You can never relax when you feel there other things you need to be doing. The secret to being relaxed is to be okay not doing the things that need to be done.
-
-There is no true relaxation until you are mentally free of all the hurriedness, that feeling that there's something you should be doing. The way to get to that state, for me anyway, is to write down everything that needs to be done, know that it's all in a notebook I can look at from time to time, and then get on with life. It is of course one thing to know this intellectually and another to stay on top of it.
-
-There's an interesting dichotomy at work here: in order to relax, you need to be disciplined. This is where I failed. I was not being disciplined in my determination to remain unhurried. I was not doing the work of keeping my life organized so that I could in turn relax and be unhurried. 
-
-As an aside, I find the larger lesson here fascinating and instructive: the path to wisdom seems to begin in the mundane ability to keep track of your commitments so you can get them off your mind, which then frees your mind up to thing about other, if not higher, than certainly more interesting things.
-
-In the end it wasn't going into the dunes to watch the sunrise that brought me back around to a more relaxed state, it was bringing my notebook with me and clearing my mind into it. Once that was done, I could watch the sunrise without worrying that I should be doing something else. It's not a solution exactly, more of [an ongoing practice](https://luxagraf.net/essay/everything-is-a-practice). Not only in the dunes, but everywhere, carving out time to empty your mind of commitments so that you can be free to live a more relaxed, unhurried life. Not a grand revelation, just a short run through the dunes and a little while sitting still. If only it had been a bit warmer.
-
-
-
-
-
-## Halloween in the Outer Banks
-
-From Virginia Beach we drifted south, making the short drive down to Oregon Inlet in the Outer Banks. Our plan was to spend a couple of weeks there, visit friends, get some time at the beach, and then head to Ocracoke for Thanksgiving. It was pretty good plan, but it didn't work out that way. So it goes.
-
-We arrived on a nearly perfect day at the end of October -- sunshine, clear skies, hardly any wind. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-25_130859_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-3833" class="picwide" />
-
-The first week we were there the days were in the 70s, the nights cooling off to the low 50s, which is perfect temps for living on grid in the bus. Although there are some electric sites at Oregon Inlet, we've never felt the need for them. There's plenty of sunshine for our solar (no trees) and we prefer to the non-electric sites backed up against the dunes, a short walk from the bus to the shore.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-28_072551_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-3840" class="picwide" />
-
-We got plenty of time in at the beach that first week. We went [seining](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/06/seining-with-val) again with our friend Val (the main reason we came back here was to see friends we made on our last trip), and went bird watching around Pea Island.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-25_162557_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-3834" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-26_134245_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-3835" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-26_141515_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-3836" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-26_141532_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-3837" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-27_140902_seining-with-val.jpg" id="image-3838" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-27_142334_seining-with-val.jpg" id="image-3839" class="picwide" />
-
-It wasn't long after we arrived in the Outer Banks before Halloween rolled around. In our family Halloween has always been a big holiday. This year Elliott spent hours designing and then building out his own green demon costume. I would take no outside assistance.
-
-But something has changed about Halloween. The Halloween vibe has shifted from the kind of playful, mock-scary decorations of the past, to an overabundance of plastic horror movie stage props. I read somewhere that ticket sales of horror movies correlate closely with several economic indexes -- as the economy gets worse, horror movies get more popular.
-
-I'm no economist, but this makes sense to me. As the world gets genuinely scary, our fantasy worlds have to up the "scary" tropes to continue to offer an escape. I think this plays out in Halloween decorations too. The change in the Halloween vibe has really accelerated over the last two years as the economy has cratered. Neighborhoods decorated with dismembered body parts says a lot about the quality of life in them I fear. 
-
-Whatever the case, our kids are not fans of the horror movie vibe, so we decided to head the Elizabethan Gardens, which had a Halloween festival and trick or treating setup the weekend before the holiday.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-28_175458_halloween.jpg" id="image-3844" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-28_175457_halloween_ORTKJsQ.jpg" id="image-3843" class="cluster pic66 caption" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-28_175730_halloween.jpg" id="image-3845" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-It was one of many local events we've ended up at over the years where after about half an hour we realize we're the only ones there that don't know everyone. I rather like it when we parachute into someone else's world for a few hours, and everyone was very kind and welcoming. Although I did have to explain to the kids there was no way they were going to win the costume contest, which was decided by popular vote. Outsiders don't win popular votes. They had fun though, and loaded up on candy, which, let's face it, is the important part of Halloween. 
-
-Corrinne was complaining to another friend about the whole horror movie Halloween thing, and she told us to come to her neighborhood, which was suitably old school and not into the horror movie thing. This turned out to be true, so the kids got to go trick or treating in peace after all. It really was an old school neighborhood, pretty much just like [being back in 1984 ](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/08/everyday-1984). Val joined us and we all wandered around for a few hours, gathering candy from strangers, as you do on Halloween.
-
-## History 
-
-We crossed the Mason Dixon line on our way to Assateague, but it didn't really feel like we were in the south yet. No offense Maryland, but it wasn't until I stopped at a gas station in Virginia that I heard the friendly twang of a southern accent. A few miles later I passed a cotton field and I felt like we were back. Smiles were less strained. Drivers were slower. [Duke's mayonnaise](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2007/06/sailing-through) was on nearby shelves.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-22_131925_virginia.jpg" id="image-3823" class="picwide" />
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-One of these days I'll get around to the essay about why it is that I love the south more than the rest of the country. Not today though.
-
-Unfortunately Virginia Beach isn't the most southern of places. We had planned to stay closer to Jamestown and Williamsburg, but the day we left Assateague Corrinne came down with what I'd had (not the ragweed apparently) and didn't feel up to a longer drive. We cut it short and stopped at First Landing State Park, just on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay.
-
-That meant a longer drive to the stuff we were here to see, but it also meant we were closer to groceries. We stocked up, and then following day the kids an I drove about an hour inland to see Jamestown.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-23_113518_virginia.jpg" id="image-3824" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-23_113807_virginia.jpg" id="image-3825" class="picwide" />
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-Jamestown has two parts, a National Park site that appears to be in a perpetual state of digging and disarray, and a re-enactment section that features a replica of the old settlement, a native village, and a few other odds and ends. We started at the actual site, which has a few buildings, mainly the church, but is on the same land as the original Jamestown settlement.
-
-I will confess that I generally dislike archaeology. To me it's a fancy word for grave robbers that we've collectively agreed to not call grave robbers. Do we learn things from archaeology? Well, maybe? I definitely think we can learn a lot about ourselves, how we see the world, and how we view our relationship to the past. That is to say, that archaeology is something we invented says more about us than anything else.
-
-It's not that I think archaeology is all wrong. There may be some truth to the stories archaeologists tell us. The problem for me is that we will never really know. There is very little that's testable about the hypotheses archaeology offers. The stories we tell ourselves based on archaeology are educated guesses presented as truth, whereas the stories from other sources, which may be educated in a different way, don't get that blessing, which rankles me. 
-
-At Jamestown current archaeology is attempting to say whose body is in which grave, which is just... I don't want to sound too cynical, but who cares? I try to keep my prejudices out of the kids' experience so I didn't say a word, but after listening to about five minutes of a tour guide's talk, the kids wandered off to look at other things. My daughter even asked me, why does it matter who is buried where? I try to see the upside of these things, so I told her perhaps it mattered to the descendants of the people buried. She said if it were her ancestor she'd want their bones left in the ground even if she didn't know exactly where. 
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-We wandered away from the grave robber area to see the rest of the Jamestown site, which was beautiful. If you were picking settlement locations based solely on picturesque qualities, Jamestown was a brilliant find. It was undoubtedly different 400 years ago, when it was covered by old growth, but it was probably even better. It's still beautiful today.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-23_115710_virginia.jpg" id="image-3826" class="picwide" />
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-We drove around the island and stopped near a marsh to have a picnic lunch. It was quiet back in the woods and we had fun imagining perhaps Pocahontas once stopped for a snack in this very same place. The kids loved the fact that Pocahontas would probably have been eating something similar -- dried meat, nuts, hard bread (crackers), cool water to drink. Probably not plantain chips, but otherwise we were reasonably historically accurate.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-23_125933_virginia.jpg" id="image-3827" class="picwide" />
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-After lunch we drove over to the re-enactment area. There was a museum, but I knew the kids didn't care that much, they were in a rush to get to the real stuff, the replicas and actors. There turned out to not be many actors around, but those that were there were great. One man, who was captain of the guard, put Elliott and another boy each in charge of an imaginary squad and walked them through their duties.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-23_133725_virginia.jpg" id="image-3828" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-23_140014_virginia.jpg" id="image-3830" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-23_140022_virginia.jpg" id="image-3831" class="picwide" />
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-The highlight though, were the replica ships. Only one was open, but the kids got to run all around it, go below decks, see the hold, and even the captain's quarters -- pretty much everything but climbing the rigging. This was extra entertaining for them because I wrote them a book a few years ago about a family that lives on a boat in the year 1710. These ships were a different design, but close enough that I could say, yes that's how Lulu and Birdie (the main characters in the book) would have cooked, where they would have slept, etc, which gave them a kind of connection to the book that goes beyond anything I could ever write.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-23_134846_virginia.jpg" id="image-3829" class="picwide" />
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-It was fun for me to watch them all infected by this fascination with the past, this thing we call history. It has always struck me that we do ourselves a great disservice by cutting off the past, putting it outside our "reality," the world around us. The past can be in the present. It can be all around you all the time. Many cultures have this view. Our view of the past as something "back there" is a choice, and from what I have seen, it is not a natural one. At least not to kids. Kids are ready to step into the past as a real and living thing. It *is* a real and living thing for them when we get out of the way, which is what I try to do as much as possible.
-
-Unfortunately, after Jamestown we decided to see Colonial Williamsburg. This was a mistake for a variety of reasons, and to tell the full story would be a post of its own and to be totally honest, I don't want to ruin Williamsburg for anyone else. But because I know you're going to ask, I will go with my grandmother's advice and say nothing. Yes, we went to Williamsburg. And then we went home for the day.
-
-Undeterred by Williamsburg, we went back the following day to check out the Yorktown battlefield, which was also divided into a museum, re-enactment area, and actual battlefield. This time the kids were into the museum and we spent several hours walking around talking about the revolutionary war (the war of colonial aggression to my British friends). The kids were especially taken with the signs that said "please touch sword" rather than the usual, don't touch anything signs you see in most museums. After wandering around the working farm out back, we drove out to the battlefield, but that one failed. To a kid, a field is just a field.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-24_124411_virginia.jpg" id="image-3832" class="picwide" />
-
-We drove into the little town that was nearby and found a fun little maritime museum, that consisted mainly of one man's amazing model ship building prowess. From early colonial ships to modern warships it was a historical tour of American shipbuilding in miniature. But more than anything it was the sort of small museum where everyone is incredibly enthusiastic and kind and friendly. All volunteers, doing it for the love of it. It helped restore the kids' faith in grownups I think, which was a little shaken after Williamsburg.
-
-
-## Shoreline
-
-If there is a theme to the places we go, it's water. Lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, creeks. We find them. Even out west, far from any large body of water, "the desire of water is scribed across the desert like graffiti."[^1]
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-While I like almost all places with water—the bigger the better, which is why we spend so much time by the sea. The sea is life. It is the blood in our veins. It always feels like coming home to me. It's only been six months since we last saw it, but that feels like too long now that we're back.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-15_142629_assateague_QNhTUJC.jpg" id="image-3811" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-15_143433_assateague.jpg" id="image-3812" class="picwide" />
-
-I tried to read a book once about why it is that many, if not most, people feel most at home near the shore. I like the premise, but it turned out to be a book full of studies, with lots of evidence of the sea doing this and that for people, and I couldn't help [thinking of Conrad](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1058/1058-h/1058-h.htm), who spent a good deal more time *at* sea than most: "For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness."
-
-I tossed the book of studies in a free book bin months ago. I realized I didn't care. I know why *I* feel at home by the shore and that's enough. I also know that part of why I love the sea is that like Conrad writes, it doesn't seem to much care about humanity, certainly not for our individual lives. My impression is not that it dislikes us, rather that it is far too old, too immense, too complex to even notice that we exist. I find this heartening, this reminder that there are forces far above and beyond me, that I can't begin to fathom. The world is large, we are small. We forget that at our peril.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-16_070233_assateague.jpg" id="image-3813" class="picwide" />
-
-I don't think, for instance, that the sea really cared that I came down with a head cold the day after we arrived. It might have been the pace we've been keeping for the last couple months. You get a rush of energy from moving quickly through things, but it feeds on itself, you burn through it eventually, and when you finally stop there's a tendency to crash. Or it could have been allergies. The campground at the National Seashore in Assateague is covered in ragweed. It was virtually the only plant around.
-
-Still, if you have to pick a place to crash (or succumb to ragweed), the sea is the place to do it. I usually cure myself of illness by swimming. I know few will believe me, but it works for me. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-18_115218_assateague.jpg" id="image-3819" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-18_120634_assateague.jpg" id="image-3820" class="picwide" />
-
-Assateague (and Chinoteague to the south) is a barrier island somewhat like the Outer Banks, but less windy. That might make it sound more appealing, but it doesn't work out that way in practice. The magic of barrier island is, I think, in that windswept character that is inescapable in the Outer Banks. In the Outer Banks, life becomes about wind. You notice when it changes directions, you notice when it picks up, dies down, and most of all you notice when it stops because it so rarely does. There was none of that in our time at Assateague. 
-
-Instead there are semi-wild horses, which people really seem to love. Including my kids. They certainly make themselves at home in the national park.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-16_145513_assateague.jpg" id="image-3816" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-16_150331_assateague.jpg" id="image-3818" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-16_145500_assateague.jpg" id="image-3815" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-16_150144_assateague.jpg" id="image-3817" class="picwide" />
-
-We spent a few days in the National Seashore portion of the island, and then migrated over to the Maryland State Park portion, which is much nicer. No ragweed and right on the beach. My head cold cleared up. Storms rolled in. The sea didn't seem to care. It was good to be back by the shore.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-21_181547_assateague.jpg" id="image-3822" class="picwide" />
-
-
-[^1]: From Craig Childs' *[The Secret Knowledge of Water](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-secret-knowledge-of-water-discovering-the-essence-of-the-american-desert-craig-childs/114453?ean=9780316610698)*, one of the few books I keep with me in the bus.
-
-## Farm Life
-
-One day this past summer a man stopped by our site to talk about the bus. I wasn't around, but when I got back he was telling Corrinne about something called Harvest Hosts. It's a clever idea, wineries, farms, other people with land provide free camping in exchange for you spending some money at their store or whatever they have. We looked into it a few years ago when first launched, but it was mostly wineries at the time and neither of us drink, so it didn't make sense for us.
-
-That day last summer though he assured us that the service had grown considerably and there was a wide range of options, not just wineries. We didn't do anything about it just then (we take what I like to call an Amish approach to things&mdash;we like to think about them for a long time before we actually do anything), but as we plotted a route the rest of the way down the Erie Canal, past New York City, along the New Jersey coast and beyond, there were quite a few places with nowhere to camp. Normally we'd get a hotel, but that's expensive and we don't enjoy it, so we decided hey, lets try out Harvest Hosts. 
-
-We signed up and booked a night at an [apple farm](https://eatapples.com) about halfway between St. Johnsville and where we were headed in New Jersey. It turned out to be a great experience. The kids got to see what a real working farm is like (well, orchard in this case), we stayed for free, and we loaded up on apple cider, fresh cheese, and other treats. In the end we spent about as much as a hotel, but it was a much more enjoyable experience.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-12_143339_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3791" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-12_170522_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3792" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-12_140938_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3790" class="picwide" />
-
-
-Apparently every place is very different, but this farm we were more or less alone in a big open field. Having just been to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the kids wanted to play, and what better place than an empty farm field? 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-12_171812_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3793" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-12_174012_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3794" class="picwide caption" />
-
-One catch about Harvest Hosts is that you can only stay 24 hours. So the next morning, after we went back for more fruit, veggies, and cheese, we hit the road again, bound for New Jersey.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-13_094107_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3795" class="picwide" />
-
-You might be wondering why we didn't stop off in New York City. We talked about it, but in the end decided that right now isn't a great time to be in New York. Crime is pretty high, particularly in the outer boroughs from what I hear. And yes, I have traveled through sketchy parts of India and Thailand where people were blowing up buses and trains and never worried about that. I still wouldn't. But American cities right now, especially New York, are too chaotic and unpredictable to be safe[^1]. Besides, we're just not city people anymore. I'd make exceptions for Paris, Bangkok, and a handful of others, but by and large I don't enjoy cities these days.
-
-We drove right on by New York City, catching a view of the Manhattan skyline from the turnpike before pointing ourselves south to a place called Cheesequake, New Jersey. We spent the night there. Between the five of us we didn't take a single photo of the place, which tells you more than I can with words.
-
-The next morning we hit the road again, headed south down the New Jersey shoreline for the Cape May area. Cape May is a major birding area and I would like to have stopped for a while, but I had picked up a cold and wasn't feeling that great, and then it started to rain.
-
-We stayed at another farm, this one a [sheep dairy farm](https://www.mistymeadowsheepdairy.com). This time we exercised a little more restraint and bought plenty of cheese, but not enough to fund a night in a hotel. We also discovered a downside of Harvest Hosts—when the weather pins you down, there's not much to do but sit in your rig and read and play games. It was only for an afternoon, so it wasn't too bad.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-15_072446_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3797" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-15_072512_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3798" class="picwide caption" />
-
-The next morning we were up bright and early to catch the Henlopen Ferry to Delaware.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-15_094314_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3799" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-15_094435_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3800" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-15_094624_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3801" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-15_104646_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3802" class="picwide" />
-
-I'll never stop enjoying putting the bus on ferries. There's something about sitting at the table in the bus and looking out to see the ocean that makes me happy. For a moment it's a boat. And then we were ashore again, still headed south, bound for Chincoteague, wild horses, and some warm beach days.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-15_115544_driving-hudson-valley.jpg" id="image-3803" class="picwide" />
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-[^1]: This is not me watching the news (I haven't done that in 25 years). Our decision was based on reports from friends currently living in New York City.
-
-
-## Baseball Diamonds
-
-We would never have come this way if weren't for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Not that I wanted to go there that badly, but when we took the kids to a [baseball game back in Florida](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/04/bus-work-and-baseball) the Baseball Hall of Fame somehow came up and I remember Elliott saying "can we go?"
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-My first thought was probably not. I lived in western Massachusetts for a few years and had driven the mountains in the area—they're more than I would want would to put the bus through. It's not that the bus can't climb mountains. It can, it's just slow and I never know which mountain is going to be its last. I like to save mountain driving for out west, where it's unavoidable.
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-Still, I pulled up Cooperstown on the map to see where it was and what it looked like. That's when I noticed the Mohawk and Hudson River Valleys, which cut through upstate New York. Valleys aren't so bad. That's probably why they put a turnpike along them. Hmm. I plugged the route into a website I use to get the elevation change of a road and was surprised to find that most of the big inclines were actually downhill. I started formulating a plan to make it through the Appalachians without going south. And here we are, upstate New York. 
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-I had to work some early mornings while we were in St Johnsville, which turned out to be a lovely, if somewhat curious town at 5 AM (and otherwise).
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-09_062423_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3764" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-11_150530_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3769" class="picwide" />
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-
-One day the kids and I headed up into the hills to find Cooperstown. I don't really know what I was expecting, but it wasn't what I got. To me the Baseball Hall of Fame is a big thing. But Cooperstown is a tiny little town. I mean tiny. The population is 1,867. Yet somehow, this is where the Baseball Hall of Fame is located. It wasn't even crowded.
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-I was dreading how much it was going to cost, but when I got the kiosk to pay the man looked at the kids and said, they're free right? I said, um, well. He said, yeah, they're free. Who am I to argue? 
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-There are several floors to wander, much of it is a tour through the history of Major League Baseball. That latter part is key, if the MLB as an organization isn't involved, there probably isn't much about it (despite the MLB not owning or otherwise having anything to do with the hall of fame). I understand that you have to set some limits or it would be an overwhelming thing to document, but I was a little disappointed there was almost nothing on stuff like the Cuba league or the Negro League (Satchel Paige has a plaque, but that's about it).
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-10_145936_baseball-hall-of-fame.jpg" id="image-3783" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-10_134102_baseball-hall-of-fame.jpg" id="image-3778" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
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-There was plenty of cool stuff though. We got to sit in Hank Aaron's locker and see countless artifacts. Different parts of the room had different historical games being broadcast, which was fun. I like being at a game, but radio is still my second favorite way to "watch" baseball.
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-<div class="cluster">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-10_150815_baseball-hall-of-fame.jpg" id="image-3784" class="cluster picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-10_144236_baseball-hall-of-fame.jpg" id="image-3782" class="cluster picwide" />
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-10_143800_baseball-hall-of-fame.jpg" id="image-3781" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-10_151130_baseball-hall-of-fame.jpg" id="image-3785" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-10_134903_baseball-hall-of-fame.jpg" id="image-3780" class="picwide caption" />
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-I was a little disappointed to find almost nothing about the 1980s LA Dodgers, which to my mind *were* baseball for so many years. I knew every player and every stat about them. I still remember most of it. But of course that was just my world. The LA Dodgers did not figure quite so prominently in the larger world of 1980s baseball.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-10_134301_baseball-hall-of-fame.jpg" id="image-3779" class="picwide caption" />
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-Part of the fun of going to Cooperstown turned out to be the drive. Upstate New York is on the more beautiful places we've been. The fall colors mixed with the seemingly endless historic farmhouses was fantastic. I could have driven around exploring for days.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-10_154603_baseball-hall-of-fame.jpg" id="image-3786" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-10_160121_baseball-hall-of-fame.jpg" id="image-3787" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-10_160158_baseball-hall-of-fame.jpg" id="image-3788" class="picwide" />
-
-As it was though I had to work much of the time we were in St. Johnsville. Corrinne took the kids up to dig for Herkimer diamonds one day. Not real diamonds, Herkimer diamonds are "double-terminated quartz crystals", whatever that is. But they're primarily found here, in and around Herkimer County and the Mohawk River Valley. They aren't just lying around either, you have to split rocks to find them.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-09_105158_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3765" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-09_105431_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3766" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-09_113950_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3767" class="picwide" />
-
-I was looking at these pictures later and the only think that came to my mind was *Cool Hand Luke*. Next time I'll boil up some eggs for them to take along.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-09_132556_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3768" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-11_152215-1_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3771" class="picwide" />
-## Fort Klock
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-We left the shores of Lake Ontario on a blustery, cold day. Fortunately the wind was with us. The bus blew down road into the Mohawk Valley, to a small town on the shores of the Erie Canal where there was a marina that also had a few campsites. 
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-08_123254_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3753" class="picwide" />
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-The campground was wedged between the canal and a train track, with a about 100 feet in either direction. Trains came by about every two or three hours, but it was right on the shores of the Erie Canal, one of the more impressive feats of engineering in American history. 
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-The Panama Canal gets all the glory (it was an epic feat), but many people don't realize there are networks of canals running all over the eastern and southern United States. They aren't used much commercially at the moment—although with diesel prices rising, the canals may be economically viable again soon -- but the Great Loop[^1] is popular with sailors. 
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-11_150813_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3770" class="picwide" />
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-It was a short drive. We made it to our campsite by lunch time and started looking around for something to do. Part of the reason we're here in upstate New York and headed through the mid-Atlantic region was to show the kids some American history sites, so when Corrinne found something called Fort Klock, A Fortified Stone Homestead, we figured it'd fit right in. What kid doesn't love the sound of a "fortified homestead"?
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-08_124343_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3754" class="picwide" />
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-To be honest we weren't expecting much from Fort Klock, but it turned out to be the best historical site we've visited. We enjoyed it more than Jamestown or Williamsburg (more on those soon). What made it the best place we've been was the people, or rather the person, Les.
-
-We were the only visitors there and when we walked in the only other person was Les, who had been in the kitchen, tending the fire. He asked if we wanted "the full tour" and we said sure. We paid $20 for the five of us and Les proceeded to lead us on a three-hour historical tour of the property, and by extension life in the Mohawk Wall over the last three hundred years.
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-It would be impossible for me to try to capture it here because part of it was that when he was talking about cooking, there was a fire in the hearth, when he talked about making far farm tools out of wood, he was showing us how to drag a draw knife, how to save the shavings to start the fire, how to work a loom. 
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-There were no glass walls cutting you off from Fort Klock. There were some railings here and there, but for the most part you could touch and interact with artifacts in a way that you never can at most historical sites. For the kids that's the whole point. They don't care about the abstraction we call history—those people back then. The kids want to know how they would have lived, what kids did, how things worked, what the food smelled like, how you load a muzzleloading rifle, how you fire a cannon, how you make a canoe, how you sail a wooden square rigger. I'm the same way. I don't really care about who won the battle, I want to hear the stories of the people who fought, or farmed, or traded, or hunted, or whatever. That's what Fort Klock was, a working example of what life was like. History that's still alive.
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-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-08_125036_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3755" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-08_130002_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3756" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-08_143146_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3761" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-08_145836_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3762" class="picwide" />
-
-Klock's fortified homestead is a stone farmhouse built in 1750 by Johannes Klock. The walls are over 2 feet thick. It sits on Kings Highway, the main thoroughfare of the valley at that time, and on the edge of the Mohawk River. It was a major trading post in the area and one of the primary defensive structures around. 
-
-It was built from the ground up with defense in mind. There are little portals on all sides with angled access to provide the widest range of fire to those inside. The windows could be covered by sturdy wood shutters and—the real key to its defensive capability -- it was built over a spring, which still bubbles up in the cellar. All the Klock's had to do was lay in some food and ammunition and they were ready to withstand a siege. Which they did, several times.
-
-Fort Klock was used during both the French and Indian War and the American War for Independence, as both a refuge and trading post (there were other such fortified homes in the valley, but this is the only one that's been restored and has public access). 
-
-<div class="cluster">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-08_153828_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3763" class="cluster picwide" />
-<span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-08_140239_st-johnsville_S4yjTPU.jpg" id="image-3758" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-08_140542_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3759" class="cluster pic66" />
-</span>
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-08_142415_st-johnsville.jpg" id="image-3760" class="cluster picwide" />
-</div>
-
-Rather amazingly the home remained in the Klock family through the 1950s, though it was largely abandoned when the family moved back to town in the '30s. In the early 1950s the Tryon County muzzleloaders (re-enactors interested in collecting and shooting antique guns) were looking for a place to shoot and came across the property. The last descendant of Klock had been looking for someone to restore the property and so they struck a deal. The muzzleloadiing group raised money and rebuilt the property and eventually opened it to the public.
-
-Today it is owned and operated by the Fort Klock Historic Restoration group. The non-profit was spun off of the muzzleloaders group because the National Park Service refused to give the National Historic Landmark distinction to a muzzleloading club. Fortunately the muzzleloaders had the humility the government lacked and they set up a separate foundation and eventually got the historic designation. Don't let the name fool you though. The truth is a bunch of people who love shooting muzzleloading rifles saved and restored this place and continue to maintain it.
-
-There is something sad about a house that is no longer a home. We've been in many over the years, and I always get the feeling that the walls feel lonely after generations of families running through them, the silence is greater for the sounds that are no longer there. It's as if an entire way of life falls silent when the families leave. Fort Klock was the opposite. It still smelled of woodsmoke and life and that, combined with Les's stories, which always seemed to wander from the past, to the present, the grandparents of someone down the road, the ancestors of the man who still has a working blacksmith shop just over the ridge in... history was not something abstract, but real. That barn, in that person's family, that did this, and so on for three hours. It was the best $20 I've ever spent.
-
-
-
-[^1]: The Great Loop is a route that brings together various waterways, making it possible to travel along the Atlantic seaboard, Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, Great Lakes, Canadian Heritage Canals, and the inland rivers of America—like the Erie Canal -- to make a big loop. There are a few routes, but the Erie portion seems to be one of the more popular ones.
-
-## Niagara Fails
-
-We left Long Point Canada bright and early, headed back to the United States to check out Niagara Falls. We originally planned to see the falls from the Canadian side because the view is better, but then there was a lot of traffic and on the map it didn't look like there was much parking for the bus. We decided to get through the border, grab a campsite, and come back to check out the falls later.
-
-It was another pleasant drive through the Canadian farmland of Ontario for most of the morning. In an older vehicle 80 km an hour is a much nicer speed than 55 MPH. I'm not sure why, there isn't a huge difference, but people weren't tailgaiting me constantly—yet too timid to actually pass -- and everything felt a bit more relaxed. Maybe that's just the way people drive in Canada. Whatever the case it was a pleasant drive despite some road construction and confusing detours.
-
-We made it to the border shortly after lunch and were waiting in line to get through to the US side when Corrinne started gesturing to me. I was mostly worried about the bus sitting there idling in the heat, the Jeep never crossed my mind, but then she got out and walked back and said the Jeep had died. Well, shit.
-
-I jumped out and open the hood and had her crank the engine. There was no gas getting to the carburetor. I couldn't hear anything squirting when she pumped the pedal. I figured it was either vapor locked or the fuel pump had died. I knew the previous owner had put in a new fuel pump not long before we bought it, but I also know from my own experience that fuel pumps don't last. Whatever the case, I knew I wasn't going to get it started again right there. I waved a couple of cars around us and was just starting to push it off to the side, to get it out of the way, when three border patrol agents came out of the building. 
-
-They asked what was wrong and I gave them a short rundown. They said okay, we'll push it. And I said, push it where? They said, through the border. Mmmm, okay. Didn't see that coming, but the kids hopped in the bus with me, and the border patrol pushed Corrinne through the checkpoint. She stopped and showed her passport and the whole bit, just as if the Jeep had been running. Then they pushed her on through and off to the side where the bridge maintenance crew had their workshop. I didn't take a picture because my experience has been that cameras and national borders don't mix well, but I did get a shot of the maintenance crew pushing the Jeep over to the parking lot.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-04_131800_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3730" class="picwide" />
-
-Once I'd brought the bus through the checkpoint we pulled over into the parking lot and I went back to work on the engine. There are only three things an engine needs to run: air, fuel, and spark. As far as I could tell, fuel was the issue, but I had no clue why fuel wasn't getting to the carburetor. I decided the fuel pump was a likely culprit and called around to see if I could get a new one. A nearby Napa said they could have one by 4 that afternoon so we decided to tow the Jeep over there and work on it in the parking lot. 
-
-The kids and I jumped in the bus and went to run a few errands in the mean time. Corrinne stayed with the  Jeep and waited on the tow truck. After we'd restocked our cupboards (nothing guarantees trouble like being low on food or water. Fortunately we had plenty of water) and refrigerator we headed over to the Napa. The tow truck showed up with the Jeep right as we got there. This time around AAA came through, surprisingly.
-
-Not long after that the fuel pump showed up and I got to work. The new fuel pump's bolt holes were slightly narrower, so I ended up having to drill them out a bit, but otherwise there was nothing to it, I installed the fuel pump and cranked it. And cranked it, and cranked it. Still no fuel getting to the carb. I even took the line off the fuel filter and cranked it with the line just sitting there and no gas came through.
-
-A handful of people had stopped to talk to us and offer advice by this time, but it was starting to get dark and I was stumped. I got Napa's permission to leave the Jeep overnight and we all loaded in the bus and drove out to a strange little New York State Park up on Lake Ontario.
-
-I'm pretty sure this was the first time we've ever driven the bus at night, but we made it safe and sound and found a campsite in the dark. I got a hot shower, which always helps improve your mood after you've been covered in oil and gasoline all day. 
-
-The next day I had to work, so I didn't get back to the Jeep until evening again. I caught a very expensive Lyft into town and got to work. First I walked a couple of miles and filled up a gas can and brought it back. I put two gallons in the tank just to be sure there was gas, and then I squirted some down into the carb and sure enough it started right up. So, the problem was somewhere between the gas tank and fuel filter.
-
-I was planning to disconnect the fuel lines and blow air through them to clear any debris that might possibly be clogging them. The tank had what looked like a cover that extended out to cover the place where the fuel lines attached. I figured I'd drop the cover, get access to the fuel lines and go from there. I had two bolts out and was beginning to realize that what I thought was the cover, appeared in fact to be holding the tank to the frame, which was not what I wanted. That's when I noticed a pair of work boots appear beside the Jeep.
-
-I crawled out from under and started talking to a man who'd pulled up in a big truck. From what he said he seemed to know everyone at Napa. We talked for a bit, and he suggested just blowing air in the fuel tank to force it down the line. This hadn't occurred to me, but I liked it. Especially as opposed to dropping a tank that was very full of gas. That's when he said, you know I have a little shop down the road behind my house, I could tow you over there if you want to get out of the parking lot. He offered me the use of his tools, including his air gun.
-
-I thanked him and said let's do it. We hooked up the tow rope and he pulled me a couple of miles while I steered and braked, making sure not to rear end his nice truck. His little shop turned out to be a full on garage that was a side gig. He was mainly a diesel mechanic working on big trucks, but he also had a side business at home. 
-
-We put the Jeep outside his shop bay and he ran out a long compressor hose and I blew it into the gas tank. Then I cranked the engine. Still nothing. Then I disconnected the fuel pump and blew again. Fuel came through the line. We talked it over for a bit and he asked if I still had the old fuel pump, which I did. We put it in a vice and worked the handle and it seemed to be fine. He said, I bet that new pump is either seated wrong or broken. This one you know is good, put it back in. So I did.
-
-This time we blew air in, cranked the engine and sure enough, fuel made it past the pump. I hooked all the lines and hoses back up and cranked it up. It ran like a top. Well, not really, the carb is all gummed up and it has hard time idling, but once I revved it, it was fine.
-
-I know what you're thinking: if the old fuel pump was fine, why did it die at the border? I don't know. Either there was something in the fuel line and we cleared it into the new fuel pump, which then, when I switched them, got rid of the problem, or... something else happened? It's been almost a month since then and we haven't had another problem. And we've sat in some traffic very similar to the border situation so my money is on the fuel line being obstructed, but to be totally honest, I don't know what happened and I probably never well with any certainty. Such is life. 
-
-I thanked him and headed back to the bus. I almost made it before dark. We could have headed out the next day, but we didn't. Instead we finally got to backtrack to see Niagara Falls. It was a windy, blustery afternoon, but I think this actually worked in our favor since it cleared some of the mist away from the falls.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-06_145204_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3732" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-06_155337_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3733" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-06_155711_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3734" class="picwide" />
-
-Niagara Falls is one of those terribly touristy things that is, despite the kitch, actually pretty cool. But it's also the sort of thing you look at for a bit and then you're done. 
-
-The campground we'd been staying in was on the banks of Lake Ontario, but oddly had no lake access. I'd been there three nights and still hadn't seen Lake Ontario. In fact the campground was a little strange in that it was just a campground, there was nothing else to see or do, you camped, end of story. From what I could tell it was mostly used by locals who came to sit around the campfire and talk. I thought this was actually pretty cool and marveled at the lack of cell phones. People really sat around the fire talking all day. There were some people with TVs watching the Bills game, but otherwise it was like a place people went to spend time together. Which, go upstate New York. It's a tragedy you're outnumbered by city people, but good on ya, as the Australians say. The world needs more places and people like this.  
-
-All that said, I wanted to see Lake Ontario. We hit the road the next morning and drove alongside the lake toward another park that was up near the eastern edge. We got there in the early afternoon and went down to the shore. The weather had turned stormy in the late morning and by the time we got to the water none of us were feeling it. Too cold, too windy. Too many ice banks. Just kidding. Not those yet. There was a lake full of swans though.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-07_134758_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3736" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-07_135524_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3737" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-07_135542_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3738" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-07_150056_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3739" class="picwide" />
-
-The day we decided to leave the temperature started to drop and it felt like the right time to head south, even if only by a few hundred miles.
-
-
-## Canada
-
-When we plotted our route east we planned to duck south of Lake Erie. The more direct route—along the north shore of Lake Erie -- involved going into Canada, and the kids' passports were expired. 
-
-About two weeks before we left Washburn we mentioned something about that to our friend Mark and he said the you don't need a passport for kids in Canada, just a birth certificate would do. A little investigation proved him right, and so we altered our plans to go along the north shore of Lake Erie, through Ontario and then back into the states in Niagara.
-
-We crossed into Canada just outside of Detroit (which seems like a fine city, not the smoldering apocalyptic thing you see in the media). We don't have international service on our phones so we promptly lost all navigation and communication. Which was fine. It's Canada, what could go wrong?
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_110341_canada.jpg" id="image-3707" class="picwide" />
-
-I must confess that most of what I know about Canada comes from watching [Strange Brew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Brew), [Kids in the Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_in_the_Hall), and [listening to Rush](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0xkMfiHIec). When I saw a man coming out of the McDonald's at the border wearing a Rush t-shirt I took it as a sign everything was going to be okay.
-
-We headed south, sticking to smaller roads along the shoreline for most of the day, communicating with hand gestures at stop signs. Once the smaller road... just stopped and we had to cut up to the interstate (interprovince?), but otherwise it was a nice drive through rural Ontario, which seems like it might actually be full of small farms still.
-
-I follow a [Canadian farmer](https://www.slowdownfarmstead.com) on the interwebs and she is always suggesting that people get to know their local farmers (as a way to *know* where your food, especially meat, is coming from), which in the United States... in most places there aren't that many farm stands and one does not just drive up to random farms and ask if you can buy something. I've always found this bit of advice confounding, but driving through Ontario I suddenly saw what she was thinking of, nearly every farm we drove past had a stand and someone manning it. It would be easy to get to know your local farmer. If you were local. We are not. 
-
-It seemed like a long day for some reason, though we only went about 140 miles. It was well into the afternoon before we pulled into Long Point Provincial Park, which sits out on a long peninsula that sticks out into Lake Erie, a bit like the opposite of the Keweenaw. 
-
-We managed to get a campsite for the night, and since it was a beautiful day, temperatures in the 70s, we headed down to the beach.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_165507_canada.jpg" id="image-3708" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_170042_canada.jpg" id="image-3710" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_170155_canada.jpg" id="image-3711" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_165540_canada.jpg" id="image-3709" class="picwide" />
-
-The water was warm in the shallows, not just by Lake Superior standards, but actually, like, warm. When you waded out deeper you could find the colder thermal layers and it was possible to stand there with your feet turning to blocks of ice while the rest of you was fine. So long as you stuck to the shallow areas though, which had been warmed by days of sunshine, it was like playing in bath water. We hadn't spent that much time at the beach since we [left Florida in May](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/05/goodbye-florida).
-
-After dinner we went back down to watch the sunset over the lake, one of the nice things about being on the east side of a great lake—you get to see the sunset over the water.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_174334_canada.jpg" id="image-3712" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_174424_canada.jpg" id="image-3713" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_174709_canada.jpg" id="image-3714" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_175125_canada.jpg" id="image-3715" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_175329_canada.jpg" id="image-3716" class="picwide" />
-
-
-That night we decided we should pause and stay a few days in Canada, enjoy the warm weather and beach time. I put some Rush on the stereo, took off work, and, the next morning, went up and booked our site for two more nights. Canada.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-02_142744_canada.jpg" id="image-3718" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-02_142708_canada.jpg" id="image-3717" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-10-03_165111_canada.jpg" id="image-3719" class="picwide" />
-
-
-## Greenfield Village
-
-It's always seems slightly perverse to me to head east in a country that once lived by the slogan, go west. Whatever the case, we're eastbound again and when planning our route we ran across something called Greenfield Village. 
-
-Greenfield Village is difficult to describe, but it's what happens when someone with resources (Henry Ford) decided to try to preserve some relics of American history. Since one of the reasons we're going east was to show the kids early American history, we stopped a couple nights in Detroit to visit Greenfield Village.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_085338_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3691" class="picwide" />
-
-What appealed to me about Ford's approach to preserving history is that his view of history mirrors my own: that the things we record in books and celebrate with monuments rarely have much impact of the lives of ordinary people. The things that actually mattered to people of the world before us are usually glossed over by what we call history.
-
-> When I went to our American history books to learn how our forefathers harrowed the land, I discovered that the historians knew nothing about harrows. Yet our country has depended more on harrows than on guns or speeches. I thought that a history which excluded harrows and all the rest of daily life is bunk and I think so yet. <cite>&mdash; Henry Ford</cite>
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_104935_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3699" class="picwide" />
-
-Ford started small, collecting things from his own childhood. In 1919 he found out that his birthplace was going to be destroyed for a road so he moved his childhood farmhouse and restored it to the way he remembered at the time of his mother’s death in 1876. The he tracked down his one-room school, the Scotch Settlement School, and then the 1836 Botsford Inn from Farmington, Michigan, a stagecoach inn where he and his wife Clara had once gone to dances.
-
-Then it started to spiral out of control and next thing he knew, Ford had built his own village, a kind of semi-living monument to the everyday life of Americans over the centuries. By then people were bringing projects to him and he ended up moving Edison's Menlo Park lab here and rebuilding it, and later he added other things like Noah Webster's house, tidewater home from Maryland, a Cotswald cottage, farms from various parts and times in America.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_112036_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3700" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_093652_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3695" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_092335_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3694" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_091352_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3693" class="picwide" />
-
-Today Greenfield Village is over 80 acres with everything from Edison's Lab to the Wright brothers original bike shop to the oldest working carousel in the United States. It has so much in fact that that is my only criticism: it was overwhelming. Fun, but sometimes almost too much.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_085810_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3692" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_123030_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3704" class="picwide" />
-
-We managed to squeeze it all in, though we did come back to the carousel several times since it provided a kind of break from history. Or perhaps a reminder that relics are supposed to be fun.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_104321_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3697" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_123543_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3705" class="picwide" />
-
-The most fascinating thing to me, and I think for the kids, was the glassblowing workshop, which is used daily to produce things that are for sale in the shop nearby. I had never seen anyone blow glass before and despite the heat of the workshop we spent a good half an hour watching a shapeless lump of molten glass get shaped into a drinking glass. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_114640_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3702" class="picwide" />
-
-
-
-
-
-## Drive My Car
-
-After last summer's [sprint north](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/05/going-up-north), we swore we'd never try to move that fast again. We are heading back down south for the winter, but we're going to take months to get there. We're going to wander, at a leisurely pace, stopping frequently, the way we traveled when [we first set out](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/edge-continent).
-
-We said goodbye to our friends in Copper Harbor, and to Lake Superior, and then we meandered south, taking our time, driving but also stopping to explore, and then on again. It was a nice mix of the road and relaxation with no need to be anywhere beyond escaping bad weather.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-25_074936_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3681" class="picwide" />
-
-We took a week to slowly work our way down out of the UP, along Lake Michigan, across the Mackinac Bridge, and down into The Mitten. We hugged the shores of Lake Huron, one of the Lakes we've visited the least.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_093330_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3683" class="picwide caption" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-25_161946_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3682" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_095626_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3684" class="picwide caption" />
-
-Every other time we've left Lake Superior we've gone west, out into the Dakotas. Once [through South Dakota](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/wall-drug), and last year [through North Dakota](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/09/ease-down-the-road). This year we're headed the opposite way, east and then south. 
-
-When you head west out of northern Wisconsin the notable change is that the trees fall away. After a day of driving you're out of the boreal forests and into the vast nothingness of the plains. Going east the trees never stop, the boreal forest does fade and give way to a much more mixed hardwood forest, but it's still mainly trees unless you stick to the shoreline. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_110008_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3685" class="picwide caption" />
-
-I love to drive, I always have. I got my driver's license at 15 and a half and never looked back. At 19 I dropped out of college and went on a three month road trip around the United States. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/crossCountryTrip_-_09.-11.jpg" id="image-3689" class="picwide caption" />
-
-Had I been born a century or two earlier, I suspect I'd feel about the horse the way I feel about the automobile. Both are, on one hand, ways to get down the road, and on the other, things that human being obsess over in their effort to go farther.
-
-I haven't ridden horses enough to know how I'd feel about them, but the car quickly came to feel like a natural extension of my body. There's an interview with Steve Jobs where he talks about how, per kilometer a human being isn't very efficient. The most efficient animal per kilometer is the Condor. But, and this is the part Jobs zeros in on, put a human on a bicycle and he becomes astronomically more efficient than any other human. 
-
-What Jobs doesn't mention, but any cyclist can attest to, is how the bicycle quickly becomes more than a tool, turning rather to an extension of the body. This also happens with cars and is, I think, more than anything else, is why I like driving *older* cars—they are more directly connected to you and your decisions, they are more fully an extension of the body.
-
-There is very little abstraction in vehicles from the 1970s and earlier. The mechanical workings of an old car form a clear picture in my head at this point—I know what happens when I push on the gas pedal. I know the entire chain of connection from the pedal to the piston compression to turning that detonation into rotational energy that actually moves you down the road. This clear picture in turn (I feel) gives a deeper connection between driver and machine.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_170422_harrisville-sp.jpg" id="image-3686" class="picwide" />
-
-When you stop and think about it, an engine is a miraculous creation. Every time one breaks down on me I find myself amazed that it ever ran at all. 
-
-An engine is a hunk of metal with holes in it really. A piston moves up and down through those metal holes. Cylinder if you want to get more technical. On the down stroke the piston rapidly increases the available volume of the cylinder, which creates a vacuum. Remember high school physics? Nature doesn't like vacuums, she fills them. In this case she fill the vacuum with a mixture of air and atomized gasoline, which comes in through an open hole. That hole then gets closed, and the piston changes direction, moving up and compressing that mixture of fuel and air, and then, right about at maximum compression, the spark plug sparks. Boom. Gasoline has more energy per unit of mass than TNT[^1] and it sends the piston back down the cylinder, which turns the crankshaft. This is the step where we get the rotary motion necessary to actually move down the road.
-
-With an old engine like the bus you're much closer to all of that. I can feel it through my foot, and hear it roar. I push a little harder, the pistons move up and down a little faster. It's a very direct, unmediated connection, at least relative to more modern engines. I can feel the road through my foot, I can sense what the tires are doing from the way the steering wheel feels in my hand. Driving the bus thus becomes an almost entirely intuitive operation, I don't sit around thinking about what to do, I just do what *feels* right when I am driving.
-
-When I stop and think about it though, all I ever think is how miraculous that an engine just does this over and over again, thousands of times a day, millions of times, possibly billions of times in its life. It just keeps doing it. What else has humanity ever built that does that?
-
-Maybe that's too much for some people. A lot of people just want to get somewhere. I understand that I guess, but it doesn't make for a very interesting experience. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_171228_harrisville-sp.jpg" id="image-3687" class="picwide" />
-
-Still, the further we got from the UP, the more we re-entered the world fast drives. Everyone who lives near a city seems to be in a hurry. All the time. At least to judge from how they drive, which is the chief way I have to observe city folks at this point.
-
-We are incredibly fortunate to live a life where we are very seldom in a hurry, and I always look at the cars darting around me on larger highways and think, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you have have to rush about. I wish I could give everyone the time to slow down, take a deep breath, relax, try to enjoy the fact that your engine is working, you hurling down the highway at speeds unthinkable just 100 years ago, that everything around us is in fact miraculous.
-
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-28_154106_harrisville-sp.jpg" id="image-3688" class="picwide" />
-
-
-[^1]: Contemplate this for a while and tell me again how we can replace fossil fuels with "clean" energy (which is nothing of the sort, but we'll leave that alone for now).
-
-## Copper Harbor
-
-After getting [kicked out of our site in McLain State Park](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/09/stop-breaking-down) we weren't thrilled at the prospect of more time in a Michigan State Park, but there's not really anything else in Copper Harbor. We pulled in around 3 and asked for a site. The woman at this check-in station was very nice and told me to drive around and pick what site I wanted. 
-
-We did that, but by the time we got back there were other people already booking some of the sites we'd been told were open, which I guess makes sense, but it's a crazy way to do things. No one had taken the site we wanted, but I made a joke about putting someone in a choke hold to make sure they didn't take my site and she said, "oh, we have fights in the office sometimes." I see. Well, there you go. Note to self: JuiJitsu is never not useful.
-
-We managed to get a site without any violence, which was nice. We also booked it up for a few days so no one would steal it out from under us. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_082623_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3667" class="picwide" />
-
-Copper Harbor is a place that remains mostly beyond the reach of the world. It's like [Ocracoke](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/05/ocracoke-beaches), [Apalachicola](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2013/05/all-the-pretty-beaches), [Patrick's Point](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/10/pacific), [Edisto](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2020/01/walking), and other places I've [never named](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/08/canyoneering). They are not off the map—that's not possible any more -- but they are at the edges, far enough outside the lines to be mostly ignored, visited like shrines by devotees. 
-
-These are worlds where cell phone service is spotty to non-existent and the people who live in them interact more, it seems to me, with the world around them. They are more present, more connected to the people around them than other places.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-20_140714_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3665" class="picwide caption" />
-
-This is my best guess. I don't live in any of them, but after spending months in several I would say that one characteristic they all share is some kind of external hardship that unites the people living there. Up here that's snow. Ocracoke and Apalachicola have storms, for others it's the sheer remoteness of life that bring people together. When the nearest store is hours away, when the nearest hospital is probably too far to help, the nearest services don't really serve you, you have to band together to get by, you share, you help others out, they help you. The way the world has been since the beginning of time—until the last 50 years anyway, when the [outside expert](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) arrived to tell people they were doing it wrong. Look where that got us. We need to get back to the way of Ocracoke, the way of Apalachicola, the way of Copper Harbor.
-
-All that said, I also think that much of what saves these places from the ills of modernity has to do with size. It might be that this kind of culture can't scale beyond a certain size.There are certain things you can't do if you live here. You can't put your headphones on and ignore the world when the world consists of only a few hundred people. Humans haven't regressed that much yet, thankfully. 
-
-To be clear, I have no romantic notions about small town living. Small towns can be really awful if you want to buck the trends of the town. My favorite example of this is from the 1820s, when Transcendentalist Joseph Palmer—who was considered eccentric because he dared to grow a beard -- was mobbed by his New England neighbors who tried to shave him in the street. He was then thrown in jail for defending himself, being charged with "unprovoked assault." 
-
-No, I have no particular love for small towns, but it does seem to me that these places that are "beyond the wall" as my friend Josh likes to say, tend to be small. Perhaps it's that there are not that many people who want to live outside the world. Perhaps these really are some kind of ideal small towns made up of eccentrics who drifted in the tides of civilization until they ended up out here in the eddies. 
-
-I'd have to live in one to know, and I don't. I like to visit them though. I like it when my phone stops working, when I can't even find a coffee shop with internet.
-
-One day I stayed home to do some writing, Corrinne took the kids and went with our friends out to a place they call Horseshoe Bay. It was sunny and almost warm. It was enough that the kids braved the water (which is about 45 degrees around here right now).
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_133557_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3668" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_134907_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3669" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_140648_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3670" class="picwide" />
-
-The next day they convinced me to come out. The fog didn't burn off as much as it had the day before, but the girls went swimming yet again.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-22_131005_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3672" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-22_130139_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3671" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-22_135733_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3673" class="picwide" />
-
-Copper Harbor is also home to Fort Wilkins, which the U.S. Army set up in 1844. It was supposed to keep the peace between the miners flooding in to the great copper rush and the local Ojibwe. While some Chippewa opposed the Treaty of La Pointe that had ceded this area to the United States in 1842, the fort seems to have been mostly unneccessary. The miners and Ojibwe got along. That's the story anyway. 
-
-
-
-## Stop Breaking Down
-
-I had a bad feeling pulling out of Washburn. The bus sat for nearly four months this summer. The bus hates sitting. I had time to drive it to the upholstery shop and back and that was the extent of my test driving. I was hoping, whatever was going to break, would do it in a populous area with an auto parts store. 
-
-To dash my hopes, our first stop was the Keweenaw peninsula, the long arm of Michigan's Upper Peninsula that sticks out into Lake Superior. In an already remote place, the Keweenaw is even more remote. That's very much the kind of place we enjoy though, the outer edges, the forgotten places that the 21st century, and in some cases most of the 20th century, has passed over. The Keweenaw isn't as unknown as it once was, but it's still out there.
-
-Fortunately for us the bus made it less than 50 miles before it died in a Walmart parking lot. One minute it was cranking over, about to start, and then boom, dead. Not even a click when I turned the key. Well, well. Electrical issues were not what I had expected to go wrong, but I went and dug out my multimeter (which I'm pretty sure is my most used tool), and started checking connections. 
-
-My instinct was that the starter relay was bad (or remote solenoid as some people call it). It went bad once long ago, before we even hit the road, and left me stranded at a dump station. That's the sort of thing you remember. I swapped out the relay with an extra one I carry, but nothing changed. Damn. 
-
-When I bent down by the starter relay and listened closely I could hear it attenuating, or at least it sounded like something was happening and really it's a pretty simple device, a coil is charged and two pieces of metal touch, completing the circuit and sending the charge on to the starter, which then turns the flywheel.
-
-I've seen quite a few mechanics complaining that over the last few years the quality of parts have done a nose dive. Maybe I'd replaced a dead relay with a dead relay? I called a local parts shop to see if they had a relay but they'd have to order it and it wouldn't be there until Monday. Damn.
-
-One of the things I learned at that dump station long ago was that you can bypass the relay by using a screwdriver to bridge the gap. I did that and she cranked up. Pretty sure I'd solved the problem, I quickly packed up my tools and figured I'd just get another relay somewhere down the road.
-
-As I was pulling out of the Walmart parking lot, smoke began pouring out from under the dash and a strong electrical smell of melting plastic filled my nose. Then some burning wire dropped on the ground between my feet. I quickly hooked the bus back around, parked it in a corner, grabbed my fire extinguisher and started tearing apart the front of the bus looking for the source of the fire. Thankfully stopping the bus had stopped the short and there was no fire.
-
-Still, having hung around Travco forums and other places online, I've heard my share of [electrical horror stories](https://www.bumfuzzle.com/fire/).To head that off I had re-wired everything related to the house batteries, and I replaced the old glass fuse panel under the dash with a modern one. But the "wiring harness" of the Travco is a rat's nest of chaos. It seems to have come that way from the factory as far as I can tell. Whatever the case, I was feeling like I'd just cheated the mechanical gods with so small a fire and I wasn't about to hit the road again until I knew everything was good with the wiring.
-
-The problem was: was the fire related to the engine not starting? Or something totally unrelated? It seemed mighty coincidental to have an electrical fire right after you were messing with the wiring, so I figured they must be related.
-
-I found the remains of the wire on the back of the instrument panel and it turned out to be one of two wires going into a single blade. The other wire went to the windshield wiper, which made it a reasonable assumption to think the other probably went to the other windshield wiper switch. I pulled out the manual and looked over the wiring diagram. The wiring diagram had every instrument and dial on the dash. Except the windshield wiper switch. Damn.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_090539_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3654" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_090935_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3655" class="picwide" />
-
-
-At this point I'd been troubleshooting the wiring for a couple of hours. In six years of traveling we've never spent a night in a Walmart parking lot, but it was beginning to look a lot like we weren't going to move. We called AAA, thinking that it'd be easier to do whatever work needed to be done back in Washburn. We called at 2 PM, they said it'd be about an hour. We made some lunch. AAA called back and said they didn't know when a tow truck was coming. 
-
-I kept testing wires. I went through the whole ignition harness and everything tested fine. I moved on to the relay, which now was giving me nothing on the starter side. Hmm. I decided, since I had nothing else to do, I might as well pull the starter and have it bench tested, so I did. When I did I noticed that one wire from the relay to the starter was pressed up against the transmission lines and the insulation had melted. Not good. I went ahead and took the starter to the auto parts store and had it tested. It was fine.
-
-I came back and re-installed the starter and made a new wire to replace the melted one. I also bent the transmission line down some so it wouldn't touch the wire. That's when I realized I had probably bent it when I installed the exhaust. That felt like the problem to me, but it still wouldn't start, which confused me.
-
-By now it was painfully obvious that AAA was useless. I could see the towing shop they claimed they'd called across the street, so I called them and asked if AAA had contacted them. They had not. Corrinne called AAA back and found that the person entering our info had listed us as an A108 van, which is about 1/3 our size. She got a manager who promised he'd have a tow truck there in an hour. An hour later, guess what wasn't there?
-
-By now I'd given up hope of going back to Washburn. Olivia made dinner while I kept testing and trying to follow the wiring diagram. It started to get dark not long after that, so we called it a night—our first in a Walmart parking lot. I've spent quite a few nights in various parking lots with the bus and I have to say, Walmart was by far the best.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_074501_keweenaw_T93HZTH.jpg" id="image-3653" class="picwide" />
-
-The next morning I was up and at it after an early breakfast. My plan was to rewire everything related to the ignition. Before I got started though, a couple came over to say hi. They turned out to also own a Travco, and lived just down the road. I told him we were having electrical issues and he offered to help. He went through basically everything I'd done the day before (which made me feel like at least I was on the right track), and ended up at the same point: the relay. Could it be as simple as having replaced a bad relay with a bad relay?
-
-Chris called a friend of his who was a Mopar guy and said to bring the relays by and he'd bench test them. He also thought he had a spare lying around. So I jumped in Chris's car and we went over to his friend's house which turned out to have a massive shop with more tools than some professional mechanics have on offer. When we got there he was welding new tension rods for a model A he was restoring. 
-
-He bench tested the relays and they were both bad. Chris then opened them up and they were both broken in the same way. Odd. While the relay was clearing the breaking point, what was breaking it? Chris's friend dug out an old relay. It was from a manual transmission so it didn't have the neutral safety switch (which means it would start in drive, which doesn't matter in a manual because the clutch is engaged), but otherwise it was a working relay.
-
-We headed back to the bus and installed it. She fired right up. By that time Chris and I had worked out that probably the wire touching the transmission line had sent current back up and burned out both relays. His friend called a few minutes later and said, you know, I was thinking, that wire you mentioned that melted, that's gotta be what blew out the relays.
-
-Problem solved. The melted wire we decided was just an unlucky coincidence, a result most likely of me bumping a wire when I testing the ignition wires.
-
-Chris and his wife invited us over to check out their Travco, which we did. It was a couple years later than ours, and strangely had some parts from a 1972 and some from a 1973, making it one of the more unusual models I've ever seen. Chris had replaced the 413 with a 440 engine and swapped out most of the drive train to get disk brakes in the front. I have no doubt it screams up mountains. I also liked Chris's collection of motorcycles, most of which he'd built out of spare parts.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_142048_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3656" class="picwide" />
-
-After chatting for a bit, thanking them profusely for getting us back on the road, we headed out again, bound for the Keweenaw. We made it to Fort McLain, about half way up, and called it a day. We woke up the next morning on the shore of Lake Superior.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_194236_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3658" class="picwide" />
-
-We'd had reservations for the weekend, but we were supposed to head on that morning. We liked the look of the place though and decided we'd try to stay. We were hunting for a vacant site online when the person next to us mentioned that their site was first-come first-served and they were headed out that morning. Perfect. I went down and booked it for two more nights and we pulled the bus over.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-18_113449_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3659" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-18_180526_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3661" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-19_192043_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3664" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-19_061303_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3662" class="picwide" />
-
-
-The next day I took the kids back to the town of Houghton, which has a park called Chutes and Ladders that their friends back in Washburn (who have a cabin up here) had been telling them about. I was a little worried that it might have been overhyped, but I was wrong. It was probably the best playground/slide setup I've ever seen, including parks you have to pay for, and this one was free.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-18_143136_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3660" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-19_112155_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3663" class="picwide caption" />
-
-The kids liked it so much Corrinne took them back the next day while I got some work done. In fact, we like camping on the edge of the lake enough that we figured we'd extend our stay. At about 11 AM on the day we were supposed to check out, Corrinne went down to extend our stay and... found out that in Michigan people can buy your camp site out from under you. No one in Michigan seemed to see anything amiss about this, but I can assure you Michigan, this is not normal. In every other campground we have stayed in seven years of living on the road, a first-come, first-served site is not vacant until the current occupant leaves. There are no exceptions to this. State parks in 36 states, national parks, forest service campgrounds, state forest campgrounds, country parks, city parks, metro parks. Never an exception. Except Michigan state parks, where occupation counts for nothing. 
-
-No wonder Michigan is hotbed of militia, these poor people have been having the government steal their campsites all their lives. I'd be pissed too. I was pissed. But not really at the policy. That is what it is. Silly, and dare I say unAmerican, but to my way of thinking, Michigan is free to do what Michigan wants and I am free to go elsewhere. What blew my mind was that the woman working in the front office totally went crazy on Corrinne when Corrinne pushed back and said, hey, that's not how it works everywhere else, where does it say that here? The woman exploded in front of the kids, swearing and telling Corrinne "I have a fucking Ph'D, I came here to get a break."
-
-Now it just seems funny to me&mdash;just one more ridiculous person working at one more misguided government institution, but at the time I was very mad. I went back up told that woman exactly what I thought of her and her Ph'D. Corrinne is very southern and polite and nice even when people swear at her. I was born in Los Angeles. I am not nice to people who swear at my wife.
-
-In the end, what are you going to do? We packed up in a hurry and headed out, bound for points farther north.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-## Ready to Start
-
-If you're not excited about where you're going, you're going the wrong way.
-
-Where you're going may be challenging, difficult, a real pain in the ass even, but come what may, you should be excited about getting there&mdash;both the getting, and the there. That's how you know you're [on the path](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/path). 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_151928_open-road.jpg" id="image-3651" class="picwide" />
-
-
-I know people struggle with finding their path. It's not easy. I lose my way sometimes too, but it's still there, inside you.
-
-I think the best way to find your path is to slow down, be quiet, and listen. 
-
-There's a lot of noise in the world, a lot of people telling you what you should do. Some of them may mean well, but no one knows your path. There are no exceptions. No one knows your path. And you don't know anyone else's path. 
-
-I think that's part of the reason some people read this site—they're not happy with their path.  Our path is appealing, if only, I think, because it's very different. That doesn't mean it's right for you, but it's an option. Most people I've met through luxagraf are looking for something that our culture didn't offer them. If you think the grand dance of existence might involve more than working all your life for [two TV sets and two Cadillac cars](https://inv.vern.cc/watch?v=9iJQQTg5_Kg), as Lou Reed put it, this site is here to tell you you're not alone. 
-
-I believe that we are here to give the gifts that we have built up inside us over millennia of our soul’s existence, that we are here to shepherd each other toward our gifts and give to the world those things that we have inside us. How you do that is for you to figure out, but I have found that letting go of the ideas that haven't been working is a good place to start. You don't have to follow the scripts you were handed. Those may not be your path. Sit down, quiet your mind, and listen. Be patient. 
-
-Toward the end of August I was starting to feel the pull of the road again. We love spending the summer up here, being anchored to a part of the world for a while, but we also get excited to get going again, to see new things. There's always sadness in leaving, we'll miss our friends, but we also know we'll see them again. 
-
-Getting ready to go means getting busy too. I probably have less time to be sad about leaving because I end up running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to get everything done in the last couple of weeks. As always, there's a balance to be found. I spent a good bit of time working on the vehicles, but we also found time to do some paddleboarding, pick blueberries, and put together a big sleepover for the kids and all their friends.
-
-Our new exhaust pipe arrived one day toward the end of the August. Since the man who made it couldn't actually be there to fit everything together, it came back to me as a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, with plenty of extra pipe on each piece, and even made a few extra pieces, so I'd have a better chance of getting it all to fit. That was a good call on his part, but it did mean I had to do a lot of cutting to get everything fitted properly.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-02_103527_bus-work.jpg" id="image-3647" class="picwide" />
-
-The tough part was wrapping around the driver's side, keeping the exhaust far enough from the oil pan, but not too close to the transmission cooler lines. There's not much room down there and this took quite a bit of doing, but I was pretty sure I'd done a good job. Actually, I had done a good job if those where the only two factors to consider. Alas, they are not, but I did not realize that when I was installing the tailpipe so I was happily ignorant. That's called foreshadowing.
-
-Once I had it cut and fitted around the engine, fitting the rest was was easy since it's mostly straight. The only hiccup is the bend over the rear axle, but the man who made the pipe did a great job and it fit perfect. We even have a muffler now. Fancy. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-01_131017_paddleboarding.jpg" id="image-3648" class="picwide" />
-
-With the tailpipe in we were pretty close to being mobile again. We just needed seats. For about four weeks this summer we lived with no seats in the bus. No front seats, no couch, no table. Nothing. We slept on the ground, ate on the ground, worked on the ground. It wasn't a ton of fun, but the seats really needed to be recovered. 
-
-The vinyl that was used in the initial job was probably dead stock. Or at least well past its ideal sell date. It turned brittle and began to fall apart last year, getting worse at an accelerating pace until we decided something had to be done. Coincidentally, this summer a new upholstery shop opened up in Washburn[^1] and we were able to get everything redone. Adam of Adam's Upholstery did a fantastic job and the seats look and feel better than they ever have.
-
-Somewhere in there we squeezed in a trip to a blueberry farm, and, after plenty of aborted attempts, we finally got to go sailing on our friend Bob's boat. I don't think the kids have ever talked so fondly about anything we've ever done. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-03_124254_sailing-superior.jpg" id="image-3649" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-03_131017_sailing-superior.jpg" id="image-3650" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-08-24_103527_blueberries-play.jpg" id="image-3646" class="picwide" />
-
-The weekend before it was time to go we set up the tent and the kids invited over some friends from town and had a kids' sleepover/camping trip. They somehow squeezed 8 people in our tent, and despite the rain, managed to stay dry and have a good time.
-
-Meanwhile, a couple days before we were set to go, I came down with a pretty terrible head cold that left me lying down most of the day. I had a list of things that needed to get done, but by the time I was up and doing things again it just wasn't possible. I had to pick one thing and I picked giving the bus a quick coat of wax. I only managed to get three sides done, but she looks good.
-
-It might sound like an odd choice, but there weren't any mechanical things that *had* to be done, and I have found that appearances matter. An old rig that's dirty and beat up just looks old. Take that same rig though and make it shiny and clean, and all the sudden it's vintage and everyone wants to say hi and talk about it. More than any mechanical fix, that good will, much of which comes from that clean first impression, is what gets us down the road.
-
-This is part of our path I think. My experience has been that when you do find your path, and it's not the path most people are familiar with, or want anything to do with, it's best to make them comfortable by making your path at least relatable in the small things. Everyone appreciates a clean home. Everyone knows that when things are shiny, it's because the people who own them care for them, and everyone cares for something. 
-
-I said earlier that no one can tell you your path, and you can go your own way, but you're still part of the world and sometimes you need to make concessions to the rest of the world. You have to meet the world half way. For us that means keeping a tight ship, as it were. Other people might not want your path, they might not even like your path, but most of them will respect it if you give them a way to do that. So wax it was. And then, we were off.
-
-
-[^1]: Technically not new, but relocated to a place we actually noticed it.
-
-## Every Day It's 1984
-
-Nostalgia is commonly used pejoratively. As if the very idea of looking backward in time and saying, hmm, maybe we lost something between then and now were... bad? The American Psychological Association considers nostalgia a subset of depression, which is, ahem, depressing. But then I guess if you're stuck trying to prop up the present as better than the past, at this point, you have to do some serious philosophical dancing. 
-
-Whatever the case, call it what you will, but one of my goals for us in living the way we do is to provide our children with a world that resembles the world of 1984. With maybe some notable elements from 1969 thrown in. But not having lived through 1969 I can't even try to authentically replicate it. 1984 though. I know some things about 1984.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-08-06_142744_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3630" class="picwide" />
-
-In 1984 no one was looking at their phones. In 1984 no one was wearing masks. In 1984 no one was wearing helmets. In 1984 no one went on play dates. In 1984 playgrounds were made of metal. In 1984 no one called the cops on kids left alone for the day. In 1984 everyone expected children to be self-governing individuals capable of surviving the day unsupervised and no one thought twice about it.
-
-This is how I grew up. It's how my peers and elders grew up, and from what I've seen of the world my peers and elders are considerably more capable individuals than the people who've grown up in the hyper-managed, ultra-safe, everyone-gets-a-trophy world kids inhabit today. 
-
-I want my kids to grow up the way we did. Yes, they get hurt sometimes. You should have seen Lilah's toe when she caught it on a root while riding her bike barefoot. It happens. One minute you're riding along, the next minute your toenail is gone. Childhood is supposed to have sharp edges and moments of pain, it's how you learn and grow.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-08-08_152605_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3631" class="picwide" />
-
-I picked 1984 somewhat at random, but the point stands that part of what I want to do living this way is provide my kids with access to the freedoms that I enjoyed and give them room to figure things out for themselves, explore new places, learn new things, meet new people, and build and sustain relationships—on their own.
-
-To be able to do this is a skill everyone has to learn, but we've had several generations now that were never given the chance to do this and... it's not good. These grown men and women are only couple steps above helpless in many cases and we're all starting to see the effects of that. When Mommy and Daddy are always there to fix things and suddenly they aren't.... 
-
-To be a self-regulating individual capable of exploring the world, learning on your own, and building friendships as you go, requires practice. It requires the space to make mistakes and find the success that builds confidence as you go. Our kids need to work things out themselves, to reason things out themselves without anyone telling them the answer. 
-
-This is a big part of why we keep coming back to Washburn. It's not just that parenting has changed since 1984. Culture changed too. We no longer have a culture that allows kids these freedoms even if the parents are willing to give them. Parents go to jail for these things in some places. Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas have actually had to [pass laws](https://reason.com/2021/05/18/texas-becomes-third-state-to-pass-free-range-kids-law/) legalizing the act of letting kids roam around unsupervised. Wisconsin has no such law that I know of, but in small towns around America the culture of letting kids roam remains much more in tact than it does in more populated areas. This is a big part of why we spend so much time on the fringes.
-
-The people we've met, the people who are here regularly, they think like we do, they grew up like we do. The sort of people who'll call the cops on an unattended child, do not come here. And so we keep coming back.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-08-13_102715_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3638" class="picwide" />
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-09-02_144746_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3642" class="picwide" />
-
-This means that a good bit of what we've done this summer—is nothing. We've stayed around town and let the kids wander the creeks, make friends, ride their bikes around town, make food over a fire, fish, swim, and whatever else they want to do.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-08-11_173916_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3636" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-08-11_173551_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3644" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-08-11_173732_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3645" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-<img src="images/2023/2023-08-11_150404_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3633" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-08-31_111330_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3641" class="picwide" />
-
-
-And sure, I was there to take these pictures. I like to swim. I like to explore. But these are just a handful of moments. The kids had most of the summer to themselves. We let them wander around in a kind of mile or two radius where they could get up to whatever they wanted. I'm grateful to all their friends' parents who also let their kids roam around and to the people of Washburn who've made a community where that's possible. Where bikes won't be stolen, no one calls the cops on kids, and the world is, well, more like it was in 1984.
-
-
-
-## Little Girl's Point
-
-The rest of my family loves rock hounding. I don't even know if that's what you call it, but that's what I'm going with. They enjoy walking around, hunting for rocks. Agates are especially popular with rock lovers, and one of the best agate beaches in the area is across the lake from us, in Michigan, at place called Little Girl's point. 
-
-We were over there one Thursday afternoon, hunting for rocks on the beach. The beach sits just below a small bluff where there is a county park with some campsites. The kids asked me why we never camped there. I didn't have a good answer, so we decided we'd come back the next weekend and camp, if we could get a campsite. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-06-08_123408_little-girl-point.jpg" id="image-3621" class="picwide" />
-
-We somehow managed to grab probably the best site in the campground for the following weekend. Since the bus tailpipe was still being bent into shape somewhere down in Eau Claire, we loaded up the Jeep with our camping gear and headed out for a few nights in a tent. 
-
-It might seem like camping is strange thing for us to do, since we're sort of always camping. If the bus had been running, we'd have brought it, but then again sometimes it's good to change it up, get a little more primitive so you appreciate what you have the rest of the time. Although it's hard to consider yourself roughing it with views like this.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_155734_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3611" class="picwide" />
-
-The main difference from our usual day trip forays to Little Girl's Point, was that we were able to linger, watch the shadows lengthen, see the orange ball of evening sun sink into the smoky edges of the lake. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_171236_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3614" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_204023_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3617" class="picwide" />
-
-We got to Little Girl's Point after a day of heavy rains, which turned the patches of clay soil in the bluffs into some impressively large mud pits. The kids scampered up and down the cliffs all day, looking for larger and larger mud pits to play in before jumping in the lake to rinse off and do it all over again.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_171640_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3615" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_150305_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3610" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_171209_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3613" class="picwide" />
-
-
-
-
-
-
-## Build
-
-*When in doubt, build shelves*. Building things is an essential part of life. Shelves are easy and satisfying to build. They're useful too. Everyone needs more shelf space. Everywhere I've ever lived I built some shelves or bookcase or some sort of flat surface on which to put thing. When you're done with a shelf your life is inevitably neater and more organized and better in some small way. 
-
-Social critic and priest Ivan Illich writes in *Tools for Convivality* that "people need... the freedom to make things among which they can live, or give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others." 
-
-Maybe that seems like too much weight to put on something as simple as shelves, but I think it's important to have an active hand in shaping the world that surrounds you. It give that world more meaning. Shelves are an easy place to start. Get a single sturdy board, a couple angle brackets and you're on your way. Or you can get fancy if that's your taste, search out how to do a french cleat. Either way you have given shape to your things yourself.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-06-17_130839_washburn.jpg" id="image-3596" class="picwide" />
-
-I've been shelf building my whole life. When I don't have anything else to do, I build shelves. Or at least paint them. I used to repaint my bookshelves whenever I moved because after a move you never quite know what to do in your new space. The answer is to build shelves. I also tidy up a lot when I can't think what else to do, which inevitably makes me think, hmm, I should build a shelf. 
-
-Despite the image many people have of me sitting in hammock doing nothing most of the time, that's not all that accurate. I mean, I try to get in the hammock as much as possible, but this summer I've built quite a few shelves. Shelves for books, shelves in the bathroom, shelves in the closet. Then I branched out and built a new towel rack. I still have a few more shelves planned before we hit the road again.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-06-17_160323_washburn.jpg" id="image-3597" class="picwide caption" />
-
-I was building shelves in part because I couldn't work on the engine. I pulled the tailpipe out of the bus--all 28 feet of it. I it cut up into manageable pieces and sent off to Eau Claire where a machine shop is building us a new one. Slowly. That pretty much means I can't work on the engine. Well, I can't start it, which makes it hard to work on it and know the results. So shelves. 
-
-We stacked the summer up with activities for the kids. Well. For us anyway. We're not used to being in one place for so long so we went maybe a little overboard. There were baseball games, juijitsu and wrestling practice, sailing camp, theater camp, and what feels like an inordinate number of other activities. The kids have had fun though.
-
-We managed to do some exploring too. We made a day trip to Little Girl's Point, which is one of the more popular agate hunting beaches in the area. Not being a rockhound myself, I usually bring a notebook, stove, coffee pot and fixings, and sit on the beach, writing and relaxing. I do lounge around in a hammock occasionally, there's just nowhere to hang a hammock on this beach.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-06-08_115737_little-girl-point.jpg" id="image-3593" class="picwide" />
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-06-08_134509_little-girl-point.jpg" id="image-3594" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-13_105224_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3602" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-06-08_135922_little-girl-point.jpg" id="image-3595" class="picwide" />
-
-The girls turned 11 in July, though this year, thanks to a family visit just before their birthday, they managed to drag it out into something like a birthday week. On the actual day there was, of course, [waffle cake](https://luxagraf.net/essay/waffle-world).
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-11_062305_11th-birthday.jpg" id="image-3600" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-11_151007_11th-birthday.jpg" id="image-3601" class="picwide" />
-
-Quite a few people have reached out to see how the smoke was up here. Most of the time it really hasn't been that bad. There's been a general haze that I don't recall from last year, air quality is not what you'd call good, but for the most part it hasn't been as bad here as I've seen elsewhere except for a handful of days. There were a couple of days though where the sun looked like this at 11 AM and the world was preternatually dark.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-15_070855_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3607" class="picwide" />
-
-To balance it out, there have also been days where it's so clear it seems like an easy swim over to Ashland.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-16_192240_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3608" class="picwide" />
-
-The bad air didn't affect the cherries at least. The great lakes area is for some reason home to the best cherries I've ever had. Around here it's mostly red cherries, and they're very good, but if you ever make it over to the UP, keep an eye out for the golden cherries, which are slightly more sour and somehow better. The reds are damn good though and after reading Ralph Moody's *Little Birches* books, which involve some cherry picking, the kids had to try their hand.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-14_120512_cherry-picking.jpg" id="image-3603" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-14_123000_cherry-picking.jpg" id="image-3604" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-14_121845_cherry-picking.jpg" id="image-3605" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-<img src="images/2023/2023-07-14_124113_cherry-picking.jpg" id="image-3606" class="picwide" />
-
-I believe we came home with 12 pounds in all. We gave away a few, but I'd say we ate at least 7 pounds in two days. 
-
-That's sort of the way summer goes up here, it's so short you have to cram a lot into it. On the one hand there's an element of gluttony to it, everything grows so fast and is gone before you know it, but on the other hand you can feel how valued and appreciated this time is. This is a land where winter is always either here, or just around the corner. Any time you don't need a jacket and skis to get outside is reason enough to celebrate.
-## Second Spring
-
-Driving 1800 miles north in a week was like stepping back in time. Spring came and went in Florida back in early march. By the time we left Florida was well into summer, whatever the calendar might have said. Here in Washburn though spring had barely arrived. 
-
-The night we got in the overnight low was 34 degrees. The trees were mainly still bare, save the birches, which leaf out really early. The undergrowth was still spindly and the creek, which normally afforded the kids somewhere to play where no one could see them, was visible to the whole campground.
-
-There was also almost no one in the campground save us, the camp hosts, and few other seasonal campers. We even mainly beat the birds up here. There were a few warblers around, some swans, geese, and ducks, but the resident merlins, and most of the spring warblers had not shown up yet, and there were hardly any flowers to be seen.
-
-In two short weeks all that changed. Leaves came out so fast I swear the kids and I watched them grow one day. In two weeks the creek was hidden again. Unfortunately the mosquitoes also grew. Thicker than we've ever seen them around here. I was some small comfort to hear some locals say this is the worst mosquitoes have ever been around here, so far as anyone can remember.
-
-
-
-
-## Going Up North 
-
-Eight days of travel. Six days driving. 1508 miles from the shores of St George Island to the shores of Lake Superior. 
-
-It was too fast. I knew it was too fast, but we wanted to get out of the heat. I was ready for the toll it takes on us, but I was not prepared for the toll it would take on the vehicles. If you do the math there, we were doing over 250 miles a day. Often considerably more since one of those days was mostly spent by the side of the road.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-14_073213_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3543" class="picwide caption" />
-
-The first day started smooth. It was hot and we left early so we wouldn't be driving in the heat. Everything was fine until the last 100 miles when the bus engine sudden got real loud. I pulled over and popped the doghouse to make sure an exhaust manifold hadn't cracked. Nothing that bad fortunately, so I crawled underneath and sure enough there was the tailpipe, broken in two just past the t-joint on the passenger's side.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-13_094713_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3542" class="picwide" />
-
-I limped into the nearest town and stopped at Napa. Which was closed. I limped back to O'Reilly and went in to see what I could find to try to rejoin those two pieces. After some debate with myself I went with a thinner piece that would fit inside. I borrowed a spreader tool and tried the widen the rear section, which would have allowed a wider diameter piece to fit, but I backed off, it just seemed to brittle to possibly stretch, more likely I'd crack it. I went with the next smaller diameter piece. It fit, the problem was that I couldn't just shove it in because that would block the flow of exhaust from the passenger's side. 
-
-I fitted it as best I could and figured I could drill a hole and then widen that with a metal blade on my jigsaw. That would have worked, but one of the O'Reilly employees saved me a ton of time by announcing that he had a vice and a reciprocating saw in his truck. As we all should. He had welded up his own vice stand that fit in the two hitch. It was genius and I may have to copy it if I can get someone to weld it for me.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-0-513_124245_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3548" class="picwide" />
-
-With the vent hole cut, I inserted the pipe into the other and anchored it with a machine screw. Then I fitted on the back half of the tailpipe and anchored it with another machine screw. I bought some putty and shoved an entire container of it into the cracks and wrapped it all up with a patch to seal it.
-
-But this time it was hot and miserable and Corrinne and kids had done everything there was to do in this little Alabama town so after I bought some baling wire, we hit the road. The Jeep did not like the heat though, and the wind had drained from our day, so we ended up calling it a day and getting hotel. We stopped about fifty miles short of goal, but we figured the hotel would let us get an early start the next day.
-
-We were on the road at 6 AM the next morning, trying to beat the heat up to Tupelo. We ended up driving over 300 miles, which I think is maybe the longest day we've ever done. Both vehicles ran great, though by the end of the day, when we pulled into Tombigbee State Park for the night, the supposedly heat-resistant exhaust wrap was pretty well burned off. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-14_163115_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3551" class="picwide" />
-
-We pulled into the first site that looked appealing, and headed for the cold showers. So long as you stayed in the shade it was actually tolerable. We whiled away the evening playing baseball and grilling burgers. After the sun set that night, and it cooled down, I got underneath and re-wrapped the repaired joint with some header tape I had lying around and then anchored that with baling wire.
-
-The next morning we hit the road again early and pulled off another long day up to Metropolis IL, to the same campground [we stayed in last year](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/06/prairie-notes). We took a day off the next day to get some work done, but even here we hadn't truly escaped the heat so we didn't linger. The only problem was that the last few miles to Metropolis the bus had been making a horrible scraping noise that sounded like it was coming from the left front wheel. I suspected either the brakes or the wheel bearings, the latter of which would be especially bad. 
-
-Leaving Metropolis I didn't hear a thing, so I pushed on. After about 100 miles I stopped to get gas and again, once I dropped below highway speeds, there was the scrapping again. I got gas and got back on the highway, scraping until I was up to about 35 MPH and then it went away. Curious. 
-
-Then I hit a particularly large bump and heard it again. Hmm. Then something in my head screamed wheel bearings. I know I have a piece about [safety third](https://luxagraf.net/essay/safety-third), but I don't mess around with wheel bearings so I pulled over. Corrinne and kids joined me at a gas station. I told her I needed to get the wheel off and apart and take a look. They headed off to explore an antique store while I went off to convince a diesel mechanic to help me get the wheel off. He agreed to help, he even spun the bolts off for me, but then he had to go run an errand. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_085108_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3544" class="picwide" />
-
-He left his tools for me, so I got the wheel apart and... the brakes looked okay. One of the wheel cylinder pins was slightly off kilter and the cylinder was leaking, but neither of those were making the scraping noise. I dug deeper and the bearings all looked okay to me.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_101812_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3545" class="picwide" />
-
-Eventually the mechanic came back and he agreed with my assessment. Then he looked at me funny and said, "weird thing is, back down the road from here a car just blew out its wheel bearings, sheared off the whole wheel and it hit a motorcyclist. They're all down in a ditch, they're trying to get them out now." We talked for a while after that. He told me some sad, sad stories about his town, his family. It was a strange stop that left me feeling like things in this country are more painfully broken than I thought. 
-
-Eventually he helped me repack the bearings and we put the wheel back together. I paid him for his time and tools and hit the road again. The scraping went away when I got above 35 and I figured if it wasn't the wheel bearings or the brakes maybe I could  just keep driving and try to puzzle it out. Which is what I did for about another 100 miles or so. 
-
-It's tough to find camping in the middle of Illinois, but there are some county parks in the small towns. We pulled into Arthur, Illinois—mostly notable for its Amish population -- not really knowing what to expect. We found a gravel lot behind the high school with electric and water. Good enough of the night.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_174622_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3546" class="picwide" />
-
-We were also in the middle of several baseball fields so after dinner I took the kids over to watch a little league game for a couple innings. When we came back there was a softball game going at the field right in front of the bus. We sat around watching the Amish play softball against the English (that's what the Amish call you and I). We arrived late, and the lighted scoreboard didn't work so I don't know who won, but the Amish were damn good and I'd be surprised if the other team won.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_175902_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3547" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_200204_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3552" class="picwide caption" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_185941_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3550" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_183512_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3549" class="picwide caption" />
-
-The next morning we hit the road early, but we decided to split up. Since stop-and-go was not good for the bus, I decided to take the interstate while Corrinne would continue on the backroads that we usually take. This worked for about 50 miles. Then I hit a bump and that was the end, the scraping became a grinding and I pulled to the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. 
-
-It's been a long time since I was at the side of the road with no clue what was wrong. I got out and crawled under the bus but I didn't see anything wrong. The conclusion I came up with was that maybe the slightly crooked pin in the wheel cylinder had become worse, making the brake pad rub the drum. That didn't feel right, but I had no other ideas. I limped along a couple of miles on the shoulder and pulled off in the tiny town of Tonika IL where there was a Casey's gas station with a truck parking lot we could leave the bus in if we needed to. And we did.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-18_193403_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3553" class="cluster picwide" />
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-18_193603_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3554" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-18_193623_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3555" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-People always ask if we're actually as calm as I make it seem when things go wrong. It comes up enough that now Corrinne and I joke about it whenever something does happen. *Are you stressed? Never.* 
-
-I actually was stressed this time because we wanted to meet up with some friends the next day in Wisconsin, and I was supposed to meet a colleague who lives in Rockford for coffee that evening . None of that was going to happen and I was stressed about that. I don't like to flake on people. But once I accepted that those things weren't going to happen, the stress went away, and I was able to get to work. You have to start where you are, not where you wish you were.
-
-I called around to find a new wheel cylinder and found a parts store that said they'd have it the next morning. We got a hotel for the kids and I stayed with the bus, camping in the parking lot for the night. I was at the parts store the next morning at 8 AM and... the wheel cylinder did not arrive. Actually one did, since I ordered both left and right side. The right side was there, the left was not. I got back on the phone and found a Napa that said they could have it by 2 that afternoon. 
-
-With a few hours to kill we decided to check out nearby Starving Rock State Park. It proved a very crowded, but interesting park. As with most places, a little walking and you soon left most of the crowds behind. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-19_100407_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3556" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-19_102804_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3557" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-19_102923_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3558" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-19_104401_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3561" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-After the hike we ate lunch and then I went back to the bus and set about taking the wheels off so everything would be ready to go when I got the parts. Except I couldn't get the lug nuts off. I stood and bounced on my breaker bar and they just wouldn't move. I walked over to a Semi truck repair shop behind the gas station and borrowed a four foot long breaker bar. Still no dice. I took it back and ended up talking to the owner for a bit. He agreed to spin off the lug nuts for me so I pulled the bus over to his driveway. He listened to my story, but I could tell he didn't think to sounded good it either. We jacked it up and spun the wheel. No scrape. "Take me for a drive then," he said.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-19_144050_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3559" class="picwide" />
-
-So we did and about half way across the parking lot I started having deja vu. "Nah, that's your drive train," he said, "spin it back around." I pulled it back onto the concrete and he and I and his son all crawled under to inspect the u-joints and shafts. That's when the deja vu got stronger and all the sudden it hit me. [King City, California](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/aquarium-kings). I will quote myself: "there was a horrible grinding noise that really sounded like wheel bearings to me." But it wasn't then and it wasn't now. Once it hit me I slip forward and there it was, the rear transmission mount had broken again. The first u-joint was hanging down, scraping against the cross member. 
-
-Once I pointed it out the owner and his sons made quick work of it. They pulled it out, welded it back together and had it back in about 10 minutes. They wouldn't even take any money for it. Yet again we continue on by the kindness of strangers.
-
-By then it was late in the day and we'd already paid for the hotel for another night, so I just drove over there and we went to a nearby Mexican market and got a rotisserie chicken that was pretty damn close to what we used to enjoy all the time in San Miguel.
-
-From there on out it was a pleasant drive. We mostly stayed on the backroads, as we usually do, though I did grab the highway through Madison because the faster I get through cities, the better. We stopped off in Edgerton WI to visit the boyhood home of Sterling North, since we'd [recently read his novel Rascal](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/03/gone-fishin), which the kids loved. In fact part of Rascal takes place on the Brule river, not far from where we've been spending our summers in Wisconsin. I looked up where Sterling North lived and discovered that his house has been preserved, so we decided to stop. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-20_092724_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3560" class="picwide" />
-
-The house is only open Sundays, so we just saw the outside, but the Methodist church caretaker happened to see us outside and asked the kids if they wanted to come into the church and ring the bell. The bell tower figures prominently in the book, but even if it didn't, what kid doesn't love to ring a huge bell?
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-<div class="cluster">
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-<img src="images/2023/DSC_3506.jpg" id="image-3563" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-20_092932_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3564" class="cluster pic66" />
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-</div>
-
-I spent some time in Edgerton trying to fix the steering wheel of the Jeep, which has become rather loose, but in the end I broke off the pivot pin puller and had to put it back together the way it was. That one ratcheted up my frustration levels because it was not just nut and bolts. It was weird torx screws, steering wheel pullers, and other specialty tools. If I want to get the steering wheel of the bus it's just one bolt. I love the Jeep, but the complexity increase from one bolt to three hours of work is not progress. 
-
-We had one other small issue that day after we left Sterling North's house. One of the bolts that holds the alternator on to the front of the bus engine snapped off and vibrated forward until the head of it was hitting the fan, making another horrible clanging noise. For a second I did panic that time. I pulled over and it really did sound like a piece of metal was bouncing around inside the engine. Then I saw the bolt vibrating around loose and relaxed. Twenty minutes later I had rigged it up well enough to get us the rest of the way to Washburn. 
-
-We'd left the heat behind a few days before in Metropolis IL, but that night in the middle of Wisconsin was the first night it was genuinely cold. This was what we'd been wanting. We pulled out our jackets before the sun had even set. I lay for a while outside on the picnic table thinking, we did it, we actually did it. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-20_181421_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3565" class="picwide" />
-
-Eight days. Only three things broke on two cars that are more than 80 years old between them.
-
-It wasn't until I was sitting there, staring up at the pines above our campsite, that it occurred to me that everything that had gone wrong on our drive—the broke tailpipe, the cracked rear transmission mount, the broken alternator bolt, the lose steering wheel bolts in the Jeep -- all those things ultimately happened most likely because of excessive vibration. You can maybe blame some of that on general engine vibration, but two of them happened after hitting potholes.
-
-American roads are falling apart. I remember when we first started we'd notice bad roads. Louisiana's roads were terrible. Corrinne's grandfather built roads in Louisiana most of his life, we'd joke that the roads were probably the same surfaces he'd help lay. I also remember thinking that highway 101 in California, just north of and down through San Francisco, was one of the worst roads in the country. The point is we noticed bad roads. 
-
-Today, we notice good roads. And there are very few of them.
-
-Luckily for us, the last day was a pleasant and very smooth drive over what was definitely the best road surface on our entire drive. We were in Washburn by mid afternoon, tucked away in the campsite that will be our home for most of the summer. Except for when we have to get our new tailpipe made. And probably when I rebuild the front brakes. And maybe when I pull the entire engine out for a rebuild. But for now at least we have nowhere else we need to be.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-21_150743_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3566" class="picwide" />
-
-
-
-
-## Leaving Florida
-
-In the evenings the song of whippoorwills echoes on all sides. Spring peepers croak and creak in the marsh reeds. Here and there through the trees I can catch a glimmering flicker of flames from a campfire. Only the truly committed are having fires in this heat. The air is still and heavy, with only the occasional puff of a breeze.
-
-We drove into Florida in December of last year, a few days before Elliott's birthday, nearly six months ago. In six years of living on the road this is the longest we've stayed in one area. The general consensus is that it's time to go. Not from any dislike of Florida, but simply because it is time. 
-
-Science says that no one knows exactly what prompts birds to migrate, but I have a theory: individual agency. That is, *a* bird feels that it's time to go. It looks at other birds. They know that look. They give it some thought, they weigh it against their own feelings. They nod. And off they go together.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_165013.jpg" id="image-3529" class="picwide caption" />
-
-From Big Lagoon we drove east, stopping off at Fred Gannon Rocky Bayou for a couple of days. In that time I managed to get some work done on the Jeep, and an oil change in for the bus. The Jeep needs more work than I have time or knowledge to do. I am really just crossing my fingers on the Jeep.
-
-I left out a story back when we left Apalachicola. The bus had been starting rough for a few days, but one day it turned ugly, like someone had poured a bag of marbles in the back of the engine. After a bit of research I saw some people say that a starter wheel can sound like that. The starter is one thing I've never touched. Chrysler starters are notoriously hard to access on cars. I've heard of people having to pull off their exhaust headers just to get to the starter. Fortunately ours is not so bad. I was able to track down a new starter and got it installed without too much trouble. I was tightening up the bolts on the new starter when I noticed the missing teeth in the flywheel. Damn. Guess it wasn't just the starter. 
-
-There turned out to be two teeth missing. They aren't next to each other fortunately, but still not great. I got the broken teeth out and that turned out to be the bag of marbles sound, which is gone. For now it starts well enough, but eventually we'll likely lose more teeth. A new flywheel is now on my list of projects for the summer. Along with new exhaust pipes and possibly a full engine rebuild.
-
-One day I was out running some errands when I spied a bunch of planes outside a building not too far from the campground. It turned out to be the Airforce Armament Museum. I took the kids over the day before we left so we could check out all the planes.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-04_111017_fred-gannon.jpg" id="image-3525" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-04_123129_fred-gannon.jpg" id="image-3526" class="picwide" />
-
-There were a few things inside, including a room full of machine guns to answer the question of just how big a machine gun is, but most of the planes were parked outside. We ate lunch in the shade of some WWII bombers and then walked around, moving forward in time through the history of American warplanes.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-04_125637_fred-gannon.jpg" id="image-3527" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-04_131400_fred-gannon.jpg" id="image-3528" class="picwide caption" />
-
-From Fred Gannon we drove east, back to St George. Because why wouldn't you start your drive north by going southeast? We needed one last week on the wilds of the island before we said goodbye.
-
-It turned out that every no see um on St George had hatched since our last visit, but thankfully they weren't bad outside of our campsite. It was too hot for campfires anyway. We split our time between the beach and the bay, depending on the wind. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-10_155526_st-george.jpg" id="image-3533" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-10_132149_st-george.jpg" id="image-3532" class="picwide" />
-
-I've finally got to the point where I can stay on the paddleboard well enough to take it out in the ocean and kinda sorta surf on the little Florida waves. I had a few good rides and then I faceplanted and lost my nice sunglasses. At least we aren't going for a long drive any time soon.
-
-My favorite thing became going down to the bay in the evenings to go for a swim as the sun set. The water was plenty warm enough and if you mostly submerged yourself in the shallow water the no-see-ums would leave you alone. The kids would play and I would just lie back, kick my feet up and relax, which always feels better after you've put in a good days work on a few old vehicles. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-09_181653_st-george.jpg" id="image-3531" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-05-09_155338_st-george.jpg" id="image-3530" class="picwide" />
-
-## Bus Work and Baseball
-
-Our last few days on St. George between all of us we saw a Scarlet Tanager, Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, and an Indigo Bunting. The migrant birds were moving through. That's one of our cues that it's time to go. When the birds are headed north it's about time for us to do likewise.
-
-A couple days later we were headed back over to Pensacola to take care of some unavoidable business. We dragged our feet though. The day before we were set to leave a spot opened up at Grayton Beach, so we stopped off there for five days and enjoyed the white sand beaches. And the occasional low flying attack helicopter.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-17_160745_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3499" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-19_130210_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3500" class="picwide" />
-
-When that week was up we finally headed for Big Lagoon. It was on that drive, stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on highway 98, that we knew it was time to wrap things up and head elsewhere. We had to stop off at Joe Patti's again to have a last seafood fest.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-20_131819_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3501" class="picwide" />
-
-We came back to the crowds and cities because we needed to sell our old Volvo, which had been sitting in a storage facility ever since we [bought the Wagoneer](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/03/wagoneer). We would have sold it right away, but we didn't have the title. As it turned out the woman who ran the storage unit office had a friend who needed a car so getting that off our hands proved easier than we thought.
-
-That left us with some time to catch a baseball game at the local minor league stadium. Ever since he watched the world series this fall, Elliott has been obsessed with baseball. We've played sandlot games and he's got the basics down, but he really wanted to see a real game so we'd had our eye on the Blue Wahoos' schedule and timed it right for a home game. 
-
-<div class="cluster">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_210515_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3508" class="cluster picwide" />
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_181548_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3502" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_181943_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3503" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_194403_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3504" class="cluster picwide" />
-</div>
-
-It turned out to be a great game, plenty of action to keep the kids enthralled. I think the final score was 12 to 1 Blue Wahoos (which are a farm team for the Florida Marlins). 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_194417_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3505" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_205516_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3506" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_210334_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3507" class="picwide" />
-
-At one point a foul ball came vaguely our way, landing in the stands a section below us. That prompted Olivia to ask me if people ever got hit by balls. I told her I'd never seen that happen, and that I wouldn't worry about it. The minute I said that I thought, hmm, maybe I should not have said that. Sure enough, about ten minutes later a foul ball came right at us. It ended up hitting the ground about a foot from her, and hard enough that it bounced clear over the section behind us and out of the stadium. I think it happened so fast she didn't have time to be any more than startled. It was moving fast enough that no one around us made any move to catch it, not even the kids with gloves. 
-
-Thinking about it later I realized at pro games a net usually covers the seats where we were, which is why you never see fouls come down on anyone. At a minor league game there's not much net. Yet another reason to prefer the minors really. Whatever the case, we had a good time, though I must say, Major League Baseball seems to really be on a quest to alienate baseball fans. The poor park management had signs up apologizing for not taking cash anymore, but apparently MLB won't let them. Buying tickets on the MLB site was a nightmare. Some friends of ours who recently went to the Braves game in Atlanta endured one hassle after another, including having their water bottle confiscated. The only people going to pro games anymore are true, diehard fans. People like us would never put up with it. I'm glad the kids got to experience the minor leagues first since they're a little less tainted by the mobsters running MLB.
-
-The next day I got busy readying the bus and Wagoneer for the long drive north. It was, naturally, hot, humid, and buggy. I always make grand plans of all things I am going to get done, with post-its the length of my arm full of tasks. In the end I usually end up doing about 20 percent of it and I base that on okay, what do I have to do to keep everyone safe and comfortable?
-
-The bus is easy at this point. I do a tune up, change the oil, plugs, wires, all the filters, top off the fluids, lube the various undercarriage joints and make sure I have a spare fuel pump, because those always seem to go out whenever we're on a long drive.
-
-Less frequently I reseal the windows, but it was time. The Florida sun is not kind to rubber or sealant. One afternoon I was scraping the old sealant off the windows, prepping them for a fresh coating to withstand any rain we might hit on our drive, when I realized I was miserable. The Florida sun can feel like a heat lamp, relentless, baking, all you want to do is get out of it before you completely shrivel up like breaded shrimp. I was sweating and scraping and the old sealant was warm so it was gummy and not coming off the way it does in cooler weather and I was hot and frustrated and mad and feeling like I'd rather be at the beach and why was I doing this anyway? What kind of idiot lives like this?
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-26_160049_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3521" class="picwide" />
-
-Just then my daughter walked by and said *hey, that's our window*. *Well, we share it* (meaning her and her twin sister). She pointed to the pane that is behind her head and the pane that is behind her sister's head and then she walked off. And I stood there for a minute and thought right, that's why I am doing this, to keep my family warm and dry.
-
-That's really the only job there is in life—making sure my wife and kids have a warm, dry, safe place in the world. Strip away all the pretensions of culture and what's left? We make shelters and feed our family and friends, maybe even strangers. That's what all creatures do, each in their own way. My way includes heat and no-see-ums, but you know what, whatever needs to be done, needs to do done.
-
-The Wagoneer is a more difficult thing for me to get a handle on because I don't know yet what needs to done. Right now I am just playing whack-a-mole. The first mole was the power windows, which stick. This turns out to be the bane of many a Jeep owner's existence. Not knowing that at the time, I ordered some new plastic tracks and started tearing apart the doors. One fringe benefit of the Wagoneer is the massive tailgate, which gives me something I've never had—a workbench.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-23_083437_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3519" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-23_105223_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3522" class="picwide" />
-
-I replaced three of the little plastic tracks and the windows kinda sorta rolled up and down a little better. I also need to replace the felt tracks, but that can happen down the road. At least the kids could roll their windows down. They're going to need to because the air conditioning gave up the ghost about two weeks after we bought it. I took it to a mechanic and paid him a service fee to track down the source of the leak, which turned out to be the compressor. The compressor that's barely two years old (I have the records from the previous owner). The mechanic wanted $800 to change it out. Which was funny. Corrinne and I decided we didn't need air conditioning that bad so long as the windows worked. I did find a rebuilt compressor for $150, so at some point I'll replace it and get it recharged, but for now we have old school WD60 air conditioning: windows down, sixty miles an hour.
-
-After going over the Jeep for a couple of days I headed to the parts store and tracked down some new brake pads, along with all the various filters I could find and decided that's where I'd leave it. When something comes up down the road, we'll deal with it then.
-
-Lest you think everyone in this bus spends their days sweating and covered with no see ums, fear not. The kids do fun things even when I don't. Big Lagoon finally re-opened some sections of the park that had been closed since the last hurricane (which was almost two years ago now) and there's a new amphitheater, which, so far as I know, so far has only been host to plays and dances put on by three children.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_134708_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3513" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_134518_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3511" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_134611_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3512" class="picwide" />
-
-The kids have also started doing nature journals, which they learned about at the Esturary Center back in Apalachicola. John Muir Laws has [a fantastic book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-laws-guide-to-nature-drawing-and-journaling-john-muir-laws/12658634?ean=9781597143158) and [series of free videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fb65ZOjBDA&list=PLpcRk9AaBeWjswF9kYxwcVwxx7oHFT5sH&index=40) that are well worth your time no matter what age you are. In Big Lagoon we finally got to see the resident alligator, which spent the entire afternoon patiently floating just below the wooden bridge so the kids could draw it.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_131547_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3510" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_131530_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3509" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-  <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_154430_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3515" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_153917_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3514" class="cluster pic66" />
-</span>
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_154638_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3516" class="picwide" />
-  <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_165801_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3517" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_165808_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3518" class="cluster pic66" />
-</span>
-</div>
-
-Just around the corner from Big Lagoon is a road named Blue Angel Parkway. At one intersection on Blue Angel Parkway there's some big box stores and a nice large parking lot where people gather every Monday and Tuesday to watch the Blue Angels rehearse. It's basically a free airshow. We headed over and dropped the tailgate with the rest of the spectators.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-25_103838_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3523" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-25_105538_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3524" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-26_103900_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3520" class="picwide" />
-
-And then it was back to work. Onward and upward.
-
-
-
-=======
-
-
-## Under The Bridge
-
-Halfway through our stay on St. George we had a little problem called Friday night. The problem was that the campground at St George was full for Friday night. One night missing in a string of twelve nights. We knew that when we came out here, but I was really hoping something would open up. It did not. That's how we came to be under the bridge in Apalachicola again. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_150219_st-george.jpg" id="image-3485" class="picwide" />
-
-We [stayed under the bridge in 2018](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/04/st-george) for similar reasons. Back then we just literally pulled under the bridge. Now the city of Pensacola has formalized things. You have to stay in the grassy field next to the marina and it costs $30 a night. The internet is full of people complaining about how you're paying for nothing, because there's no water or electricity, and it does feel like a heavy-handed money grab, but we didn't mind. It beats driving an hour just for the night.
-
-It was a hot day without much breeze so we parked the bus and headed out to explore Apalachicola until evening when it cooled down some. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-07_091835_st-george.jpg" id="image-3495" class="picwide" />
-
-We walked around town for a bit, but quickly found the every shop had the same thing as the last. [St. George Island hasn't changed much in the last decade](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/04/the-lost-coast) we've been coming, but Apalachicola definitely has. Part of that is due to the inevitable, gradual, crapification of everything. But around here the hurricanes often accelerate that process.
-
-Hurricane Michael hit here in 2018. I remember watching coverage from Mexico, trying to figure out how bad the damage was on St. George. St. George seemed okay, but Apalachicola was hit hard. The after effects were still all around us as we walked. Buildings that were headed downhill in our last visit were in total ruin now. Several restaurants were boarded up. Shops were gone. The maritime museum has yet to re-open, though its phone recording claims it's planning too.
-
-Along with the wreckage there is the seemingly inevitable "upgrades" that come when real estate developers get an opportunity like a hurricane. The old local favorite watering hole, which was always a little rough around the edges, was gone, replaced by an upscale brewer offering $10 microbrews and kids menus.
-
-We headed out to the same place we always get oysters. Most of it's food is straight of the Sysco truck[^1], but it does at least serve up local oysters. We got a dozen raw and a dozen steamed. The kids have tried oysters when they were younger, but none of them remembered it. They were unimpressed with raw oysters, though the girls liked the steamed oysters.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_143031_st-george.jpg" id="image-3483" class="cluster picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_143545_st-george.jpg" id="image-3484" class="cluster picwide" />
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_163606_st-george.jpg" id="image-3490" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_163421_st-george.jpg" id="image-3489" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-After the oysters we walked around some more. We ended up buying some coffee from a local roaster, and couple of whale and shark guides done by [our friend Val](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/06/seining-with-val), before we gave up on downtown Apalachicola. 
-
-We headed out to the old cemetery for a bit. It hasn't changed much. Maybe the Spanish Moss is a bit longer, the trees a bit taller, the general feeling of neglect a bit stronger, but the dead, and the land they claim, can usually be counted on not change too much.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_151259_st-george.jpg" id="image-3486" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_161406_st-george.jpg" id="image-3487" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_161456_st-george.jpg" id="image-3488" class="picwide" />
-
-The cemetery is right across from [The Pig](https://www.pigglywigglyfl.com/locations/piggly-wiggly-apalachicola/) and while we had plenty of food, we didn't want to use the stove in the heat. So we did what you used to do when it was hot: we bought some food we didn't have to cook, a bag of ice, and a few pints of ice cream. Back at the bus we ate the ice cream first, of course, and sat around in the shade drinking cold water. It wasn't too long before the sun got low enough that the heat faded.
-
-Parking the bus in the middle of a grassy field in town is like hanging out a big sign that says, come say hi. And quite a few people did. We also seem to meet interesting people when we camp under the bridge. After dinner a man drove up in a truck and started chatting with us about the bus. He had spent years in the area as a general contractor, had even built some of the structures on the state park back in the 1980s. 
-
-We talked about how Apalachicola had changed (he's the one that told me about the bar that was now upscale) and how hurricanes reshape people as much as they do land. In some ways the real devastation of hurricanes comes later, when all those people who didn't have the money to set up shop again have to sell their businesses, and inevitably they sell to outsiders who see real estate opportunities without ever considering their impact on the communities they're buying into. That how you get to the point where there are more shops selling beach trinkets from China than anything produced locally, more restaurants serving up whatever came on the Sysco truck, and fewer and fewer places to get an oyster on the half shell. 
-
-Sam (not his real name) had been a traveler too, living in an RV while he toured on the rodeo circuit as a bronc rider. He told us stories about George Strait and what life was like going around the country back in the day when there wasn't a lot of money in rodeo riding, "you don't win, you don't eat." We looked him up later and realized he was a famous rodeo rider back in the 1970s and 80s.
-
-He offered us a free place to stay up the river on a 100 acres of wood with a river nearby. It made me a little sad to have to say no, we couldn't do it, we had to get back to Pensacola to wrap up some business there, but he told us if we ever needed a place to stay to just drive into the middle of a small town near his property and ask anyone, everyone will point you to my place, he said. 
-
-By the time he left it had cooled down enough that we weren't sweating in the sun anymore, but it was still pretty warm to sleep so we sat around in the twilight. The kids sketched and wrote in their journals and I did a little work on the Jeep. 
-
-We woke the next morning to the cries of seagulls and the sound of fishing boat motors as every charter fishing trip and private boat in the area put in at the marina's boat ramp. 
-
-On our drive down the battery I bought around this time last year had died on us. This was probably partly my fault for charging it with a battery charger rather than using the alternator (the bus's voltage regulator was shot and it took me a while to track down a new one). Whatever the case the auto parts chain I bought from exchanged it for a new one, no questions asked. Unfortunately, while I was installing that I accidentally shorted something and blew the fuse from our house battery to our inverter, which meant we had no power for the fridge and it was warming up quickly. 
-
-While I wrestled with all that, Corrine took the kids over to Eastpoint, where there's an estuary nature center they could explore.
-
-I eventually gave up trying to find a replacement fuse and just ordered four new ones off the internet. It'd take a week, but we were headed back our to St. George state park anyway, so we'd have shore power to get us by. We don't use shore power much, mostly we live off solar, but we can hookup to 30 amp power in a pinch.
-
-
-[^1]: Sysco is a food supply company that offers complete meal "kits" that your local restaurant then assembles on-site. If you've ever wondered by so many restaurants have such similar menus and food, Sysco is a big part of why.
-
-
-We've seen this all up and down the Gulf Coast dating back to Katrina (and before I'm sure, but I didn't live in the south then). Hurricanes take out small businesses, large ones scoop up the land on the cheap. 
-
-I don't know that there's anything to be done about it. Tourism may be [a short-sighted industry that ruins better long term bets](https://live.luxagraf.net/jrnl/2013/05/oysterman-wanted), but we all have to pay rent in the short-term. And it isn't just hurricanes bringing real estate opportunists—fishing and other gulf coast economies have been in decline for some time.  Everything from water quality to foreign investment had a hand in killing off the local oyster industry here in Apalachicola. Our friend Amy Evans has been covering this for years. Her article [The Oysterman](https://bittersoutherner.com/the-oysterman), in the *Bitter Southerner* is the best thing I've read on it.
-
-It's not just an abstraction though, the changes wrought by hurricanes and culture play out in the streets of Apalachicola as they do everywhere, and I think the short story, from my point of view, is that the good guys are not winning.
-
-I have been called nostalgic, but I don't think it's nostalgia to wish for the days when there local oystermen with plots on the bay rather than international seafood conglomerates. The days when buildings were made of real brick and wood rather than thin metal "2x4s" and wallboard. If it's nostalgia to recognize that things today are not as well made, and designed to serve the needs of corporations rather than people, then fine, I am nostalgic.
-
-## St George
-
-Driving west on Florida's highway 98 is a little like traveling back in time. It's hard to believe standing amidst the crowds of Panama City Beach, but not ten miles east, once you pass through the actual Panama City, the crowds disappear, along with everything else. 
-
-After winding through some rundown warehouse districts at the very eastern edge of the city the highway passes over East Bay and onto the property of Tyndall Air Force Base. The base is a kind of barrier that stops Panama City from advancing eastward. Once you clear the long stretch of pine forest that makes up the eastern portion of the base you come to Mexico Beach, which is in the process of expanding. I'm not sure why, it's the least appealing part of this area. My working theory is that it's cheap. If you can't afford 30A, you buy here maybe. 
-
-It's after Mexico Beach that you begin to slip back in time. The road alternates running along the seashore and winding through slash pine forests. It's wilder, and only occasionally interspersed with small towns. This is the part of Florida we've been visiting regularly since 2010.
-
-<img src="images/2023/GX010132-f001676.jpg" id="image-3481" class="picwide" />
-
-The region from roughly Port St Joe in the west, to Alligator Point in the east, is known as The Lost Coast. That's mostly a local marketing term, but it has an element of truth to it. Far fewer people come out here. It's too far from any airports and it lacks high end resorts to draw in the tourists. Those who come here like it that way.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-15_071331_st-george.jpg" id="image-3466" class="picwide" />
-
-Having been coming here for so long, I've written about this area quite a few times so I went back and read some of my older pieces. In [All The Pretty Beaches](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2013/05/all-the-pretty-beaches) I call this area "a little backwater in time" and it still is, mostly. It's a slice of the world as was before the proliferation of mega-resorts and all-inclusive vacation package extravaganzas. 
-
-There's still little more to St. George than a store, a gas station and a couple of seafood trailers offering up fresh shrimp and scallops from nearby Apalachicola. Sure, there are plenty of AirBnBs and condos, and I'd guess that there are fewer full time residents than there were in 2010, but the two motels are still rundown affairs that still look like holdouts from the early 1990s. Nothing on the island feels all that different than it did over a decade ago. Perhaps this place really is lost.
-
-Little things have changed of course. Doug's seafood trailer is no longer there, Doug passed away several years ago now. The grocery store on the island is considerably fancier than it used to be. A Boar's Head Deli has replaced the dried out breaded shrimp under heat lamps. But otherwise the same resturants still serve up the same food to people that look much the same as they always have.
-
-Prices are through the roof though. We couldn't afford to rent the beach house we used to stay in even if we wanted to. AirBnB changed everything everywhere for the worse. That's okay. These days we head even further away from civilization to the state park at the far end of the island. It's a good thirty minute drive from our campsite to the first signs of the civilization, which is a rarity on the east coast, let alone on the Florida coast.
-
-We embrace the remoteness. When we come out here we load up on food before hand so we don't really have to leave the park. For about ten days we didn't do much other than wander the maritime forests of oak and pine and swim and play in the sea. 
-
-The only problem was the purple flag. 
-
-Coming from California, I find Florida's use of warming flags downright hilarious. I have never seen any beach conditions in the Gulf that would warrant more than a yellow flag in California. If that. But here the red flag is almost constant. I've already said my piece about our [safety-third philosophy](https://luxagraf.net/essay/safety-third), I won't repeat it here. Suffice to say that the color of flag never has much bearing on what we do at the beach here. But a purple flag is different. 
-
-We did not have those in California. The purple flag is for "stinging marine life". I talked to a ranger about it. Portuguese man o' war had been washing up the week before. He said it had been a few days since they'd had any reports. But then, you never know. Portugese Man-o-war are pretty obvious in clear water, they stick up above the surface and are bright purple. The problem is their tentacles can be alarming long and often proceed them in the water, depending on current.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-05_113155_st-george.jpg" id="image-3463" class="picwide" />
-
-
-I decided—wait for it -- that is wasn't worth the risk. When we were here at Christmas the kids and I stumbled on a little trail that led down to the leeward side of the island, which faces St. George Island sound. This became our hang out spot. Everyone else headed to the windward beaches, leaving the sound side to us. We spent whole days out there without seeing another soul.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_151441_st-george.jpg" id="image-3457" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_152419_st-george.jpg" id="image-3458" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_163641_st-george.jpg" id="image-3462" class="picwide" />
-
-I got out the paddle boards, we'd pack lunch and head down to the water. There was even a little picnic table I could work at while the kids played. I'd be hard pressed to think of a better place to spend our time. Not coincidentally, the campground on Lake Superior where we spend our summers has virtually the same setup, picnic table by the water with a little beach. We really don't need much to call a place paradise.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-03_142846_st-george.jpg" id="image-3454" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_151356_st-george.jpg" id="image-3456" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-11_152823_st-george.jpg" id="image-3465" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_162252_st-george.jpg" id="image-3461" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_160444_st-george.jpg" id="image-3460" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_155857_st-george.jpg" id="image-3459" class="picwide caption" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-04-03_151352_st-george.jpg" id="image-3455" class="picwide" />
-
-One day I took the paddle board on a longer trip, paddling for a few hours up the coastline. I am in the process of editing a movie about, but it was interesting. I made me realize that longer paddles, perhaps even going overnight would definitely be possible. Florida is too hot these days to make that comfortable, but I'm looking into some trips when we get up north. I'd be curious to hear from anyone who's done an overnight paddleboard trip.
-
-As happens when you live this way, we reached the day when it was time to head on. We had some business to take care of back in Pensacola. I mentioned this to the camphost one day and she kind of wrinkled her nose and paused for a moment before saying, "oh... it's very crowded up that way". I smiled because I knew exactly what she meant. You get used to life at the pace of the Lost Coast and everything else starts to seem like... too much. We decided Pensacola could wait and managed to book a few more days out here.
-
-
-
-## St. Andrews
-
-St Andrews State Park is a beautiful little postage stamp of beach off the coast of Panama City, Florida. When the sea is calm it looks almost like Thailand. 
-
-
-
-Despite the lovely beach, I was dreading returning to St. Andrews. We had some bad experiences with the staff on our first trip. And the campground is a parking lot. When I mentioned that last time a reader asked what was so bad about it so I climbed on top of the bus one morning and took a picture.
-
-
-
-It's not an awful, but to borrow a 60s-ism that I think is worth keeping around, the vibe is not the sort we enjoy. 
-
-Still. That beach. It did get increasingly crowded as we got closer to spring break, but even at its worst it wasn't half as bad as my home town gets in the summer. Considering this is Panama City, hardly anyone comes out here.
-
-
-One day while we were at St. Andrews I went to a nearby gas station to fill up the Jeep. I went inside the building to give the cashier my money, and found several other people already in line. There was only one cashier, but in front of us off to the side there were three self-check out kiosks. No one made any move toward them. We all waited for the person at the register. After a couple minutes a man who'd been over at the soda machine came toward the front to pay. He looked around confusedly at those of us in line, gestured toward the self-checkout and said to no one in particular, "do you mind if I cut ahead here?"
-
-The young man in front of me immediately turned and smiled at the man and said, "Go right ahead." "Thanks," said the man and he stepped forward to the self-check out. He turned around as he started to ring up his fountain drink and asked the young man, "do you just not like self checkout or are you waiting in line for a reason?"
-
-"Last time I checked," the young man drawled, "I don't get a W2 from Racetrack, so I can't see myself doing their work for them." 
-
-The other man chuckled, but didn't say anything. He finished checking out, and went on his way. 
-
-I will confess I had never thought of self checkout this way, but now I can't see it any other way. It's become almost impossible for me to use the self-checkout because I just see myself willfully becoming, for a few minutes, an employee of that business, doing their work for them.
-
-Something about the whole encounter reminded me of a moment in David Foster Wallace's famous Kenyon graduation speech, *This Is Water*. Wallace talks through how these default thought patterns take over when we're tired, overworked, in a hurry, and so on. But that's the problem he argues, that these default settings are a choice. Not a conscious one, but a choice still and they are robbing us of seeing something more in those moments. Stopping at the store on your way home from work at rush hour doesn't have to be a moment of consumer hell, we experience it that way because our default programming has conditioned us to see it that way.
-
-> If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important—if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.  
-
-I think a lot time I use those self checkout kiosks as a way to avoid having to spend another second in crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situations. That's what they're there for right? To avoid having to add a cashier to what's already *by default*, at least that's the assumption, a terrible situation. But again, that's a choice. And not the only one.
-
-I have a note in my journal, written months before the incident above, that reads: "Every little withdrawal you can make not only resists The Machine, but empowers you. Even a tiny act, like paying cash to a person rather than swiping your implant at the self checkout screen is a choice where you can retain your humanity and the humanity of those around you."
-
-
-
-Not really though. Really I don't need anything. I need less things. It's the time of year when I find myself taking stock of things and seeing what I can streamline, simplify, and do without. It's my form of a new year's resolution I think. Or perhaps some seasonally wayward attempt at early spring cleaning. Whatever the case this time of year is when I go through my life and think, what can I get rid of? What can I do without? What can I improve on? What is no longer necessary? 
-
-It's a fun thought process. I always change things up. Sometimes silly things, like the number of spoons in the drawer. Too many damnit. Out spoons, out. Other times I realize a don't need some tool I've previously considered indispensable. Some other tool I hardly pay attention to will turn out to do the job even better and I didn't realize it because I'd stopped thinking about the problem when I found the first solution.
-
-The problems is those first solutions are often ugly hacks, temporary patch jobs, but then you forget to go back and redo them. Or I do anyway. It's good to go back and check your old work, make sure there aren't any hack jobs left around.
-
-I don't do this annual taking stock to change my life, it's more of a cleaning out. It's a chance to pull off the rutted road for a few days and see what all is going on down there in the grooves. This is especially true when I get past the silly stuff like too many spoons in the drawer and start looking at my thought patterns.
-
-Any pattern of thought soon becomes transparent. That's part of what the pattern is for, and for many things that's good. I don't want to think *what should I do?* every morning. I want to make a cup of coffee and relax for a bit, like I always do. Still, I am sometimes alarmed to find patterns I didn't know I had when I step back and detach, and really *look* at myself.
-
-David Foster Wallace has a parable that I think is relevant:
-
-> There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
-
-Wallace's whole text is [worth a read](http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html) if you're not familiar (it was a commencement speech originally), but the salient point is, to quote Wallace's own explication: "the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about."
-
-I think "realities" is too vague. I don't know exactly what Wallace had in mind, but for me "realities" are the patterns of thought that govern my day.
-
-These patterns are hardest to see because they are the things that provide the framework in which we live. They're the things we decided way back when we couldn't even conceive of 2021 as a now that would eventually be *now*. They're the things we figured out so long ago we can't even recall exactly what we figured out. Still, they're there in the background informing everything we do. They're the water in which we live.
-
-When you see the water around you, you see yourself differently. Sometimes that means you find a few spoons you don't need. Other times it might mean something more. 
-
-So every year, around this time, I take a pen, a scrap of paper, and go for a walk. Woods are ideal for this, there's such a tangle of growth and life all around you that somehow the tangle of your own thoughts becomes less intimidating. From the tangle patterns emerge, pathways of thought through the trees. Somewhere in there I try to figure out what it is I am doing, where I am going, where I want to be going, and which patterns are going to close the gap between those two things. With any luck I find my way home before dark.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-And problems with the staff came up yet again. We had to move around a lot. We didn't boo a year in advance, so we booked what we could. A couple nights in one site, a night in another, and another, and so on. The park clearly isn't set up to handle that sort of thing. Nearly every park employee we talked to told us something different when we'd go to move camp sites. We were supposed to move whenever we wanted, after we checked in at the front office, not until 12, not until 1, not until 3, as soon as the camp host said it was okay, or as soon as the front office said it was okay. Literally never got the same answer twice. 
-
-One camp host even lied straight to our faces. He told us to go ahead and move sites and then came back and yelled at us for moving sites. This made Corrine quite livid. Do not try to gaslight my wife. I was less moved because I read Kafka in college. I credit this with my ability to see the post-2016 world as amusing rather than endlessly frustrating. If the modern Machine State confuses you, I suggest grabbing a copy of *The Castle* or *The Trial*. They won't help you understand anything, but at least you'll know some people saw this coming and found humor in it.
-
-I eventually found someone higher up at St. Andrews and learned the actual rules regarding moving sites (ask a ranger in the front office, if there is no ranger in the front office walk away). After that we ignored everything else and just did what that ranger had told me. I mentioned that one of the camp hosts had lied to us. The ranger seemed unsurprised. He even said to me, pointing the at ranger badge on his shirt, "if you don't see this on their shirt, just ignore them." Sound advice I had already come up with on my own.
-
-Two days later we saw the camp host who lied to us pack up and leave. I have no idea if it was because of us, but I can say this: don't lie to my wife.
-
-That probably makes it sound like we had a terrible time, which really we didn't. Most of the time we spent enjoying ourselves at the beach. The circus of moving was relatively minor and the beach is still beautiful.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-One day while we were at St. Andrews I went to a nearby gas station to fill up the Jeep. I went inside the building to give the cashier my money, and found several other people already in line. There was only one cashier, but in front of us off to the side there were three self-check out kiosks. No one made any move toward them. We all waited for the person at the register. After a couple minutes a man who'd been over at the soda machine came toward the front to pay. He looked around confusedly at those of us in line, gestured toward the self-checkout and said to no one in particular, "do you mind if I cut ahead here?"
-
-The young man in front of me immediately turned and smiled at the man and said, "Go right ahead." "Thanks," said the man and he stepped forward to the self-check out. He turned around as he started to ring up his fountain drink and asked the young man, "do you just not like self checkout or are you waiting in line for a reason?"
-
-"Last time I checked," the young man drawled, "I don't get a W2 from Racetrack, so I can't see myself doing their work for them." 
-
-The other man chuckled, but didn't say anything. He finished checking out, and went on his way. 
-
-I will confess I had never thought of self checkout this way, but now I can't see it any other way. It's become almost impossible for me to use the self-checkout because I just see myself willfully becoming, for a few minutes, an employee of that business, doing their work for them.
-
-Something about the whole encounter reminded me of a moment in David Foster Wallace's famous Kenyon graduation speech, *This Is Water*. Wallace talks through how these default thought patterns take over when we're tired, overworked, in a hurry, and so on. But that's the problem he argues, that these default settings are a choice. Not a conscious one, but a choice still and they are robbing us of seeing something more in those moments. Stopping at the store on your way home from work at rush hour doesn't have to be a moment of consumer hell, we experience it that way because our default programming has conditioned us to see it that way.
-
-> If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important—if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.  
-
-I think a lot time I use those self checkout kiosks as a way to avoid having to spend another second in crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situations. That's what they're there for right? To avoid having to add a cashier to what's already *by default*, at least that's the assumption, a terrible situation. But again, that's a choice. And not the only one.
-
-I have a note in my journal, written months before the incident above, that reads: "Every little withdrawal you can make not only resists The Machine, but empowers you. Even a tiny act, like paying cash to a person rather than swiping your implant at the self checkout screen is a choice where you can retain your humanity and the humanity of those around you."
-
-
-
-
-## Gone Fishin
-
-Every morning when I step outside I am greeted by a chorus of Ospreys circling in the glint of the rising sun. There are between four and six of them, depending on the day. They spend their days fishing, building nests, and fighting. Every evening, sitting out by the fire as dusk turns to darkness, we hear them winding down their day, circling until they settle into roosts in a dead trees around us, the females returning to their nests. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-12_174659_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3383" class="picwide" />
-
-The osprey is a consummate fisherman. Spend any time casting a line into the surf along the gulf of Mexico and you will see them. You will see them come along, hover for a few minutes, not far from wherever your line is, and then they'll drop down like a rock falling out of the sky and snatch a fish before heading inland again. Meanwhile you will sweat in the humid sun all afternoon and not get a bite.
-
-The Osprey has been here far longer than humans. The Osprey will probably be here long after we have retreated. The Osprey doesn't get sunburns. If it gets hot it doesn't complain about it. It's willing to live just about anywhere. It loves old dead trees, but it'll settle for the top of telephone poles, collapsing radio towers, even the 1970s-inspired Pensacola Beach welcome sign. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-07_131029_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3419" class="picwide" />
-
-Osprey's always make me feel like I could catch a fish. We carry quite a few fishing poles on the roof of the bus, but I rarely get them down. It's some combination of sloth and fear of failure. But those damn Ospreys. If they can do it we have to try.
-
-The weather was pretty near perfect. Sunny, but not too hot. Enough breeze to stir up waves for the kids to play in and get the Pompano out running. Or so they say. Maybe for other people the Pompano come out. Our friend John caught two in the time we were there. We caught zero. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-07_152732_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3375" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-07_150322_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3374" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-09_161424_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3378" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-07_150303_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3373" class="picwide" />
-
-The problem is that we are not serious enough about fishing. The Osprey is single minded, maniacal even, about fishing. If you want the rewards you have to put in the time. We don't put in the time. We'd rather lie around reading and playing in the surf. We reap the rewards of that, which are numerous, but fresh fish is not one of them. If we want fish, we have to be more like the osprey, focused.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-16_133050_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3389" class="picwide" />
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-16_132451_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3388" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-16_132325_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3387" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-16_145252_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3390" class="picwide" />
-</div>
-
-The one time we did hook something we didn't even know it. When Lilah went to reel in the line, as I was taking the image above, I noticed she was having trouble. We were using a 5 oz sinker, which none of us were used to, so I thought maybe it was that. But finally she said "Dad, I can't get it in, it feels like there's something on it". I came over and took the pole and started to reel it in. It felt like the hook was snagged on a log. I have never felt anything that big on a line before. I didn't even have the drag set for something that big (I'd switched from a lighter line and forgotten all about the drag setting). 
-
-Luckily a fellow fisherman nearby came over and while I kept tension on the line, he ratcheted down the drag and I started reeling in. Whatever it was had run quite a ways out before we noticed it. It took a few minutes to even get it anywhere near shore. Once it got into the surf though, it must have charged the shore, or somehow managed to get the hook out of its mouth. The line went slack before we ever saw what it was. Giant red fish? Possibly. Definitely too big to be a Pompano. Could have been a huge ray, in which case I'm glad it got off. Either way now the kids, especially Lilah, have a good story about the one that got away. I feel like that is a kind of necessary initiation into fishing. 
-
-Having failed to catch dinner we headed across the bay to [Joe Patti's wholesale seafood](https://joepattis.com/joe-pattis-seafood-and-our-history/) to buy dinner. We'd driven by it several times going between Fort Pickens and Big Lagoon. It's hard to miss, there's a life-size viking vessel out front. But sometimes as an outsider it's hard to tell the legit from the tourist trap. I'd always kind of assumed it was the latter, but our friend John assured us it was legit. And that we had to try the Caribbean Grouper. He was right. About both.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-15_133738_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3386" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-15_132844_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3384" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-15_133105_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3385" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-We bought a mess of Caribbean Grouper and Royal Red shrimp. If you've never had Royal Reds, which are only really found in the Florida Panhandle and along the Mississippi/Alabama coast, they're very different than ordinary shrimp. As the name implies they're deep reddish pink and they taste like lobster. We had a huge seafood cookout. Never let one getting away stop your seafood fest.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-07_175029_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3376" class="picwide caption" />
-
-Fishing slacked off even more after we added boogie boards to the list of things we don't have room for. They've proved very well-loved though and they definitely take precedence over fishing most days. Can't say I blame the kids for that, when the waves are big enough I'd rather be out there surfing too. Osprey don't surf.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-10_140713_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3380" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-10_141326_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3381" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-11_130530_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3382" class="picwide" />
-
-Then the weather took a turn. It was my fault. I donated the heater. It happens every year. We buy a heater in December or so and then we donate it come spring. There's just no room for a heater so the sooner we get rid of it, the better. But almost every year as soon as I take it to the donation center, the weather turns cold. This year was probably the worst—it dipped down below freezing for two nights in a row. We have plenty of blankets, and just turning on the stove to make tea and coffee in the morning makes the bus plenty warm, so it'a minor discomfort. But someone has to get up and turn on the stove.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-09_173839_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3379" class="picwide" />
-
-With it too cold to swim, we took to playing games, climbing trees, and reading books, sometimes at the same time.  
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-18_171601_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3392" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-18_165300_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3391" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-08_173457_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3377" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-20_133751_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3394" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-20_133546_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3393" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-20_140834_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3395" class="picwide" />
-
-Part of the reading in a tree comes from reading Sterling North's *[Rascal](https://bookshop.org/p/books/rascal-sterling-north/7815241?ean=9780142402528)*, which was one of my favorite books as a kid. Sterling and Rascal spend some afternoons reading in a tree, with Rascal lying in the tree on his belly. Lilah reports it is relaxing and comfortable. She recommends it to everyone.
-
-I recommend *Rascal* to everyone. Grab a copy from your local library. It is well worth re-reading as an adult. For those unfamiliar it is Sterling North's account of a year of his boyhood in small, rural Wisconsin town in 1918, which for that year he shares with a pet raccoon named Rascal. It's a world that hasn't existed since that time, but the book somehow manages to balance nostalgia with piercing, sometimes heartbreaking doses of reality. There's no changing reality, one is saving Sterling. The world must be dealt with. It cannot be changed, it cannot be shouted at, it just is and Sterling has to deal with that.
-
-It's made me realize that a big part of why we live this way is to try, as much as possible, to let our kids inhabit the sort of world young Sterling lives in, surrounded by nature, able to do what what they please with their time, but also knowing that the world is full of real responsibilities and no one is [coming to save them](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming). To remain innocent requires facing up to reality, not hiding from it. I know that the world of *Rascal* is hard to find these days, but I think it's worth chasing the idea still there, even if, in the end, it should get away from us.
-
-
-
-## Renaissance Fair
-
-One of the things I find most peculiar about our current age is our utter disregard for the past. That's only true in the realm of mainstream culture though. Step outside the increasingly tunneled vision media presents us and you find that most people love the past. They love visiting it. They love learning about it. Most of all they love pretending to be in it.
-
-What better way to understand other people in other times than to put on the clothes, use the tools, and see where you end up?
-
-We're no different. The kids love history. Travel would be pretty dull if you didn't like digging into the history of the places you're going. We've enjoyed all sorts of [re-enactment festivals](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/07/around-washburn), [working 19th century farms](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/06/alberto-and-land-between-lakes), [historic forts](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/10/rodeos-and-fur-trading-posts), and more. Our most recent foray was something less strictly educational and more oddball fun—[The Gulf Coast Renaissance Fair, Pirate Festival, Wild West Roundup, and Historical Festival](http://gcrf.us).
-
-I have never been to a Renaissance Fair before, but I've heard some stories. This one was pretty laid back compared to some accounts I've heard. There were plenty of costumes, but there were also plenty of us not in character. Or in totally different characters, like the girls, who dressed in Greek Chitons. Ancient Greece wasn't on the bill, but the very first person we saw inside the festival took one look at the kids and said, "are those Chitons?" Clearly these were our people.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_130920-1_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3367" class="picwide" />
-
-The festival was true to its name. There was a section for Wild West enthusiasts, a section for pirates, a section for all things roughly late Medieval to Renaissance, and plenty of random elements as well, like fire eaters and a woman laying on a bed of nails. 
-
-As anyone who's ever been to Medieval Times knows (I have not, but I assume), the big draw for kids is always going to be the jousting. Huge war horses done up in armor, knights in full metal armor as well, riding at each other with actual jousts—who doesn't love that?
-
-The answers is, everyone loves that. Pro tip: head the stands early if you want a seat. We did not, and had to content ourselves with some standing room in what was, I think, the cattle pen when the rodeo is in town. The jousting turned out to be slow getting started, with overly long intros to the knights that we couldn't hear because we were behind the speakers. 
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_123138_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3363" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_123123_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3362" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-The girls lost interest so Corrinne took them over to do some archery. Even I was contemplating heading elsewhere, but Elliott was not to be dissuaded. Eventually the real action got underway though and it did prove worth the wait.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_134709_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3368" class="picwide" />
-
-
-It doesn't look like much in the photos. In fact it looks like they're missing each other, but they aren't. It was wood ramming metal . It look I believe seven passes before one knight unseated the other.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_140100-1_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3369" class="picwide" />
-
-When that was over we wandered off to try our hand at archery. Anything hands-on is always the favorite thing with out kids. Arrows were flying. A few even hit the bullseye.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_130455_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3364" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_130508_renaissance-fair_x3dx4KX.jpg" id="image-3366" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_162330_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3370" class="cluster picwide" />
- <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_162411_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3371" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-03-05_073454_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3372" class="cluster pic66" />
-</span>
-</div>
-
-We ate a packed lunch with some overpriced lemonade in the shade and then the kids decided to break into their savings accounts to buy bows and arrows and a cross bow before we called it a day. We're now the most heavily armed campers in Big Lagoon. Well, most visibly armed anyway.
-
-
-
-
-## Wagoneer
-
-My favorite way to travel is with everyone in the bus, no other vehicle involved. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-19_080825_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3360" class="picwide" />
-
-As we've slowed down our travels though, spending more time in an area makes it nice to have a car to go exploring, run errands, and get to places the bus can't. For that reason we bought a 2006 Volvo during the pandemic and have been relatively happy with it ever since. It's easily our lowest maintenance car ever. Other than changing the oil periodically we haven't done anything to it. 
-
-Which is to say, we never loved it. It was practical, ran well, but it was just a modern car. They're all the same. Ours was black, but this graphic illustrates what I think of modern cars better than anything I could say.
-
-<div style="margin-top: 4rem">
-<img src="images/2023/design.jpg" id="image-3355" class="picfull"/>
-</div>
-
-We talked about replacing the Volvo. We decided we'd get a late 1980s Jeep Cherokee, with the 4.0 engine. Chrysler's last inline six is, by all accounts, a great engine. In some ways it's a bit like the 318 in the bus, it runs forever. My kind of engine. And hey, I could figure out fuel injection. Probably.
-
-But the Volvo ran fine. I don't fix things that aren't broken. The Cherokee was just a rough plan.
-
-Then the Volvo started to show some alarming behaviors—stuttering and dying in parking lots, randomly rolling down windows. Things I found best described as "electrical gremlins"[^1]. I tried to ignore these as best I could, but one day in Destin the Volvo stuttered and died in a parking lot and it took me quite a bit of tinkering to get it running again and home.
-
-From what I read on the internet that night it sounded like it could be the battery. Or something far more expensive. The battery is in the trunk (I don't know either) and it was a two-year battery going on year five, which seemed like a reasonable culprit. The next day I dropped the kids off at the condo my parents had rented and headed over to the auto parts store to get the battery and alternator tested. 
-
-On the way I happen to past a very cool looking old Jeep Wagoneer. Not a Cherokee, but in most ways cooler than a Cherokee. One of my best friends in high school had a Wagoneer and it had hauled all our gear climbing, hiking, and skiing more times than I could count. I always loved that Jeep. It seemed strangely fated that I should see one now. I texted Corrinne a photo and said, hey, maybe we should just buy this Wagoneer and be done with the Volvo. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-17_162333_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3357" class="picwide" />
-
-She immediately started doing research to figure out if it was a good deal or not. I got the alternator and battery tested. Both were fine. According to the test. I decided to replace the battery anyway. Except that the parts store told me I couldn't. I did not believe them so I looked it up myself and sure enough, you can't change the battery in a 2006 Volvo without the expensive diagnostic tool to "reset" everything. Sigh. The Volvo was on its way out of our lives.
-
-I drove back over to the Wagoneer to have a closer look. A cursory inspection revealed a little body rust here and there, the front windshield had leaked on the passengers side, but the body was in surprisingly good shape for being being 34 years old. I was shocked to learn in was a 1989, it looked much older thanks to what's known as a "Rhino Chaser" front end the owner had put on. 
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-17_133235_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3356" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-20_200749_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3358" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-
-I took a few more pictures and texted the owner to see which engine it had. It turned out to have a rebuilt stock engine, the V8 AMC 360. Despite being a 1989 vehicle, the AMC 360 is an aspirated engine. The Venn diagram of vehicles with carburetors and post-Freon air conditioning systems is very small. But the Wagoneer is in there. Check.
-
-We had family in town and it turned out the owner was out of town for the week as well, so we mostly set the idea aside for a week. 
-
-After life settle back down we moved up to Fort Pickens for [the bus's photo shoot](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/02/photo-shoot), but before the photographer got there I took a drive back to look over the car in more detail and talk to the owner. Everything I was interested in checked out. The number of recently replaced things on this vehicle is too long to list. It's easier to say the transmission is original and pretty much everything else is new. The previous owner sunk a lot of money into it and then, apparently, his wife wanted to get rid of it. My wife wanted to get it. We had a deal.
-
-A week later we wired over the money, signed some papers, and drove off in our new 1989 Wagoneer.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-20_200820_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3359" class="picwide" />
-
-We haven't had a chance to really shine it up yet, but
-
-
-
-[^1]: Further research revealed that electrical gremlins in a Volvo of this era are not uncommon and notoriously difficult and expensive to solve. They sometimes include fun things like the car suddenly shutting down at highways speeds, the brakes deciding not to engage, the throttle sticking open, and other treats brought to you by modern over-engineering.
-
-
-## Fort Pickens Photo Shoot
-
-After [shining up the bus in Rocky Bayou](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/02/family) we headed back over to Fort Pickens where we were scheduled to meet up with a photographer who was shooting the bus for an article I wrote for *Wired* magazine. Both *Wired* and I wanted us to be out west for the photo shoot, but that didn't happen. Fort Pickens is the most wide open place in this area, it would have to do.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-19_080841_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3345" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-14_075619_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3341" class="picwide caption" />
-
-How I came to write a story about the bus for *Wired* is something of a story in itself.
-
-I don't recall how it came about, but a few years ago some enterprising person at Wired put together a mentoring system, which connected those of us with less experience with more experienced writers and editors. Now, my current title at *Wired* is "senior writer", but I signed up to be mentored because this seemed like a good opportunity to learn.
-
-People sometimes ask me for advice about becoming a writer and I always tell them, find something useful to do for money and keep writing in your spare time. Making a living writing is very difficult. Most people I know who have succeed have had some way to get through the lean years—either they come from money, have a significant other who makes makes enough to support them, or were prepared to live on lentils and rice and beans for a very, very long time. I went the latter route. I hate lentils.
-
-I was fascinated by the early internet and started putting together websites in my spare time way back in 1996-1997. By 2000, the height of the dot-com bubble, I was pretty good at it, such as it was back then. I was still working restaurants to pay the bills, but I had a nice side income building websites. Meanwhile, a friend became a writer, and later editor, for Webmonkey.com, which was *the* place to go if you wanted to learn how to build websites on the early internet. It was a collection of tutorials mostly written by the developers working on Wired's website, which was then called Hot Wired.
-
-By coincidence in about 2002 I met up with him and his wife in New York. Despite me living in Georgia and them living in San Francisco, somehow we were all in New York at the same time (we've also met up in [Paris](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2011/05/from-here-we-go-sublime) and [San Miguel de Allende](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/06/hasta-luego) by coincidence). I remember telling him that I'd just been rejected by a bunch of graduate writing programs and he said something like, meh, that's for the best, pitch me a tutorial about web development, I'll get you a little money, and then see how much you care about grad school. 
-
-So I did. And he rejected my first pitch. Hilarious.
-
-Even when you have an in, you don't always get the story. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-14_111142_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3342" class="picwide caption" />
-
-But he took my second pitch. And the third. I was still working my day job running a restaurant kitchen, but it wasn't long before I was making more money writing than I was in the kitchen or building websites. Don't worry, that didn't last long. Luckily for me, I liked cooking and I didn't quit that job because eventually economic times changed and the tutorial money dried up. Not entirely, but it wasn't nearly as good or frequent. Eventually *Wired* sold Webmonkey and my friend went on to other things.
-
-I'd been saving every penny I could for several years though, and so I did finally did quit the restaurant. Rather than getting serious about writing though, I took my savings and went [traveling around Southeast Asia](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/southeast-asia/2/) and [Europe](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/europe/) for a year. 
-
-Writing for Webmonkey did open quite a few doors, but mostly they led to programming jobs, not a ton, but enough to extend my trip in Southeast Asia. I'd go travel around Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, periodically returning to Bangkok to work and earn some more money. Then I'd go out again. I ended up worked freelance this way for about three years, some of it traveling, some of it back in Athens, GA.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-13_165517_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3346" class="picwide" />
-
-Around 2008 *Wired* re-acquired Webmonkey.com and relaunched it with my old editor now in charge. I went back to writing nearly full-time, though I was still technically freelance. That lasted for about five years. One day *Wired* got a new editor who decided he didn't want Webmonkey anymore and shut it down. I went back to programming. About a year later is when we sold our house and left on this trip.
-
-When we were in Mexico my primary client in my freelance business tragically passed away and the company he founded cut me loose. I had put all my eggs in one basket (classic small business mistake, don't do it, no matter how good that client is, don't do it) and I had to scramble to find work. One day Corrinne noticed a full time position at *Wired*. I still did the occasional freelance review and enjoyed it so I applied. I also applied for a job elsewhere as a documentation writer, but I was tired of writing about technical subjects. I didn't want to tell people how to make things on the web. I didn't want to write about software anymore. Moving from Webmonkey to Wired would, theoretically, give me a chance to write about other things. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-13_172501_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3348" class="picwide caption" />
-
-That is how I ended up a product reviewer for *Wired*. Note the total absence of journalistic experience in that story. So when the mentorship opportunity came up, I jumped on it. I was extremely lucky to get paired with someone from a very different part of *Wired*, who primarily worked on long, involved pieces called feature stories. This is what you probably think of when you think of reading a story in a magazine. 
-
-I told that editor that I'd always wanted to write a feature. She very kindly started coaching me. This was right around the time we moved to the house in Iva and, despite being stationary for the first time in years, our internet was worse than ever. I decided I should write about rural internet and how bad it is. I called experts. I got lots of quotes. 
-
-But then I started paying more attention to my neighbors out there in the woods. They didn't seem to be hurting for internet. Sure it wasn't great, but what use was the online world anyway? There was livestock to feed, fields to plow, work to be done. I came to believe that whole notion that rural America needs better internet is a story people in cities tell themselves because it's what they would want if they were out here. It's not what the people out here want. Rural America does not need further dependence on the complex systems that are already failing all around us. Rural America needs investment in localized systems and resources for local entrepreneurs. The internet is good enough. 
-
-I had to come back to my mentor and say, you know what, this isn't the story for me. She was very gracious about it and kept meeting with me. The mentorship was supposed to last six months, but a year later we were still talking once a week. Somewhere in that time I started telling her stories about living in the bus, and she said, you know, you should write one of these stories down, but tell it in such a way that Wired readers will get something out of it. I ended up wrapping a story of how I came to love working on engines around the larger culture of repair. 
-
-Now, almost three years after we started talking, that story is going to be in the May issue of *Wired*. At least that's the plan, you never really know until the ink is dry. I do know that it's real enough that *Wired* paid a professional photographer from Houston to come hang out and take pictures of the bus for a few days. The photographer they sent was very nice and made something we were all dreading not that bad in the end. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-19_072422_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3354" class="picwide" />
-
-That's the story of the story. Of course the photo shoot was only one weekend out of nearly two weeks we spent at Fort Pickens. We had plenty of beach time and even discovered a spot we could get away from everyone and play baseball in the cool of the evenings.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-14_161701_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3349" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-14_163903_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3350" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-20_170138_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3351" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-13_170550_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3347" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-19_072035_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3352" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-15_163007_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3344" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-14_165109_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3343" class="picwide" />
-
-I still worry that this story may bring unwanted attention to us, but we already get quite a bit of attention, I can't see one story adding too much. Hopefully. While it's about the bus, and me to some degree, it's really more of a ode to the dying culture of repair, the DIY spirit, and the love of sturdy old things that so many people I've met over the years share with me. For me at least, it's about everyone else. We'll see what the rest of world thinks in a couple of months.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-20_200926_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3353" class="picwide" />
-
-
-## Family
-
-After a few weeks in the Pensacola area we headed back east, across the Florida panhandle to St. Andrews state park, a little postage stamp of protected land off the coast of Panama City Beach. 
-
-Apparently this was once a gem in the Florida State Park system, but the universal consensus is that when it was remodeled following a hurricane, they ruined it. I'm not sure when they ruined it, or who they are, but if St. Andrews was ever a nice place, it's not now. Now it's indistinguishable from the over-priced RV parks across the bay in Panama City. Maybe this is what people want, but everyone we've met talks about how it was ruined, so I don't buy that. As with so many things right now, I think St. Andrews is what you get when you let a very vocal minority push an agenda. Luckily we were only there for three days. 
-
-While the campground is awful, the rest of the park is nice and there is some excellent birding, with a heron rookery in the middle of a pond. Hiking one day the kids and I happened upon an osprey devouring its catch on a branch not more than ten fee above our heads. It didn't pay the slightest attention to us until we walked directly underneath it.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-23_163634_01_st-andrews-birds.jpg" id="image-3323" class="picwide" />
-
-From St. Andrews we backtracked a few miles inland to Fred Gannon Rocky Bayou State Park. Tucked on the northern side of Choctawhatchee Bay, in a well-preserved maritime forest of live oaks and palmettos, "Fred," as the kids dubbed it, was much more our speed. There were plenty of trails to explore and the campsites where nice and spread out compared to St. Andrews.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-05_144107_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3324" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-05_144223_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3325" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-03_101408_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3327" class="picwide" />
-
-
-My parents flew in for a visit, arriving the same day we did. They rented a condo across the bay in Destin and we took turns driving back and forth across the bridge, spending the nice days hiking around Fred Gannon and going to the beach in Destin. Fred Gannon was the highlight though. There are just two trails there, but they're really nice trails through forests carpeted with deer moss and old growth pine.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-08_164740_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3335" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-08_164543_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3334" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-03_113739_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3326" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-02-08_164233_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3330" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-03_114305_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3328" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-29_141030_fred-parents.jpg" id="image-3329" class="picwide" />
-
-It turned cooler and we had a little bit of rain, which made it nice to have a condo to hang out in. The kids could spread out their art supplies and books and lounge in oversize chairs, which sounds strange, but is something they're not really used to doing. We also discovered there is such a thing as black light mini golf, though let me tell you, the novelty of that wears off around hole three.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-29_144449_fred-parents.jpg" id="image-3331" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-01-30_163427_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3321" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-01_161803_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3322" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-01-30_153050_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3320" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/IMG_20230129_144610.jpg" id="image-3336" class="picwide caption" />
-
-Toward the end of my parents' visit, my cousin and his wife, who were on their way back to Washington, stopped by to hang out for a couple of days. My cousin and I hadn't seen each other in over five years, not since [Thanksgiving in Nevada](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/the-city). It wasn't long, but we spent plenty of time around the fire, which is always the best way to spend time with people. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-03_135536_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3332" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-02-03_164440_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3333" class="picwide" />
-
-It was good to see everyone, but then, all too quickly, everyone had to head home. 
-
-We spent a couple extra days at Fred, catching up on missed work, running some important errands, and give the bus a fresh wash and wax for an upcoming photo shoot. More on that next time.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-## Pensacola History
-
-From Fort Pickens we came around the entirety of Pensacola Bay to a small park on the western edge, Big Lagoon. From our campsite there it was a short car ride to Perdido Key, which is another part of Gulf Islands National Seashore. Although it takes the better part of two hours to drive all the way around from Fort Pickens, in the end, you can just about skip a rock from the tip Perdido Key back to the tip of Fort Pickens.
-
-We were hoping to get some more beach time at Perdido Key, but the temperature dropped considerably, making it less beachy. Then a storm blew in a couple of rainy days. I use rainy days to get ahead on work so that I have more free time when the weather is nice, but being inside is no fun for the kids. That's when we look for indoor things to do. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-18_184523_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3298" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-18_184335_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3297" class="picwide" />
-
-We wanted to go [back to the Naval Aviation Museum](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/03/island-sun), but it's on the Navy base and the base is closed to anyone not on active duty. Driving through Pensacola though I noticed a sign for a museum of commerce that said it had a street scene, which in my head was going to be just like what we [saw at the Milwaukee Public museum](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/07/hello-milwaukee). And it was, just a bit smaller, but it led us to the rest of Pensacola's very cool historic village.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_153051_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3301" class="picwide caption" />
-
-It must have been absolutely mind blowing to come from the crowded, filthy, disease-ridden cities of Europe, like London or Lisbon, to the Americas in the 16th century. 
-
-It's difficult for me to imagine what it would have been like to make landfall here in the 16th century, but my guess is that two things would stand out: the sheer amount of wildlife and the relative lack of people. Not to say that there weren't huge civilizations here in the Americas, but by and large they were not on the coasts, so they weren't something you'd likely notice at first. 
-
-What I think you'd notice at first, at least what I think I would notice at first, is the staggering number of birds. Even 18th century accounts of this region are still full of descriptions of the huge flocks of shorebirds, flying overhead for hours, in the words of the well-traveled William Bartram. And that's after over a 100 years of Europeans hunting.
-
-Despite all the press the Plymouth area gets, Florida is where the early European exploration of the present day United States began. Pensacola was established in 1559, making it the oldest point of settlement in the U.S. The catch is that Pensacola was abandoned after two years and then taken up again later, so if you count continuous settlement, Saint Augustine, Florida, established in 1565, wins by a few years. Maybe don't bring that up in Pensacola though.
-
-I know about early Florida history because I am fascinated by the life of Álvar Núñez, better known by the unfortunate nickname Cabeza de Vaca, or head of the cow. Núñez was long dead by the time any cities were finally established, but he started kicking around Florida as early as 1528, and ended up being shipwrecked, made a slave, escaping, shipwrecked again, and then wandering the desert southwest of America and Mexico for eight years. Along the way he befriended the local inhabitants and lived among them for many years. His is one of the few Spanish accounts of the area that spends any time describing the people he met.
-
-He's just a footnote to the history in the Pensacola historic village though since all trace of him, and most traces of the Spanish, are long gone. The buildings that make up the downtown historic area are pulled from Pensacola's more recent past—cottages of 19th century settlers, a museum of industry devoted to everything from lumber and turpentine, to brick making and fishing, along with a couple of train cars from the railroads moving it all out to the rest of the world.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_161005_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3303" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_153755_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3302" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_133509_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3317" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_154604_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3318" class="picwide" />
-
-It may look boring in photos, but I love these tributes to the times when people did work of actual value to the world rather than getting paid to blabber about random garbage like I do. At least my wife does stuff of actual value. And yes, I know it's hard to live on the road when you have to slash pines and haul sap, but it still has a certain appeal.
-
-In terms of the hardships we endure in our work, I don't think it's ever been easier to live than right now. Even the worst jobs I can think of are nothing compared to say coal mining in the 19th century. In terms of work, I don't think anyone in European history has had it easier than the current western world. And yet no one seems very happy. I don't think the answer is to go back in time and draw a box around that world and say this is how it should be, but clearly making work "easier" has had some unintended consequences.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_160211_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3316" class="picwide caption" />
-
-Across the street from the industry museum was the commerce museum with its turn of the century Pensacola street scene. I'm not a nostalgic person by nature, but there are some things I am mad that I missed, like street cars. I wish we still had street cars in every city. Street cars are just fantastic.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_162801_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3304" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_162831_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3305" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_162914_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3306" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_163258_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3307" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_163331_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3308" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_163417_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3309" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_163456_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3310" class="picwide" />
-
-The tickets to the historic district also get you into the Pensacola Museum of History down the street, which is mainly a natural history museum, but then somewhat inexplicably has a huge room that's a replica of a much-loved local bar that shutdown a few years ago. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_173649_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3311" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_175629_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3312" class="picwide" />
-
-After a long day wandering the town we decided to grab some pizza, which normally I probably wouldn't write about, but this pizza place happened to be in the bottom floor of the old Sacred Heart Hospital, which is an imposing, and frankly quite creepy building that looks like this:
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_182550_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3313" class="picwide" />
-
-The pizza was good. The fact that we were sitting, eating, in what used to be the morgue... was, well, not how we wanted to end our night. On the way home we grabbed some ice cream and had a more upbeat ending to our day back at the bus.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_204211_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3314" class="picwide" />
-
-
-
-
-## Pickens original
-Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />
-
-If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.
-
-No matter how full the campground is—and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />
-
-After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />
-
-The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here is out to get you."
-
-That sums it up well. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 
-
-For reasons I can't explain, we were left alone. But some friends of our came down to visit and they ran afoul of the Fort Pickens gestapo. Their kids climbed up in a tree to read. Heaven forbid. The camp host came over and said, "I'd rather you didn't climb the tree, there could be nesting birds." Now, set aside for a moment the fact that our friend is a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service, in addition to an avid birder, and is well aware, as anyone who knows anything about birds or seasons, that no songbirds are nesting down here right now. What irked me (I was not there to respond) was that "I'd rather you didn't" bit. You're a camp host. I don't give a damn what you'd rather I do.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />
-
-As you might expect from a place where people feel the need to flout their petty powers, there are more rules here than anywhere else we've ever been. Also as you might expect, the condition of things at Fort Pickens is abysmal. There are bathrooms here so moldy they need to be condemned. But again, this is what you'd expect right? The more concerned leaders are with meaningless minutia, the more they can avoid looking at the crumbling big picture, and the more they hire the kinds of people who yell at children and don't do their job cleaning the bathrooms. 
-
-Now, lest you think we had a horrible time, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. There are worse problems than this for sure. Still, reflecting on what was happening back in the campground I realized Fort Pickens is a great lesson in what happens when leaders fail.
-
-I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.
-
-It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.
-
-When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself—that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.
-
-Chances are the camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.
-
-What's strange to me, what worries me, quite frankly, is that no one challenges the situation at Fort Pickens. Including me. Surely the grown men and women working in the campground at Fort Pickens must realize their powerlessness, at least intuitively. Why do none of the rest of us say, *hey, man, what are you doing? Why did tell that kid to get out of tree? With all the problems of childhood these days, do we need to add climbing a tree to the list? And really, is that why you were put here on earth, to keep kids out of trees?*
-
-I'm guessing even this guy would say no, that's not his life's mission. I hope anyway. I hope he's not so far gone that he really does enjoy yelling at children. I plan to ask him if he ever tells my kids to get out of a tree. Not to be rude, but because I want to understand. I want to understand how he got to where he is. My guess is, where he is isn't a very happy place. And yet he lives in one of the most beautiful beaches in the country.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
-
-My point here isn't that Fort Pickens sucks. I mean, it kinda does. But the larger point is that we as a culture are headed to dark places when we get this obsessed with pointless power and blindly enforcing rules, with no idea why, the *just doing my job* logic prevails well outside this campground. This is the same thinking that underpinned the rise of all the horrible despots of the 20th century. All of them got where they got with the backing of legions of people who said the four most dangerous words in the English language: I'm just following orders.
-
-It's not just that people are following orders. That's bad, but even worse, people find a way out of their own powerlessness through the tiny bit of power they get by enforcing orders. That's the danger. What starts as a perceived necessity ends in a perverse pleasure. One people don't like to let go of.
-
-I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. 
-
-I know, I know. More travel, less philosophy. Why bother saying any of this? Because I believe that if we don't start questioning the people who are just following orders. Not to be rude or mean. Not because we think we're better, but because it's how we snap each other out of our trances. I don't see when I'm being this way. My family confronts me. I snap out of it. If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. And if we don't snap out of it, well, we already know how that ends.
-
-## Fort Pickens Final
-
-Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />
-
-If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.
-
-No matter how full the campground is—and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />
-
-After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />
-
-The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 
-
-I'll confess the first time I read that stuff I thought to myself, boy, these reviewers really like to complain. Plus I know every park has to deal with plenty of problematic people. But then, the more park staff I met the more I found myself thinking, wait, why was that person so rude? My general default reaction in those kinds of situations is to think, *gosh, that person must be having a bad day, they must not be [on their path](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/path), that's too bad*. Still, that's just one person, I generally go on my way without another thought. But then it was two people. And then three. And then there comes a point where you realize it's not the reviewers, it's not you. It really is just totally bonkers here. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here is watching you from behind a dune, waiting for you to do something wrong."
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />
-
-It's no way to live. For the people working here that is. For reasons I can't explain, we were mostly left alone, but it was still a strange place. And it wasn't just camp hosts, it was systemic. From the moment you arrive here there is none of the usual "welcome to your national parks!" enthusiasm we have found at every other park. Here everyone makes you feel as if you are a burden the staff has to bear. You also get the feeling they see everyone as someone who's out to screw them over somehow. At least that's how you feel. The sooner they can catch you doing something wrong, the sooner they have a reason to get rid of you. 
-
-Still has a great beach though.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
-
-I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way, it certainly wasn't this way when we were here in 2017 and 2018. Perhaps the new superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. Sometimes places are like that, you just have to ignore it and carry on, which is what we did. We're just passing through, though we will be back again next month, and the month after that, so we'll see. If all else fails we'll just spend more time on the deserted beaches.
-
-Part of the reason we didn't pay much attention to the shenanigans of For Pickens is that we had company. Some friends of ours from Wisconsin came down to visit, spending a week with us at Fort Pickens. The kids got to reunite most of the pack they ran around in all summer in Washburn and the adults got to spend the days in relative peace on the beach. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-11_145419_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3294" class="picwide" />
-
-One of the things I think people don't understand about traveling the way we do is how quickly you can become very close friends with people. These friendships often, in my experience, prove more durable and long lasting than any other. The crucible of shared experience is in my opinion far better than shared time. I am still in touch with people I traveled with 20 years ago and feel like I know them far better than some people I've lived nearby for those same decades. The same is true for children, as far as I can tell. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-14_131258_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3295" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-14_133400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3296" class="picwide" />
-
-The difference is that our kids have been doing this for more of their life than I have, which has given them an ability to form friendships quickly. That's a skill I wish I had. I know some of that is just being a kid, but even then, the process has never come easy for me. Luckily, in the this case, the apples fell far enough away from the tree that I don't have to worry.
-
-## Pickens new 
-Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />
-
-If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.
-
-No matter how full the campground is—and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />
-
-After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />
-
-The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here watching you from behind a dune, waiting for you to do something wrong."
-
-That sums it up well. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 
-
-For reasons I can't explain, we were left alone. But some friends of our came down to visit and they ran afoul of the Fort Pickens dune hiders. They found something wrong with our friends. Their kids climbed up in a tree to read. Heaven forbid. The camp host came over and said, "I'd rather you didn't climb the tree, there could be nesting birds." Now, set aside for a moment the fact that our friend is a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service, in addition to an avid birder, and is well aware, as anyone who knows anything about birds or seasons, that no songbirds are nesting down here right now. What irked me (and I was not there to respond) was that "I'd rather you didn't" bit. You're a camp host. I don't give a damn what you'd rather I do or don't do.
-
-As you might expect from a place where people feel the need to flout their petty powers, there are more rules here than anywhere else we've ever been. Also as you might expect, the condition of things at Fort Pickens is abysmal. There are bathrooms here so moldy they need to be condemned. But again, this is what you'd expect right? The more concerned leaders are with meaningless minutia, the more they can avoid looking at the crumbling big picture, and the more they hire the kinds of people who yell at children and don't do their job cleaning the bathrooms. 
-
-It wasn't just camp hosts though, it was systemic. From the moment you arrived there was none of the usual "welcome to your national parks!" enthusiasm we have found at every other park. Here everyone made you feel as if you were a burden the staff had to bear. And chances are you were out to screw them. The sooner they could catch you doing something wrong, the sooner they'd have a reason to get rid of you. I saw it in the office where you checked in, the attitude of the people at the entrance gate (where we weren't even so much as offered a map, luckily we knew where to go, but if you didn't, too bad for you). I saw it in the way people were told which was to park their cars. I saw it in the way no one told the tent campers that the bathrooms were going to be shut down all day. I saw everywhere, all the time. One bad camp host would not be worth writing about. Fort Pickens is study in leadership failure.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />
-
-Now, lest you think we had a horrible time, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. The good news at Fort Pickens is that it's easy to avoid the staff. 
-
-But I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.
-
-It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.
-
-When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself—that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.
-
-That's doubly true when everyone around us is doing the same thing. Once the leader normalizes this behavior it is very tough to transcend it.
-
-The camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.
-
-
-What's strange to me, what worries me, quite frankly, is that no one challenges the situation at Fort Pickens. Including me. Surely the grown men and women working in the campground at Fort Pickens must realize their powerlessness, at least intuitively. Why do none of the rest of us say, *hey, man, what are you doing? Why did tell that kid to get out of tree? With all the problems of childhood these days, do we need to add climbing a tree to the list? And really, is that why you were put here on earth, to keep kids out of trees?*
-
-I'm guessing even this guy would say no, that's not his life's mission. I hope anyway. I hope he's not so far gone that he really does enjoy yelling at children. I plan to ask him if he ever tells my kids to get out of a tree. Not to be rude, but because I want to understand. I want to understand how he got to where he is. My guess is, where he is isn't a very happy place. And yet he lives in one of the most beautiful beaches in the country.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
-
-My point here isn't that Fort Pickens sucks. I mean, it kinda does. But the larger point is that we as a culture are headed to dark places when we get this obsessed with pointless power and blindly enforcing rules, with no idea why, the *just doing my job* logic prevails well outside this campground. This is the same thinking that underpinned the rise of all the horrible despots of the 20th century. All of them got where they got with the backing of legions of people who said the four most dangerous words in the English language: I'm just following orders.
-
-It's not just that people are following orders. That's bad, but even worse, people find a way out of their own powerlessness through the tiny bit of power they get by enforcing orders. That's the danger. What starts as a perceived necessity ends in a perverse pleasure. One people don't like to let go of.
-
-I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. 
-
-I know, I know. More travel, less philosophy. Why bother saying any of this? Because I believe that if we don't start questioning the people who are just following orders. Not to be rude or mean. Not because we think we're better, but because it's how we snap each other out of our trances. I don't see when I'm being this way. My family confronts me. I snap out of it. If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. And if we don't snap out of it, well, we already know how that ends.
-
-The solution I think is to make sure the people around you feel comfortable confronting you. I know I don't see when I'm behaving this way. I'm not behaving this way, damnit. I'm right. It's fine when I do it. But then my family confronts me. I snap out of it. That's the only way to save ourselves from ourselves—with help from others.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
-
-I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. Whatever the reason, my hope is that someday soon the right person will ask the right question and another right person will snap out of it. They'll look aroudn the way you do when someone calls you out and think, *wait, what was I thinking? I'm sorry...*
-
-If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. 
-
-
-
-## Fort Pickens
-
-Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />
-
-If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.
-
-No matter how full the campground is—and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />
-
-After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />
-
-The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here is out to get you."
-
-That sums it up well. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 
-
-For reasons I can't explain, we were left alone, but it got me thinking. Whenever I see a lot of rules and people being very, well, ruley. I always think, the leadership here as failed. Good leaders don't need rules. They set a tone, they make sure the people under them understand the mission and they give those people the autonomy to make decisions on their own. None of that was happening here. This was a strict set of rules that will be enforced or else and the culture that comes from living that way, e.g. high fives when you "bust" someone sort thing.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />
-
-Now, lest you think we had a horrible time because of some overbearing camp hosts, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. And I didn't even think about them for more than an afternoon. But I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.
-
-It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.
-
-When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself—that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.
-
-Chances are the camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.
-
-The solution I think is to make sure the people around you feel comfortable confronting you. I know I don't see when I'm behaving this way. I'm not behaving this way, damnit. I'm right. It's fine when I do it. But then my family confronts me. I snap out of it. That's the only way to save ourselves from ourselves—with help from others.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
-
-I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. Whatever the reason, my hope is that someday soon the right person will ask the right question and another right person will snap out of it. They'll look aroudn the way you do when someone calls you out and think, *wait, what was I thinking? I'm sorry...*
-
-If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. 
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-But some friends of our came down to visit and they ran afoul of the Fort Pickens gestapo. Their kids climbed up in a tree to read. Heaven forbid. The camp host came over and said, "I'd rather you didn't climb the tree, there could be nesting birds." Now, set aside for a moment the fact that our friend is a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service, in addition to an avid birder, and is well aware, as anyone who knows anything about birds or seasons, that no songbirds are nesting down here right now. What irked me (I was not there to respond) was that "I'd rather you didn't" bit. You're a camp host. I don't give a damn what you'd rather I do.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />
-
-As you might expect from a place where people feel the need to flout their petty powers, there are more rules here than anywhere else we've ever been. Also as you might expect, the condition of things at Fort Pickens is abysmal. There are bathrooms here so moldy they need to be condemned. But again, this is what you'd expect right? The more concerned leaders are with meaningless minutia, the more they can avoid looking at the crumbling big picture, and the more they hire the kinds of people who yell at children and don't do their job cleaning the bathrooms. 
-
-Now, lest you think we had a horrible time, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. There are worse problems than this for sure. Still, reflecting on what was happening back in the campground I realized Fort Pickens is a great lesson in what happens when leaders fail.
-
-I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.
-
-It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.
-
-When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself—that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.
-
-Chances are the camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.
-
-What's strange to me, what worries me, quite frankly, is that no one challenges the situation at Fort Pickens. Including me. Surely the grown men and women working in the campground at Fort Pickens must realize their powerlessness, at least intuitively. Why do none of the rest of us say, *hey, man, what are you doing? Why did tell that kid to get out of tree? With all the problems of childhood these days, do we need to add climbing a tree to the list? And really, is that why you were put here on earth, to keep kids out of trees?*
-
-I'm guessing even this guy would say no, that's not his life's mission. I hope anyway. I hope he's not so far gone that he really does enjoy yelling at children. I plan to ask him if he ever tells my kids to get out of a tree. Not to be rude, but because I want to understand. I want to understand how he got to where he is. My guess is, where he is isn't a very happy place. And yet he lives in one of the most beautiful beaches in the country.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
-
-My point here isn't that Fort Pickens sucks. I mean, it kinda does. But the larger point is that we as a culture are headed to dark places when we get this obsessed with pointless power and blindly enforcing rules, with no idea why, the *just doing my job* logic prevails well outside this campground. This is the same thinking that underpinned the rise of all the horrible despots of the 20th century. All of them got where they got with the backing of legions of people who said the four most dangerous words in the English language: I'm just following orders.
-
-It's not just that people are following orders. That's bad, but even worse, people find a way out of their own powerlessness through the tiny bit of power they get by enforcing orders. That's the danger. What starts as a perceived necessity ends in a perverse pleasure. One people don't like to let go of.
-
-I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. 
-
-I know, I know. More travel, less philosophy. Why bother saying any of this? Because I believe that if we don't start questioning the people who are just following orders. Not to be rude or mean. Not because we think we're better, but because it's how we snap each other out of our trances. I don't see when I'm being this way. My family confronts me. I snap out of it. If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. And if we don't snap out of it, well, we already know how that ends.
-
-
-## Cold Christmas Walk
-
-After a week at Grayton we moved down the coastline to our favorite place in the Florida panhandle: St George Island. This is the wildest, least developed area I know of in the Florida panhandle. We've visited St. George more than any other spot and we never tire of it. We'd spend more time here if we could, but it's not a big campground and everyone wants to be here.
-
-This is where we holed up for the cold front that swept across the United States around Christmas. Even down here the panhandle, where the clear tropical waters still looked inviting, the temperature dipped into the low 20s. I had to put on socks for a week and regular readers know how I feel about socks.
-
-The problem with cold is that it tends to keep me indoors—I have to fight a tendency to sit around in the bus that doesn't exist when the weather is warm. To avoid falling into the trap of inaction I forced myself out on a long walk in the cold. There's a trail leading right out of the campground here to a point that sticks out into the Apalachicola Bay. It's a wide sandy trail through a slash pine forest. I've been quite sure what species "slash" pines are. The name comes from the turpentine making process, which involves slashing the tree to collect the sap, but there are several species capable of making turpentine. 
-
-Whatever the case the tall pines are popular with Bald Eagles. I saw four in the five miles I walked. Along with seemingly every yellow rumped warbler in America. I mostly stopped birdwatching while I was here, mostly because every little bird I saw flitting in the bushes turned out to be a yellow rumped warbler. Florida in winter is just yellow rumpled warblers all the way down.
-
-Despite the cold and the wind I saw a suprising amount of wildlife out and about, even a little yellow rat snake that came out to grab a bit of sunshine and maybe a bite to eat before the freezing cold of Christmas Eve set in. 
-
-Gap point, as the end of the trail is called, was a windy, wild place when I was out there on Christmas eve. I had the place to myself, save for the occasional circling eagle.
-
-While I'm not fan of the cold, if it *has* to be cold, Christmas is the time to do it I suppose. It does feel right for the world to be cold on Christmas. Maybe even snow. But that didn't happen. We had a good holiday anyway.
-
-## Birthday in Grayton Beach
-
-After New Orleans we hightailed it to Florida, looking for some warmer beaches. Our first stop was Grayton Beach, where we spent Elliott's birthday—in the white sands with afternoons warm enough to swim.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-15_164430_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3246" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-19_155619_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3248" class="picwide" />
-
-The sunsets were pretty spectacular too. We'd go down in the evenings, along with lots of other people to watch the sunset. Most evenings there would be at least four or five groups of people (not campers), often in identical clothes, who had hired a professional photographer to shoot family portraits. It was funny watching photographers trying to wrangle 10 people in matching outfits into a pose while the light faded. Made me feel good about my decision to abandon photography as a career back in college.
-
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-19_161117_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3249" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-19_161757_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3250" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-19_161809_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3251" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-By the time Elliott's birthday rolled around the warm weather had retreated unfortunately, but does any kid *really* care about the weather on their birthday? A rainy birthday is still a birthday. Your sisters will still descend on you before you're out of bed, clamoring for you to open their gifts.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_064257_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3252" class="cluster picwide" />
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_064302_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3266" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_064330_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3253" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-We've always let the kids start their birthdays like Christmas—giving each other their gifts in the early morning. It's my favorite part of their birthdays, watching them be kind and generous and loving to each other. Elliott's eighth birthday was no exception. He's kind, smart, fun, strong, caring, adventurous, and the best little brother his sisters could ever hope for. I am biased of course, but I know some people think kids have to stay in one place to grow up well, and Elliott (and his sisters) is here to tell those people they don't know what they're talking about. 
-
-I am not crazy about how fast they are all growing up—a speed that seems to be exponentially accelerating too -- but it brings me great happiness and joy to see how they've grown and I am excited to see what they have in store for the future.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_085141_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3255" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_084849_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3254" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_085921_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3256" class="cluster picwide" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_094759_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3260" class="cluster picwide" />
-</div>
-
-You do have to watch him though, take one sip of tea and your whole army might get wiped out.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_092146_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3258" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_092216_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3261" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_092205_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3259" class="cluster picwide" />
-</div>
-
-Despite my losses on the tabletop battlefield I did manage to get some cake.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_140114_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3263" class="picwide" />
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_140130_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3265" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_140128_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3264" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-
-
-## New Orleans
-
-After Galveston we headed north, bound for New Orleans. We broke up the drive with a stop at one of the gates of hell, located in Sea Rim, Texas. Sea Grim as we call it. Do not go there. Ever. For any reason. We had to abandon the bus there that night and retreat to a hotel. The next morning we went back, fired up the bus, and did not stop driving until we were safely over the state line in Louisiana—successfully [escaping Texas](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/06/escaping-texas) again, but this was definitely our closest call yet.
-
-We regrouped for a day at a little state park on a small bayou outside Lake Charles, Louisiana. It was good to be back in the bayous, swamp cypress, and most of all, warm humid air. Never thought I'd miss it, but I did.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-06_132438_bayou.jpg" id="image-3243" class="picwide" />
-
-We met an Australian couple there who have been coming to the US nearly every year since the early 2000s, traveling around in an older RV. It's always humbling to meet someone from somewhere else who knows your country better than you do. We were headed in opposite directions unfortunately, but we were able to save them from Sea Rim at least. I look forward to our paths crossing again one day.
-
----
-
-The next day we continue on, taking the beat-up, pothole-strewn back roads through the sugar cane fields and flooded rice paddies, past where we once spent Mardi Gras, on down into New Orleans. We arrived a little too late to head into the city that day. We had to stave off our New Orleans cravings with a few crayfish sausages grilled over the fire that night.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-07_132438_driving-new-orleans.jpg" id="image-3242" class="picwide" />
-
-The next morning we headed over the river and into the city. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-13_130726_new-orleans.jpg" id="image-3240" class="picwide" />
-
-There is something truly remarkable about New Orleans. Long time readers may have noticed that New Orleans is essentially the only city we visit. Chicago? Drove right by as fast as we could. Atlanta? We've been known to detour hundreds of miles to avoid it. We did stop in Columbia, SC, and regretted it. We have been to Milwaukee, but that's to visit friends, not because we love the city.
-
-No, if we're going into a city it has to be a city that's alive the way a forest is alive, the way a seashore is alive: organically, miraculously, beautifully. Why waste your time on anything else? A good city should evoke the three transcendentals in you when you're in it: goodness, truth, and beauty. The only U.S. city where I have experienced those things every time I go is New Orleans.
-
-If you were just looking at it on paper, New Orleans probably wouldn't jump out at you. It's insanely touristy. It's rough around the edges. It has a reputation for violence. And yet none of those things seem to affect the city or the people. It's a mystery, but it's not hard to see how living here you might come to think like Ignatius J Reilly when he rather famously says, "Leaving New Orleans frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins."
-
-Picking apart what makes New Orleans great is likely as fruitless as trying to figure out how it got that way. Something about the collision of Afro-Caribbean culture, Acadian culture, French culture—among others -- created something unlike anywhere else on earth. New Orleans is louder, more vibrant, and more alive than any other city in America and that, I think, is what keeps us coming back.
-
-Just as we took the girls out for a [birthday around Milwaukee](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/07/hello-milwaukee), we had promised Elliott a day out in New Orleans. It started with an early lunch at a Thai restaurant. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_121233_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3223" class="picwide" />
-
-Then we went to the thing the kids have been talking about ever since we where here in 2018: the New Orleans Children's Museum. Alas, a lot can change in four years. It turned out the Children's museum had moved locations and been "modernized". The kids still had fun, though they all agreed the old one was better. The new one offered a few of the same things, but everything was new and clean and looked like it had just come off the Ikea shelf. The old museum had a rather more homemade charm about it. 
-
-This is what passes for progress in modern America though—taking good things, throwing them away, and replacing them with things that don't work as well and generally suck. In that sense I'm glad the kids are getting a gentle introduction to the future now. 
-
-And maybe I am reading to much into it, but I found it interesting that much of what was missing were what you might call blue collar stuff: the exhibit showcasing what an electrician does, the sample bayou farm, the signage about lap boarding, and the example working fishing boat. Among the new exhibits were a fake laboratory where the kids could pretend to be scientists and a purely mechanical farming setup that moved crops from harvest to ship without the presence of a single human. Again, maybe I'm overthinking it, but I felt the distinct presence of a specific agenda at work when I compared the old museum with the new. 
-
-All that said, at least the kids had fun. And the legendary (in our family) giant bubble maker was still there.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_140728_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3231" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_131634_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3225" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_133650_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3227" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_133242_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3228" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_134027_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3229" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_134134_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3230" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-After a few hours playing with all the stuff, we decamped for the French Quarter to get crepes at our favorite stand in the French Market. This first pic is 2018, the next 2022:
-
-<img src="images/2018/2018-02-18_145959_new-orleans.jpg" id="image-1178" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_164526_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3235" class="picwide" />
-
-Aside from the jarring sight of my children getting older, I can't help but notice that we've shed even more vestiges of civilization... forks? Who needs forks?
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_154738_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3232" class="picwide" />
-
-That was supposed to be the end of our day. We planned to wander over to Jackson Square, maybe listen to some music and then head back to the bus. In Jackson Square though we came across some street performers doing some amazing athletic stuff—standing flips, gymnastic-style flips without the padding, you have to stop and respect that. So we did. And that's when they said "we need a few volunteers from the audience". As soon as someone says that, I am volunteered. Not because I want to mind you, but because in any situation that requires a volunteer or random person to be selected, it's not random, it's me. Always. I think it's a kind of penance I have to pay for being very lucky in games of chance. Whatever the case, yes, I was selected. And I had fun dancing for a crowd with a bunch of other people who couldn't dance either.
-
-That's not the surprising part though. The surprising part is that Lilah volunteered—legitimately volunteered. She and another girl got up and did a similarly impromptu choreographed dance. More surprising is that the street performers gave her and the other girl $20 to keep. Naturally, since this is the most money she has ever earned in about 30 minutes, Lilah is convinced street performers are the greatest thing ever and she is going to be one. And who knows, maybe they are. Their job is certainly a lot more fun than mine.
-
-By the time that was all over with though we were famished again. We headed over to the warehouse district to an Argentinean restaurant Corrinne had been wanting to try. A few arepas later we all felt much better. It was a long day in the city, but a good one. I still judge the success of our days by how quickly the kids fall asleep and I don't think anyone was up past 9 that night.
-
-We spent a full week in New Orleans, mostly exploring the city, though we did have one day of running errands. I even found a reputable Volvo mechanic and took the Volvo in to see about replacing the hose I fixed with some fuel line and other scraps back in Devil's Tower. He looked at what I'd done, leak tested it with some brake fluid, and told me he wouldn't touch it unless he had to. Good enough for me. It's held up well. I did pay to have him clear out all the sensor codes and warnings though so we'll know if something is going amiss from here on out.
-
-So often what we do in New Orleans is just wander around. It's a city that lends itself to wandering. We've got our favorite little spots in the French Quarter, some in the Garden District, some in the Marigny, some in the Treme. This time around though we decided to visit some of the museums we've never bothered with before. 
-
-The notable one was the Jazz museum. I mention is chiefly because I don't think I have ever been somewhere quite so disappointing. Now granted, Jazz is a big topic, spanning almost 100 years now, and even if you narrow it down to New Orleans... it's a lot for any museum to cover. That said, the Jazz museum was a massive letdown. I don't think the kids came out understanding any more about the history of Jazz than when they went in. They were more impressed with the tiny exhibit about the old Mint in the basement than they were with Jazz museum. 
-
-Oh well, we'll stick to just wandering around, listen to the jazz you hear all over the city. Maybe that's the thing, maybe you can't stick Jazz or any other part of New Orleans in a building and try to explain it. It is what it is. Maybe you have to come out here and wander around, discover your own version of the city, to really understand.  
-
-
-## Galveston Sings
-
-After a couple of sunny days at the beach we headed a little ways south, out to Mustang Island. We had an uneventful drive down and we were looking forward to some more time in the sun. Unfortunately, when we woke up the next morning clouds had rolled in, a steady drizzle was falling, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. We were forced to put on socks—always a sign things have gone astray. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-13_161813_mustand-island.jpg" id="image-3207" class="picwide caption" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-13_163713_mustand-island.jpg" id="image-3208" class="picwide" />
-
-Luckily another family pulled into the site next to us so whenever there was a break in the rain, all the kids would run outside and play together. That helped break up the monotony of rainy days a little. but about three days of rain in, with 8 more days forecasted, we realized our plan to spend thanksgiving a few miles south on Padre Island wasn't going to work. 
-
-Padre Island National Seashore, where [we've stayed before](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/almost-warm), is right on the beach, but there's no electric hookups. We have a 300 amp hour battery, and 550 watts of solar, which is enough power (our needs are small) that we never really think about energy. We can go 4 or 5 days without recharging, but eight days of no sun? Even for us that wasn't going to happen. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-14_120726_mustand-island.jpg" id="image-3209" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-14_121549_mustand-island.jpg" id="image-3212" class="picwide caption" />
-
-So we decided to head north and check out Galveston. While the weather probably wasn't going to be any better (it wasn't) the State Park campground looked better than Mustang Island (it was) and there was more indoor stuff to do—museums, old ships, and more. 
-
-We had an another uneventful drive up the coast. Well, actually, before the drive, the fuel line cracked and was spraying gas everywhere, but I had that fixed in under half an hour, and these days, anything I can fix in under half an hour is uneventful. With some fuel hose patching the line, we were underway again, though a late start did mean we didn't get to Galveston until the sun was setting, which I think is the latest we've ever arrived somewhere.
-
-While we had power, the weather didn't improve much. There's an episode of the show Portlandia where everyone is [chasing a single beam of sunlight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBUxZdWJ_zE) around the city of Portland. That's a bit what we felt like in Galveston. Every now and then the sun would poke through and everyone would rush out to enjoy it.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-20_180253_galveston.jpg" id="image-3210" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_093428_galveston.jpg" id="image-3213" class="picwide" />
-
-We went to a couple of museums to break up the rainy days in the bus. The Bryant Museum has a ton of exhibits on Texas history, but the big draw for the kids was a diorama depicting the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive battle in the Texas revolution. There are more than 1,200 hand-painted soldiers in this scene. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_140604_galveston.jpg" id="image-3215" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_143016_galveston.jpg" id="image-3216" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_142526_galveston.jpg" id="image-3217" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_143032_galveston.jpg" id="image-3218" class="picwide" />
-
-We also went to the Texas Seaport Museum, which is home to the 3-masted bark Elissa, which first set sail in 1877. Unlike most tall ships you can visit, the Elissa still actively sails, though not in winter apparently. We got to walk around it though and see (somewhat) what ships of that era were like.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-30_151802_galveston.jpg" id="image-3219" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-30_150226_galveston.jpg" id="image-3221" class="picwide" />
-
-
-There's a building just adjacent to the ship that serves a museum about the experience of the some 133,000 immigrants who entered the United States through Galveston. I had high hopes for the museum since one side of my family arrived around that time (1910, though through Ellis Island, not Galveston). Unfortunately this was the modern sort of museum, heavily reliant on digital displays, which seem chiefly concerned with collecting your email address. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-30_141720_galveston.jpg" id="image-3220" class="picwide" />
-
-
-It was too bad, because the potential was there to have something really cool, and the kids did learn a few things, but it could have been much better. Even central premise of the experience—that you would follow a real immigrant across the ocean and learn about their experience -- fell flat because no matter who you followed the outcome at the end was arbitrary.
-
-Finally, one day, a few days before we were set to leave, the sun decided to get serious again and there was much happiness. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-27_114155_galveston.jpg" id="image-3214" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_120136_galveston.jpg" id="image-3222" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-23_123126_galveston.jpg" id="image-3211" class="picwide" />
-
-
-## November Sun
-
-We had an uneventful drive down from Dallas. We took it easy, making leisurely lunch stops in small towns along way. In the end it took two days, we stopping off in the middle at a place called Lake Somerville State Park. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-05_133349_goose-island-sp.jpg" id="image-3195" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-06_090224_goose-island-sp.jpg" id="image-3196" class="picwide" />
-
-It was somewhat warmer that first night out of Dallas, but the real heat started the next day. By the time we rolled into the low country around Corpus Christi it was hot and humid. I was ready to dive into the ocean and cool off.
-
-We rolled into Goose Island State Park in the midst of a November heat wave. Goose Island is actually on the bay side of Port Aransas, which dashed my hopes of a quick dip, but it was the only place we could get a campsite on short notice. The actual Gulf beaches were a 20 minute drive, with a quick ferry ride, away. There's nothing quite like a warm November day at the beach to make you feel like you're doing something right. Even the water temps were still in the 70s.
-
-<img src="images/2022/DSC08506.jpg" id="image-3197" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/DSC08507.jpg" id="image-3198" class="picwide" />
-
-Unfortunately, shortly after we arrived the girls came down with a bit of a cold, and then Corrinne got sick too. To get the kids out of the bus a little (being sick in the bus is a crowded, unhappy experience), in the evenings I'd take them over to a place near the campground called The Big Tree. 
-
-It was a bit like [the octopus tree in Huntington Beach](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/huntington-beach-birds), but the kids said the trees here were even better for climbing. The namesake tree was fenced off, but there were several others around that were fair game. We'd go over in the evenings for an hour or so, watch the sunset through the trees, and then walk over to watch the moon rise over the bay, before heading home to make dinner.
-
-<img src="images/2022/B0222465.jpg" id="image-3201" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/B0222468.jpg" id="image-3202" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/B0222475.jpg" id="image-3203" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-07_181356_goose-island-sp.jpg" id="image-3204" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-11-07_183606_goose-island-sp.jpg" id="image-3200" class="picwide" />
-
-It's always funny to me how we fall into these little routines even on the road. Do the same thing three or four days in a row and it starts to feel like what you've always done. But weather like this, and sunsets like that, are a routine I'd never argue against.
-
-
-## Halloween in the Big City
-
-After a few days relaxing, and catching our breath, so to speak, out at Lake Arrowhead, we headed into Dallas to visit family. Seems like a simple thing, drive 100 miles or so. I'm at the dump station adjusting the idle on the carburetor because it was running a little high. I do this in drive because if I pull the idle screw out too much I stall at lights. I get it where I want it, then I reach over and move the shifter into park. The shifter goes into park, but the transmission definitely does not. Sigh. 
-
-I shut it off, chock the wheels so it won't go anywhere and finish dumping. I need to get out of the dump station in case someone else comes along to use it, but I'm in gear, so I can't just start the engine. I jump the relay with a screwdriver to get it going and limp over to an empty campsite. Take a deep breath, get to work. Everyone stood around and watched as I unscrewed the shifter from the dash. 
-
-Once I got it off the dash I could see what had happened. The cable runs from the sifter to the transmission inside a sleeve, the sleeve clamps into the back of the shifter. A piece of metal had broken and the sleeve had slipped out so that when you moved the shifter, everything moved. All we needed to do was get the sleeve to stay in place again. The kids started offering ideas on how to hack it back together to get to Dallas. It was Halloween and they wanted to trick or treat with their Aunt and Uncle. If they had to figure out how to get the bus running again, then so be it.  
-
-After playing around with it for a bit, I found that if I held it in place with one hand, I could shift with other. Not ideal, but it would get us down the road to Halloween so that's what we did. It's an automatic, so it's not like I shift much. We made it into town without incident. I shut off the engine and we got down to the important stuff, visiting with family, and of course, carving pumpkins.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_141334_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3183" class="picwide" />
-
-This wasn't arbitrary carving either, there was a plan and then they went out and executed that plan.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_142848_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3185" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_142728_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3184" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_182601_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3187" class="picwide" />
-
-The area Corrinne's sister lives in does Halloween at a level we had never really experienced before. Decorations all over the place, crowded streets. I went in the house below and can honestly say it was better decorated than any amusement park I have ever been in. At one point later in the night it was so crowded the kids had to get in line at each house just to get to the door to say tick or treat. It was fun, but that was about when we called it a night.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_185309_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3186" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_183857_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3188" class="picwide" />
-
-"Can we do one with less drama?"
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_183859_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3189" class="picwide" />
-
-After Halloween I got busy figuring out how to fix the shift cable. It had obviously been welded once already. What broke was a piece of metal someone else had bent over and drilled out many years before. Redoing that would have been the way to go, but I didn't have access to a welder. I ended up cutting a piece of aluminum and screwing it in on both sides. So far, so good. When we stop later this year to pull out and rebuild the engine and transmission I'll probably weld up something more secure.
-
-We spent the week hanging out with family and visiting, lots of swimming, somehow there always seemed to be a dog or cat around for the kids to play with. I think this is the hardest trade off for them about living the way we do, they'd really like to have a dog. At least they get to visit with plenty dogs.
-
-
-
-## Going Down Swinging
-
-When we broke down in Lamar I kept thinking about a book I read almost a decade ago: *Shop Class as Soul Craft* by Matthew Crawford. The gist of the book is that the only way to escape a dependency on stuff is to be able to take it apart and repair it. There is empowerment in knowing how things work—your stuff will never fail you because if it does break, you can repair it. 
-
-Crawford calls this person who wants to fix their own stuff, The Spirited Man. Crawford writes:
-
->[The Spirited Man] hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging.
-
-I kept staring at the bus's valve covers thinking about that line. Could I get my valve train back together again? There was only one way to find out. Still, I don't think I would have done it if Corrinne hadn't insisted that I could do it. The kids also seemed to think I could do it. You can do a lot more when people believe in you. So I decided I had to try, to go down swinging at least.
-
-After a week of thinking it over, weighing other options, and realizing no one else was going to do it for me, I dove in. The valve covers came off.
-
-Well, first I messaged my Uncle Ron and asked for advice before I dug in. He gave me some helpful pointers—take lots of photos, label everything, keep track of where each rod came from, clean it all up with soap and water, coat it with a light coat of oil. Check. The best mechanics he told me are the ones that were patient and methodical -- take your time. Patient. Methodical. Check. 
-
-I grabbed the four wrenches I'd need and started taking things apart. I pulled off the electrical components first. That's when I remembered the alternator problems I'd yet to deal with. Since I had to drain the radiator anyway, I decided to pull it out completely which would give me easier access to the alternator. I removed the alternator (the most difficult, stubborn bolt in the whole job) and had the local Napa bench test it. Dead. I ordered a new alternator. If you're going to go all the way, you better go all the way. 
-
-Then I pulled off the carburetor and then the valve covers. I took a lot of photos, I cleaned and labeled everything. I pulled off the intake manifold (which was so much heavier than I expected), and then I took out the valve trains (the bus's are all on a long rod, which I took out as a single piece, so they stayed together nicely). Finally, the only thing left was the head. Ten more bolts and then I'd know. I won't lie, I was a little scared that I'd find a blown cylinder in there, but I didn't. The head came off and there was the gasket burnt through in pretty much the exact same place it blew last time. 
-
-That told me something was wrong with more than the gasket. 
-
-At Ron's suggestion I tested it with a feeler gauge, which is just a bunch of strips of metal of precise thicknesses, and discovered that the head and the block are each slightly warped in that spot. That's why we blew the gasket again, and it's why we'll blow the new one I installed eventually too. If there'd been a machine shop around I might have pulled the other head and had them both ground down, but there wasn't. Machine shops that were over 200 miles away in big cities told me it would be at least two weeks before they could get to it.
-
-All I wanted to do was get us back on the road and keep us there for a few more months. I *do* plan to rebuild or replace the engine next year, but now that I've done the head gasket, I feel like I want to do a rebuild myself too. But I want to do it where I can work on it without being stuck somewhere we don't really want do be. In the mean time we just need to squeeze a few thousand more miles out of it. In the end I put some copper coat on the block, the gasket, and the head to help seal it a little better and hoped for the best.
-
-Once I had everything I needed, I reversed everything I'd done, working from my notes, photos, and some videos, to get it all back together. It took me three days to get everything back in, though I imagine I could do it in two now that I have a better idea of how it all works. 
-
-Then came the evening when I first fired it up. Deep down I knew it was going to work, but it was still a stressful moment. Especially with the amount of oil that had to burn off... so much oil... for a moment I thought we'd failed. It was too windy that day to go for a drive, but the next day after work I drove into town and filled up the tank before going down the highway for about 20 minutes. Amazingly, everything seemed to work. Well, almost everything. I must have bumped a wire somewhere because the headlights don't come on anymore, but if that's the only thing I screwed up... I can live with (and fix) that.
-
-Two days later we hit the road south. Unfortunately we had to abandon our plans to go to Tucson. There are too many hills between here and there. We didn't want to push it. If we're going to squeeze more life out this engine as it is, we're going to have to stick to the flat areas. So we pointed south, to Texas. It was a long drive to Amarillo, probably the longest, most nerve-wracking drive I've ever done in the bus. Dead into a 20-30 mile per hour headwind the whole way, with me obsessively opening the doghouse hatch, sure I would see the telltale smoke blowing out again... but I never did. We made it to Amarillo. We checked into The Big Texan RV park and took the kids to swim at the indoor pool. It was almost like a normal day on the road for us.
-
-With more wind in the forecast the following day we got a very early start, hitting the road when the light was just enough to not need headlights anymore. We got three hours of driving in before the wind came up hard again, but by then we were only an hour from Lake Arrowhead State Park, where we planned to spend the weekend. I managed to relax a little, I only lifted the doghouse half a dozen times on the drive. There was never any smoke coming out. So far so good. A few thousand more miles and I'll start to trust myself.
-
-We set up camp at Lake Arrowhead State Park, which was deserted, and settled into something we haven't had in a long time: silence. There was just the wind in the trees and the sounds of the kids playing. I forgot how peaceful it could be out here. It's good to be back.
-
-
-
-## Rodeos and Forts
-
-Three weeks flew by in Lamar, Colorado. It took a week just to figure out what we wanted to do about the engine and find someone willing to do it. Every mechanic was booked at least two weeks out, so we had plenty of time on our hands. I got caught up on work (and this site), but we also got out to see some of the local sights, like the local end-of-the-season rodeo.
-
-The community college in town has a rodeo team (natch) and hosts this rodeo, which pulled in competitors from all over the place—Wyoming, South Dakota, there was even a contestant from Australia. We missed the first day, but Saturday I took the kids over to watch their first rodeo.
-
-We saw everything from goat tying and barrel racing to bull wrestling and riding, but I think the favorite was the bronco and bull riding. There's something about watching someone try to stay on a bucking animal that I think everyone can relate to, at least metaphorically. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_111708_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3153" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_113624_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3155" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_112450-1_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3154" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_120545_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3156" class="picwide" />
-
-
-It had been a long time since I'd been to a rodeo and forgot how physically brutal it is—by the end of the day my spine was hurting from just watching those guys get thrown around like rag dolls.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_121155_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3157" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_131358_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3158" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_131633_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3159" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_132136_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3160" class="picwide" />
-
-The first day we went no one managed to stay on a bull for the full 8 seconds. We had so much fun the kids insisted we go back Sunday morning to watch the final rounds of all the events, where the top three finishers from Fri and Sat squared off. This time one young man—and only one -- managed to stay on for the full 8 seconds and went home with a trophy.
-
-The next weekend we headed about an hour west of Lamar to see something called Bent's Old Fort. Fort is a bit of a misnomer though, it was really a trading post, the largest on the mountain branch of the Santa Fe Trail. The only really. From the last signs of city in Missouri, to well into Mexico, Bent's Fort was the only permanent settlement.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_133823_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3165" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_134203_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3166" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_134406_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3167" class="picwide" />
-
-The fort was abandoned in 1849, primarily due to a bad cholera outbreak. The original adobe structure long ago crumbled to dust, but at one point it housed a young man who recorded all the dimensions and architectural details in a journal. That was used as the basis for rebuilding the structure for Colorado’s centennial in 1976. There were only two when we were there, but much of the year it's well-staffed with historical re-enactors as well.
-
-I am going to sound like a broken record here, but once again what made Bent's Old Fort such a great experience was the fact that it isn't all roped off. The kids could touch things, feel the furs, try on a hat, pick up the super-sharp two-tined fork, walk up to the stove, work the blacksmith's bellows and loads more. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_125924_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3161" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_134702_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3169" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_130137_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3163" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_130109_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3162" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_135840_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3170" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_130835_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3164" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_140106_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3171" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_141930_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3174" class="picwide" />
-
-It was quite a contrast to our other recent historical building visit, which was in Theodore Roosevelt National Park where you can walk in Teddy's original cabin and... look at all the stuff behind the plexiglas walls. That was so uninspiring I didn't even mention it. Apparently it pays to come to out of the way places if you want to interact with them.
-
-I particularly enjoyed the kitchen, the blacksmith's shop, and the carpenter's shop for this reason. All the tools were there, or in the case of the blacksmith, the tools to make the tools. The kitchen actually incorporated the original limestone fireplace stones into the floor, which were worn smooth from years of cooks working over them. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_141242_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3173" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_140241_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3172" class="picwide" />
-
-The spider pans and cast iron pots were mostly period correct, though I did notice a couple of Lodge brand skillets. Cast iron hasn't changed much over the years though so there isn't much difference between what they had in the 1840s and what I have in the bus right now.
-
-The other room I found fascinating was the council room, the room you would have been taken to when you first arrived at the fort, especially if you were from a local tribe or up from Mexico. The purpose was to sit down and present gifts to the visiting traders. This was expected, though where that expectation comes from I'm not quite sure. I assume it was just how the tribes had always done business. The purpose was to establish at least a business relationship, but often, from what I have read, friendships. 
-
-It reminded me of some of my experiences in [India](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/india/) and [Nepal](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/nepal/), and for that matter much of the world. Commerce is not just an exchange of currency for goods, but a kind of relationship. You go in a shop in India or Nepal and you will have to bargain to establish a price, and you usually bargain over tea. If the shopkeeper thinks you might spend a lot of money you might also get some bread and chutney. 
-
-These days it's very fashionable to hates capitalism, and I am not here to defend the current brand of capitalism, especially in the form of online commerce, but I do think it's worth remembering that where we are isn't the only place we could be. The free market was absolutely the driving force behind any frontier trade (the nearest regulatory body being thousands of miles away), and yet somehow what seems to have emerged is a system of exchange that had elements of a gift economy and elements of more traditional barter. Personally it sounds a lot nicer than what we have. I'd rather sit around a fire on bear skins talking than stare at a screen, clicking buttons until a bunch of plastic crap is delivered to my home.
-
-My contention would be that we will get back to Bent's Old Fort style trading sooner or later. The totally lack of humanity in today's commerce makes it deadening to our souls. That's usually a sign of something that's not long for the world. In some ways there are aspects of the old ways lingering in our current system. A lot of the hardware stores and auto parts stores I end up at have a bunch of older men sitting around on stools, talking. I've always preferred Napa auto parts for exactly this reason, you come in and pull up a stool. That's inviting. Except in smaller communities most of the stools are taken. There's a gathering of some kind in progress whenever I come in. Perhaps those men came in to buy some little thing, but I think mostly they're there to talk. I imagine those relationships may have started a little like the old council room gatherings at Bent's Old Fort, where there may have been a commercial origin to the relationship, but it didn't have to end there. 
-
-Of course while musing on all this I ordered a bunch of engine gaskets from Rock Auto rather than going to the Napa just down the road. In my defense, Napa wanted almost double what I paid, and for inferior gaskets. I'm sure some traders never made it past the council room, after all. Not every deal is a good one. Still, after our trip out to the trading post, and thinking about these things, I started buying what I could locally here in Lamar, sitting on a stool in Napa. Sometimes I know I did pay more, but it was more enjoyable and if we want to find our way back to commerce with a bit of humanity, we might have to pay a little extra. I mean, who really wants to win a race to the bottom anyway?  
-
-
-
-
-## Broken Down In Lamar
-
-From Bear's Lodge we continued south, bound eventually for Tucson though we had a few weeks to get there. Unfortunately there isn't much between northern Wyoming and New Mexico. Or, let me rephrase that. Taking into account that the bus doesn't climb into the mountains, and Colorado is ridiculously expensive and crowded, there isn't much between northern Wyoming and New Mexico. 
-
-The first night out we spent at a random fairground in southern Wyoming. The next day we drove onto to Brush, CO were we camped in a city park for the night. At that point we had originally planned to head to Trinidad to camp and then maybe take a day trip into the Rockies. As we talked about it though we realized our heart really wasn't in it. We decided to cut east and down into New Mexico that way instead.
-
-We were just outside of Lamar CO when the bus suddenly lurched and hesitated. At this point that's happened enough that I immediately knew the fuel pump was shot. Again. I pulled over and confirmed that there was air spitting into the fuel filter. I don't know if it's poor manufacturing, the amount of ethanol in gasoline or what, but I've been through three fuel pumps in five years. These days I carry a spare. I got under the bus and half and hour later the fuel system was back to normal.
-
-When I was changing the fuel pump I noticed the wind was blowing much harder than I thought and we were headed straight into it. According to the local weather it was blow 25 miles and hour. Still, there wasn't much we could do about that. We hit the road again.
-
-About ten minutes later I smelled smoke, specifically the smell of burning oil. I lifted up the doghouse and sure enough there was smoke coming out the value cover vent. I pulled over again. When I opened up the air filter I found a good bit of oil, along with an oil soaked filter. I try not to jump to catastrophic conclusions, but at this point I know this engine pretty well, and this had happened once before, when we blew our head gasket.
-
-We were about 20 miles outside of Lamar CO, but the next town was a good 60 miles away and it was already 3:30 in the afternoon. I hated to do it, but we had to turn around. We found an RV park in Lamar and pulled in for the night. 
-
-The next morning I got up and started troubleshooting. I like to be optimistic so I started by replacing the PCV valve, but unfortunately, that did nothing. At least I have a spare PCV valve now. I moved on to a dry compression test. The results were... not good. Not only did I have two adjacent cylinders with compression at 65 PSI, which is a pretty good sign of a blown head gasket, not a single cylinder was actually at the compression it should be. As my uncle put it when I texted him the results, "your cylinders are rattling around in there like a bunch of old coffee cans."
-
-The fact of the matter is this engine is worn down and need to either be rebuilt or replaced. 
-
-It's been nearly two weeks now and I still can't tell you which of those things we're going to end up doing, but whichever it is we're looking at a minimum of six weeks. We couldn't even get a mechanic to look at it for two weeks. And that mechanic is in Amarillo. Currently our plan is to—if it's possible—just fix the head gasket and keep going for a couple of months. Then this spring we can either rebuild or replace the engine.
-
-Either way, we're stuck in Lamar Colorado for the next two weeks. Worse, when that two weeks is up we're looking at spending over a month without our home. That's stressful, expensive, and not at all what we want to be doing. This is the part of travel that your favorite YouTube stars don't tell you about (actually, the good ones do, see our blogroll for some of those), but it's part of travel. 
-
-There are always challenges that make you think, oh god, how are we going to handle this? How are we going to get out of this? What are we going to do? Those are good questions you're going to have to answer if you want to keep going. I like to write them down and then write down answers. And then change the answers when my first ideas don't work out. And keep updating my answers until something finally works. That's all there is to it really, you put your head down and you get to work fixing things.
-
-This particular time is proving mostly to be a test of patience. I'm not sure if it's a parts shortage, staff shortages, or what, but mechanics are slammed with business. Could I pull the heads here and put in a new gasket? Yes, I could. Maybe I should, but so far I haven't. Work has been consuming most of my time and so here we sit. 
-
-
-
-
-The other temptation I am prone to in these situations is to stick my head in the sand and try to pretend it hasn't happened. I'll just take the kids to the park, make dinner, read a book, go to bed and pretend everything is normal. This is also not the way out. You have to do all that, but you also have to keep throwing solutions at the wall until you find the one that sticks. 
-
-That time out in Colorado we threw a whole bunch of shit at the wall before we even had a hint that anything was going to stick. But it did. Wasn't the things I thought would stick, but we got out. you always do. Until you don't. and then it doesn't matter anyway. there you are. 
-
-
-An alternative to the front porch culture. it think we went wrong when we became to sedentary, it made us see the world as fixed, unchanging, things as they are become things as they have always been. I think the connectedness and community that you find in people who want to create a front porch culture is the right way forward, but I don't think that a rootedness to place is what drive that. I think that's a conscious human decision. I don't think it organically springs into a being. I think people have to want it, and I think so long as there is television, the internet, screens, that will not happen. the culture from afar is too strong, to universal and too enslaving to overcome. it's not until that culture has run its course that something new will arise. that doesn't mean of course that you can't free yourself from screens, from the culture of afar. That's not too difficult. But you aren't going to free the whole of culture. 
-
-
-1) find out if we can stay here without an engine, if not where?
-2) find out when the mechanic can pull the engine, 
-3) We have to find someone to rebuilt the engine, can they do a rush job?
-4) somehow get it a crate and send it to the rebuilder or drive it to dallas
-5) get towed back here into a site. 
-6) wait
-7) get towed back to the shop to put the new engine in.
-8) leave
-
-
-## Under The Bear’s Lodge
-
-
-From Theodore Roosevelt National Park we headed south. Originally we'd planned to go through South Dakota and then down into Colorado, but the day before we left we noticed that if you west around the Black Hills, instead of east like we'd planned, you pass right by a place none of us had every been—Devil's Tower.
-
-I'll confess that my chief association with Devil's Tower is *Close Encounters*. And yes, we made mashed potatoes the night we arrived. I mean, you have to right? 
-
-Devil's Tower is either a poor translation or a deliberately wrong translation of the local name, Bear's Lodge Butte. That name comes from the fact that it really does look like a tree that bear has gone to town on, and the constellation of the bear is always nearby, above the Butte. I don't see a bear when I stare up in the sky, but then I don't think I'd see a dipper either (the big dipper is part of the bear) if people hadn't been pointing it out all my life. Constellations aren't my strong suit. Whatever the case I think Bear's Lodge is a better name for this place. It stops me from confusing it with [Devil's Postpile](https://www.nps.gov/depo/index.htm).
-
-We'd planned to just stay a night, maybe two, but then we ended up staying a week because we liked it. It's always interesting to stop for a while in places that most people come, see the thing, and then leave. Every morning the campground would empty out, but then every night it was full again. When that happens you notice the people who don't leave, and those often turn out to be people in the same situation—people who aren't seeing the sights, but are moseying their way around the world like we do. We met a few of those and enjoyed our extra time in Bear's Lodge. 
-
-One of the great things about living this way is the fluidity you can bring to plans. That cuts both ways. Sometimes you *have* to be flexible. Sometimes you *get* to be flexible. The flexible part is the constant. Fortunately in Bear's Lodge we got to be flexible. Though we also got a little hint of how we might have to flexible soon.
-
-The day we pulled in I ran over to the only store around and bought some ice. I noticed the check engine light in our Volvo was on. I didn't think too much of it, it happens when you don't properly tighten the gas cap. Usually it goes away when you re-tighten the gas cap. I did that and forgot about it for a few days.
-
-But a few days later I went to get some groceries in a town down the road and the light was still on. Damn. Well then. I stopped for gas and opened the hood to see if anything was amiss. It took me a minute, but then, next the oil filler cap I noticed a plastic hose that had broken. I wasn't sure what it did, but I assumed it was probably involved in the vacuum system somehow. 
-
-I took a closer look when I got back to camp the plastic hose promptly disintegrated. So much for patching a crack. Now I needed to rig up some kind of temporary hose or we were stuck. I dug through my considerable collection of hoses and came up with some fuel line that fit at both ends, and then I telescoped that up to some extra PCV valve hose I had lying around. I anchored it all together with hose clamps and wedged it in place with a hose clamp at the bottom and some blue RTV gasket maker at the top. Then I waited 24 hours.
-
-The next morning it started up fine and seemed to run, so we hit road with it, figuring I'd pick up a replacement hose at the next Napa. About 3 hours into the drive, the check engine light went off. 
-
-
-## Ease Down the Road 
-
-We set out from Washburn, bound for Arizona via North Dakota. We wanted to see Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and then we figured we'd head south and maybe catch some of the fall colors in the Rockies on our way.
-
-It's pretty rare for us to drive more than 200 miles a day. We're not in any rush and that's about how far you can go in the bus before it starts to feel like a chore. That said, we decided to blast our way across Minnesota and North Dakota doing back-to-back 300 mile days. We spent the night at a city park in Fargo the first day and then pushed on for Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It was a lot of driving, but there just weren't many places to stop in between.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_141824_drive-to-dakotas.jpg" id="image-3115" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_134205_drive-to-dakotas.jpg" id="image-3114" class="picwide" />
-
-Theodore Roosevelt has a fairly nice campground, but we opted to stay at a more remote boondocking spot in the Little Missouri Grasslands. Although it was well outside the park, and off by itself, it was actually closer to town and made a good base for exploring the area.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_151155_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3116" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_162322_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3117" class="picwide" />
-
-The Grasslands themselves were in some ways more interesting than the national park, though if you want to see bison you have to go into the park since a fence keeps them in. The kids loved having some badlands for a backyard. They'd disappear up into the hills in the mornings while Corrinne and I worked, returning only for food.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_163516_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3118" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_155612_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3132" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-19_194953_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3125" class="picwide" />
-
-The kids and I hiked a ways out on a trail that runs through a petrified forest. We were mostly looking for birds since the petrified forest was farther than anyone wanted to walk. The kids had been looking over the bird list we picked up at the visitor center, deciding ahead of time what they wanted to see—the Sharp-tailed Grouse was their top pick. I gave them the usual caution that one doesn't really pick which birds they're going to see, to have patience, and so on. 
-
-Naturally, the first thing we see, after less than 10 minutes of walking, was a Sharp-tailed Grouse. It reminded me of the time I explained to them that fishing requires patience and then less than two minutes after casting [Lilah was reeling in a fish](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/almost-warm). Maybe it's just me. Maybe everyone else is always seeing birds and catching fish.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-17_002345_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3121" class="picwide" />
-
-We're not just bird and fish people these days, we also go in for rocks. Some of us anyway. Whatever the case there's a river just over the Montana border that is the place to find eponymous agates. We made the hour long drive and came back with more Montana agates than anyone living in a 26-foot bus should really have. 
-
-It was nice to spend a day beside the river though. The current was pretty strong, but we managed to get a little swimming in.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-18_115628-1_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3123" class="picwide" />
-
-And yes, we did drive into Theodore Roosevelt National Park one day. The kids like to get junior ranger badges whenever we're anywhere national, so they did that while I wandered around the visitor center. Men like Theodore Roosevelt aren't very popular these days, but it seems to me that might actually be most of our problem. We could use some leadership just now and boy it's been a while since politicians were leaders. Try to imagine one of our current "leaders" taking a bullet and then refusing to stop his speech just because he'd been shot. 
-
-We also wanted to see the bison herd that lives in the park. Our best view though turned out to be this one, which was off by himself, standing right beside the road. Maybe, I thought while I was taking the picture, if you can't be a leader, at least don't be a follower. Maybe just stand off by yourself, mind your own business, eat grass, and stare at the tourists.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-17_155530_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3122" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-20_163735_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3129" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-20_164453_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3130" class="picwide" />
-
-We also made a stop at the cowboy museum in the nearby town of Medora, where the kids learned a little about rodeo culture.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-20_104432_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3126" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-20_110610_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3128" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-20_110315_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3127" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-Mostly though we spent a lot of time just hanging out at the campsite. The landscape here is such a stark contrast to the last few months that we were all happy to just wander around under that vast, seemingly endless western sky.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_163650_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3119" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-18_185406_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3124" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_201159_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3120" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-20_215737_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3131" class="picwide" />
-
-Part of what made our campsite nice and our time in the grasslands so enjoyable was that we happened to hit a gap between storms. For five days we had virtually no wind. On the sixth day though we got a taste of what this place is like most of the time. With a 20 MPH wind blowing dust around all day, and a storm bearing down on us that promised a 40 MPH headwind for our next drive, we decided to it was time to hit the road again.
-
-## Goodbye Big Waters 
-
-Leaving is always a bustle of activity. We go from spending our days relaxing in the sun to frantically making lists and scrambling to get everything done before we hit the road. You'd think by now we'd plan ahead and know how to do it well, but not really. I always end up wit a task list that's far more than I can possibly do in however long we have left. I think this is my way of dealing with pain of leaving somewhere—overwhelming myself with tasks so there's no time to feel.
-
-Because yes, there is always a pain in leaving. Heading toward new possibilities, while exciting, still means closing off old ones. This isn't something that's unique to travel, all of us are always changing, always leaving things behind. New jobs, new homes, new grades in school, something is always left behind as we move down the river of time. 
-
-For reasons I have not completely figured out, we seemed to have sunk deeper into the life of this place than anywhere else we've stopped in our travels. In all we were here nine weeks, which is actually less time than we spent in the Outer Banks, but I felt more a part of this place. Perhaps it is the open and welcoming people of the area, the [giddiness of summer](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/07/washburn) up here, or maybe we're getting better at settling in. Perhaps some combination of these things and more.
-
-We are making a bigger change than we have yet on this leg of our journey (which I count as starting when we left the [100 acre woods]()). For ten months now we have lived by the water—[coastal South Carolina](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/02/ice-storm), [the Outer Banks](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/05/ocracoke-beaches), and now [the shores of Lake Superior](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/superior)—and now we're headed west to the plains, mountains, and deserts. 
-
-After [our backpacking trip in the Porcupine Mountains](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/09/porcupine-mountains-backpacking) we had two more weeks in Washburn, which we spent visiting with friends we've made, hiking up to a waterfall in the hills, re-visiting Little Girl Point, stocking up on local favorite foods, and readying the bus for the next leg of our journey. 
-
-
-
-Leaving is always bittersweet. The kids will miss their new friends, and so will we. Up here the pain of leaving is eased by the fact that few of the people we met spend the winters here anyway, so everyone is leaving soon. We will also very likely be back next summer, so this time around while we did say out long midwestern goodbyes, they were really see you next years.
-
-
-
-## Porcupine Mountains Backpacking
-
-There are only a few small stands of old growth forests left on this continent. I have been to couple of smaller old growth stands—one in the west, one in the south—but I've never really spent much time in them. When I found out that the Porcupine Mountains were the second largest old growth Hemlock forest left in the U.S., I knew we had to go. 
-
-This time I wanted to spend some time, so I put together a another family backpacking trip. We left the bus in its site in Washburn and headed up into the mountains of Michigan[^1]. Well, elsewhere they might be called hills, but up here they're mountains. 
-
-We drove a couple of hours around Superior to the Porcupine Mountains, picked up our permit, and hit the trail.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_125052_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3086" class="picwide" />
-
-The kids were able (and wanted) to carry more weight compared to [our last trip in North Carolina](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2020/10/walking-north-carolina-woods), but of course what they think they can carry and what they can actually carry depends on the distance. 
-
-We wanted a destination to hang out at, so we opted for the trail to Mirror Lake—three miles in from the east, three miles back out to the west. We started with the eastern portion of trail, which went over Summit Peak. We wanted to get the hard stuff over with at the start. For about a half a mile it was straight up—about half of that was stairs -- to a tower that brought you above the tree tops for a view of Lake Superior.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_130152_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3087" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_120356-1_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3085" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_130547_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3088" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_130559_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3089" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-It wasn't until we were almost to the lake that we finally stepped into the old growth Hemlock. Much of the old growth forest in the Mirror Lake area was knocked down in a storm in 1953 when 5,000 acres of old growth forest—thousands upon thousands of trees—came down in a matter of hours. Two high school kids out fishing near Mirror Lake got caught in the storm (and lived), which must have made for an exciting morning. Wind shear like that is not unheard of up here, but that's a pretty extreme example (that is weirdly undocumented online, you can read about it at the visitor center though).
-
-It was dark and cool in the old growth, little sun made it down to the forest floor, which was a deep bed of needles. The thing that really jumped out about the old growth though was how quiet it was in those portions of the forest. I noticed the silence before I really registered anything else. I'm not sure why, but I have never been anywhere so utterly silent. The birds were mostly gone, headed south for the winter, that was definitely part of the silence, but it was also just quieter among the hemlocks than in the younger stretches of forest we passed through. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-09-01_094641_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3104" class="picwide" />
-
-We made it to camp by mid afternoon. I will confess I am fascinated by the modern hiking crowd who seem to love nothing better than 20 mile days. If the people I see on YouTube and Instagram are in fact representative of modern hikers. I am just about the opposite. Even if I didn't have kids... I like three mile days and lounging around camp, swimming, fishing, birding, cooking. The walking part? Meh, it's fine, but it's not why I am here. Walking is just the necessary ingredient to reach the last few spots on earth with some solitude. 
-
-Whatever the case, we set up camp, and spent the afternoon lounging around.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_153953_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3090" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_093826_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3095" class="picwide" />
-
-
-I have two regrets from this trip. The first is that we did not bring the hammock. Always bring the hammock. Well, if there are trees around. 
-
-My second regret is that we did not bring more real food. Five steaks really would not have added that much weight to our pack and would have 100 percent been worth that added weight. I am done with the whole dehydrated food thing. Some is fine when you're doing longer walks, but there's nothing like a steak in the backcountry. At least in my imagination there is nothing like a steak in the backcountry. Which isn't to say that we ate poorly, just that, well, steaks and bacon and eggs would have been better. Next time.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_174525_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3092" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_173223_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3091" class="picwide" />
-
-At least we got to have fires, something that's increasingly rare, not just in the backcountry, but everywhere. Long periods of poor forest management, combined with dry weather, have left much of the west forced to ban open fires. I am working on a longer piece about the importance of the fire, especially the outdoor fire, but suffice to say that it was very nice to have one in the backcountry. We even almost got something like a decent family photo. Almost.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_184129_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3093" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_065645_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3094" class="picwide" />
-
-The next day we did a little day hiking around the lake and little swimming when we got back to camp.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_115020_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3096" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_125719_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3099" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_115414_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3097" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_132928_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3101" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_125223_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3098" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_130033_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3100" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_134317_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3102" class="picwide" />
-
-
-
-[^1]: We originally intended to go canoeing in the Boundary Waters, but couldn't get the permits for the areas that were doable with kids (everything was booked). In hindsight, I am glad we didn't.
-
-
-## Grandparents
-
-My parents flew out to visit us in Washburn. Somehow they managed to find a rental house outside of town (there isn't much besides hotels and camping in the these parts) with a spectacular garden.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-23_141236_parents.jpg" id="image-3076" class="picwide" />
-
-We took them out to Madeline Island for the day, which meant the kids got a second trip on the ferry, always a popular way to spend the day. We'd do it more regularly if it wasn't so ridiculously expensive.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-19_153339_madeline-island-parents.jpg" id="image-3075" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-19_123846_madeline-island-parents.jpg" id="image-3071" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-19_123343_madeline-island-parents.jpg" id="image-3070" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-19_124138-1_madeline-island-parents.jpg" id="image-3072" class="picwide" />
-
-Mostly we had nice weather while they were here, but one day while we were parking in Bayfield it started to rain, so we ducked into the nearby Bayfield Heritage Museum. If we hadn't recently been the Milwaukee Public Museum, I'd say the Bayfield Heritage Museum is the best museum we've been to. As it is, it's pretty close, for one simple reason—the kids could touch everything. 
-
-The woman working even came over and told the kids to open the turn of the century oven, the dresser drawers, the kitchen cabinets and the rest. That's really all it takes to make children totally enthralled by anything, just let them do what they want. 
-
-Down in the basement there was a very detailed model of Bayfield at the height of the timber industry. There was a scavenger hunt that involved finding ten little scenes in the model. We found everything but the happy hobo, the host had to help us with the happy hobo.
-
-<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220818_131559.jpg" id="image-3077" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220818_132312.jpg" id="image-3079" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220818_131627.jpg" id="image-3078" class="picwide" />
-
-One of the great things about having visitors come is it gives you a reason to do some of the things you just never seem to get around to otherwise. The Houghton Falls is less than two miles from the campground, but for whatever reason—maybe because it was too close by—we never made it until my parents came.
-
-It turned out to be a great little trail. Judging by the wood planks on the trail, it is probably boggy and miserably buggy in the early season—maybe it's a good thing we waited until August—but it was dry and nice when we went. After wandering through the forest for a quarter mile, the trail drops down to the river bed which has cut a deep gorge through pre-Cambrian sandstone. The result is a wonderland of caves and pools with plenty of climbing to keep the kids busy.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-21_112147_washburn.jpg" id="image-3081" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-21_113404_washburn.jpg" id="image-3082" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-21_113840_washburn.jpg" id="image-3083" class="picwide" />
-
-The namesake falls are a bit back from the lake, but there was no water anyway. The trail ends at Lake Superior, just beyond a shallow bay where the river finally empties into the lake. There's a little rock outcropping about 10 feet off the water that looked pretty good for jumping. I actually would not have gone if the kids hadn't been gung ho about it. But then they were less so after I jumped and they saw how far down it was. I ended up being the only one to jump. Next time I'll talk them into it.
-
-## August Jottings
-
-***August 2*:** Already I feel the end of summer heading toward us. There's a fleetingness to the warm days now, an inevitability to the cold that comes in the evenings and is slower to go again in mornings. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-12_054139_washburn.jpg" id="image-3052" class="picwide" />
-
-I miss the merlins. Every morning since we arrived the first thing I heard in the morning was five or six merlin chicks shrieking and playing in the pines around our campsite. Today I heard nothing. They've gone. Or they all died. Either way the bird life here as changed. The small birds are back. Nuthatches and chickadees are the morning sounds now, with occasional crows and blue jays.
-
-The pileated woodpeckers were through again this morning, you can never fail to notice that flaming-red crest streaking through the trees. It sounds like a jackhammer when they beat on the bark. Such a massive bird for something that spends most of it's time clinging to the side of a tree. This morning there were three. One stayed on the ground, which I had never seen a pileated do before. At first I thought it might be injured, but eventually it took off to join its fellows in the trees.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-27_084517_washburn.jpg" id="image-3051" class="picwide" />
-
-***August 6*:** Strange mayfly hatch this morning. The bathroom building is completely covered in mayflies. Thousands of them, inside and out. Camp host tried blowing them with a leaf blower but it didn't work, they hung on. Reminded me of [the night in New Orleans when the termites hatched](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/new-orleans-instrumental-number-2), (which I didn't actually write about in that post, not everything makes out of the journal). Fortunately we were far enough away this time that nothing ended up swarming in the bus. 
-
-***August 8*:** The kids started sailing camp this morning. I picked them up at lunch time and managed to see the girls sailing, Elliott was already in. Their first day on the water and it was probably the windiest we've had in quite a while. Can't reef an [Optimist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimist_(dinghy)). I guess you just go fast. They spent most of the day practicing knots and righting flipped boats so they knew what to do, but according to them no one flipped in the stiff breezes. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-09_112805_sailing-camp.jpg" id="image-3053" class="picwide" />
-
-I've been challenged to many a knot tying contest this afternoon. I have lost almost all of them. I used to be able to tie a bowline one-handed without thinking about it. Now I have to sit there and tell myself the rabbit story to get it right.
-
-***August 12*:** Final day of sailing camp featured a sail by for the parents followed by a potluck lunch. Unfortunately there was very little wind so it was more a drift, crank-the-tiller-back-and-forth by. Still, it was good to see them out on the water, having fun and making new friends.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-12_111237_sailing-camp.jpg" id="image-3054" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-12_111629_sailing-camp.jpg" id="image-3055" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-12_111643_sailing-camp.jpg" id="image-3056" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-12_112257_sailing-camp.jpg" id="image-3057" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-12_112622_sailing-camp.jpg" id="image-3058" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-***August 13*:** Heading to the country fair later today. We're suckers for a local fair, but we're used to fairs in October. Yet another reminder that cold comes early up here.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-13_140027_county-fair.jpg" id="image-3059" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-13_145435_county-fair.jpg" id="image-3061" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-13_145423_county-fair.jpg" id="image-3060" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-<img src="images/2022/2022-08-13_152157_county-fair.jpg" id="image-3062" class="picwide" />
-
-Years ago at the [Elberton Fair](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/10/elberton-county-fair) Elliott was too short to ride some of the rides with his sisters. This year Olivia was too tall to ride some of the rides with her siblings. We can't seem to completely win. At least there was a lumberjack show, complete with crosscut saws and log rolling exhibitions.
-
-***August 13*:** Cooler this morning. 54 on the gauge. Blue-gray fog bank on the far show enshrouding the hills. Crows are unhappy about something this morning. Red-breasted nuthatches seem unconcerned. 
-
-Signs of winter are increasing. The weather has shifted, more birds are passing through. Cape may warblers are already headed south from wherever they've been north of here. On the way to the store today I saw the city had pulled out it's snow plows and was giving them a wash. Seasons remain a strange thing to this Los Angeles native. I like the idea of them, I like the transitions between them, but we are not sticking around to live in them. 
-
-## Around Washburn
-One weekend I took the kids over to Madeline Island again. The museum was have a trading post-style reenactment., and we are suckers for a good reenactment festival. 
-
-
-
-We got to see some real birch bark canoes, and some artifacts like trade blankets, early compasses and navigation tools, even early pharmacy tools, including a pill-making board the kids got to try out, making some playdough pills.
-
-Most of the reenactment stuff was things Voyageurs would have used in the fur trade, though there were a couple of people there representing local tribes. One man in particular was really great at show the kids various tools and demonstrating how they worked. He was so good I forgot to take any pictures, which I realized later is kind of the highest praise I can (accidentally) give.
-
-
-
-## Ten
-
-I was thinking the other day about some friends I haven't talked to since I left Los Angeles for good in 1999. I was thinking how astounded they would probably be to know that I had managed to keep two children alive and well for ten years now. What they would probably say is, *I think you mean your wife has managed to keep two children alive and well for ten years*. And of course they'd be right. 
-
-Whatever the case, somehow, our twins are ten. Double digits. Decades old. And all that. 
-
-
-
-## Midsummer
-We pulled into Memorial Park Campground in Washburn, Wisconsin just before lunch on a Thursday and grabbed one of the few spots left in the campground. It was just a few sites down from where we [stayed four years ago](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/island-golden-breasted-woodpecker). We love a good first-come, first-serve campground, especially one with no stay limits. We unfurled the awning and settled in for the summer. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-08_200436_washburn.jpg" id="image-3017" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-08_174443_washburn.jpg" id="image-3016" class="picwide" />
-
-For us, these days, settling in means signing the kids up for Jui Jitsu, getting library cards, and figuring out the best places to get in whatever body of water is nearby. Washburn, and nearby Ashland, provide all that and more, perhaps most importantly, reasonable temperatures all summer, little in the way of crowds, and the kind of hospitality you really only find in small towns anymore.
-
-At their first Jui Jitsu class one of their classmate's mother invited us to a midsummer party. Summer is bigger deal up here than it is in say Florida. When something is so fleeting you appreciate it more I think. Whatever the case, we showed up and had a great time. There was music, flower wreaths, comedy, even sack races. The kids danced late into the night. It was a good way to celebrate midsummer, something I've never celebrated before.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-        <img src="images/2022/2022-07-16_165753_washburn.jpg" id="image-3019" class="cluster pic66" />
-        <img src="images/2022/2022-07-16_171809_washburn.jpg" id="image-3020" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-    <img src="images/2022/2022-07-16_175425_washburn.jpg" id="image-3021" class="cluster picwide" />
-    <img src="images/2022/2022-07-16_190818_washburn.jpg" id="image-3022" class="cluster picwide" />
-</div>
-
-While Jui Jitsu, libraries, and swimming holes are all we really need, we do appreciate there being good Mexican food, and as of this summer, Washburn has that. All this corner of the world needs now is for the shifting climate to mellow out the winters a bit.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-24_124345_washburn.jpg" id="image-3023" class="cluster pic66 caption" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-25_153047_washburn.jpg" id="image-3024" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-26_072037_washburn.jpg" id="image-3025" class="cluster picwide" />
-</div>
-
-I think if we'd been closer to Washburn in 2020 when the U.S. shut everything down, we'd have rented a place around here. But of course that's not where we were so we'll likely never know how we'd handle a winter up here. For now though, it's a pretty great place to spend your summer.
-
-
-
-## Away From the Crowds
-
-We would have stayed longer at Harrington Beach State Park, and we would have loved to head up into the Door Peninsula, but we were facing every full time RVer's least favorite holiday: Fourth of July weekend. Everything was booked. So, we loaded up our still-not-installed awning and headed north, where the crowds are fewer and we knew of at least one first come first served campground. 
-
-You can't just show up at a first come first serve campground on the Friday of fourth of July weekend though. Corrinne does 90 percent of the camp planning and she, marvel that she is, found a campground somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin that was somehow not already booked for the fourth and was on our way. We had reservations the day before and hit the road Friday.
-
-Now, you might be asking yourself, what sort of campground *isn't* full on America's most popular camping weekend? How awful is it that no one wants to go there? Actually it was quite nice. I think no one wants to go there in part because it's in a very rural area and when you have wild acreage, camping isn't really something you care about as much. At least that was our experience living in a 300-acre pine forest. Whatever the case Governor Thompson State Park was nice and we were happy to have a spot to park for the holiday weekend.
-
-Admittedly, there wasn't much to do at Governor Thompson if you don't have a boat (it's on a lake). One fellow vintage camper owner we met ventured over to the swim beach one day and called it the saddest little thing he'd ever seen. We never went to find out for ourselves. We just relaxed, did a lot of reading, and finally had the space to get our new awning installed.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-02_153235_gov-thompson-sp.jpg" id="image-2999" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-02_180645_gov-thompson-sp.jpg" id="image-3000" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-02_182710_gov-thompson-sp.jpg" id="image-3001" class="picwide" />
-
-After putting on the window awning on the other side I was dreading the full size patio awning. Fortunately for me, the installation process was different, so my fears proved unfounded. In some ways I think it was easier to install the patio than the window awning, though there were a couple of awkward moments. But now have plenty of shade to sit around and relax (and work, and play) in. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-03_120708_gov-thompson-sp.jpg" id="image-3004" class="picwide" />
-
-I'd forgotten how nice it is to have that under the awning space. We used to live in that shade, but we stopped using our old awning because it was so beat up and gross. Sitting under it was not a pleasant experience the last few months. With the Zipdee we've reclaimed that space. We have a wonderfully warm yellow light bathing the bus from all angles, and we've been spending a lot more time outside. Zipdee awnings aren't cheap, but well worth the money in my opinion.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-03_115523_gov-thompson-sp.jpg" id="image-3002" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-03_115524_gov-thompson-sp.jpg" id="image-3003" class="picwide" />
-
-With the holiday weekend behind us we continued north, bound for the shores of Lake Superior. We stopped off at a place called Copper Falls for a couple of nights. It's supposedly one of the highlights of the area, but our experience was that it's buggy and there's not much to do other than hike to see the falls. They are nice waterfalls, but you can't get near them and the mosquitoes and black flies were bad enough that it would have made Yosemite miserable.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-04_182326_copper-falls.jpg" id="image-3007" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-04_152815_copper-falls.jpg" id="image-3008" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-04_154726_copper-falls.jpg" id="image-3006" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-04_154339_copper-falls.jpg" id="image-3005" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-04_182533_copper-falls.jpg" id="image-3009" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-04_191019_copper-falls.jpg" id="image-3010" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-07-04_191036_copper-falls.jpg" id="image-3011" class="picwide" />
-
-I never like to complain too much about anywhere because it's an incredible experience to be able to live the way we do and a few bad nights for us is a tiny price to pay (and Copper Falls wasn't even that bad), but I was glad to hit the road again.
-
-And our plan worked. We pulled into the first-come first-serve campground in Washburn WI on a Thursday morning, snagged the best site, and settled in for the summer. 
-
-
-## Hello Milwaukee
-
-The drive up to Harrington Beach State Park wasn't far, about 50 miles, but somehow that 50 miles changed everything. Once we were past Milwaukee (Harrington Beach is about 30 minutes north of Milwaukee) the last traces of heat disappeared. There were cheese curds at every gas station—a sure sign you're in Wisconsin—and the world felt quieter, more relaxed, more natural. Even the lake seemed somehow wilder. 
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-27_151631_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2974" class="picwide" />
-
-Last time we were here I [wrote about the yellow warblers](https://luxagraf.net/dialogues/yellow-warbler) that were everywhere in our campsite. This time was no different, one even came in the bus to check it out.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-28_110935_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2977" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-28_110933_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2995" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
- 
-We came back to Harrington because it's a good place to camp and access Milwaukee. We don't spend much time in cities anymore. We avoid them actually, especially large cities. Driving into the Chicago to get the awning was a nightmare I'd just as soon never repeat. Smaller cities like Milwaukee are more tolerable, though still not our thing anymore. 
-
-That said, we made an exception here because we actually like Milwaukee and we have some friends living here that we wanted to catch up with, however briefly. We had also promised the girls we'd get some sushi and cupcakes, and then go to a museum for their birthday since we'd be spending their actual birthday somewhere without sushi.
-
-We started with cupcakes of course.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-29_103614_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2979" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-29_103541_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2978" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-Then we had a sushi lunch and popped into a bookstore that was pretty amazing, but, despite having a seemingly endless number of books, did not have the one that the girls wanted.
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-29_123150_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2980" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-29_123221_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2981" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
- <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-29_131256_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2982" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-29_131312_harrington-milwaukee_bzc4u7m.jpg" id="image-2983" class="cluster pic66" /></span>
-</div>
-
-The next stop was the Milwaukee Public Museum, which is such a vague name we didn't really know what to expect except that it had some dinosaur exhibit of some kind. I think that was a good way to go in, not knowing anything (the opportunity for you to go not knowing anything is about to be ruined) because now that I've been, I am still not totally sure what the Milwaukee Public Museum is, beyond, the very generic: really fun.
-
-The specimen collection in the lobby area reminded me of [La Specula in Florence](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2011/06/natural-science), and set the tone of the place. It's a throw back the museums of old: big dioramas, lots of signs and welcome absence of any screens, or QR codes, or any of the ridiculous digital gimmicks that pass for content in modern museums. Instead it was interactive in the original sense—the kids could touch the buffalo fur and ride a penny farthing and even let butterflies land on them. 
-
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-29_135459_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2984" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-29_135612_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2985" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-29_182409_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2990" class="cluster picwide caption" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-29_141216_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2986" class="cluster picwide caption" />
-</div>
-
-The natural history portion of the Milwaukee Public Museum was extensive and full of great dioramas, though I have to take some exception the tiny little section devoted to the south. The south is apparently little more than a footnote here and can be adequately represented by a banjo, a musket, a few ears of corn, and a flag none of us recognized. 
-
-What the Public Museum does a far, far better job with is the history of Milwaukee, which is set up in a lifesize replica of Milwaukee through the ages, though most of it is done up like the late 19th century. This was by far the most fun to walk around. It was lit with the equivalent of old gas lamps so it's a very dark exhibit that you can get lost in. 
-
-
-
--- roughly the technological level I suspect my grandkids will live in. 
-
-
-
-## Illinois Beach
-
-I think it's important to remember that it's fun to do something for no reason at all. That is, not everything needs a reason beyond simply the freedom to do it. 
-
-This is what Sir Edmund Hilery was hinting at when he was asked, *why do you want to climb Mount Everest,* and he answered, *because it's there*. Because the freedom of the will to choose and act and do, the freedom for you to do something for no other reason than you happen to want to do it, is irreducible, unassailable base on which all human delight is built. 
-
-That has nothing to do with how we came to be at Illinois Beach State Park, on the far northern reaches of Chicago, or what we did there, but I think it's worth saying things from time to time about the meta-journey if you will and one of the key things I've learned from this adventure is that life isn't so serious as it seems, perhaps especially when it seems most serious. The universe is a whimsical place after all, how else do you explain the giraffe? Or this strange, abandoned concession center in the middle of Illinois Beach State Park looking for all the world like it was plucked out of a 1950s Soviet seaside resort and plopped here in Illinois?
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-21_065427_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2970" class="picwide" />
-
-One of the things I was most looking forward to about coming back to the Great Lakes area was replicating the day we [drove out of the heat and into the wonderfully cool summer of Wisconsin](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/06/wisconsin). Alas, that did not happen this time (you can [never go back](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2008/06/you-cant-go-home-again)).
-
-The heat wave followed us up through Chicago, where I stopped off at the Zipdee factory to pick up two awnings we'd ordered several months ago. With the giant, fifteen foot tubes on the floor of the bus, I hit the road again bound for Illinois State Beach, on the shores of Lake Michigan.
-
-Thankfully the heat wave only lasted two more days, and we had the nice clear, cool waters of Lake Michigan to keep us cool in the mean time. Almost any day spent on the water is a good day in my book, though the temperature extremes were more than we're used to—100 in the air, 53 in the water. Stay in for more than a few minutes and you're shivering, but by the time you're out two minutes you're ready to cool back down again.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-20_174403_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2972" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-20_174406_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2971" class="picwide" />
-
-Fortunately after the weekend the air temp settled back down to a nice 80 degrees, making it a bit for fun to sit (and play) on the beach.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-21_103522_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2968" class="picwide" />
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-21_105102_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2967" class="cluster pic66" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-21_105937_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2966" class="cluster pic66" />
-    </span>
-</div>
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-21_173023_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2965" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-22_190901_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2964" class="picwide" />
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-22_194625_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2963" class="picwide" />
-
-The abandoned concession stand wasn't the only odd thing in Illinois State Beach, in fact there were quiet a few oddities. My favorite was the pair of Sandhill Cranes that strolled through the campground every day utterly unconcerned with any humans that might be around. In fact they would march right up to people looking for food, I saw one sneak a hot dog off a picnic table and proceed to eat it before any of the people around noticed.
-
-<img src="images/2022/2022-06-21_102538_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2969" class="picwide" />
-
-However odd it might have been, Illinois State Park was perfectly suited to the real reason we came—to install our new Zipdee awnings and get rid of our old. No one complained about the sawing and the remains of the old one fit nicely in the dumpster. In the end rain stopped me from getting the big awning installed here, but I got our new side awning on at least. 
-
-
-
-It keeps the afternoon sun out of the window and allows us to have the window open even if it's raining, but really we just like it... because it's there. It makes the bus a little more fun, a little more delightful if I do say so myself.
-
-"" 
-
-## Birding
-
-I spent most of the afternoon today watchng a least tern fish in the waters of Hatteras island in the outer banks of North Carolina. The tern hovered, fluttering like a sheet of white paper in the wind, ducking and diving in the currents until it tucked in its wings and dropped like a rock into a wave. It was too far away to see if it got anything.
-
-An osprey I watched was heavier, weightier in the air, purposeful until it too tucked its wings and dove. In that moment of freefall both seemed no longer in control. Only gravity was in charge at the moment. The osprey came up empty, but did something I've never noticed a bird doing before, it shook itself as it hovered over the waves, skaing and ruffling its features to shed the water it had picked up when it dove. And then with a few quick strong wingbeats it roase up, gaught and updraft and drifted down the shoreline, scan the waves for fish.
-
-Bird watching isn't really anything more than deciding to pay great attention to birds. Bird watching is really a never ending process of turning something that is always happening in the background to something you're focused solely on. It's the process of learning that that brown and white bird likes to sit on the top of the myrtle in the morning and sing, but spends its afternoons rather silently, scratching at the ground in search of grubs and seeds. These days birdwatchers call it a brown thrasher, or Toxostoma rufum, but that there are many other names for it, the rusty mockingbird, the brown thrush. The Ojibwe call it apagaande-ikwewinini.
-
-
-
-
-This process of turning your full attention to something not only outside yourself, but not even human is I think a large part of what makes bird watching so popular. I don't think we were made to live in a wholly human world, and I think much of what ails us these days has roots back in this entirely self-reflexive world we've trapped ourselves in. Birds offer a way outside of ourselves, our culture, our species. 
-
-
-To pay attention to anything in great detail is a rewarding thing. This is why I like make this site, I like to pay attention to things and then I like to do something with the results of that attention. Sometimes I write things only for myself in my journal, sometimes I take photographes, sometimes I sketch something in pencil or pen, sometimes I write things and put them up here. All of these are outlets for the accumulated results of paying attention to something, be it birds, the shape and rythem of waves, the wind in the leaves, the movement of clouds or what my kids are doing around me. 
-
----
-
-I know there's other reasons for the popularity of birdwatching. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't some competitive aspect to it to for me. Would I like to have a life list in the 1000s? Sure, but not because I want to have seen more than you or anyone else, but because that would mean that I'd have paid attention to over 1000 birds.
-
-
-
-
-Cameras are increasingly designed to remove the human factor from the act of taking a picture. With the addition over the last several decades of features like autofocus, auto white balance, and auto light metering, the engineering effort of most camera manufacturers has gone into replacing the learned choices of the individual photographer with algorithms. These algorithms turn the act of producing a great image into something that’s no longer a challenge you must rise to or adapt to, but a series of options you can choose between. 
-
-To repair is to join a community.
-
-The right to repair the need to repair the desire to repair is fundamentally a communal desire it's a hierarchical desire hierarchical community of experience being handed down but it's fundamentally communal you can't get this knowledge without it being handed down to you whether that is through books through more experienced people through YouTube through any number of other means of disseminating information it has to come down 3 time from someone hierarchical a above you with more skills than you and it takes humility to become part of that system so you have humility and community and these are two things that are fundamentally opposed pictures of dominant worldview of the modern world
-
-
-
-
 # Birds
 
 ## Carolina Wren
diff --git a/src.txt b/src.txt
index 3289a2b..ff53ff7 100644
--- a/src.txt
+++ b/src.txt
@@ -1,25 +1,3437 @@
-## CSP-Active
+# Notes
+## w3m
 
-be sure to look here:
+How do you open a link in a new tab? meh, you don't really need to, just hit "s" for the buffer selection window which has your whole browsing history.
 
-https://github.com/nico3333fr/CSP-useful/blob/master/csp-wtf/explained.md
+okay back is shift-b. s to list buffers. esc-e to edit, that seems to be the basics. 
 
-Also make sure you log:
+Meta U to get the equivelant of ctrl-l (select URL bar), then bash shortcuts work:
 
-https://mgdm.net/weblog/csp-logging-with-nginx/
+ctrl -u to delete everything behind the cursor
+Ctrl-a Move cursor to beginning of line -- doesn't work
+Ctrl-e Move cursor to end of line
+Ctrl-b Move cursor back one letter
+Ctrl-f Move cursor forward one letter 
 
-useful: 
+Need to figure out how to save current buffers to file
 
-https://www.troyhunt.com/locking-down-your-website-scripts-with-csp-hashes-nonces-and-report-uri/
-https://www.troyhunt.com/how-chromes-buggy-content-security-policy-implementation-cost-me-money/
-https://www.uriports.com/blog/creating-a-content-security-policy-csp/
-https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP
-https://cspscanner.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fluxagraf.net
+you can bookmark with esc-a to add esc b to view
+# Console-Based Web Browsing With W3M
 
-## You Don't Need Cloudfront
+date:2023-05-15 12:24:54
+url:/src/console-based-web-browsing-w3m
 
-https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/do-not-use-s3-for-static-assets/
+Lately I've been browsing the web with a 28-year-old, text-only browser, and it has made me like the web again. Pages load blazingly fast and I find myself using the web like the library it once was -- I connect, I find what I want, I save it offline to read, and I close the browser. It makes me more efficient, less distracted, and I don't ever want to go back to a graphical browser.
 
-## Mx Route Email Notes
+The web is a steaming pile of JavaShit though, so I do from time to time have to open pages in a graphical browser. I start in w3m now though. If the page I'm after works, I am happy, if it doesn’t I get to decide: begrudgingly open it in a graphical browser or just skip it. It’s remarkable how often the second option is the one I chose. It’s made me question what all I do on the web, most of it turns out to be unimportant and unnecessary.
+
+It isn't the lack of JavaScript that makes browsing with w3m great. That does help clear up clutter, but it's really an entirely different experience that, the more I use it, the more I love it. It returns the web to text and in some ways I think this may be the ideal form of the web. Text and images.
+
+Perhaps, in hindsight, it might have been better to leave the rest -- email, chat, real-time messaging services and all the rest of the bells and whistles -- perhaps we should have left all that to mobile apps. That's how most people use them anyway.
+
+<img src="images/2023/w3m-screen_LGRQBFb.jpg" id="image-3589" class="picwide caption" />
+
+With w3m I find myself focused on a single task in a way that I am not in Vivaldi (my [graphical browser of choice](https://www.wired.com/story/vivaldi-4-2021/)). With w3m I get the information I want faster. I can save it easier. I can open a rendered page in Vim with a single keystroke. Then I can copy and paste things to my notes. Another keystroke saves the whole page as text. When I'm done I quit and move on to something different. 
+
+Opening w3m is so fast I don't keep it open. I use it when I need it and then I close it. 
+
+This, I've come to think, is the key to eliminating distractions, staying focused, getting worthwhile work done: close the browser when you don't need it.
+
+I never thought of an open web browser as multitasking, but that's what tabs are after all. Worse the web has no edges. An open browser window is a glittering invitation to distraction. 
+
+Unitasking is the way forward friends. When you're done with the page, close the browser.
+
+This is very cumbersome with a graphical browser which has to boot up a ton of stuff and then load all those open tabs you have and it ends up taking so long enough that only a crazy person would close it when they were done with a single task. It'd be like shutting off your laptop every time you closed the lid[^1].
+
+With w3m this is not a factor. I shut it down every time I'm done. And I waste less time because of it. Often I even close out the terminal window that it was in because booting up a terminal window is fast too. Then I find myself staring at my desktop, which happens to be a somber image I took a long time ago in the swamps of Florida, and it always makes me want to close my laptop and go outside, which is why I use it as a desktop.
+
+What does this have to do with w3m? Very little I suppose, other than to say, if you're finding yourself wasting time browsing the internet for hours, try w3m, you might like it, and I can almost garantee you'll save yourself some time that you'd otherwise waste on pointless internet things. Go make something instead. Or give someone a hug or a high five.
+
+[^1]: Cough. Which I also do.
+
+# How I Work on a $75 Tablet
+
+date:2022-11-24 09:50:58
+url:/src/how-to-get-work-done-on-a-75-tablet
+
+Fresh out of the box Amazon's Fire tablets are useless. They're just firehoses designed to shove Amazon content down your throat. That's why Amazon sells them for as little as $55 for the 10-inch model. Technically it's $150, but it frequently goes on sale for around, and sometimes under, $75. The time to buy is major shopping holidays, Prime Day and Black Friday/Cyber Monday are your best bet. 
+
+To do any work you'll also want the Finite keyboard. The tablet-keyboard bundle typically runs about $75-$120 depending on the sale. It's $200 not on sale. Don't do that, it's not worth $200.
+
+For $75 though, I think it's worth it. Once I strip the Amazon crap out and install a few useful apps, I have a workable device. The price is key for me. This is what I take when I head out to the beach or into the woods or up some dusty canyon for the day. I don't want to take my $600 laptop to those places. $75 tablet? Sure. Why not get it a little sandy here and there? So far (going on a year now), it's actually survived. Mostly. I did crack the screen, but it's not too bad yet.
+
+It lets me work in places like this, which happens to be where I am typing right now (picnic tables in the middle of nowhere are rare, but I'll take it).
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-11_152857_st-george.jpg" id="image-3587" class="picwide" />
+
+A Fire HD 10 is not the most pleasant thing to type on. The keyboard is cramped and there's no way to map caps lock to control, which trips me up multiple times a day. Still. After a year. But hey, it enables me to get outside and play and still get a little work done when I need to. 
+
+For anyone else who might be interested, here's what I do.
+
+First you need to disable all of Amazon's crap apps. Before you so that though, you need to make sure you have a new launcher and a new web browser installed, because if you turn off Amazon's defaults before you have new ones you will have nothing and you'll be stuck. There are millions of browsers and launchers for Android. I happen to like Vivaldi as a web browser, which you can download from UptoDown.com (which is officially supported by Vivaldi). For a launcher I like [Nova Launcher](https://nova-launcher.en.uptodown.com/android).
+
+Once you have those it's time to start shutting off all the Amazon apps and services. To do that I use [these instructions](https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-no-root-remove-amazon-apps-on-fire-10-hd-2019.4009547/) from the XDA forums. You need to install the adb developer tool, connect that to your fire, and then run a series of commands. The commands themselves are a touch of of date in the XDA article, so to disable some apps on newer tablets you may have to search for the new app names. 
+
+Once you've eliminated Amazon from the Fire HD 10, you have a base on which to build. Over the years I've purposefully built a workflow based around very simple tools that are available everywhere. If it can run a terminal emulator, I can probably work on it. On Android devices, the app I need is Termux. That and a web browser and I can get by. All of those work fine without the Google Play Store installed. If you do need apps from the Play Store I wrote a tutorial on [how to install the Google Play Store](https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-install-google-play-store-on-amazon-fire-tablet/) for Wired that you can use.
+
+For writing and accessing my documents and other files I use Termux, which is available via F-Droid. I write prose and code the same way, using Vim and Git. I track changes using Git and push them to a remote repo I host on a server. When I get back to my laptop, I can pull the work from the tablet and pickup where I left off. To make everything work you also need the Termux:API, which for some reason is a separate app. 
+
+To set things up the way I like them I install Termux and then configure ssh access to my server. Once that's setup I can clone my dotfiles and setup Termux to mirror the way my laptop is set up. I can also [install git annex]() and clone my documents and notes folders. I don't often access these from the tablet, but I like to have them just in case. The last thing I do is clone my writing repository. That gets me a basic setup, but there are some things I do to make life on Android smoother.
+
+First install the termux-api package with:
+
+~~~
+pkg install termux-api 
+~~~ 
+
+This gives you access to a shell command `termux-clipboard-set` and `-get` so you can copy and past from vim. I added this to my Termux .vimrc and use control copy in visual mode to send that text to the system clipboard:
+
+~~~
+vnoremap <C-x> :!termux-clipboard-set<CR>
+vnoremap <C-c> :w !termux-clipboard-set<CR><CR>
+inoremap <C-v> <ESC>:read !termux-clipboard-get<CR>i
+~~~ 
+
+That works for updating this site, but some sites I write for want rich text, which I generate using [Pandoc](https://pandoc.org) and then open in the browser using this script:
+
+~~~
+#!/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/sh
+cat $1 \
+  | pandoc -t html --ascii > /storage/emulated/0/Download/output.html \
+  && darkhttpd /storage/emulated/0/Download --daemon --addr 127.0.0.1 \
+  && termux-open http://localhost:8080/output.html
+~~~
+
+I saved that as rtf.sh, made it executable with `chmod +x`, and put it on my path (which in my setup, includes `~/bin`). Then I run it with whatever file I am working on.
+
+~~~
+~/./bin/rtf.sh mymarkdown.txt
+~~~
+
+That'll open a new window in my browser with the formatted text and then I can copy and paste to where it needs to go. Note that you'll need to install [darkhttpd](https://github.com/emikulic/darkhttpd) (a very simple web server) with `pkg install darkhttpd`.
+
+#### Issues and Some Solutions
+
+There's no `esc` key on the Finite keyboard, which is a problem for Vim users. I get around it by mapping `jj` to escape in my .vimrc. 
+
+The one thing I have not solved is the caps lock key. I am so used to having that set as both Control and Esc that I hit it several times a day and end up not only not running whatever keycombo shortcut I thought I was about to run, but also activating caps lock and thus messing up the next commands as well because they're now capital letter commands not lowercase. I've considered just prying off the key so it'd be harder to hit, but so far I haven't resorted to that. 
+
+I've tried quite a few key remapping apps but none of them have worked consistently enough to rely on them. Such is life. It's $75, what do want really? I get by. I write and edit in vim, copy/paste things to the browser. That's all I need. Again, part of the reason I can work on a tiny $75 computer is that I have chosen to learn and rely on simple tools that work just about anywhere. 
+
+That said, this thing is not perfect. The keyboard is prone to double typing letters and also not registering a space bar press. I end up spending more time editing when I write with it. I also constantly reach for the trackpad that isn't there. Also, sometimes I get to the middle of the woods and realize I don't have the latest version of the document I want to edit. Git comes to the rescue then though, I just create a new branch, work, push the branch to the remote repo, and then merge it to master by hand when I get back to my laptop. 
+
+If you don't do everything in a terminal you might be able to still get something similar set up using other offline-friendly tools. I'm sure it's possible I just have no need so I haven't explored it. Anyway, if there's something you want to know, or you want me to try to see if it might work for you, feel free to email me, or leave a comment.
+
+# Back to X11
+
+date:2022-05-18 19:11:23
+url:/src/back-to-x11
+
+Earlier this year I upgraded my Lenovo laptop with a new, larger SSD. Video takes a staggering amount of disk space. In the process I decided to completely re-install everything. It had probably been at least five years since I've done that.
+
+Normally I would never say anything about this because really, the software you run is just a tool. If it works for you then that's all that matters. However, since I once disregarded this otherwise excellent advice and wrote about how [I use Arch Linux](https://luxagraf.net/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux) and [Sway](https://luxagraf.net/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway), I feel somewhat obligated to follow up and report that I still love Arch, but I no longer run Sway or Wayland. 
+
+I went back to X.org. Sorry Wayland, but much as I love Sway, I did not love wrestling with MIDI controller drivers, JACK, video codecs and hardware acceleration and all the other elements of an audio/video workflow in Wayland. It can be done, but it's more work. I don't want to work at getting software to work. I'm too old for that shit. 
+
+I want to open a video and edit. I want to plug in a microphone and record. If it's any more complicated than that -- and it was for me in Wayland with the mics I own -- I will find something else. Again, I really don't care what my software stack is, so long as I can create what I want to create with it.
+
+So I went back to running Openbox with a Tint2 status bar. And you know what... I really like it.
+
+Wayland was smoother, less graphically glitchy, but meh, whatever. Ninety-five percent of the time I'm writing in Vim in a Urxvt window. I even started [browsing the web in the terminal](https://luxagraf.net/src/console-based-web-browsing-w3m) half the time. I need smooth scrolling and transitions like I need a hole in my head. 
+
+That said, I did take all of Sway's good ideas and try as best I could to replicate them in Openbox. So I still have the same keyboard shortcuts and honestly, aside from the fact that Tint2 has more icons than Waybar, and creating "desktops" isn't dynamic, I can't tell much difference. Even my battery life seems to have improved in X11, and that's why I switched to Wayland in the first place, was the better battery life I was getting. Apparently that's not true with this laptop (a Lenovo Flex 5, as opposed to the X270, which does get better battery life under Wayland).
+
+Anyway, there you have it. X11 for the win. At least for me. For now.
+
+# Indie Web Companies
+
+date:2021-02-22 09:37:29
+url:/src/indie-web-companies
+
+Here's a disturbing factoid: **the world’s ten richest men have made $540 billion so far during the pandemic.** Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' worth went up so much between March and September 2020 that he could afford to give all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105k bonus and still have as much money as he had before the pandemic started ([source](https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621149/bp-the-inequality-virus-summ-250121-en.pdf)).
+
+What does that have to do with code? Well, some of my code used to run on Amazon services. Some of my money is in Jeff Bezos' pocket. I was contributing to the economic inequality that Amazon enables. I decided I did not want to do that.
+
+But more than I didn't want to contribute to Amazon's bottom line, I *wanted* to contribute to someone's bottom line, the emphasis being on *someone*. I wanted to redirect the money I was already spending to small businesses, businesses that need the revenue.
+
+We can help each other instead of Silicon Valley billionaires.
+
+Late last year at [work](https://www.wired.com/author/scott-gilbertson/) we started showcasing some smaller, local businesses in affiliate links. It was a pretty simple idea, find some small companies in our communities making worthwhile things and support them by telling others.
+
+One woman whose company I linked to called it "life-changing." It's so strange to me that an act as simple as pasting some HTML into the right text box can changed someone's life. That's amazing. I bring this up not to toot my own horn, but to say that every day there are ways in which you can use the money you spend to help real people trying to make a living. If you've ever charged a little for a web service you probably know how much of a big deal even one more customer means. I want to be that one more customer for someone.
+
+### Small business web hosts, email providers, and domain registrars
+
+My online expenses aren't much, just email, web hosting, storage space, and domain registration. I wanted to find some small business replacements for the megacorps I was using.
+
+I did a ton of research. Web hosting and email servers are tricky, these are critical things that run my business and my wife's business. It's great to support small businesses, but above all the services have to *work*. Luckily for us the forums over at [Low End Talk](https://www.lowendtalk.com/) are full of ideas and long term reviews of exactly these sorts of business -- small companies offering cheap web hosting, email hosting, and domain registration. 
+
+After a few late nights digging through threads, finding the highlights, and then more research elsewhere on the web, I settled on [BuyVM](https://buyvm.net/) for my web hosting. The owner Francisco is very active on Low End Talk and, in my experience for the last three months, is providing a great service *for less* than I was paying at Vultr. It was so much less I was able to get a much larger block storage disk and have more room for my backups, which eliminated my need for Amazon S3/Glacier as well[^2]. I highly recommend BuyVM for your VPS needs. 
+
+For email hosting I actually was already using a small company, [Migadu](https://www.migadu.com/). I liked their service, and I still recommend them if the pricing works for you, but they discountinued the plan I was on and I would have had to move to a more expensive plan to retain the same functionality. 
+
+I jumped ship from Migadu during Black Friday because another small email provider I had heard good things about was having a deal: $100 for life. At that price, so long as it stays in business for 2 years, I won't loss any money. I moved my email to [MxRoute](https://mxroute.com/) and it has been excellant. I liked it so much I bought my parents a domain and freed them from Google. Highly recommend MxRoute.
+
+That left just one element of my web stack at Amazon: domain registration. I'll confess I gave up here. Domain registration are not a space filled with small companies (which to me is like 2-8 people). I gave up. And complained to a friend, who said, try harder. So I did and discovered [Porkbun](https://porkbun.com/), the best domain registrar I've used in the past two decades. I moved my small collection of domain over at the beginning of the year and it was a seamless, super-smooth transition. It lives up to its slogan: "an oddly safisfying experience."
+
+And those are my recommendations for small businesses you can support *and* still have a great technology stack: [Porkbun](https://porkbun.com/) (domain registration), [MxRoute](https://mxroute.com/) (email hosting), and [BuyVM](https://buyvm.net/) (VPS hosting).
+
+The thing I didn't replace was AWS CloudFront. I don't have enough traffic to warrant a CDN, so I just dropped it. If I ever change my mind about that, based on my research, I'll go with [KeyCDN](https://www.keycdn.com/pricing), or possible [Hostry](https://hostry.com/products/cdn/). 
+
+I also haven't found a reliable replacement for SES, which I use to send my newsletters. I wish Sendgrid would spin off a company for non-transational email, but I don't see that happening. I could write another 5,000 words on how the big email providers totally, purposefully fucked up the best distributed communication system around. But I will spare you. 
+
+The point is, these are three small companies providing useful services we developers need. If you're feeling like you'd rather your money went to people trying to make cool, useful stuff, rather than massive corporations, give them a try. If you have other suggestions drop them in the comments and maybe I can put together some sort of larger list.
+
+[Note: none of these links are affiliate links, just services I actually use and therefore recommend.]
+
+[^1]: This is something I'd like to do more, unfortunately there are not cottage industries for most of the things I write about (cameras, laptops, etc). Still, you do what you can I guess.
+[^2]: I have a second cloud-based backup stored in Backblaze's B2 system. Backblaze is not a small company by any means, but it's one that, from the research I've been able to do, seems ethically run and about as decent as a corporation can be these days.
+
+# How To Use Webster's 1913 Dictionary, Linux Edition
+
+date:2020-12-09 09:22:58
+url:/src/how-use-websters-1913-dictionary-linux-edition
+
+I suspect the overlap of Linux users and writers who care about the Webster's 1913 dictionary is vanishingly small. Quite possible just me. But in case there are others, I am committing these words to internet. Plus I will need them in the future when I forget how I set this up. 
+
+Here is how you install, set up, and configure the command line app `sdcv` so that you too can have the one true dictionary at your fingertips in the command line app of your choosing.
+
+But first, about the one true dictionary.
+
+The one true dictionary is debatable I suppose. Feel free to debate. I have a "compact" version of the Oxford English Dictionary sitting on my desk and it is weighty both literally and figuratively in ways that the Webster's 1913 is not, but any dictionary that deserves consideration as your one true dictionary ought to do more than spit out dry, banal collections of words. 
+
+John McPhee writes eloquently about the power of a dictionary in his famous New Yorker essay, *[Draft No 4](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4)*, which you can find in paper in [the compilation of essays by the same name](https://bookshop.org/books/draft-no-4-on-the-writing-process/9780374537975). Fellow New Yorker writer James Somers has [a brilliant essay on the genius of McPhee's dictionary](http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary) and how you can get it installed on your Mac.
+
+Remarkably, the copy of the Webster's 1913 that Somers put up is still available. So go grab that.
+
+However, while his instructions are great for macOS users, they don't work on Linux and moreover they don't offer access from the shell. I write in Vim, in a tmux session, so I wanted an easy way to look things up without switching apps. 
+
+The answer is named `sdcv`. It is, in the words of its man page, "a simple, cross-platform text-based utility for working with dictionaries in StarDict format." That last bit is key, because the Webster's 1913 file you downloaded from Somers is in StarDict format. I installed `sdcv` from the Arch Community repository, but it's in Debian and Ubuntu's official repos as well. 
+
+Once `sdcv` is install you need to unzip that dictionary.zip file you should have grabbed from Somers' post. That will give you four files. All we need to do now is move them somewhere `sdcv` can find them. By default that's `$(XDG_DATA_HOME)/stardict/dic`, although you can customize that by add thing Environment variable `STARDICT_DATA_DIR` to your .bashrc. I keep my dictionaries in `~/bin/dict` folder so I just drop this in .bashrc:
+
+~~~bash
+STARDICT_DATA_DIR="$HOME/bin/dict/
+~~~
+
+### How to Lookup Words in Webster's 1913 from the Command Line
+
+To use your new one true dictionary, all you need to do is type `sdcv` and the word you'd like to look up. Add a leading '/' before the word and `sdcv` will use a fuzzy search algorithm, which is handy if you're unsure of the spelling. Search strings can use `?` and `*` for regex searching. I have never used either. 
+
+My use is very simple. I wrote a little Bash function that looks like this:
+
+~~~bash
+function d() {
+    sdcv "$1" | less
+}
+~~~
+
+With this I type `d search_term` and get a paged view of the Webster's 1913 entry for that word. Since I always write in a tmux split, I just move my cursor to the blank split, type my search term and I can page through and read it while considering the context in the document in front of me.
+
+### But I Want a GUI
+
+Check out [StarDict](http://www.huzheng.org/stardict/), there are versions for Linux, Windows, and macOS, as well as source code.
+
+# Solving Common Nextcloud Problems
+
+date:2020-11-17 14:27:01
+url:/src/solving-common-nextcloud-problems
+
+I love [NextCloud](https://nextcloud.com). Nextcloud allows me to have all the convenience of Dropbox, but hosted by me, controlled by me, and customized to suit my needs. I mainly use the file syncing, calendar, and contacts features, but Nextcloud can do a crazy amount of things.
+
+The problem with NextCloud, and maybe you could argue that this is the price you pay for the freedom and control, is that I find it requires a bit of maintenance to keep it running smoothly. Nextcloud does some decidedly odd things from time to time, and knowing how to deal with them can save you some disk space and maybe avoid syncing headaches.
+
+I should note, that while I call these problems, I **have never lost data** using Nextcloud. These are really more annoyances and some ways to prevent them than *problems*.
+
+### How to Get Rid of Huge Thumbnails in Nextcloud
+
+If Nextcloud is taking up more disk space than you think it should, or your Nextcloud storage space is just running low, the first thing to check is the image thumbnails directory. 
+
+At one point I poked around in the Nextcloud `data` directory and found 11-gigabytes worth of image previews for only 6-gigabytes worth of actual images stored. That is crazy. That should never happen. 
+
+Nextcloud's image thumbnail defaults err on the side of "make it look good in the browser" where as I prefer to err on the side of keep it really small. 
+
+I did some research and came up with a few solutions. First, it looks like my runaway 11-gigabyte problem might have been due to a bug in older versions of Nextcloud. Ideally I will not hit that issue again. But, I don't admin servers with hope and optimism, so I figured out how to tell Nextcloud to generate smaller image previews. I almost never look at the images within the web UI, so I really don't care about the previews at all. I made them much, much smaller than the defaults. Here's the values I use:
+
+~~~bash
+occ config:app:set previewgenerator squareSizes --value="32 256"
+occ config:app:set previewgenerator widthSizes  --value="256 384"
+occ config:app:set previewgenerator heightSizes --value="256"
+occ config:system:set preview_max_x --value 500
+occ config:system:set preview_max_y --value 500
+occ config:system:set jpeg_quality --value 60
+occ config:app:set preview jpeg_quality --value="60"
+~~~
+
+Just ssh into your Nextcloud server and run all these commands. If you followed the basic Nextcloud install instructions you'll want to run these as your web server user. For me, with NextCloud running on Debian 10, the full command looks like this:
+
+~~~bash
+sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ config:app:set previewgenerator squareSizes --value="32 256"
+sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ config:app:set previewgenerator widthSizes  --value="256 384"
+# and so on, running all the commands listed above
+~~~
+
+This assumes you installed Nextcloud into the directory `/var/www/nextcloud`, if you installed it somewhere else, adjust the path to the Nextcloud command line tool `occ`.
+
+That will stop Nextcloud from generating huge preview files. So far so good. I deleted the existing previews and reclaimed 11-gigabytes. Sweet. You can pre-generate previews, which will make the web UI faster if you browse images in it. I do not, so I didn't generate any previews ahead of time.
+
+### How to Solve `File is Locked` Issues in Nextcloud
+
+No matter what I do, I always end up with locked file syncing issues. Researching this led me to try using Redis to cache things, but that didn't help. I don't know why this happens. I blame PHP. When in doubt, blame PHP. 
+
+Thankfully it doesn't happen very often, but every six months or so I'll see an error, then two, then they start piling up. Here's how to fix it.
+
+First, put Nextcloud in maintenance mode (again, assuming Debian 10, with Nextcloud in the `/var/www/nextcloud` directory):
+
+~~~bash
+sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --on
+~~~
+
+Now we're going directly into the database. For me that's Postgresql. If you use Mysql or Mariadb, you may need to adjust the syntax a little. 
+
+~~~bash
+psql -U yournextclouddbuser -hlocalhost -d yournextclouddbname
+password:
+nextclouddbname=> DELETE FROM oc_file_locks WHERE True;
+~~~
+
+That should get rid of all the locked file problems. For a while anyway.
+
+Don't forget to turn maintenance mode off:
+
+~~~bash
+sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --off
+~~~
+
+### Force a File Re-Scan
+
+If you frequently add and remove folders from Nextcloud, you may sometimes run into issues. I usually add a folder at the start of a new project, and then delete it when the project is finished. Mostly this just works, even with shared folders, on the rare occasion that I used them, but sometimes Nextcloud won't delete a folder. I have no idea why. It just throws an unhelpful error in the web admin and refuses to delete the folder from the server.
+
+I end up manually deleting it on the server using: `rm -rf path/to/storage/folder`. Nextcloud however, doesn't always seem to notice that the folder is gone, and still shows it in the web and sync client interfaces. The solution is to force Nextcloud to rescan all its files with this command:
+
+~~~bash
+sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --on
+sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ files:scan --path="yournextcloudusername/files/NameOfYourExternalStorage"
+sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --off
+~~~
+
+Beware that on large data directories this can take some time. It takes about 30 seconds to scan my roughly 30GB of files.
+
+### Mostly Though, Nextcloud is Awesome
+
+Those are three annoyances I've hit with Nextcloud over the years and the little tricks I've used to solve them. Lest anyone think I am complaining, I am not. Not really anyway. The image thumbnail thing is pretty egregious for a piece of software that aims to be enterprise grade, but mostly Nextcloud is pretty awesome.
+
+I rely on Nextcloud for files syncing, Calendar and Contact hosting, and keeping my notes synced across devices. Aside from these three things, I have never had a problem.
+
+####Shoulder's Stood Upon
+
+* [Nextcloud's documentation](https://docs.nextcloud.com) isn't the best, but can help get you pointed in the right direction.
+* I tried a few different solutions to the thumbnail problem, especially helpful was this post on [Understanding and Improving Nextcloud Previews](https://ownyourbits.com/2019/06/29/understanding-and-improving-nextcloud-previews/), but nachoparker.
+* The [file lock solution](https://help.nextcloud.com/t/file-is-locked-how-to-unlock/1883) comes from the Nextcloud forums.
+* The solution to scanning external storages comes from the [Nextcloud forums](https://help.nextcloud.com/t/automate-occ-filescan/35282/4).
+
+# Why I Built My Own Mailing List Software
+
+date:2020-10-24 08:36:15
+url:/src/why-i-built-my-own-mailing-list-software
+
+This is not a tutorial. If you don't already know how to write the code you need to run a mailing list, you probably shouldn't try to do it yourself. Still, I wanted to outline the reasons I built my own mailing list software in 2020, when there are dozens of commercial and open source projects that I could have used.
+
+The short answer is that when I plan to use something as a core piece of what I do, I like to understand it completely. The only way to really understand a thing is to either build it yourself from scratch or completely disassemble it and put it back together. 
+
+This is true for software as well as the rest of the world. I ripped all the electrical, propane, plumbing, and engine systems out of [my home (a 1969 RV)](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome) because I needed to know how every single piece works and how they all work together. I understand them now, and that makes maintaining them much easier. Otherwise I would always be defendant on someone else to keep my home running.
+
+The same is true with software. If the software you're considering is a core part of your personal or business infrastructure, you need to understand every single part of it and how all those parts fit together. 
+
+The question is, should you deconstruct an existing project or write your own from scratch? The answer depends on the situation, the right choice won't always be the same. I do a mix a both and I'm sure most other people do too. There's no one right answer, which means you have to think things through in detail ahead of time. 
+
+When I decided I wanted to [start a mailing list](/jrnl/2020/11/invitation), I looked around at the software that was available and very quickly realized that I had different goals than most mailing list software. That's when you should write your own.
+
+The available commercial software did not respect users privacy and did not allow me any control. There are some services that do provide a modicum of privacy for your subscribers, but you're going to be working against the software to enable it. If you know of a dead simple commercial mailing list software that's built with user privacy in mind, please post a link in the comments, I'd love to have somewhere to point people. 
+
+A big part of privacy is that I wanted to be in control of the data. I host my own publishing systems. I consider myself a writer first, but publisher is a close second. What sort of publisher doesn't control their own publishing system?[^1]
+
+Email is a wonderful distributed publishing system that no one own. That's okay, I don't need to control the delivery mechanism, just the product at either end. And email is more or less the inverse of the web. You send a single copy to many readers, rather than many readers coming to a single copy as with a web page. The point is, there's no reason I can't create and host the original email here and send out the copies myself. The hard part -- creating the protocols and low-level tool that power email -- was taken care of decades ago.
+
+With that goal in mind I started looking at open source solutions. I use [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com) to publish what you're reading here, so I looked at some Django-based mailing list software. The two I considered most seriously were [Django Newsletter](https://django-newsletter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) and [Emencia Django Newsletter](https://github.com/emencia/emencia-django-newsletter). I found a few other smaller projects as well, but those seem to be the big two in what's left of the Django universe. 
+
+Those two, and some others influenced what I ended up writing in various ways, but none of them were quite what I wanted out of the box. Most of them still used some kind of tracking, whether a pixel embedded in the email or wrapping links with individual identifiers. I didn't want either of those things and stripping them out, while staying up-to-date with upstream changes would have been cumbersome. So, DIY then.
+
+But running a mail server is... difficult, risky, and probably going to keep you up at night. I tried it, briefly.
+
+One of the big problems with email is that, despite email being an open protocol, Google and other big corps are able to gain some control by using spam as a reason to tightly control who gets to send email[^2] That means if I just spin up a VPS at Vultr and try to send some emails with Postfix they're probably all going to end up in, best case, you Spam folder, but more likely they'd never be delivered. 
+
+So while I wrote the publishing tools myself, host the newletter archive myself, designed everything about it myself, I handed off the sending to Amazon's SES, which has been around long enough, and is used by enough big names that mail sent through it isn't automatically deleted. It may possibly still end up in some Spam folders, but for the most part in my early testing (thank you to all my friends who helped out with that) that hasn't been an issue.
+
+In the end what I have is a fairly robust, loosely-joined system where I have control over the key elements and it's easy to swap out the sending mechanism down the road should I have problems with Amazon SES. 
+
+###Was it Worth It?
+
+So far absolutely not. But I knew that when I started.
+
+I could have signed up for Mailchimp, picked some pre-made template, and spent the last year sending out newsletters to subscribers, and who knows, maybe I'd have tons of those by now. But that's okay, that was never the goal. 
+
+I am and always have been playing a very long game when it comes to publishing. I am building a thing that I want to last the rest of my life and beyond if I can manage it. 
+
+I am patient. I am not looking for a ton of readers, I am looking for the right readers. The sort of people who are in short supply these days, the sort of people who end up on a piece like this and actually read the whole thing. The people for whom signing up for Mailchimp would be too easy, too boring.
+
+I am looking for those who want some adventure in everything they do, the DIYer, the curious, the explorers, the misfits. There's more of us than most of us realize. If you're interested feel free to [join our club](/newsletter/friends).
+
+[^1]: Sadly, these days almost no publisher retains any control over their systems. They're all beholden to Google AMP, Facebook News, and whatever the flavor of year happens to be. A few of them are slowly coming around to the idea that it might be better to build their own audiences, which somehow passed for revolutionary in publishing today. But I digress.
+[^2]: Not to go too conspiracy theory here, but I suspect that Google and its ilk generate a fair bit of the spam themselves, and do nothing to prevent the rest precisely because it allows for this control. Which is not to say spam isn't a problem, just that it's a convenient problem.
+
+# Replacing Autokey on Wayland
+
+date:2020-06-03 11:35:31
+url:/src/replacing-autokey-wayland-plain-text-snippets
+
+Snippets are bits of text you use frequently. Boilerplate email responses, code blocks, and whatever else you regularly need to type. My general rule is, if I type it more than twice, I save it as a snippet.
+
+I have a lot of little snippets of text and code from years of doing this. When I used the i3 desktop (and X11) I used [Autokey](https://github.com/autokey/autokey) to invoke shortcuts and paste these snippets where I need them. In Autokey you define a shortcut for your longer chunk of text, and then whenever you type that shortcut Autokey "expands" it to your longer text.
+
+It's a great app, but I [switched to a Wayland-based desktop](/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway) ([Sway](https://swaywm.org/)) and Autokey doesn't work in Wayland yet. It's unclear to me whether it's even possible to have an Autokey-like app work within Wayland's security model ([Hawck](https://github.com/snyball/Hawck) claims to, but I have not tested it). 
+
+Instead, after giving it some thought, I came up with a way to do everything I need in a way like even better, using tools that I already have installed. 
+
+###Rolling Your Own Text Snippet Manager
+
+Autokey is modeled on the idea of typing shortcuts and having them replaced with a larger chuck of text. It works to a point, but has the mental overhead of needing to remember all those keystroke combos. 
+
+Dedicating memory to digital stuff feels like we're doing it wrong. Why not *search* for a snippet instead of trying to remember some key combo? If the searching is fast and seamless there's no loss of "flow," or switching contexts, and no need to remember some obtuse shortcut. 
+
+To work though the search must be *fast*. Fortunately there's a great little command line app that offers lighting-fast search: [`fzf`](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf), a command line "fuzzy" finder. `fzf` is a find-as-you-type search interface that's incredibly fast, especially when you pair it with [`ripgrep`](https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep) instead of `find`.
+
+I already use `fzf` as a DIY application launcher, so I thought why not use it to search for snippets? This way I can keep my snippets in a simple text file, parse them into an array, pass that to `fzf`, search, and then pass the selected result on to the clipboard. 
+
+I combined Alacritty, a Python script, `fzf`, `sed`, and some Sway shortcuts to make a snippet manager I can call up and search through with a single keystroke. 
+
+###Python 
+
+It may be possible to do this entirely in a bash script, but I'm not that great at bash scripting so I did the text parsing in Python, which I know well enough.
+
+I wanted to keep all my snippets in a single text file, with the option to do multiline snippets for readability (in other words I didn't want to be writing `\n` characters just because that's easier to parse). I picked `---` as a delimiter because... no reason really. 
+
+The other thing I wanted was the ability to use tags to simplify searching. Tags become a way of filtering searches. For example, all the snippets I use writing for Wired can be tagged wired and I can see them all in one view by typing "wired" in `fzf`. 
+
+So my snippet files looks something like this:
+
+````
+<div class="cluster">
+    <span class="row-2">
+    </span>
+</div>
+tags:html cluster code
+
+---
+```python
+
+```
+tags: python code
+
+---
+````
+
+Another goal, which you may notice above, is that I didn't want any format constraints. The snippets can take just about any ascii character. The tags line can have a space, not a have space, have commas, semicolons, doesn't matter because either way `fzf` can search it, and the tags will be stripped out before it hits the clipboard. 
+
+Here's the script I cobbled together to parse this text file into an array I can pass to `fzf`:
+
+~~~python
+import re
+with open('~/.textsnippets.txt', 'r') as f:
+    data = f.read()
+snips = re.split("---", data)
+for snip in snips:
+    # strip the blank line at the end
+    s = '\n'.join(snip.split('\n')[1:-1])
+    #make sure we output the newlines, but no string wrapping single quotes
+    print(repr(s.strip()).strip('\''))
+~~~
+
+All this script does is open a file, read the contents into a variable, split those contents on `---`, strip any extra space and then return the results to stdout. 
+
+The only tricky part is the last line. We need to preserve the linebreaks and to do that I used [`repr`](https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/functions.html#repr), but that means Python literally prints the string, with the single quotes wrapping it. So the last `.strip('\'')` gets rid of those. 
+
+I saved that file to `~/bin` which is already on my `$PATH`.
+
+###Shell Scripting
+
+The next thing we need to do is call this script, and pass the results to `fzf` so we can search them.
+
+To do that I just wrote a bash script. 
+
+~~~.bash
+#!/usr/bin/env bash
+selected="$(python ~/bin/snippet.py | fzf -i -e )"
+#strip tags and any trailing space before sending to wl-copy
+echo -e "$selected"| sed -e 's/tags\:\.\*\$//;$d' | wl-copy
+~~~
+
+What happens here is the Python script gets called, parses the snippets file into chunks of text, and then that is passed to `fzf`. After experimenting with some `fzf` options I settled on case-insensitive, exact match (`-i -e`) searching as the most efficient means of finding what I want. 
+
+Once I search for and find the snippet I want, that selected bit of text is stored in a variable called, creatively, `selected`. The next line prints that variable, passes it to `sed` to strip out the tags, along with any space after that, and then sends that snippet of text the clipboard via wl-copy.
+
+I saved this file in a folder on my `PATH` (`~/bin`) and called it `fzsnip`. At this point in can run `fzsnip` in a terminal and everything works as I'd expect. As a bonus I have my snippets in a plain text file I can access to copy and paste snippets on my phone, tablet, and any other device where I can run [NextCloud](https://nextcloud.com/).
+
+That's cool, but on my laptop I don't want to have to switch to the terminal every time I need to access a snippet. Instead I invoke a small terminal window wherever I am. To do that, I set up a keybinding in my Sway config file like this:
+
+~~~.bash
+bindsym $mod+s exec alacritty --class 'smsearch' --command bash -c 'fzsnip | xargs -r swaymsg -t command exec'
+~~~
+
+This is very similar to how I launch apps and search passwords, which I detailed in my post on [switching from i3 to Sway](/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway). The basic idea is whatever virtual desktop I happen to be on, launch a new instance of [Alacritty](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty), with the class `smsearch`. Assigning that class gives the new instance some styling I'll show below. The rest of the line fires off that shell script `fzsnip`. This allows me to hit `Alt+s` and get a small terminal window with a list of my snippets displayed. I search for the name of the snippet, hit return, the Alacritty window closes and the snippet is on my clipboard, ready to paste wherever I need it.
+
+This line in my Sway config file styles the window class `launcher`:
+
+~~~.bash
+for_window [app_id="^smsearch$"] floating enable, border none, resize set width 80 ppt height 60 ppt, move position 0 px 0 px
+~~~
+
+That puts the window in the upper left corner of the screen and makes it about 1/3 the width of my screen. You can adjust the width and height to suite your tastes.
+
+If you don't use Alacritty, adjust the command to use the terminal app you prefer. If you don't use Sway, you'll need to use whatever system-wide shortcut tool your window manager or desktop environment offers. Another possibility it is using [Guake](https://github.com/Guake/guake) which might be able to this for GNOME users, but I've never used it.
+
+###Conclusion
+
+I hope this gives anyone searching for a way to replace Autokey on Wayland some ideas. If you have any questions for run into problems, don't hesitate to drop a comment below.
+
+Is it as nice as Autokey? I actually like this far better now. I often had trouble remembering my Autokey shortcuts, now I can search instead. 
+
+As I said above, if I were a better bash scripter I get rid of the Python file and just use a bash loop. That would make it easy to wrap it in a neat package and distribute it, but as it is it has too many moving parts to make it more than some cut and paste code.
+
+####Shoulders Stood Upon
+
+- [Using `fzf` instead of `dmenu`](https://medium.com/njiuko/using-fzf-instead-of-dmenu-2780d184753f) -- This is the post that got me thinking about ways I could use tools I already use (`fzf`, Alacritty) to accomplish more tasks.
+
+# How to Use Ranger, the Command Line File Browser
+
+date:2020-02-12 14:45:49
+url:/src/how-use-ranger-command-line-file-browser
+
+[Ranger](http://nongnu.org/ranger/) is a terminal-based file browser with Vim-style keybindings. It uses ncurses and can hook into all sorts of other command line apps to create an incredibly powerful file manager.
+
+If you prefer a graphical experience, more power to you. I'm lazy. Since I'm already using the terminal for 90 percent of what I do, it make sense to not leave it just because I want to browse files. 
+
+The keyword here for me is "browse." I do lots of things to files without using Ranger. Moving, copying, creating, things like that I tend to do directly with `cp`, `mv`, `touch`, `mkdir` and so on. But sometimes you want *browse* files, and in those cases Ranger is the best option I've used.
+
+That said, Ranger is something of a labyrinth of commands and keeping track of them all can be overwhelming. If I had a dollar for every time I've searched "show hidden files in Ranger" I could buy you a couple beers (the answer, fellow searchers, is `zh`). 
+
+I'm going to assume you're familiar with the basics of movement in Ranger like `h`, `j`, `k`, `l`, `gg`, and `G`. Likewise that you're comfortable with `yy`, `dd`, `pp`, and other copy, cut, and paste commands. If you're not, if you're brand new to ranger, check out [the official documentation](https://github.com/ranger/ranger/wiki/Official-user-guide) which has a pretty good overview of how to do all the basic stuff you'll want to do with a file browser. 
+
+Here's a few less obvious shortcuts I use all the time. Despite some overlap with Vim, I do not find these particularly intuitive, and had a difficult time remembering them at first:
+
+- `zh`: toggle hidden files
+- `gh`: go home (`cd ~/`)
+- `oc`: order by create date (newest at top)
+- `7j`: jump down seven lines (any number followed by j or k will jump that many lines)
+- `7G`: jump to line 7 (like Vim, any number followed by `G` will jump to that line)
+- `.d`: show only directories
+- `.f`: show only files
+- `.c`: clear any filters (such as either of the previous two commands)
+
+Those are handy, but if you really want to speed up Ranger and bend it to the way you work, the config file is your friend. What follows are a few things I've done to tweak Ranger's config file to make my life easier.
+
+###Ranger Power User Recommendations
+
+Enabling line numbers was a revelation for me. Open `~/.config/ranger/rc.conf` and search for `set line_numbers` and change the value to either `absolute` or `relative`. The first numbers from the top no matter what, the `relative` option sets numbers relative to the cursor. I can't stand relative, but absolute works great for me, YMMV.
+
+Another big leap forward in my Ranger productivity came when I discovered local folder sorting options. As noted above, typing `oc` changes the sort order within a folder to sort by date created[^1]. While typing `oc` is pretty easy, there are some folders that I *always* want sorted by date modified. That's easily done with Ranger's `setlocal` config option. 
+
+Here's a couple lines from my `rc.conf` file as an example:
+
+~~~bash
+setlocal path=~/notes sort mtime
+setlocal path=~/notes/reading sort mtime
+~~~
+
+This means that every time I open `~/notes` or `~/notes/reading` the files I've worked with most recently are at the top (and note that you can also use `sort_reverse` instead of `sort`). That puts the most recently edited files right at the top where I can find them.
+
+Having my most recent notes at the top of the pane is great, but what makes it even more useful is having line wrapped file previews so I don't even need to open the file to read it. To get that I currently use the latest Git version of Ranger which I installed via [Arch Linux's AUR](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ranger-git/).
+
+This feature, which is invaluable to me since one of my common use cases for Ranger is quickly scanning a bunch of text files, has been [merged to master](https://github.com/ranger/ranger/pull/1322), but not released yet. If you don't [use Arch Linux](/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux) you can always build from source, or you can wait for the next release which should include an option to line wrap your previews.
+
+###Bookmarks
+
+Part of what makes Ranger incredibly fast are bookmarks. With two keystrokes I can jump between folders, move/copy files, and so on. 
+
+To set a bookmark, navigate to the directory, then hit `m` and whatever letter you want to serve as the bookmark. Once you've bookmarked it, type `` `<letter>`` to jump straight to that directory. I try to use Vim-like mnemonics for my bookmarks, e.g. `` `d`` takes me to documents, `` `n`` takes me to `~/notes`, `` `l `` takes me to the dev folder for this site, and so on. As with the other commands, typing just `` ` `` will bring up a list of your bookmarks.  
+
+###Conclusion
+
+Ranger is incredibly powerful and almost infinitely customizable. In fact I don't think I really appreciated how customizable it was until I wrote this and dug a little deeper into all the ways you can map shell scripts to one or two character shortcuts. It can end up being a lot to keep track of though. I suggest learning maybe one or two new shortcuts a week. When you know longer have to think abut them, move on to the next couple.
+
+Or you can do what I do, wait until you have something you want to do, but don't know how, figure out how to do it, then write it down so you remember it.
+
+####Shoulders Stood Upon
+
+* [Dquinton's Ranger setup details](http://dquinton.github.io/debian-install/config/ranger.html) - I have no idea who this person is, but their Ranger setup and detailed notes was hugely helpful. 
+* [Ranger documentation](https://ranger.github.io/ranger.1.html) - The docs have a pretty good overview of the options available, though sometimes it's challenging to translate that into real world use cases.
+* [Arch Wiki Ranger page](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ranger) - Where would we be without the Arch Wiki?
+
+
+
+[^1]: In fact, just type `o` and you'll get a list of other sorting options (and if you know what `normal` means, drop me a comment below, I'm still trying to figure out what that means).
+
+# A Guide to Switching From i3 to Sway
+
+date:2020-01-14 10:20:01
+url:/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway
+
+[*Updated June 2023: While I do still love Sway, fighting to get video and audio editors working properly in Wayland took too much time. I gave up and went back to [X.org with Openbox](https://luxagraf.net/src/back-to-x11).*]
+
+I recently made the switch from the [i3 tiling window manager](https://i3wm.org/) to [Sway](https://swaywm.org/), a Wayland-based i3 clone. I still [run Arch Linux on my personal machine](/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux), so all of this is within the context of Arch.
+
+I made the switch for a variety of reasons. There's the practical: Sway/Wayland gives me much better battery life on my laptop. As well as the more philosophical: Sway's lead developer Drew Devault's take on code is similar to mine[^1] (e.g. [avoid traumatic changes](https://drewdevault.com/2019/11/26/Avoid-traumatic-changes.html) or [avoid dependencies](https://drewdevault.com//2020/02/06/Dependencies-and-maintainers.html)), and after reading his blog for a year he's someone whose software I trust. 
+
+I know some people would think this reason ridiculous, but it's important to me that the software I rely on be made by people I like and trust. Software is made by humans, for humans. The humans are important. And yes, it goes the other way too. I'm not going to name names, but there are some theoretically good software out there that I refuse to use because I do not like or trust the people who make it.
+
+When I find great software made by people who seem trustworthy, I use it. So I switched to Sway and it's been a good experience.
+
+Sway and Wayland have been very stable in my use. I get about 20 percent more out of my laptop battery. That seems insane to me, but as someone who [lives almost entirely off solar power](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome) it's a huge win I can't ignore.
+
+### Before You Begin
+
+I did not blindly switch to Sway. Or rather I did and that did not go well. I switched back after a few hours and started doing some serious searching, both the search engine variety and the broader, what am I really trying to do here, variety. 
+
+The latter led me to change a few tools, replace some things, and try some new work flows. Not all of it was good. I could never get imv to do the things I can with feh for instance, but mostly it was good.
+
+One thing I really wanted to do was avoid XWayland (which allows apps that need X11 to run under Wayland). Wherever I could I've opted for applications that run natively under Wayland. There's nothing wrong with XWayland, that was just a personal goal, for fun.
+
+Here's my notes on making the transition to Wayland along with the applications I use most frequently.
+
+##### Terminal
+
+I do almost everything in the terminal. I write in Vim, email with mutt, read RSS feeds with newsboat, listen to music with mpd, and browse files with ranger.
+
+I tested quite a few Wayland-native terminals and I really like [Alacritty](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty). Highly recommended. [Kitty](https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty) is another option to consider.
+
+<s>That said, I am sticking with urxvt for now. There are two problems for me with Alacritty. First off Vim doesn't play well with the Wayland clipboard in Alacritty. Second, Ranger will not show image previews in Alacritty.</s>
+
+*Update April 2021:* I have never really solved either of these issues, but I switched to Alacritty anyway. I use Neovim instead of Vim, which was a mostly transparent switch and Neovim support the Wayland clipboard. As for previews in Ranger... I forgot about those. They were nice. But I guess I don't miss them that much.
+
+
+##### Launcher
+
+I've always used dmenu to launch apps and grab passwords from pass. It's simple and fast. Unfortunately dmenu is probably never going to run natively in Wayland. 
+
+I tested rofi, wofi, and other potential replacements, but I did not like any of them. Somewhere in my search for a replacement launcher I ran across [this post](https://medium.com/njiuko/using-fzf-instead-of-dmenu-2780d184753f) which suggested just calling up a small terminal window and piping a list of applications to [fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf), a blazing fast search tool.
+
+That's what I've done and it works great. I created a keybinding to launch a new instance of Alacritty with a class name that I use to resize the window. Then within that small Alacritty window I call `compgen` to get a list of executables, then sort it to eliminate duplicates, and pass the results to fzf. Here's the code in my Sway config file:
+
+~~~console
+bindsym $mod+Space exec alacritty --class 'launcher' --command bash -c 'compgen -c | sort -u | fzf | xargs -r swaymsg -t command exec'
+
+for_window [app_id="^launcher$"] floating enable, border none, resize set width 25 ppt height 20 ppt, move position 0 px 0 px
+~~~
+
+These lines together will open a small terminal window in the upper left corner of the screen with a fzf search interface. I type, for example, "dar" and Darktable comes up. I hit return, the terminal window closes, and Darktable launches. It's as simple as dmenu and requires no extra applications (since I was already using fzf in Vim).
+
+If you don't want to go that route, Bemenu is dmenu-like launcher that runs natively in Wayland.
+
+##### Browsers
+
+I mainly use [qutebrower](https://qutebrowser.org/), supplemented by [Vivaldi](https://vivaldi.com/)[^2] for research because having split screen tabs is brilliant for research. I also use [Firefox Developer Edition](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/) for any web development work, because the Firefox dev tools are far superior to anything else.
+
+All three work great under Wayland. In the case of qutebrowser though you'll need to set a few shell variables to get it to start under Wayland, out of the box it launches with XWayland for some reason. Here's what I added to `.bashrc` to get it to work:
+
+~~~bash
+export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland 
+export GDK_BACKEND=wayland
+~~~
+
+One thing to bear in mind if you do have a lot of X11 apps still is that with this in your shell you'll need to reset the `GDK_BACKEND` to X11 or those apps won't launch. Instead you'll get an error, `Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0`. To fix that error you'll need to reset `GDK_BACKEND=x11`, then launch your X11 app.
+
+There are several ways you can do this, but I prefer to override apps in `~/bin` (which is on my $PATH). So, for example, I have a file named `xkdenlive` in `~/bin` that looks like this:
+
+~~~bash
+#! /bin/sh
+GDK_BACKEND=x11 kdenlive
+~~~
+
+Note that for me this is easier, because the only apps I'm using that need X11 are Kdenlive and Slack. If you have a lot of X11 apps, you're probably better off making qutebrowser the special case by launching it like this:
+
+~~~bash
+GDK_BACKEND=wayland qutebrowser
+~~~
+
+##### Clipboard
+
+I can't work without a clipboard manager, I keep the last 200 things I've copied, and I like to have things permanently stored as well.
+
+Clipman does a good job of saving clipboard history.
+
+You need to have wl-clipboard installed since Clipman reads and writes to and from that. I also use wofi instead of the default dmenu for viewing and searching clipboard history. Here's how I set up clipman in my Sway config file:
+
+~~~bash
+exec wl-paste -t text --watch clipman store --max-items=60 --histpath="~/.local/share/clipman.json"
+bindsym $mod+h exec clipman pick --tool="wofi" --max-items=30 --histpath="~/.local/share/clipman.json"
+~~~
+
+Clipman does not, however, have a way to permanently store bits of text. That's fine. Permanently stored bits of frequently used text are really not all that closely related to clipboard items and lumping them together in a single tool isn't a very Unix-y approach. Do one thing, do it well.
+
+For snippets I ended up bending [pet](https://github.com/knqyf263/pet), the "command line snippet manager" a little and combining it with the small launcher-style window idea above. So I store snippets in pet, mostly just `printf "my string of text"`, call up an Alacritty window, search, and hit return to inject the pet snippet into the clipboard. Then I paste it were I need it. 
+
+##### Volume Controls
+
+Sway handles volume controls with pactl. Drop this in your Sway config file and you should be good:
+
+~~~bash
+bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ +5%
+bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -5%
+bindsym XF86AudioMute exec pactl set-sink-mute @DEFAULT_SINK@ toggle
+bindsym XF86AudioMicMute exec pactl set-source-mute @DEFAULT_SOURCE@ toggle
+~~~
+
+##### Brightness 
+
+I like [light](https://github.com/haikarainen/light) for brightness. Once it's installed these lines from my Sway config file assign it to my brightness keys:
+
+~~~bash
+bindsym --locked XF86MonBrightnessUp exec --no-startup-id light -A 10
+bindsym --locked XF86MonBrightnessDown exec --no-startup-id light -U 10
+~~~
+
+### Quirks, Annoyances And Things I Haven't Fixed
+
+There have been surprisingly few of these, save the Vim and Ranger issues mentioned above.
+
+<s>I haven't found a working replacement for xcape. The only thing I used xcape for was to make my Cap Lock key dual-function: press generates Esc, hold generates Control. So far I have not found a way to do this in Wayland. There is ostensibly [caps2esc](https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/caps2esc), but it's poorly documented and all I've been able to reliably do with it is crash Wayland.</s>
+
+*Update April 2021*: I managed to get caps2esc working. First you need to install it, for Arch that's something like:
+
+~~~bash
+yay -S interception-caps2esc
+~~~
+
+Once it's installed you need to create the config file. I keep mine at `/etc/interception/udevmon.d/caps2esc.yaml`. Open that up and paste in these lines:
+
+~~~yaml
+- JOB: "intercept -g $DEVNODE | caps2esc | uinput -d $DEVNODE"
+  DEVICE:
+    EVENTS:
+      EV_KEY: [KEY_CAPSLOCK, KEY_ESC]
+~~~
+
+Then you need to start and enable the `udevmon` service unit, which is what runs the caps2esc code:
+
+~~~bash
+sudo systemctl start udevmon
+sudo systemctl enable udevmon
+~~~
+
+The last thing to do is restart. Once you've rebooted you should be able to hold down caps_lock and have it behave like control, but a quick press with give you escape instead. This is incredibly useful if you're a Vim user.
+
+The only other problems I've run into is the limited range of screen recording options -- there's wf-recorder and that's about it. It works well enough though for what I do. 
+
+I've been using Sway exclusively for a year and half now and I have no reason or desire to ever go back to anything else. The rest of my family isn't fond of the tiling aspect of Sway so I do still run a couple of laptops with Openbox. I'd love to see a Wayland Openbox clone that's useable. I've played with [labwc](https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc), which is promising, but lacks a tint2-style launcher, which is really what I need (i.e., a system tray with launcher buttons, which Waybar does not have). Anyway, I am keeping an eye on labwc because it looks like a good project.
+
+That's how I did it. But I am just one person. If you run into snags, feel free to drop a comment below and I'll see if I can help.
+
+### Helpful pages:
+
+- **[Sway Wiki](https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki)**: A good overview of Sway, config examples (how to replicate things from i3), and application replacement tips for i3 users (like this fork of [redshift](https://github.com/minus7/redshift/tree/wayland) with support for Wayland).
+- **[Arch Wiki Sway Page](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sway)**: Another good Sway resource with solutions to a lot of common stuff: set wallpaper, take screenshots, HiDPI, etc.
+- **[Sway Reddit](https://old.reddit.com/r/swaywm/)**: There's some useful info here, worth searching if you run into issues. Also quite a few good tips and tricks from fellow Sway users with more experience. 
+- **[Drew Devault's Blog](https://drewdevault.com/)**: He doesn't always write about Sway, but he does give updates on what he's working on, which sometimes has details on Sway updates.
+
+
+[^1]: That's not to imply there's anything wrong with the i3 developers.
+
+[^2]: Vivaldi would be another good example of me trusting a developer. I've been interviewing Jon von Tetzchner for many years, all the way back to when he was at Opera. I don't always see eye to eye with him (I wish Vivaldi were open source) but I trust him, so I use Vivaldi. It's the only software I use that's not open source (not including work, which requires quite a few closed source crap apps).
+
+# Why I Ditched Vagrant for LXD
+
+date:2019-04-07 21:09:02
+url:/src/why-and-how-ditch-vagrant-for-lxd
+
+***Updated July 2022**: This was getting a bit out of date in some places so I've fixed a few things. More importantly, I've run into to some issues with cgroups and lxc on Arch and added some notes below under the [special note to Arch users](#arch)*
+
+I've used Vagrant to manage my local development environment for quite some time. The developers I used to work with used it and, while I have no particular love for it, it works well enough. Eventually I got comfortable enough with Vagrant that I started using it in my own projects. I even wrote about [setting up a custom Debian 9 Vagrant box](/src/create-custom-debian-9-vagrant-box) to mirror the server running this site. 
+
+The problem with Vagrant is that I have to run a huge memory-hungry virtual machine when all I really want to do is run Django's built-in dev server. 
+
+My laptop only has 8GB of RAM. My browser is usually taking around 2GB, which means if I start two Vagrant machines, I'm pretty much maxed out. Django's dev server is also painfully slow to reload when anything changes.
+
+Recently I was talking with one of Canonical's [MAAS](https://maas.io/) developers and the topic of containers came up. When I mentioned I really didn't like Docker, but hadn't tried anything else, he told me I really needed to try LXD. Later that day I began reading through the [LinuxContainers](https://linuxcontainers.org/) site and tinkering with LXD. Now, a few days later, there's not a Vagrant machine left on my laptop.
+
+Since it's just me, I don't care that LXC only runs on Linux. LXC/LXD is blazing fast, lightweight, and dead simple. To quote, Canonical's [Michael Iatrou](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/01/26/lxd-5-easy-pieces), LXC "liberates your laptop from the tyranny of heavyweight virtualization and simplifies experimentation."
+
+Here's how I'm using LXD to manage containers for Django development on Arch Linux. I've also included instructions and commands for Ubuntu since I set it up there as well.
+
+### What's the difference between LXC, LXD and `lxc`
+
+I wrote this guide in part because I've been hearing about LXC for ages, but it seemed unapproachable, overwhelming, too enterprisey you might say. It's really not though, in fact I found it easier to understand than Vagrant or Docker.
+
+So what is a LXC container, what's LXD, and how are either different than say a VM or for that matter Docker?
+
+* LXC - low-level tools and a library to create and manage containers, powerful, but complicated.
+* LXD - is a daemon which provides a REST API to drive LXC containers, much more user-friendly
+* `lxc` - the command line client for LXD.
+
+In LXC parlance a container is essentially a virtual machine, if you want to get pedantic, see Stéphane Graber's post on the [various components that make up LXD](https://stgraber.org/2016/03/11/lxd-2-0-introduction-to-lxd-112/). For the most part though, interacting with an LXC container is like interacting with a VM. You say ssh, LXD says socket, potato, potahto. Mostly.
+
+An LXC container is not a container in the same sense that Docker talks about containers. Think of it more as a VM that only uses the resources it needs to do whatever it's doing. Running this site in an LXC container uses very little RAM. Running it in Vagrant uses 2GB of RAM because that's what I allocated to the VM -- that's what it uses even if it doesn't need it. LXC is much smarter than that. 
+
+Now what about LXD? LXC is the low level tool, you don't really need to go there. Instead you interact with your LXC container via the LXD API. It uses YAML config files and a command line tool `lxc`.
+
+That's the basic stack, let's install it.
+
+### Install LXD
+
+On Arch I used the version of [LXD in the AUR](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/lxd/). Ubuntu users should go with the Snap package. The other thing you'll want is your distro's Btrfs or ZFS tools. 
+
+Part of LXC's magic relies on either Btrfs and ZFS to read a virtual disk not as a file the way Virtualbox and others do, but as a block device. Both file systems also offer copy-on-write cloning and snapshot features, which makes it simple and fast to spin up new containers. It takes about 6 seconds to install and boot a complete and fully functional LXC container on my laptop, and most of that time is downloading the image file from the remote server. It takes about 3 seconds to clone that fully provisioned base container into a new container. 
+
+In the end I set up my Arch machine using Btrfs or Ubuntu using ZFS to see if I could see any difference (so far, that would be no, the only difference I've run across in my research is that Btrfs can run LXC containers inside LXC containers. LXC Turtles all the way down).
+
+Assuming you have Snap packages set up already, Debian and Ubuntu users can get everything they need to install and run LXD with these commands:
+
+~~~~console
+apt install zfsutils-linux
+~~~~
+
+And then install the snap version of lxd with:
+
+~~~~console
+snap install lxd
+~~~~
+
+Once that's done we need to initialize LXD. I went with the defaults for everything. I've printed out the entire init command output so you can see what will happen:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo lxd init
+Create a new BTRFS pool? (yes/no) [default=yes]: 
+would you like to use LXD clustering? (yes/no) [default=no]: 
+Do you want to configure a new storage pool? (yes/no) [default=yes]: 
+Name of the new storage pool [default=default]: 
+Name of the storage backend to use (btrfs, dir, lvm) [default=btrfs]: 
+Create a new BTRFS pool? (yes/no) [default=yes]: 
+Would you like to use an existing block device? (yes/no) [default=no]: 
+Size in GB of the new loop device (1GB minimum) [default=15GB]: 
+Would you like to connect to a MAAS server? (yes/no) [default=no]: 
+Would you like to create a new local network bridge? (yes/no) [default=yes]:
+What should the new bridge be called? [default=lxdbr0]: 
+What IPv4 address should be used? (CIDR subnet notation, “auto” or “none”) [default=auto]: 
+What IPv6 address should be used? (CIDR subnet notation, “auto” or “none”) [default=auto]: 
+Would you like LXD to be available over the network? (yes/no) [default=no]:    
+Would you like stale cached images to be updated automatically? (yes/no) [default=yes] 
+Would you like a YAML "lxd init" preseed to be printed? (yes/no) [default=no]: yes
+~~~~
+
+LXD will then spit out the contents of the profile you just created. It's a YAML file and you can edit it as you see fit after the fact. You can also create more than one profile if you like. To see all installed profiles use:
+
+~~~~console
+lxc profile list
+~~~~
+
+To view the contents of a profile use:
+
+~~~~console
+lxc profile show <profilename>
+~~~~
+
+To edit a profile use:
+
+~~~~console
+lxc profile edit <profilename>
+~~~~
+
+So far I haven't needed to edit a profile by hand. I've also been happy with all the defaults although, when I do this again, I will probably enlarge the storage pool, and maybe partition off some dedicated disk space for it. But for now I'm just trying to figure things out so defaults it is. 
+
+The last step in our setup is to add our user to the lxd group. By default LXD runs as the lxd group, so to interact with containers we'll need to make our user part of that group.
+
+~~~~console
+sudo usermod -a -G lxd yourusername
+~~~~
+
+#####Special note for Arch users. {:#arch } 
+
+To run unprivileged containers as your own user, you'll need to jump through a couple extra hoops. As usual, the [Arch User Wiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Linux_Containers#Enable_support_to_run_unprivileged_containers_(optional)) has you covered. Read through and follow those instructions and then reboot and everything below should work as you'd expect.
+
+Or at least it did until about June of 2022 when something changed with cgroups and I stopped being able to run my lxc containers. I kept getting errors like:
+
+~~~~console
+Failed to create cgroup at_mnt 24() 
+lxc debian-base 20220713145726.259 ERROR conf - ../src/lxc/conf.c:lxc_mount_auto_mounts:851 - No such file or directory - Failed to mount "/sys/fs/cgroup"
+~~~~
+
+I tried debugging, and reading through all the bug reports I could find over the course of a couple of days and got nowhere. No one else seems to have this problem. I gave up and decided I'd skip virtualization and develop directly on Arch. I installed PostgreSQL... and it wouldn't start, also throwing an error about cgroups. That is when I dug deeper into cgroups and found a way to revert to the older behavior. I added this line to my boot params (in my case that's in /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf):
+
+~~~~console
+systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0
+~~~~
+
+That fixed all the issues for me. If anyone can explain *why* I'd be interested to hear from you in the comments.
+
+### Create Your First LXC Container
+
+Let's create our first container. This website runs on a Debian VM currently hosted on Vultr.com so I'm going to spin up a Debian container to mirror this environment for local development and testing.
+
+To create a new LXC container we use the `launch` command of the `lxc` tool. 
+
+There are four ways you can get LXC containers, local (meaning a container base you've downloaded), images (which come from [https://images.linuxcontainers.org/](https://images.linuxcontainers.org/), ubuntu (release versions of Ubuntu), and ubuntu-daily (daily images). The images on linuxcontainers are unofficial, but the Debian image I used worked perfectly. There's also Alpine, Arch CentOS, Fedora, openSuse, Oracle, Palmo, Sabayon and lots of Ubuntu images. Pretty much every architecture you could imagine is in there too. 
+
+I created a Debian 9 Stretch container with the amd64 image. To create an LXC container from one of the remote images the basic syntax is `lxc launch images:distroname/version/architecture containername`. For example:
+
+~~~~console
+lxc launch images:debian/stretch/amd64 debian-base
+Creating debian-base
+Starting debian-base
+~~~~
+
+That will grab the amd64 image of Debian 9 Stretch and create a container out of it and then launch it. Now if we look at the list of installed containers we should see something like this:
+
+~~~~console
+lxc list
++-------------+---------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------------+------------+-----------+                                                                                         
+|    NAME     |  STATE  |         IPV4          |                     IPV6                      |    TYPE    | SNAPSHOTS |                                                                                         
++-------------+---------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------------+------------+-----------+                                                                                         
+| debian-base | RUNNING | 10.171.188.236 (eth0) | fd42:e406:d1eb:e790:216:3eff:fe9f:ad9b (eth0) | PERSISTENT |           |                                                                                         
++-------------+---------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------------+------------+-----------+  
+~~~~
+
+Now what? This is what I love about LXC, we can interact with our container pretty much the same way we'd interact with a VM. Let's connect to the root shell:
+
+~~~~console
+lxc exec debian-base -- /bin/bash
+~~~~
+
+Look at your prompt and you'll notice it says `root@nameofcontainer`. Now you can install everything you need on your container. For me, setting up a Django dev environment, that means Postgres, Python, Virtualenv, and, for this site, all the Geodjango requirements (Postgis, GDAL, etc), along with a few other odds and ends. 
+
+You don't have to do it from inside the container though. Part of LXD's charm is to be able to run commands without logging into anything. Instead you can do this:
+
+~~~~console
+lxc exec debian-base -- apt update
+lxc exec debian-base -- apt install postgresql postgis virtualenv
+~~~~
+
+LXD will output the results of your command as if you were SSHed into a VM. Not being one for typing, I created a bash alias that looks like this: `alias luxdev='lxc exec debian-base -- '` so that all I need to type is `luxdev <command>`.  
+
+What I haven't figured out is how to chain commands, this does not work:
+
+~~~~console
+lxc exec debian-base -- su - lxf && cd site && source venv/bin/activate && ./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
+~~~~
+
+According to [a bug report](https://github.com/lxc/lxd/issues/2057), it should work in quotes, but it doesn't for me. Something must have changed since then, or I'm doing something wrong.
+
+The next thing I wanted to do was mount a directory on my host machine in the LXC instance. To do that you'll need to edit `/etc/subuid` and `/etc/subgid` to add your user id. Use the `id` command to get your user and group id (it's probably 1000 but if not, adjust the commands below). Once you have your user id, add it to the files with this one liner I got from the [Ubuntu blog](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2016/12/08/mounting-your-home-directory-in-lxd):
+
+~~~~console
+echo 'root:1000:1' | sudo tee -a /etc/subuid /etc/subgid
+~~~~
+
+Then you need to configure your LXC instance to use the same uid:
+
+~~~~console
+lxc config set debian-base raw.idmap 'both 1000 1000'
+~~~~
+
+The last step is to add a device to your config file so LXC will mount it. You'll need to stop and start the container for the changes to take effect.
+
+~~~~console
+lxc config device add debian-base sitedir disk source=/path/to/your/directory path=/path/to/where/you/want/folder/in/lxc
+lxc stop debian-base
+lxc start debian-base
+~~~~
+
+That replicates my setup in Vagrant, but we've really just scratched the surface of what you can do with LXD. For example you'll notice I named the initial container "debian-base". That's because this is the base image (fully set up for Djano dev) which I clone whenever I start a new project. To clone a container, first take a snapshot of your base container, then copy that snapshot to create a new container:
+
+~~~~console
+lxc snapshot debian-base debian-base-configured
+lxc copy debian-base/debian-base-configured mycontainer
+~~~~
+
+Now you've got a new container named mycontainer. If you'd like to tweak anything, for example mount a different folder specific to this new project you're starting, you can edit the config file like this:
+
+~~~~console
+lxc config edit mycontainer
+~~~~
+
+I highly suggest reading through Stéphane Graber's 12 part series on LXD to get a better idea of other things you can do, how to manage resources, manage local images, migrate containers, or connect LXD with Juju, Openstack or yes, even Docker.
+
+#####Shoulders stood upon
+
+* [Stéphane Graber's 12 part series on lxd 2.0](https://stgraber.org/2016/03/11/lxd-2-0-blog-post-series-012/) - Graber wrote LXC and LXD, this is the best resource I found and highly recommend reading it all.
+* [Mounting your home directory in LXD](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2016/12/08/mounting-your-home-directory-in-lxd)
+* [Official how to](https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/getting-started-cli/)
+* [Linux Containers Discourse site](https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/deploying-django-applications/996)
+* [LXD networking: lxdbr0 explained](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2016/04/07/lxd-networking-lxdbr0-explained)
+
+
+[^1]: To be fair, I didn't need to get rid of Vagrant. You can use Vagrant to manage LXC containers, but I don't know why you'd bother. LXD's management tools and config system works great, why add yet another tool to the mix? Unless you're working with developers who use Windows, in which case LXC, which is short for, *Linux Container*, is not for you.
+
+# Create a Debian 9 Stretch Vagrant Box
+
+date:2019-02-24 15:45:53
+url:/src/create-custom-debian-9-vagrant-box
+
+I'm a little old fashioned with my love of Vagrant. I should probably keep up with the kids, dig into to Docker and containers, but I like managing servers. I like to have the whole VM at my disposal. 
+
+[**Note**: Everything here is still true and will work, but I have [switched to using `lxd` rather than Vagrant](/src/why-and-how-ditch-vagrant-for-lxd). If I were using Vagrant though, I would still absolutely be using my own Debian image.]
+
+Why Vagrant? Well, I run Arch Linux on my laptop, but I usually deploy sites to either Debian, preferably v9, "Stretch", or (if a client is using AWS) Ubuntu, which means I need a virtual machine to develop and test in. Vagrant is the easiest way I've found to manage that workflow.
+
+When I'm deploying to Ubuntu-based machines I develop using the [Canonical-provided Vagrant box](https://app.vagrantup.com/ubuntu/boxes/bionic64) available through Vagrant's [cloud site](https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search). There is, however, no official Debian box provided by Debian. Worse, the most popular Debian 9 box on the Vagrant site has only 512MB of RAM. I prefer to have 1 or 2GB of RAM to mirror the cheap, but surprisingly powerful, [Vultr VPS instances](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=6825229) I generally use (You can use them too, in my experience they're faster and slightly cheaper than Digital Ocean. Here's a referral link that will get you [$50 in credit](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7857293-4F)). 
+
+That means I get to build my own Debian Vagrant box. 
+
+Building a Vagrant base box from Debian 9 "Stretch" isn't hard, but most tutorials I found were outdated or relied on third-party tools like Packer. Why you'd want to install, setup and configure a tool like Packer to build one base box is a mystery to me. It's far faster to do it yourself by hand (which is not to slag Packer, it *is* useful when you're building an image from AWS or Digital Ocean or other provider).
+
+Here's my guide to building a Debian 9 "Stretch" Vagrant Box.
+
+### Create a Debian 9 Virtual Machine in Virtualbox
+
+We're going to use Virtualbox as our Vagrant provider because, while I prefer qemu for its speed, I run into more compatibility issues with qemu. Virtualbox seems to work everywhere. 
+
+First install Virtualbox, either by [downloading an image](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) or, preferably, using your package manager/app store. We'll also need the latest version of Debian 9's netinst CD image, which you can [grab from the Debian project](https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/) (scroll to the bottom of that page for the actual downloads).
+
+Once you've got a Debian CD, fire up Virtualbox and create a new virtual machine. In the screenshot below I've selected Expert Mode so I can go ahead and up the RAM (in the screenshot version I went with 1GB).
+
+<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-virtualmachine.jpg" id="image-1859" class="picfull" />
+
+Click "Create" and Virtualbox will ask you about the hard drive, I stick with the default type, but bump the size to 40GB, which matches the VPS instances I use.
+
+<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-virtualdisk.jpg" id="image-1860" class="picfull" />
+
+Click "Create" and then go to the main Virtualbox screen, select your new machine and click "Settings". Head to the audio tab and uncheck the Enable Audio option. Next go to the USB tab and disable USB.
+
+<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-no-audio.jpg" id="image-1855" class="picfull" />
+<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-no-usb.jpg" id="image-1856" class="picfull" />
+
+Now click the network tab and make sure Network Adapter 1 is set to NAT. Click the "Advanced" arrow and then click the button that says Port Forwarding. Add a port forwarding rule. I call mine SSH, but the name isn't important. The important part is that the protocol is TCP, the Host and Guest IP address fields are blank, the Host port is 2222, the Guest port is 22. 
+
+<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-port-forward_EqGwcg4.jpg" id="image-1858" class="picfull" />
+
+Hit okay to save your changes on both of those screens and now we're ready to boot Debian. 
+
+### Install Debian
+
+To get Debian installed first click the start button for your new VM and Virtualbox will boot it up and ask you for the install CD. Navigate to wherever you saved the Debian netinst CD we downloaded earlier and select that. 
+
+That should boot you to the Debian install screen. The most important thing here is to make sure you choose the second option, "Install", rather than "Graphical Install". Since we disabled USB, we won't have access to the mouse and the Debian graphical installer won't work. Stick with plain "Install".
+
+<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-vm-install.jpg" id="image-1861" class="picfull" />
+
+From here it's just a standard Debian install. Select the appropriate language, keyboard layout, hostname (doesn't matter), and network name (also doesn't matter). Set the root password to something you'll remember. Debian will then ask you to create a user. Create a user named "vagrant" (I used "vagrant" for the fullname and username) and set the password to "vagrant".
+
+Tip: to select (or unselect) a check box in the Debian installer, hit the space bar.
+
+Then Debian will get the network time, ask what timezone you're in and start setting up the disk. I go with the defaults all the way through. Next Debian will install the base system, which takes a minute or two.
+
+Since we're using the netinst CD, Debian will ask if we want to insert any other CDs (no), and then it will ask you to choose which mirrors to download packages from. I went with the defaults. Debian will then install Linux, udev and some other basic components. At some point it will ask if you want to participate in the Debian package survey. I always go with no because I feel like a virtual machine might skew the results in unhelpful ways, but I don't know, maybe I'm wrong on that.
+
+After that you can install your software. For now I uncheck everything except standard system utils (remember, you can select and unselect items by hitting the space bar). Debian will then go off and install everything, ask if you want to install Grub (you do -- select your virtual disk as the location for grub), and congratulations, you're done installing Debian. 
+
+Now let's build a Debian 9 base box for Vagrant.
+
+### Set up Debian 9 Vagrant base box
+
+Since we've gone to the trouble of building our own Debian 9 base box, we may as well customize it. 
+
+The first thing to do after you boot into the new system is to install sudo and set up our vagrant user as a passwordless superuser. Login to your new virtual machine as the root user and install sudo. You may as well add ssh while you're at it:
+
+~~~~console
+apt install sudo ssh
+~~~~
+
+Now we need to add our vagrant user to the sudoers list. To do that we need to create and edit the file:
+
+~~~~console
+visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant
+~~~~
+
+That will open a new file where you can add this line:
+
+~~~~console
+vagrant ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
+~~~~
+
+Hit control-x, then "y" and return to save the file and exit nano. Now logout of the root account by typing `exit` and login as the vagrant user. Double check that you can run commands with `sudo` without a password by typing `sudo ls /etc/` or similar. If you didn't get asked for a password then everything is working.
+
+Now we can install the vagrant insecure SSH key. Vagrant sends commands from the host machine over SSH using what the Vagrant project calls an insecure key, which is so called because everyone has it. We could in theory, all hack each other's Vagrant boxes. If this concerns you, it's not that complicated to set up your own more secure key, but I suggest doing that in your Vagrant instance, not the base box. For the base box, use the insecure key.
+
+Make sure you're logged in as the vagrant user and then use these commands to set up the insecure SSH key:
+
+~~~~console
+mkdir ~/.ssh
+chmod 0700 ~/.ssh
+wget https://raw.github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/master/keys/vagrant.pub -O ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
+chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
+chown -R vagrant ~/.ssh
+~~~~
+
+Confirm that the key is in fact in the `authorized_keys` file by typing `cat ~/.ssh/authorized_keys`, which should print out the key for you. Now we need to set up SSH to allow our vagrant user to sign in:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
+~~~~
+
+Uncomment the line `AuthorizedKeysFile ~/.ssh/authorized_keys ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2` and hit `control-x`, `y` and `enter` to save the file. Now restart SSH with this command:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo systemctl restart ssh
+~~~~
+
+### Install Virtualbox Guest Additions 
+
+The Virtualbox Guest Addition allows for nice extras like shared folders, as well as a performance boost. Since the VB Guest Additions require a compiler, and Linux header files,  let's first get the prerequisites installed:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo apt install gcc build-essential linux-headers-amd64
+~~~~
+
+Now head to the VirtualBox window menu and click the "Devices" option and choose "Insert Guest Additions CD Image" (note that you should download the latest version if Virtualbox asks[^1]). That will insert an ISO of the Guest Additions into our virtual machine's CDROM drive. We just need to mount it and run the Guest Additions Installer:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
+cd /mnt
+sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
+~~~~
+
+Assuming that finishes without error, you're done. Congratulations. Now you can add any extras you want your Debian 9 Vagrant base box to include. I primarily build things in Python with Django and Postgresql, so I always install packages like `postgresql`, `python3-dev`, `python3-pip`, `virtualenv`, and some other software I can't live without. Also edit the .bashrc file to create some aliases and helper scripts. Whatever you want all your future Vagrant boxes to have, now is the time to install it.
+
+### Packaging your Debian 9 Vagrant Box
+
+Before we package the box, we're going to zero out the drive to save a little space when we compress it down the road. Here's the commands to zero it out:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zeroed bs=1M
+sudo rm -f /zeroed
+~~~~
+
+Once that's done we can package up our box with this command:
+
+~~~~console
+vagrant package --base debian9-64base
+==> debian9-64base: Attempting graceful shutdown of VM...
+==> debian9-64base: Clearing any previously set forwarded ports...
+==> debian9-64base: Exporting VM...
+==> debian9-64base: Compressing package to: /home/lxf/vms/package.box
+~~~~
+
+As you can see from the output, I keep my Vagrant boxes in a folder call `vms`, you can put yours wherever you like. Wherever you decide to keep it, move it there now and cd into that folder so you can add the box. Sticking the `vms` folder I use, the commands would look like this:
+
+~~~console
+cd vms
+vagrant box add debian9-64 package.box
+~~~
+
+Now when you want to create a new vagrant box from this base box, all you need to do is add this to your Vagrantfile:
+
+~~~~console
+Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
+  config.vm.box = "debian9-64"
+end
+~~~~
+
+Then you start up the box as you always would:
+
+~~~~console
+vagrant up
+vagrant ssh
+~~~~
+
+#####Shoulders stood upon
+
+* [Vagrant docs](https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/virtualbox/boxes.html)
+* [Engineyard's guide to Ubuntu](https://www.engineyard.com/blog/building-a-vagrant-box-from-start-to-finish)
+* [Customizing an existing box](https://scotch.io/tutorials/how-to-create-a-vagrant-base-box-from-an-existing-one) - Good for when you don't need more RAM/disk space, just some software pre-installed.
+
+[^1]: On Arch, using Virtualbox 6.x I have had problems downloading the Guest Additions. Instead I've been using the package `virtualbox-guest-iso`. Note that after you install that, you'll need to reboot to get Virtualbox to find it.
+
+# Install Gitea with Nginx, Postgresql on Ubuntu 18.04
+
+date:2018-10-12 08:43:47
+url:/src/gitea-nginx-postgresql-ubuntu-1804
+
+I've never liked hosting my git repos on someone else's servers. GitHub especially is not a company I'd do business with, ever. I do have a repo or two hosted over at [GitLab](https://gitlab.com/luxagraf) because those are projects I want to be easily available to anyone. But I store almost everything in git -- notes, my whole documents folder, all my code projects, all my writing, pretty much everything is in git -- but I like to keep all that private and on my own server.
+
+For years I used [Gitlist](http://gitlist.org/) because it was clean, simple, and did 95 percent of what I needed in a web-based interface for my repos. But Gitlist is abandonware at this point and broken if you're using PHP 7.2. There are few forks that [patch it](https://github.com/patrikx3/gitlist), but it's copyrighted to the original dev and I don't want to depend on illegitimate forks for something so critical to my workflow. Then there's self-hosted Gitlab, which I like, but the system requirements are ridiculous.
+
+Some searching eventually led me to Gitea, which is lightweight, written in Go and has everything I need. 
+
+Here's a quick guide to getting Gitea up and running on your Ubuntu 18.04 -- or similar -- VPS.
+
+### Set up Gitea
+
+The first thing we're going to do is isolate Gitea from the rest of our server, running it under a different user seems to be the standard practice. Installing Gitea via the Arch User Repository will create a `git` user, so that's what I used on Ubuntu 18.04 as well. 
+
+Here's a shell command to create a user named `git`:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo adduser --system --shell /bin/bash --group --disabled-password --home /home/git git
+~~~~
+
+This is pretty much a standard adduser command such as you'd use when setting up a new VPS, the only difference is that we've added the `--disable-password` flag so you can't actually log in with it. While we will use this user to authenticate over SSH, we'll do so with a key, not a password.
+
+Now we need to grab the latest Gitea binary. At the time of writing that's version 1.5.2, but be sure to check the [Gitea downloads page](https://dl.gitea.io/gitea/) for the latest version and adjust the commands below to work with that version number. Let's download the Gitea binary and then we'll verify the signing key. Verifying keys is very important when working with binaries since you can't see the code behind them[^1].
+
+~~~~console
+wget -O gitea https://dl.gitea.io/gitea/1.5.2/gitea-1.5.2-linux-amd64
+gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv 0x2D9AE806EC1592E2
+wget https://dl.gitea.io/gitea/1.5.2/gitea-1.5.2-linux-amd64.asc
+gpg --verify gitea-1.5.2-linux-amd64.asc gitea
+~~~~
+
+A couple of notes here, GPG should say the keys match, but then it should also warn that "this key is not certified with a trusted signature!" That means, essentially, that this binary could have been signed by anybody. All we know for sure is that wasn't tampered with in transit[^1].
+
+Now let's make the binary executable and test it to make sure it's working:
+
+~~~~console
+chmod +x gitea
+./gitea web
+~~~~
+
+You can stop Gitea with `Ctrl+C`. Let's move the binary to a more traditional location:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo cp gitea /usr/local/bin/gitea
+~~~~
+
+The next thing we're going to do is create all the directories we need. 
+
+~~~~console
+sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/gitea/{custom,data,indexers,public,log}
+sudo chown git:git /var/lib/gitea/{data,indexers,log}
+sudo chmod 750 /var/lib/gitea/{data,indexers,log}
+sudo mkdir /etc/gitea
+sudo chown root:git /etc/gitea
+sudo chmod 770 /etc/gitea
+~~~~
+
+That last line should make you nervous, that's too permissive for a public directory, but don't worry, as soon as we're done setting up Gitea we'll change the permissions on that directory and the config file inside it. 
+
+Before we do that though let's create a systemd service file to start and stop Gitea. The Gitea project has a service file that will work well for our purposes, so let's grab it, make a couple changes and then we'll add it to our system:
+
+~~~~console
+wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/go-gitea/gitea/master/contrib/systemd/gitea.service 
+~~~~
+
+Now open that file and uncomment the line `After=postgresql.service` so that Gitea starts after postgresql is running. The resulting config file should look like this:
+
+~~~~ini
+[Unit]
+Description=Gitea (Git with a cup of tea)
+After=syslog.target
+After=network.target
+#After=mysqld.service
+After=postgresql.service
+#After=memcached.service
+#After=redis.service
+
+[Service]
+# Modify these two values and uncomment them if you have
+# repos with lots of files and get an HTTP error 500 because
+# of that
+###
+#LimitMEMLOCK=infinity
+#LimitNOFILE=65535
+RestartSec=2s
+Type=simple
+User=git
+Group=git
+WorkingDirectory=/var/lib/gitea/
+ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/gitea web -c /etc/gitea/app.ini
+Restart=always
+Environment=USER=git HOME=/home/git GITEA_WORK_DIR=/var/lib/gitea
+# If you want to bind Gitea to a port below 1024 uncomment
+# the two values below
+###
+#CapabilityBoundingSet=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
+#AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
+
+[Install]
+WantedBy=multi-user.target
+~~~~
+
+Now we need to move the service file to somewhere systemd expects it and then start and enable the service so Gitea will launch automatically when the server boots.
+
+~~~~console
+sudo cp gitea.service /etc/systemd/system/
+sudo systemctl enable gitea
+sudo systemctl start gitea
+~~~~
+
+There you have it, Gitea is installed, running and will automatically start whenever we restart the server. Now we need to set up Postgresql and then Nginx to serve up our Gitea site to the world. Or at least to us.
+
+### Setup a Postgresql and Nginx
+
+Gitea needs a database to store all our data in; I use PostgreSQL. You can also use MySQL, but you're on your own there. Install PostgreSQL if you haven't already:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo apt install postgresql
+~~~~
+
+Now let's create a new user and database for Gitea:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo su postgres
+createuser gitea
+createdb gitea -O gitea
+~~~~
+
+Exit the postgres user shell by hitting `Ctrl+D`. 
+
+Now let's set up Nginx to serve our Gitea site. 
+
+~~~~console
+sudo apt update
+sudo apt install nginx
+~~~~
+
+For the next part you'll need a domain name. I use a subdomain, git.mydomain.com, but for simplicity sake I'll refer to `mydomain.com` for the rest of this tutorial. Replace `mydomain.com` in all the instructions below with your actual domain name.
+
+We need to create a config file for our domain. By default Nginx will look for config files in `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/`, so the config file we'll create is:
+
+~~~~console
+nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mydomain.com.conf
+~~~~
+
+Here's what that file looks like:
+
+~~~~nginx
+server {
+    listen 80;
+    listen [::]:80;
+    server_name <mydomain.com>;
+
+
+    location / {
+        proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
+    }
+
+    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
+}
+~~~~
+
+The main line here is the `proxy_pass` bit, which takes all requests and sends it to gitea, which is listening on `localhost:3000` by default. You can change that if you have something else that conflicts with it, but you'll need to change it here and in the service file that we used to start Gitea.
+
+The last step is to add an SSL cert to our site so we can clone over https (and SSH if you keep reading). I have another tutorial on setting up [Certbot for Nginx on Ubuntu](/src/certbot-nginx-ubuntu-1804). You can use that to get Certbot installed and auto-renewing certs. Then all you need to do is run:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo certbot --nginx
+~~~~
+
+Select your Gitea domain, follow the prompts and when you're done you'll be ready to set up Gitea. 
+
+### Setting up Gitea
+
+Point your browser to `https://mydomain.com/install` and go through the Gitea setup process. That screen looks like this, and you can use these values, except for the domain name (and be sure to enter the password you used when we created the `gitea` user for postgresql).
+
+One note, if you intend your Gitea instance to be for you alone, I strongly recommend you check the "disable self registration" box, which will stop anyone else from being able to sign up. But, turning off registration means you'll need to create an administrator account at the bottom of the page. 
+
+<img src="images/2018/gitea-install_FAW0kIJ.jpg" id="image-1706" class="picwide" />
+
+Okay, now that we've got Gitea initialized it's time to go back and change the permissions on those directories that we set up earlier.
+
+~~~~console
+sudo chmod 750 /etc/gitea
+sudo chmod 644 /etc/gitea/app.ini
+~~~~
+Now you're ready to create your first repo in Gitea. Click the little button next to the repositories menu on the right side of your Gitea dashboard and that'll walk you through creating your first repo. Once that's done you can clone that repo with:
+
+~~~~console
+git clone https://mydomain.com/giteausername/reponame.git
+~~~~
+
+Now if you have an existing repo that you want to push to your new Gitea repo, just edit the `.git/config` files to make your Gitea repo the new url, e.g.:
+
+~~~~ini
+[remote "origin"]
+    url = https://mydomain.com/giteausername/reponame.git
+	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
+~~~~
+
+Now do this:
+
+~~~~console
+git push origin master 
+~~~~
+
+### Setting up SSH
+
+Working with git over https is pretty good, but I prefer the more secure method of SSH with a key. To get that working we'll need to add our SSH key to Gitea. That means you'll need a GPG key. If you don't have one already, open the terminal on your local machine and issue this command:
+
+~~~~console
+ssh-keygen -o -a 100 -t ed25519
+~~~~
+
+That will create a key named `id_ed25519` in the directory `.ssh/`. If you want to know where that command comes from, read [this article](https://blog.g3rt.nl/upgrade-your-ssh-keys.html).
+
+Now we need to add that key to Gitea. First open the file `.ssh/id_ed25519.pub` and copy the contents to your clipboard. Now in the Gitea web interface, click on the user menu at the upper right and select "settings". Then across the top you'll see a bunch of tabs. Click the one that reads "SSH / GPG Keys". Click the add key button, give your key a name and paste in the contents of the key.
+
+Note: depending on how your VPS was set up, you may need to add the `git` user to your sshd config. Open `/etc/ssh/sshd_config` and look for a line that reads something like this:
+
+~~~~console
+AllowUsers myuser myotheruser git
+~~~~
+
+Add `git` to the list of allowed users so you'll be able to authenticate with the git user over ssh. Now test SSH cloning with this line, substituting your SSH clone url:
+
+~~~~console
+git clone ssh://git@mydomain/giteausername/reponame.git
+~~~~
+
+Assuming that works then you're all set, Gitea is working and you can create all the repos you need. If you have any problems you can drop a comment in the form below and I'll do my best to help you out.
+
+If you want to add some other niceties, the Gitea docs have a good guide to [setting up Fail2Ban for Gitea](https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/fail2ban-setup/) and then there's a whole section on [backing up Gitea](https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/backup-and-restore/) that's well worth a read.
+
+[^1]: You can compile Gitea yourself if you like, there are [instructions on the Gitea site](https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/install-from-source/), but be forewarned its uses quite a bit of RAM to build.
+
+# Set Up AWStats for Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04
+
+date:2018-10-07 12:40:39
+url:/src/awstats-nginx-ubuntu-debian
+
+*Update Sept 2023: I still use this method and it still works. I've updated the guide so that the commands work on both Debian 12 and Ubuntu 23.04. Unfortunately the spambots love this page so I have disabled comments, if you have a question, [email me](/contact)*
+
+If you'd like some basic data about your site's visitors, but don't want to let spyware vendors track them around the web, AWStats makes a good solution. It parses your server log files and tells you who came by and what they did. There's no spying, no third-party code bloat. AWStats just analyzes your visitors' footprints.
+
+Here's how I've managed to get AWStats installed and running on Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 10, and Debian 11.
+
+### AWStats with GeoIP
+
+The first step is to install the AWStats package from the Ubuntu repositories:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo apt install awstats
+~~~~
+
+This will install the various tools and scripts AWStats needs. Because I like to have some geodata in my stats, I also installed the tools necessary to use the AWStats geoip plugin. Here's what worked for me. 
+
+First we need build-essential and libgeoip:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo apt install libgeoip-dev build-essential
+~~~~
+
+Next you need to fire up the cpan shell:
+
+~~~~console
+cpan
+~~~~
+
+If this is your first time in cpan you'll need to run two commands to get everything set up. If you've already got cpan set up, you can skip to the next step:
+
+~~~~perl
+make install
+install Bundle::CPAN
+~~~~
+
+Once cpan is set up, install GeoIP:
+
+~~~~perl
+install Geo::IP
+~~~~
+
+That should take care of the GeoIP stuff. You can double-check that the database files exist by looking in the directory `/usr/share/GeoIP/` and verifying that there's a file named `GeoIP.dat`. 
+
+Now, on to the log file setup.
+
+#### Optional Custom Nginx Log Format
+
+This part isn't strictly necessary. To get AWStats working the next step is to create our config files and build the stats, but first I like to overcomplicate things with a custom log format for Nginx. If you don't customize your Nginx log format then you can skip this section, but make a note of where Nginx is putting your logs, you'll need that in the next step. 
+
+Open up `/etc/nginx/nginx.conf` and add these lines:
+
+~~~~nginx
+log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
+                '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
+                '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';    
+~~~~
+
+Now we need to edit our individual nginx config file to use this log format. If you follow the standard nginx practice, your config file should be in `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/`. For example this site is served by the file `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/luxagraf.net.conf`. Wherever that file may be in your setup, open it and add this line somewhere in the `server` block.
+
+~~~~nginx
+server {
+    # ... all your other config ...
+    access_log  /var/log/nginx/yourdomain.com.access.log main;
+    # ... all your other config ...
+}
+~~~~
+
+### Configure AWStats for Nginx
+
+As I said in the beginning, AWStats is ancient, it hails from a very different era of the internet. One legacy from the olden days is that AWStats is very strict about configuration files. You have to have one config file per domain you're tracking and that file has to be named in the following way: `awstats.domain.tld.conf`. Those config files must be placed inside the /etc/awstats/ directory.
+
+If you go take a look at the `/etc/awstats` directory you'll see two files in there: `awstats.conf` and `awstats.conf.local`. The first is a main conf file that serves as a fallback if your own config file doesn't specify a particular setting. The second is an empty file that's meant to be used to share common config settings, which really doesn't make much sense to me.
+
+I took a tip from [this tutorial](https://kamisama.me/2013/03/20/install-configure-and-protect-awstats-for-multiple-nginx-vhost-on-debian/) and dumped the contents of awstats.conf into awstats.local.conf. That way my actual site config file is very short. If you want to do that, then all you have to put in your config file are a few lines.
+
+Using the naming scheme mentioned above, my config file resides at `/etc/awstats/awstats.luxagraf.net.conf` and it looks like this (drop your actual domain in place of "yourdomain.com"):
+
+~~~~ini
+# Path to your nginx log file
+LogFile="/var/log/nginx/yourdomain.com.access.log"
+
+# Domain of your vhost
+SiteDomain="yourdomain.com"
+
+# Directory where to store the awstats data
+DirData="/var/lib/awstats/"
+
+# Other domains/subdomain you want included from your logs, for example the www subdomain
+HostAliases="www.yourdomain.com"
+
+# If you customized your log format above add this line:
+
+LogFormat = "%host - %host_r %time1 %methodurl %code %bytesd %refererquot %uaquot %otherquot"
+
+# If you did not, uncomment and use this line:
+# LogFormat = 1
+~~~~
+
+Save that file and open the fallback file `awstats.conf.local`. Now set a few things:
+
+~~~~ini
+# if your site doesn't get a lot of traffic you can leave this at 1
+# but it can make things slow
+DNSLookup = 0
+
+# find the geoip plugin line and uncomment it:
+LoadPlugin="geoip GEOIP_STANDARD /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat"
+~~~~
+
+Then delete the LogFile, SiteDomain, DirData, and HostAliases settings in your `awstats.conf.local` file. We've got those covered in our site-specific config file. Also delete the import statement at the bottom to make sure you don't end up with a circular import.
+
+Okay, that's it for configuring things, let's generate some data to look at.
+
+### Building Stats and Rotating Log Files
+
+Now that we have our log files, and we've told AWStats where they are, what format they're in and where to put its analysis, it's time to actually run AWStats and get the raw data analyzed. To do that we use this command:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=yourdoamin.com -update
+~~~~
+
+Alternately, if you have a bunch of config files you'd like to update all at once, you can use this wrapper script conveniently located in a completely different directory:
+
+~~~~console
+/usr/share/doc/awstats/examples/awstats_updateall.pl now -awstatsprog=/usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl
+~~~~
+
+You're going to need to run that command regularly to update the AWStats data. One way to do is with a crontab entry, but there are better ways to do this. Instead of cron we can hook into logrotate, which rotates Nginx's log files periodically anyway and conveniently includes a `prerotate` directive that we can use to execute some code. Technically logrotate runs via /etc/cron.daily under the hood, so we haven't really escaped cron, but it's not a crontab we need to keep track of anyway.
+
+~~~~log
+Open up the file `/etc/logrotate.d/nginx` and replace it with this: 
+
+    /var/log/nginx/*.log{
+        daily
+        missingok
+        rotate 30
+        compress
+        delaycompress
+        notifempty
+        create 0640 www-data adm
+        sharedscripts
+        prerotate
+            /usr/share/doc/awstats/examples/awstats_updateall.pl now -awstatsprog=/usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl
+            if [ -d /etc/logrotate.d/httpd-prerotate ]; then \
+                run-parts /etc/logrotate.d/httpd-prerotate; \
+            fi \
+        endscript
+        postrotate
+            invoke-rc.d nginx rotate >/dev/null 2>&1
+        endscript
+    }
+~~~~
+
+The main things we've changed here are the frequency, moving from weekly to daily rotation in line 2, keeping 30 days worth of logs in line 4, and then calling AWStats in line 11. 
+
+One thing to bear in mind is that if you re-install Nginx for some reason this file will be overwritten. 
+
+Now do a dry run to make sure you don't have any typos or other problems:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/nginx
+~~~~
+
+### Serving Up AWStats 
+
+Now that all the pieces are in place, we need to put our stats on the web. I used a subdomain, awstats.luxagraf.net. Assuming you're using something similar here's an nginx config file to get you started:
+
+~~~~nginx
+server {
+    server_name awstats.luxagraf.net;
+
+    root    /var/www/awstats.luxagraf.net;
+    error_log /var/log/nginx/awstats.luxagraf.net.error.log;
+    access_log off;
+    log_not_found off;
+
+    location ^~ /awstats-icon {
+        alias /usr/share/awstats/icon/;
+    }
+
+    location ~ ^/cgi-bin/.*\\.(cgi|pl|py|rb) {
+        auth_basic            "Admin";
+        auth_basic_user_file  /etc/awstats/awstats.htpasswd;
+
+        gzip off;
+        include         fastcgi_params;
+        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock; # change this line if necessary
+        fastcgi_index   cgi-bin.php;
+        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME    /etc/nginx/cgi-bin.php;
+        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_NAME        /cgi-bin/cgi-bin.php;
+        fastcgi_param   X_SCRIPT_FILENAME  /usr/lib$fastcgi_script_name;
+        fastcgi_param   X_SCRIPT_NAME      $fastcgi_script_name;
+        fastcgi_param   REMOTE_USER        $remote_user;
+    }
+
+}
+~~~~
+
+This config is pretty basic, it passes requests for icons to the AWStats icon dir and then sends the rest of our requests to php-fpm. The only tricky part is that AWStats needs to call a Perl file, but we're calling a PHP file, namely `/etc/nginx/cgi-bin.php`. How's that work?
+
+Well, in a nutshell, this script takes all our server variables and passes them to stdin, calls the Perl script and then reads the response from stdout, passing it on to Nginx. Pretty clever, so clever in fact that I did not write it. Here's the file I use, taken straight from the Arch Wiki:
+
+~~~~php
+<?php
+$descriptorspec = array(
+   0 => array("pipe", "r"),  // stdin is a pipe that the child will read from
+   1 => array("pipe", "w"),  // stdout is a pipe that the child will write to
+   2 => array("pipe", "w")   // stderr is a file to write to
+);
+$newenv = $_SERVER;
+$newenv["SCRIPT_FILENAME"] = $_SERVER["X_SCRIPT_FILENAME"];
+$newenv["SCRIPT_NAME"] = $_SERVER["X_SCRIPT_NAME"];
+if (is_executable($_SERVER["X_SCRIPT_FILENAME"])) {
+   $process = proc_open($_SERVER["X_SCRIPT_FILENAME"], $descriptorspec, $pipes, NULL, $newenv);
+   if (is_resource($process)) {
+       fclose($pipes[0]);
+       $head = fgets($pipes[1]);
+       while (strcmp($head, "\n")) {
+           header($head);
+           $head = fgets($pipes[1]);
+       }
+       fpassthru($pipes[1]);
+       fclose($pipes[1]);
+       fclose($pipes[2]);
+       $return_value = proc_close($process);
+   } else {
+       header("Status: 500 Internal Server Error");
+       echo("Internal Server Error");
+   }
+} else {
+   header("Status: 404 Page Not Found");
+   echo("Page Not Found");
+}
+?> 
+~~~~
+
+Save that mess of PHP as `/etc/nginx/cgi-bin.php` and then install php-fpm if you haven't already:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo apt install php-fpm
+~~~~
+
+Next we need to create the password file referenced in our Nginx config. We can create a .htpasswd file with this little shell command, just make sure to put an actual username in place of `username`:
+
+~~~~console
+printf "username:`openssl passwd -apr1`\n" >> awstats.htpasswd
+~~~~
+
+Enter your password when prompted and your password file will be created in the expected format for basic auth files.
+
+Then move that file to the proper directory:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo mv awstats.htpasswd /etc/awstats/
+~~~~
+
+Now we have an Nginx config, a script to pass AWStats from PHP to Perl and some basic password protection for our stats site. The last, totally optional, step is to serve it all over HTTPS instead of HTTP. Since we have a password protecting it anyway, this is arguably unnecessary. I do it more out of habit than any real desire for security. I mean, I did write an article [criticizing the push to make everything HTTPS](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/https-is-not-a-magic-bullet-for-web-security/). But habit.
+
+I have a separate guide on [how to set up Certbot for Nginx on Ubuntu](/src/certbot-nginx-ubuntu-1804) that you can follow. Once that's installed you can just invoke Certbot with:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo certbot --nginx
+~~~~
+
+Select the domain name you're serving your stats at (for me that's awstats.luxagraf.net), then select 2 to automatically redirect all traffic to HTTPS and certbot will append some lines to your Nginx config file.
+
+Now restart Nginx:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo systemctl restart nginx
+~~~~
+
+Visit your new site in the browser at this URL (changing yourdomain.com to the domains you've been using): [https://awstats.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=yourdomain.com](https://awstats.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=yourdomain.com ). If all went well you should see AWStats with a few stats in it. If all did not go well, feel free to drop whatever your error message is in a comment here and I'll see if I can help.
+
+### Motivations
+
+And now the why. The "why the hell don't I just use --insert popular spyware here--" part.
+
+My needs are simple. I don't have ads. I don't have to prove to anyone how much traffic I get. And I don't really care how you got here. I don't care where you go after here. I hardly ever look at my stats. 
+
+When I do look all I want to see is how many people stop by in a given month and if there's any one article that's getting a lot of visitors. I also enjoy seeing which countries visitors are coming from, though I recognize that VPNs make this information suspect.
+
+Since *I* don't track you I certainly don't want third-party spyware tracking you, so that means any hosted service is out. Now there are some self-hosted, open source spyware packages that I've used, Matomo being the best. It is nice, but I don't need or use most of what it offers. I also really dislike running MySQL, and unfortunately Matomo requires MySQL, as does Open Web Analytics. 
+
+By process of elimination (no MySQL), and my very paltry requirements, the logical choice is a simple log analyzer. I went with AWStats because I'd used it in the past. Way in the past. But you know what, AWStats ain't broke. It doesn't spy, it uses no server resources, and it tells you 95 percent of what any spyware tool will tell you (provided you actually [read the documentation](http://www.awstats.org/docs/))
+
+In the end, AWStats is good enough without being too much. But for something as simple as it is, AWStats is surprisingly complex to get up and running, which is what inspired this guide.
+
+##### Shoulders stood upon:
+
+* [AWStats Documentation](http://www.awstats.org/docs/awstats_config.html)
+* [Ubuntu Community Wiki: AWStats](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AWStats)
+* [Arch Wiki: AWStats](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Awstats)
+* [Install, configure and protect Awstats for multiple nginx vhost on Debian](https://kamisama.me/2013/03/20/install-configure-and-protect-awstats-for-multiple-nginx-vhost-on-debian/)
+
+# Set up Certbot for Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04
+
+date:2018-08-08 08:34:42
+url:/src/certbot-nginx-ubuntu-1804
+
+The EFF's free certificate service, [Certbot](https://certbot.eff.org/), has greatly simplified the task of setting up HTTPS for your websites. The only downside is that the certificates are only good for 90 days. Fortunately renewing is easy, and we can even automate it all with systemd. Here's how to set up Certbot with Nginx *and* make sure your SSL certs renew indefinitely with no input from you.
+
+This tutorial is aimed at anyone using an Ubuntu 18.04 VPS from cheap hosts like DigitalOcean or [Vultr.com](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=6825229), but should also work for other versions of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS and any other system that uses systemd. The only difference will be the commands you use to install Certbot. See the Certbot site for [instructions](https://certbot.eff.org/) specific to your system.
+
+First we'll get Certbot running on Ubuntu 18.04, then we'll dive into setting up automatic renewals via systemd.
+
+You should not need this with 18.04, but to be on the safe side, make sure you have the `software-properties-common` package installed. 
+
+~~~~console
+sudo apt install software-properties-common
+~~~~
+
+The next part requires that you add a PPA, my least favorite part of Certbot for Ubuntu, as I don't like to rely on PPAs for something as mission critical as my security certificates. Still, as of this writing, there is not a better way. At least go [look at the code](https://launchpad.net/~certbot/+archive/ubuntu/certbot) before you blindly cut and paste. When you're done, here's your cut and paste:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo apt update
+sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
+sudo apt update
+sudo apt install python-certbot-nginx 
+~~~~
+
+Now you're ready to install some certs. For this part I'm going to show the commands and the output of the commands since the `certbot` command is interactive. Note that the version below will append some lines to your Nginx config file. If you prefer to edit your config file yourself, use this command: `sudo certbot --nginx certonly`, otherwise, here's what it looks like when you run `sudo certbot --nginx`:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo certbot --nginx
+
+[sudo] password for $youruser: 
+Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
+Plugins selected: Authenticator nginx, Installer nginx 
+
+Which names would you like to activate HTTPS for?
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
+1: luxagraf.net
+2: awstats.luxagraf.net
+3: origin.luxagraf.net
+4: www.luxagraf.net
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -                                                                                                                                                               
+Select the appropriate numbers separated by commas and/or spaces, or leave input blank to select all options shown (Enter 'c' to cancel): 4
+Obtaining a new certificate
+Performing the following challenges:
+http-01 challenge for www.luxagraf.net
+Waiting for verification...
+Cleaning up challenges
+Deploying Certificate to VirtualHost /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/luxagraf.net.conf
+
+Please choose whether or not to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS, removing HTTP access.
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
+1: No redirect - Make no further changes to the webserver configuration.
+2: Redirect - Make all requests redirect to secure HTTPS access. Choose this for
+new sites, or if you're confident your site works on HTTPS. You can undo this
+change by editing your web server's configuration.
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
+Select the appropriate number [1-2] then [enter] (press 'c' to cancel): 2
+
+Traffic on port 80 already redirecting to ssl in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/luxagraf.net.conf
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
+Congratulations! You have successfully enabled https://www.luxagraf.net.
+You should test your configuration at: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.luxagraf.net
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
+IMPORTANT NOTES:
+ - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
+   /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.luxagraf.net/fullchain.pem
+   Your key file has been saved at:
+   /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.luxagraf.net/privkey.pem
+   Your cert will expire on 2019-01-09. To obtain a new or tweaked
+   version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot again
+   with the "certonly" option. To non-interactively renew *all* of
+   your certificates, run "certbot renew"
+ - If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:
+   Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt:   https://letsencrypt.org/donate
+   Donating to EFF:                    https://eff.org/donate-le     
+~~~~
+
+And there you have it, SSL certs for all your domains.
+
+Unfortunately, those new certs are only good for 90 days. The odds of you remembering to renew that every 90 days -- even with reminder emails from the EFF -- is near nil. Plus, do you really want to be renewing certs by hand, [like an animal](http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/17)? No, you want to automate everything so you can do better things with your time. 
+
+You could use cron, but the more modern approach would be to create a systemd service and a systemd timer to control when that service runs.
+
+I highly recommend reading through the Arch Wiki page on [systemd services and timers](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Timers), as well as the [systemd.timer man pages](https://jlk.fjfi.cvut.cz/arch/manpages/man/systemd.timer.5) to get a better understanding of how you can automate other tasks in your system. But for the purposes of this tutorial all you really need to understand is that timers are just like other systemd unit files, but they include a `[Timer]` block which lets you specify exactly when you want your service file to run.
+
+Timer files can live right next to your service files in `/etc/systemd/system/`.
+
+There's no hard and fast rules about naming timers, but it makes sense to use the same name as the service file the timer controls, except the timer gets the `.timer` extension. So you'd have two files `myservice.service` and `myservice.timer`.
+
+Let's start with the service file. I call mine `certbot-renewal`. Open the service file:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/certbot-renewal.service
+~~~~
+
+This is going to be a super simple service, we'll give it a description and a command to run and that's it:
+
+~~~~ini
+[Unit]
+Description=Certbot Renewal
+
+[Service]
+ExecStart=/usr/bin/certbot renew
+~~~~
+
+Next we need to create a .timer file that will run the certbot.renewal service every day. Create this file:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/certbot-renewal.timer
+~~~~
+
+And now for the slightly more complex timer:
+
+~~~~ini
+[Unit]
+Description=Certbot Renewal Timer
+
+[Timer]
+OnBootSec=500
+OnUnitActiveSec=1d
+
+[Install]
+WantedBy=multi-user.target
+~~~~
+
+The `[Timer]` directive can take a number of parameters, the ones we've used constitute what's called a monotonic timer, which means they run "after a time span relative to a varying starting point". In other words they're not calendar events like cron. 
+
+Our monotonic timer has two directives, `onBootSec` and `OnUnitActiveSec`. The first should be obvious, our timer will run 500 seconds after the system boots. Why 500? No real reason, I just didn't want to bog down the system at boot. 
+
+The `OnUnitActiveSec` is really what makes this work. This directive measures time relative to when the service that the timer controls was last activated. In our case the `1d` means run the service one day after it last ran. So our timer will run once a day to make sure our scripts stay up to date.
+
+As a kind of footnote, in systemd parlance calendar-based timers are called realtime timers and can be used to replace cron if you want. There are some disadvantages, see the Arch Wiki for [a good overview of what you get and what you lose](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Timers#As_a_cron_replacement) if you go that route.
+
+Okay, the last step for our certbot renewal system is to enable and then start our timer. Note that we don't have to do either to our actual service file because we don't want it active, the timer will control when it runs.
+
+~~~~console
+sudo systemctl enable certbot-renewal.timer
+sudo systemctl start certbot-renewal.timer
+~~~~
+
+Run those commands and you're done. Your timer is now active and your Certbot certificates will automatically renew as long as your server is up and running.
+
+# Why I Switched to Arch Linux
+
+date:2016-07-23 00:56:15
+url:/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux
+
+Everyone seems to have a post about why they ended up with Arch. This is mine.
+
+I recently made the switch to Arch Linux for my primary desktop and it's been great. If you're a Linux user with some experience, I highly suggest you give Arch a try. The installation is a little bit of a pain, hand partitioning, hand mounting and generating your own fstab files, but it teaches you a lot. It pulls back the curtain so you can see that you are in fact the person behind the curtain, you just didn't realize it.
+
+**[Updated July 2021: Still running Arch. Still happy about it. I did switch back to Openbox instead of i3/Sway, but otherwise my setup is unchanged]**
+
+<img src="images/2021/arch-screen_eknsuvf.jpg" id="image-2649" class="picwide caption" />
+
+Why Arch? The good old DIY ethos, which is born out of the realization that if you don't do things yourself you'll have to accept the mediocrity that capitalism has produced. You'll never learn; you'll never grow. That's no way to live.
+
+I used to be a devoted Debian fan. I still agree with the Debian manifesto, but in practice however I found myself too often having to futz with things and figure out how to get something to work. I know Arch as the reputation of being unstable, but for me it's been exactly the opposite. It's been five years now and I have never had an issue.
+
+I came to Arch for the AUR, though the truth is these days I don't use it much anymore since I don't really test software anymore. For a while I [ran Sway](/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway), which was really only practical on Arch. Since then though I went back to X.org. Sorry Wayland, but much as I love Sway, I did not love wrestling with MIDI controller drivers, JACK, and all the other elements of an audio/video workflow in Wayland. It can be done, but it’s more work, and I don’t want to work at getting software to work. I’m too old for that shit. I want to plug in a microphone, open Audacity, and record. If it’s any more complicated than that -- and it was for me in Wayland with the mics I own -- I will find something else. I really don’t care what my software stack is, so long as I can create what I want to create with it.
+
+Wayland was smoother, less graphically glitchy, but meh, whatever. Ninety percent of the time I’m writing in Vim in a Urxvt window. I need smooth scrolling and transitions like I need a hole in my head. I also set up Openbox to behave very much like Sway, so I still have the same shortcuts and honestly, aside from the fact that Tint2 has more icons than Waybar, I can’t tell the difference. Well, that’s not true. Vim works fine with the clipboard again, no need for Neovim.
+
+My Arch setup these days is minimalist: [Openbox](http://openbox.org/wiki/Main_Page) with [tint2](https://gitlab.com/o9000/tint2). I open apps with [dmenu](http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/) and do most of my file system tasks from the terminal using bash (or [Ranger](http://nongnu.org/ranger/) if I want something fancier). Currently my setup uses about 200MB of RAM with no apps open. Arch doesn't have quite the software selection of Debian, but it has most of the software you'd ever want. My needs are simple: bash, vim, tmux, mutt, newsboat, mpd, mpv, git, feh, gimp, darktable and dev stuff like python3, postgis, etc. Every distro has this stuff. 
+
+I've installed Arch on dozens of machines at this point. Currently I use a Lenovo x270 that I picked up off eBay for $300. I added a larger hard drive, a second hard drive, and 32-gigabytes of RAM. That brought to total cost to about $550. It runs Arch like a champ and gives me all I could ever want in a laptop. Okay, a graphics card would be nice for my occasional bouts of video editing, but otherwise it's more than enough.
+
+# Workflows That Automatically Spawn Backups
+
+date:2016-01-28 01:23:34
+url:/src/workflows-automatically-spawn-backups
+
+I wrote previously about how I [backup database files](/src/automatic-offsite-postgresql-backups) automatically. The key word there being "automatically". If I have to remember to make a backup the odds of it happening drop to zero. So I automate as I described in that piece, but that's not the only backup I have.
+
+The point for me as a writer is that I don't want to lose these words.
+
+Part of the answer is backing up databases, but part of my solution is also creating workflows which automatically spawn backups. 
+
+This is actually my preferred backup method because it's not just a backup, it's future proofing. PostgreSQL may not be around ten years from now (I hope it is, because it's pretty awesome, but it may not be), but it's not my only backup.
+
+In fact I've got at least half a dozen backups of these words and I haven't even finished this piece yet. Right now I'm typing these words in Vim and will save the file in a Git repo that will get pushed to a server. That's two backups. Later the containing folder will be backed up on S3 (weekly), as well as two local drives (one daily, one weekly, both [rsync](https://rsync.samba.org/) copies). 
+
+None of that really requires any effort on my part. I do have to add this file to the git repo and then commit and push it to the remote server, but [Vim Fugitive](https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive) makes that ridiculously simple.
+
+That's not the end of the backups though. Once I'm done writing I'll cut and paste this piece into my Django app and hit a publish button that will write the results out to the flat HTML file you're actually reading right now (this file is another backup). I also output a plain text version (just append `.txt` to any luxagraf URL to see a plain text version of the page).
+
+The end result is that all this makes it very unlikely I will loose these words outright.
+
+However, when I plugged these words into the database I gave this article a relationship with other objects in that database. So even though the redundant backups built into my workflow make a total data loss unlikely, without the database I will lose the relationships I've created. That's why I [a solid PostgreSQL backup strategy](/src/automatic-offsite-postgresql-backups), but what if Postgres does disappear?
+
+I could and occasionally do output all the data in the database to flat files with JSON or YAML versions of the metadata attached. Or at least some of it. It's hard to output massive amounts of geodata in the text file (for example the shapefiles of [national parks](https://luxagraf.net/projects/national-parks/) aren't particularly useful as text data). 
+
+I'm not sure what the answer is really, but lately I've been thinking that maybe the answer is just to let it go? The words are the story, that's what my family, my kids, my friends, and whatever few readers I have really want. I'm the only one that cares about the larger story that includes the metadata, the relationships between the stories. Maybe I don't need that. Maybe that it's here today at all is remarkable enough on its own.
+
+The web is after all an ephemeral thing. It depends on our continued ability to do so many things we won't be able to do forever, like burn fossil fuels. In the end the most lasting backup I have may well be the 8.5x11 sheets of paper I've recently taken to printing out. Everything else depends on so much.
+
+# Automatic Offsite PostgreSQL Backups Without a Password
+
+date:2016-01-09 15:27:49
+url:/src/automatic-offsite-postgresql-backups
+
+When it comes to backups I'm paranoid and lazy. That means I need to automate the process of making redundant backups. 
+
+Pretty much everything to do with luxagraf lives in a single PostgreSQL database that gets backed up every night. To make sure I have plenty of copies of those backup files I download them to various other machines and servers around the web. That way I have copies of my database files on this server, another backup server, my local machine, several local backup hard drives, in Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. Yes, that's overkill, but it's all so ridiculously easy, why not? 
+
+Here's how I do it. 
+
+## Make Nightly Backups of PostgreSQL with `pg_dump` and `cron`
+
+The first step is to regularly dump your database. To do that PostgreSQL provides the handy `pg_dump` command. If you want a good overview of `pg_dump` check out the excellent [PostgreSQL manual]. Here's the basic syntax:
+
+~~~~console
+pg_dump -U user -hhostname database_name > backup_file.sql
+~~~~
+
+So, if you had a database named mydb and you wanted to back it up to a file that starts with the name of the database and then includes today's date, you could do something like this:
+
+~~~~console
+pg_dump -U user -hlocalhost mydb > mydb.`date '+%Y%m%d'`.sql
+~~~~
+
+That's pretty useful, but it's also potentially quite a big file. Thankfully we can just pipe the results to gzip to compress them:
+
+~~~~console
+pg_dump -U user -hlocalhost mydb | gzip -c > mydb.`date '+%Y%m%d'`.sql.gz
+~~~~
+
+That's pretty good. In fact for many scenarios that's all you'll need. Plug that into your cron file by typing `crontab -e` and adding this line to make a backup every night at midnight:
+
+~~~~bash
+0 0 * * * pg_dump -U user -hlocalhost mydb | gzip -c > mydb.`date '+%Y%m%d'`.sql
+~~~~
+
+For a long time that was all I did. But then I started running a few other apps that used PostgreSQL databases (like a version [Tiny Tiny RSS](https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home)), so I needed to have quite a few lines in there. Plus I wanted to perform a [VACUUM](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-vacuum.html) on my main database every so often. So I whipped up a shell script. As you do. 
+
+Actually most of this I cobbled together from sources I've unfortunately lost track of since. Which is to say I didn't write this from scratch. Anyway here's the script I use:
+
+~~~~base
+#!/bin/bash
+#
+# Daily PostgreSQL maintenance: vacuuming and backuping.
+#
+##
+set -e
+for DB in $(psql -l -t -U postgres -hlocalhost |awk '{ print $1}' |grep -vE '^-|:|^List|^Name|template[0|1]|postgres|\|'); do
+  echo "[`date`] Maintaining $DB"
+  echo 'VACUUM' | psql -U postgres -hlocalhost -d $DB
+  DUMP="/path/to/backup/dir/$DB.`date '+%Y%m%d'`.sql.gz"
+  pg_dump -U postgres -hlocalhost $DB | gzip -c > $DUMP
+  PREV="$DB.`date -d'1 day ago' '+%Y%m%d'`.sql.gz"
+  md5sum -b $DUMP > $DUMP.md5
+  if [ -f $PREV.md5 ] && diff $PREV.md5 $DUMP.md5; then
+    rm $DUMP $DUMP.md5
+  fi
+done
+~~~~
+
+Copy that code and save it in a file named psqlback.sh. Then make it executable:
+
+~~~~console
+chmod u+x psqlback.sh
+~~~~
+
+Now before you run it, let's take a look at what's going on.
+
+First we're creating a loop so we can backup all our databases.
+
+~~~~bash
+for DB in $(psql -l -t -U postgres -hlocalhost |awk '{ print $1}' |grep -vE '^-|:|^List|^Name|template[0|1]|postgres|\|'); do
+~~~~
+
+This looks complicated because we're using `awk` and `grep` to parse some output but basically all it's doing is querying PostgreSQL to get a list of all the databases (using the `postgres` user so we can access all of them). Then we pipe that to `awk` and `grep` to extract the name of each database and ignore a bunch of stuff we don't want. 
+
+Then we store the name of database in the variable `DB` for the duration of the loop. 
+
+Once we have the name of the database, the script outputs a basic logging message that says it's maintaining the database and then runs VACUUM. 
+
+The next two lines should look familiar:
+
+~~~~bash
+DUMP="/path/to/backup/dir/$DB.`date '+%Y%m%d'`.sql.gz"
+pg_dump -U postgres -hlocalhost $DB | gzip -c > $DUMP
+~~~~
+
+That's very similar to what we did above, I just stored the file path in a variable because it gets used again. The next thing we do is grab the file from yesterday:
+
+~~~~bash
+PREV="$DB.`date -d'1 day ago' '+%Y%m%d'`.sql.gz"
+~~~~
+
+Then we calculate the md5sum of our dump:
+
+~~~~bash
+md5sum -b $DUMP > $DUMP.md5
+~~~~
+
+The we compare that to yesterday's sum and if they're the same we delete our dump since we already have a copy.
+
+~~~~bash
+  if [ -f $PREV.md5 ] && diff $PREV.md5 $DUMP.md5; then
+    rm $DUMP $DUMP.md5
+  fi
+~~~~
+
+Why? Well, there's no need to store a new backup if it matches the previous one exactly. Since sometimes nothing changes on this site for a few days, weeks, months even, this can save a good bit of space.
+
+Okay now that you know what it does, let's run it:
+
+~~~~console
+./psqlback.sh
+~~~~
+
+If everything went well it should have asked you for a password and then printed out a couple messages about maintaining various databases. That's all well and good for running it by hand, but who is going to put in the password when cron is the one running it?
+
+### Automate Your Backups with `cron`
+
+First let's set up cron to run this script every night around midnight. Open up crontab:
+
+~~~~console
+crontab -e
+~~~~
+
+Then add a line to call the script every night at 11:30PM:
+
+~~~~console
+30 23 * * * ./home/myuser/bin/psqlback.sh > psqlbak.log
+~~~~
+
+You'll need to adjust the path to match your server, but otherwise that's all you need (if you'd like to run it less frequently or at a different time, you can read up on the syntax in the cron manual).
+
+But what happens when we're not there to type in the password? Well, the script fails.
+
+There are a variety of ways we can get around this. In fact the [PostgreSQL docs](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/auth-methods.html) cover everything from LDAP auth to peer auth. The latter is actually quite useful, though a tad bit complicated. I generally use the easiest method -- a password file. The trick to making it work for cron jobs is to create a file in your user's home directory called `.pgpass`.
+
+Inside that file you can provide login credentials for any user on any port. The format looks like this:
+
+~~~~vim
+hostname:port:username:password
+~~~~
+
+You can use * as a wildcard if you need it. Here's what I use:
+
+~~~~vim
+localhost:*:*:postgres:passwordhere
+~~~~
+
+I hate storing a password in the plain text file, but I haven't found a better way to do this. 
+
+To be fair, assuming your server security is fine, the `.pgpass` method should be fine. Also note that Postgres will ignore this file if it has greater than 600 permissions (that is, user is the only one that can execute it. Let's change that so that:
+
+~~~~console
+chmod 600 .pgpass
+~~~~
+
+Now we're all set. Cron will run our script every night at 11:30 PM and we'll have a compressed backup file of all our PostgreSQL data.
+
+## Automatically Moving It Offsite
+
+Now we have our database backed up to a file. That's a start. That saves us if PostgreSQL does something wrong or somehow becomes corrupted. But we still have a single point of failure -- what if the whole server crashes and can't be recovered? We're screwed.
+
+To solve that problem we need to get our data off this server and store it somewhere else. 
+
+There's quite a few ways we could do this and I have done most of them. For example we could install [s3cmd](http://s3tools.org/s3cmd) and send them over to an Amazon S3 bucket. I actually do that, but it requires you pay for S3. In case you don't want to do that, I'm going to stick with something that's free -- Dropbox.
+
+Head over to the Dropbox site and follow their instructions for [installing Dropbox on a headless Linux server](https://www.dropbox.com/en/install?os=lnx). It's just one line of cut and pasting though you will need to authorize Dropbox with your account.
+
+**BUT WAIT**
+
+Before you authorize the server to use your account, well, don't. Go create a second account solely for this server. Do that, then authorize that new account for this server. 
+
+Now go back to your server and symlink the folder you put in the script above, into the Dropbox folder.
+
+~~~~console
+cd ~/Dropbox
+ln -s ~/path/to/pgbackup/directory .
+~~~~
+
+Then go back to Dropbox log in to the second account, find that database backup folder you just symlinked in and share it with your main Dropbox account. 
+
+This way, should something go wrong and the Dropbox folder on your server becomes compromised at least the bad guys only get your database backups and not the entirety of your documents folder or whatever might be in your normal Dropbox account. 
+
+Credit to [Dan Benjamin](http://hivelogic.com/), who's first person I heard mention this dual account idea.
+
+The main thing to note about this method is that you're limited to 2GB of storage (the max for a free Dropbox account). That's plenty of space in most cases. Luxagraf has been running for more than 10 years, stores massive amounts of geodata in PostgreSQL, along with close to 1000 posts of various kinds, and a full compressed DB dump is still only about 35MB. So I can store well over 60 days worth of backups, which is plenty for my purposes (in fact I only store about half that).
+
+So create your second account, link your server installation to that and then share that folder with your main Dropbox account. 
+
+The last thing I suggest you do, because Dropbox is not a backup service, but a syncing service, is **copy** the backup files out of the Dropbox folder on your local machine to somewhere else on that machine. Not move, but **copy**. So leave a copy in Dropbox and make a second copy on your local machine outside of the Dropbox folder.
+
+If you dislike Dropbox (I don't blame you, I no longer actually use it for anything other than this) there are other ways to accomplish the same thing. The already mentioned s3cmd could move your backups to Amazon S3, good old `scp` could move them to another server and of course you can always download them to your local machine using `scp` or `rsync` (or SFTP, but then that wouldn't be automated).
+
+Naturally I recommend you do all these things. I sync my nightly backups to my local machine with Dropbox and `scp` those to a storage server. Then I use s3cmd to send weekly backups to S3. That gives me three offsite backups which is enough even for my paranoid, digitally distrustful self.
+
+# How to Set Up Django with Nginx, uWSGI & systemd on Debian/Ubuntu
+
+date:2016-01-05 16:06:00
+url:/src/how-set-django-uwsgi-systemd-debian-8
+
+I've served Django over all sorts of different servers, from Apache with mod_python to Nginx with Gunicorn. The current incarnation of my publishing system[^1] runs atop an Nginx server which passes requests for dynamic pages to uWSGI. I've found this setup to be the fastest of the various options out there for serving Django apps, particularly when pared with a nice, [fast, cheap VPS instance](/src/setup-and-secure-vps).
+
+I am apparently not alone in thinking uWSGI is fast. Some people have even [tested uWSGI](http://www.peterbe.com/plog/fcgi-vs-gunicorn-vs-uwsgi) and [proved as much](http://nichol.as/benchmark-of-python-web-servers). Honestly though speed is not what got me using uWSGI. I switched because just plays so much nicer with systemd than Gunicorn. Also, something about the Gunicorn project always rubbed me the wrong way, but that's just me.
+
+Anyway, my goal was to have a server running that's managed by the system. In my case that means Debian 8 with systemd. I set things up so that a uWSGI "emperor" instance starts up with systemd and then automatically picks up any "vassals" residing a directory[^2]. That way the server will automatically restart should the system need to reboot. 
+
+The first step in this dance is to install uWSGI, which is a Python application (for more background on how uWSGI works and what the various parts are, check out [this tutorial](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-uwsgi-and-nginx-to-serve-python-apps-on-centos-7#definitions-and-concepts)). We could install uwsgi through the Debian repos with `apt-get`, but that version is pretty ancient, so I install uWSGI with pip. 
+
+~~~~console
+pip install uwsgi
+~~~~
+
+Now we need a systemd service file so that we can let systemd manage things for us. Here's what I use. Note that the path is the standard Debian install location, your system may vary (though I believe Ubuntu is the same):
+
+~~~~ini
+[Unit]
+Description=uWSGI Emperor
+After=syslog.target
+
+[Service]
+ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/uwsgi --ini /etc/uwsgi/emperor.ini
+Restart=always
+KillSignal=SIGQUIT
+Type=notify
+StandardError=syslog
+NotifyAccess=all
+
+[Install]
+WantedBy=multi-user.target
+~~~~
+
+Save that to `/lib/systemd/system/uwsgi.service`
+
+Then enable it and try starting it:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo systemctl enable uwsgi.service
+sudo systemctl start uwsgi
+~~~~
+
+This should cause an error like so...
+
+~~~~console
+Job for uwsgi.service failed. See 'systemctl status uwsgi.service' and 'journalctl -xn' for details.
+~~~~
+
+If you look at the journal you'll see that the problem is that uwsgi can't find the emperor.ini file we pointed to in our service file. Let's create that file. Most likely the directory /etc/uwsgi doesn't exist, so create that and then the emperor.ini file in it:
+
+~~~~console
+mkdir /etc/uwsgi
+vim /etc/uwsgi/emperor.ini
+~~~~
+
+Here's the contents of my emperor.ini:
+
+~~~~ini
+[uwsgi]
+emperor = /etc/uwsgi/vassals
+uid = www-data
+gid = www-data
+limit-as = 1024
+logto = /tmp/uwsgi.log
+~~~~
+
+The last step is to create the vassals directory we just referenced in emperor.ini:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo mkdir /etc/uwsgi/vassals
+~~~~
+
+The last step is to add a vassal, which would be the ini file for your actual uWSGI app. 
+
+To create that file, have a look at [this gist over on github](https://gist.github.com/evildmp/3094281), it has a pretty good example. Once you have that file tweaked to your liking, just symlink it into `/etc/uwsgi/vassals/`. The exact paths will vary, but something like this should do the trick:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo ln -s /path/to/your/project/django.ini /etc/uwsgi/vassals/
+~~~~
+
+Now go back and try starting uWSGI again:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo systemctl start uwsgi
+~~~~
+
+This time it should work with no errors. Go ahead and stop it and add it to systemd so it will startup with the system:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo systemctl stop uwsgi
+sudo systemctl enable uwsgi
+sudo systemctl start uwsgi
+~~~~
+
+Congratulations, your uWSGI server is now running.
+
+
+Further Reading:
+
+* As mentioned above, [this gist](https://gist.github.com/evildmp/3094281) covers how to setup the Django end of the equation and covers more of what's actually happening in this setup.
+* This [Digital Ocean tutorial](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-uwsgi-and-nginx-to-serve-python-apps-on-centos-7#definitions-and-concepts) is for CentOS and related distros, but it's what I used originally (I wrote this to keep track of all the places I changed that one).
+* The [official uWSGI docs](http://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorials/Django_and_nginx.html) are pretty great too.
+
+If you enjoyed this tutorial and want a VPS instance to try it out on consider [signing up for Digital Ocean](https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=3bda91345045). It's cheap ($5/month gets you a VPS, this site runs on a $10/month instance), fast and dare I say fun. That link will get you $10 credit, which works out to two free months of hosting and you'll help support this site. But if you prefer here's [a link](https://www.digitalocean.com/) without the referral code and no $10 credit.
+
+[^1]: The vast majority of this site is served from flat html files, but there are a few dynamic things like the comments that actually hit the database. For the most part though, I am the only one interacting with the Django portion of my site (which is used to build the flat HTML files I serve up to you).
+[^2]: I think "emperor" and "vassal" are the uWSGI project's effort to get rid of the "slave"/"master" lingo that gets used a lot in these circumstances.
+
+#  How Google’s AMP project speeds up the Web—by sandblasting HTML
+
+date:2015-11-05 16:42:44
+url:/src/how-googles-amp-project-speeds-web-sandblasting-ht
+
+[**This story originally appeared on <a href="http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/googles-amp-an-internet-giant-tackles-the-old-myth-of-the-web-is-too-slow/" rel="me">Ars Technica</a>, to comment and enjoy the full reading experience with images (including a TRS-80 browsing the web) you should read it over there.**]
+
+There's a story going around today that the Web is too slow, especially over mobile networks. It's a pretty good story—and it's a perpetual story. The Web, while certainly improved from the days of 14.4k modems, has never been as fast as we want it to be, which is to say that the Web has never been instantaneous.
+
+Curiously, rather than a focus on possible cures, like increasing network speeds, finding ways to decrease network latency, or even speeding up Web browsers, the latest version of the "Web is too slow" story pins the blame on the Web itself. And, perhaps more pointedly, this blame falls directly on the people who make it.
+
+The average webpage has increased in size at a terrific rate. In January 2012, the average page tracked by HTTPArchive [transferred 1,239kB and made 86 requests](http://httparchive.org/trends.php?s=All&minlabel=Oct+1+2012&maxlabel=Oct+1+2015#bytesTotal&reqTotal). Fast forward to September 2015, and the average page loads 2,162kB of data and makes 103 requests. These numbers don't directly correlate to longer page load-and-render times, of course, especially if download speeds are also increasing. But these figures are one indicator of how quickly webpages are bulking up.
+
+Native mobile applications, on the other hand, are getting faster. Mobile devices get more powerful with every release cycle, and native apps take better advantage of that power.
+
+So as the story goes, apps get faster, the Web gets slower. This is allegedly why Facebook must invent Facebook Instant Articles, why Apple News must be built, and why Google must now create [Accelerated Mobile Pages](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/googles-new-amp-html-spec-wants-to-make-mobile-websites-load-instantly/) (AMP). Google is late to the game, but AMP has the same goal as Facebook's and Apple's efforts—making the Web feel like a native application on mobile devices. (It's worth noting that all three solutions focus exclusively on mobile content.)
+
+For AMP, two things in particular stand in the way of a lean, mean browsing experience: JavaScript... and advertisements that use JavaScript. The AMP story is compelling. It has good guys (Google) and bad guys (everyone not using Google Ads), and it's true to most of our experiences. But this narrative has some fundamental problems. For example, Google owns the largest ad server network on the Web. If ads are such a problem, why doesn't Google get to work speeding up the ads?
+
+There are other potential issues looming with the AMP initiative as well, some as big as the state of the open Web itself. But to think through the possible ramifications of AMP, first you need to understand Google's new offering itself.
+
+## What is AMP?
+
+To understand AMP, you first need to understand Facebook's Instant Articles. Instant Articles use RSS and standard HTML tags to create an optimized, slightly stripped-down version of an article. Facebook then allows for some extra rich content like auto-playing video or audio clips. Despite this, Facebook claims that Instant Articles are up to 10 times faster than their siblings on the open Web. Some of that speed comes from stripping things out, while some likely comes from aggressive caching.
+
+But the key is that Instant Articles are only available via Facebook's mobile apps—and only to established publishers who sign a deal with Facebook. That means reading articles from Facebook's Instant Article partners like National Geographic, BBC, and Buzzfeed is a faster, richer experience than reading those same articles when they appear on the publisher's site. Apple News appears to work roughly the same way, taking RSS feeds from publishers and then optimizing the content for delivery within Apple's application.
+
+All this app-based content delivery cuts out the Web. That's a problem for the Web and, by extension, for Google, which leads us to Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project.
+
+Unlike Facebook Articles and Apple News, AMP eschews standards like RSS and HTML in favor of its own little modified subset of HTML. AMP HTML looks a lot like HTML without the bells and whistles. In fact, if you head over to the [AMP project announcement](https://www.ampproject.org/how-it-works/), you'll see an AMP page rendered in your browser. It looks like any other page on the Web.
+
+AMP markup uses an extremely limited set of tags. Form tags? Nope. Audio or video tags? Nope. Embed tags? Certainly not. Script tags? Nope. There's a very short list of the HTML tags allowed in AMP documents available over on the [project page](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-html-format.md). There's also no JavaScript allowed. Those ads and tracking scripts will never be part of AMP documents (but don't worry, Google will still be tracking you).
+
+AMP defines several of its own tags, things like amp-youtube, amp-ad, or amp-pixel. The extra tags are part of what's known as [Web components](http://www.w3.org/TR/components-intro/), which will likely become a Web standard (or it might turn out to be "ActiveX part 2," only the future knows for sure).
+
+So far AMP probably sounds like a pretty good idea—faster pages, no tracking scripts, no JavaScript at all (and so no overlay ads about signing up for newsletters). However, there are some problematic design choices in AMP. (At least, they're problematic if you like the open Web and current HTML standards.)
+
+AMP re-invents the wheel for images by using the custom component amp-img instead of HTML's img tag, and it does the same thing with amp-audio and amp-video rather than use the HTML standard audio and video. AMP developers argue that this allows AMP to serve images only when required, which isn't possible with the HTML img tag. That, however, is a limitation of Web browsers, not HTML itself. AMP has also very clearly treated [accessibility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_accessibility) as an afterthought. You lose more than just a few HTML tags with AMP.
+
+In other words, AMP is technically half baked at best. (There are dozens of open issues calling out some of the [most](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/517) [egregious](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/481) [decisions](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/545) in AMP's technical design.) The good news is that AMP developers are listening. One of the worst things about AMP's initial code was the decision to disable pinch-and-zoom on articles, and thankfully, Google has reversed course and [eliminated the tag that prevented pinch and zoom](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/592).
+
+But AMP's markup language is really just one part of the picture. After all, if all AMP really wanted to do was strip out all the enhancements and just present the content of a page, there are existing ways to do that. Speeding things up for users is a nice side benefit, but the point of AMP, as with Facebook Articles, looks to be more about locking in users to a particular site/format/service. In this case, though, the "users" aren't you and I as readers; the "users" are the publishers putting content on the Web.
+
+## It's the ads, stupid
+
+The goal of Facebook Instant Articles is to keep you on Facebook. No need to explore the larger Web when it's all right there in Facebook, especially when it loads so much faster in the Facebook app than it does in a browser.
+
+Google seems to have recognized what a threat Facebook Instant Articles could be to Google's ability to serve ads. This is why Google's project is called Accelerated Mobile Pages. Sorry, desktop users, Google already knows how to get ads to you.
+
+If you watch the [AMP demo](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/10/introducing-accelerated-mobile-pages.html), which shows how AMP might work when it's integrated into search results next year, you'll notice that the viewer effectively never leaves Google. AMP pages are laid over the Google search page in much the same way that outside webpages are loaded in native applications on most mobile platforms. The experience from the user's point of view is just like the experience of using a mobile app.
+
+Google needs the Web to be on par with the speeds in mobile apps. And to its credit, the company has some of the smartest engineers working on the problem. Google has made one of the fastest Web browsers (if not the fastest) by building Chrome, and in doing so the company has pushed other vendors to speed up their browsers as well. Since Chrome debuted, browsers have become faster and better at an astonishing rate. Score one for Google.
+
+The company has also been touting the benefits of mobile-friendly pages, first by labeling them as such in search results on mobile devices and then later by ranking mobile friendly pages above not-so-friendly ones when other factors are equal. Google has been quick to adopt speed-improving new HTML standards like the responsive images effort, which was first supported by Chrome. Score another one for Google.
+
+But pages keep growing faster than network speeds, and the Web slows down. In other words, Google has tried just about everything within its considerable power as a search behemoth to get Web developers and publishers large and small to speed up their pages. It just isn't working.
+
+One increasingly popular reaction to slow webpages has been the use of content blockers, typically browser add-ons that stop pages from loading anything but the primary content of the page. Content blockers have been around for over a decade now (No Script first appeared for Firefox in 2005), but their use has largely been limited to the desktop. That changed in Apple's iOS 9, which for the first time put simple content-blocking tools in the hands of millions of mobile users.
+
+Combine all the eyeballs that are using iOS with content blockers, reading Facebook Instant Articles, and perusing Apple News, and you suddenly have a whole lot of eyeballs that will never see any Google ads. That's a problem for Google, one that AMP is designed to fix.
+
+## Static pages that require Google's JavaScript
+
+The most basic thing you can do on the Web is create a flat HTML file that sits on a server and contains some basic tags. This type of page will always be lightning fast. It's also insanely simple. This is literally all you need to do to put information on the Web. There's no need for JavaScript, no need even for CSS.
+
+This is more or less the sort of page AMP wants you to create (AMP doesn't care if your pages are actually static or—more likely—generated from a database. The point is what's rendered is static). But then AMP wants to turn around and require that each page include a third-party script in order to load. AMP deliberately sets the opacity of the entire page to 0 until this script loads. Only then is the page revealed.
+
+This is a little odd; as developer Justin Avery [writes](https://responsivedesign.is/articles/whats-the-deal-with-accelerated-mobile-pages-amp), "Surely the document itself is going to be faster than loading a library to try and make it load faster."
+
+Pinboard.in creator Maciej Cegłowski did just that, putting together a demo page that duplicates the AMP-based AMP homepage without that JavaScript. Over a 3G connection, Cegłowski's page fills the viewport in [1.9 seconds](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151016_RF_VNE/). The AMP homepage takes [9.2 seconds](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151016_9J_VNN/). JavaScript slows down page load times, even when that JavaScript is part of Google's plan to speed up the Web.
+
+Ironically, for something that is ostensibly trying to encourage better behavior from developers and publishers, this means that pages using progressive enhancement, keeping scripts to a minimum and aggressively caching content—in other words sites following best practices and trying to do things right—may be slower in AMP.
+
+In the end, developers and publishers who have been following best practices for Web development and don't rely on dozens of tracking networks and ads have little to gain from AMP. Unfortunately, the publishers building their sites like that right now are few and far between. Most publishers have much to gain from generating AMP pages—at least in terms of speed. Google says that AMP can improve page speed index scores by between 15 to 85 percent. That huge range is likely a direct result of how many third-party scripts are being loaded on some sites.
+
+The dependency on JavaScript has another detrimental effect. AMP documents depend on JavaScript, which is to say that if their (albeit small) script fails to load for some reason—say, you're going through a tunnel on a train or only have a flaky one-bar connection at the beach—the AMP page is completely blank. When an AMP page fails, it fails spectacularly.
+
+Google knows better than this. Even Gmail still offers a pure HTML-based fallback version of itself.
+
+## AMP for publishers
+
+Under the AMP bargain, all big media has to do is give up its ad networks. And interactive maps. And data visualizations. And comment systems.
+
+Your WordPress blog can get in on the stripped-down AMP action as well. Given that WordPress powers roughly 24 percent of all sites on the Web, having an easy way to generate AMP documents from WordPress means a huge boost in adoption for AMP. It's certainly possible to build fast websites using WordPress, but it's also easy to do the opposite. WordPress plugins often have a dramatic (negative) impact on load times. It isn't uncommon to see a WordPress site loading not just one but several external JavaScript libraries because the user installed three plugins that each use a different library. AMP neatly solves that problem by stripping everything out.
+
+So why would publishers want to use AMP? Google, while its influence has dipped a tad across industries (as Facebook and Twitter continue to drive more traffic), remains a powerful driver of traffic. When Google promises more eyeballs on their stories, big media listens.
+
+AMP isn't trying to get rid of the Web as we know it; it just wants to create a parallel one. Under this system, publishers would not stop generating regular pages, but they would also start generating AMP files, usually (judging by the early adopter examples) by appending /amp to the end of the URL. The AMP page and the canonical page would reference each other through standard HTML tags. User agents could then pick and choose between them. That is, Google's Web crawler might grab the AMP page, but desktop Firefox might hit the AMP page and redirect to the canonical URL.
+
+On one hand, what this amounts to is that after years of telling the Web to stop making m. mobile-specific websites, Google is telling the Web to make /amp-specific mobile pages. On the other hand, this nudges publishers toward an idea that's big in the [IndieWeb movement](http://indiewebcamp.com/): Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (or [POSSE](http://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE) for short).
+
+The idea is to own the canonical copy of the content on your own site but then to send that content everywhere you can. Or rather, everywhere you want to reach your readers. Facebook Instant Article? Sure, hook up the RSS feed. Apple News? Send the feed over there, too. AMP? Sure, generate an AMP page. No need to stop there—tap the new Medium API and half a dozen others as well.
+
+Reading is a fragmented experience. Some people will love reading on the Web, some via RSS in their favorite reader, some in Facebook Instant Articles, some via AMP pages on Twitter, some via Lynx in their terminal running on a [restored TRS-80](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/surfing-the-internet-from-my-trs-80-model-100/) (seriously, it can be done. See below). The beauty of the POSSE approach is that you can reach them all from a single, canonical source.
+
+## AMP and the open Web
+
+While AMP has problems and just might be designed to lock publishers into a Google-controlled format, so far it does seem friendlier to the open Web than Facebook Instant Articles.
+
+In fact, if you want to be optimistic, you could look at AMP as the carrot that Google has been looking for in its effort to speed up the Web. As noted Web developer (and AMP optimist) Jeremy Keith [writes](https://adactio.com/journal/9646) in a piece on AMP, "My hope is that the current will flow in both directions. As well as publishers creating AMP versions of their pages in order to appease Google, perhaps they will start to ask 'Why can't our regular pages be this fast?' By showing that there is life beyond big bloated invasive webpages, perhaps the AMP project will work as a demo of what the whole Web could be."
+
+Not everyone is that optimistic about AMP, though. Developer and Author Tim Kadlec [writes](https://timkadlec.com/2015/10/amp-and-incentives/), "[AMP] doesn't feel like something helping the open Web so much as it feels like something bringing a little bit of the walled garden mentality of native development onto the Web... Using a very specific tool to build a tailored version of my page in order to 'reach everyone' doesn't fit any definition of the 'open Web' that I've ever heard."
+
+There's one other important aspect to AMP that helps speed up their pages: Google will cache your pages on its CDN for free. "AMP is caching... You can use their caching if you conform to certain rules," writes Dave Winer, developer and creator of RSS, [in a post on AMP](http://scripting.com/2015/10/10/supportingStandardsWithoutAllThatNastyInterop.html). "If you don't, you can use your own caching. I can't imagine there's a lot of difference unless Google weighs search results based on whether you use their code."
+
+
+# About <code>src</code>
+
+date:2015-10-28 15:04:24
+url:/src/about
+
+**If you're here because Google sent you to one of the articles I deleted and then you got redirected here, have a look at the [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://longhandpixels.net/blog/), which preserved those pages.**
+
+For a while I had another blog at the URL longhandpixels.net. I made a few half-hearted attempts to make money with it, which I refuse to do here. 
+
+I felt uncomfortable with the marketing that required and a little bit dirty about the whole thing. I don't want to spend my life writing things that will draw in people to buy my book. Honestly, I don't care about selling the book (at this point, 2018, it's enough out of date that I pulled it completely).
+
+What I want to do is write what I want to write, whether the topic is [life on the road with my family, traveling in a restored 1969 Dodge Travco RV](/) (which is what most of this site is about), fiction or technology. I don't really care if anyone else is interested or not. Long story short; I shut down longhandpixels. I ported over a small portion of articles that I liked and deleted the rest, redirecting them all to this page, hence the message at the top.
+
+So, there you go. Now if I were you I'd close this browser window right now and go somewhere with fresh air and sunshine, but if you're not up for that, I really do hope you enjoy `src`, which is what I call this code/tech-centric portion of luxagraf. 
+
+###Acknowledgements
+
+`src` and the rest of this site would not be possible without the following software, many thanks to the creators:
+
+* [Git](http://git-scm.com/) -- pretty much everything I write is stored in Git for version control purposes. I host my own repos privately.
+
+* [Nginx](http://nginx.org/) -- This site is served by a custom build of Nginx. You can read more about how I set up Nginx in the tutorial I wrote, *[Install Nginx on Debian/Ubuntu](/src/install-nginx-debian)*
+
+* [Python](https://www.python.org/) and [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com/) -- This site consists primarily of flat HTML files generated by a custom Django application I wrote.
+
+* [Arch Linux](https://www.archlinux.org/) -- Way down at the bottom of stack there is Arch, which is my preferred operating system, server or otherwise. Currently I run Arch on a small VPS instance at [Vultr.com](http://www.vultr.com/?ref=6825229) (affiliate link, costs you nothing, but helps cover my hosting).
+
+# Switching from LastPass to Pass
+
+date:2015-10-28 15:02:09
+url:/src/pass
+
+I used to keep all my passwords in my head. I kept track of them using some memory tricks based my very, very limited understanding of what memory champions like [Ed Cooke][1] do. Basically I would generate strings using [pwgen][2] and then memorized them. 
+
+As you might imagine, this did not scale well. 
+
+Or rather it led to me getting lazy. It used to be that hardly any sites required you to log in so it was no big deal to memorize a few passwords. Now pretty much every time you buy something you have to create an account and I don't want to memorize a new strong password for some one-off site I'll probably never visit again. So I ended up using a less strong password for those. Worse, I'd re-use that password at multiple sites.
+
+My really important passwords (email and financial sites), are still only in my head, but recognizing that re-using the same simple password for the one-offs was a bad idea, I started using LastPass for those sorts of things. But I never really liked using LastPass. It bothered me that my passwords were stored on a third-party server. But LastPass was just *so* easy.
+
+Then LogMeIn bought LastPass and suddenly I was motivated to move on. 
+
+As I outlined in a [brief piece][3] for The Register, there are lots of replacement services out there -- I like [Dashlane][4], despite the price -- but I didn't want my password data on a third party server any more. I wanted to be in total control.
+
+I can't remember how I ran across [pass][5], but I've been meaning to switch over to it for a while now. It exactly what I wanted in a password tool -- a simple, secure, command line based system using tested tools like GnuPG. There's also [Firefox add-on][6] and [an Android app][7] to make life a bit easier. So far though, I'm not using either.
+
+So I cleaned up my LastPass account, exported everything to CSV and imported it all into pass with this [Ruby script][8]. 
+
+Once you have the basics installed there are two ways to run pass, with Git and without. I can't tell you how many times Git has saved my ass, so naturally I went with a Git-based setup that I host on a private server. That, combined with regular syncing to my Debian machine, my wife's Mac, rsyncing to a storage server, and routine backups to Amazon S3 means my encrypted password files are backed up on six different physical machines. Moderately insane, but sufficiently redundant that I don't worry about losing anything.
+
+If you go this route there's one other thing you need to backup -- your GPG keys. The public key is easy, but the private one is a bit harder. I got some good ideas from [here][9]. On one hand you could be paranoid-level secure and make a paper print out of your key. I suggest using a barcode or QR code, and then printing on card stock which you laminate for protection from the elements and then store it in a secure location like a safe deposit box. I may do this at some point, but for now I went with the less secure plan B -- I simply encrypted my private key with a passphrase. 
+
+Yes, that essentially negates at least some of the benefit of using a key instead of passphrase in the first place. However, since, as noted above, I don't store any passwords that would, so to speak, give you the keys to my kingdom, I'm not terribly worried about it. Besides, if you really want to get these passwords it would be far easier to just take my laptop and [hit me with a $5 wrench][10] until I told you the passphrase for gnome-keyring.
+
+The more realistic thing to worry about is how other, potentially far less tech-savvy people can access these passwords should something happen to you. No one in my immediate family knows how to use GPG. Yet. So should something happen to me before I teach my kids how to use it, I periodically print out my important passwords and store that file in a secure place along with a will, advance directive and so on.
+
+
+[1]: https://twitter.com/tedcooke
+[2]: https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=pwgen
+[3]: tk
+[4]: http://dashlane.com/
+[5]: http://www.passwordstore.org/
+[6]: https://github.com/jvenant/passff#readme
+[7]: https://github.com/zeapo/Android-Password-Store
+[8]: http://git.zx2c4.com/password-store/tree/contrib/importers/lastpass2pass.rb
+[9]: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/51771/where-do-you-store-your-personal-private-gpg-key
+[10]: https://www.xkcd.com/538/
+
+
+# Setup And Secure Your First VPS
+
+date:2015-03-31 20:45:50
+url:/src/setup-and-secure-vps
+
+Let's talk about your server hosting situation. I know a lot of you are still using a shared web host. The thing is, it's 2015, shared hosting is only necessary if you really want unexplained site outages and over-crowded servers that slow to a crawl.
+
+It's time to break free of those shared hosting chains. It time to stop accepting the software stack you're handed. It's time to stop settling for whatever outdated server software and configurations some shared hosting company sticks you with.
+
+You need a VPS. Seriously.
+
+What? Virtual Private Servers? Those are expensive and complicated... don't I need to know Linux or something?
+
+No, no and not really.
+
+Thanks to an increasingly competitive market you can pick up a very capable VPS for $5 a month. Setting up your VPS *is* a little more complicated than using a shared host, but most VPS's these days have one-click installers that will set up a Rails, Django or even WordPress environment for you.
+
+As for Linux, knowing your way around the command line certainly won't hurt, but these tutorials will teach you everything you really need to know. We'll also automate everything so that critical security updates for your server are applied automatically without you lifting a finger.
+
+## Pick a VPS Provider
+
+There are hundreds, possibly thousands of VPS providers these days. You can nerd out comparing all of them on [serverbear.com](http://blog.serverbear.com/) if you want. When you're starting out I suggest sticking with what I call the big three: Linode, Digital Ocean or Vultr.
+
+Linode would be my choice for mission critical hosting. I use it for client projects, but Vultr and Digital Ocean are cheaper and perfect for personal projects and experiments. Both offer $5 a month servers, which gets you .5 GB of RAM, plenty of bandwidth and 20-30GB of a SSD-based storage space. Vultr actually gives you a little more RAM, which is helpful if you're setting up a Rails or Django environment (i.e. a long running process that requires more memory), but I've been hosting a Django-based site on a 512MB Digital Ocean instance for 18 months and have never run out of memory.
+
+Also note that all these plans start off charging by the hour so you can spin up a new server, play around with it and then destroy it and you'll have only spent a few pennies.
+
+Which one is better? They're both good. I've been using Vultr more these days, but Digital Ocean has a nicer, somewhat slicker control panel. There are also many others I haven't named. Just pick one.
+
+Here's a link that will get you a $10 credit at [Vultr](http://www.vultr.com/?ref=6825229) and here's one that will get you a $10 credit at [Digital Ocean](https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=3bda91345045) (both of those are affiliate links and help cover the cost of hosting this site *and* get you some free VPS time).
+
+For simplicity's sake, and because it offers more one-click installers, I'll use Digital Ocean for the rest of this tutorial.
+
+## Create Your First VPS
+
+In Digital Ocean you'll create a "Droplet". It's a three step process: pick a plan (stick with the $5 a month plan for starters), pick a location (stick with the defaults) and then install a bare OS or go with a one-click installer. Let's get WordPress up and running, so select WordPress on 14.04 under the Applications tab.
+
+If you want automatic backups, and you do, check that box. Backups are not free, but generally won't add more than about $1 to your monthly bill -- it's money well spent.
+
+The last thing we need to do is add an SSH key to our account. If we don't Digital Ocean will email our root password in a plain text email. Yikes.
+
+If you need to generate some SSH keys, here's a short guide, [How to Generate SSH keys](/src/ssh-keys-secure-logins). You can skip step 3 in that guide. Once you've got your keys set up on your local machine you just need to add them to your droplet.
+
+If you're on OS X, you can use this command to copy your public key to the clipboard:
+
+~~~~console
+pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
+~~~~
+
+Otherwise you can use cat to print it out and copy it:
+
+~~~~console
+cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
+~~~~
+
+Now click the button to "add an SSH key". Then paste the contents of your clipboard into the box. Hit "add SSH Key" and you're done.
+
+Now just click the giant "Create Droplet".
+
+Congratulations you just deployed your first VPS server.
+
+## Secure Your VPS
+
+Now we can log in to our new VPS with this code:
+
+~~~~console
+ssh root@127.87.87.87
+~~~~
+
+That will cause SSH to ask if you want to add the server to list of known hosts. Say yes and then on OS X you'll get a dialog asking for the passphrase you created a minute ago when you generate your SSH key. Enter it, check the box to save it to your keychain so you don't have to enter it again.
+
+And you're now logged in to your VPS as root. That's not how we want to log in though since root is a very privileged user that can wreak all sorts of havoc. The first thing we'll do is change the password of the root user. To do that, just enter:
+
+~~~~console
+passwd
+~~~~
+
+And type a new password.
+
+Now let's create a new user:
+
+~~~~console
+adduser myusername
+~~~~
+
+Give your username a secure password and then enter this command:
+
+~~~~console
+visudo
+~~~~
+
+If you get an error saying that there is no app installed, you'll need to first install sudo (`apt-get install sudo` on Debian, which does not ship with sudo). That will open a file. Use the arrow key to move the cursor down to the line that reads:
+
+~~~~vim
+root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
+~~~~
+
+Now add this line:
+
+~~~~vim
+myusername ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
+~~~~
+
+Where myusername is the username you created just a minute ago. Now we need to save the file. To do that hit Control-X, type a Y and then hit return.
+
+Now, **WITHOUT LOGGING OUT OF YOUR CURRENT ROOT SESSION** open another terminal window and make sure you can login with your new user:
+
+~~~~console
+ssh myusername@12.34.56.78
+~~~~
+
+You'll be asked for the password that we created just a minute ago on the server (not the one for our SSH key). Enter that password and you should be logged in. To make sure we can get root access when we need it, try entering this command:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo apt-get update
+~~~~
+
+That should ask for your password again and then spit out a bunch of information, all of which you can ignore for now.
+
+Okay, now you can log out of your root terminal window. To do that just hit Control-D.
+
+## Finishing Up
+
+What about actually accessing our VPS on the web? Where's WordPress? Just point your browser to the bare IP address you used to log in and you should get the first screen of the WordPress installer.
+
+We now have a VPS deployed and we've taken some very basic steps to secure it. We can do a lot more to make things more secure, but I've covered that in a separate article:
+
+One last thing: the user we created does not have access to our SSH keys, we need to add them. First make sure you're logged out of the server (type Control-D and you'll get a message telling you the connection has been closed). Now, on your local machine paste this command:
+
+~~~~console
+cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh myusername@45.63.48.114 "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat >>  ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
+~~~~
+
+You'll have to put in your password one last time, but from now on you can login via SSH.
+
+## Next Steps
+
+Congratulations you made it past the first hurdle, you're well on your way to taking control over your server. Kick back, relax and write some blog posts.
+
+Write down any problems you had with this tutorial and send me a link so I can check out your blog (I'll try to help figure out what went wrong too).
+
+Because we used a pre-built image from Digital Ocean though we're really not much better off than if we went with shared hosting, but that's okay, you have to start somewhere. Next up we'll do the same things, but this time create a bare OS which will serve as the basis for a custom built version of Nginx that's highly optimized and way faster than any stock server.
+
+# Setup SSH Keys for Secure Logins
+
+date:2015-03-21 20:49:26
+url:/src/ssh-keys-secure-logins
+
+SSH keys are an easier, more secure way of logging into your virtual private server via SSH. Passwords are vulnerable to brute force attacks and just plain guessing. Key-based authentication is (currently) much more difficult to brute force and, when combined with a password on the key, provides a secure way of accessing your VPS instances from anywhere.
+
+Key-based authentication uses two keys, the first is the "public" key that anyone is allowed to see. The second is the "private" key that only you ever see. So to log in to a VPS using keys we need to create a pair -- a private key and a public key that matches it -- and then securely upload the public key to our VPS instance. We'll further protect our private key by adding a password to it.
+
+Open up your terminal application. On OS X, that's Terminal, which is in Applications >> Utilities folder. If you're using Linux I'll assume you know where the terminal app is and Windows fans can follow along after installing [Cygwin](http://cygwin.com/).
+
+Here's how to generate SSH keys in three simple steps.
+
+
+## Setup SSH for More Secure Logins
+
+### Step 1: Check for SSH Keys
+
+Cut and paste this line into your terminal to check and see if you already have any SSH keys:
+
+~~~~console
+ls -al ~/.ssh
+~~~~
+
+If you see output like this, then skip to Step 3:
+
+~~~~console
+id_dsa.pub
+id_ecdsa.pub
+id_ed25519.pub
+id_rsa.pub
+~~~~
+
+### Step 2: Generate an SSH Key
+
+Here's the command to create a new SSH key. Just cut and paste, but be sure to put in your own email address in quotes:
+
+~~~~console
+ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@example.com"
+~~~~
+
+This will start a series of questions, just hit enter to accept the default choice for all of them, including the last one which asks where to save the file.
+
+Then it will ask for a passphrase, pick a good long one. And don't worry you won't need to enter this every time, there's something called `ssh-agent` that will ask for your passphrase and then store it for you for the duration of your session (i.e. until you restart your computer).
+
+~~~~console
+Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): [Type a passphrase]
+Enter same passphrase again: [Type passphrase again]
+~~~~
+
+Once you've put in the passphrase, SSH will spit out a "fingerprint" that looks a bit like this:
+
+~~~~console
+# Your identification has been saved in /Users/you/.ssh/id_rsa.
+# Your public key has been saved in /Users/you/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
+# The key fingerprint is:
+# d3:50:dc:0f:f4:65:29:93:dd:53:c2:d6:85:51:e5:a2 scott@longhandpixels.net
+~~~~
+
+### Step 3 Copy Your Public Key to your VPS
+
+If you have ssh-copy-id installed on your system you can use this line to transfer your keys:
+
+~~~~console
+ssh-copy-id user@123.45.56.78
+~~~~
+
+If that doesn't work, you can paste in the keys using SSH:
+
+~~~.language-bash
+cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user@12.34.56.78 "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat >>  ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
+~~~
+
+Whichever you use you should get a message like this:
+
+~~~~console
+The authenticity of host '12.34.56.78 (12.34.56.78)' can’t be established.
+RSA key fingerprint is 01:3b:ca:85:d6:35:4d:5f:f0:a2:cd:c0:c4:48:86:12.
+Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
+Warning: Permanently added '12.34.56.78' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
+username@12.34.56.78's password: 
+~~~~
+
+Now try logging into the machine, with `ssh username@12.34.56.78`, and check in:
+
+~~~~console
+~/.ssh/authorized_keys
+~~~~
+
+to make sure we haven't added extra keys that you weren't expecting.
+
+Now log in to your VPS with ssh like so:
+
+~~~~console
+ssh username@12.34.56.78
+~~~~
+
+And you won't be prompted for a password by the server. You will, however, be prompted for the passphrase you used to encrypt your SSH key. You'll need to enter that passphrase to unlock your SSH key, but ssh-agent should store that for you so you only need to re-enter it when you logout or restart your computer.
+
+And there you have it, secure, key-based log-ins for your VPS.
+
+### Bonus: SSH config
+
+If you'd rather not type `ssh myuser@12.34.56.78` all the time you can add that host to your SSH config file and refer to it by hostname. 
+
+The SSH config file lives in `~/.ssh/config`. This command will either open that file if it exists or create it if it doesn't:
+
+~~~~console
+nano ~/.ssh/config
+~~~~
+
+Now we need to create a host entry. Here's what mine looks like:
+
+~~~~ini
+Host myname  
+  Hostname 12.34.56.78
+  user myvpsusername
+  #Port 24857 #if you set a non-standard port uncomment this line
+  CheckHostIP yes
+  TCPKeepAlive yes
+~~~~
+
+Then to login all I need to do is type `ssh myname`. This is even more helpful when using `scp` since you can skip the whole username@server and just type: `scp myname:/home/myuser/somefile.txt .` to copy a file.
+
+
+# How My Two-Year-Old Twins Made Me a Better Programmer
+
+date:2014-08-05 20:55:13
+url:/src/better
+
+TL;DR version: "information != knowledge; knowledge != wisdom; wisdom != experience;"
+
+I have two-year-old twins. Every day I watch them figure out more about the world around them. Whether that's how to climb a little higher, how to put on a t-shirt, where to put something when you're done with it, or what to do with these crazy strings hanging off your shoes.
+
+It can be incredibly frustrating to watch them struggle with something new and fail. They're your children so your instinct is to step in and help. But if you step in and do everything for them they never figure out how to do any of it on their own. I've learned to wait until they ask for help.
+
+Watching them struggle and learn has made me realize that I don't let myself struggle enough and my skills are stagnating because of it. I'm happy to let Google step in and solve all my problems for me. I get work done, true, but at the expense of learning new things.
+
+I've started to think of this as the Stack Overflow problem, not because I actually blame Stack Overflow -- it's a great resource, the problem is mine -- but because it's emblematic of a problem. I use StackOverflow, and Google more generally, as a crutch, as a way to quickly solve problems with some bit of information rather than digging deeper and turning information into actual knowledge.
+
+On one hand quick solutions can be a great thing. Searching the web lets me solve my problem and move on to the next (potentially more interesting) one.
+
+On the other hand, information (the solution to the problem at hand) is not as useful as knowledge. Snippets of code and other tiny bits of information are not going to land you job, nor will they help you when you want to write a tutorial or a book about something. This sort of "let's just solve the problem" approach begins and ends in the task at hand. The information you get out of that is useful for the task you're doing, but knowledge is much larger than that. And I don't know about you, but I want to be more than something that's useful for finishing tasks.
+
+Information is useless to me if it isn't synthesized into personal knowledge somehow. And, for me at least, that information only becomes knowledge when I stop, back up and try to understand the *why* rather than than just the *how*. Good answers on Stack Overflow explain the why, but more often than not this doesn't happen.
+
+For example, today I wanted a simple way to get python's `os.listdir` to ignore directories. I knew that I could loop through all the returned elements and test if they were directories, but I thought perhaps there was a more elegant way to doing that (short answer, not really). The details of my problem aren't the point though, the point is that the question had barely formed in my mind and I noticed my fingers already headed for command tab, ready to jump the browser and cut and paste some solution from Stack Overflow.
+
+This time though I stopped myself before I pulled up my browser. I thought about my daughters in the next room. I knew that I would likely have the answer to my question in 10 seconds and also knew I would forget it and move on in 20. I was about to let easy answers step in and solve my problem for me. I was about to avoid learning something new. Sometimes that's fine, but do it too much and I'm worried I might be more of a successful cut-and-paster than struggling programmer.
+
+Sometimes it's good to take a few minutes to read the actual docs, pull up the man pages, type `:help` or whatever and learn. It's going to take a few extra minutes. You might even take an unexpected detour from the task at hand. That might mean you learn something you didn't expect to learn. Yes, it might mean you lose a few minutes of "work" to learn. It might even mean that you fail. Sometimes the docs don't help. The sure, Google. The important part of learning is to struggle, to apply your energy to the problem rather than finding to solution.
+
+Sometimes you need to struggle with your shoelaces for hours, otherwise you'll never figure out how to tie them.
+
+In my specific case I decided to permanently reduce my dependency on Stack Overflow and Google. Instead of flipping to the browser I fired up the Python interpreter and typed `help(os.listdir)`. Did you know the Python interpreter has a built-in help function called, appropriately enough, `help()`? The `help()` function takes either an object or a keyword (the latter needs to be in quotes like "keyword"). If you're having trouble I wrote a quick guide to [making Python's built-in `help()` function work][1].
+
+Now, I could have learned what I wanted to know in 2 seconds using Google. Instead it took me 20 minutes[^1] to figure out. But now I understand how to do what I wanted to do and, more importantly, I understand *why* it will work. I have a new piece of knowledge and next time I encounter the same situation I can draw on my knowledge rather than turning to Google again. It's not exactly wisdom or experience yet, but it's getting closer. And when you're done solving all the little problems of day-to-day coding that's really the point -- improving your skill, learning and getting better at what you do every day.
+
+[^1]: Most of that time was spent figuring out where OS X stores Python docs, which [I won't have to do again][1]. Note to self, I gotta switch back to Linux.
+
+[1]: /src/python-help
+
+# Get Smarter with Python's Built-In Help
+
+date:2014-08-01 20:56:57
+url:/src/python-help
+
+
+One of my favorite things about Python is the `help()` function. Fire up the standard Python interpreter, and import `help` from `pydoc` and you can search Python's official documentation from within the interpreter. Reading the f'ing manual from the interpreter. As it should be[^1].
+
+The `help()` function takes either an object or a keyword. The former must be imported first while the latter needs to be a string like "keyword". Whichever you use Python will pull up the standard Python docs for that object or keyword. Type `help()` without anything and you'll start an interactive help session.
+
+The `help()` function is awesome, but there's one little catch.
+
+In order for this to work properly you need to make sure you have the `PYTHONDOCS` environment variable set on your system. On a sane operating system this will likely be in '/usr/share/doc/pythonX.X/html'. In mostly sane OSes like Debian (and probably Ubuntu/Mint, et al) you might have to explicitly install the docs with `apt-get install python-doc`, which will put the docs in `/usr/share/doc/pythonX.X-doc/html/`.
+
+If you're using OS X's built-in Python, the path to Python's docs would be:
+
+~~~~console
+/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Resources/Python.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Documentation/
+~~~~
+
+Note the 2.6 in that path. As far as I can tell OS X Mavericks does not ship with docs for Python 2.7, which is weird and annoying (like most things in Mavericks). If it's there and you've found it, please enlighten me in the comments below.
+
+Once you've found the documentation you can add that variable to your bash/zshrc like so:
+
+~~~~console
+export PYTHONDOCS=/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Resources/Python.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Documentation/
+~~~~
+
+Now fire up iPython, type `help()` and start learning rather than always hobbling along with [Google, Stack Overflow and other crutches](/src/better).
+
+Also, PSA. If you do anything with Python, you really need to check out [iPython](http://ipython.org/). It will save you loads of time, has more awesome features than a Veg-O-Matic and [notebooks](http://ipython.org/notebook.html), don't even get me started on notebooks. And in iPython you don't even have to import help, it's already there, ready to go from the minute it starts.
+
+[^1]: The Python docs are pretty good too. Not Vim-level good, but close.
+
+
+# Protect Your Online Privacy with Ghostery
+
+date:2014-05-29 21:00:40
+url:/src/protect-your-online-privacy-ghostery
+
+[**Update 12-11-2015** While everything in this tutorial still works, I should note that I don't actually use Ghostery anymore. Instead I've found [uBlock Origin](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/) for Chromium and Firefox to be far more robust, customizable and powerful. It's also [open source](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock). For most people I would continue to suggest Ghostery, but for the particularly tech savvy, check out uBlock.]
+
+There's an invisible web that lies just below the web you see everyday. That invisible web is tracking the sites you visit, the pages you read, the things you like, the things you favorite and collating all that data into a portrait of things you are likely to purchase. And all this happens without anyone asking your consent.
+
+Not much has changed since [I wrote about online tracking years ago on Webmonkey][1]. Back then visiting five websites meant "somewhere between 21 and 47 other websites learn about your visit to those five". That number just continues to grow.
+
+If that doesn't bother you, and you could not care less who is tracking you, then this is not the tutorial for you.
+
+However, if the extent of online tracking bothers you and you want to do something about it, there is some good news. In fact it's not that hard to stop all that tracking.
+
+To protect your privacy online you'll just need to add a tool like [Ghostery][2] or [Do Not Track Plus][3] to your web browser. Both will work, but I happen to use Ghostery so that's what I'm going to show you how to set up. 
+
+## Install and Setup Ghostery in Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, Opera and Safari.
+
+The first step is to install the Ghostery extension for your web browser. To do that, just head over to the [Ghostery downloads page][4] and click the install button that's highlighted for your browser.
+
+Some browsers will ask you if you want to allow the add-on to be installed. In Firefox just click "Allow" and then click "Install Now" when the installation window opens up.
+
+[![Installing add-ons in Firefox][5]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-firefox-install01.png "View Image 1")
+: In Firefox click Allow...
+
+[![Installing add-ons in Firefox 2][6]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-firefox-install02.png "View Image 2")
+: ...and then Install Now
+
+If you're using Chrome just click the Add button. 
+
+[![Installing extensions in Chrome/Chromium][7]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-chrome-install01.jpg "View Image 3")
+: Installing extensions in Chrome/Chromium
+
+Ghostery is now installed, but out of the box Ghostery doesn't actually block anything. That's why, once you have it installed, Ghostery should have opened a new window or tab that looks like this:
+
+[![The Ghostery install wizard][8]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-first-screen.jpg "View Image 4")
+: The Ghostery install wizard
+
+This is the series of screens that walk you through the process of setting up Ghostery to block sites that would like to track you. 
+
+Before I dive into setting up Ghostery, it's important to understand that some of what Ghostery can block will limit what you see on the web. For example, Disqus is a very popular third-party comment system. It happens to track you as well. If you block that tracking though you won't see comments on a lot of sites. 
+
+There are two ways around this. One is to decide that you trust Disqus and allow it to run on any site. The second is to only allow Disqus on sites where you want to read the comments. I'll show you how to set up both options.
+
+## Configuring Ghostery
+
+First we have to configure Ghostery. Click the right arrow on that first screen to get started. That will lead you to this screen:
+
+[![The Ghostery install wizard, page 2][9]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-second-screen.jpg "View Image 5")
+: The Ghostery install wizard, page 2
+
+If you want to help Ghostery get better you can check this box. Then click the right arrow again and you'll see a page asking if you want to enable the Alert Bubble.
+
+[![The Ghostery install wizard, page 3][10]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-third-screen.jpg "View Image 6")
+: The Ghostery install wizard, page 3
+
+This is Ghostery's little alert box that comes up when you visit a new page. It will show you all the trackers that are blocked. Think of this as a little window into the invisible web. I enable this, though I change the default settings a little bit. We'll get to that in just a second.
+
+The next screen is the core of Ghostery. This is where we decide which trackers to block and which to allow. 
+
+[![The Ghostery install wizard -- blocking trackers][11]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-main-01.jpg "View Image 7")
+: The Ghostery install wizard -- blocking trackers
+
+Out of the box Ghostery blocks nothing. Let's change that. I start by blocking everything:
+
+[![Ghostery set to block all known trackers][12]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-main-02.jpg "View Image 8")
+: Ghostery set to block all known trackers
+
+Ghostery will also ask if you want to block new trackers as it learns about them. I go with yes.
+
+Now chances are the setup we currently have is going to limit your ability to use some websites. To stick with the earlier example, this will mean Disqus comments are never loaded. The easiest way to fix this is to search for Disqus and enable it:
+
+[![Ghostery set to block everything but Disqus][13]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-main-03.jpg "View Image 9")
+: Ghostery set to block everything but Disqus
+
+Note that, along the top of the tracker list there are some buttons. This makes it easy to enable, for example, not just Disqus but every commenting system. If you'd like to do that click the "Commenting System" button and uncheck all the options:
+
+[![Filtering Ghostery by type of tracker][14]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-main-04.jpg "View Image 10")
+: Filtering Ghostery by type of tracker
+
+Another category of things you might want to allow are music players like those from SoundCloud. To learn more about a particular service, just click the link next to the item and Ghostery will show you what it knows, including any industry affiliations.
+
+[![Ghostery showing details on Disqus][15]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-main-05.jpg "View Image 11")
+: Ghostery showing details on Disqus
+
+Now you may be thinking, wait, how do I know which companies I want to allow and which I don't? Well, you don't really need to know all of them because you can enable them as you go too. 
+
+Let's save what we have and test Ghostery out on a site. Click the right arrow one last time and check to make sure that the Ghostery icon is in your toolbar. If it isn't you can click the button "Add Button".
+
+## Ghostery in Action
+
+Okay, Ghostery is installed and blocking almost everything it knows about. But that might limit what we can do. For example, let's go visit arstechnica.com. You can see down here at the bottom of the screen there's a list of everything that's blocked. 
+
+[![Ghostery showing all the trackers no longer tracking you][16]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-example-01.jpg "View Image 12")
+: Ghostery showing all the trackers no longer tracking you
+
+You can see in that list that right now the Twitter button is blocked. So if you scroll down the bottom of the article and look at the author bio (which should have a twitter button) you'll see this little Ghostery icon:
+
+[![Ghostery replaces elements it has blocked with the Ghostery icon.][17]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-example-02.jpg "View Image 13")
+: Ghostery replaces elements it has blocked with the Ghostery icon.
+
+That's how you will know that Ghostery has blocked something. If you were to click on that element Ghostery would load the blocked script and you'd see a Twitter button. But what if you always want to see the Twitter button? To do that we'll come up to the toolbar and click on the Ghostery icon which will reveal the blocking menu:
+
+[![The Ghostery panel.][18]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-example-03.jpg "View Image 14")
+: The Ghostery panel.
+
+Just slide the Twitter button to the left and Twitter's button (and accompanying tracking beacons) will be allowed after you reload the page. Whenever you return to Ars, the Twitter button will load. As I mentioned before, you can do this on a per-site basis if there are just a few sites you want to allow. To enable the Twitter button on every site, click the little check box button the right of the slider. Realize though, that enabling it globally will mean Twitter can track you everywhere you go.
+
+[![Enabling trackers from the Ghostery panel.][19]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-example-04.jpg "view image 15")
+: Enabling trackers from the Ghostery panel.
+
+This panel is essentially doing the same thing as the setup page we used earlier. In fact, we can get back the setting page by click the gear icon and then the "Options" button:
+
+[![Getting back to the Ghostery setting page.][20]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-example-05.jpg "view image 16")
+: Getting back to the Ghostery setting page.
+
+Now, you may have noticed that the little purple panel showing you what was blocked hung around for quite a while, fifteen seconds to be exact, which is a bit long in my opinion. We can change that by clicking the Advanced tab on the Ghostery options page:
+
+
+[![Getting back to the Ghostery setting page.][21]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-example-06.jpg "view image 17")
+: Getting back to the Ghostery setting page.
+
+The first option in the list is whether or not to show the alert bubble at all, followed by the length of time it's shown. I like to set this to the minimum, 3 seconds. Other than this I leave the advanced settings at their defaults. 
+
+Scroll to the bottom of the settings page, click save, and you're done setting up Ghostery.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Now you can browse the web with a much greater degree of privacy, only allowing those companies *you* approve of to know what you're up to. And remember, any time a site isn't working the way you think you should, you can temporarily disable Ghostery by clicking the icon in the toolbar and hitting the pause blocking button down at the bottom of the Ghostery panel:
+
+[![Temporarily disable Ghostery.][22]](/media/src/images/2014/gh-example-07.jpg "view image 18")
+: Temporarily disable Ghostery.
+
+Also note that there is an iOS version of Ghostery, though, due to Apple's restrictions on iOS, it's an entirely separate web browser, not a plugin for Mobile Safari. If you use Firefox for Android there is a plugin available. 
+
+##Further reading:
+
+
+* [How To Install Ghostery (Internet Explorer)][23] -- Ghostery's guide to installing it in Internet Explorer.
+* [Secure Your Browser: Add-Ons to Stop Web Tracking][24] -- A piece I wrote for Webmonkey a few years ago that gives some more background on tracking and some other options you can use besides Ghostery. 
+* [Tracking our online trackers][25] -- TED talk by Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla Corp, covering online behavior tracking more generally. 
+* This sort of tracking is [coming to the real world too][26], so there's that to look forward to. 
+
+
+
+
+[1]: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/02/secure-your-browser-add-ons-to-stop-web-tracking/
+[2]: https://www.ghostery.com/
+[3]: https://www.abine.com/index.html
+[4]: https://www.ghostery.com/en/download
+[5]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-firefox-install01-tn.jpg
+[6]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-firefox-install02-tn.jpg
+[7]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-chrome-install01-tn.jpg
+[8]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-first-screen-tn.jpg
+[9]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-second-screen-tn.jpg
+[10]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-third-screen-tn.jpg
+[11]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-main-01-tn.jpg
+[12]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-main-02-tn.jpg
+[13]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-main-03-tn.jpg
+[14]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-main-04-tn.jpg
+[15]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-main-05-tn.jpg
+[16]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-example-01-tn.jpg
+[17]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-example-02-tn.jpg
+[18]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-example-03-tn.jpg
+[19]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-example-04-tn.jpg
+[20]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-example-05-tn.jpg
+[21]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-example-06-tn.jpg
+[22]: /media/src/images/2014/gh-example-07-tn.jpg
+[23]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaI17dSfPRg
+[24]: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/02/secure-your-browser-add-ons-to-stop-web-tracking/
+[25]: http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_kovacs_tracking_the_trackers
+[26]: http://business.financialpost.com/2014/02/01/its-creepy-location-based-marketing-is-following-you-whether-you-like-it-or-not/?__lsa=e48c-7542
+
+# Scaling Responsive Images in CSS
+
+date:2014-02-27 20:43:23
+url:/src/scaling-responsive-images-css
+
+It's pretty easy to handle images responsively with CSS. Just use `@media` queries to swap images at various breakpoints in your design.
+
+It's slightly trickier to get those images to be fluid and scale in between breakpoints. Or rather, it's not hard to get them to scale horizontally, but what about vertical scaling?
+
+Imagine this scenario. You have a div with a paragraph inside it and you want to add a background using the `:before` pseudo element -- just a decorative image behind some text. You can set the max-width to 100% to get the image to fluidly scale in width, but what about scaling the height?
+
+That's a bit trickier, or at least it tripped me up for a minute the other day. I started with this:
+
+~~~~css
+.wrapper--image:before {
+    content: "";
+    display: block;
+    max-width: 100%;
+    height: 443px;
+    background-color: #f3f;
+    background-image: url('bg.jpg');
+    background-repeat: no-repeat;
+    background-size: 100%;
+ }
+~~~~
+
+Do that and you'll see... nothing. Okay, I expected that. Setting height to auto doesn't work because the pseudo element has no real content, which means its default height is zero. Okay, how do I fix that?
+
+You might try setting the height to the height of your background image. That works whenever the div is the size of, or larger than, the image. But the minute your image scales down at all you'll have blank space at the bottom of your div, because the div has a fixed height with an image inside that's shorter than that fixed height. Try re-sizing [this demo](/demos/css-bg-image-scaling/no-vertical-scaling.html) to see what I'm talking about, make the window less than 800px and you'll see the box no longer scales with the image.
+
+To get around this we can borrow a trick from Thierry Koblentz's technique for [creating intrinsic ratios for video](http://alistapart.com/article/creating-intrinsic-ratios-for-video/) to create a box that maintains the ratio of our background image. 
+
+We'll leave everything the way it is, but add one line:
+
+~~~~css
+.wrapper--image:before {
+    content: "";
+    display: block;
+    max-width: 100%;
+    background-color: #f3f;
+    background-image: url('bg.jpg');
+    background-repeat: no-repeat;
+    background-size: 100%;
+    padding-top: 55.375%;
+}
+
+~~~~
+
+We've added padding to the top of the element, which forces the element to have a height (at least visually). But where did I get that number? That's the ratio of the dimensions of the background image. I simply divided the height of the image by the width of the image. In this case my image was 443px tall and 800px wide, which gives us 53.375%.
+
+Here's a [working demo](/demos/css-bg-image-scaling/vertical-scaling.html).
+
+And there you have it, properly scaling CSS background images on `:before` or other "empty" elements, pseudo or otherwise.
+
+The only real problem with this technique is that requires you to know the dimensions of your image ahead of time. That won't be possible in every scenario, but if it is, this will work.
+
+
+# Install Nginx on Debian/Ubuntu
+
+date:2014-02-10 21:03:23
+url:/src/install-nginx-debian
+
+
+I recently helped a friend set up his first Nginx server and in the process realized I didn't have a good working reference for how I set up Nginx.
+
+So, for myself, my friend and anyone else looking to get started with Nginx, here's my somewhat opinionated guide to installing and configuring Nginx to serve static files. Which is to say, this is how I install and set up Nginx to serve my own and my clients' static files whether those files are simply stylesheets, images and JavaScript or full static sites like this one. What follows is what I believe are the best practices of Nginx[^1]; if you know better, please correct me in the comments.
+
+[This post was last updated <span class="dt-updated updated" datetime="2015-10-30T12:04:25" itemprop="datePublished"><span>30 October 2015</span></span>]
+
+## Nginx Beats Apache for Static Content[^2]
+
+Apache is overkill. Unlike Apache, which is a jack-of-all-trades server, Nginx was really designed to do just a few things well, one of which is to offer a simple, fast, lightweight server for static files. And Nginx is really, really good at serving static files. In fact, in my experience Nginx with PageSpeed, gzip, far future expires headers and a couple other extras I'll mention is faster than serving static files from Amazon S3[^3] (potentially even faster in the future if Verizon and its ilk [really do](http://netneutralitytest.com/) start [throttling cloud-based services](http://davesblog.com/blog/2014/02/05/verizon-using-recent-net-neutrality-victory-to-wage-war-against-netflix/)).
+
+## Nginx is Different from Apache
+
+In its quest to be lightweight and fast, Nginx takes a different approach to modules than you're probably familiar with in Apache. In Apache you can dynamically load various features using modules. You just add something like `LoadModule alias_module modules/mod_alias.so` to your Apache config files and just like that Apache loads the alias module.
+
+Unlike Apache, Nginx can not dynamically load modules. Nginx has available what it has available when you install it.
+
+That means if you really want to customize and tweak it, it's best to install Nginx from source. You don't *have* to install it from source. But if you really want a screaming fast server, I suggest compiling Nginx yourself, enabling and disabling exactly the modules you need. Installing Nginx from source allows you to add some third-party tools, most notably Google's PageSpeed module, which has some fantastic tools for speeding up your site.
+
+Luckily, installing Nginx from source isn't too difficult. Even if you've never compiled any software from source, you can install Nginx. The remainder of this post will show you exactly how.
+
+## My Ideal Nginx Setup for Static Sites
+
+Before we start installing, let's go over the things we'll be using to build a fast, lightweight server with Nginx.
+
+* [Nginx](http://nginx.org).
+* [SPDY](http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol) -- Nginx offers "experimental support for SPDY", but it's not enabled by default. We're going to enable it when we install Nginx. In my testing SPDY support has worked without a hitch, experimental or otherwise.
+* [Google Page Speed](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module) -- Part of Google's effort to make the web faster, the Page Speed Nginx module "automatically applies web performance best practices to pages and associated assets".
+* [Headers More](https://github.com/agentzh/headers-more-nginx-module/) -- This isn't really necessary from a speed standpoint, but I often like to set custom headers and hide some headers (like which version of Nginx your server is running). Headers More makes that very easy.
+* [Naxsi](https://github.com/nbs-system/naxsi) -- Naxsi is a "Web Application Firewall module for Nginx". It's not really all that important for a server limited to static files, but it adds an extra layer of security should you decided to use Nginx as a proxy server down the road.
+
+So we're going to install Nginx with SPDY support and three third-party modules.
+
+Okay, here's the step-by-step process to installing Nginx on a Debian 8 (or Ubuntu) server. If you're looking for a good, cheap VPS host I've been happy with [Vultr.com](http://www.vultr.com/?ref=6825229) (that's an affiliate link that will help support luxagraf; if you prefer, here's a non-affiliate link: [link](http://www.vultr.com/))
+
+The first step is to make sure you're installing the latest release of Nginx. To do that check the [Nginx download page](http://nginx.org/en/download.html) for the latest version of Nginx (at the time of writing that's 1.5.10).
+
+Okay, SSH into your server and let's get started.
+
+While these instructions will work on just about any server, the one thing that will be different is how you install the various prerequisites needed to compile Nginx.
+
+On a Debian/Ubuntu server you'd do this:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo apt-get -y install build-essential zlib1g-dev libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libbz2-dev libssl-dev tar unzip
+~~~~
+
+
+
+If you're using RHEL/Cent/Fedora you'll want these packages:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo yum install gcc-c++ pcre-dev pcre-devel zlib-devel make
+~~~~
+
+After you have the prerequisites installed it's time to grab the latest version of Google's Pagespeed module. Google's [Nginx PageSpeed installation instructions](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/build_ngx_pagespeed_from_source) are pretty good, so I'll reproduce them here.
+
+First grab the latest version of PageSpeed, which is currently 1.9.32.2, but check the sources since it updates frequently and change this first variable to match the latest version.
+
+~~~~console
+NPS_VERSION=1.9.32.2
+wget https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed/archive/release-${NPS_VERSION}-beta.zip
+unzip release-${NPS_VERSION}-beta.zip
+~~~~
+
+Now, before we compile pagespeed we need to grab `psol`, which PageSpeed needs to function properly. So, let's `cd` into the `ngx_pagespeed-release-1.8.31.4-beta` folder and grab `psol`:
+
+~~~~console
+cd ngx_pagespeed-release-${NPS_VERSION}-beta/
+wget https://dl.google.com/dl/page-speed/psol/${NPS_VERSION}.tar.gz
+tar -xzvf ${NPS_VERSION}.tar.gz
+cd ../
+~~~~
+
+Alright, so the `ngx_pagespeed` module is all setup and ready to install. All we have to do at this point is tell Nginx where to find it.
+
+Now let's grab the Headers More and Naxsi modules as well. Again, check the [Headers More](https://github.com/agentzh/headers-more-nginx-module/) and [Naxsi](https://github.com/nbs-system/naxsi) pages to see what the latest stable version is and adjust the version numbers in the following accordingly.
+
+~~~~console
+HM_VERSION =v0.25
+wget https://github.com/agentzh/headers-more-nginx-module/archive/${HM_VERSION}.tar.gz
+tar -xvzf ${HM_VERSION}.tar.gz
+NAX_VERSION=0.53-2
+wget https://github.com/nbs-system/naxsi/archive/${NAX_VERSION}.tar.gz
+tar -xvzf ${NAX_VERSION}.tar.gz
+~~~~
+
+Now we have all three third-party modules ready to go, the last thing we'll grab is a copy of Nginx itself:
+
+~~~~console
+NGINX_VERSION=1.7.7
+wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-${NGINX_VERSION}.tar.gz
+tar -xvzf nginx-${NGINX_VERSION}.tar.gz
+~~~~
+
+Then we `cd` into the Nginx folder and compile. So, first:
+
+~~~~console
+cd nginx-${NGINX_VERSION}/
+~~~~
+
+So now we're inside the Nginx folder, let's configure our installation. We'll add in all our extras and turn off a few things we don't need. Or at least they're things I don't need, if you need the mail modules, then delete those lines. If you don't need SSL, you might want to skip that as well. Here's the config setting I use (Note: all paths are for Debian servers, you'll have to adjust the various paths accordingly for RHEL/Cent/Fedora/ servers):
+
+
+~~~~console
+./configure 
+        --add-module=$HOME/naxsi-${NAX_VERSION}/naxsi_src 
+        --prefix=/usr/share/nginx 
+        --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx 
+        --conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf 
+        --pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid 
+        --lock-path=/var/lock/nginx.lock 
+        --error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log 
+        --http-log-path=/var/log/access.log 
+        --user=www-data 
+        --group=www-data 
+        --without-mail_pop3_module 
+        --without-mail_imap_module 
+        --without-mail_smtp_module 
+        --with-http_stub_status_module 
+        --with-http_ssl_module 
+        --with-http_spdy_module 
+        --with-http_gzip_static_module 
+        --add-module=$HOME/ngx_pagespeed-release-${NPS_VERSION}-beta 
+        --add-module=$HOME/headers-more-nginx-module-${HM_VERSION}
+~~~~
+
+There are a few things worth noting here. First off make sure that Naxsi is first. Here's what the [Naxsi wiki page](https://github.com/nbs-system/naxsi/wiki/installation) has to say on that score: "Nginx will decide the order of modules according the order of the module's directive in Nginx's ./configure. So, no matter what (except if you really know what you are doing) put Naxsi first in your ./configure. If you don't do so, you might run into various problems, from random/unpredictable behaviors to non-effective WAF." The last thing you want is to think you have a web application firewall running when in fact you don't, so stick with Naxsi first.
+
+There are a couple other things you might want to add to this configuration. If you're going to be serving large files, larger than your average 1.5MB HTML page, consider adding the line: `--with-file-aio `, which is apparently faster than the stock `sendfile` option. See [here](https://calomel.org/nginx.html) for more details. There are quite a few other modules available. A [full list of the default modules](http://wiki.nginx.org/Modules) can be found on the Nginx site. Read through that and if there's another module you need, you can add it to that config list.
+
+Okay, we've told Nginx what to do, now let's actually install it:
+
+~~~~console
+make
+sudo make install
+~~~~
+
+Once `make install` finishes doing its thing you'll have Nginx all set up.
+
+Congrats! You made it.
+
+The next step is to add Nginx to the list of things your server starts up automatically whenever it reboots. Since we installed Nginx from scratch we need to tell the underlying system what we did.
+
+## Make it Autostart
+
+Since we compiled from source rather than using Debian/Ubuntu's package management tools, the underlying stystem isn't aware of Nginx's existence. That means it won't automatically start it up when the system boots. In order to ensure that Nginx does start on boot we'll have to manually add Nginx to our server's list of startup services. That way, should we need to reboot, Nginx will automatically restart when the server does.
+
+**Note: I have embraced systemd so this is out of date, see below for systemd version**
+
+To do that I use the [Debian init script](https://github.com/MovLib/www/blob/master/bin/init-nginx.sh) listed in the [Nginx InitScripts page](http://wiki.nginx.org/InitScripts):
+
+If that works for you, grab the raw version:
+
+~~~~console
+wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MovLib/www/develop/etc/init.d/nginx.sh
+# I had to edit the DAEMON var to point to nginx
+# change line 63 in the file to:
+DAEMON=/usr/sbin/nginx
+# then move it to /etc/init.d/nginx
+sudo mv nginx.sh /etc/init.d/nginx
+# make it executable:
+sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/nginx
+# then just:
+sudo service nginx start #also restart, reload, stop etc
+~~~~
+
+##Updated Systemd scripts
+
+Yeah I went and did it. I kind of like systemd actually. Anyway, here's what I use to stop and start my custom compiled nginx with systemd...
+
+First we need to create and edit an nginx.service file.
+
+~~~~console
+sudo vim /lib/systemd/system/nginx.service #this is for debian
+~~~~
+
+Then I use this script which I got from the nginx wiki I believe.
+
+~~~~ini
+# Stop dance for nginx
+# =======================
+#
+# ExecStop sends SIGSTOP (graceful stop) to the nginx process.
+# If, after 5s (--retry QUIT/5) nginx is still running, systemd takes control
+# and sends SIGTERM (fast shutdown) to the main process.
+# After another 5s (TimeoutStopSec=5), and if nginx is alive, systemd sends
+# SIGKILL to all the remaining processes in the process group (KillMode=mixed).
+#
+# nginx signals reference doc:
+# http://nginx.org/en/docs/control.html
+#
+[Unit]
+Description=A high performance web server and a reverse proxy server
+After=network.target
+
+[Service]
+Type=forking
+PIDFile=/run/nginx.pid
+ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/nginx -t -q -g 'daemon on; master_process on;'
+ExecStart=/usr/sbin/nginx -g 'daemon on; master_process on;'
+ExecReload=/usr/sbin/nginx -g 'daemon on; master_process on;' -s reload
+ExecStop=-/sbin/start-stop-daemon --quiet --stop --retry QUIT/5 --pidfile /run/nginx.pid
+TimeoutStopSec=5
+KillMode=mixed
+
+[Install]
+WantedBy=multi-user.target
+~~~~
+
+Save that file, exit your text editor. Now we just need to tell systemd about our script and then we can stop and start via our service file. To do that...
+
+~~~~console
+sudo systemctl enable nginx.service
+sudo systemctl start nginx.service
+sudo systemctl status nginx.service
+~~~~
+
+I suggest taking the last bit and turning it into an alias in your `bashrc` or `zshrc` file so that you can quickly restart/reload the server when you need it. Here's what I use:
+
+~~~~ini
+alias xrestart="sudo systemctl restart nginx.service"
+~~~~
+
+
+If you're using systemd, congrats, you're done. If you're looking for a way to get autostart to work on older or non-systemd servers, read on...
+
+**End systemd update**
+
+Okay so we now have the initialization script all set up, now let's make Nginx start up on reboot. In theory this should do it:
+
+~~~~console
+update-rc.d -f nginx defaults
+~~~~
+
+But that didn't work for me with my Digital Ocean Debian 7 x64 droplet (which complained that "`insserv rejected the script header`"). I didn't really feel like troubleshooting that at the time; I was feeling lazy so I decided to use chkconfig instead. To do that I just installed chkconfig and added Nginx:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo apt-get install chkconfig
+sudo chkconfig --add nginx
+sudo chkconfig nginx on
+~~~~
+
+So there we have it, everything you need to get Nginx installed with SPDY, PageSpeed, Headers More and Naxsi. A blazing fast server for static files.
+
+After that it's just a matter of configuring Nginx, which is entirely dependent on how you're using it. For static setups like this my configuration is pretty minimal.
+
+Before we get to that though, there's the first thing I do: edit `/etc/nginx/nginx.conf` down to something pretty simple. This is the root config so I keep it limited to a `http` block that turns on a few things I want globally and an include statement that loads site-specific config files. Something a bit like this:
+
+~~~~nginx
+user  www-data;
+events {
+    worker_connections  1024;
+}
+http {
+    include mime.types;
+    include /etc/nginx/naxsi_core.rules;
+    default_type  application/octet-stream;
+    types_hash_bucket_size 64;
+    server_names_hash_bucket_size 128;
+    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
+                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
+                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
+
+    access_log  logs/access.log  main;
+    more_set_headers "Server: My Custom Server";
+    keepalive_timeout  65;
+    gzip  on;
+    pagespeed on;
+    pagespeed FileCachePath /var/ngx_pagespeed_cache;
+    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*.conf;
+}
+~~~~
+
+A few things to note. I've include the core rules file from the Naxsi source. To make sure that file exists, we need to copy it over to `/etc/nginx/`.
+
+~~~~console
+sudo cp naxsi-0.53-2/naxci_config/naxsi_core.rule /etc/nginx
+~~~~
+
+Now let's restart the server so it picks up these changes:
+
+~~~~console
+sudo service nginx restart
+~~~~
+
+Or, if you took my suggestion of creating an alias, you can type: `xrestart` and Nginx will restart itself.
+
+With this configuration we have a good basic setup and any `.conf` files you add to the folder `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/` will be included automatically. So if you want to create a conf file for mydomain.com, you'd create the file `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mydomain.conf` and put the configuration for that domain in that file.
+
+I'm going to post a follow up on how I configure Nginx very soon. In the mean time here's a pretty comprehensive [guide to configuring Nginx](https://calomel.org/nginx.html) in a variety of scenarios. And remember, if you want to some more helpful tips and tricks for web developers, sign up for the mailing list below.
+
+[^1]: If you're more experienced with Nginx and I'm totally bass-akward about something in this guide, please let me know.
+[^2]: In my experience anyway. Probably Apache can be tuned to get pretty close to Nginx's performance with static files, but it's going to take quite a bit of work. One is not necessarily better, but there are better tools for different jobs.
+[^3]: That said, obviously a CDN service like Cloudfront will, in most cases, be much faster than Nginx or any other server.
+
+
+# Tools for Writing an Ebook
+
+date:2014-01-24 20:05:17
+url:/src/ebook-writing-tools
+
+It never really occurred to me to research which tools I would need to create an ebook because I knew I was going to use Markdown, which could then be translated into pretty much any format using [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/). Bu since a few people have [asked](https://twitter.com/situjapan/status/549935669129142272) for more details on *exactly* which tools I used, here's a quick rundown:
+
+1. I write books as single text files lightly marked up with Pandoc-flavored Markdown.
+2. Then I run Pandoc, passing in custom templates, CSS files, fonts I bought and so on. Pretty much as [detailed here in the Pandoc documentation](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/epub.html). I run these commands often enough that I write a shell script for each project so I don't have to type in all the flags and file paths each time.
+3. Pandoc outputs an ePub file and an HTML file. The latter is then used with [Weasyprint](http://weasyprint.org/) to generate the PDF version of the ebook. Then I used the ePub file and the [Kindle command line tool](http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765211) to create a .mobi file.
+4. All of the formatting and design is just CSS, which I am already comfortable working with (though ePub is only a subset of CSS and reader support is somewhat akin to building website in 1998 -- who knows if it's gonna work? The PDF is what I consider the reference copy.)
+
+In the end I get the book in TXT, HTML, PDF, ePub and .mobi formats, which covers pretty much every digital reader I'm aware of. Out of those I actually include the PDF, ePub and Mobi files when you [buy the book](/src/books/).
+
+## FAQs and Notes.
+
+**Why not use InDesign or iBook Author or \_\_\_\_\_\_\_?**
+
+I wanted to use open source software, which offers me more control over the process than I could get with monolithic tools like visual layout editors. 
+
+The above tools are, for me anyway, the simplest possible workflow which outputs the highest quality product. 
+
+**What about Prince?**
+
+What does The Purple One have to do with writing books? Oh, that [Prince](http://www.princexml.com/). Actually I really like Prince and it can do a few things that WeasyPrint cannot (like execute JavaScript which is handy for code highlighting or allow for `@font-face` font embedding), but it's not free and in the end, I decided, not worth the money.
+
+**Can you share your shell script?**
+
+Here's the basic idea, adjust file paths to suit your working habits.
+
+~~~~bash
+#!/bin/sh
+#Update PDF:
+pandoc --toc --toc-depth=2 --smart --template=lib/template.html5 --include-before-body=lib/header.html -t html5 -o rwd.html draft.txt && weasyprint rwd.html rwd.pdf
+
+
+#Update epub:
+pandoc -S -s --smart -t epub3 --include-before-body=lib/header.html --template=lib/template_epub.html --epub-metadata=lib/epub-metadata.xml --epub-stylesheet=lib/print-epub.css --epub-cover-image=lib/covers/cover-portrait.png --toc --toc-depth=2 -o rwd.epub draft.txt
+
+#update Mobi:
+pandoc -S -s --smart -t epub3 --include-before-body=lib/header.html --template=lib/template_epub.html --epub-metadata=lib/epub-metadata.xml --epub-stylesheet=lib/print-kindle.css --epub-cover-image=lib/covers/cover-portrait.png --toc --toc-depth=2 -o kindle.epub Draft.txt && kindlegen kindle.epub -o rwd.mobi
+~~~~
+
+I just run this script and bang, all my files are updated. 
+
+<strong>What advice do you have for people trying to write an ebook?</strong>
+
+At the risk of sounding trite, just do it. 
+
+Writing a book is not easy, or rather the writing is never easy, but I don't think it's ever been this easy to *produce* a book. It took me two afternoons to come up with a workflow that involves all free, open source software and allows me to publish literally any text file on my hard drive as a book that can then be read by millions. I type two key strokes and I have a book. Even if millions don't ever read your book (and, for the record, millions have most definitely not read my books), that is still f'ing amazing. 
+
+Now go make something cool (and be sure to tell me about it).
+
+
+# Whatever Happened to Webmonkey.com?
+
+date:2013-09-20 21:04:57
+url:/src/whatever-happened-webmonkey
+
+[Update 02/2019: If you're looking for a good resource, similar to Webmonkey, I suggest Mozilla's [Developer Docs site](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/). It lacks Webmonkey's sense of humor and fun, and it doesn't cover everything Webmonkey covered, but it does have some good tutorials and documentation on HTML, CSS and JavaScript]
+
+People on Twitter have been asking what's up with [Webmonkey.com][1]. Originally I wanted to get this up on Webmonkey, but I got locked out of the CMS before I managed to do that, so I'm putting it here.
+
+Earlier this year Wired decided to stop producing new content for Webmonkey. [**Update 07/2016**: The domain has been shut down and now redirects to wired.com. I told you they were serious this time.]
+For those keeping track at home, this is the fourth, and I suspect final, time Webmonkey has been shut down (previously it was shut down in 1999, 2004 and 2006).
+
+I've been writing for Webmonkey.com since 2000, full time since 2006 (when it came back from the dead for a third run). And for the last two years I have been the sole writer, editor and producer of the site.
+
+Like so many of you, I learned how to build websites from Webmonkey. But it was more than just great tutorials and how tos. Part of what made Webmonkey great was that it was opinionated and rough around the edges. Webmonkey was not the product of professional writers, it was written and created by the web nerds building Wired's websites. It was written by people like us, for people like us.
+
+I'll miss Webmonkey not just because it was my job for many years, but because at this point it feels like a family dog to me, it's always been there and suddenly it's not. Sniff. I'll miss you Webmonkey.
+
+Quite a few people have asked me why it was shut down, but unfortunately I don't have many details to share. I've always been a remote employee, not in San Francisco at all in fact, and consequently somewhat out of the loop. What I can say is that Webmonkey's return to Wired in 2006 was the doing of long-time Wired editor Evan Hansen ([now at Medium][2]). Evan was a tireless champion of Webmonkey and saved it from the Conde Nast ax several times. He was also one of the few at Wired who "got" Webmonkey. When Evan left Wired earlier this year I knew Webmonkey's days were numbered.
+
+I don't begrudge Wired for shutting Webmonkey down. While I have certain nostalgia for its heyday, even I know it's been a long time since Webmonkey was leading the way in web design. I had neither the staff nor the funding to make Webmonkey anything like its early 2000s self. In that sense I'm glad it was shut down rather than simply fading further into obscurity.
+
+<span class="strike">I am very happy that Wired has left the site in place. As far as I know Webmonkey (and its ever-popular cheat sheets, which still get a truly astounding amount of traffic) will remain available on the web</span>. [**Update 07/2016**: so much for that, domain and all content are gone now.] That said, note to the [Archive Team][3], it wouldn't hurt to create a backup. Sadly, many of the very earliest writings have already been lost in the various CMS transitions over the years and even much of what's there now has incorrect bylines. Still, at least most of it's there. For now.
+
+If you have any questions or want more details use the comments box below.
+
+In closing, I'd like to thank some people at Wired -- thank you to my editors over the years, especially [Michael Calore][5], [Evan Hansen][6] and [Leander Kahney][7] who all made me a much better writer. Also thanks to Louise for always making sure I got paid. And finally, to everyone who read Webmonkey and contributed over the years, whether with articles or even just a comment, thank you.
+
+Cheers and, yes, thanks for all the bananas.
+
+[1]: http://www.webmonkey.com/
+[2]: https://medium.com/@evanatmedium
+[3]: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
+[4]: https://twitter.com/LongHandPixels
+[5]: http://snackfight.com/
+[6]: https://twitter.com/evanatmedium
+[7]: http://www.cultofmac.com/about/
+
+# New Adventures in HiFi Text
+
+date:2005-02-12 11:01:49
+url:/src/new-adventures-in-hifi-text
+
+I sometimes bitch about Microsoft Word in this piece, but let me be clear that I do not hate Windows or Microsoft, nor am I a rabid fan of Apple. In fact prior to the advent of OS X, I was ready to ditch the platform altogether. I could list as many crappy things about Mac OS 7.x-9.x as I can about Windows. Maybe even more. But OS X changed that for me, it's everything I was looking for in an OS and very little I wasn't. But I also don't think Microsoft is inherently evil and Windows is their plan to exploit the vulnerable masses. I mean really, do you think [this guy][2] or anything he might do could be *evil*? Of course not. I happen to much prefer OS X, but that's just personal preference and computing needs. I use Windows all the time at work and I don't hate it, it just lacks a certain *je ne sais quoi*. [2014 update: These days I use Arch Linux because it just works better than any other OS I have use.]
+
+###In Praise of Plain Text
+
+That said, I have never really liked Microsoft Word on any platform. It does all sorts of things I would prefer that it didn't, such as capitalize URLs while I'm typing or automatically convert email addresses to live links. Probably you can turn these sorts of things on and off in the preferences, but that's not the point. I dislike the way Word approaches me, [assuming that I want every bell and whistle possible][10], including a shifty looking paperclip with Great Gatsbyesque eyes watching my every move. 
+
+Word has too many features and yet fails to implement any of them with much success. Since I don't work in an office environment, I really don't have any need for Word (did I mention it's expensive and crashes with alarming frequency?). I write for a couple of magazines here and there, post things on this site, and slave away at the mediocre American novel, none of which requires me to use MS Word or the .doc format. In short, I don't *need* Word.
+
+Yet for years I used it anyway. I still have the copy I purchased in college and even upgraded when it became available for OS X. But I used it mainly out of ignorance to the alternatives, rather than usefulness of the software. I can now say I have tried pretty much every office/word processing program that's available for OS X and I only like one of them -- [Mellel][11]. But aside from that one, I've concluded I just don't like word processors (including [Apple's new Pages program][12]). 
+
+These days I do my writing in a text editor, usually BBEdit. Since I've always used BBEdit to write code, it was open and ready to go. Over time I noticed that when I wanted to jot down some random idea I turned to BBEdit rather than opening up Word. It started as a convenience thing and just sort of snowballed from there. Now I'm really attached to writing in plain text.
+
+In terms of archival storage, plain text is an excellent way to write. If BareBones, the makers of BBEdit, went bankrupt tomorrow I wouldn't miss a beat because just about any program out there can read my files. As a file storage format, plain text is almost totally platform independent (I'm sure someone has got a text editor running on their PS2 by now.), which makes plain text fairly future proof (and if it's not then we have bigger issues to deal with). Plain text is also easy to marked up for web display, a couple of `<p>` tags, maybe a link here and there and we're on our way.
+
+###In Praise of Formatted Text
+
+But there are some drawbacks to writing in plain text -- it sucks for physical documents. No one wants to read printed plain text. Because plain text must be single spaced printing renders some pretty small text with no room to make corrections -- less than ideal for editing purposes. Sure, I could adjust the font size and whatnot from within BBEdit's preferences, but I can't get the double spacing, which is indispensable for editing, but a waste of space when I'm actually writing. 
+
+Of course this may  be peculiar to me. It may be hard for some people to write without having the double-spaced screen display. Most people probably look at what they're writing while they write it. I do not. I look at my hands. Not to find the keys, but rather with a sort of abstract fascination. My hands seem to know where to go without me having to think about it, it's kind of amazing and I like to watch it happen. I could well be thinking about something entirely different from what I'm typing and staring down at my hands produces a strange realization -- wow look at those fingers go, I wonder how they know what their doing? I'm thinking about the miraculous way they seem to know what their doing, rather than what they're actually doing. It's highly likely that this is my own freakishness, but it eliminates the need for nicely spaced screen output (and introduces the need for intense editing).
+
+But wait, let's go back to that earlier part where I said its easy to mark up plain text for the web -- what if it were possible to mark up plain text for print? Now that would be something.
+
+###The Best of Both Worlds (Maybe)
+
+In fact there is a markup language for print documents. Unfortunately its pretty clunky. It goes by the name TeX, the terseness of which should make you think -- ah, Unix. But TeX is actually really wonderful. It gives you the ability to write in plain text and use an, albeit esoteric and awkward, syntax to mark it up. TeX can then convert your document into something very classy and beautiful.
+
+Now prior to the advent of Adobe's ubiquitous PDF format I have no idea what sort of things TeX produced, nor do I care, because PDF exists and TeX can leverage it to render printable, distributable, cross-platform, open standard and, most importantly, really good looking documents.
+
+But first let's deal with the basics. TeX is convoluted, ugly, impossibly verbose and generally useless to anyone without a computer science degree. Recognizing this, some reasonable folks can along and said, hey, what if we wrote some simple macros to access this impossibly verbose difficult to comprehend language? That would be marvelous. And so some people did and called the result LaTeX because they were nerd/geeks and loved puns and the shift key. Actually I am told that LaTeX is pronounced Lah Tech, and that TeX should not be thought of as tex, but rather the greek letters tau, epsilon and chi. This is all good and well if you want to convince people you're using a markup language rather than checking out fetish websites, but the word is spelled latex and will be pronounced laytex as long as I'm the one saying it. (Note to Bono: Your name is actually pronounced bo know. Sorry, that's just how it is in my world.)
+
+So, while TeX may do the actual work of formating your plain text document, what you actually use to mark up your documents is called LaTeX. I'm not entirely certain, but I assume that the packages that comprise LaTeX are simple interfaces that take basic input shortcuts and then tell TeX what they mean. Sort of like what Markdown does in converting text to HTML. Hmmm. More on that later.
+
+###Installation and RTFM suggestions
+
+So I went through the whole unixy rigamarole of installing packages in usr/bin/ and other weird directories that I try to ignore and got a lovely little Mac OS X-native front end called [TeXShop][3]. Here is a link to the [Detailed instructions for the LaTeX/TeX set up I installed][4]. The process was awkward, but not painful. The instruction comprise only four steps, not as bad as say, um, well, okay, it's not drag-n-drop, but its pretty easy.
+
+I also went a step further because LaTeX in most of it's incarnations is pretty picky about what fonts it will work with. If this seems idiotic to you, you are not alone. I thought hey, I have all these great fonts, I should be able to use any of them in a LaTeX document, but no, it's not that easy. Without delving too deep into the mysterious world of fonts, it seems that, in order to render text as well as it does, TeX needs special fonts -- particularly fonts that have specific ligatures included in them. Luckily a very nice gentlemen by the name of Jonathan Kew has already solved this problem for those of us using Mac OS X. So I [downloaded and installed XeTeX][13], which is actually a totally different macro processor that runs semi-separately from a standard LaTeX installation (at least I think it is, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. This link offers [more information on XeTeX][5].
+
+So then [I read the fucking manual][6] and [the other fucking manual][7] (which should be on your list of best practices when dealing with new software or programming languages). After an hour or so of tinkering with pre-made templates developed by others, and consulting the aforementioned manuals, I was actually able to generate some decent looking documents.
+
+But the syntax for LaTeX is awkward and verbose (remember -- written to avoid having to know an awkward and verbose syntax known as TeX). Would you rather write this:
+
+~~~{.latex}
+
+\section{Heading}
+\font\a="Bell MT" at 12pt 	
+\a some text some text some text some text, for the love of god	I will not use latin sample text because damnit I am not roman and do not like fiddling. \href{some link text}{http://www.linkaddress.com} to demonstrate what a link looks like in XeTeX. \verb#here is a line of code# to show what inline code looks like in XeTeX some more text because I still won't stoop, yes I said stoop, to Latin.
+~~~
+
+Or this:
+
+~~~{.markdown}
+
+###Heading
+
+Some text some text some text some text, for the love of god I will not use latin sample text because damnit I am not roman and do not like fiddling. [some link text][99] to demonstrate what a link looks like in Markdown. `here is a line of code` to show what inline code looks like in Markdown. And some more text because I still won't stoop, yes I said stoop, to Latin.
+
+~~~
+    
+In simple terms of readability, [John Gruber's Markdown][8] (the second sample code) is a stroke of true brilliance. I can honestly say that nothing has changed my writing style as much since my parents bought one of these newfangled computer thingys back in the late 80's. So, with no more inane hyperbole, lets just say I like Markdown.
+
+LaTeX on the other hand shows it's age like the denture baring ladies of a burlesque revival show. It ain't sexy. And believe me, my sample is the tip of the iceberg in terms of mark up.
+
+###Using Perl and Applescript to Generate XeTeX
+
+Here's where I get vague, beg personal preferences, hint a vast undivulged knowledge of AppleScript (not true, I just use the "start recording" feature in BBEdit) and simply say that, with a limited knowledge of Perl, I was able to rewrite Markdown, combine that with some applescripts to call various Grep patterns (LaTeX must escape certain characters, most notably, `$` and `&`) and create a BBEdit Textfactory which combines the first two elements to generate LaTeX markup from a Markdown syntax plain text document. And no I haven't been reading Proust, I just like long, parenthetically-aside sentences.
+
+Yes all of the convolution of the preceding sentence allows me to, in one step, convert this document to a latex document and output it as a PDF file. Don't believe me? [Download this article as a PDF produced using LaTeX][9]. In fact it's so easy I'm going to batch process all my entries and make them into nice looking PDFs which will be available at the bottom of the page.
+
+###Technical Details
+
+I first proposed this idea of using Markdown to generate LaTeX on the BBEdit mailing list and was informed that it would be counter-productive to the whole purpose and philosophy of LaTeX. While I sort of understand this guidance, I disagree. 
+
+I already have a ton of documents written with Markdown syntax. Markdown is the most minimal syntax I've found for generating html. Why not adapt my existing workflow to generate some basic LaTeX? See I don't want to write LaTeX documents; I want to write text documents with Markdown syntax in them and generate html and PDF from the same initial document. Then I want to revert the initial document back to it's original form and stash it away on my hard drive.
+
+I simply wanted a one step method of processing a Markdown syntax text file into XeTeX to compliment the one step method I already have for turning the same document into HTML.
+
+Here's how I do it. I modified Markdown to generate what LaTeX markup I need, i.e. specific definitions for list elements, headings, quotes, code blocks etc. This was actually pretty easy, and keep in mind that I have never gotten beyond a "hello world" script in Perl. Kudos to John Gruber for copious comments and very logical, easy to read code.
+
+That's all good and well, but then there are some other things I needed to do to get a usable TeX version of my document. For instance certain characters need to be escaped, like the entities mentioned above. Now if I were more knowledgeable about Perl I would have just added these to the Markdown file, but rather than wrestle with Perl I elected to use grep via BBEdit. So I crafted an applescript that first parsed out things like `&mdash;` and replaced them with the unicode equivalent which is necessary to get an em-dash in XeTeX (in a normal LaTeX environment you would use `---` to generate an emdash). Other things like quote marks, curly brackets and ampersands are similarly replaced with their XeTeX equivalents (for some it's unicode, others like `{` or `}` must be escaped like so: `\{`). 
+
+Next I created a BBEdit Textfactory to call these scripts in the right order (for instance I need to replace quote marks after running my modified Markdown script since Markdown will use quotes to identify things like url title tags (which my version simply discards). Then I created an applescript that calls the textfactory and then applies a BBEdit glossary item to the resulting (selected) text, which adds all the preamble TeX definitions I use and then passes that whole code block off to XeTeX via TeXShop and outputs the result in Preview.
+
+Convoluted? Yes. But now that it's done and assigned a shortcut key it takes less than two seconds to generate a pdf of really good looking (double spaced) text. The best part is if I want to change things around, the only file I have to adjust is the BBEdit glossary item that creates the preamble.
+
+The only downside is that to undo the various manipulations wrought on the original text file I have to hit the undo command five times. At some point I'll sit down and figure out how to do everything using Perl and then it will be a one step undo just like regular Markdown. In the mean time I just wrote a quick applescript that calls undo five times :)
+
+###Am I insane?
+
+I don't know. I'm willing to admit to esoteric and when pressed will concede stupid, but damnit I like it. And from initial install to completed workflow we're only talking about six hours, most of which was spent pouring over LaTeX manuals. Okay yes, I'm insane. I went to all this effort just to avoid an animated paperclip. But seriously, that thing is creepy.
+
+Note of course that my LaTeX needs are limited and fairly simple. I wanted one version of my process to output a pretty simple double spaced document for editing. Then I whipped up another version for actual reading by others (single spaced, nice margins and header etc). I'm a humanities type, I'm not doing complex math equations, inline images, or typesetting an entire book with table of contents and bibliography. Of course even if I were, the only real change I would need to make is to the LaTeX preamble template. Everything else would remain the same, which is pretty future proof. And if BBEdit disappears and Apple goes belly up, well, I still have plain text files to edit on my PS457.
+
+[1]: http://www.luxagraf.com/archives/flash/software_sucks "Why Software sucks. Sometimes."
+[2]: http://www.snopes.com/photos/people/gates.asp "Bill Gates gets sexy for the teens--yes, that is a mac in the background"
+[3]: http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html "TeXShop for Mac OS X"
+[4]: http://www.mecheng.adelaide.edu.au/~will/texstart/ "TeX on Mac OS X: The most simple beginner's guide"
+[5]: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex_texshop "Using XeTeX with TexShop"
+[6]: http://www.math.hkbu.edu.hk/TeX/ "online LaTeX manual"
+[7]: http://www.math.hkbu.edu.hk/TeX/lshort.pdf "Not so Short introduction to LaTeX"
+[8]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ "Markdown"
+[9]: http://www.luxagraf.com/pdf/hifitext.pdf "this article as an XeTeX generated pdf"
+[10]: http://www1.appstate.edu/~clarkne/hatemicro.html "Microsoft Word Suicide Note help"
+[11]: http://www.redlers.com/ "Mellel, great software and a bargin at $39"
+[12]: http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/ "Apple's Pages, part of the new iWork suite"
+[13]: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex&_sc=1 "The XeTeX typesetting system"
 
-had to split domain key dkim value for Route53: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/route53-resolve-dkim-text-record-error/
diff --git a/src/backup-2.txt b/src/backup-2.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 15ac8c9..0000000
--- a/src/backup-2.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,15 +0,0 @@
-I wrote previously about how I backup database files automatically. The key word there being "automatically". If I have to remember to make a backup the odds of it happening drop to zero. So I automate as I described, but that's not really what making backups entails or at least that's not the point for me as a writer.
-
-The point for me as a writer is that I don't want to lose these words 
-
-Ba
-
-In some cases "automate" can mean build workflows that spawn redundant copies. For example, right now I'm typing these words in Vim and will save the file in a Git repo that will get pushed to a server. Later the containing folder will be backed up on S3 plus a couple of local drives. 
-
-It's unlikely I will loose these words outright.
-
-However, once I'm done writing I'll cut and paste this piece into my Django app and hit a publish button that will write the results out to the flat HTML file you're actually reading right now (this file is another backup). When I plugged it into the database I gave this article a relationship with other objects in that database. So even the redundant backups built into my workflow make a total data loss unlikely, without the database I will lose the relationships I've created.
-
-Which is just to illustrate what you already know: database backups are important and need to happen regularly.
-
-
diff --git a/src/console-based-web-browsing-w3m.txt b/src/console-based-web-browsing-w3m.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index f548555..0000000
--- a/src/console-based-web-browsing-w3m.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,17 +0,0 @@
-Console-Based Web Browsing With W3M
-
-I've been browsing the web with a 27-year-old, text-only browser for a couple of months now and it has made me like the web again. I don't ever want to go back to a graphical browser.
-
-The web is a steaming pile of JavaShit though, so I do from time to time have to open pages in a graphical browser. But I much prefer w3m and I always start there now. If the page I'm after works, I am happy, if it doesn’t I get to decide: begrudgingly open it in a graphical browser or just skip it. It’s remarkable how often the second option is the one I chose. It’s made me question what all I do on the web, most of it turns out to be unimportant and unnecessary.
-
-But it isn't the lack of JavaScript that makes browsing with w3m great. That does help clear up clutter, but it's really an entirely different experience that, the more I use it, the more I love it. 
-
-With w3m I find myself focused on a single task in a way that I am not in Vivaldi. With w3m I get the information I want faster. I can open an entire rendered page in Vim with a single keystroke, and then I can copy and paste things to my notes or just save the whole page as text. When I'm done I quit and move on to something different. Opening w3m is so fast I don't keep it open. I use it when I need it and then I close it. 
-
-This, I've come to think, is the key to eliminating distractions, staying focused and getting actual work done: close the browser when you don't need it. You don't think of an open web browser as multitasking, but it is and that's a recipe for distraction. Unitasking is the way forward most of the time, when you're done with the page, close the browser.
-
-This is very cumbersome with a graphical browser which has to boot up a ton of stuff and then load all those open tabs you have and it ends up taking so long enough that only a crazy person would close it when they were done with a single task. It'd be like shutting off your laptop every time you closed the lid.
-
-With w3m though this is exactly what I do and I swear I waste less time because of it. Often I even close out the terminal window that it was in because foot is pretty speedy too. Then I find myself staring at my desktop, which happens to be a somber image I took a long time ago in the swamps of Florida, and it always makes me want to close my laptop and go outside, which is why I use it as a desktop.
-
-What does this have to do with w3m? Very little I suppose, other than to say, if you're finding yourself wasting time browsing the internet for hours, try using w3m, you might like it, and I can almost garantee you'll save yourself some time that you'd otherwise waste on pointless internet things. Go make something instead. Or give someone a hug or a high five.
diff --git a/src/getting-started-maas.txt b/src/getting-started-maas.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 74622a5..0000000
--- a/src/getting-started-maas.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,48 +0,0 @@
-Canonical's Metal As A Service (MAAS) allows you to deploy and manage physical hardware in the same way you can deploy and manage virtual machines. This means you can configure, deploy and manage bare metal servers just like you would VMs running on Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure. MAAS gives you the management tools that have made the cloud popular, but with the additional benefits of physical hardware.
-
-To use MAAS you'll need a server to run the management software and at least one server which can be managed with a BMC (once MAAS in installed you can select different BMC power types according to your hardware setup). 
-
-Canonical recommends letting the MAAS server handle DHCP for the network the managed machines are connected to, but if your current infrastructure requires a different approach to DHCP there are other options. The MAAS documentation has more details on [how DHCP works in MAAS](https://docs.maas.io/2.6/en/installconfig-network-dhcp) and how you can adapt it to your current setup.
-
-To install MAAS first download Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS and follow the step-by-step installation instructions to set up Ubuntu on your server. Once you have Ubuntu 18.04 up and running, you can install MAAS. 
-
-To get the latest development release of MAAS, use the [maas/next PPA](https://launchpad.net/~maas/+archive/ubuntu/next). First add the PPA, then update and install. 
-
-~~~~console
-sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maas/next
-sudo apt update
-sudo apt install maas
-~~~~
-
-Once MAAS is installed, you'll need initialize it and create an admin user.
-
-~~~~console
-sudo maas init
-~~~~
-
-The init command will ask you ask you to create a username and password for the web-based GUI. You can optionally import your SSH keys as well.
-
-Once the installation is done you can login to the web-based MAAS GUI by pointing your browser to http://<your.maas.ip>:5240/MAAS/.
-
-<img src="maas-01.png" alt="MAAS web UI login screen" />
-
-Once you login to the MAAS web UI you'll be presented with the MAAS configuration panel where you can set the region name, configure a DNS forwarder for domains not managed by MAAS, as well as configure the images and architectures you want available for MAAS-managed machines.
-
-<img src="maas-02.png" alt="MAAS web UI initial setup screen" />
-
-For now you can accept the defaults and click continue. If you did not add your SSH keys in the initialization step, you'll need to upload them now. Then click "Go to Dashboard" to continue.
-
-<img src="maas-04.png" alt="MAAS web UI SSH keys screen" />
-
-The last step is to configure DHCP. When the MAAS Dashboard loads it will alert you that "DHCP is not enabled on any VLAN." To setup DHCP click the "Subnets" menu item and then click the VLAN where you want to enable DHCP. 
-
-<img src="maas-07.png" alt="MAAS web UI Subnet screen" />
-
-This will bring up a new page where you can configure your DHCP subnet, start and end IP addresses, and Gateway IP. You can also decide how MAAS handles DHCP, whether directly from the rack controller or relayed to another VLAN. If you don't want MAAS to manage DHCP you can disable it here.
-
-<img src="maas-08.png" alt="MAAS web UI Subnet screen" />
-
-To set up your first MAAS instances with MAAS handling DHCP, click the "Configure MAAS-managed DHCP" button.
-
-<img src="maas-09.png" alt="MAAS web UI Subnet screen" />
-
diff --git a/src/gitea.txt b/src/gitea.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index d45c469..0000000
--- a/src/gitea.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,229 +0,0 @@
-I've never liked hosting my git repos on someone else's servers. GitHub especially is not a company I'd do business with, ever. I do have a repo or two hosted over at GitLab because those are projects I want to be easily available to anyone. But I store almost everything in git -- notes, my whole documents folder, all my code projects, all my writing, pretty much everything is in git -- but I like to keep all that private and on my own server.
-
-For years I used [Gitlist](http://gitlist.org/) because it was clean, simple, and did 95 percent of what I needed in a web-based interface for my repos. But Gitlist is abandonware at this point and broken if you're using PHP 7.2. There are few forks that [patch it](https://github.com/patrikx3/gitlist), but it's copyrighted to the original dev and I don't want to depend on illegitimate forks for something so critical to my workflow. Then there's Gitlab, which I like, but the system requirements are ridiculous.
-
-Some searching eventually led me to Gitea, which is lightweight, written in Go and has everything I need. 
-
-Here's a quick guide to getting Gitea up and running on your Ubuntu 18.04 -- or similar -- VPS.
-
-### Set up Gitea
-
-The first thing we're going to do is isolate Gitea from the rest of our server, running it under a different user seems to be the standard practice. Installing Gitea via the Arch User Repository will create a `git` user, so that's what I used on Ubuntu 18.04 as well. 
-
-Here's a shell command to do that:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo adduser --system --shell /bin/bash --group --disabled-password --home /home/git git
-~~~~
-
-This is pretty much a standard adduser command like you'd use when setting up a new VPS, the only difference is that we've added the `--disable-password` flag so you can't actually log in with it. That's a bit more secure and while we will use this user to authenticate over SSH, we'll do so with a key, not a password.
-
-Now we need to grab the latest Gitea binary. At the time of writing that's version 1.5.2, but be sure check the [Gitea downloads page](https://dl.gitea.io/gitea/) for the latest version and adjust the commands below to work with that version number. Let's download the Gitea binary and then we'll verify the signing key. Verifying keys is very important when working with binaries since you can't see the code behind them[^1].
-
-~~~~console
-wget -O gitea https://dl.gitea.io/gitea/1.5.2/gitea-1.5.2-linux-amd64
-gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv 0x2D9AE806EC1592E2
-wget https://dl.gitea.io/gitea/1.5.2/gitea-1.5.2-linux-amd64.asc
-gpg --verify gitea-1.5.2-linux-amd64.asc gitea
-~~~~
-
-A couple of notes here, GPG should say the keys match, but then it should also warn that "this key is not certified with a trusted signature!" That means, essentially, that this binary could have been signed by anybody. That should make you nervous, but at least we know it wasn't tampered with in transit[^1].
-
-Now let's make the binary executable and test it to make sure it's working:
-
-~~~~console
-chmod +x gitea
-./gitea web
-~~~~
-
-You can stop Gitea with `Ctrl+C`. Let's move the binary to a more traditional location:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo cp gitea /usr/local/bin/gitea
-~~~~
-
-The next thing we're going to be is create all the directories we need. 
-
-~~~~console
-sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/gitea/{custom,data,indexers,public,log}
-sudo chown git:git /var/lib/gitea/{data,indexers,log}
-sudo chmod 750 /var/lib/gitea/{data,indexers,log}
-sudo mkdir /etc/gitea
-sudo chown root:git /etc/gitea
-sudo chmod 770 /etc/gitea
-~~~~
-
-That last line should make you nervous, that's too permissive for a public directory, but don't worry, as soon as we're done setting up Gitea we'll change the permissions on that directory and the config file inside it. 
-
-Before we do that though let's create an systemd service file to start and stop Gitea. The Gitea project has a service file that will work well for our purposes, so let's grab it, make a couple changes and then we'll add it to our system:
-
-~~~~console
-wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/go-gitea/gitea/master/contrib/systemd/gitea.service 
-~~~~
-
-Now open that file and uncomment the line `After=postgresql.service` so that Gitea starts after postgresql is running. The resulting config file should look like this:
-
-~~~~ini
-[Unit]
-Description=Gitea (Git with a cup of tea)
-After=syslog.target
-After=network.target
-#After=mysqld.service
-After=postgresql.service
-#After=memcached.service
-#After=redis.service
-
-[Service]
-# Modify these two values and uncomment them if you have
-# repos with lots of files and get an HTTP error 500 because
-# of that
-###
-#LimitMEMLOCK=infinity
-#LimitNOFILE=65535
-RestartSec=2s
-Type=simple
-User=git
-Group=git
-WorkingDirectory=/var/lib/gitea/
-ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/gitea web -c /etc/gitea/app.ini
-Restart=always
-Environment=USER=git HOME=/home/git GITEA_WORK_DIR=/var/lib/gitea
-# If you want to bind Gitea to a port below 1024 uncomment
-# the two values below
-###
-#CapabilityBoundingSet=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
-#AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
-
-[Install]
-WantedBy=multi-user.target
-~~~~
-
-Now we need to move the service file to somewhere systemd expects it and then start and enable the service so Gitea will launch automatically when the server boots up.
-
-~~~~console
-sudo cp gitea.service /etc/systemd/system/
-sudo systemctl enable gitea
-sudo systemctl start gitea
-~~~~
-
-There you have it, Gitea is installed, running and will automatically boot whenever we restart the server. Now we need to set up Postgresql and then Nginx to serve up our Gitea site to the world. Or at least to us.
-
-### Setup a Postgresql and Nginx
-
-Gitea needs a database to store all our data in, I use PostgreSQL. You can also use MySQL, but you're on your own there. Install PostgreSQL if you haven't already:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo apt install postgresql
-~~~~
-
-Now let's create a new user and database for Gitea:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo su postgres
-createuser gitea
-createdb gitea -O gitea
-~~~~
-
-Exit the postgres user shell by hitting `Ctrl+D`. Now let's set up Nginx to serve our Gitea site. 
-
-For the next part you'll need a domain name. I use a subdomain, git.mydomain.com, but for simplicity sake I'll refer to `mydomain.com` for the rest of this tutorial. Replace `mydomain.com` in all the instructions below with your actual domain name.
-
-~~~~console
-sudo apt update
-sudo apt install nginx
-~~~~
-
-Now we need to create a config file for this domain. By default Nginx will look for config files in `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/`, so the config file we'll create is:
-
-~~~~console
-nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mydomain.com.conf
-~~~~
-
-Here's what that file looks like:
-
-~~~~nginx
-server {
-    listen 80;
-    listen [::]:80;
-    server_name <mydomain.com>;
-
-
-    location / {
-        proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
-    }
-
-    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
-}
-~~~~
-
-The main line here is the proxy_pass bit, which takes all requests and sends it to gitea, which is listening on `localhost:3000` by default. You can change that if you have something else that conflicts with it, but you'll need to change it here and in the service file that we used to start Gitea.
-
-The last step is to add an SSL cert to our site so we can clone over https (and SSH if you keep reading). I have another tutorial on setting up [Certbot for Nginx on Ubuntu](/src/certbot-nginx-ubuntu-1804). You can use that to get Certbot installed and auto-renewing certs. Then all you need to do is run:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo certbot --nginx
-~~~~
-
-Select your gitea domain, follow the prompts and when you're done you'll be read to set up Gitea. 
-
-### Setting up Gitea
-
-Point your browser to https://&lt;mydomain&gt;.com/install and go through the Gitea setup process. That screen looks like this, and you can use these values, except for the domain name (and be sure to enter the password you used when we created the `gitea` user for postgresql).
-
-One note, I strongly recommend check the "disable self registration" box, which means you'll need to create an administrator account at the bottom of the page, but will stop anyone else from being able to sign up.
-
-<img src="images/2018/gitea-install_FAW0kIJ.jpg" id="image-1706" class="picwide" />
-
-Okay, now that we've got Gitea initialized it's time to go back and change the permissions on their directories that we set up earlier.
-
-~~~~console
-sudo chmod 750 /etc/gitea
-sudo chmod 644 /etc/gitea/app.ini
-~~~~
-Okay, now you can create your first repo. Click the little button next to the repositories menu on the right side of your Gitea dashboard and that'll walk you through creating your first repo. Once that's done you can clone that repo with:
-
-~~~~console
-git clone https://mydomain.com/giteausername/reponame.git
-~~~~
-
-Now if you have an existing repo that you want to push to your new Gitea repo, just edit the `.git/config` files to make your Gitea repo the new url, e.g.:
-
-~~~~ini
-[remote "origin"]
-    url = https://mydomain.com/giteausername/reponame.git
-	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
-~~~~
-
-Now do this:
-
-~~~~console
-git push origin master 
-~~~~
-
-### Setting up SSH
-
-Working with git over https is pretty good, but I prefer the more secure method of SSH. To get that working we'll need to add our SSH key to Gitea. That means you'll need a GPG key. If you don't have one already, open the terminal on your local machine and issue this command:
-
-~~~~console
-ssh-keygen -o -a 100 -t ed25519
-~~~~
-
-That will create a key named id_ed25519 in the directory `.ssh/`. If you want to know where that command comes from, read [this article](https://blog.g3rt.nl/upgrade-your-ssh-keys.html).
-
-Now we need to add that key to gitea. First open the file `.ssh/id_ed25519.pub` and copy the contents to your clipboard. Now in the Gitea we interface, click on the user menu link at the upper right and select "settings". Then across the top you'll see a bunch of tabs. Click the one that reads "SSH / GPG Keys". Click the add key button, give your key a name and paste in the contents of the key.
-
-Depending on how your VPS was set up, you may need to add the `git` user to your sshd config. Open `/etc/ssh/sshd_config` and look for a line that reads something like this:
-
-~~~~console
-AllowUsers myuser myotheruser git
-~~~~
-
-Add git to the list so you'll be able to authenticate with the git user over ssh. Now test SSH cloning with this line, subsituting your SSH clone url:
-
-~~~~console
-git clone ssh://git@mydomain/giteausername/reponame.git
-~~~~
-
-Assuming that works then you're all set, Gitea is working and you can create all the repos you need. If you have any problems you can drop a comment in the form below and I'll do my best to help you out.
-
-[^1]: You can compile Gitea yourself if you like, there are [instructions on the Gitea site](https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/install-from-source/), but be forewarned its uses quite a bit of RAM to build.
diff --git a/src/how-use-websters-1913-dictionary-linux-edition.txt b/src/how-use-websters-1913-dictionary-linux-edition.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 12898f3..0000000
--- a/src/how-use-websters-1913-dictionary-linux-edition.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,39 +0,0 @@
-I suspect the overlap of Linux users and writers who care about the Webster's 1913 dictionary is vanishingly small. Quite possible just me. But in case there are others, I am committing these words to internet. Plus I will need them in the future when I forget how I set this up. 
-
-Here is how you install, set up, and configure the command line app `sdcv` so that you too can have the one true dictionary at your fingertips in the command line app of your choosing.
-
-But first, about the one true dictionary.
-
-The one true dictionary is debatable I suppose. Feel free to debate. I have a "compact" version of the Oxford English Dictionary sitting on my desk and it is weighty both literally and figuratively in ways that the Webster's 1913 is not, but any dictionary that deserves consideration as your one true dictionary ought to do more than spit out dry, banal collections of words. 
-
-John McPhee writes eloquently about the power of a dictionary in his famous New Yorker essay, *[Draft No 4](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4)*, which you can find in paper in [the compilation of essays by the same name](https://bookshop.org/books/draft-no-4-on-the-writing-process/9780374537975). Fellow New Yorker writer James Somers has [a brilliant essay on the genius of McPhee's dictionary](http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary) and how you can get it installed on your Mac.
-
-Remarkably, the copy of the Webster's 1913 that Somers put up is still available. So go grab that.
-
-However, while his instructions are great for macOS users, they don't work on Linux and moreover they don't offer access from the shell. I write in Vim, in a tmux session, so I wanted an easy way to look things up without switching apps. 
-
-The answer is named `sdcv`. It is, in the words of its man page, "a simple, cross-platform text-based utility for working with dictionaries in StarDict format." That last bit is key, because the Webster's 1913 file you downloaded from Somers is in StarDict format. I installed `sdcv` from the Arch Community repository, but it's in Debian and Ubuntu's official repos as well. 
-
-Once `sdcv` is install you need to unzip that dictionary.zip file you should have grabbed from Somers' post. That will give you four files. All we need to do now is move them somewhere `sdcv` can find them. By default that's `$(XDG_DATA_HOME)/stardict/dic`, although you can customize that by add thing Environment variable `STARDICT_DATA_DIR` to your .bashrc. I keep my dictionaries in `~/bin/dict` folder so I just drop this in .bashrc:
-
-~~~bash
-STARDICT_DATA_DIR="$HOME/bin/dict/
-~~~
-
-### How to Lookup Words in Webster's 1913 from the Command Line
-
-To use your new one true dictionary, all you need to do is type `sdcv` and the word you'd like to look up. Add a leading '/' before the word and `sdcv` will use a fuzzy search algorithm, which is handy if you're unsure of the spelling. Search strings can use `?` and `*` for regex searching. I have never used either. 
-
-My use is very simple. I wrote a little Bash function that looks like this:
-
-~~~bash
-function d() {
-    sdcv "$1" | less
-}
-~~~
-
-With this I type `d search_term` and get a paged view of the Webster's 1913 entry for that word. Since I always write in a tmux split, I just move my cursor to the blank split, type my search term and I can page through and read it while considering the context in the document in front of me.
-
-### But I Want a GUI
-
-Check out [StarDict](http://www.huzheng.org/stardict/), there are versions for Linux, Windows, and macOS, as well as source code.
diff --git a/src/indie-web-co.txt b/src/indie-web-co.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 9924aae..0000000
--- a/src/indie-web-co.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,36 +0,0 @@
-Here's a disturbing factoid: **the world’s ten richest men have made $540 billion so far during the pandemic.** Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' worth went up so much between March and September 2020 that he could afford to give all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105k bonus and still have as much money as he had before the pandemic started ([source](https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621149/bp-the-inequality-virus-summ-250121-en.pdf)).
-
-What does that have to do with code? Well, some of my code used to run on Amazon services. Some of my money is in Jeff Bezos' pocket. I was contributing to the economic inequality that Amazon enables. I decided I did not want to do that.
-
-But more than I didn't want to contribute to Amazon's bottom line, I *wanted* to contribute to someone's bottom line, the emphasis being on *someone*. I wanted to redirect the money I was already spending to small businesses, businesses that need the revenue.
-
-We can help each other instead of Silicon Valley billionaires.
-
-Late last year at [work](https://www.wired.com/author/scott-gilbertson/) we started showcasing some smaller, local businesses in affiliate links. It was a pretty simple idea, find some small companies in our communities making worthwhile things and support them by telling others.
-
-One woman whose company I linked to called it "life-changing." It's so strange to me that an act as simple as pasting some HTML into the right text box can changed someone's life. That's amazing. I bring this up not to toot my own horn, but to say that every day there are ways in which you can use the money you spend to help real people trying to make a living. If you've ever charged a little for a web service you probably know how much of a big deal even one more customer means. I want to be that one more customer for someone.
-
-My online expenses aren't much, just email, web hosting, storage space, and domain registration. I wanted to find some small business replacements for the megacorps I was using.
-
-I did a ton of research. Web hosting and email servers are tricky, these are critical things that run my business and my wife's business. It's great to support small businesses, but above all the services have to *work*. Luckily for us the forums over at [Low End Talk](https://www.lowendtalk.com/) are full of ideas and long term reviews of exactly these sorts of business -- small companies offering cheap web hosting, email hosting, and domain registration. 
-
-After a few late nights digging through threads, finding the highlights, and then more research elsewhere on the web, I settled on [BuyVM](https://buyvm.net/) for my web hosting. The owner Francisco is very active on Low End Talk and, in my experience for the last three months, is providing a great service *for less* than I was paying at Vultr. It was so much less I was able to get a much larger block storage disk and have more room for my backups, which eliminated my need for Amazon S3/Glacier as well[^2]. I highly recommend BuyVM for your VPS needs. 
-
-For email hosting I actually was already using a small company, [Migadu](https://www.migadu.com/). I liked their service, and I still recommend them if the pricing works for you, but they discountinued the plan I was on and I would have had to move to a more expensive plan to retain the same functionality. 
-
-I jumped ship from Migadu during Black Friday because another small email provider I had heard good things about was having a deal: $100 for life. At that price, so long as it stays in business for 2 years, I won't loss any money. I moved my email to [MxRoute](https://mxroute.com/) and it has been excellant. I liked it so much I bought my parents a domain and freed them from Google. Highly recommend MxRoute.
-
-That left just one element of my web stack at Amazon: domain registration. I'll confess I gave up here. Domain registration are not a space filled with small companies (which to me is like 2-8 people). I gave up. And complained to a friend, who said, try harder. So I did and discovered [Porkbun](https://porkbun.com/), the best domain registrar I've used in the past two decades. I moved my small collection of domain over at the beginning of the year and it was a seamless, super-smooth transition. It lives up to its slogan: "an oddly safisfying experience."
-
-And those are my recommendations for small businesses you can support *and* still have a great technology stack: [Porkbun](https://porkbun.com/) (domain registration), [MxRoute](https://mxroute.com/) (email hosting), and [BuyVM](https://buyvm.net/) (VPS hosting).
-
-The thing I didn't replace was AWS CloudFront. I don't have enough traffic to warrant a CDN, so I just dropped it. If I ever change my mind about that, based on my research, I'll go with [KeyCDN](https://www.keycdn.com/pricing), or possible [Hostry](https://hostry.com/products/cdn/). 
-
-I also haven't found a reliable replacement for SES, which I use to send my newsletters. I wish Sendgrid would spin off a company for non-transational email, but I don't see that happening. I could write another 5,000 words on how the big email providers totally, purposefully fucked up the best distributed communication system around. But I will spare you. 
-
-The point is, these are three small companies providing useful services we developers need. If you're feeling like you'd rather your money went to people trying to make cool, useful stuff, rather than massive corporations, give them a try. If you have other suggestions drop them in the comments and maybe I can put together some sort of larger list.
-
-[Note: none of these links are affiliate links, just services I actually use and therefore recommend.]
-
-[^1]: This is something I'd like to do more, unfortunately there are not cottage industries for most of the things I write about (cameras, laptops, etc). Still, you do what you can I guess.
-[^2]: I have a second cloud-based backup stored in Backblaze's B2 system. Backblaze is not a small company by any means, but it's one that, from the research I've been able to do, seems ethically run and about as decent as a corporation can be these days.
diff --git a/src/kindle-hacking.txt b/src/kindle-hacking.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 064c700..0000000
--- a/src/kindle-hacking.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,16 +0,0 @@
-links:
-
-[Installing ADB and Fastboot on Linux & Device Detection "Drivers"](https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/general/guide-installing-adb-fastboot-linux-adb-t3478678)
-
-You need to be on 6.3.1.2 firmware:
-[Fire HD 8 2018 (karnak) amonet-3](https://forum.xda-developers.com/hd8-hd10/orig-development/unlock-fire-hd-8-2018-karnak-amonet-3-t3963496/page52)
-
-[Download 6.3.1.2 firmware](https://fireos-tablet-src.s3.amazonaws.com/LlO8A9g4Q6ugQCylaeqWBWxYBb/update-kindle-Fire_HD8_8th_Gen-NS6312_user_1852_0002517056644.bin)
-
-2. Download the amazon frimware above and keep it where you can flash it.
-3. Boot into recovery (Volume Down + Power at the same time)
-4. Select "adb sideload" or whatever it says using your volume keys and press the power to select
-5. Now adb sideload <frimware>.bin
-
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN6PphcI6XQ
-
diff --git a/src/mutt-help.txt b/src/mutt-help.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index bddfb8e..0000000
--- a/src/mutt-help.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,5 +0,0 @@
-To delete messages matching a pattern: `D <text>`
-
-That will mark them for deletion, then you press tab to actually move them to the trash (or delete them depending on how you have mutt set up).
-
-
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2013-09-25_writing-in-the-open.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2013-09-25_writing-in-the-open.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 6a9e33f..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2013-09-25_writing-in-the-open.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,50 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Writing in the Open
-pub_date: 2013-09-25 14:14:55
-slug: /blog/2013/09/writing-in-the-open
-
----
-
-Whew! Crazy weekend. I wasn't really prepared for how the web would react to learning that [Webmonkey is no more][9]. My inbox blew up. Clearly Webmonkey will be missed. Thanks to everyone who sent me their thoughts on Webmonkey shutting down and all the stories about learning HTML (DHTML natch), CSS or JavaScript from the site. Also, glad to hear that there are apparently so many Webmonkey beanies out there. Anyway, if I'm a little slow responding to you, I apologize, but rest assured I have read everyone's email and I will get back to you all in the next few days
- 
-In the mean time, you should go read Brad Frost's recent post on [Designing in the Open][1]. 
-
-Frost and his wife, Melissa, are redesigning the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Banks website and have decided to do everything in the open so the rest of us can see the process. There's a [very cool looking timeline][2] and a [post about their process so far][3]. In that post Melissa quotes a comment Josh Long wrote some time ago on Chris Coyier's [Working in Public][4] post (itself a good example) about why you would want to risk the potential embarrassment or ridicule or whatever else you're afraid of to work publicly:
-
->   1. It makes you think clearly and directly.
->   2. It forces you to know what the hell you're talking about.
->   3. It shows people how much you put into your work.
->   4. It's a great way to document your work.
->   5. It's a great way to give back and teach others.
-
-To that I would add a couple more: it teaches you what you know (and don't), and it's fun, because really, if this isn't fun you shouldn't do it. 
-
-The main reason we don't show our processes more or work in public is fear. Fear that, as Melissa Frost says, you'll embarrass yourself or that you'll be seen as a fraud or <your fear here>. Fear is self-created though. Fear is _our_ reaction to an imaginary negative event _we've_ projected into the future. It's something that might happen, but hasn't. Fear can be helpful. For example, you're afraid you'll forget about an important meeting and that fear prompts you to write it down on your calendar. But more often than not fear is not helpful. More often than not fear - that imaginary projection into the future - ends up inhibiting us in the present. It stops you from sharing the stuff you've made for instance. I put off launching this site for months, at least partly out of fear. 
-
-So fuck fear. I don't have a cool looking timeline like the Frosts', nor do I have a super cool working new/old design split for this site like [Sparkbox's open redesign site][5]. But, in lieu of anything else, I do have a screenshot of my responsive web design book in progress: 
-
-![responsive web design in progress](/media/images/2013/rwdbook-inprogress.jpg)
-
-Does that count as working in the open? Probably not. But that's the best I can do at the moment. One of the early issues of McSweeneys had a line drawing of a bird with one wing, below it was the caption "trying, trying, trying". That's how I feel.
-
-If there's interest I could write more about what it's like to write a book (which I could title, how I tricked myself into writing 40,000 words in three weeks). At some point I'd like to take working in the open even further and put the "source" of the book in a public Git repository to make it easy for other people to fix typos, contribute resource links or, well - who knows what else people might end up doing? 
-
-I think that's probably the best reason to do anything "in the open" - it opens more doors for other people. Yeah some of them will be jerks and trolls. But in my experience most of them are not.
-
-And opening the door to others opens the door to serendipity. And serendipity often leads to magic.
-
-When you put things out in the world the world takes them, plays with them - sometimes nicely, sometimes not - and unexpected things start to happen. In my experience these things tend to be good. Random @replies morph into friends, ideas spark others' imaginations. I find there ends up being a lot of synchronicity - ideas colliding in interesting ways, what Robert Anton Wilson called "[Coincidance][8]". 
-
-I've never tried designing in the open, but I'd like to do more writing in the open. If you've got any good ideas on how to do that, please let me know.
-
-Okay, back to work.
-
-[1]: http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/designing-in-the-open/ (bradfrostweb.com, Designing in the Open)
-[2]: http://foodbank.bradfrostweb.com/
-[3]: http://melissafrostdesign.com/post/pittsburgh-food-bank-open-redesign/
-[4]: http://chriscoyier.net/2012/09/23/working-in-public/
-[5]: http://building.seesparkbox.com/
-[6]: https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2013/xrwdbook-inprogress-sm.jpg.
-[7]: /media/images/2013/rwdbook-inprogress.jpg (view larger image of responsive design book in progress)
-[8]: http://www.amazon.com/Coincidance-Head-Robert-Anton-Wilson/dp/1561840041
-[9]: /blog/2013/09/whatever-happened-to-webmonkey
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2013-09-30_responsive-images-srcset.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2013-09-30_responsive-images-srcset.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 3b3e02b..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2013-09-30_responsive-images-srcset.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,181 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Responsive Images & `srcset`
-pub_date: 2013-09-30 20:08:57
-slug: /blog/2013/09/responsive-images-srcset
-metadesc: A comprehensive overview of responsive images and the srcset attribute. Regularly updated to keep up with changing standards proposals.
-code: True
-tags: Responsive Images
----
-
-[Note: This post is superseded by the fact that the picture element now exists. Picture supports srcset as well, so you can do everything I mention below, you just do it within `<picture>`. See my [complete guide to the picture element](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2014/02/complete-guide-picture-element) for more details.]
-
-There are, in my experience, three pain points in any responsive design -- tabular data, advertising and images. The latter is the most interesting problem to me since it's not something you can design or engineer your way around. True, there are ways you can coerce today's browsers into doing roughly what you want -- serve large images to large screens and small ones to small screens -- but these are really hacks, sometimes very clever hacks, but still hacks. 
-
-Nathan Ford has put together a nice [Responsive Images Mega-List][1] in an attempt to catalog all the ways you can handle images in a responsive site today.
-
-That's a great list of resources for handling images today, but what I've been obsessing over lately is the future, when we won't need all these workarounds.
-
-Just like we hacked video into the web using Flash and eventually got the `<video>` tag, we're hacking responsive images into the web and eventually the web is going to give us a native solution. In fact, there's one just around the browser update bend. 
-
-## How `srcset` Simplifies Responsive Images
-
-The exciting thing is that there are not just one, but two responsive image solutions already in the works. The W3C is working on a couple of new tools aimed at making responsive images less complex. The first new feature that's likely to make it to a browser near you is the new `srcset` attribute for the `<img>` tag.
-
-[**Update 27 Feb 2014**: Chrome has [added support](http://blog.chromium.org/2014/02/chrome-34-responsive-images-and_9316.html) for `srcset`, which means it will land in Opera soon as well. The Chrome implementation mirrors what's described below for WebKit. At the same time the `srcset` attribute has been added to the proposed `<picture>` element which you can read about in my [Complete Guide to the <Picture> Element](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2014/02/complete-guide-picture-element).]
-
-The proposed `srcset` attribute has a controversial history, which I wrote about [several][2] [times][3] on Webmonkey. I don't think any of that matters at this point though. It's true that `srcset` doesn't address everything about responsive images, but it looks to me like it covers the 80 percent use case and, more importantly, there is [already some browser support][4] (and more on the way). 
-
-Here's how `srcset` works:
-    
-~~~.language-markup
-<img alt="Image Desc"
-   src="image.jpg"
-   srcset="image-HD.jpg 2x, image-phone.jpg 320w, image-phone-HD.jpg 320w 2x">
-~~~
-
-As you can see, the `srcset` attribute takes a comma-separated list of values. Within each item in the list you have three variables. First there's the URL to the image, then there's a maximum viewport dimension (optional) and then an optional pixel density (for targeting higher resolution screens). So the `srcset` value `image-HD.jpg 2x` tells the browser, roughly, if you're on a display with high-res screen then grab this high-res image. Pretty simple. You can of course make it much more complex by adding several other images to the list, for example, to target various screen widths.
-
-There are two major drawbacks to `srcset`. First, **you can only specify screen width (or height) in pixels**. The reason has to with how browsers pre-fetch content, which happens long before there's enough info to calculate the value of a percentage or em width/height. See this [thread on the W3C mailing list][5] for details. The bottom line is, flexible units for `srcset` is a no-go.
-
-The other major drawback is that **you can only specify the equivalent of max-width** when defining the viewport dimensions. There is no min-width or orientation support like you'd use in CSS @media queries. That means you may not be able to line your `srcset` breakpoints up with your CSS breakpoints.
-
-There's some other stuff in the spec worth noting as well. For instance, "if the viewport dimensions or pixel density changes, the user agent can replace the image data with a new image on the fly." That means (I think) that, while there's no equivalent to CSS 3 @media's `orientation` query, you could get the same effect because the viewport dimensions change on rotation, triggering larger images to load (though to make that work you'd end up targeting specific device widths, which is not [future-friendly][6]). It's hard to imagine a scenario in which the pixel density would change, but hey, why not I guess?
-
-There is one very cool part of the spec though, it puts the ultimate decision about which images are served in the hands of the user. 
-
-No browser supports it, but the spec says that the higher res images specified in `srcset` are just candidates. Here's the [relevant bit][7]:
-
-> Optionally, return the URL of an entry in *candidates* chosen by the user agent, and that entry's associated pixel density, and then abort these steps. The user agent may apply any algorithm or heuristic in its selection of an entry for the purposes of this step.
-
-So in theory the browser gets the final say. This means the browser can check the available network and make a decision about whether or not to actually obey `srcset`. For instance it might reject the high-res images on 3G, but accept them over wifi. Even better, mobile browsers could add a user preference so users can say (as they can today with native apps), "I only want high-res images over wifi". Or all the time or whatever. The user is in control.
-
-I think that's probably the best way to handle what's possibly a user-developer conflict. For example, I want my images to look good on your retina iPad, but you might want to save your (possibly) expensive bandwidth for other things. I think the user should trump the developer in that scenario. With `srcset` the browser can give the user the power to make that decision.
-
-## Testing `srcset` Today
-
-This is all largely academic right now. Only one browser supports `srcset` and even that's just the nightly builds of Apple's WebKit.
-
-If you want to see it in action, go grab the [latest WebKit nightly][8]. Here's a live demo:
-
-<img src="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-fallback.jpg" srcset="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-2x.jpg 2x" alt="demo of srcset in action" width="660"/>
-This first test is for retina displays, which looks like this:
-
-~~~.language-markup
-<img alt="demo of srcset in action"
-  src="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-fallback.jpg" 
-  srcset="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-2x.jpg 2x"  />
-~~~
-
-<img src="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-fallback.jpg" srcset="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-widthquery.jpg 420w" alt="demo of srcset in action" />
-This test is for mobile screens with a maximum viewport of 420px, here&#8217;s the code:
-
-~~~.language-markup
-<img alt="demo of srcset in action" 
-    src="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-fallback.jpg" 
-    srcset="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-widthquery.jpg 420w" />
-~~~    
-
-<img src="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-fallback.jpg" srcset="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-mobile2x.jpg 420w x2" alt="demo of srcset in action" />
-The last test is for mobile high res screens and uses this code:
-
-~~~.language-markup
-<img alt="demo of srcset in action"
-    src="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-fallback.jpg" 
-    srcset="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-mobile2x.jpg 420w x2" />
-~~~   
-
-<img src="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-fallback.jpg" srcset="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-superwidequery.jpg 9000w" alt="demo of srcset in action" />
-This final test is designed to check WebKit's current implementation, which does not yet support specifying a width. It's the same query as above, but with a much wider max-width which should trigger it to load in desktop WebKit Nightly.
-
-~~~.language-markup
-<img alt="demo of srcset in action"
-    src="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-fallback.jpg" 
-    srcset="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-superwidequery.jpg 9000w"  />
-~~~
-    
-
-As of September 30, 2013, using the latest WebKit Nightly (v8536.30.1, 538+) only the first test works. WebKit only supports the pixel density queries, not the max viewport width query.
-
-## Which Web Browsers Support `srcset`?
-
-Eventually caniuse.org will probably [add][8] `srcset` (I think they require at least one shipping version of the feature before they'll track it), but for now I threw together a table for keeping track of which web browsers support `srcset`.
-
-Here's the list as of November 15, 2013:
-
-<div class="longtable">
-<table>
-<colgroup>
-<col style="text-align:left;"/>
-<col style="text-align:left;"/>
-</colgroup>
-
-<thead>
-<tr>
-	<th style="text-align:left;">Browser</th>
-	<th style="text-align:left;"><code>srcset</code> support</th>
-</tr>
-</thead>
-
-<tbody>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">WebKit Nightly</td>
-	<td class="yes" style="text-align:left;">yes</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">Safari 7</td>
-	<td class="no" style="text-align:left;">no</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">Firefox 30</td>
-	<td class="no" style="text-align:left;">no</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">Chrome 34+</td>
-	<td class="yes" style="text-align:left;">yes</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">Opera 16</td>
-	<td class="no" style="text-align:left;">no</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">IE 11</td>
-	<td class="no" style="text-align:left;">no</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">Mobile Safari 7</td>
-	<td class="no" style="text-align:left;">no</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">Opera Mini 7</td>
-	<td class="no" style="text-align:left;">no</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">Opera Mobile 14</td>
-	<td class="no" style="text-align:left;">no</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">Android Default 4.2</td>
-	<td class="no" style="text-align:left;">no</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">Chrome for Android</td>
-	<td class="no" style="text-align:left;">no</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-	<td style="text-align:left;">Firefox for Android</td>
-	<td class="no" style="text-align:left;">no </td>
-</tr>
-</tbody>
-</table>
-</div>
-
-Yes, it's a slightly ridiculous table, <strike>but with any luck Chrome will be joining the list of <code>srcset</code> supporters in the very near future</strike>. [**Update 2014-02-27**: Chrome 34 and higher [now support](http://blog.chromium.org/2014/02/chrome-34-responsive-images-and_9316.html) `srcset`, which also means Opera will soon as well]. My contacts at Mozilla tell me that Firefox is also working on support. So things are looking pretty good for the future. That doesn't help today though, so if you need something now, remember to check out Nathan Ford's [Responsive Images Mega-List][1] for a complete collection of responsive image solutions that work today.
-
-[1]: http://artequalswork.com/posts/responsive-images/ (Responsive Images Mega-List)
-[2]: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/05/ready-or-not-adaptive-image-solution-is-now-part-of-html/ (Ready or Not, Adaptive-Image Solution Is Now Part of HTML)
-[3]: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/05/browsers-at-odds-with-web-developers-over-adaptive-images/ (Browsers at Odds With Web Developers Over 'Adaptive Images')
-[4]: http://mobile.smashingmagazine.com/2013/08/21/webkit-implements-srcset-and-why-its-a-good-thing/
-[5]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2012May/0310.html
-[6]: http://futurefriend.ly/
-[7]: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/srcset/w3c-srcset/#processing-the-image-candidates
-[8]: http://nightly.webkit.org/
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2013-11-08_easiest-way-get-started-designing-browser.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2013-11-08_easiest-way-get-started-designing-browser.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index f6b4b30..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2013-11-08_easiest-way-get-started-designing-browser.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,116 +0,0 @@
----

-title: The Easiest Way to Get Started 'Designing in the Browser'

-pub_date: 2013-11-08 16:02:19

-slug: /blog/2013/11/easiest-way-get-started-designing-browser

-metadesc: Developing and designing directly in the browser has greatly simplify my workflow. Skipping intermediary tools like Photoshop means I'm able to accomplish more in less time, which in turn means I can say yes to more projects.

-tags: Responsive Web Design, Building Smarter Workflows

-code: True

-tutorial: True

-

----

-

-*If you've ever struggled to "design in the web browser" this post is for you.*

-

-You've probably heard that phrase before, "designing in the browser", especially when it comes to building responsive websites. Some people even go so far as to say you shouldn't use Photoshop at all, but should build everything right in the browser. 

-

-I think you should choose whatever tool works the best for you, but since I switched to developing directly in the browser a few years ago I've been able to greatly simplify my workflow. Skipping intermediary tools like Photoshop means I'm able to accomplish more in less time, which in turn means I can say yes to more projects.

-

-Sounds awesome right? But where do you start?

-

-## How to Simplify "Designing in the Browser"

-

-Start with the content. Get your content from the client, make your sketches, your wireframes, whatever other preliminary things are already part of your workflow. Then, when that's done, instead of opening Photoshop, Illustrator or other layout apps, you convert that content to HTML and start structuring it to match your wireframes.

-

-But how? I start up a web browser (I use Firefox), point it to my local mockup files (just HTML files in my project folder) and start editing. That's it; that's my workflow: edit, refresh; edit, refresh. It's simple and it makes the feedback loop of design and development immediate and simple. 

-

-And to do that I didn't spend hours setting up some complex development environment, nor did I have to buy some expensive GUI server software package. In fact, I use just one line of code to pull this off.

-

-Here's how you can simplify your responsive design workflow, and start "designing in the browser" with what I call "the Python web server trick". I've been doing this for so long I often assume everyone knows about this, but I keep meeting people who don't. So... if you don't, here's a dead simple way to serve files locally with just one line of code.

-

-## The Best Web Server is the One That's Already Installed

-

-The key to designing in the browser is to have **a quick and easy way to serve up files locally**. You don't need anything fancy at this stage, just a basic web server.

-

-The easiest way I have found to set up this workflow is to use a very simple command line tool that creates a web server wherever I want it, whenever I want it.

-

-I know, I know, the command line is antiquated, mysterious and a bit frightening for many people. I know that because it was that way for me too. But I kept noticing how much faster I could do things compared to visual apps. And I found that every time I used the terminal, it got a little less intimidating. I learned how to do one little thing that sped up my overall workflow. Then I learned another. And another. Today I use the terminal more than any other application. You don't have to go that far, but don't let it intimidate you. Just take it slow. Start with one thing that simplifies your life, like this web server trick.

-

-If you've ever tried to set up a local development environment with Apache, PHP and the like you probably know what a headache that can be. Well, it turns out, if all you want is a simple web server, there's a much easier way. 

-

-Here's how to **turn any local folder on your Mac or Linux machine into a web server** (Windows users can do the very same thing, though first you'll need to install Python. Follow [these instructions](http://www.anthonydebarros.com/2011/10/15/setting-up-python-in-windows-7/) to get Python installed and then come back and follow along).

-

-Before we start our web server we need a folder to hold all our files. This folder will be the "root" of our web server. I divide my time between OS X and Linux, which both offer a "Sites" folder in your home folder. I use this folder to store all my projects. If you prefer to store things elsewhere just adjust all the path names in the code that follow. Open the `Sites` folder and create a new folder inside it named `myproject`. Then create a new file named `mydemo.html`. Open that file in your favorite editor and just type "Hello World".

-

-That gives us something to test with. The next step is to open up your terminal application. In OS X that means you head to the `Applications` folder, open the `Utilities` folder and then double-click the Terminal application (Windows users head to the Start Menu, click Run and then type `cmd`; if you're on Linux I'll assume you know how to open a terminal window). In the new Terminal window type/paste this line:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-cd ~/Sites/myproject

-~~~

-

-The command `cd` just means "change directory". So we've changed from our home user folder to the `myproject` directory. Okay, you're now inside the folder we created just a minute ago. Now type this line:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

-~~~

-

-Now open your favorite web browser and head to the URL: `localhost:8080/`. You should now see a directory listing with a link to your `mydemo.html` file. Click that and you should see "Hello World". Go back to your text editor and change the `mydemo.html` file to read "Hello World, it's nice to meet you". Jump back to the browser and reload the page. You should now see the message "Hello World, it's nice to meet you"

-

-Congratulations! You created a web server. You now have a simple and fast way to serve up HTML files locally. You can edit, refresh and mock up live HTML files right in the browser.

-

-All we're doing here is taking advantage of the fact that the [Python programming language](http://www.python.org/) ships with a built-in web server. Since Python is built into OS X and Linux, it's always there, ready to serve up files (as noted above, if you're on Windows you'll need to install Python. I also suggest installing [Cygwin](http://cygwin.com/), it will make everything you do on the command line easier).

-

-## Improving the Script

-

-So we have a very basic way to serve files locally. There are various ways to make this more sophisticated, but this basic method will work when you're first getting started. 

-

-If you don't mind another quick trip to the Terminal you can even automate the process some more. To make it even simpler we can add an alias to what's known as a "profile", the configuration file that loads every time we start up a new terminal window. Most operating systems these days ship with the [Bash shell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_%28Unix_shell%29). Assuming that's what you have (OS X uses Bash by default, as do most Linux distros), open a new terminal window and type this:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-nano ~/.bash_profile

-~~~

-

-Now paste this line into the window:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-alias serve='cd ~/Sites/myproject && python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080'

-~~~

-

-Hit `control-x`, type a "y" and hit return to save the file. Now quit your terminal app and restart it.

-

-Now to turn on the server all we need to do is open a new terminal window and type "serve". Note that if your folder is in a different location, or if you move the folder you'll need to adjust your alias accordingly.

-

-If you've got a home network running and you'd like to be able to see your website on all your devices (handy for testing on phones, tablets and whatnot), you can alter this code slightly so other local devices can connect to your server. It's a little more complicated, but can still be a one-liner. 

-

-For example, if your machine's local network address is 192.168.1.5, you could run this command:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-python -c "import BaseHTTPServer as bhs, SimpleHTTPServer as shs; bhs.HTTPServer(('192.168.1.5', 8080), shs.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler).serve_forever()"

-~~~

-

-Now, instead of `localhost`, open the URL `192.168.1.5:8080` in your web browser and you'll see the same page, but now you can point your phone to that URL and it will load there as well. Ditto your tablet, Kindle and any other devices connected to your local network. 

-

-Obviously that's tough to remember so let's create an alias. To do that we'll just add another alias to the .bash_profile file we edited earlier. To open that up again just enter:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-nano ~/.bash_profile

-~~~

-

-Now paste this line into the window:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-alias serve_all="python -c 'import BaseHTTPServer as bhs, SimpleHTTPServer as shs; bhs.HTTPServer(('\''192.168.1.5'\'', 8080), shs.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler).serve_forever()'"

-~~~

-

-Now you can `cd` into any directory, type `serve_all` and run a web server that you can use to testing your sites on any device.

-

-That's all there is to it. A live web server whenever you want it, wherever you want it.

-

-That's how I "design in the browser". 

-

-The next step is to take that nice content the client gave us and put it into our mockup files so we have something more useful than "Hello World" in our web browser. I do this using plain text files, [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) and [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/), which I cover in more detail in this follow-up post: [Work Smarter: The Plain Text Workflow](/blog/2014/02/work-smarter-plain-text-workflow). 

-

-I hope this simple Python server trick proves helpful, and, if you have any questions, drop them in the comments below.

-

-If you want to learn some more handy tips and tricks for improving your responsive design workflows check out my book, [Build a Better Web With Responsive Web Design](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design) and the accompanying videos.

-

-

diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-02_work-smarter-plain-text-workflow.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-02_work-smarter-plain-text-workflow.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 551f195..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-02_work-smarter-plain-text-workflow.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,250 +0,0 @@
----

-title: "Work Smarter: The Plain Text Workflow"

-pub_date: 2014-02-02 19:37:07

-slug: /blog/2014/02/work-smarter-plain-text-workflow

-metadesc: A guide to smarter responsive design workflows. If you're still designing websites in Photoshop you're doing too much work. 

-tags: Responsive Web Design, Building Smarter Workflows

-code: True

-tutorial: True

----

-

-*If you've ever struggled building responsive websites, this post is for you. It's part of a series on responsive design and smarter workflows, all pulled from my book, [Responsive Web Design](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design). If you find this excerpt useful, and want even more ideas on how responsive design can help you create amazing websites, sign up for the newsletter below and you'll get a discount when the book is released.*

-

-[TOC]

-

-If your current workflow looks anything like mine used to, you probably start most of your design work in a graphics editor like Photoshop. There's nothing "wrong" with that per say, nor is Photoshop some tool for evil, but I'm here to tell you there is a better, more productive way to work.

-

-Here's the thing: if you're designing websites in Photoshop you're doing too much work. 

-

-If you're building responsive websites and you're not working directly with the code in a web browser you're wasting time and energy using the wrong tool for the job. There's nothing wrong with Photoshop, but it's not the best tool for developing responsive websites.

-

-Why?

-

-Photoshop has a fixed canvas size; the web has an infinitely flexible canvas. Responsive design means embracing that flexible canvas and you can't do that when you're working in a graphics editor.

-

-The web browser is the only tool I know of that offers the same fluid, flexible canvas of the web. **If you want to simplify and optimize your responsive workflow, the place to work is in the browser**. 

-

-Designing in the browser means working with the web rather than against it, and that's the first step toward a simpler, faster responsive design workflow.

-

-##Faster, Easier Web Development? Sign Me Up!

-

-For a long time I ignored the advice to design in the browser because often the people giving it stopped with the advice. Go design in the browser! It's awesome! And, unicorns! Whereas I would just sit there thinking, *Uuuuuuuh, okay, but what the heck does that mean? Design in the browser...? Grumble, well, I've got work to do and I know how to use Photoshop...*

-

-Designing directly in the web browser makes sense at a theoretical level, but what does it mean in practical terms? What does this workflow look like and where do you start?

-

-That's why I wrote this, to outline how I finally figured out I could save tremendous time and effort working directly in the browser rather than prototyping everything in Photoshop. I'm going to share my workflow in hopes it will prove useful to you. 

-

-Before we dive in, realize that this is just my workflow. It's not THE workflow by any means. Whether you're part of a small team, large team or working on your own, you have your idiosyncrasies and tics to consider. A good workflow will work with, not against you. I can't tell you how you should work. I can, however, tell you how I work and hopefully that will give you some ideas you can test in your own workflow. Take what you need, skip what you don't.

-

-In the [first part of this responsive design workflow series](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2013/11/easiest-way-get-started-designing-browser) we looked at a super simple way to serve files on our local development machines. After all, you can't design in the browser if you don't have a server for your web browser to talk to. So I'll assume you've completed that tutorial (or have your own web server setup already). 

-

-## Everything Starts with the Content

-

-The first thing to do with any tough question is to break it down into smaller questions. So instead of asking what does designing in the browser look like, let's start with a more basic question: What do we need before we can display a webpage?

-

-The simple answer is: the content.

-

-Before we can do anything with HTML or CSS we need the contents of our site. Everything starts with content. No content, no HTML. No HTML, no CSS. 

-

-The foundation of any design has to be the content. I know what you're thinking; you're thinking I'll just grab some Lorem Ipsum. Or, if you prefer some snarky for your dev work, [Samuel L. Ipsum](http://slipsum.com). But that's not going to cut it. 

-

-Without the content we're designing in the dark. I can't remember where I first saw a graphic like this, but it's what turned the light bulb on for me.... Simply put, there's no point in designing a layout with this:

-

-[![two plain lorem ipsum paragraphs](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/contentfirst1.png)](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/contentfirst1.png "View Image 1")

-: The content you think you're going to get.

-

-When what you're actually need to display looks like this:

-

-[![structurally complex content with lists, paragraphs and blockquotes](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/contentfirst2.png)](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/contentfirst1.png "View Image 2")

-: The content you actually got.

-

-

-As Jeffery Zeldman [writes](http://www.zeldman.com/2008/05/06/content-precedes-design/), "design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration." We're not decorating websites, we're designing them, which means we need actual content.

-

-In terms of workflow, this means you need to get the content as soon as you can. No content, no work to flow. It means that when you're meeting with clients you need to emphasize the importance of having the actual content, not placeholders, but actual content. Without the content you can't make the client's vision a reality. You need real content to build real websites.

-

-If you're doing a redesign of existing content, you're all set, just dump the site using a tool like [curl](http://curl.haxx.se) or wget[^1] and then do a content inventory -- list all the contents and make a special note of any patterns, repeated content and outlier content you find.  

-

-Once you have the content you can move on to sketching and wireframing -- figuring out the structure of the pages and overall site. I tend to do this stage mostly on paper because I find that to be the fastest way to get my ideas recorded, but I've seen other developers who use iPads with styluses, mind mapping tools, even one who used spreadsheets to create wireframes (yeah, he was a little strange). 

-

-Once I have a good idea of the hierarchy and structure of the content on the site, I immediately jump into the browser and start working with live HTML. At this point I'm just stacking text and creating structure, there's no CSS yet.

-

-There are two necessary components in this workflow: the web server and the files.

-

-##Tool #1: The Web Server

-

-For the full details on how you can start a web server in any folder on your computer, see the first part of this series. To quickly recap where we left off, recall that we set up our example project in `~/Sites/myproject/`. We then open up our terminal application and type:

-

-~~~language-bash

-cd ~/Sites/myproject/ && serve

-~~~

-

-Assuming you set up the aliases outlined in the first post, this will start up a server in the `myproject` folder. Now point your browser to [http://localhost/:8080](http://localhost/:8080) and you should see a directory listing of... nothing! That's okay, the important thing is that we've got a server up and running. 

-

-Now we're ready to turn our content into actual HTML files.

-

-##Tool #2: Plain Text

-

-Up until now I've been using a phrase I don't particularly like -- "the content". That makes it sound like it's just a pile of stuff. But it's not. It's words, phrases, sentences, pitches, headlines, sub headlines, outlines, lists, tables, buttons, forms, charts, illustrations, images, videos. "The content" is generic, the contents of the site you're building are not. This isn't just semantics, it's your first clue in how to get your workflow in line with the web itself.

-

-Notice two that almost everything in that list is either text, an image or a video. 

-

-At its core this is what the web is made of -- text and images. This is why starting your work in a graphics editor doesn't make sense. The web is mostly text. Even fancy landing pages and ultra-slick web apps are ultimately about serving up text and images in the some way.

-

-And within that core, for most sites, "the content" is text. So when we're designing in the browser we'll start where the web does, with text. Then we'll add structure to that text. Then we can actually **design** pages optimized to display that structured text rather than just decorating some filler and hoping for the best.

-

-### The Power of Markdown

-

-Starting with just the text makes it much easier to see the structure of your content and mark it up accordingly. 

-

-To my mind the best way to markup your documents at this stage is to use John Gruber's [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/). Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool which allows you to markup text using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write format and then convert it to structurally valid HTML. While it won't allow you to markup every thing you might need in the end, it's perfect for generating quick prototypes like this. You can read through the [Markdown documentation over on Daring Fireball](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax).

-

-Best of all the syntax of Markdown is extremely simple, you can pick it up in an afternoon and reach the level of mastery we need in a day or two. 

-

-To markup our content we'd just dive into our plain text files and add a bit of structure. Let's say you had some text that looks like this:

-

-~~~{language-markup}

-Acme Widgets

-

-We're Awesome Widget Makers

-

-Crank your widgets faster with ACME Widgets

-

-Our Widgets are the best in the business. You can rely on ACME widgets day in and day out. The toughest, most dependable widgets out there.

-

-What can ACME Widgets do for you?

-

-We can help you build better subwidgets

-We can make you life widgetier

-We can solve all your widget headaches

-~~~

-

-Let's use Markdown to add some structure. The result might look something like this:

-

-~~~language-markup

-#We're Awesome Widget Makers

-

-##Crank your widgets faster with ACME Widgets

-

-Our Widgets are the best in the business. You can rely on ACME widgets day in and day out. The toughest, most dependable widgets out there.

-

-###What can ACME Widgets do for you?

-

-* We can help you build better subwidgets

-* We can make your life widgetier

-* We can solve all your widget headaches

-~~~

-

-You can refer to the [Markdown docs](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) for more details on the syntax, but the main thing to know is that `#` will be converted to `<h1>`, `##` to `<h2>` and so on. The asterisks denote an unordered list. The sentences in the middle will automatically be wrapped in `<p>` tags. We've added structure to the text, but kept things readable. 

-

-Why bother? Why not go straight to HTML? Well, in this case the content is simple enough that sure, you might as well, but with much more complex, real-world content marking everything up in pure HTML is going to make it very difficult to read. Remember, this is the prototyping stage, things will be changing and you'll likely need to edit, rearrange and change your content many times. The more readable it is, the easier it is to make those structural changes.

-

-### Tools for Converting to Plain Text

-

-Unfortunately, it's rare that a client gives you plain text files. Most clients deliver content in MS Word files or PDFs or something even stranger. I had one client who sent over all their content as a series of PowerPoint presentations. 

-

-The good news is that almost any files can be reduced to plain text. Regardless of how the client delivers the content, I convert it to plain text. For Word files I just open and save as plain text. That won't preserve any formatting, but you can keep the original around just to make sure you get the hierarchy and structure right. 

-

-For PDFs I use a tool called [pdftotext](http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html). OS X users can grab a handy installer from [Carsten Blüm](http://www.bluem.net/en/mac/packages/). There are also numerous free online PDF-to-text converters, as well as OCR software available. If the client hands you content in PowerPoint slides you can open it in PowerPoint, save it as a Rich Text document and then open the Rich Text document in TextEdit or similar and save as plain text.

-

-The point is to get your content in plain text form. 

-

-### Pandoc for Fame and Fortune

-

-The next step is to convert our Markdown-formatted file into an HTML file we can view in the browser using the server we set up above. There's a nearly unlimited number of ways we can convert from Markdown to actual HTML, but my favorite is [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/).

-

-Installing Pandoc is simple, just head over to the [Pandoc download page](http://code.google.com/p/pandoc/downloads/list) and grab the installer for your platform (for OS X grab the .dmg file, for Windows grab the .msi). Then double click the installer and follow the directions. 

-

-Once you have Pandoc installed you just need to run it on your markdown files. To do that fire up a terminal application. On OS X that would be Applications >> Utilities >> Terminal. On Windows you'll need [Cygwin](http://x.cygwin.com).

-

-I know, the command line is antiquated, mysterious and a bit frightening for many people. 

-

-I know that because it was that way for me too. But I kept noticing how much faster I could do things compared to visual apps. And I found that every time I used the terminal, it got a little less intimidating. I learned how to do one little thing that sped up my overall workflow. Then I learned another. And another. Today I use the terminal more than any other application. You don't have to go that far, but don't let it intimidate you. Just take it slow. Start with one thing that simplifies your life, like [the web server trick](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2013/11/easiest-way-get-started-designing-browser). 

-

-With that one already under your belt you're ready for Pandoc.

-

-Open your terminal and navigate to your project folder. To stick with the previous tutorial in this series we'll say our project files are in `~/Sites/myproject`:

-

-~~~{.language-bash}

-cd ~/Sites/myproject

-~~~

-

-Now that we're in the right directory we just need to invoke Pandoc:

-

-~~~{.language-bash}

-pandoc -s --smart -t html5 -o about.html about.txt

-~~~

-

-This line says, take the file `about.txt`, convert it from Markdown to HTML5 (that's the `-t html5` bit) and save the results in a new file named `about.html`. The `-s` flag at the beginning of the line tells Pandoc that we want this to be a standalone conversion, which means Pandoc will add `<html>`, `<head>`, `<body>` and a few other tags so that we have an actual valid HTML file rather than just a fragment of HTML. Pandoc even adds a link to the [HTML5shiv](https://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/) for IE. 

-

-The `--smart` flag turns on one little extra feature that converts straight quotes to actual or curly quotes. 

-

-Point your web browser to <http://localhost:8080/about.html> and you should see the results. View source and you'll notice that Pandoc has done a bunch of stuff:

-

-~~~language-markup

-<!DOCTYPE html>

-<html>

-<head>

-    <meta charset="utf-8">

-    <meta name="generator" content="pandoc">

-    <title></title>

-    <style type="text/css">code{white-space: pre;}</style>

-    <!--[if lt IE 9]>

-    <script src="http://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>

-    <![endif]-->

-</head>

-<body>

-    <h1 id="were-awesome-widget-makers">We're Awesome Widget Makers</h1>

-    <h2 id="crank-your-widgets-faster-with-acme-widgets">Crank your widgets faster with ACME Widgets</h2>

-    <p>Our Widgets are the best in the business. You can rely on ACME widgets day in and day out. The toughest, most dependable widgets out there.</p>

-    <h3 id="what-can-acme-widgets-do-for-you">What can ACME Widgets do for you?</h3>

-    <ul>

-        <li>We can help you build better subwidgets</li>

-        <li>We can make your life widgetier</li>

-        <li>We can solve all your widget headaches</li>

-    </ul>

-</body>

-</html>

-~~~

-Pandoc has converted all our Markdown formatting into actual HTML. Our hashes change to header tags and our list gets marked up as an unordered list. Don't worry too much about the IDs and all the header elements. That can be changed or deleted when you move to working with templates in an actual content management system. 

-

-As you can see we have a nicely structured HTML file which can serve as the basis of our templates or undergo further editing to add things like a site-wide navigation menu, header, logo and the like. 

-

-Hmm. Maybe that list at the end should be an ordered list (probably not, but for example's sake, go with me here). Well, that's easy to change. Just open up the `about.txt` files and change the markdown to look like this:

-

-~~~language-markup

-#We're Awesome Widget Makers

-

-##Crank your widgets faster with ACME Widgets

-

-Our Widgets are the best in the business. You can rely on ACME widgets day in and day out. The toughest, most dependable widgets out there.

-

-###What can ACME Widgets do for you?

-

-1. We can help you build better subwidgets

-2. We can make you life widgetier

-3. We can solve all your widget headaches

-~~~

-

-Run the same Pandoc command (**tip**: if you hit the up arrow in your terminal app it will bring up the last used command. Assuming you've done nothing else in the mean time, that will be the Pandoc command we ran before). 

-

-Refresh your browser and you should see that the list of things ACME widgets can do for you is now an ordered list. Hmm, maybe that header should be an H2? Maybe the client just called, they're sending over some updates for the page. None of that's a problem any more, you just update your text file, run Pandoc and see the results. Simple.

-

-## Further

-

-So far we've established a very basic, but fast workflow. We take our client provided content, convert it to text and with just two lines of code create HTML files and serve them locally for prototyping and structuring.

-

-All this does is give you quick and dirty HTML you can use for prototyping. Why is that useful?

-

-As Stephen Hay has [said repeatedly](http://www.the-haystack.com/) (and [written a book about](http://www.responsivedesignworkflow.com/), which you should read), starting with raw, unstyled HTML forces you to focus and prioritize. Hay suggests asking yourself, "what is the message that needs to be communicated if I was only able to provide them with unstyled HTML?" Start there, with the content -- the most important content -- and design everything around that.

-

-We've got that basic unstyled HTML. What if you want to get a little bit fancier with Pandoc? Well, you certainly can. I do. 

-

-In the next installment in this series we'll look at some advanced ways to use Pandoc including customizing the HTML template it uses, adding site-wide elements like navigation, headers and footers, as well as the part most designers all waiting for -- adding an actual stylesheet. 

-

-So stay tuned. In the mean time, you can head over the [Pandoc documentation](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html) if you'd like to get a head start.

-

-[^1]: If you prefer a graphical download check out [Sitesucker](http://www.sitesucker.us/mac/mac.html) for OS X or [HTTrack](http://www.httrack.com) for Windows

-

-If you want to learn some more handy tips and tricks for improving your responsive design workflows, I'm writing a book to teach you exactly that (and a whole lot more). Sign up for the mailing list below to hear more about the book and get a discount when it's released.

-

diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-12_what-is-responsive-web-design.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-12_what-is-responsive-web-design.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 9d63bf5..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-12_what-is-responsive-web-design.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,75 +0,0 @@
----
-title: What is Responsive Web Design?
-pub_date: 2014-02-12 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/02/what-is-responsive-web-design
-metadesc: A gentle introduction to responsive web design... hint, it's more than flexible sites with some media queries
-tags: Responsive Web Design
-
----
-
-[*Note: This is an excerpt from my book, [Build a Better Web With Responsive Web Design](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design). This starts out pretty simple, but even if you're already familiar with the basic concept of responsive design you might learn a few new things. My definition of responsive web design is very braod, encompassing ideas like taking a mobile-first approach and using progressive enhancement to make sure you responsive web site works everywhere.*]
-
-The phrase responsive design was coined by Ethan Marcotte in 2009 in an *A List Apart* article, entitled, appropriately enough, *[Responsive Web Design](http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/)*. At the most basic level Marcotte used the phrase to mean building websites that respond to users' needs.
-
-The specific case Marcotte wrote about was making websites flow into different layouts for a variety of screens, especially mobile. When Marcotte's article first appeared in 2009 the iPhone was just starting to be truly ubiquitous. Clients were asking for "iPhone websites". But it wasn't just the iPhone, the handheld device market was just about to explode. There was a fear that the web would devolve into a multitude of separate websites, each tailored to a specific device, which, as Marcotte and others recognized, would be insane.
-
-As Marcotte writes "can we really continue to commit to supporting each new user agent with its own bespoke experience? At some point, this starts to feel like a zero sum game. But how can we -- and our designs -- adapt?"
-
-The answer was two-fold. First there were some new tools available to help us out, namely the @media query in CSS 3. Then there was the second and more powerful part, which meant going back to the web's origins and rediscovering something many of us lost along the way -- the web is an inherently flexible medium.
-
-In practice responsive design means creating websites that look good no matter which screen they might be on. Building a responsive website means making sure that the site is easy to read and navigate with a minimum of resizing, scrolling or panning. Building a responsive website means building a site your users and customers will recognize and enjoy regardless of which device they might be using -- mobile phone, tablet, laptop, desktop or even the internet enabled toaster of the future.
-
-![Marcotte's original responsive demo site, shown here at roughly phone, tablet and desktop sizes](images/marcotte-demo.png)
-
-It sounds wonderful at first blush -- who doesn't want their website to look great and work well on any screen? Even those we don't know about yet? Stop and think about it for a bit though and suddenly responsive design starts to sound unfathomably complex. 
-
-How in the world do you make your site look good no matter where it's being served up -- phone, tablet, ebook reader, laptop, desktop and more?
-
-To complicate matters even those nice clean divisions -- mobile, tablet and desktop -- are fast disappearing. There are phones with tablet-like 7-inch HD screens, desktop-size monitors that run Android 4.0 and hybrid devices like Ubuntu's mobile OS which can dock to a monitor -- is that mobile? Is it a desktop? What if the answer to both questions is yes?
-
-Also consider that the "screens" of the future might not be screens at all. Google Glass is already in the wild and while it's still a "screen" of sorts, it's certainly different from what most of us are used to. Several years ago Microsoft showed off a prototype projection device dubbed the "OmniTouch" which essentially put the "screen" anywhere -- the desk in front of you, the wall during a presentation, your hand, anywhere. Other, somewhat more likely to actually make it to market "screens" include "smart" glass for windows, that can can pull all sort of tricks, including turning opaque to become a display. At the other end of the spectrum Sony is hard at work on displays that behave like and are no thicker than a single sheet of paper.
-
-![Google glasses. Say what you will, they're out there and they want to load your site. <small>Image credit: Giuseppe Costantino, [CC/Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/69730904@N03/8813574238/).</small>](images/google-glass.png)
-
-Some of these ideas will become part of our reality, some will not. Other ideas we can't even imagine right now will also be created. 
-
-The "screen" of the future might be your sunglasses, your hand, the back of the seat in front of you on the bus or the window by your bed when you wake up in the morning. Which of these is mobile, which is a tablet and which is a desktop? To build a future-proof web we need to stop focusing so heavily on individual devices, yes, but why stop there? While we're at it we might as well get rid of the notion of device categories as well since the hardware has already started doing exactly that. In the end even thinking of "screens" will soon seem antiquated. For this reason most web standards rarely use the word "screen", opting instead to talk about "viewports". 
-
-Ultimately it makes no sense to frame our discussions by device type or even context. All of these devices, these screens, these viewports, these *things* are just portals into the world of the web. The more portals that can see into the web the more people you can bring into your world. 
-
-The future of the web is a chaos and confusion of portals. Building a tricked out site for each of them is an insane idea today and it will be even more insane two years, five years, twenty years from now.
-
-So what do we do? Well, we could wait and see. Keep building sites that target individual devices until we collapse under the weight of the work (or price ourselves out of anything clients would be willing to pay). Or we can take what developers like Brad Frost call a "future-friendly" approach. That is, we can do the best we can with the tools we have available today and make decisions on which tools to use based on which are the most likely to work in the future. 
-
-Let's step back in time for a minute to 2007 and consider the developer's dilemma when the iPhone first launched. You need to embed a movie in your page. The do-nothing approach would dictate you just embed a Flash player and call it a day. No Flash? Too bad. Apple will come around because, well, everyone has Flash. Except that we all know how that turned out.
-
-If instead we took a more future-friendly approach we might embed the movie using HTML5's video tag, while offering a Flash fallback for browsers that don't support modern web standards. This would have meant a bit more work at the time since there's a bit more code to write and we would have had to figure out exactly how to do it. 
-
-But the easier, "do-nothing" approach would have meant more work down the road when you had to convert your site to HTML5 video anyway since even Adobe has abandoned the idea of including Flash on mobile devices.
-
-What can we learn from this little example? Well, first and foremost we need to embrace solutions that work today. There's no point in designing *only* for the future. In this case going with only HTML5 video tags would probably have been a bad choice; in 2007 you still needed a Flash-based fallback. 
-
-We need to make our sites work well with the web as it is, but we should also keep an ear cocked toward the future and embrace those tools and design patterns that are most likely to work with the devices of the future as well. Brad Frost put it quite well when he said, "We don't know what will be under Christmas trees two years from now, but that's what we need to design for today."
-
-Right now that means using the responsive design tools and best practices that follow to build websites. 
-
-Let's start with the three basic tools of responsive design -- fluid layouts, media queries and flexible media. 
-
-*   *Fluid Layouts*: By defining our content grids in mathematical proportions rather than pixels our content will fit any screen. So instead of having a 750px main column and a 250px sidebar, the columns would be defined as 75% and 25% respectively.
-*    *Media Queries*: Media queries are a CSS feature that allow styles to be applied conditionally, based on criteria such as screen width and pixel density. With as little as 3 or 4 lines of code you can resize your entire website and re-flow content to fit different screen sizes.
-*    *Flexible Media*: Dimensions of images, video, and animations should be flexible and adapt to suit different screen sizes similar to how grids should be fluid.
-            
-To these three core principles of responsive design I am adding two more -- mobile-first design and progressive enhancement.
-
-*   *Mobile-first Design*: Start by making sure your site and its content work on the least capable devices your visitors are using. By all means build as fancy and JavaScripty of a site as you want; just do it on basic, solid foundations.
-*   *Progressive Enhancement*: Don't *stop* with that most basic version of your site; start there. Then layer in complexity and more advanced features for more capable devices, progressively enhancing it as the devices become more capable.
-
-That may sound like a lot of stuff to keep track of, but guess how many of the things in this list are actually new? 
-
-Just one, @media queries. Everything else is almost as old as the web. That means you don't really have to learn anything new, you just need to shift your approach in some subtle, but profound ways.
-
-Implementing responsive design is simple, but, as they say, the devil is in the details.
-
-That's where this book comes in. You bought this book, which means you're open to new ideas and new workflows. That's good because I'm going to challenge some long-held assumptions behind many of the sites you've probably built. I'm also going to tell you that, most likely, you've been doing it wrong, as they say. That's okay, I did it wrong for years too. Sure the sites we built worked, after all the biggest challenge we had was making things work in IE 6. And work they did, but we were still working from flawed premises and it's time to change that.
-
-It's time to step back from our toolkits and workflows and question everything because those fixed width sites designed for desktop screens don't work well on smartphones and probably don't work at all on feature phones. They probably won't look all that great in Google Glass or projected directly onto your retina either. As William Gibson said, the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. And that's what we need to develop, websites and web apps capable of handling the uneven distribution of the future.
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-19_complete-guide-picture-element.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-19_complete-guide-picture-element.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 8f1c18b..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-19_complete-guide-picture-element.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,235 +0,0 @@
----

-title: A Complete Guide to the `<Picture>` Element

-pub_date: 2014-02-19 09:30:23

-slug: /blog/2014/02/complete-guide-picture-element

-tags: Responsive Images, Responsive Web Design

-metadesc: Everything you ever wanted to know about the proposed <picture> element. Just don't use it quite yet.

-code: True

-tutorial: True

-

----

-

-*If you've ever struggled building responsive websites, this post is for you. It's part of a series on responsive design, in particular responsive images, pulled from my book, [Responsive Web Design](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design). If you find this excerpt useful, and want even more ideas on how responsive design can help you create amazing websites, pick up a copy today.*

-

-[**Last Update: 08/20/2014**]

-

-I also wrote up the back story of the `<picture>` element and all the hard work that made it possible for Ars Technica. If you want to know not just how to use it, but how a small group of people created it, be sure to <a href="http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/how-a-new-html-element-will-make-the-web-faster/" rel="me">check that out</a> as well.

-

-[TOC]

-

-Most people who've never heard the phrase before think that "responsive design" refers to building websites that are, well, responsive. That is, fast pages that respond to user input with no lag or discernible load times.

-

-Of course that's not exactly what the phrase "responsive design" refers to in most web development contexts, but I think the web might be better off if it were. I don't think we need to throw out Ethan Marcotte's original definition of responsive design -- fluid grids, flexible images and @media queries -- but perhaps we could add another criteria to our definition: responsive websites should, above all else, be **really, really fast**.

-

-There are many, many ways to speed up websites, responsive or otherwise, but few things will lighten the load like reducing image size. If you've done nothing yet to optimize the front-end portion of your site, images are almost always the best place to start. Even without responsive images, I managed to shave several seconds off this site's load time using some very simple, basic optimizations.

-

-Nothing, however, is going to speed up mobile page load times like responsive images. And the good news is, thanks to a lot of hard work from some deditcated developers,  responsive images are here.

-

-## The `<picture>` Element

-

-Following the development of `<picture>` was a bit like listening to [Statler and Waldorf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statler_and_Waldorf) in the [balcony of the Muppet's theatre](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpYEJx7PkWE): "I love it!" "It's terrible!" "It's brilliant!" "It's okay" "It could be better" "It's awful!" "I love it!" And so on as developers and browser makers hashed out the details.

-

-In short, it was a soap opera. But in the end sanity prevailed and it got done. We have a draft specification for a new HTML element -- `<picture>`.

-

-As of right now `<picture>` is available in the dev channel of Chrome and in Firefox 34+. In both cases you'll need to enable it. In Firefox, head to `about:config` and search for "dom.image.picture.enabled". In Chrome you'll need to go to [chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features](chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features), enable that feature and restart.

-

-By the end of the year `<picture>` support should be on by default in the stable versions of both Chrome and Firefox. More importantly for those of us taking a mobile-first approach to development, `<picture.` support will be available in the mobile versions as well.

-

-What about other browsers? Opera is based on Blink and will support `<picture>` (hopefully) when Chrome does. Apple's Safari supports the `srcset` portion of `picture`, which we'll discuss in a minute. WebKit, which powers Safari, will soon have support for the rest of picture, but Apple won't likely ship it in Safari until the next major update. According to Microsoft's new [Status.Modern.IE](http://status.modern.ie/pictureelement) site, `<picture>` support is "under consideration" for a future release. 

-

-Fortunately for us, browsers that don't understand `<picture>` have a fallback -- the good old `<img>` element.

-

-That means there's nothing to stop you from using `<picture>` right now. If you need a solution that works everywhere right now, there's PictureFill, a JavaScript based polyfill, but it requires JavaScript, which may not be right for every solution. On the plus side, PictureFill only kicks in when the browser doesn't have native support. Personally, I'm going ahead with straight `picture` for most clients. 

-

-## Digging Into Picture

-

-The `<picture>` element looks a bit like the HTML5 `<audio>` and `<video>` tags. The actual `<picture>` tag acts as a container element for `<source>` elements which then points to the actual images you want to load. 

-

-The big difference is that `<picture>` doesn't actually load your image. For that you need an `<img>` tag. So the browser evaluates all the various attributes you've specified in your `<picture>` block, picks the best image and then loads the image into the `<img>` inside your `<picture>` tag. 

-

-In other words, `<picture>` doesn't actually display your image, it just tells the browser which image to display. Think of it as a way to filter possibilities for the `img` tag inside it.

-

-To help the browser pick the best image you have three major components to work with, all attributes of `<source>` elements within the `<picture>` tag, except for `srcset`, which can be an attribute of image as well.

-

-The three attributes are: 

-

-* `srcset`: Yes, the same `srcset` that was [originally proposed for the `<img>` tag](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2013/09/responsive-images-srcset). The `srcset` attribute gives the browser a list of possible images, along with some (optional) "hints" about the screen resolution and screen size that correspond with each image source.

-

-* `media`: The `media` attribute is where you would put your `@media` query information. When the `@media` attribute evaluates to true, the browser then moves to the associated `srcset`.

-

-* `sizes`: The `sizes` attribute allows you to specify a set of intrinsic sizes for the images described in the srcset attribute. This one is a little tricky at first, but basically it allows you to tell the browser how much of the viewport should be taken up by the image. This will become clearer in the example below.

-{^ .list--indented }

-

-To get a better understanding of how each attribute works, let's dive into some code.

-

-## Using the `<picture>` Element for High Resolution Images

-

-Let's start with the first use case in the [responsive images use case list](http://usecases.responsiveimages.org): "[resolution-based selection](http://usecases.responsiveimages.org/#resolution-based-selection)". Essentially we want to serve high-resolution images to high-res devices while allowing low-res devices to avoid the bandwidth penalty of overly-large files.

-

-Here's how you would use `<picture>` to give Hi-DPI screens high-res images and regular screens regular images. 

-

-Let's say we're trying to build a more responsive version of my [Responsive Web Design book page](/books/responsive-web-design). Let's say we have two book cover images -- `cover1x.jpg`, which is a normal resolution image, and `cover2x.jpg` which is the same image, but at a much higher resolution. 

-

-Let's go ahead and make things [future-friendly](http://futurefriendlyweb.com) by adding a third image, `cover4x.jpg`, to handle those 4K+ monitors that are just a few years away from being on every desktop. So with three images at three resolutions our `<picture>` code would look like this:

-

-~~~{.language-markup}

-<picture>

-    <source srcset="cover1x.jpg 1x, cover2x.jpg 2x, cover4x.jpg 4x">

-    <img src="cover1x.jpg" alt="Responsive Web Design cover">

-</picture>

-~~~

-

-Here we have a simple `<picture>` tag with one `<source>` tag and an `<img>` tag which doubles as a fall back for older browsers. Within the `<source>` tag we've used the `srcset` attribute to say to the browser (or "user-agent" in spec-speak) if the screen pixel density is 1x then load `cover1x.jpg`; if the screen density is 2x then load the higher-resolution `cover2x.jpg`. Finally, if the screen density is 4x, grab `cover4x.jpg`. 

-

-What happens if the resolution is somewhere in between these values? Well, you could add in other resolutions (e.g. 1.3x, 1.6x and so on) and URLs if you want to be explicit. Remember though that which image to choose is entirely up to the browser. The `srcset` values we've given are described in the spec as "hints". It may be that, despite having a high-res screen, the user has explicitly instructed the browser (through a preference setting) not to download large images over 3G. 

-

-Screen resolution is after all just one factor in deciding on the appropriate image to download. As developers we don't (and never will) have all the information that the browser does, which is why the final decision lies with the browser. As I've said before, this is a good thing; this is exactly the way it should be.

-

-Here's the our resolution-based query in action. Provided you're got a high-res display and are running a browser with `<picture>` support this should display the high-res image:

-

-<picture>

-    <source srcset="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-2x.jpg 2x" />

-    <img src="/media/images/demos/srcsetdemo-fallback.jpg" alt="demo of srcset in action" />

-</picture>

-

-That's how you would handle the simple resolution-based selection scenario. Before we move on though, let's look at another value you can add to `srcset` declarations: width. 

-

-Consider this scenario: we have roughly the same situation, we'll limit it to two images this time, one high-res, one not. But we don't know how wide the image is going to be on the user's screen. Say our normal-res image is 640px wide. On a high-res screen that happens to be only 320 effective pixels wide, a 640px image would actually qualify as a high-res image. The situation is slightly more nuanced than a simple 1x vs 2x screen. To always send the larger image to 2x screens might still waste bandwidth because we're not accounting for the size of the screen/image.

-

-Here's how you can handle this scenario with `<picture>`. Let's stick with the same assumptions in the last scenario, but let's be a little more specific this time, `cover1x.jpg` is 640px wide and `cover2x.jpg` is 1280px wide. Here's what the code would look like:

-

-~~~{.language-markup}

-<picture>

-    <source sizes="100%" srcset="cover1x.jpg 640w, cover2x.jpg 1280w">

-    <img src="cover1x.jpg" alt="Responsive Web Design cover">

-</picture>

-~~~

-

-Now our `srcset` values are based on width and the browser gets to select the best image based on another `<source>` attribute,  `sizes`. In this case we've told the browser that final image selected will be as wide as the entire viewport. Later we'll see how you can use this with other values.

-

-The final result will be as wide as the viewport, so if the user is on a device that is effectively 320px wide, but at 2x density the browser would, barring other conflicting info like user settings, pick `cover1.jpg`. If the user's viewport happened to be 640px wide, but the density was only 1x, `cover1.jpg` would again be used. On the other hand if the viewport happened to be 640px wide, but the density was 2x, `cover2.jpg` would be used.

-

-## Different Image Sizes Based on Viewport Width

-

-When you think of responsive images, this is probably the use case you think of -- serving smaller images to smaller screens, larger ones to larger screens. Later we'll see how you can combine this with the pixel density stuff above for even more control.

-

-First, here's how `<picture>` can be used to serve up different images based on viewport width. 

-

-For the following examples, let's say we have three images, `small.jpg`, `medium.jpg` and `large.jpg` and we want to serve them to the corresponding viewport sizes. Let's make one more assumption: that we're taking a mobile-first approach and our fallback will also be the smallest image.

-

-Here's what that code would look like:

-

-~~~{.language-markup}

-<picture>

-    <source media="(min-width: 45em)" srcset="large.jpg">

-    <source media="(min-width: 18em)" srcset="medium.jpg">

-    <img src="small.jpg" alt="Robert Anton Wilson laughing">

-</picture>

-~~~

-

-This time we've used the `media` attribute to write a couple queries that work just like CSS `@media` queries. Our mobile-first approach here means any viewport larger than 45em gets `large.jpg`, any viewport between 18em and 45em gets `medium.jpg` and anything smaller than 18em gets our `small.jpg`. 

-

-Notice that here our smaller image is in the `<img>` tag, not a `<source>` tag. While we could add a third `<source>` tag with a srcset pointing to `small.jpg`, there's no need to do that since, as I mentioned earlier, `<picture>` and `<source>` are not the tags that actually load images. The `<picture>` element must contain an `<img>` element for the browser to actually display your image. Browsers that understand `<picture>` will first parse through all your rules, pick an image and then swap that image into the `src` attribute on the `<img>` tag.

-

-In this example not only is the `<img>` tag a fallback for older browsers, its `src` value also becomes the image used by `<picture>` savvy browsers if neither media query evaluates to true.

-

-Here's the above example in action (wrapped in a figure tag)

-

-<figure>

-<picture>

-    <source media="(min-width: 45em)" srcset="/media/images/2014/wilson-large.jpg">

-    <source media="(min-width: 28em)" srcset="/media/images/2014/wilson-medium.jpg">

-    <img src="/media/images/2014/wilson-small.jpg" alt="Robert Anton Wilson laughing">

-</picture>

-<figcaption>Robert Anton Wilson. Image from Wikicommons</figcaption>

-</figure>

-

-## Different Image Size and Resolution Based on Viewport Width

-

-Now let's combine both of the previous examples and use `<picture>` to serve up different size and resolution images based on viewport width and device pixel density. To do that we'll need six images -- `small.jpg`, `small-hd.jpg`, `medium.jpg`, `medium-hd.jpg`, `.large.jpg` and `large-hd.jpg` (side note: in the future you'll want a CMS that's good at generating tons of image options from the one you actually upload. Otherwise, plan on going insane while resizing images in Photoshop).

-

-Okay, let's put all those images into a `<picture>` tag:

-

-~~~{.language-markup}

-<picture>

-    <source media="(min-width: 45em)" srcset="large.jpg, large-hd.jpg 2x">

-    <source media="(min-width: 18em)" srcset="medium.jpg, medium-hd.jpg 2x">

-    <source srcset="small.jpg, small-hd.jpg 2x">

-    <img src="small.jpg" alt="Robert Anton Wilson laughing" >

-</picture>

-~~~

-

-This looks just like the previous example except that now our `scrset` includes a second image and the 2x value to indicate that our `-hd.jpg` images are for high resolution screens. 

-

-Also note that this time we did use a third `<source>` tag since small screen devices may still be high resolution. That is, while we don't need a media attribute, we do want to check the resolution, which requires a third `<source>` tag.

-

-## Solving the Art Direction Conundrum

-

-Here's a common responsive design problem: You have an image that, at full size on large screens, easily conveys its information. However, when that image is scaled down to fit on a small screen it becomes difficult to understand the image. For example consider an image of the president shaking hands with Robert Anton Wilson. At full size the image might show both men and some background, but when shrunk down you would barely be able to make out that it's two men shaking hands, let alone have any clue who the men might be. 

-

-In situations like this it makes sense to crop the image rather than just scaling it down. In the example above that might mean cropping the image to be just the President and Robert Anton Wilson's heads. You no longer know they're shaking hands, but most of the time it's more important to know who they are than what they're doing.

-

-Frankly, handling this scenario is really more a problem for your CMS than the `<picture>` element. But assuming you have a way to generate the cropped image (or images if you're doing both normal and high-res) then the code would look something like this:

-

-~~~{.language-markup}

-<picture>

-    <source media="(min-width: 45em)" srcset="original.jpg, original-hd.jpg 2x">

-    <source media="(min-width: 18em)" srcset="cropped-medium.jpg, cropped-medium-hd.jpg 2x">

-    <source srcset="cropped-small.jpg, cropped-small-hd.jpg 2x">

-    <img src="cropped-small.jpg" alt="The President shaking hands with Robert Anton Wilson" >

-</picture>

-~~~

-

-Here we're assuming there are two crops that make sense for the viewports they're targeting. In this case that means a crop that fits viewports between 18em and 45em and another (presumably tighter) crop for smaller screens. We're also assuming we have both regular and high-resolution versions of the image.

-

-See what I mean about having a CMS that makes it really easy to generate a ton of different images from a single source? Having to do something like this by hand would suck for even the smallest of blogs.

-

-There are other possible scenarios that fit the art direction problem, for example, providing a black and white version of a color pie chart for monochrome screens.

-

-## Handling More Complex Scenarios

-

-So far we've looked at pretty easy-to-grok scenarios using `<picture>`, but the new element addresses some more complex situations as well. For example, we might have a responsive layout where images morph depending on viewport width (and thus there may not always be a one-to-one correlation between viewport width and image size). 

-

-The `<picture>` element can handle this scenario as well, but this where the syntax starts to get, well, things can get complicated (as things tend to do when you want them to be very flexible).

-

-Imagine you have a storefront with three breakpoints, one for phone-ish devices, another for tablet-ish and a desktop layout. You build the site using a mobile-first approach, so you start with a single-column layout with images that span the full width of the viewport. At the first breakpoint the images switch to a two-column layout and may be a bit smaller than the full-width, single-column images just before the breakpoint (even though the viewport is larger now). Finally, on the larger layout the images move to a three-column grid and start off at the same size as the two-column layout but then scale up to be as large or larger than the images in the single-column layout.

-

-[![Illustration of scenario where image size does not necessary correspond to viewport](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/picture_element_illustration.png)](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/picture_element_illustration.png "View Image 1")

-: The very common image grid scenario. In this example we're using a single column (100% width) on small screens, two columns (50% width) on medium screens and three columns (rough 33%, but with some additional padding) on large screens.

-

-So what do we do with this scenario? Again, the first thing you'll need is a CMS that generates, let's say six, images to fit this scenario. Assuming the images are in place, the code is actually not that bad, albeit a little verbose. Here's some example code pulled directly from the responsive images spec:

-

-~~~{.language-markup}

-<picture>

-<source sizes="(max-width: 30em) 100%, (max-width: 50em) 50%, calc(33% - 100px)"

-        srcset="pic100.jpg 100w, pic200.jpg 200w, pic400.jpg 400w,

-                pic800.jpg 800w, pic1600.jpg 1600w, pic3200.jpg 3200w">

-<img src="pic400.jpg" alt="Robert Anton Wilson laughing">

-</picture>

-~~~

-

-Believe it or not, this is actually the terse way to write this out. You *could* write this out as six different `<source>` elements each with the entire `srcset` above, though I have no idea why you would want to do that.

-

-Let's step through the code line by line. The first thing we do is set up a series of breakpoints along with the size of the image relative to the viewport width at each of those breakpoints. So `(max-width: 30em) 100%` covers our smaller screen where the layout is single column and the image is full width. Then `(max-width: 50em) 50%` covers our medium layout which happens between 30em and 50em, where images are now 50% the width of the viewport.

-

-For the last argument in `sizes` things are a little trickier. There's no max-width, this just applies to everything over 50em. The single argument uses `calc()` to say images are 1/3 the viewport width, but there's 100px of padding as well. You may have heard that you should avoid using `calc()` in CSS since it tends to slow things down. Is the same thing true here? I actually don't know; if you do, chime in in the comments. 

-

-Once we have the image-to-viewport ratio setup for each of our layout possibilities, then we use `srcset` to point the browser to our six image sizes, adding a width specification to help the browser pick the best one. In the end the browser will pick the optimal image based on the current image-to-viewport ratio, current viewport size and current viewport density. 

-

-Complicated though this may be, it's actually pretty awesome. You've got the ability to serve the right image to the right screen based on the actual size the image will be on the screen. That's far more effective and powerful than just saying send a small image to a small screen and a big on to a big screen.

-

-## Further Reading

-

-Picture is awesome, but sprawling in scope. It's probably the single most potentially confusing element in HTML, but fortunately the basic uses cases are simple.

-

-Still, it never hurts to have more info. With that in mind here's a list of tutorials and write ups that you should check out as well.

-

-* [Native Responsive Images](https://dev.opera.com/articles/native-responsive-images/) -- Yoav Weiss writing for the Opera Dev center on how to use the `<picture>` element. Weiss wrote the code for Blink/WebKit's `<picture>` support; very few people understand `<picture>` as well as he does.

-

-* [The official Responsive Images Community Group website](http://responsiveimages.org/) Lots of good stuff here, including some [demos](http://responsiveimages.org/demos/).

-

-* [Responsive Images Use Cases](http://usecases.responsiveimages.org/) -- This covers the use cases and rational behind the `<picture>` element.

-

-* [The picture Element](http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/embedded-content.html#the-picture-element) -- the HTML spec document. 

-{^ .list--indented }

-

diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-20_live-editing-sass-firefox-vim-keybindings.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-20_live-editing-sass-firefox-vim-keybindings.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index a133705..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-02-20_live-editing-sass-firefox-vim-keybindings.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,118 +0,0 @@
----

-title: Live Editing Sass in Firefox with Vim Keybindings

-pub_date: 2014-02-20 10:08:45

-slug: /blog/2014/02/live-editing-sass-firefox-vim-keybindings

-tags: Building Smarter Workflows

-metadesc: The Firefox developer tools now support live editing Sass files right in the browser and Vim keyboard shortcuts

-code: True

-tutorial: True

-

----

-

-[TOC]

-

-The Firefox developer tools now support [live editing Sass files right in the browser](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/02/live-editing-sass-and-less-in-the-firefox-developer-tools/).

-

-This is, like a lot of what Mozilla has been doing lately, a case of Firefox playing catch-up with the competition -- Chrome has had similar features for quite some time. 

-

-On the other hand, Firefox is ahead of Chrome in another area: [Vim and Emacs keybindings](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Using_the_Source_Editor#Alternative_key_mappings) (which I believe is because the editor in Firefox is based on [CodeMirror](http://codemirror.net/)).

-

-If that means nothing to you then stick with Chrome. If, however, you're loath to abandon the power of Vim or Emacs for editing files in the browser, this means you can have the best of both worlds -- live editing Sass files in the browser *and* Vim or Emacs keybindings.

-

-Because live editing [Sass files](http://sass-lang.com/) in the browser with Vim keybindings? That's some awesome sauce right there.

-

-If you prefer, here's a screencast walking you through the process. Other wise, read on.

-

-<div class="embed-container-960">

-<div class='embed-container'>

-    <iframe src='https://player.vimeo.com/video/87289985' frameborder='0' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-## Set Up Sass Editing in Firefox.

-

-The Mozilla Hacks blog posted a [quick overview](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/02/live-editing-sass-and-less-in-the-firefox-developer-tools/) on how to set things up, but it assumes you've already got Sass set up to compile sourcemaps. In case you don't, here's some more complete instructions on how to set up Sass and Firefox[^1].

-

-### Firefox

-

-First off you need a pre-release version of Firefox. Both the Sass sourcemaps support and the Vim/Emacs keybindings are available starting with Firefox 29. I use the [Nightly channel](http://nightly.mozilla.org/) (currently Firefox 30a1), but the [Aurora channel](http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/aurora/) (currently Firefox 29a2) will work as well. 

-

-### Sass and Compass

-

-The next step is to set up Sass such that it will output a sourcemap file in addition to your CSS.

-

-What in the world is a sourcemap? Simply put, sourcemaps are a way to map compiled code back to its pre-compiled source. The reason any of this is possible at all is because Sass recently added support for CSS sourcemaps. That means that when it turns your Sass code into CSS, Sass also outputs a map of what it did. Firefox can then look at the map and connect the rendered CSS back to your source Sass. The sourcemap support is brand new and currently only found in the pre-release versions of Sass.

-

-I happen to like the Sass offshoot [Compass](http://compass-style.org/) better than vanilla Sass as Compass provides some very handy extras like CSS 3 prefixing tools. As with Sass, only the pre-release versions of Compass support sourcemaps (and even those are [not quite there](https://github.com/chriseppstein/compass/issues/1108)). 

-

-Fortunately we can get the pre-release versions of both Sass and Compass with a single command. 

-

-~~~.language-bash

-$ sudo gem install compass --pre

-~~~

-

-This command tells the Ruby gem system that we want the pre-release version of Compass (that's what the --pre flag is for). In the process we'll also get the latest version of Sass that works with Compass. 

-

-You're probably used to starting Compass with something like `compass watch`. Eventually you'll be able to do that, but for now the only way I've been able to get Sass, Compass and sourcemaps working together is by invoking `sass` directly like so:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-`sass --compass --poll --sourcemap --watch sass/screen.scss:screen.css`

-~~~

-

-To break that down:

-

-1. `sass --compass` -- this bit starts Sass and includes Compass so that we have access to all our extras.

-2. `--poll` -- this gets around a super annoying permissions error. This shouldn't be necessary, but currently it gets around a bug. Alternately you can start `sass` with `sudo`.

-3. `--watch` -- watch tells sass to watch for changes rather than just compiling once.

-4. `--sourcemap sass/screen.scss:screen.css` -- This is the important part. We tell Sass that we want to use sourcemaps and then we create a mapping. In this case I've told Sass to make a map explaining how the file screen.scss inside the `sass` folder turns into the `screen.css` output file. This is what Firefox will use to map CSS rules to Sass rules.

-

-Sass is now running, watching our files for changes. Now we just need a local server of some kind. I typically use my [my python server trick](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2013/11/easiest-way-get-started-designing-browser) for quick prototyping, but anything will work -- local Apache, Nginx, Django development server, whatever development server RoR offers -- anything will work.

-

-### Putting it All Together

-

-Now let's go back to Firefox and let it know about our sourcemap. 

-

-Here's where things are significantly different than Chrome. I'm not sure which is "better" but if you're used to the Chrome approach, the Firefox approach may seem strange. 

-

-![Right click in the CSS field to show original source](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/show_original_sources.jpg){: class="img-right"}First load your localhost url. Now open the developer tools and inspect some element you want to change. Now all you need to do is right click in the CSS section of the Inspector tab and choose "Show original sources". Now click the little link next to the style rules and Firefox will open your Sass file in the Style editor.

-

-Now just hit save, either the link next to the file list or hit CMD-S (CTRL-S). The first time you save a file you have to tell Firefox where the file is on your disk -- navigate to the folder with your Sass files and hit save, overwriting the original. You'll need to do this once for each Sass partial that you have, which is annoying if you've got a lot. I happen to prefer the Chrome method, which maps the local folder to a local URL. It's a bit more work to set up, but you only have to do it once.

-

-Either way though that's it, you're done. Edit Sass live in the browser, see your changes update almost instantly with no refresh.

-

-Here's what it looks like:

-

-[![Animated gif showing live Sass editing in Firefox](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/smaller-ff-tools.gif)](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/smaller-ff-tools.gif "View Image 1")

-: Just right click to change the view from compiled CSS to SCSS. Pretty Cool. Note that I've already saved the file once so Firefox knows where it is.

-

-

-## Vim or Emacs Keybindings

-

-I know, I know you were only in it for the keybindings, how the heck do you get those?

-

-Pretty simple. Open `about:config` and search for `devtools.editor.keymap`. Right click the "value" field and enter either "vim" or "emacs". I had to restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

-

-Now you have a way to edit Sass right in the browser and still get the benefit of all the keyboard shortcuts you've commited to muscle memory over the years.

-

-There's one annoying bug (at least I think it's a bug) for Vim users, `:w` (the Vim save command) does not work like CMD-S (CTRL-S); it will always open the file save dialog box rather than just writing to disk. It's annoying, but I haven't found a workaround yet.

-

-## Shortcomings Compared to Chrome

-

-While Firefox's combo of live editing Sass and Vim keybindings is awesome, there a couple things that I think could be improved.

-

-In Chrome if you CMD-click (or CTRL-click) on an individual CSS rule in the styles tab Chrome jumps you to the relevant file and moves your cursor right to that rule. It even highlights the line in yellow for a second or two so you know where the cursor is in the file. It's very slick and very useful. CMD-click a rule in Firefox and nothing special will happen. Bummer. 

-

-The other thing that's troubling me with Firefox is the need to "Save As" the first time you edit a Sass file. It feels janky to me and frankly it's a pain when your project has dozens and dozens of Sass partials. I much prefer Chrome's (admittedly perhaps more confusing at first) approach of associating a folder with a URL.

-

-Still, the Vim keybindings makes me more productive than I can be in Chrome without them so I'm back to Firefox.

-

-## Further Reading

-

-* Mozilla Hack Blog: [Live Editing Sass and Less in the Firefox Developer Tools](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/02/live-editing-sass-and-less-in-the-firefox-developer-tools/)

-* Tutsplus: [Developing With Sass and Chrome DevTools](http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/developing-with-sass-and-chrome-devtools--net-32805)

-* Ben Frain: [Faster Sass debugging and style iteration with source maps, Chrome Web Developer Tools and Grunt](http://benfrain.com/add-sass-compass-debug-info-for-chrome-web-developer-tools/)

-* Google Developer Docs: [Working with CSS Preprocessors](https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/css-preprocessors)

-* HTML5Rocks: [Sass/CSS Source Map debugging](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/revolutions2013/#toc-key-performance)

-{^ .list--indented }

-

-[^1]: At least here's how you make it happen for Sass; I know nothing about Less, much less Less with Grunt. If you prefer Less, head over to the [Mozilla Hack blog post](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/02/live-editing-sass-and-less-in-the-firefox-developer-tools/) and check out their instructions.

diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-04_how-to-build-responsive-websites-like-bruce-lee.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-04_how-to-build-responsive-websites-like-bruce-lee.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index c6e9036..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-04_how-to-build-responsive-websites-like-bruce-lee.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,54 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Why Responsive Design, or How to Build Websites Like Bruce Lee
-pub_date: 2014-03-04 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/03/how-to-build-responsive-websites-like-bruce-lee
-metadesc: Embracing the fluid nature of responsive web design means you can start building websites like Bruce Lee. 
-tags: Responsive Web Design
-
----
-
-[*Note: This is an excerpt from my book, [Build a Better Web With Responsive Web Design](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design). If you like what you read here, pick up a copy of the book and be sure to sign up for the newsletter over there in the sidebar.*]
-
-Spend enough time emersed in the world of web development and you may notice that the phrase ***responsive web design*** has taken on an almost religious status. 
-
-I grew believing that you should question everything, especially your unchallenged premises. So, why is responsive design a good idea? 
-
-There are many reasons, but to me the most compelling is also the simplest -- the web already is responsive.
-
-Every time you build a website that is not fluid by nature, with content that flows gracefully onto any screen, you are fighting the essential nature of the web. That fighting is going to make your life as a developer more difficult, as anyone who's ever tried to achieve pixel-perfect precision across browsers can attest.
-
-The web is naturally fluid. To show you what I mean, let's play with an example page.
-
-Head to the `sample_files` folder that came with this book and open up the folder `responsive basics`. Now open the file basic.html in your favorite web browser. Pretty boring right? Just some black text on a white background. The text isn't even centered or constrained at all, just long lines stretching across the screen. But let's play with this most basic of web pages for a minute. Grab the right edge of your browser window and resize it, making it narrower. What happens? The text re-wraps and re-flows to fit the new window size. 
-
-Hmm, so the page responded to our input (resizing the screen). That's responsive design in a nutshell. And yes, the web is responsive right out of the box. Now no one but web developers ever drags their window around to watch how designs reflow, so don't get hung up on that. The point isn't that text re-flows as you drag, but that the text can flow onto any screen.
-
-If you've ever built a fixed-width website (960px wide by chance?) you've broken one of the web's greatest features -- it's naturally fluid. Web browsers have always enabled nearly everything now labeled "responsive design" right out of the box, including  the most fundamental element you're looking at here -- fluid layouts. 
-
-Okay, sweet, done.
-
-Well, there is a little more to it, but this really is the core and I find it helpful to frame the question "why responsive design?" this way because it gets to the basic truth of the web -- everything is flexible, everything is fluid. When we embrace the web's inherent fluidity we're actually freeing ourselves from our own constraints. I find that a very liberating feeling, one that has implications well beyond just the web. 
-
-Kung Fu legend Bruce Lee's teacher once said to him. "Preserve yourself by following the natural bends of things and don't interfere." Lee meditated on this idea and eventually came up with his now famous quote that he must have "a mind like water".
-
->"Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless -- like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot." -- Bruce Lee
-
-Lee's metaphor works for nearly anything, but it's especially apt for anyone building responsive websites. It perfectly captures what we're striving for -- content and design that flow like water from one screen to the next -- as well as the approach we need to take -- keeping an open mind, letting go of our preconceptions and learning to embrace the flow of the web.
-
-If all that sounds a little hokey to you, consider another thought, equally rooted in Asian philosophy, but a little more concrete, John Allsopp's *[A Dao of Web Design](http://alistapart.com/article/dao)*. 
-
-Allsopp's famous article is perhaps the best thing ever written about web development. What's perhaps most astounding about *A Dao of Web Design* is that it was written not last year, not even right after the iPhone was released and changed the mobile device landscape forever, but way back in 2000 when the web development community was still trying to sort out how to separate form and function with cascading stylesheets.
-
-Before iPads, before Google Glasses, before there even was a mobile web, Allsopp hit the nail on the head: "It is the nature of the web to be flexible, and it should be our role as designers and developers to embrace this flexibility, and produce pages which, by being flexible, are accessible to all."
-
-I highly recommend you read [the entire article](http://alistapart.com/article/dao). Go ahead, I'll wait. 
-
-Sure, some of Allsopp's examples are a bit outdated, like his argument against the font tag. No developer worth their salt would even think to use a font tag these days. In fact, that's one of the upsides of the web today -- much of Allsopp's advice in the article has since become part of most web developer's best practices, part of the standard web developer toolkit. For example, avoiding HTML for presentation and using relative font sizing (percentages or ems) to ensure pages scale properly. 
-
-But sadly most of us did not heed Allsopp's bigger-picture advice to embrace the inherently flexible nature of the web. Here's Allsopp's original suggestion for working with the flexibility of the web rather than fighting it:
-
->Make pages which are accessible, regardless of the browser, platform or screen that your reader chooses or must use to access your pages. This means pages which are legible regardless of screen resolution or size, or number of colors (and remember too that pages may be printed, or read aloud by reading software, or read using braille browsers). This means pages which adapt to the needs of a reader, whose eyesight is less than perfect, and who wishes to read pages with a very large font size.
-
-Unfortunately Allsopp's advice was largely ignored, even by some of the best known developers on the web. Regrettably, we at Webmonkey did not start embracing responsive development best practices until the second round of interest, when, like everyone else, the iPhone and other mobile devices forced us to rethink our designs.
-
-That's okay though, it's never too late to embrace something new. 
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-12_zen-art-responsive-workflow.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-12_zen-art-responsive-workflow.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index f9e023f..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-12_zen-art-responsive-workflow.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,86 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Zen and the Art of the Responsive Web Design Workflow
-pub_date: 2014-03-12 10:08:57
-slug: /blog/2014/03/zen-art-responsive-design-workflow
-metadesc: Embracing the fluid nature of responsive web design means you can start building websites like Bruce Lee. 
-tags: Responsive Web Design
-tutorials: True
-
----
-
-[*Note: This is an excerpt from my book, [Build a Better Web With Responsive Web Design](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design). If you like what you read here, pick up a copy of the book and be sure to sign up for the newsletter over there in the sidebar.*]
-
-[TOC]
-
-If your current workflow is anything like mine and that of other designers I have worked with, it probably goes something like this: wireframe content -> sketch designs -> convert those to Photoshop comps -> pass to client for approval -> convert to HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I've left out a few steps, but the basic idea is pretty simple: Photoshop is the first place you go after you have the skeleton of the design on paper.
-
-Perhaps not coincidentally that's almost exactly the workflow (albeit a greatly simplified version) of Wired magazine's print edition. It's the workflow that web designers inherited from print and one that's still taught in all but the most forward thinking web design programs. It's taught because for a long time it worked. Sure people might resize their browser or text, but for the most part you could mock up something in Photoshop and reliably convert it to HTML and CSS  with maybe a bit of JavaScript thrown in.
-
-To embrace a responsive approach and stick with the this workflow means you're going to have a very hard time not just thinking responsively but mocking things up. How will you know where your breakpoints need to be without putting your designs in a live browser and resizing them? Once you have those breakpoints you're going to have to back the Photoshop and create what, 4 mockups? 6? 10? That's a lot of extra work.
-
-[![Illustration of scenario where image size does not necessary correspond to viewport](/media/images/2014/workflows-the-hard-way.jpg)](/media/images/2014/workflows-the-hard-way.jpg "View Image 1")
-: Mockups the hard way. Why create tons of different size and state mockups in Photoshop when you can actually build it, live, fully-functional in the browser?
-
-Just as we've shrugged off so much of the print design legacy in other ways -- flexible canvases, fluid designs and flowing text -- it's time to shrug off the print design workflow. It's time to put down the Photoshop, step away from the pixels and rethink our approach from the ground up.
-
-That doesn't mean we shouldn't learn from print. A lot of web developers talk about starting from the content and working your way out, which is exactly what print designers do as well. The content should always be the starting point, but the way we think about the content and the way we figure out how it will behave and appear to the user needs to change.
-
-## Working with the Responsive Flow
-
-Quite frankly coming up with a responsive workflow that really works is going to take some experimentation on your part. Whether you're part of a small team, large team or working on your own, you have your idiosyncrasies and tics to consider. A good workflow will work with, not against your unique style.
-
-While you should embrace your idiosyncrasies and tics, there are some general guidelines that have emerged from those of us who have worked on responsive sites big and small. I'm going to offer some methods and tools in the hope that they prove beneficial to you and your team.
-
-The biggest change I suggest making when -- or even before -- you attempt your first responsive design project is to get your designers and developers working together. Too often developers are brought in much later in the process, after the design work is already done. That might work when your designs have only one, set in stone width, but for responsive design you'll likely benefit from bringing in developers right at the outset. 
-
-When your design and development teams work together you can start to get the kind of feedback loop you need for effective responsive workflows. Collaboration means there's immediate feedback for both teams. Developers can point out scenarios where designs fail and designers can go back and handle those. You decrease the likelihood of anything falling through the cracks. For example, what happens when the user denies access to geo-location data? What happens when the JavaScript fails and the ads don't load? What happens when the third-party fonts fail? 
-
-Developers tend to be better at imagining all the ways in which a design can fail. Let them in early so they can better inform the process. They can point out problems early, before they require a massive effort to solve.
-
-The other side of the coin comes later, when you're building out the actual site. Keep designers involved and they can help sort out unforeseen problems. Developers might not know the why behind a decision, but if your designers are working alongside them they can help guide the development process by offering insight into decisions and helping to ensure the original, client-approved vision is maintained.
-
-This sort of workflow necessarily requires good communication skills, but more than anything it requires rethinking your approach. Gone are the days when designers handed their work to developers and moved on. Gone too are the days when developers could just sit back and wait for finalized mockups to convert to HTML and CSS. If such days ever existed at all, they are certainly behind us now. 
-
-If your design and development teams aren't working together, get them working together post haste. 
-
-What does this look like on a practical level?
-
-Well, as I've written elsewhere, [start with content](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2014/02/work-smarter-plain-text-workflow#everything-starts-with-the-content) when you can. 
-
-Once you have the content you can move on to sketching and wireframing -- figuring out the structure of the page and overall site. I tend to do this stage mostly on paper because if find it the fastest way to get my ideas recorded, but I've seen other developers who use iPads with styluses, mind mapping tools, even one who used spreadsheets to create wireframes (yeah, he was a little strange). 
-
-If you haven't before embrace what designer Jason Santa Maria once termed the "[gray box method](http://v3.jasonsantamaria.com/archive/2004/05/24/grey_box_method.php)". That is, wireframe the basic elements of your site as a series of gray boxes you can then shuffle and rearrange as you figure out which bits of content need to go where on various layouts and screen sizes. You can even take this literally, cutting our gray shapes and taping them to something like a white board in various configurations. The point of using gray is to stop, in Santa Maria's words, "worrying about color and imagery choices and allow myself to focus on the site’s structure and hierarchy." This is particularly helpful in responsive design because it forces you to consider from the outset how you'll need to reshuffle content as the screen size changes.
-
-Along with wireframes, I sketch user flows and step by step scenarios based on how the client imagines their visitors interacting with the site. This helps with design obviously, but it also helps tremendously when you get to the testing stage by providing an ideal against which to measure how visitors *actually* interact with the site. The gap between those two things becomes the basis of the next iteration. 
-
-## Designing in the Browser
-
-Once I have a good idea of how I want to arrange the content on the page I immediately jump into the browser and start working with live HTML. At this point I'm just stacking text and creating structure, there's no CSS yet.
-
-How I work in the browser is probably the most idiosyncratic part of my workflow. I've written a bit before about how I work with [plain text files and Pandoc to generate live HTML mockups](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2014/02/work-smarter-plain-text-workflow#tool-2-plain-text). I then serve those mockups with a simple webserver, which I think is the [easiest way to get started "designing in the browser"](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2013/11/easiest-way-get-started-designing-browser). From there I start editing and refining my mockups directly in the browser, using tools like the Chrome or [Firefox Developer Tools](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2014/02/live-editing-sass-firefox-vim-keybindings).
-
-It's worth pointing out that this process of sketching, wireframing, outlining user flows and building mockups in the browser is not all that different from what I've always done, responsive or otherwise, but there is one major difference -- responsive design requires a more circular flow. 
-
-In other words this is not a straight linear progression from sketch to wireframe live demo. It's more like a series of loops, something like: look at the content, sketch out basic ideas, create a wireframe, consider user flows, go back to content, rearrange slightly, tweak wireframe, create mockups, revisit user flows, re-tweak wireframe and so on.
-
-## Rinse and Repeat
-
-Once I've got a basic live site served up from a local folder, with at least one version of all the different pages the site is likely to have, the next step is to start doing all the things that make up building a responsive site. For me that means starting with my small screen layout,  which is also typically the least capable device I'm supporting, and then working my way up the line. I create a basic mobile layout and then start stretching it until it looks like crap. I mark that as a breakpoint and head back to my text editor to start a new media query. Then I rinse and repeat with all the various pages until everything has been handled.
-
-This will be ported over to template files at some point. This mockup process is still very loose and experimental and I shift back and forth between text editor and Firefox/Chrome, experimenting to see what makes the most sense. 
-
-This essentially begins the looping workflow I talked about above -- iterating through various pages, encountering issues and solving them, whether that's something I do myself or something slightly more structured when I'm working with a team.
-
-One of the advantages of this workflow is the fact that you can take a live mockup to the client. In my experience this is usually incredibly helpful. It allows the client to interact with a mockup and see where the problems are before the site is in a more finalized form. 
-
-
-## Conclusion and Further Reading.
-
-As I wrote at the start of this piece, there is no one size fits all responsive design workflow. That said I think it is helpful to distill the basics down to these three general principles:
-
-* Start with content (when possible)
-* Work with code directly as much as possible -- test everything in the browser.
-* Iterate. 
-{^ .list--indented }
-
-If you'd like more details on how I do all that and the tools I use be sure to look at my previous post on my [plain-text based workflow](). You might also want to pick up a copy of my book which has over 100 pages and dozens of videos devoted to various tools and [responsive design workflows](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design).
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-19_better-link-underlines-css-background-image.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-19_better-link-underlines-css-background-image.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 85a929c..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-19_better-link-underlines-css-background-image.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,58 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Better Link Underlines with CSS `background-image`
-pub_date: 2014-03-19 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/03/better-link-underlines-css-background-image
-tags: CSS Tips & Tricks
-metadesc: Using CSS background-image to get (nearly) perfect link underlines.
-code: True
-tutorial: True
-
----
-
-Medium's Marcin Wichary posted a fascinating look at his [quest](https://medium.com/p/7c03a9274f9) to create better looking link underlines on the site. It's a great read if you're at all obsessive about typography on the web.
-
->How hard could it be to draw a horizontal line on a screen? ... This is a story on how a quick evening project to fix the appearance of underlined Medium links turned into a month-long endeavour.
-
-I highly suggest having a look at [Wichary's post](https://medium.com/p/7c03a9274f9), but Medium doesn't seem big on tutorials -- Wichary never actually posts the code he's using to achieve the underlines.
-
-I was curious, because Google may be abandoning link underlines, but I still like them, especially when the links are in bodies of text. I was also curious because this site has the same problem Medium's old link styles had in Chrome: ugly, thick underlines. The version of Chrome in the Canary channel fixes this, but the current shipping version still looks bad:
-
-[![Ugly link underlines in Chrome](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/chrome-underlines-bad.png)](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/chrome-underlines-bad.png "View Image 1")
-: Link underlines in Chrome 33 and below
-
-Canary channel:
-
-[![better link underlines in Chrome](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/chrome-underlines-better.png)](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/chrome-underlines-better.png "View Image 2")
-: Link underlines in Chrome 35+
-
-Still, I was curious what Wichary has come up with so I opened the dev tools, poked around a bit and found that these are the key styles:
-
-~~~.language-css
-a {
-    text-decoration: none;
-    background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, white 75%, #333332 75%);
-    background-size: 2px 2px;
-    background-position: 0px 24px;
-    background-repeat: repeat-x;
-}
-~~~
-
-You'll need to adjust the colors to fit with your site's color scheme and bear in mind that the background size and position may need to be adjusted based on your font size and line-height.
-
-I happen to like the underline slightly heavier than what Medium is using so after playing with this technique a bit, here's what I'm planning to roll out here at some point:
-
-~~~.language-css
-    background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, white 50%, #DE4D00 75%);
-    background-size: 2px 2px;
-    background-position: 0 20px;
-    background-repeat: repeat-x;
-~~~
-
-Here's what it looks like:
-
-[![Fancy link underlines using background-image](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/fancy-underlines.png)](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/fancy-underlines.png "View Image 3")
-: Link underlines using `background-image`
-
-So far as I can tell there are no accessibility or other downsides to this technique, but if you know better let me know in the comments. It degrades pretty well too since you can just use a good old `text-decoration: underline;` for older browsers.
-
-Now if only the Medium developers would give the site's URLs this level of attention.
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-20_look-responsive-design.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-20_look-responsive-design.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index b4553af..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-20_look-responsive-design.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,36 +0,0 @@
----
-title: The Look of Responsive Design 
-pub_date: 2014-03-20 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/03/look-responsive-design
-metadesc: Does responsive design have a 'look'?
-tags: Responsive Web Design
----
-
-Mark Boulton posted something to Twitter yesterday that I think deserves more attention than it has seen thus far. Boulton [writes](https://twitter.com/markboulton/status/445943150247702528): 
-
->"I wonder if #RWD looks the way it does because so many projects aren't being run by designers, but by front-end dev teams."
-
-I suppose you could take that as a dig against front end developers, but I don't think it was meant that way and that, to me anyway, is not the interesting part of the question. 
-
-I'm also not interested in defending responsive design. If you don't want/like/care about responsive design that's fine. Carry on. 
-
-What I've been thinking about since I read Boulton's thought is not the roles of designers and developers in responsive projects[^1]. What got me thinking is this notion that "responsive web design looks the way it does". 
-
-The reason I've been thinking about it is because when I first saw this in my Twitter feed I had a kind of gut reaction -- *yeah, I know what he means there, responsive web design does look a certain way*. But the more I've thought about this, the less I agree with myself and my initial gut reaction. 
-
-I'm actually pretty sure I have no idea what responsive design looks like. 
-
-What I'm really hoping is that Boulton will blog about what he meant because he's a talented designer and I am not, so it's very possible I'm missing the obvious. 
-
-Tim Kadlec offers some reasons [Why RWD Looks Like RWD](http://timkadlec.com/2014/03/why-rwd-looks-like-rwd/), and goes a little further, writing "to be fair, a pretty large number of responsive sites do tend to share similar aesthetics."
-
-I agree with him, but I don't know that responsive web design has anything to do with it. I think that a pretty large number of WordPress site's [look like WordPress sites](http://ma.tt/2014/01/techmeme-100/). I think you could back up out of categories entirely and simply say "a large number of *websites* share similar aesthetics".
-
-Sure, the popularity of responsive design coincides with some other design trends: blocky, very consciously grid-oriented layouts, Pinterest-inspired layouts, Medium-popularized big image layouts and so on. And at the same time libraries like Bootstrap and its ilk have homogenized design details to some degree[^2]. Then there's the ubiquitous "hamburger" menu and other shared mobile design patterns, but most of those patterns are purloined from mobile applications rather than something responsive web designers came up with.
-
-There's also the fact that newsy websites (Boston Globe, BBC, The Guardian, et al) have been some of the earliest and most prominent adopters of responsive design. They all have similar visual designs, but I think that's owing more to the similarity in [the structure of news content](http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/structure-first-content-always) than responsive web design.
-
-Responsive design imposes new constraints that are hard to solve. And whenever there's new territory, early maps all tend to borrow from each other and end up looking similar. When someone solves a problem -- for example, pull to refresh -- dozens of others rush to adopt the same solutions, which leads to common design patterns, but there's nothing about that that's unique to responsive design.
-
-[^1]: I suspect that was more the point and it's probably a better topic, but it's not the one that got me thinking.
-[^2]: Which is not to say that's a bad thing. It is just a thing.
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-26_shell-code-snippets-done-right.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-26_shell-code-snippets-done-right.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 038b841..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-03-26_shell-code-snippets-done-right.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,48 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Shell Code Snippets Done Right
-pub_date: 2014-03-26 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/03/shell-code-snippets-done-right
-metadesc: A better way to post shell code samples on your site.
-tags: CSS Tips & Tricks
-code: True
-tutorial: True
-
----
-
-If you post tutorials online, particularly anything involving shell code, you've inevitably run into the problem where people copy and paste the code and end up including the `$` prompt by mistake.
-
-The code won't work when you do that so your tutorial becomes less helpful. Sometimes people will post a comment wondering what happened, but they're just as likely to decide you don't know what you're talking about and move on.
-
-Even users that know not to copy the `$` have to be careful how when they select your code to avoid accidentally copying it.
-
-You could leave out the `$` to avoid this, but then it can be hard to tell what's a wrapped line versus what's two separate lines of code.
-
-Turn out there's a better way -- you can display the prompt and make sure no one ever selects it thanks to the CSS pseudo class `:before`.
-
-I found [this screenshot][1][^1] in an open tab this morning and thought I'd share what a subtle, but helpful stroke of genius Github has created here:
-
-[![Screenshot of Github source code showing how to use `:before` to add a prompt before shell code][2]](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/github-prompt-before.jpg "View Image 1")
-: Github's ingenius use of `:before` to display a prompt before shell code snippets
-
-Github is using a pseudo class to prepend command line code with the `$` prompt. It's a great attention to detail -- you get the prompt, but because it's a pseudo element it can't be copied when users copy and paste the code. In most browsers it can't even be selected, which means you don't have to worry when you're highlighting code to copy it.
-
-This site currently uses [Prismjs][3] for code highlighting so Github's exact syntax won't work here, but here's a snippet of CSS to make this work with Prismjs:
-
-~~~.language-css
-code.language-bash:before {
-    content: "$ ";
-}
-~~~
-
-The markdown processor I use adds `language-bash` to both the `pre` and `code` tags, which is why I've used the more specific `code` selector. 
-
-And there you go, a better way to display snippets of shell code on your site.
-
-The main downside I can see is that if/when I roll this out I have to go back and delete all the `$` in my posts. 
-
-[^1]: I have no idea where I found this or how it came to open in my browser. Probably Twitter, but I've been unable to track down who did it since Twitter's search features suck. If you know, post a comment.
-
-
-[1]: http://cl.ly/Ub7p
-[2]: https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/github-prompt-before.jpg
-[3]: http://prismjs.com/
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-04-05_why-mobile-first-responsive-design.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-04-05_why-mobile-first-responsive-design.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 4728863..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-04-05_why-mobile-first-responsive-design.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,52 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Why Mobile-First is the Right Way to Build Responsive Websites
-pub_date: 2014-04-05 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/04/why-mobile-first-responsive-design
-metadesc: Why taking a mobile-first approach is the best way to build responsive website.
-tags: Responsive Web Design
-
----
-[*Note: This is an excerpt from my book, [Build a Better Web With Responsive Web Design](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design). If you like what you read here, pick up a copy of the book and be sure to sign up for the newsletter over there in the sidebar.*]
-
-The goal of responsive web design is to create websites that look great and function well on any device that accesses them. 
-
-Assuming you're already familiar with the flexible foundations of fluid layouts and typography along with @media queries you're ready to dive into the world of responsive web design. 
-
-In fact, you're probably itching to dive in and start writing @media queries for tablet-size devices and others for mobile devices to trick out your current fixed-width sites in shiny new responsive duds.
-
-That approach works. You can approach responsive design as something you tack on to a desktop site. That is, you can build out your designs for larger screens and then use media queries to make sure things look good on tablets, phones and all the other myriad devices out there. Indeed, this is often the only practical approach to take when you're adding on to an existing design with clients who have a tight budget or timeline and don't want a completely redesigned website. 
-
-In other words, there's nothing wrong with building a desktop site and then adding some @media queries to handle other screens. In fact I guarantee that, no matter how much you want to embrace the approach I'm about to outline there will be cases where it just isn't an option.
-
-That said, there is, to my mind, a far better place to start your responsive designs -- with the least capable device. 
-
-Developer Luke Wroblewski, who, among other things, was the Chief Design Architect at Yahoo, has helped popularize what he calls a "mobile-first" approach to design. In fact he's written a book on the subject entitled, appropriately, *[Mobile First](http://www.abookapart.com/products/mobile-first "buy Mobile First")*. I'm going to briefly discuss why I think what Wroblewski calls mobile first is the best approach for responsive design. For a deeper look at why a mobile first approach makes the most sense be sure to pick up a copy of Wroblewski's *Mobile First*.
-
-Why does Wroblewski think you should start designing for mobile devices first? Here's what he [writes on his blog](http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1333 "Luke Wroblewski on why mobile-first is the right approach" ):
-
->We start with the value of our service and our content. The constraints in mobile devices force us to focus on what really matters so we only include and emphasize the most valuable parts of our offering first and foremost. 
-
-In other words the constraints of mobile devices -- often, though not always, limited bandwidth, small screens, touch interfaces, etc -- help you focus on what's really important in your designs. That means cutting the cruft and getting the content your users are after front and center. For example, it might force you to consider, given the limited screen sizes of mobile devices -- often less than 480px in height -- whether that 100px tall logo is really worth the screen real estate it requires. Ditto menus, sharing buttons and all the other cruft that can accumulate around the actual content users want. Some of that "cruft" might be important, some might not. The point is that starting with mobile devices helps to create constraints, which in turn creates focus.
-
-While I like Wroblewski's mobile-first approach, I have a slightly different way of looking at it. As I already mentioned, I like to think not just mobile-first, but *least capable device first*^[1].
-
-Clearly I'm no good at coining a phrase, but I prefer to think of it this way because most of the constraints of mobile devices will be gone in the next few years -- networks are getting faster, so are mobile processors. However, while the phones of tomorrow may be as powerful as the laptops of today, there will be an entirely new class of devices we haven't even thought of yet connecting to the web that will have constraints. In other words, don't get hung up on the "mobile" part of mobile-first, think ***least capable device first***.
-
-Naturally, *least capable* is very open-ended. Does that mean you have to make sure your site renders in Lynx running on a BBC Micro? No, it just means starting with the basics and layering on complexity rather than starting with the complex desktop layout and trying to strip it back. 
-
-In fact the first step is determining the least capable device you want to support. Sometimes that might be a feature phone browser that doesn't understand @media queries. Other clients might not care about reaching that market and just want something that works well on the mobile devices most popular in the U.S and Europe.
-
-Whatever the case, first determine where you're going to start. Once you have that least capable device to target you can start building.
-
-So what are the practical components of a least capable device mindset? What does this mean for our actual code?
-
-It means we start by building a site that works on these least capable devices. No media queries, no fancy JavaScript. Just a basic site optimized for the least capable device you're targeting. 
-
-Start simple. Build your site so it looks good without many bells or whistles. This has two advantages, the first is practical, it supports older phones and mobile web browsers that don't understand @media queries (as noted earlier it might even mean obscurities like Lynx works as well). The second advantage to the approach is that it forces you to focus on what's important from the get-go.
-
-Then, once you have a baseline experience you can add the bells and whistles. 
-
-You wouldn't start building a massive skyscraper without first laying a strong foundation. That's precisely what this bare-bones experience provides, a strong foundation to support all the rest of your progressively more complex enhancements.
-
-
-[^1]: I'm pretty sure Wroblewski also means least capable device when he says mobile first, I just like to be explicit about it.
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-04-23_learn-web-development-today.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-04-23_learn-web-development-today.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 47144c4..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-04-23_learn-web-development-today.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,89 +0,0 @@
----
-title: How to Learn Web Development Today
-pub_date: 2014-04-13 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/04/learn-web-development-today
-metadesc: How to learn web development on the modern web or why you don't need webmonkey, A List Apart, Smashing Magazine or anyone else.
-
----
-
-I launched my book today. If you're interested in learning how to build fast, user-friendly, mobile-first, progressively-enhanced responsive websites grab a copy of the awkwardly titled, ***[Build a Better Web with Responsive Web Design](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design?utm_source=lhp&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=lhp)***. There's a free 60 page excerpt you can download to try it out before you buy.
-
-It's been a long, and lately very hectic, road from [running Webmonkey](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2013/09/whatever-happened-to-webmonkey) to self-publishing, but along the way I got an idea stuck in my head and it won't go away: we need to embrace the post-Webmonkey world. 
-
-To put it another way, we need to embrace the post-megasite web. Webmonkey happens to be the megasite that I identify with, but there are others as well.
-
-I've been thinking about this in part because I've been embracing a post-megasite world on a personal level and also because several dozen people have emailed me over the past year to ask, "now that Webmonkey is gone, what publications should I follow to keep up with web development?"
-
-Most of these people will mention A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, <strike>.Net</strike>, maybe one or two more megasites and then want to know what else is out there that they don't know about yet.
-
-These are all great publications, but they're all, like Webmonkey, a dying breed. .Net already died in fact. There's just not much money in selling ads alongside daily web development news and web-savvy audiences like yourself tend to have ad blockers installed, which means even less money for these sites than say, CNN.
-
-## What to Do Instead
-
-Learning how to build websites and finding answers to your questions has become a very distributed thing in last ten years. While there are still some Webmonkey-esque things around, none of them can possibly keep track of everything. There's simply too much stuff happening too fast for any centralized resource to keep track of. Except for maybe CSS Tricks, which seems to show up in the results for pretty much every web development question I've ever had. Not sure when Chris Coyier sleeps.
-
-For the most part though web development has long since moved past the top-down, hierarchical knowledge structures that tend to define new endeavors, when only a few people know how to do something, to a distributed model where there are so many blog posts, so many answers on Stack Overflow, so many helpful tip and tricks around the web that there is no single resource capable of tracking them all. Except Google.
-
-This has some tremendous advantages over the world in which Webmonkey was born. 
-
-First, it makes our knowledge more distributed, which means its more resilient. Fewer silos means less risk of catastrophic loss of knowledge. Even the loss of major things like Mark Pilgrim's wonderful HTML5 book can be recovered and distributed around so it won't disappear again.
-
-This sort of resilience is good, but the far better part of the more distributed knowledge base is that there are so many more people to learn from. So many people facing the same situations you are and solving the same problems you have means more solutions to be found. This has a two-fold effect. First, it makes your life easier because it's easier to find answers to your questions. Second, it frees up your time to contribute back different, possibly novel solutions to the problems you can't easily answer with a bit of web searching.
-
-So my response to people asking that question "now that Webmonkey is gone, what publications should I follow to keep up with web development?" has two parts. 
-
-## Write What You Know
-
-First, and most importantly, start keeping a public journal of your work. I don't mean a portfolio, I mean a record of the problems you encounter and ways you solve them. Seriously, go right now and download and install WordPress or setup GitHub Pages or something. You're a web developer. If you don't know how to do that yet, you need to do learn how to do it now. 
-
-Now you have a website. When you get stumped by some problem start by searching to see what other people have done to solve it. Then write up the problem and post a link to the solution you find. Your future self will thank you for this; I will thank you for this. 
-
-Not only will you have a reference point should the same question come up again, you're more likely to remember your solution because you wrote it down. 
-
-You'll also be helping the rest of us since the more links that point to good solutions the more those solutions rise to the top of search engines. Everyone wins and you have something to refer back to in six months when you encounter the same problem again and can't remember what you did. 
-
-For example, I don't particularly want to remember how to setup Nginx on Debian. I want to know how to do it, but I don't really want to waste actual memory on it. There are too many far more interesting things to keep track of. So, when I did sit down and figure out how to do it, I wrote a post called [Install Nginx on Debian/Ubuntu](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2014/02/install-nginx-debian-ubuntu). Now whenever I need to know how to install Nginx I just refer to that.
-
-## Find People Smarter Than You
-
-My other suggestion to people looking for a Webmonkey replacement is to embrace Noam Chomsky's notion of a star system, AKA the blogroll. Remember the blogroll? That thing where people used to list the people the admired, followed, learned from? Bring that back. List the people you learn from, the people you admire, the people that are smarter than you. As they say, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.  
-
-I'll get you started, here's a list of people that are way smarter than me. Follow these people on Twitter, subscribe to their RSS feeds, watch what they're doing and don't be afraid to ask them for advice. Most of them won't bite. The worst thing that will happen is they'll ignore you, which is not the end of the world.
-
-* [@anna_debenham](https://twitter.com/anna_debenham)
-* [@yoavweiss](https://twitter.com/yoavweiss)
-* [@jenville](https://twitter.com/jenville)
-* [@wilto](https://twitter.com/wilto)
-* [@MattWilcox](https://twitter.com/MattWilcox)
-* [@aworkinglibrary](https://twitter.com/aworkinglibrary)
-* [@igrigorik](https://twitter.com/igrigorik)
-* [@JennLukas](https://twitter.com/JennLukas)
-* [@karenmcgrane](https://twitter.com/karenmcgrane)
-* [@paul_irish](https://twitter.com/paul_irish)
-* [@meyerweb](https://twitter.com/meyerweb)
-* [@mollydotcom](https://twitter.com/mollydotcom)
-* [@lukew](https://twitter.com/lukew)
-* [@susanjrobertson](https://twitter.com/susanjrobertson)
-* [@adactio](https://twitter.com/adactio)
-* [@Souders](https://twitter.com/Souders)
-* [@lyzadanger](https://twitter.com/lyzadanger)
-* [@beep](https://twitter.com/beep)
-* [@tkadlec](https://twitter.com/tkadlec)
-* [@brucel](https://twitter.com/brucel)
-* [@johnallsopp](https://twitter.com/johnallsopp)
-* [@scottjehl](https://twitter.com/scottjehl)
-* [@jensimmons](https://twitter.com/jensimmons)
-* [@sara_ann_marie](https://twitter.com/sara_ann_marie)
-* [@samanthatoy](https://twitter.com/samanthatoy)
-* [@swissmiss](https://twitter.com/swissmiss)
-* [@LeaVerou](https://twitter.com/LeaVerou)
-* [@stubbornella](https://twitter.com/stubbornella)
-* [@brad_frost](https://twitter.com/brad_frost)
-* [@chriscoyier](https://twitter.com/chriscoyier)
-* [@RWD](https://twitter.com/RWD)
-
-For simplicity's sake these are all twitter links, but have a look at the bio section in each of those links, most of them have blogs you can add to your feed reader as well. 
-
-This list is far from complete, there are thousands and thousands of people I have not listed here, but hopefully this will get you started. Then look and see who these people are following and keep expanding your network.
-
-Okay, now go build something you love. And don't forget to tell us how you did it.
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-04-26_create-email-courses-mailchimp.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-04-26_create-email-courses-mailchimp.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 7beeb91..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-04-26_create-email-courses-mailchimp.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,205 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Create Email Courses With MailChimp
-pub_date: 2014-04-25 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/04/create-email-courses-mailchimp
-metadesc: How to set up email courses or drip campaigns using MailChimp
-tutorial: True
-
----
-
-I like to teach people how to do things, whether that's a simple tutorial on this site or a [big ol' book](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design). Lately I've been playing with the idea of a "course" delivered via email. 
-
-I use MailChimp for my mailing lists and it turns out you can also use MailChimp to provide a timed series of tutorials as well, a bit like an email-based course. Basically I wanted a way to take sequential and otherwise related tutorials from this site and package them up in something that can be delivered via email.
-
-While MailChimp can do this, it's not really the primary use case and it was not immediately obvious to me how to do it. MailChimp has great documentation, but it doesn't really cover this use case in detail. The MailChimp admin interface also appears to have changed a lot in the last couple years so many of tutorials out there on the web are no longer completely accurate when it comes to menu locations and such. 
-
-This is how I ended up accomplishing what I wanted to do.
-
-Everything that follows assumes you've used MailChimp before to at least send a newsletter. You'll also need to have a paid account because we're going to create a series of autoresponders, which (at the time of writing) are only available as part of paid accounts.
-
-Before we dive in, here's how I want this to work: When a person signs up for the longhandpixels newsletter there will be a checkbox that says "Yes, I'd also like to receive a free 7-day course on responsive web design" or similar. When someone checks that box I want to 1) add them to the main mailing list and 2) start a series of emails that get delivered once a day for the next seven days. If they don't check that box then they should just be signed up for the main mailing list.
-
-Note that you can do this in some sleazy ways that amount to tricking people into getting a bunch of marketing spam they don't want. Please don't do that. Life is short, don't waste people's time. It will just make people hate you and whatever you're offering. But if you have content people actually want, I think this is a great way to get it to them.
-
-## Create the Form
-
-The first step is to create a sign up form with a custom field that offers the option to also get the email course. To do that click the lists menu item to the left of the page in the MailChimp admin. 
-
-Select the mailing list you want subscribers to end up on (or create a new list). That will take you to the list page where, along the top you'll see a series of tabs, click on "Signup forms". You should see three options, General forms, Embedded forms and Form integrations. Select the middle option, Embedded forms. 
-
-![The link to the form builder](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/mailchimp-form-builder-link.png){: class="img-right"} You should now be on the form customization page. Here you can build your form however you'd like, the thing we need to do is add an extra field so our potential subscribers can take the 7-day course. To do that we'll use MailChimp's form builder, which you can get to via the link under the Form options menu. 
-
-Now we need to add a new field, so double-click the Check Boxes option on the right, which will add a new checkbox field to your form. You can change the field label to something that makes sense. I ended up not displaying this in the actual form, but it's how this segment of subscribers will be identified in the next step so put something in there that makes sense. I chose "rwd_course". 
-
-You can then set the text in the options box to whatever you'd like. I use "Yes, I'd also like to receive a free 7-day course on responsive web design".
-
-[![MailChimp form builder](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/mailchimp-form-builder.png)](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/mailchimp-form-builder.png "View Image 2")
-: Adding a checkbox using MailChimp's form builder
-
-Alright, now go back to the initial form page and grab the embed code. This is curiously difficult to do. I may be missing something, but the only way I know of to get out of the form builder is to click Signup forms again and then once again select the middle option, Embedded forms. From here you can grab the embed code and customize it to your liking. You can see the example at the bottom of this page to see what mine looks like.
-
-## Set up the Email Course
-
-Now we have a way for people to join our mailing list and let us know they want the course. The next step is to set up the actual course.
-
-To do that we'll need to create a series of autoresponders. Click the autoresponders link on the left side of the page and then click the Create Autoresponder button at the top of the page.
-
-This will take you to the first step in the autoresponder setup process, which is essentially exactly the same as setting up your regular mailings, it just has a few extra options that allow you to control when it is sent out.
-
-The first step is to select whichever list you're using. Then we want to narrow the list by selecting the "Send to a new segment" option. Click the drop-down menu and look under Merge fields for the checkbox option we created earlier. Select "rwd_course" (or whatever you named it), "one of" and the only option available.
-
-[![Setting up the list segment in MailChimp](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/mailchimp-segment-options.png)](https://longhandpixels.net/media/images/2014/mailchimp-segment-options.png "View Image 3")
-: Setting up the list segment in MailChimp
-
-Hit the Next button and you'll see the screen that set what event will trigger the autoresponder and when the mail will be sent. The event we want to start things off with is "subscription to the list". Typically I send a welcome email to everyone who subscribes so I consider this to be first lesson in the course and thus send it one day from when someone signs up. You could, however, use this first autoresponder to send a kind of "thanks for signing up for the course, the first lesson will be here tomorrow" sort of thing, in which case I would set it to send "within the hour" after sign up (which is the shortest time MailChimp offers for autoresponders).
-
-Other options here include the ability to limit which days of the week the mail is sent, for example perhaps not sending your course on weekends. To be honest I haven't touched this yet, but it might be worth tweaking delivery days down the road, based on your response rates.
-
-The next screens are the same as setting up any other campaign in MailChimp, allowing you to customize the mail subject, email, name and other variables. There's plenty of [good documentation](http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-do-i-create-a-new-campaign/) on this stuff so I won't repeat it here. See the [MailChimp knowledge base](http://kb.mailchimp.com/home) if you're completely new to MailChimp.
-
-The only thing I'll mention here is that I use a very specific campaign naming structure so I can see the order of emails sent at a glance. Since this will be the first lesson I would name it "RWD Course - Lesson 01". Without the sequential naming scheme it's impossible to look at a list of your autoresponders and know which one is which lesson.
-
-From here you just add your first lesson, pick a nice theme and start up the autoresponder. 
-
-So you have the form set up, and anyone who signs up will get lesson one delivered to their inbox a day later. 
-
-Now you just need to rinse and repeat. Like I said, this is a little outside the typical MailChimp use case so unfortunately there's no simpler way to do it. Luckily you can save a bit of time if you go back to the Autoresponders list page (by clicking the autoresponer link in the left-hand menu) and click on the Edit drop down button where you'll see an option to "Replicate". 
-
-This will essentially clone your autoresponder, keeping everything the same so all you have to change is the subject line, the autoresponder name (now "RWD Course - Lesson 02" or similar) and the actual content. Don't forget to force the plain text content to update as well since it won't, for some reason, always auto-update when you change the HTML content.
-
-Then replicate again. And again. And so on. You can start to see why Nathan Berry is doing well with [ConvertKit](http://convertkit.com/) (which greatly streamlines this process). I don't mind the extra steps, and I like to keep everything in one place so I'm sticking with MailChimp even if my attempts to create email courses are a little outside the usual use case.
-
-Be sure to let me know if you have any questions and if you'd like to see my responsive design course in action, here's the signup form:
-
-<div class="form--wrapper">
-<style>
-.input--button, .package--button {
-  display: block;
-  background-color: #d05c1c;
-  background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(bottom, #d05c1c, #e26f30);
-  background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(bottom, #d05c1c, #e26f30);
-  background-image: linear-gradient(to top bottom, #d05c1c, #e26f30);
-  -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient (GradientType=0, startColorstr=#d05c1c, endColorstr=#e26f30)";
-  padding: 15px 25px;
-  color: #fff !important;
-  margin-bottom: 10px;
-  font-weight: normal;
-  border: 1px solid #c14b0b;
-  border-radius: 5px;
-  text-decoration: none;
-  box-shadow: 0px 0px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.19), 0px 1px 0px rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.34) inset, 0px 0px 10px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.05) inset; }
-.form--wrapper {
-  padding: 2em 0; }
-
-.form--wrapper form {
-  margin: 0 auto;
-  max-width: 18.75em;
-font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif;
-  clear: both; }
-  @media (min-width: 32em) {
-    .form--wrapper form {
-      float: right;
-      clear: none;
-      max-width: 15em; } }
-  @media (min-width: 47em) {
-    .form--wrapper form {
-      max-width: 23.75em; } }
-
-.form--fieldgroup {
-  margin-bottom: 1em; }
-
-label {
-  display: block;
-  font-size: 12px;
-  font-size: 0.75rem;
-  font-weight: 600; }
-
-.label--inline {
-  display: inline-block;
-  margin-left: 8px;
-  max-width: 21.875em; }
-
-.input--check {
-  float: left;
-  margin: 0; }
-
-.input--textfield {
-  width: 15.3125em; }
-  @media (min-width: 32em) {
-    .input--textfield {
-      max-width: 13.125em; } }
-  @media (min-width: 47em) {
-    .input--textfield {
-      max-width: 17.1875em; } }
-
-.input--button {
-  max-width: 250px; }
-  @media (min-width: 32em) {
-    .input--button {
-      max-width: 15em; } }
-  @media (min-width: 47em) {
-    .input--button {
-      max-width: 250px; } }
-
-.input--button__sample {
-  max-width: 280px; }
-
-.form--small {
-  font-size: 90%; }
-
-.img-open-book {
-  margin: 0 auto 2em;
-  display: block; }
-  @media (min-width: 32em) {
-    .img-open-book {
-      float: left;
-      width: 48%;
-      margin-right: 1em; } }
-.form--wrapper:before,
-.form--wrapper:after {
-  content:"";
-  display:table;
-}
-.form--wrapper:after {
-  clear:both;
-}
-.form--wrapper {
-  zoom:1; /* For IE 6/7 (trigger hasLayout) */
-}
-.form--small {
-font-size: 73% !important;}
-</style>
-<img alt="Build A Better Web With Responsive Design by Scott Gilbertson" src="https://longhandpixels.net/books/media/sample-chapter-image.png" class="img-open-book">
- <!-- Begin MailChimp Signup Form -->
-<form action="https://longhandpixels.us7.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=f56776029b67b1c8c712eee00&amp;id=040927f84d" method="post" id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" name="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" class="validate" target="_blank" novalidate="">
-
-<div class="form--fieldgroup">
-<label for="mce-FNAME">First Name </label> <input type="text" value="" name="FNAME" class="input--textfield" placeholder="Jane Doe" id="mce-FNAME" style="background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQCAYAAAAf8/9hAAABHklEQVQ4EaVTO26DQBD1ohQWaS2lg9JybZ+AK7hNwx2oIoVf4UPQ0Lj1FdKktevIpel8AKNUkDcWMxpgSaIEaTVv3sx7uztiTdu2s/98DywOw3Dued4Who/M2aIx5lZV1aEsy0+qiwHELyi+Ytl0PQ69SxAxkWIA4RMRTdNsKE59juMcuZd6xIAFeZ6fGCdJ8kY4y7KAuTRNGd7jyEBXsdOPE3a0QGPsniOnnYMO67LgSQN9T41F2QGrQRRFCwyzoIF2qyBuKKbcOgPXdVeY9rMWgNsjf9ccYesJhk3f5dYT1HX9gR0LLQR30TnjkUEcx2uIuS4RnI+aj6sJR0AM8AaumPaM/rRehyWhXqbFAA9kh3/8/NvHxAYGAsZ/il8IalkCLBfNVAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==); background-attachment: scroll; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">
-</div>
-<div class="form--fieldgroup">
-<label for="mce-EMAIL">Email Address</label> <input type="email" autocapitalize="off" autocorrect="off" value="" placeholder="jane@doe.com" name="EMAIL" class="input--textfield" id="mce-EMAIL">
-</div>
-<div class="form--fieldgroup">
-<label for="mce-group[5529]-5529-0" class="label--inline">Yes, I’d also like to receive a free 7-day course on responsive web design.</label><input type="checkbox" value="1" name="group[5529][1]" id="mce-group[5529]-5529-0" class="input--check" checked="">
-</div>
-<div style="position: absolute; left: -5000px;">
-<input type="text" name="b_f56776029b67b1c8c712eee00_040927f84d" value="">
-</div>
-<input type="submit" value="Send Me the Sample Chapter" name="subscribe" id="mc-embedded-subscribe" class="input--button input--button__sample">
-<p class="form--small">
-<small>We won’t send you spam. Unsubscribe at any time.</small>
-</p>
-</form>
-</div>
-
-And seriously, don't create spammy drip campaigns no one wants to read.
-
-##Further Reading
-
-* [MailChimp.com - Getting Started Autoresponders: An Experiment in Empowerment](http://blog.mailchimp.com/getting-started-autoresponders-an-experiment-in-empowerment/)
-* [MailChimp.com - Advanced customization of MailChimp's signup forms](http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/advanced-customization-of-mailchimps-sign-up-forms)
-* [MailChimp.com - Drip Email Campaigns – Setting Expectations](https://blog.mailchimp.com/drip-email-campaigns-setting-expectations/)
-* [Smashing Magazine - How To Create A Self-Paced Email Course](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/02/10/how-to-create-a-self-paced-email-course/)
-* [ryandoom.com - Setting up a drip email campaign with MailChimp](http://www.ryandoom.com/Blog/tabid/91/ID/26/Setting-up-a-drip-email-campaign-with-MailChimp.aspx)
-{^ .list--indented }
-
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-05-16_should-you-wrap-headers-images-and-text-links.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-05-16_should-you-wrap-headers-images-and-text-links.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 853275f..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-05-16_should-you-wrap-headers-images-and-text-links.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,39 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Should You Wrap Headers, Images and Text Together in Links?
-pub_date: 2014-05-16 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/05/should-you-wrap-headers-images-and-text-links
-metadesc: What happens when you wrap large amounts of text and images in link tags?
-code: True
-
----
-
-Question marks in headlines are a pet peeve of mine because the answer is [almost always](https://twitter.com/YourTitleSucks), "no". In this case though, I'm genuinely not sure. 
-
-[Update 2014-07-16: I lean toward no for situations with a large amount of text since it makes selecting that text really hard on mobile devices]
-
-Matt Wilcox asked an interesting [question on Twitter](https://twitter.com/MattWilcox/status/467251442307567616) today:
-
-> A11y question: we now often wrap headers and paras and images all in one `<a/>`... Makes sense, but how does that impact screen reader users?
-
-And [the follow up](https://twitter.com/MattWilcox/status/467251958387331072):
-
-> This is a good way to avoid having to link an image, header, and ‘read more’ with three identical URLs, but how are wrapped links read out?
-
-Just in case you didn't know, HTML5 allows you to put just about anything inside an `<a>`, which means you can do things like this:
-
-~~~language-markup
-<a href="#">
-    <article>
-        <h1>My Article Title</h1>
-        <img src="" alt="some related image" />
-        <time datetime="2014-05-15T19:43:23">05/15/14</time>
-        <p>Paragraph text. Couple be multiple 'grafs, could be dozens. Could be just about anything really.</p>
-    </article> 
-</a>
-~~~
-
-This eliminates the need have three separate links around the title, image and perhaps a "read more" link.
-
-But as Wilcox points out, there might be unanticipated consequences that make this not such a good idea in terms of accessibility, and even usability (not sure there's a real distinction there). For example, any text becomes <strike>impossible</strike> very difficult to select, which makes me hesitate to use this technique in this particular case. There may be cases where that isn't a major problem.
-
-I threw together a [test page](https://longhandpixels.net/demos/large-text-a11y/) that I can run through [ChromeVox](http://www.chromevox.com/) and OS X's VoiceOver (the two screen readers I have access to) and see what happens. But I don't use a screen reader on a regular basis so it's hard to know what works and what doesn't, other than obviously very annoying stuff. If you use a screen reader or have a means to test this scenario on other screen readers, I'd love to hear from you.
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-10-03_using-picture-vs-img.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-10-03_using-picture-vs-img.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 3c2d39c..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-10-03_using-picture-vs-img.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,72 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "`<picture>` Is Not the Element You're Looking For"
-pub_date: 2014-09-30 09:30:23
-slug: /blog/2014/09/picture-not-the-element-youre-looking-for
-tags: Responsive Images, Responsive Web Design
-metadesc: Most of the time the <picture> element is not what you want, just use img. Your users will thank you.
-code: True
-tutorial: True
-
----
-
-The `<picture>` element will be supported in Chromium/Chrome/Opera stable in a few weeks. Later this year it will be part of Firefox. Some of it is already available in Safari and Mobile Safari. It's also top of IE12's to-do list. 
-
-The bottom line is that you can start using `<picture>`. You can polyfill it with [Picturefill][1] if you want, but since `<picture>` degrades reasonably gracefully I haven't even been doing that. I've been using `<picture>`.
-
-Except that, as Jason Grigsby recently pointed out, you probably [don't need `<picture>`][2]. 
-
-See, two of the most useful attributes for the `<picture>` element also work on the good old `<img>` element. Those two attributes are `srcset` and `sizes`.
-
-In other words, this markup (from, [A Complete Guide to the `<picture>` Element][3])...
-
-~~~{.language-markup}
-<picture>
-    <source media="(min-width: 48em)" srcset="pic-large1x.jpg 800w, pic-large2x.jpg 800w 2x">
-    <source media="(min-width: 37.25em)" srcset="pic-med1x.jpg 400w, pic-med2x.jpg 400w 2x">
-    <source srcset="pic1x.jpg 200w, pic2x.jpg 200w 2x">
-    <img src="pic1x.jpg" alt="Responsive Web Design cover">
-</picture>
-~~~
-
-...will do nearly the same things as this markup that doesn't use `<picture>`:
-
-~~~{.language-markup}
-<img sizes="(min-width: 48em) 100vw,
-			(min-width: 37.25em) 50vw,
-			calc(33vw - 100px)"
-	srcset="pic-large1x.jpg 800w,
-			pic-large2x.jpg 800w 2x,
-			pic-med1x.jpg 400w,
-			pic-med2x.jpg 400w 2x,
-			pic2x.jpg 200w 2x,
-			pic1x.jpg 200w"
-    src="pic1x.jpg" alt="Responsive Web Design cover">
-~~~
-
-The main difference between these two lies in the browser algorithm that ends up picking which image to display.
-
-In the first case, using the `<source>` tag means the browser **MUST** use the first source that has a rule that matches. That's [part of the `<picture>` specification][4].
-
-In the second bit of code, using the `sizes` and `srcset` attribute on the `<img>` tag, means the browser gets to decide which image it thinks is best. **When you use `<img>` the browser can pick the picture as it sees fit**. Avoiding the `<source>` tag allows the browser to pick the image via its own algorithms. 
-
-That means the browser can respect the wishes of your visitor, for example, not downloading a high resolution image over 3G networks. It also allows the browser to be smarter, for example, downloading the lowest resolution image until the person zooms in, at which point the browser might grab a higher resolution image.
-
-Generally speaking, the only time you need to use `<picture>` is when you're handling [the "art direction" use case][5], which, according to `<picture>` guru Yoav Weiss is [currently around 25 percent of the time][6]. 
-
-The rest of the time, the majority of the time, stick with `<img>`, your users will thank you.
-
-## Further Reading
-
-* [Don't use `<picture>` (most of the time)](http://blog.cloudfour.com/dont-use-picture-most-of-the-time/)
-* [A Complete Guide to the `<Picture>` Element](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2014/02/complete-guide-picture-element)
-* [Native Responsive Images](https://dev.opera.com/articles/native-responsive-images/)
-* [Srcset and sizes](http://ericportis.com/posts/2014/srcset-sizes/)
-{^ .list--indented }
-
-
-[1]: http://scottjehl.github.io/picturefill/
-[2]: http://blog.cloudfour.com/dont-use-picture-most-of-the-time/
-[3]: https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2014/02/complete-guide-picture-element)
-[4]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/embedded-content.html#select-an-image-source
-[5]: http://usecases.responsiveimages.org/#h3_art-direction
-[6]: http://blog.yoav.ws/2013/05/How-Big-Is-Art-Direction
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-10-10_lenovo-chromebook-review.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-10-10_lenovo-chromebook-review.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index e4b6bca..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-10-10_lenovo-chromebook-review.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,86 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "Review: The Lenovo n20p Chromebook"
-pub_date: 2014-10-10 09:30:23
-slug: /blog/2014/10/lenovo-n20p-chromebook-review
-metadesc: A follow up to my Wired review, aimed at those curious about running Linux on Chromebooks
-
----
-
-I've been testing some Chromebooks for Wired. My first review is the [Lenovo n20p][1].
-
-Here's the part I can't fit into the allotted 750 words: I'm not at all interested in these devices when they're running Chrome OS[^1]. 
-
-I'm interested in Chromebooks because they're cheap and they're hackable. I'm interested in them because for $200-$300 you can get what amounts to an underpowered ultrabook. My ideal laptop is cheap, light, and long lasting. Chromebooks deliver on all three counts, which means I can take the $800-$1000 I would have spent on an actual ultrabook and put it to better use in the world.
-
-Chrome OS, however, is not for me. I need a terminal. I want to run shell scripts and apps like Vim, Mutt, Python, Pandoc, etc. I also want a RAW image editor. And I want to use the browser of my choice. 
-
-In other words, I want Linux on my Chromebook, otherwise all bets are off, which is why I'm putting up this little addendum to my Wired review -- for anyone else who's curious to hear what Linux is like on a $200 laptop. 
-
-Spoiler alert: It's surprisingly awesome, though you need to make sure you get the right hardware for what you want to do.
-
-## The Lenovo n20p
-
-I hope it's clear from the Wired review that I do not recommend you buy the Lenovo n20p unless you really, really want the touchscreen features. Otherwise the screen is a deal breaker. It's also overpriced relative to other Chromebooks and short on RAM.
-
-Let me reiterate that first point here: the screen is awful. Completely, utterly awful. Sure it's a touch screen, which is good, because it's not much of visual screen. There are far better screens on Chromebooks that retail for $100 less. I'm typing this right now in Vim, using the [Solarized][2] dark] color scheme and I can barely see the words on the screen. It's that bad. 
-
-Still, this is the first Chromebook I've had to experiment with so I installed and have been using Debian GNU/Linux on it. I opted for the Xfce desktop since it's somewhat lighter than GNOME[^2].
-
-Debian runs really well on this machine when booted through the [Crouton project][3]. Crouton is not secure and I don't recommend actually using it full time, but it's not bad for testing. The better option would be to dual boot through the [SeaBIOS firmware][4] (or ditch Chrome OS entirely) but I'm not sure SeaBIOS is included with this hardware. I'm sending this device back to Lenovo; I don't want to brick a loaner machine installing alternate firmware. 
-
-## The Strange Story of Performance
-
-In the Wired review I mentioned that with Chrome OS I got about 6 hours of battery life doing normal stuff -- browsing the web, streaming audio and video, writing and so on. With Xfce on top of Debian on the same machine I get 8 sometimes 9 hours. I have no explanation for this other than perhaps Linux has better power management...? If that's true, Chrome OS is really lagging here because Linux has pretty shitty power management in my experience. Whatever the case Xfce routinely outdid Chrome OS in battery life.
-
-But wait, it gets weirder. In the Wired review I mentioned that the Lenovo bogs down considerably when you open more than 10 or so tabs (sad for 2GB of RAM, but that's just how it is). For example, open a few YouTube videos, Google Docs, a web-based email app and few dozen more and scrolling starts to stutter and switching tabs is noticeably sluggish. Do the very same thing in Chromium running on Debian and you get nothing of the sort.
-
-I have no explanation for this either, especially because Crouton means Chrome OS is still running alongside Debian. While performance should be on par, exceeding Chrome OS is difficult to explain. But hey, good news for those who want to run Linux on a Chromebook. 
-
-So, what's it like to try something moderately taxing, in my case, editing RAW images in Darktable? And can you record a decent screencast? How about editing video? The answers are, it's not that bad, yes and yes but it will take longer. Which is to say that I found the Lenovo to be plenty snappy considering it's only 2GB of RAM and a Celeron processor.
-
-I did not load my entire photo library (remember there's only a 16GB SSD), but I did throw about 5 GB of photos in it and Darktable wasn't much slower than on my MacBook Pro, which has 16GB of RAM. Browsing through large folders of images sometimes caused jumpy scrolling and thumbnails took longer to generate and come into view, but it was not nearly as horrible as I expected. In fact it was totally usable, other than the screen.
-
-I didn't really understand how bad the screen sucks on the n20p until I tried to edit a photo. It was a washed out joke. Whole tonal ranges that Darktable was offering to adjust simply didn't show up in the image on the screen. 
-
-I record a lot of screencasts and edit video a fair bit. I tested both on the Lenovo and am happy to report that it's possible, though exporting your edited HD video of any length will be something you're better off starting shortly before you head to bed. Which is to say it works fine, it just takes longer.
-
-## Hardware Problems 
-
-Overall I was quite happy with the n20p's hardware, save the screen. The keyboard is one the best I've used on a small device. There is a proprietary power jack, which is annoying if you want to have two -- there's no borrowing a compatible cable from another device.
-
-Another potential annoyance for Linux users is that the SD card doesn't sit flush, which means you can't leave it in and use it as a second drive. Regrettably this seems to be the overall trend in current laptop design, so not like Lenovo are the only ones doing this, but it still sucks. 
-
-I made a half-hearted attempt to crack open the case and see what the RAM/SSD upgrade potential is, but the case did not open easily and since I have to get it back to Lenovo in one piece I didn't push it. Also, the screen. Deal breaker.
-
-## Software Problems
-
-I couldn't get Xmodmap to remap the search key (what would be the caps lock key on most laptops) to control. I have no doubt it can be done, but my first attempt did not work and I didn't feel like spending the time to debug it. I doubt this is a hardware problem though since others have managed to get it working on Chromebooks, just a warning that your current .Xmodmap file might not work on a Chromebook.
-
-I also encountered some problems getting unicode characters to display properly. I've never had this problem with Xfce before but I doubt it was hardware related. I also somehow ended up with the xfce4-mixer needing to run as root to work, which can be fixed by uninstalling and reinstalling.
-
-Most of these things can probably be attributed to my own ignorance than anything directly related to the Chromebook/Linux experience.
-
-## Conclusion
-
-Don't buy the Lenovo n20p as a hackable Linux Chromebook.
-
-That said, Linux on a Chromebook is awesome. Or at least it has the potential to be. 
-
-I want this to be my only computer. For that I want an HD IPS screen. There are a couple Chromebooks on the market now with better screens, which is encouraging. I'd also want a Chromebook with an upgradable SSD (like the Acer 720 line). 
-
-In an ideal world there would be a way to upgrade to 8GB of RAM, but it seems that soldered RAM is becoming more common. On the plus side, I now know I can get by with 4GB and this revolutionary new technology called patience. I'd also love to see an SD card slot that accommodates the entire card so it can act as a second drive, but this seems to be the thing least likely to actually happen.
-
-Currently all these things exist, but not in a single machine. Like I said in the Wired article, at this point the best Chromebook is an impossible Frankenbook. That means there has to be some compromise or some patience. I'm opting for the latter. I'd be willing to bet though that when CES rolls around next year there will be some very tempting Chromebooks available.
-
-I'll follow this up with more thoughts when the next review is up on Wired (which will likely be the 13in NVIDIA Tegra-based Acer).
-
-
-[^1]: I don't believe the deal Google offers -- all your data in exchange for free, useful services -- is a good exchange. They get more than I do out of that. But I am privileged to know how to host things myself and I can afford to pay for services like Fastmail. Most people, unfortunately, are not as privileged, something I try to be mindful of when suggesting whether or not you should use a particular technology.
-
-[^2]: Something like Openbox or Xmonad would be even lighter, but requires a bit more work to install through Crouton. I went with the lightest of the easy-to-install options available in Crouton.
-
-
-[1]: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/lenovo-n20p-chromebook/
-[2]: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
-[3]: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/
-[4]: http://www.coreboot.org/SeaBIOS
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-10-28_google-progressive-enhancement.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-10-28_google-progressive-enhancement.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 8008e41..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2014-10-28_google-progressive-enhancement.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,31 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Google Recommends Progressive Enhancement
-pub_date: 2014-10-28 09:30:23
-slug: /blog/2014/10/google-progressive-enhancement
-metadesc: Google has updated its webmaster tools guidelines to suggest developers use progressive enhancement.
-
----
-
-Just in case you don't subscribe to the [Longhandpixels newsletter][1] (for shame, sign up in the footer :-)), Google recently [updated its Webmaster Guidelines][2] to suggest that developers use progressive enhancement. 
-
-Here's the quote:
-
->Just like modern browsers, our rendering engine might not support all of the technologies a page uses. Make sure your web design adheres to the principles of progressive enhancement as this helps our systems (and a wider range of browsers) see usable content and basic functionality when certain web design features are not yet supported.
-
-As a fan of progressive enhancement ever since the term first appeared on Webmonkey eons ago, I would like to say thank you to Google. Thank you for throwing your weight behind progressive enhancement.
-
-I consider progressive enhancement the cornerstone on which all web design builds (literally and figuratively), but I also know from painful experience that not every developer agrees. I also know nothing shuts up a web developer faster than saying, *well, Google says...*
-
-What makes Google's announcement even more interesting is that it comes in the middle of a post that's actually telling developers that Google spiders will now render CSS and JavaScript. Even as Google's spiders get smarter and better at rendering pages the company still thinks progressive enhancement is important. 
-
-If you're scratching your head wondering what progressive enhancement is, well, you can go read Steve Champeon’s [original Webmonkey article][3] for some background and then check out Aaron Gustafson's [ALA article from 2008][4]. 
-
-If you're interested in how progressive enhancement works in conjunction with responsive design, pick up a copy of my book, <cite>[Build a Better Web with Responsive Design][5]</cite>. I published an excerpt that covers some aspects of progressive enhancement, responsive design and [Why mobile-first is the right way to build responsive websites][6], if you'd like to get a feel for what I'm talking about.
-
-
-[1]: https://longhandpixels.net/newsletter/
-[2]: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.html
-[3]: http://hesketh.com/publications/progressive_enhancement_and_the_future_of_web_design.html
-[4]: http://alistapart.com/article/understandingprogressiveenhancement
-[5]: https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design
-[6]: https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2014/04/why-mobile-first-responsive-design
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2015-01-15_google-mobile-friendly-label.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2015-01-15_google-mobile-friendly-label.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 58aa108..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2015-01-15_google-mobile-friendly-label.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,34 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Google Calls Out 'Mobile-Friendly' Sites
-pub_date: 2015-01-15 09:30:23
-slug: /blog/2015/01/google-mobile-friendly-label
-metadesc: Google is now labeling mobile-friendly sites in search results and mobile-unfriendliness may soon hurt your search engine rankings
-
----
-
-Google has started adding a "mobile-friendly" label next to search results on mobile devices. 
-
-<img src="/media/images/2015/google-mobile-friendly.png" alt="Google's new mobile friendly label">
-
-As a user I love this [^1], and I'll be honest, I'd be pretty unlikely to click through to a site that doesn't get this label -- what's the point? Even if the site is the sole source of whatever I want there's a good chance I won't be able to view it on my phone.
-
-As a web developer I want to make sure my sites get that little "mobile-friendly" label. Here's Google's criteria for what makes a website "mobile-friendly":
-
->* Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
->* Uses text that is readable without zooming
->* Sizes content to the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom
->* Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped
-
-The first is hopefully obvious at this point. The third item is just basic responsive design 101. The others though are things that don't get nearly enough attention in responsive web design. Text big enough to read and links you can tap *should* be key elements of any good responsive design, but sadly, at least in my mobile browsing experience, they aren't.
-
-I'm happy to see Google start to label sites that fail on these counts and I hope it motivates developers to start taking the smaller, but still very important aspects of responsive design -- like typography and white space -- more seriously. 
-
-I'm also happy that the mobile-friendliness of a site may become a factor in how it ranks in search results. According [the Google Webmaster Blog](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/11/helping-users-find-mobile-friendly-pages.html), Google sees the "mobile-friendly" labels as "a first step in helping mobile users to have a better mobile web experience. ***We are also experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal***. (emphasis mine).
-
-<img src="/media/images/2015/google-mobile-friendly-lhp.jpg" alt="Longhandpixels gets the mobile friendly label">
-
-There's a [test page](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/) where you can see how your sites do. This one gets the mobile-friendly label, natch.
-
-<div class="callout"><h3>Need help getting to "mobile-friendly"?</h3> <img src="/media/rwd-cover.png" alt="book cover" />The book <a href="https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design">Build a Better Web with Responsive Web Design</a> is the fastest way to get from here to responsive. You'll learn the best ways to scale fonts with screen size and make sure your tap targets are big enough for comfortable browsing. Read the book, follow the suggestions and your site will be "mobile-friendly".</div>
-
-[^1]: I really wish DuckDuckGo would do this as well since I use it quite a bit more than Google these days.
diff --git a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2015-10-03_wordpress-1.txt b/src/old-no-longer-pub/2015-10-03_wordpress-1.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 846f751..0000000
--- a/src/old-no-longer-pub/2015-10-03_wordpress-1.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,48 +0,0 @@
-WordPress is pretty universally reviled among programmers. It's more or less the Walmart of code. A lot of the core code is very poorly written and in a language no one likes. That's never bothered me. What I don't like is that it encourages mixing presentation code and logic. It also encourages terrible behavior by users[^1] and is at least partly responsible for how damn slow the web has become[^2].
-
-WordPress is also often the best choice for clients. 
-
-Why is something so awful often the best choice? Because clients have budgets and paying me to set up and lightly customize WordPress is dramatically cheaper than paying me to write you something totally custom (and really awesome) using Django or Rails. Budgets are part of reality and with WordPress -- in spite of all that's wrong with it -- the client's money goes further[^3].
-
-WordPress is also fantastically good at some things. The admin is generally very usable and thoughtfully created; the comment system is hands down the best of the web and it has helped millions, possibly billions of people get their ideas on the web. 
-
-That does not, however, explain why *I* was able to get past my dislike of WordPress. My dislike of WordPress centers around the way it mixes logic -- PHP code in this case -- and presentation (HTML). It's a terrible way to work and terrible thing to try to maintain. 
-
-I want all my code in one file, all my HTML in another. The code file uses logic to get the information needed and put it in variables. It then passes those variables to the HTML which displays them and all is well. That's how pretty much every thing designed for the web since about 1999 has worked. Except for WordPress.
-
-I've built dozens of WordPress sites over the years and for most of that time I've hated every minute of it, which, trust me, is no way to make a living. 
-
-All that changed about 4 months ago when I discovered [Timber](https://github.com/jarednova/timber). Timber is a plugin that lets you develop WordPress themes using object-oriented code and the [Twig template engine](http://twig.sensiolabs.org/).
-
-Timber takes all that is bad about WordPress's coding style and enables the kind of clean, sane separation of code web developers are used to. It makes WordPress behave a bit more like Rails or Django.
-
-More importantly, it lets me build WordPress sites without hating every minute of it. I actually like building WordPress sites using Timber. It's not as much fun as using Django, but it's close enough that I ported this site over to WordPress (from a custom Python-based static publishing system).
-
-A couple things to note if this sounds good to you. First, yes, Timber is a WordPress plugin. No, from my testing, it won't slow your site down. But yes, it does introduce a dependency on which all your code will hang. Porting from Timber to non-Timber will be non-trivial. Make sure you're okay with that before you dive in. 
-
-To give you some sense of what it's like to work with Twig, here's what your template code looks like:
-
-~~~.language-markup
-{% extends "base.twig" %}
-{% block content %}
-<article class="h-entry">
-<h1 class="p-name">{{post.title}}</h1>
-<img src="{{post.thumbnail.src}}" alt="image alt text" />
-<div class="body">
-    {{post.content}}
-</div>
-{% endblock %}
-~~~
-
-Yes, that looks a lot like Django template code. The Twig templating system is based on Django's (so is nearly every other templating project I've come across lately. Django is  not perfect, but its template system is clearly pretty close).
-
-You still create .php files with Timber, they're just all logic. You instantiate Timber objects and then query for whatever posts/pages/custom post type data you want. Then you pass that on to the template file. Again, that will probably sound familiar to most non-WordPress developers.
-
-Who cares? Well, if you hate WordPress because of the way it forces you to mix logic and presentation code then Timber might make your life a bit brighter. If you're perfectly happy with WordPress as is, then why the hell are you still reading this?
-
-
-[^1]: For a long time the WordPress Codex actually said that your wp-content folder was "intended by Developers to be completely writable by all (owner/user, group, and public)." Yup, seriously. It's since been changed, so congrats to the WordPress team on cracking open [Internet Security for Dummies](http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Internet-Security-Dummies-Computers/dp/0764575775), but here's the [Internet Archive page](https://web.archive.org/web/20110325073349/http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress) of that advice in case you don't believe me.
-
-[^2]: WordPress supposedly powers about a 1/3 of the web so that alone makes it responsible. But search the web for almost any problem with WordPress and the first bit of advice you'll get is "just install ______ plugin". That's great on one hand, because you don't need to know any code, but because of how WordPress bootstraps plugins it also tends to slow sites to a crawl (and load dozens of external scripts in many cases).
-
-[^3]: WordPress is also more widely used and therefore there are more people capable of maintaining it. That means clients have a more future-proof solution than a customized system written in Python or Ruby.
diff --git a/src/pg-backup.txt b/src/pg-backup.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index e1b6b10..0000000
--- a/src/pg-backup.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,191 +0,0 @@
-When it comes to backups I'm paranoid and lazy. That means I need to automate the process of making redundant backups. 
-
-Pretty much everything to do with luxagraf lives in a single PostgreSQL database that gets backed up every night. To make sure I have plenty of copies of those backup files I download them to various other machines and servers around the web. That way I have copies of my database files on this server, another backup server, my local machine, several local backup hard drives, in Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. Yes, that's overkill, but it's all so ridiculously easy, why not? 
-
-Here's how I do it. 
-
-## Make Nightly Backups of PostgreSQL with `pg_dump` and `cron`
-
-The first step is to regularly dump your database. To do that PostgreSQL provides the handy `pg_dump` command. If you want a good overview of `pg_dump` check out the excellent [PostgreSQL manual]. Here's the basic syntax:
-
-~~~~console
-pg_dump -U user -hhostname database_name > backup_file.sql
-~~~~
-
-So, if you had a database named mydb and you wanted to back it up to a file that starts with the name of the database and then includes today's date, you could do something like this:
-
-~~~~console
-pg_dump -U user -hlocalhost mydb > mydb.`date '+%Y%m%d'`.sql
-~~~~
-
-That's pretty useful, but it's also potentially quite a big file. Thankfully we can just pipe the results to gzip to compress them:
-
-~~~~console
-pg_dump -U user -hlocalhost mydb | gzip -c > mydb.`date '+%Y%m%d'`.sql.gz
-~~~~
-
-That's pretty good. In fact for many scenarios that's all you'll need. Plug that into your cron file by typing `crontab -e` and adding this line to make a backup every night at midnight:
-
-~~~~bash
-0 0 * * * pg_dump -U user -hlocalhost mydb | gzip -c > mydb.`date '+%Y%m%d'`.sql
-~~~~
-
-For a long time that was all I did. But then I started running a few other apps that used PostgreSQL databases (like a version [Tiny Tiny RSS](https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home)), so I needed to have quite a few lines in there. Plus I wanted to perform a [VACUUM](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-vacuum.html) on my main database every so often. So I whipped up a shell script. As you do. 
-
-Actually most of this I cobbled together from sources I've unfortunately lost track of since. Which is to say I didn't write this from scratch. Anyway here's the script I use:
-
-~~~~base
-#!/bin/bash
-#
-# Daily PostgreSQL maintenance: vacuuming and backuping.
-#
-##
-set -e
-for DB in $(psql -l -t -U postgres -hlocalhost |awk '{ print $1}' |grep -vE '^-|:|^List|^Name|template[0|1]|postgres|\|'); do
-  echo "[`date`] Maintaining $DB"
-  echo 'VACUUM' | psql -U postgres -hlocalhost -d $DB
-  DUMP="/path/to/backup/dir/$DB.`date '+%Y%m%d'`.sql.gz"
-  pg_dump -U postgres -hlocalhost $DB | gzip -c > $DUMP
-  PREV="$DB.`date -d'1 day ago' '+%Y%m%d'`.sql.gz"
-  md5sum -b $DUMP > $DUMP.md5
-  if [ -f $PREV.md5 ] && diff $PREV.md5 $DUMP.md5; then
-    rm $DUMP $DUMP.md5
-  fi
-done
-~~~~
-
-Copy that code and save it in a file named psqlback.sh. Then make it executable:
-
-~~~~console
-chmod u+x psqlback.sh
-~~~~
-
-Now before you run it, let's take a look at what's going on.
-
-First we're creating a loop so we can backup all our databases.
-
-~~~~bash
-for DB in $(psql -l -t -U postgres -hlocalhost |awk '{ print $1}' |grep -vE '^-|:|^List|^Name|template[0|1]|postgres|\|'); do
-~~~~
-
-This looks complicated because we're using `awk` and `grep` to parse some output but basically all it's doing is querying PostgreSQL to get a list of all the databases (using the `postgres` user so we can access all of them). Then we pipe that to `awk` and `grep` to extract the name of each database and ignore a bunch of stuff we don't want. 
-
-Then we store the name of database in the variable `DB` for the duration of the loop. 
-
-Once we have the name of the database, the script outputs a basic logging message that says it's maintaining the database and then runs VACUUM. 
-
-The next two lines should look familiar:
-
-~~~~bash
-DUMP="/path/to/backup/dir/$DB.`date '+%Y%m%d'`.sql.gz"
-pg_dump -U postgres -hlocalhost $DB | gzip -c > $DUMP
-~~~~
-
-That's very similar to what we did above, I just stored the file path in a variable because it gets used again. The next thing we do is grab the file from yesterday:
-
-~~~~bash
-PREV="$DB.`date -d'1 day ago' '+%Y%m%d'`.sql.gz"
-~~~~
-
-Then we calculate the md5sum of our dump:
-
-~~~~bash
-md5sum -b $DUMP > $DUMP.md5
-~~~~
-
-The we compare that to yesterday's sum and if they're the same we delete our dump since we already have a copy.
-
-~~~~bash
-  if [ -f $PREV.md5 ] && diff $PREV.md5 $DUMP.md5; then
-    rm $DUMP $DUMP.md5
-  fi
-~~~~
-
-Why? Well, there's no need to store a new backup if it matches the previous one exactly. Since sometimes nothing changes on this site for a few days, weeks, months even, this can save a good bit of space.
-
-Okay now that you know what it does, let's run it:
-
-~~~~console
-./psqlback.sh
-~~~~
-
-If everything went well it should have asked you for a password and then printed out a couple messages about maintaining various databases. That's all well and good for running it by hand, but who is going to put in the password when cron is the one running it?
-
-### Automate Your Backups with `cron`
-
-First let's set up cron to run this script every night around midnight. Open up crontab:
-
-~~~~console
-crontab -e
-~~~~
-
-Then add a line to call the script every night at 11:30PM:
-
-~~~~console
-30 23 * * * ./home/myuser/bin/psqlback.sh > psqlbak.log
-~~~~
-
-You'll need to adjust the path to match your server, but otherwise that's all you need (if you'd like to run it less frequently or at a different time, you can read up on the syntax in the cron manual).
-
-But what happens when we're not there to type in the password? Well, the script fails.
-
-There are a variety of ways we can get around this. In fact the [PostgreSQL docs](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/auth-methods.html) cover everything from LDAP auth to peer auth. The latter is actually quite useful, though a tad bit complicated. I generally use the easiest method -- a password file. The trick to making it work for cron jobs is to create a file in your user's home directory called `.pgpass`.
-
-Inside that file you can provide login credentials for any user on any port. The format looks like this:
-
-~~~~vim
-hostname:port:username:password
-~~~~
-
-You can use * as a wildcard if you need it. Here's what I use:
-
-~~~~vim
-localhost:*:*:postgres:passwordhere
-~~~~
-
-I hate storing a password in the plain text file, but I haven't found a better way to do this. 
-
-To be fair, assuming your server security is fine, the `.pgpass` method should be fine. Also note that Postgres will ignore this file if it has greater than 600 permissions (that is, user is the only one that can execute it. Let's change that so that:
-
-~~~~console
-chmod 600 .pgpass
-~~~~
-
-Now we're all set. Cron will run our script every night at 11:30 PM and we'll have a compressed backup file of all our PostgreSQL data.
-
-## Automatically Moving It Offsite
-
-Now we have our database backed up to a file. That's a start. That saves us if PostgreSQL does something wrong or somehow becomes corrupted. But we still have a single point of failure -- what if the whole server crashes and can't be recovered? We're screwed.
-
-To solve that problem we need to get our data off this server and store it somewhere else. 
-
-There's quite a few ways we could do this and I have done most of them. For example we could install [s3cmd](http://s3tools.org/s3cmd) and send them over to an Amazon S3 bucket. I actually do that, but it requires you pay for S3. In case you don't want to do that, I'm going to stick with something that's free -- Dropbox.
-
-Head over to the Dropbox site and follow their instructions for [installing Dropbox on a headless Linux server](https://www.dropbox.com/en/install?os=lnx). It's just one line of cut and pasting though you will need to authorize Dropbox with your account.
-
-**BUT WAIT**
-
-Before you authorize the server to use your account, well, don't. Go create a second account solely for this server. Do that, then authorize that new account for this server. 
-
-Now go back to your server and symlink the folder you put in the script above, into the Dropbox folder.
-
-~~~~console
-cd ~/Dropbox
-ln -s ~/path/to/pgbackup/directory .
-~~~~
-
-Then go back to Dropbox log in to the second account, find that database backup folder you just symlinked in and share it with your main Dropbox account. 
-
-This way, should something go wrong and the Dropbox folder on your server becomes compromised at least the bad guys only get your database backups and not the entirety of your documents folder or whatever might be in your normal Dropbox account. 
-
-Credit to [Dan Benjamin](http://hivelogic.com/), who's first person I heard mention this dual account idea.
-
-The main thing to note about this method is that you're limited to 2GB of storage (the max for a free Dropbox account). That's plenty of space in most cases. Luxagraf has been running for more than 10 years, stores massive amounts of geodata in PostgreSQL, along with close to 1000 posts of various kinds, and a full compressed DB dump is still only about 35MB. So I can store well over 60 days worth of backups, which is plenty for my purposes (in fact I only store about half that).
-
-So create your second account, link your server installation to that and then share that folder with your main Dropbox account. 
-
-The last thing I suggest you do, because Dropbox is not a backup service, but a syncing service, is **copy** the backup files out of the Dropbox folder on your local machine to somewhere else on that machine. Not move, but **copy**. So leave a copy in Dropbox and make a second copy on your local machine outside of the Dropbox folder.
-
-If you dislike Dropbox (I don't blame you, I no longer actually use it for anything other than this) there are other ways to accomplish the same thing. The already mentioned s3cmd could move your backups to Amazon S3, good old `scp` could move them to another server and of course you can always download them to your local machine using `scp` or `rsync` (or SFTP, but then that wouldn't be automated).
-
-Naturally I recommend you do all these things. I sync my nightly backups to my local machine with Dropbox and `scp` those to a storage server. Then I use s3cmd to send weekly backups to S3. That gives me three offsite backups which is enough even for my paranoid, digitally distrustful self. 
diff --git a/src/piwik.txt b/src/piwik.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 65e43fa..0000000
--- a/src/piwik.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,25 +0,0 @@
-If you follow tech circles at all you've probably read something lately about how ad-blockers are going to destroy the web. Or more humorously to my mind, that they're "immoral". I think they're neither, but they are most definitely not going away.
-
-Curiously, the browser add-on at the center of the controversy is Ghostery, which I've written about before not as an ad-blocker, which it really isn't, but as a privacy tool.
-
-To my mind that pretty much nails the debate. If you see Ghostery as a tool for preserving your privacy and blocking attempts to track you, you'll be a supporter. If you see Ghostery as a tool to block ads you'll probably be opposed to it. 
-
-It should be obvious, since I wrote a tutorial about how to install and use it, that I think Ghostery is great. I wouldn't use a browser without it. 
-
-That said, I think that as a erstwhile publisher, or perhaps just as a participant in the open web, I have an obligation to explore all the ways in which I can make Ghostery unnecessary for you. 
-
-So I sat down and looked over this site and my personal site (luxagraf.net) to see what I could do to protect my readers from being tracked. I serve all my sites over HTTPS, which I guess is good, though sometimes I worry it's already been compromised and therefore creates a false sense of security. 
-
-And, while I don't set or use any cookies that track you, I was loading a tracker via Google Analytics. I don't have a particular problem with Google Analytics, but that's not the point. The point is that you might have a problem with it. All you've really agreed to in following a link here is to see what information I might have. You didn't also agree to let Google know what you're doing and by extension anyone Google wants to share that info with.
-
-Not that Google is evil. But Google is beyond our control. But neither you nor I have any control over the data it collects. In the case of Analytics that means I can't, for example, delete all the data in it that's more than 6 months old. Nor do I have any control over what Google might do with all that data it's collected about what you do here. Yes it's supposedly anonymous data, but I truly hope that by now no one still believes any tracking data can truly be anonymous.
-
-I decided that I could not in good conscience continue to expose my readers to a script that tracks them, stores information about them and at the same time advocate a tool like Ghostery. 
-
-That kind of hypocrisy doesn't sit well with me. So I deleted the Google Analytics script from all my sites (I'd already made a similarly inspired decision to pull my mailing list out of MailChimp).
-
-However, I found that I missed that analytics data. The web always feels a little like screaming into a black hole, the data we get from tools like Google Analytics makes it a little less so. I could see that people did indeed find my [tutorial on setting up Nginx on Debian]() useful or that almost no ever visits my [Ghostery tutorial](). It also helps see connections. Without it I would have no idea that several posts here are referenced on Stack Overflow or linked to from other articles around the web. 
-
-Without analytics the web feels less friendly, less collaborative and more like futile shouting in a black hole. I didn't like it.
-
-Now I could analyze my server logs with Webalizer, and I have set that up in the past, but let's face it, it's pretty fugly. Fortunately there's Piwik, a self-hosted analytics package that offers everything I liked about Google Analytics, but keeps my in charge and even lets me turn off cookie-based tracking. So I can see who's coming here, where they're coming from, what they seem to be enjoying **and that's it**. I have no idea where you go from here, no idea what you do next and, most importantly, neither does anyone else.
diff --git a/src/published/2013-09-20_whatever-happened-to-webmonkey.txt b/src/published/2013-09-20_whatever-happened-to-webmonkey.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 112ce46..0000000
--- a/src/published/2013-09-20_whatever-happened-to-webmonkey.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,43 +0,0 @@
----

-title: Whatever Happened to Webmonkey.com?

-pub_date: 2013-09-20 21:12:31

-slug: /blog/2013/09/whatever-happened-to-webmonkey

-metadesc: Wired has shut down Webmonkey.com for the fourth and probably final time.

-

----

-

-People on Twitter have been asking what's up with [Webmonkey.com][1]. Originally I wanted to get this up on Webmonkey, but I got locked out of the CMS before I managed to do that, so I'm putting it here.

-

-Earlier this year Wired decided to stop producing new content for Webmonkey.

-

-For those keeping track at home, this is the fourth, and I suspect final, time Webmonkey has been shut down (previously it was shut down in 1999, 2004 and 2006).

-

-I've been writing for Webmonkey.com since 2000, full time since 2006 (when it came back from the dead for a third run). And for the last two years I have been the sole writer, editor and producer of the site.

-

-Like so many of you, I learned how to build websites from Webmonkey. But it was more than just great tutorials and how tos. Part of what made Webmonkey great was that it was opinionated and rough around the edges. Webmonkey was not the product of professional writers, it was written and created by the web nerds building Wired's websites. It was written by people like us, for people like us.

-

-I'll miss Webmonkey not just because it was my job for many years, but because at this point it feels like a family dog to me, it's always been there and suddenly it's not. Sniff. I'll miss you Webmonkey.

-

-Quite a few people have asked me why it was shut down, but unfortunately I don't have many details to share. I've always been a remote employee, not in San Francisco at all in fact, and consequently somewhat out of the loop. What I can say is that Webmonkey's return to Wired in 2006 was the doing of long-time Wired editor Evan Hansen ([now at Medium][2]). Evan was a tireless champion of Webmonkey and saved it from the Conde Nast ax several times. He was also one of the few at Wired who "got" Webmonkey. When Evan left Wired earlier this year I knew Webmonkey's days were numbered. 

-

-I don't begrudge Wired for shutting Webmonkey down. While I have certain nostalgia for its heyday, even I know it's been a long time since Webmonkey was leading the way in web design. I had neither the staff nor the funding to make Webmonkey anything like its early 2000s self. In that sense I'm glad it was shut down rather than simply fading further into obscurity.

-

-I am very happy that Wired has left the site in place. As far as I know Webmonkey (and its ever-popular cheat sheets, which still get a truly astounding amount of traffic) will remain available on the web. That said, note to the [Archive Team][3], it wouldn't hurt to create a backup. Sadly, many of the very earliest writings have already been lost in the various CMS transitions over the years and even much of what's there now has incorrect bylines. Still, at least most of it's there. For now.

-

-As for me, I've decided to go back to what I enjoyed most about the early days of Webmonkey: teaching people how to make cool stuff for the web. 

-

-To that end I'm currently working on a book about responsive design, which I'm hoping to make available by the end of October. If you're interested drop your email in the box below and I'll let you know when it's out (alternately you can follow [@LongHandPixels][4] on Twitter).

-

-If you have any questions or want more details use the comments box below. 

-

-In closing, I'd like to thank some people at Wired -- thank you to my editors over the years, especially [Michael Calore][5], [Evan Hansen][6] and [Leander Kahney][7] who all made me a much better writer. Also thanks to Louise for always making sure I got paid. And finally, to everyone who read Webmonkey and contributed over the years, whether with articles or even just a comment, thank you. 

-

-Cheers and, yes, thanks for all the bananas.

-

-[1]: http://www.webmonkey.com/

-[2]: https://medium.com/@evanatmedium

-[3]: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

-[4]: https://twitter.com/LongHandPixels

-[5]: http://snackfight.com/

-[6]: https://twitter.com/evanatmedium

-[7]: http://www.cultofmac.com/about/

diff --git a/src/published/2014-02-07_html5-placeholder-label-search-forms.txt b/src/published/2014-02-07_html5-placeholder-label-search-forms.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index b1c083e..0000000
--- a/src/published/2014-02-07_html5-placeholder-label-search-forms.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,102 +0,0 @@
----

-title: HTML5 Placeholder as a Label in Search Forms

-pub_date: 2014-02-07 14:38:20

-slug: /blog/2014/02/html5-placeholder-label-search-forms

-metadesc: Using HTML5's placeholder attribute instead of a label is never a good idea. Except when maybe it is.

-tags: Best Practices

-code: True

-tutorial: True

----

-

-The HTML5 form input attribute `placeholder` is a tempting replacement for the good old `<label>` form element. 

-

-In fact the web is littered with sites that use `placeholder` instead of labels (or worse, JavaScript to make the `value` attribute act like `label`).

-

-Just because a practice is widespread does not make it a *best* practice though. Remember "skip intro"? I rest my case. Similarly, **you should most definitely not use `placeholder` as a substitute for form labels**. It may be a pattern on today's web, but it's a shitty pattern.

-

-Labels help users complete forms. There are [mountains](http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/web-form-design/) of [data](http://css-tricks.com/label-placement-on-forms/) and [eye tracking studies](http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement-in-forms.php) to back this up. If you want people to actually fill out your forms (as opposed, I guess, to your forms just looking "so clean, so elegant") then you want to use labels. The best forms, from a usability standpoint, are forms with non-bold, left aligned labels above the field they label.

-

-Again, **using placeholder as a substitute for labels is a horrible UI pattern that you should (almost) never use.**

-

-Is that dogmatic enough for you? Oh wait, *almost* never. Yes, I think there is one specific case where maybe this pattern makes sense: search forms.

-

-Search forms are so ubiquitous and so well understood at this point that it may be redundant to have a label that says "search", a placeholder that also says "search" and a button that says "search" as well. I think just two of those would be fine. 

-

-We could skip the placeholder text, which should really be more of a hint anyway -- e.g. "Jane Doe" rather than "Your Name" -- but what if we want to dispense with the label to save a bit of screen real estate, which can be at a premium on smaller viewports?

-

-The label should still be part of the actual HTML, whether your average sighted user actually sees it or not. We need it there for accessibility. But with search forms, well, maybe you can tuck that label away, out of site. 

-

-Progressive enhancement dictates that the labels should most definitely be there though. Let's consider a simple search form example:

-

-~~~.language-markup

-<form action="/search" method="get">

-    <label id="search-label" for="search">Search:</label>

-    <input type="text" name="search" id="query" value="" placeholder="Search LongHandPixels"> 

-    <input class="btn" type="submit" value="Search">

-</form>

-~~~

-

-Here we have our `<label>` tag and use the `for` attribute to bind it with the text input that is our search field. So far, so good for best practices. 

-

-Here's what I think is the progressive enhancement route for search forms: use the HTML above and then use JavaScript and CSS to hide away the label when the it makes sense to do so. In other words, don't just hide the label in CSS. 

-

-Hiding the label with something like `label {visibility: hidden;}` is a bad idea. That, and its evil cousin `display: none;` hide elements from screen readers and other assistive devices. Instead we'd want to do something like this:

-

-~~~.language-css

-.search-form-label-class {

-    position: absolute; 

-    left: -999em;

-}

-~~~

-

-Check out Aaron Gustafson's ALA article <cite>[Now You See Me](http://alistapart.com/article/now-you-see-me)</cite> for more details on the various ways to hide things visually without hiding them from people who may need them the most. 

-

-So this code is better, our label is off-screen and the placeholder text combined with descriptive button text serve the same purpose and still make the function of the form clear. The main problem we have right now is we've hidden the label in every browser, even browsers that won't display the `placeholder` attribute. That's not so great.

-

-In this case you might argue that the button still makes the form function relatively clear, but I think we can do better. Instead of adding a rule to our stylesheet, let's use a bit of JavaScript to apply our CSS only if the browser understands the `placeholder` attribute. Here's a bit of code to do that:

-

-~~~.language-javascript

-<script>

-if (("placeholder" in document.createElement("input"))) {

-    document.getElementById("search-label").style.position= 'absolute';

-    document.getElementById("search-label").style.left= '-999em';

-}

- </script>

-~~~

-

-This is just plain JavaScript, if your site already has `jQuery` or some other library running them by all means use it's functions to select your elements and apply CSS. The point is the `if` statement,  which tests to see if the current browser support the `placeholder` attribute. If it does them we hide the label off-screen, if it doesn't then nothing happens. Either way the element remains accessible to screen readers.

-

-If you'd like to see it in action, here's a working demo: [HTML5 placeholder as a label in search form](https://longhandpixels.net/demos/html5-placeholder/)

-

-So is this a good idea? Honestly, I don't know. It might be splitting hairs. I think it's okay for search forms or other single field forms where there's less chance users will be confused when the placeholder text disappears. 

-

-Pros:

-

-* Saves space (no label, which can be a big help on small viewports)

-* Still offers good accessibility

-

-Cons:

-

-* **Technically this is wrong**. I'm essentially using JavaScript to make `placeholder` take the place of a label, which is not what `placeholder` is for.

-* **Placeholders can be confusing**. Some people won't start typing a search term because they're waiting for the field to clear. Others will think that the field is filled and the form can be submitted. See Chris Coyier's CSS-Tricks site for some ideas on how [you can make it apparent that the field](http://css-tricks.com/hang-on-placeholders/) is ready for input.

-* **Not good for longer forms**. Again, multi-field forms need labels. Placeholders disappear when you start typing. If you forget which field you're in after you start typing, placeholders are no help. Despite the fact that the web is littered with forms that do this, please don't. Use labels on longer forms.

-

-I'm doing this with the search form on this site. I started to do the same with my new mailing list sign up form (which isn't live yet), which is what got me writing this, thinking aloud as it were. My newsletter sign up form will have two fields, email and name (only email is required), and after thinking about this some more I deleted the JavaScript and left the labels.

-

-If I shorten the form to just email, which I may, depending on some A/B testing I'm doing, then I may use this technique there too (and A/B test again). As of now though I don't think it's a good idea for that form for the reasons mentioned above.

-

-I'm curious to hear from users, what do you think of this pattern? Is this okay? Unnecessary? Bad idea? Let me know what you think.

-

-## Further Reading:

-

-* The W3C's Web Platform Docs on the [placeholder](http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/html/attributes/placeholder) attribute.

-* Luke Wroblewski's book <cite>[Web Form Design](http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/web-form-design/)</cite> is the Bible of building good forms.

-* A little taste of Wroblewski's book over on his blog: [Web Application Form Design](http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1502).

-* UXMatter's once did some [eyeball tracking studies](http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement-in-forms.php) based on Wroblewski's book.

-* Aaron Gustafson's ALA article [Now You See Me](http://alistapart.com/article/now-you-see-me), which talks about best practices for hiding elements with JavaScript.

-* CSS-Tricks: [Hang On Placeholders](http://css-tricks.com/hang-on-placeholders/).

-* [Jeremy Keith on `placeholder`](http://adactio.com/journal/6147/).

-* CSS-Tricks: [Places It's Tempting To Use Display: None; But Don't](http://css-tricks.com/places-its-tempting-to-use-display-none-but-dont/). Seriously, don't.

-{^ .list--indented }

-

-

diff --git a/src/published/2014-02-10_install-nginx-debian-ubuntu.txt b/src/published/2014-02-10_install-nginx-debian-ubuntu.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index e6cc835..0000000
--- a/src/published/2014-02-10_install-nginx-debian-ubuntu.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,250 +0,0 @@
----

-title: Install Nginx on Debian/Ubuntu

-pub_date: 2014-02-10 11:35:31

-slug: /blog/2014/02/install-nginx-debian-ubuntu

-tags: Web Servers

-metadesc: A complete guide to installing and configuring Nginx to serve static files (on a Digital Ocean or similar VPS)

-code: True

-tutorial: True

-

----

-

-I recently helped a friend set up his first Nginx server and in the process realized I didn't have a good working reference for how I set up Nginx. 

-

-So, for myself, my friend and anyone else looking to get started with Nginx, here's my somewhat opinionated guide to installing and configuring Nginx to serve static files. Which is to say, this is how I install and set up Nginx to serve my own and my clients' static files whether those files are simply stylesheets, images and JavaScript or full static sites like this one. What follows is what I believe are the best practices of Nginx[^1]; if you know better, please correct me in the comments.

-

-[This post was last updated <span class="dt-updated updated" datetime="2014-11-05T12:04:25" itemprop="datePublished"><span>05 November 2014</span></span>]

-

-## Nginx Beats Apache for Static Content[^2]

-

-I've written before about how static website generators like [Jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com), [Pelican](http://blog.getpelican.com) and [Cactus](https://github.com/koenbok/Cactus) are a great way to prototype websites in a hurry. They're also great tools for actually managing sites, not just "blogs". There are in fact some very large websites powered by these "blogging" engines. President Obama's very successful fundraising website [ran on Jekyll](http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/).

-

-Whether you're just building a quick live prototype or running an actual live website of static files, you'll need a good server. So why not use Apache? Simply put, Apache is overkill.

-

-Unlike Apache, which is a jack-of-all-trades server, Nginx was really designed to do just a few things well, one of which is to offer a simple, fast, lightweight server for static files. And Nginx is really, really good at serving static files. In fact, in my experience Nginx with PageSpeed, gzip, far future expires headers and a couple other extras I'll mention is faster than serving static files from Amazon S3[^3] (potentially even faster in the future if Verizon and its ilk [really do](http://netneutralitytest.com/) start [throttling cloud-based services](http://davesblog.com/blog/2014/02/05/verizon-using-recent-net-neutrality-victory-to-wage-war-against-netflix/)).

-

-## Nginx is Different from Apache

-

-In its quest to be lightweight and fast, Nginx takes a different approach to modules than you're probably familiar with in Apache. In Apache you can dynamically load various features using modules. You just add something like `LoadModule alias_module modules/mod_alias.so` to your Apache config files and just like that Apache loads the alias module.

-

-Unlike Apache, Nginx can not dynamically load modules. Nginx has available what it has available when you install it. 

-

-That means if you really want to customize and tweak it, it's best to install Nginx from source. You don't *have* to install it from source. But if you really want a screaming fast server, I suggest compiling Nginx yourself, enabling and disabling exactly the modules you need. Installing Nginx from source allows you to add some third-party tools, most notably Google's PageSpeed module, which has some fantastic tools for speeding up your site. 

-

-Luckily, installing Nginx from source isn't too difficult. Even if you've never compiled any software from source, you can install Nginx. The remainder of this post will show you exactly how. 

-

-## My Ideal Nginx Setup for Static Sites

-

-Before we start installing, let's go over the things we'll be using to build a fast, lightweight server with Nginx.

-

-* [Nginx](http://nginx.org).

-* [SPDY](http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol) -- Nginx offers "experimental support for SPDY", but it's not enabled by default. We're going to enable it when we install Nginx. In my testing SPDY support has worked without a hitch, experimental or otherwise.

-* [Google Page Speed](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module) -- Part of Google's effort to make the web faster, the Page Speed Nginx module "automatically applies web performance best practices to pages and associated assets". 

-* [Headers More](https://github.com/agentzh/headers-more-nginx-module/) -- This isn't really necessary from a speed standpoint, but I often like to set custom headers and hide some headers (like which version of Nginx your server is running). Headers More makes that very easy.

-* [Naxsi](https://github.com/nbs-system/naxsi) -- Naxsi is a "Web Application Firewall module for Nginx". It's not really all that important for a server limited to static files, but it adds an extra layer of security should you decided to use Nginx as a proxy server down the road.

-

-So we're going to install Nginx with SPDY support and three third-party modules.

-

-Okay, here's the step-by-step process to installing Nginx on a Debian 7 (or Ubuntu) server. If you're looking for a good, cheap VPS host I've been happy with [Digital Ocean](https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=3bda91345045) (that's an affiliate link that will help support LongHandPixels; if you prefer, here's a non-affiliate link: [link](https://www.digitalocean.com/))

-

-The first step is to make sure you're installing the latest release of Nginx. To do that check the [Nginx download page](http://nginx.org/en/download.html) for the latest version of Nginx (at the time of writing that's 1.5.10). 

-

-Okay, SSH into your server and let's get started. 

-

-While these instructions will work on just about any server, the one thing that will be different is how you install the various prerequisites needed to compile Nginx. 

-

-On a Debian/Ubuntu server you'd do this:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-$ sudo apt-get -y install build-essential zlib1g-dev libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libbz2-dev libssl-dev tar unzip

-~~~

-

-If you're using RHEL/Cent/Fedora you'll want these packages:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-$ sudo yum install gcc-c++ pcre-dev pcre-devel zlib-devel make

-~~~

-

-After you have the prerequisites installed it's time to grab the latest version of Google's Pagespeed module. Google's [Nginx PageSpeed installation instructions](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/build_ngx_pagespeed_from_source) are pretty good, so I'll reproduce them here.

-

-First grab the latest version of PageSpeed, which is currently 1.9.32.2, but check the sources since it updates frequently and change this first cariable to match the latest version.

-

-~~~.language-bash

-NPS_VERSION=1.9.32.2

-wget https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed/archive/release-${NPS_VERSION}-beta.zip

-unzip release-${NPS_VERSION}-beta.zip

-~~~

-

-Now, before we compile pagespeed we need to grab `psol`, which PageSpeed needs to function properly. So, let's `cd` into the `ngx_pagespeed-release-1.8.31.4-beta` folder and grab `psol`:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-cd ngx_pagespeed-release-${NPS_VERSION}-beta/

-wget https://dl.google.com/dl/page-speed/psol/${NPS_VERSION}.tar.gz

-tar -xzvf ${NPS_VERSION}.tar.gz

-cd ../

-~~~

-

-Alright, so the `ngx_pagespeed` module is all setup and ready to install. All we have to do at this point is tell Nginx where to find it.

-

-Now let's grab the Headers More and Naxsi modules as well. Again, check the [Headers More](https://github.com/agentzh/headers-more-nginx-module/) and [Naxsi](https://github.com/nbs-system/naxsi) pages to see what the latest stable version is and adjust the version numbers in the following accordingly.

-

-~~~.language-bash

-HM_VERSION =v0.25 

-wget https://github.com/agentzh/headers-more-nginx-module/archive/${HM_VERSION}.tar.gz

-tar -xvzf ${HM_VERSION}.tar.gz

-NAX_VERSION=0.53-2

-wget https://github.com/nbs-system/naxsi/archive/${NAX_VERSION}.tar.gz

-tar -xvzf ${NAX_VERSION}.tar.gz

-~~~

-

-Now we have all three third-party modules ready to go, the last thing we'll grab is a copy of Nginx itself:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-NGINX_VERSION=1.7.7

-wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-${NGINX_VERSION}.tar.gz

-tar -xvzf nginx-${NGINX_VERSION}.tar.gz

-~~~

-

-Then we `cd` into the Nginx folder and compile. So, first:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-cd nginx-${NGINX_VERSION}/

-~~~

-

-So now we're inside the Nginx folder, let's configure our installation. We'll add in all our extras and turn off a few things we don't need. Or at least they're things I don't need, if you need the mail modules, then delete those lines. If you don't need SSL, you might want to skip that as well. Here's the config setting I use (Note: all paths are for Debian servers, you'll have to adjust the various paths accordingly for RHEL/Cent/Fedora/ servers):

-

-

-~~~.language-bash

-./configure \

-        --add-module=$HOME/naxsi-${NAX_VERSION}/naxsi_src \

-        --prefix=/usr/share/nginx \

-        --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx \

-        --conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf \

-        --pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid \

-        --lock-path=/var/lock/nginx.lock \

-        --error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log \

-        --http-log-path=/var/log/access.log \

-        --user=www-data \

-        --group=www-data \

-        --without-mail_pop3_module \

-        --without-mail_imap_module \

-        --without-mail_smtp_module \

-        --with-http_stub_status_module \

-        --with-http_ssl_module \

-        --with-http_spdy_module \

-        --with-http_gzip_static_module \

-        --add-module=$HOME/ngx_pagespeed-release-${NPS_VERSION}-beta \

-        --add-module=$HOME/headers-more-nginx-module-${HM_VERSION}\

-~~~

-

-There are a few things worth noting here. First off make sure that Naxsi is first. Here's what the [Naxsi wiki page](https://github.com/nbs-system/naxsi/wiki/installation) has to say on that score: "Nginx will decide the order of modules according the order of the module's directive in Nginx's ./configure. So, no matter what (except if you really know what you are doing) put Naxsi first in your ./configure. If you don't do so, you might run into various problems, from random/unpredictable behaviors to non-effective WAF." The last thing you want is to think you have a web application firewall running when in fact you don't, so stick with Naxsi first.

-

-There are a couple other things you might want to add to this configuration. If you're going to be serving large files, larger than your average 1.5MB HTML page, consider adding the line: `--with-file-aio \`, which is apparently faster than the stock `sendfile` option. See [here](https://calomel.org/nginx.html) for more details. There are quite a few other modules available. A [full list of the default modules](http://wiki.nginx.org/Modules) can be found on the Nginx site. Read through that and if there's another module you need, you can add it to that config list.

-

-Okay, we've told Nginx what to do, now let's actually install it:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-make

-sudo make install

-~~~

-

-Once `make install` finishes doing its thing you'll have Nginx all set up. 

-

-Congrats! You made it.

-

-The next step is to add Nginx to the list of things your server starts up automatically whenever it reboots. Since we installed Nginx from scratch we need to tell the underlying system what we did.

-

-## Make it Autostart

-

-Since we compiled from source rather than using Debian/Ubuntu's package management tools, the underlying stystem isn't aware of Nginx's existence. That means it won't automatically start it up when the system boots. In order to ensure that Nginx does start on boot we'll have to manually add Nginx to our server's list of startup services. That way, should we need to reboot, Nginx will automatically restart when the server does. 

-

-To do that I use the [Debian init script](https://github.com/MovLib/www/blob/master/bin/init-nginx.sh) listed in the [Nginx InitScripts page](http://wiki.nginx.org/InitScripts): 

-

-If that works for you, grab the raw version:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MovLib/www/develop/etc/init.d/nginx.sh

-# I had to edit the DAEMON var to point to nginx

-# change line 63 in the file to:

-DAEMON=/usr/sbin/nginx

-# then move it to /etc/init.d/nginx

-sudo mv nginx.sh /etc/init.d/nginx

-# make it executable:

-sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/nginx

-# then just:

-sudo service nginx start #also restart, reload, stop etc

-~~~

-

-I suggest taking the last bit and turning it into an alias in your `bashrc` or `zshrc` file so that you can quickly restart/reload the server when you need it. Here's what I use:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-alias xrestart="sudo service nginx restart"

-alias xreload="sudo service nginx reload"

-~~~

-

-Okay so we now have the initialization script all set up, now let's make Nginx start up on reboot. In theory this should do it:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-update-rc.d -f nginx defaults 

-~~~

-

-But that didn't work for me with my Digital Ocean Debian 7 x64 droplet (which complained that "`insserv rejected the script header`"). I didn't really feel like troubleshooting that at the time; I was feeling lazy so I decided to use chkconfig instead. To do that I just installed chkconfig and added Nginx:

-   

-~~~.language-bash

-sudo apt-get install chkconfig

-sudo chkconfig --add nginx

-sudo chkconfig nginx on

-~~~

-

-So there we have it, everything you need to get Nginx installed with SPDY, PageSpeed, Headers More and Naxsi. A blazing fast server for static files.

- 

-After that it's just a matter of configuring Nginx, which is entirely dependent on how you're using it. For static setups like this my configuration is pretty minimal.

-

-Before we get to that though, there's the first thing I do: edit `/etc/nginx/nginx.conf` down to something pretty simple. This is the root config so I keep it limited to a `http` block that turns on a few things I want globally and an include statement that loads site-specific config files. Something a bit like this:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-user  www-data;

-events {

-    worker_connections  1024;

-}

-http {

-    include mime.types;

-    include /etc/nginx/naxsi_core.rules;

-    default_type  application/octet-stream;

-    types_hash_bucket_size 64;

-    server_names_hash_bucket_size 128;

-    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '

-                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '

-                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

-

-    access_log  logs/access.log  main;

-    more_set_headers "Server: My Custom Server";

-    keepalive_timeout  65;

-    gzip  on;

-    pagespeed on;

-    pagespeed FileCachePath /var/ngx_pagespeed_cache;

-    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*.conf;

-}

-~~~

-

-A few things to note. I've include the core rules file from the Naxsi source. To make sure that file exists, we need to copy it over to `/etc/nginx/`.

-

-~~~.language-bash

-sudo cp naxsi-0.53-2/naxci_config/naxsi_core.rule /etc/nginx

-~~~

-

-Now let's restart the server so it picks up these changes:

-

-~~~.language-bash

-sudo service nginx restart

-~~~

-

-Or, if you took my suggestion of creating an alias, you can type: `xrestart` and Nginx will restart itself.

-

-With this configuration we have a good basic setup and any `.conf` files you add to the folder `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/` will be included automatically. So if you want to create a conf file for mydomain.com, you'd create the file `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mydomain.conf` and put the configuration for that domain in that file.

-

-I'm going to post a follow up on how I configure Nginx very soon. In the mean time here's a pretty comprehensive [guide to configuring Nginx](https://calomel.org/nginx.html) in a variety of scenarios. And remember, if you want to some more helpful tips and tricks for web developers, sign up for the mailing list below.

-

-[^1]: If you're more experienced with Nginx and I'm totally bass-akward about something in this guide, please let me know.

-[^2]: In my experience anyway. Probably Apache can be tuned to get pretty close to Nginx's performance with static files, but it's going to take quite a bit of work. One is not necessarily better, but there are better tools for different jobs.

-[^3]: That said, obviously a CDN service like Cloudfront will, in most cases, be much faster than Nginx or any other server.

diff --git a/src/published/2014-02-27_scaling-responsive-images-css.txt b/src/published/2014-02-27_scaling-responsive-images-css.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 15fc129..0000000
--- a/src/published/2014-02-27_scaling-responsive-images-css.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,60 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Scaling Responsive Images in CSS
-pub_date: 2014-02-27 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/02/scaling-responsive-images-css
-tags: Responsive Web Design, Responsive Images
-metadesc: Media queries make responsive images a snap in CSS, but if you want your responsive images to scale between breakpoints things get a bit trickier.
-code: True
-tutorial: True
----
-
-It's pretty easy to handle images responsively with CSS. Just use `@media` queries to swap images at various breakpoints in your design.
-
-It's slightly trickier to get those images to be fluid and scale in between breakpoints. Or rather, it's not hard to get them to scale horizontally, but what about vertical scaling?
-
-Imagine this scenario. You have a div with a paragraph inside it and you want to add a background using the `:before` pseudo element -- just a decorative image behind some text. You can set the max-width to 100% to get the image to fluidly scale in width, but what about scaling the height?
-
-That's a bit trickier, or at least it tripped me up for a minute the other day. I started with this:
-
-~~~.language-css
-.wrapper--image:before {
-    content: "";
-    display: block;
-    max-width: 100%;
-    height: 443px;
-    background-color: #f3f;
-    background-image: url('bg.jpg');
-    background-repeat: no-repeat;
-    background-size: 100%;
- }
-~~~
-
-Do that and you'll see... nothing. Okay, I expected that. Setting height to auto doesn't work because the pseudo element has no real content, which means its default height is zero. Okay, how do I fix that?
-
-You might try setting the height to the height of your background image. That works whenever the div is the size of, or larger than, the image. But the minute your image scales down at all you'll have blank space at the bottom of your div, because the div has a fixed height with an image inside that's shorter than that fixed height. Try re-sizing [this demo](/demos/css-bg-image-scaling/no-vertical-scaling.html) to see what I'm talking about, make the window less than 800px and you'll see the box no longer scales with the image.
-
-To get around this we can borrow a trick from Thierry Koblentz's technique for [creating intrinsic ratios for video](http://alistapart.com/article/creating-intrinsic-ratios-for-video/) to create a box that maintains the ratio of our background image. 
-
-We'll leave everything the way it is, but add one line:
-
-~~~.language-css
-.wrapper--image:before {
-    content: "";
-    display: block;
-    max-width: 100%;
-    background-color: #f3f;
-    background-image: url('bg.jpg');
-    background-repeat: no-repeat;
-    background-size: 100%;
-    padding-top: 55.375%;
-}
-
-~~~
-
-We've added padding to the top of the element, which forces the element to have a height (at least visually). But where did I get that number? That's the ratio of the dimensions of the background image. I simply divided the height of the image by the width of the image. In this case my image was 443px tall and 800px wide, which gives us 53.375%.
-
-Here's a [working demo](/demos/css-bg-image-scaling/vertical-scaling.html).
-
-And there you have it, properly scaling CSS background images on `:before` or other "empty" elements, pseudo or otherwise.
-
-The only real problem with this technique is that requires you to know the dimensions of your image ahead of time. That won't be possible in every scenario, but if it is, this will work.
diff --git a/src/published/2014-06-10_protect-your-privacy-with-ghostery.txt b/src/published/2014-06-10_protect-your-privacy-with-ghostery.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 983936c..0000000
--- a/src/published/2014-06-10_protect-your-privacy-with-ghostery.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,148 +0,0 @@
----
-title: How to Protect Your Online Privacy with Ghostery
-pub_date: 2014-05-29 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/05/protect-your-privacy-ghostery
-metadesc: How to install and configure the Ghostery browser add-on for maximum online privacy
-tutorial: True
-
----
-
-There's an invisible web that lies just below the web you see everyday. That invisible web is tracking the sites you visit, the pages you read, the things you like, the things you favorite and collating all that data into a portrait of things you are likely to purchase. And all this happens without anyone asking your consent.
-
-Not much has changed since [I wrote about online tracking years ago on Webmonkey][1]. Back then visiting five websites meant "somewhere between 21 and 47 other websites learn about your visit to those five". That number just continues to grow.
-
-If that doesn't bother you, and you could not care less who is tracking you, then this is not the tutorial for you.
-
-However, if the extent of online tracking bothers you and you want to do something about it, there is some good news. In fact it's not that hard to stop all that tracking.
-
-To protect your privacy online you'll just need to add a tool like [Ghostery](https://www.ghostery.com/) or [Do Not Track Plus](https://www.abine.com/index.html) to your web browser. Both will work, but I happen to use Ghostery so that's what I'm going to show you how to set up. 
-
-## Install and Setup Ghostery in Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, Opera and Safari.
-
-The first step is to install the Ghostery extension for your web browser. To do that, just head over to the [Ghostery downloads page](https://www.ghostery.com/en/download) and click the install button that's highlighted for your browser.
-
-Some browsers will ask you if you want to allow the add-on to be installed. In Firefox just click "Allow" and then click "Install Now" when the installation window opens up.
-
-[![Installing add-ons in Firefox](/media/images/2014/gh-firefox-install01-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-firefox-install01.png "View Image 1")
-: In Firefox click Allow...
-
-[![Installing add-ons in Firefox 2](/media/images/2014/gh-firefox-install02-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-firefox-install02.png "View Image 2")
-: ...and then Install Now
-
-If you're using Chrome just click the Add button. 
-
-[![Installing extensions in Chrome/Chromium](/media/images/2014/gh-chrome-install01-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-chrome-install01.jpg "View Image 3")
-: Installing extensions in Chrome/Chromium
-
-Ghostery is now installed, but out of the box Ghostery doesn't actually block anything. That's why, once you have it installed, Ghostery should have opened a new window or tab that looks like this:
-
-[![The Ghostery install wizard](/media/images/2014/gh-first-screen-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-first-screen.jpg "View Image 4")
-: The Ghostery install wizard
-
-This is the series of screens that walk you through the process of setting up Ghostery to block sites that would like to track you. 
-
-Before I dive into setting up Ghostery, it's important to understand that some of what Ghostery can block will limit what you see on the web. For example, Disqus is a very popular third-party comment system. It happens to track you as well. If you block that tracking though you won't see comments on a lot of sites. 
-
-There are two ways around this. One is to decide that you trust Disqus and allow it to run on any site. The second is to only allow Disqus on sites where you want to read the comments. I'll show you how to set up both options.
-
-## Configuring Ghostery
-
-First we have to configure Ghostery. Click the right arrow on that first screen to get started. That will lead you to this screen:
-
-[![The Ghostery install wizard, page 2](/media/images/2014/gh-second-screen-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-second-screen.jpg "View Image 5")
-: The Ghostery install wizard, page 2
-
-If you want to help Ghostery get better you can check this box. Then click the right arrow again and you'll see a page asking if you want to enable the Alert Bubble.
-
-[![The Ghostery install wizard, page 3](/media/images/2014/gh-third-screen-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-third-screen.jpg "View Image 6")
-: The Ghostery install wizard, page 3
-
-This is Ghostery's little alert box that comes up when you visit a new page. It will show you all the trackers that are blocked. Think of this as a little window into the invisible web. I enable this, though I change the default settings a little bit. We'll get to that in just a second.
-
-The next screen is the core of Ghostery. This is where we decide which trackers to block and which to allow. 
-
-[![The Ghostery install wizard -- blocking trackers](/media/images/2014/gh-main-01-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-main-01.jpg "View Image 7")
-: The Ghostery install wizard -- blocking trackers
-
-Out of the box Ghostery blocks nothing. Let's change that. I start by blocking everything:
-
-[![Ghostery set to block all known trackers](/media/images/2014/gh-main-02-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-main-02.jpg "View Image 8")
-: Ghostery set to block all known trackers
-
-Ghostery will also ask if you want to block new trackers as it learns about them. I go with yes.
-
-Now chances are the setup we currently have is going to limit your ability to use some websites. To stick with the earlier example, this will mean Disqus comments are never loaded. The easiest way to fix this is to search for Disqus and enable it:
-
-[![Ghostery set to block everything but Disqus](/media/images/2014/gh-main-03-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-main-03.jpg "View Image 9")
-: Ghostery set to block everything but Disqus
-
-Note that, along the top of the tracker list there are some buttons. This makes it easy to enable, for example, not just Disqus but every commenting system. If you'd like to do that click the "Commenting System" button and uncheck all the options:
-
-[![Filtering Ghostery by type of tracker](/media/images/2014/gh-main-04-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-main-04.jpg "View Image 10")
-: Filtering Ghostery by type of tracker
-
-Another category of things you might want to allow are music players like those from SoundCloud. To learn more about a particular service, just click the link next to the item and Ghostery will show you what it knows, including any industry affiliations.
-
-[![Ghostery showing details on Disqus](/media/images/2014/gh-main-05-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-main-05.jpg "View Image 11")
-: Ghostery showing details on Disqus
-
-Now you may be thinking, wait, how do I know which companies I want to allow and which I don't? Well, you don't really need to know all of them because you can enable them as you go too. 
-
-Let's save what we have and test Ghostery out on a site. Click the right arrow one last time and check to make sure that the Ghostery icon is in your toolbar. If it isn't you can click the button "Add Button".
-
-## Ghostery in Action
-
-Okay, Ghostery is installed and blocking almost everything it knows about. But that might limit what we can do. For example, let's go visit arstechnica.com. You can see down here at the bottom of the screen there's a list of everything that's blocked. 
-
-[![Ghostery showing all the trackers no longer tracking you](/media/images/2014/gh-example-01-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-example-01.jpg "View Image 12")
-: Ghostery showing all the trackers no longer tracking you
-
-You can see in that list that right now the Twitter button is blocked. So if you scroll down the bottom of the article and look at the author bio (which should have a twitter button) you'll see this little Ghostery icon:
-
-[![Ghostery replaces elements it has blocked with the Ghostery icon.](/media/images/2014/gh-example-02-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-example-02.jpg "View Image 13")
-: Ghostery replaces elements it has blocked with the Ghostery icon.
-
-That's how you will know that Ghostery has blocked something. If you were to click on that element Ghostery would load the blocked script and you'd see a Twitter button. But what if you always want to see the Twitter button? To do that we'll come up to the toolbar and click on the Ghostery icon which will reveal the blocking menu:
-
-[![The Ghostery panel.](/media/images/2014/gh-example-03-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-example-03.jpg "View Image 14")
-: The Ghostery panel.
-
-Just slide the Twitter button to the left and Twitter's button (and accompanying tracking beacons) will be allowed after you reload the page. Whenever you return to Ars, the Twitter button will load. As I mentioned before, you can do this on a per-site basis if there are just a few sites you want to allow. To enable the Twitter button on every site, click the little check box button the right of the slider. Realize though, that enabling it globally will mean Twitter can track you everywhere you go.
-
-[![Enabling trackers from the Ghostery panel.](/media/images/2014/gh-example-04-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-example-04.jpg "view image 15")
-: Enabling trackers from the Ghostery panel.
-
-This panel is essentially doing the same thing as the setup page we used earlier. In fact, we can get back the setting page by click the gear icon and then the "Options" button:
-
-[![Getting back to the Ghostery setting page.](/media/images/2014/gh-example-05-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-example-05.jpg "view image 16")
-: Getting back to the Ghostery setting page.
-
-Now, you may have noticed that the little purple panel showing you what was blocked hung around for quite a while, fifteen seconds to be exact, which is a bit long in my opinion. We can change that by clicking the Advanced tab on the Ghostery options page:
-
-
-[![Getting back to the Ghostery setting page.](/media/images/2014/gh-example-06-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-example-06.jpg "view image 17")
-: Getting back to the Ghostery setting page.
-
-The first option in the list is whether or not to show the alert bubble at all, followed by the length of time it's shown. I like to set this to the minimum, 3 seconds. Other than this I leave the advanced settings at their defaults. 
-
-Scroll to the bottom of the settings page, click save, and you're done setting up Ghostery.
-
-## Conclusion
-
-Now you can browse the web with a much greater degree of privacy, only allowing those companies *you* approve of to know what you're up to. And remember, any time a site isn't working the way you think you should, you can temporarily disable Ghostery by clicking the icon in the toolbar and hitting the pause blocking button down at the bottom of the Ghostery panel:
-
-[![Temporarily disable Ghostery.](/media/images/2014/gh-example-07-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/gh-example-07.jpg "view image 18")
-: Temporarily disable Ghostery.
-
-Also note that there is an iOS version of Ghostery, though, due to Apple's restrictions on iOS, it's an entirely separate web browser, not a plugin for Mobile Safari. If you use Firefox for Android there is a plugin available. 
-
-##Further reading:
-
-* [How To Install Ghostery (Internet Explorer)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaI17dSfPRg) -- Ghostery's guide to installing it in Internet Explorer.
-* [Secure Your Browser: Add-Ons to Stop Web Tracking][1] -- A piece I wrote for Webmonkey a few years ago that gives some more background on tracking and some other options you can use besides Ghostery.
-* [Tracking our online trackers](http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_kovacs_tracking_the_trackers) -- TED talk by Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla Corp, covering online behavior tracking more generally.
-* This sort of tracking is [coming to the real world too](http://business.financialpost.com/2014/02/01/its-creepy-location-based-marketing-is-following-you-whether-you-like-it-or-not/?__lsa=e48c-7542), so there's that to look forward to.
-{^ .list--indented }
-
-
-[1]: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/02/secure-your-browser-add-ons-to-stop-web-tracking/
diff --git a/src/published/2014-08-02_get-smarter-pythons-built-in-help.txt b/src/published/2014-08-02_get-smarter-pythons-built-in-help.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index cb9c807..0000000
--- a/src/published/2014-08-02_get-smarter-pythons-built-in-help.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,37 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Get Smarter with Python's Built-In Help
-pub_date: 2014-08-01 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/08/get-smarter-pythons-built-in-help
-metadesc: Sometimes you have to put down the Stack Overflow, step away from the Google and go straight to the docs. Python has great docs, here's how to use them.
-tags: Python
-code: True
-
----
-
-One of my favorite things about Python is the `help()` function. Fire up the standard Python interpreter, and import `help` from `pydoc` and you can search Python's official documentation from within the interpreter. Reading the f'ing manual from the interpreter. As it should be[^1].
-
-The `help()` function takes either an object or a keyword. The former must be imported first while the latter needs to be a string like "keyword". Whichever you use Python will pull up the standard Python docs for that object or keyword. Type `help()` without anything and you'll start an interactive help session.
-
-The `help()` function is awesome, but there's one little catch. 
-
-In order for this to work properly you need to make sure you have the `PYTHONDOCS` environment variable set on your system. On a sane operating system this will likely be in '/usr/share/doc/pythonX.X/html'. In mostly sane OSes like Debian (and probably Ubuntu/Mint, et al) you might have to explicitly install the docs with `apt-get install python-doc`, which will put the docs in `/usr/share/doc/pythonX.X-doc/html/`.
-
-If you're using OS X's built-in Python, the path to Python's docs would be:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Resources/Python.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Documentation/
-~~~
-
-Note the 2.6 in that path. As far as I can tell OS X Mavericks does not ship with docs for Python 2.7, which is weird and annoying (like most things in Mavericks). If it's there and you've found it, please enlighten me in the comments below. 
-
-Once you've found the documentation you can add that variable to your bash/zshrc like so:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-export PYTHONDOCS=/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Resources/Python.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Documentation/
-~~~
-
-Now fire up iPython, type `help()` and start learning rather than always hobbling along with [Google, Stack Overflow and other crutches](/blog/2014/08/how-my-two-year-old-twins-made-me-a-better-programmer).
-
-Also, PSA. If you do anything with Python, you really need to check out [iPython](http://ipython.org/). It will save you loads of time, has more awesome features than a Veg-O-Matic and [notebooks](http://ipython.org/notebook.html), don't even get me started on notebooks. And in iPython you don't even have to import help, it's already there, ready to go from the minute it starts.
-
-[^1]: The Python docs are pretty good too. Not Vim-level good, but close. 
diff --git a/src/published/2014-08-05_how-my-two-year-old-twins-made-me-a-better-programmer.txt b/src/published/2014-08-05_how-my-two-year-old-twins-made-me-a-better-programmer.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 4838814..0000000
--- a/src/published/2014-08-05_how-my-two-year-old-twins-made-me-a-better-programmer.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,40 +0,0 @@
----
-title: How My Two-Year-Old Twins Made Me a Better Programmer
-pub_date: 2014-08-05 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/08/how-my-two-year-old-twins-made-me-a-better-programmer
-metadesc: To get better at programming you have to struggle. Sometimes you have to put down the Stack Overflow, step away from the Google and go straight to the docs. Open a manpage, pull up the help files, dig a little deeper and turn information into knowledge.
-tags: Python
-
----
-
-TL;DR version: "information != knowledge; knowledge != wisdom; wisdom != experience;"
-
-I have two-year-old twin girls. Every day I watch them figure out more about the world around them. Whether that's how to climb a little higher, how to put on a t-shirt, where to put something when you're done with it, or what to do with these crazy strings hanging off your shoes.
-
-It can be incredibly frustrating to watch them struggle with something new and fail. They're your children so your instinct is to step in and help. But if you step in and do everything for them they never figure out how to do any of it on their own. I've learned to wait until they ask for help.
-
-Watching them struggle and learn has made me realize that I don't let myself struggle enough and my skills are stagnating because of it. I'm happy to let Google step in and solve all my problems for me. I get work done, true, but at the expense of learning new things. 
-
-I've started to think of this as the Stack Overflow problem, not because I actually blame Stack Overflow -- it's a great resource, the problem is mine -- but because it's emblematic of a problem. I use StackOverflow, and Google more generally, as a crutch, as a way to quickly solve problems with some bit of information rather than digging deeper and turning information into actual knowledge.
-
-On one hand quick solutions can be a great thing. Searching the web lets me solve my problem and move on to the next (potentially more interesting) one. 
-
-On the other hand, information (the solution to the problem at hand) is not as useful as knowledge. Snippets of code and other tiny bits of information are not going to land you job, nor will they help you when you want to write a tutorial or a book about something. This sort of "let's just solve the problem" approach begins and ends in the task at hand. The information you get out of that is useful for the task you're doing, but knowledge is much larger than that. And I don't know about you, but I want to be more than something that's useful for finishing tasks.
-
-Information is useless to me if it isn't synthesized into personal knowledge somehow. And, for me at least, that information only becomes knowledge when I stop, back up and try to understand the *why* rather than than just the *how*. Good answers on Stack Overflow explain the why, but more often than not this doesn't happen.
-
-For example, today I wanted a simple way to get python's `os.listdir` to ignore directories. I knew that I could loop through all the returned elements and test if they were directories, but I thought perhaps there was a more elegant way to doing that (short answer, not really). The details of my problem aren't the point though, the point is that the question had barely formed in my mind and I noticed my fingers already headed for command tab, ready to jump the browser and cut and paste some solution from Stack Overflow. 
-
-This time though I stopped myself before I pulled up my browser. I thought about my daughters in the next room. I knew that I would likely have the answer to my question in 10 seconds and also knew I would forget it and move on in 20. I was about to let easy answers step in and solve my problem for me. I was about to avoid learning something new. Sometimes that's fine, but do it too much and I'm worried I might be more of a successful cut-and-paster than struggling programmer.
-
-Sometimes it's good to take a few minutes to read the actual docs, pull up the man pages, type `:help` or whatever and learn. It's going to take a few extra minutes. You might even take an unexpected detour from the task at hand. That might mean you learn something you didn't expect to learn. Yes, it might mean you lose a few minutes of "work" to learn. It might even mean that you fail. Sometimes the docs don't help. The sure, Google. The important part of learning is to struggle, to apply your energy to the problem rather than finding to solution. 
-
-Sometimes you need to struggle with your shoelaces for hours, otherwise you'll never figure out how to tie them.
-
-In my specific case I decided to permanently reduce my dependency on Stack Overflow and Google. Instead of flipping to the browser I fired up the Python interpreter and typed `help(os.listdir)`. Did you know the Python interpreter has a built-in help function called, appropriately enough, `help()`? The `help()` function takes either an object or a keyword (the latter needs to be in quotes like "keyword"). If you're having trouble I wrote a quick guide to [making Python's built-in `help()` function work][1].
-
-Now, I could have learned what I wanted to know in 2 seconds using Google. Instead it took me 20 minutes[^1] to figure out. But now I understand how to do what I wanted to do and, more importantly, I understand *why* it will work. I have a new piece of knowledge and next time I encounter the same situation I can draw on my knowledge rather than turning to Google again. It's not exactly wisdom or experience yet, but it's getting closer. And when you're done solving all the little problems of day-to-day coding that's really the point -- improving your skill, learning and getting better at what you do every day.
-
-[^1]: Most of that time was spent figuring out where OS X stores Python docs, which [I won't have to do again][1]. Note to self, I gotta switch back to Linux.
-
-[1]: /blog/2014/08/get-smarter-pythons-built-in-help
diff --git a/src/published/2014-08-11_building-faster-responsive-websites-webpagetest.txt b/src/published/2014-08-11_building-faster-responsive-websites-webpagetest.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index fa82f90..0000000
--- a/src/published/2014-08-11_building-faster-responsive-websites-webpagetest.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,124 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Building Faster Responsive Websites with Webpagetest
-pub_date: 2014-08-11 12:04:25
-slug: /blog/2014/08/building-faster-responsive-sites-with-webpagetest
-metadesc: All the usual performance best practices apply to responsive web design, but there are some extra things you can do to speed up your responsive websites.
-tags: Responsive Web Design, Best Practices
-code: True
-tutorial: True
-
----
-
-All the normal best practices for speeding up your website apply to responsive web design. That is, optimize your database and backend tools first, eliminate bottlenecks, cache queries, etc. Then move on to your server where you should focus on compressing and caching everything you can.
-
-It makes no sense to optimize front end code like we're about to do if the real bottlenecks are complex database queries or other back end issues. Because those sorts of things are way beyond the scope of this article, I'll assume that your back end code or the team responsible for it has already optimized and everything is cached as much as possible.
-
-Before we dive into how you can use Webpagetest to speed up your responsive web sites let's clarify what we mean by "speed up". 
-
-What we really care about when we're trying to speed up a page is the *time to first render*.  That is, the time it takes to get something visible on the screen. The overall page load time is secondary to getting *something* -- ideally the most important content -- on the screen as fast as possible. 
-
-Give the viewer something; the rest of the page can load in the background. 
-
-The first step is to do some basic front-end optimization -- eliminate blocking scripts, compress images, minify files, turn on cache headers, use a CDN for static assets and all the other well established best practices for speeding up pages. Run your site through [Google PageSpeed Insights](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) and read through Yahoo's [Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site](http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) (it's old but it's still a great reference).
-
-Remember that the single biggest win for most sites will be reducing image size. 
-
-There are many tools for testing your site and running performance audits that look at specific areas of potential optimization. There's desktop software that simulates all kinds of network conditions and web browsers, but for now we'll stick with [Webpagetest.org](http://www.webpagetest.org/) (hereafter, WPT), a free, online testing tool. 
-
-When you first visit WPT, you'll see a screen that looks like this:
-
-[![Webpagetest.org](/media/images/2014/wpt-01-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/wpt-01.jpg "View Image 1")
-: Webpagetest basics
-
-Before you do anything, expand the advanced options. This is where the good stuff is hidden. The first thing to do here is change the number of tests to run. I like to go with 5. If you want you can use a higher number (the max is 9), but it will take longer. Use odd numbers here since WPT uses the median for results.
-
-I like to set it to First View Only and check Capture Video so I can see the page load for myself. Here's what this would look like (note that I've also set it to emulate a 3G connection and the device is set to iPhone 4):
-
-[![Webpagetest advanced config options](/media/images/2014/wpt-02-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/wpt-02.jpg "View Image 2")
-: Webpagetest advanced config options
-
-Before we actually run the test I want to point out a slightly hidden, but super cool feature. Click the scripts tab to the right. See the empty box? What the? Well, click the documentation link and have a look at all the possibilities. There's a ton of stuff you can do here, but let me give you an example of one very powerful feature -- the `setDnsName` option. 
-
-You can use this to test how much your CDN is helping your page load times. To do that you'd enter your overrides in the format: `setDnsName <name-to-override> <override-name>`. If your CDN served files from say `www.domain.com` and your origin was `origin.domain.com` you'd enter this in the box:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-setDnsName	www.domain.com	origin.domain.com
-~~~
-
-That way you can run the test both with and without your CDN and compare the results without altering the code on your actual site.
-
-Right now we'll keep it simple and run an ordinary test, so hit the yellow button. Depending on how many times you told it to run, this may take a little while. Eventually you'll get a page that looks like this:
-
-[![The test results overview page](/media/images/2014/wpt-03-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/wpt-03.jpg "View Image 3")
-: The test results overview page
-
-The main results there at the top are pulled from the median run. In this case that's run 3. Notice the Plot Full Results link below the main table. Follow that link to see a breakdown of all your tests, which can be useful to see if there are any anomalies in load times. Since there weren't any anomalous results for this page, let's take a closer look at the median, run 3.
-
-So what jumps out here? Well, the time to fully loaded is almost 15 seconds. I consider that terrible, but it actually passes for reasonably fast over 3G these days. Why is it so bad? Well, I picked this URL for a reason, it has nearly a dozen images, which take a while to load. 
-
-But I'm not really interested in total load times, I want to get a sense of how long it takes to get something on the page. The number we want to look at for that information is the Start Render time. Here you can see it's about 2.5 seconds for the median run. 
-
-In this case though I'm going to focus on the worst test, which is run 1, where nothing appears on the screen for 5 seconds. That's terrible, though it is a lot better than 15 seconds. 
-
-Now I know there's a lot I can do to improve the overall load time of this page, but what I'm most interested in is shaving down that 5 seconds before anything shows up. To get a better idea of what might be causing that delay I'll go back to the test results page and click on the waterfall view.
-
-[![The test results waterfall view](/media/images/2014/wpt-04-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/wpt-04.jpg "View Image 4")
-: The test results waterfall view
-
-Here I can see that there are some redirects going on. I recently switched from http to https and haven't updated this post. So I need to do that. Then there's the images themselves, which are most likely the bottleneck. I ran the same test conditions on another page on my site that doesn't have any images at all and, as you can see from this filmstrip image (yes, you can export WPT filmstrips as images, look for the link that says "Export filmstrip as an image...") the above the fold content is visible in 1 second:
-
-![The filmstrip view of a more typical Longhandpixels URL](/media/images/2014/wpt-05.jpg)
-
-So the problem with the first URL is likely three-fold, the size of the images, the number of images and how they're loaded.  
-
-I was in a hurry to get that post up, so I just let my `max-width: 100%;` rule for responsive images handle scaling down the very large images. In short I did what your clients will likely do -- be lazy and skip image optimization. I really need to automate an image optimization setup on my server, but in lieu of that, I manually resized the images, ran them through [ImageOptim](https://imageoptim.com/) (if you want a Linux equivalent check out [Trimage](http://trimage.org/), which hasn't been updated in years, but runs just fine for me in Debian stable and testing) and reran the tests:
-
-[![Test results showing 3 second load time](/media/images/2014/wpt-06-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/wpt-06.jpg "View Image 6")
-: Things are getting better
-
-That's a little better. We're down to worst case scenario of 3 second load time over a 3G connection. So it looks as if my hunch is right, the images are the bottleneck. 
-
-I'm convinced, but suppose this were a client site and I wanted to show them why they need to optimize their images. You know what makes a powerful argument for image optimization? Making your client sit through those painfully slow load times. So go back to your main text results page, click the link on the right that says "Watch Video."
-
-It will take a minute for WPT to generate your video, but when it does scroll to the bottom and grab the embed code. Here's the two videos from the WPT results I've run so far, embedded below for your viewing pain:
-
-<iframe src="https://www.webpagetest.org/video/view.php?id=140806_XB_Z5T.1.0&embed=1&width=332&height=716" width="332" height="716"></iframe>
-
-<iframe src="https://www.webpagetest.org/video/view.php?id=140808_0G_RZW.2.0&embed=1&width=332&height=716" width="332" height="716"></iframe>
-
-Convincing no?
-
-Now I'm going to keep testing and trying to speed up my page. My next step is going to be tweaking the server. Yeah I know I said at the beginning that you should start here and I didn't. Neither, I'd be willing to bet, did you. That's okay, we'll do it now. 
-
-I use Nginx to serve this site and I compile it myself with quite a few speed-oriented extras, but the main tool I use is the [Nginx Pagespeed module](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module). For more on how I set up Nginx and how you can do the same, see my post: [Install Nginx on Debian/Ubuntu](https://longhandpixels.net/blog/2014/02/install-nginx-debian-ubuntu). 
-
-I'm going to turn on a very cool feature in the `nginx_pagespeed_module` that I haven't been using until now, something called the [`lazyload_images` filter](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter-lazyload-images). Here's the line I'll add to my configuration file:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-pagespeed EnableFilters lazyload_images;
-~~~
-
-This will tell PageSpeed to delay loading images on the page unless they're visible in the viewport. Even better, as of version 1.8.31.2, this filter will force download images after the page's `onload` event fires. That means you won't get that janky scrolling effect that happens when images are fetched as they enter the viewport, which happens with a lot of websites that do this with JavaScript.
-
-So I turned on the `lazyload_images` filter on my server and reran the tests to find that...
-
-[![Test results showing 1 second load time over 3G](/media/images/2014/wpt-07-tn.jpg)](/media/images/2014/wpt-07.jpg "View Image 7")
-: That's more like it -- Test results showing 1 second load time over 3G.
-
-The page is now filling the initial viewport in about 1 second over 3G. I can live with that, but honestly it could probably be better. For example, some sort of responsive image solution would reduce the size of images on mobile screens and bring down the total page load time (not to mention saving a bunch of bandwidth)
-
-I could also do some other little optimizations, including combining the prism.css code highlighting file with my main CSS file to save a request. I could probably ditch the web fonts, create a single SVG that holds the logo and icons and then position everything with CSS. 
-
-That would eliminate a request and probably reduce the overall size of the page as well. And I could put everything behind a CDN, which would probably have more impact than everything else I just mentioned combined, but that costs money and frankly, 1 second over 3G is fine for now.
-
-Hopefully this has given you some idea of how the tools available through Webpagetest can help you speed up your responsive website (or even your non-responsive site). It's true that I didn't really do anything here you can't do with the Firefox or Chrome developer tools, but I find -- particularly with clients who need a little convincing -- that WPT's filmstrips and videos are invaluable. And I should note that there are plenty of things WPT can do that your favorite developer tools cannot, but I'll save those for another post.
-
-While Webpagetest and its ilk are great tools, you should always also test on real devices in the real world. Ideally you'll test your site on an actual, slower network and see what it feels like to wait. Three seconds might sound fine, but actually sitting through it might inspire you to dig a little deeper and see what else you can optimize.
-
-If you don't have access to a slow network, <strike>then come to the U.S., they're everywhere</strike> then simulators will have to do. If you want to do some live testing over constrained network simulations there are some great dedicated tools like [Slowy](http://slowyapp.com/), [Throttle](https://github.com/dmolsen/Throttle) or even the Network Conditioner tool which is part of more recent versions of Apple's OS X Developer Tools (see developer Matt Gemmel's helpful overview of [how to set up Network Conditioner](http://mattgemmell.com/2011/07/25/network-link-conditioner-in-lion/) if you're using Mac OS X 10.7 or higher).
-
-## Further Reading
-
-If you'd like to learn more I recommend you start at the beginning. First learn [how to read the waterfall charts](http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2010/07/09/waterfalls-101/) that these services generate. Then I suggest you read Steve Souders' [High Performance Web Sites](http://stevesouders.com/) and the [Web Performance Today](http://www.webperformancetoday.com/) blog, both excellent resources for anyone interested in speeding up their site. Finally, few people know as much about [optimizing massive web applications](http://www.igvita.com/2013/01/15/faster-websites-crash-course-on-web-performance/) and sites as Google's Ilya Grigorik, who's part of the company's Make The Web Fast team. Subscribe to Ilya's blog and [follow him on Twitter](https://twitter.com/igrigorik) for a steady stream of speed-related links and tips.
-
-For some more details on all the cool stuff in Webpagetest, check out [Patrick Meenan's blog](http://blog.patrickmeenan.com/) (he's the creator of Webpagetest) and especially [this short video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEAj-HSfYSA). 
diff --git a/src/published/2014-09-04_history-of-picture-element.txt b/src/published/2014-09-04_history-of-picture-element.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index d3e6fb2..0000000
--- a/src/published/2014-09-04_history-of-picture-element.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,199 +0,0 @@
----
-title: A Brief History of the Picture Element
-pub_date: 2014-09-01 09:30:23
-slug: /blog/2014/09/brief-history-picture-element
-tags: Responsive Images, Responsive Web Design
-metadesc: The story behind the new HTML picture element and how a few dedicated web developers made the web better for everyone.
-code: True
-
----
-
-[**Note**: This article was originally written for Ars Techica and there's a nice, [slightly edited version of it over on Ars][1] that you should probably read. It's also got some artwork and screenshots not included here. But I'm re-publishing this here as well for posterity]
-
-The web is going to get faster in the very near future. Sadly, this is rare enough to be news.
-
-The speed bump won't be because our devices are getting faster, though they are. Nor will it be because some giant company created something great, though they probably have.
-
-The web will be getting faster very soon because a small group of web developers saw a problem and decided to solve it for all of us.
-
-The problem is images.
-
-As of August 2014 the [size of the average page in the top 1,000 sites on the web][2] is 1.7MB. Images account for almost 1MB of that 1.7MB. 
-
-If you've got a nice fast fiber connection that image payload isn't such a big deal. But, if you're on a mobile network, that huge image payload is not just slowing you down, it's using up your limited bandwidth and, depending on your mobile data plan, might well be costing you money.
-
-What makes that image payload doubly annoying when you're using a mobile device is that you're getting images intended for giant monitors and they're being loaded on a screen little bigger than your palm. It's a waste of bandwidth delivering pixels you don't need.
-
-Web developers recognized this problem very early on in the growth of what was called the "mobile" web back then. 
-
-More recently a few of them banded together to do something that web developers have never done before -- create a new HTML element.
-
-## In the Beginning Was the "Mobile Web"
-
-Browsing the web on your phone hasn't always been what it is today. Even browsing the web on the first iPhone, one of the first phones with a real web browser, was still pretty terrible. 
-
-Browsing the web on a small screen back then required constant tapping to zoom in on content that had been optimized for much larger screens. Images took forever to load over the iPhone's slow EDGE network connection and then there was all that Flash content, which didn't load at all. And that was the iPhone. Browsing the web using Blackberry and other OSes crippled mobile browsers was even worse.
-
-It wasn't necessarily the devices' fault, though mobile browsers did, and in many cases still do, lag well behind their desktop brethren. Most of the problem though was the fault of web developers. The web is inherently flexible, but web developers had made it fixed by optimizing sites for large desktop monitors.
-
-To fix this a lot of sites started building a second site. It sounds crazy now, but just a few years ago the going solution for handling new devices like the Blackberry, the then-new iPhone and some of the first Android phones was to use server-side device detection scripts and redirect users to a dedicated site for mobile devices, typically a URL like m.domain.com. 
-
-These dedicated mobile URLs -- often referred to as M-dot sites -- typically lacked many features found on their "real" desktop counterparts and often didn't even redirect properly, leaving you on the homepage when you wanted a specific article. 
-
-M-dot websites are a fine example of developers encountering a problem and figuring out a way to make it even worse.
-
-Luckily for us, most web developers did not jump on the m-dot bandwagon because something much better came along.
-
-## Responsive Design Killed the M-Dot Star
-
-In 2010 web developer Ethan Marcotte wrote a little article about something he called [Responsive Web Design][3]. 
-
-Marcotte suggested that with the proliferation of mobile devices and the pain of building these dedicated m-dot sites, it might make more sense to embrace the inherently fluid nature of the web and build websites that were flexible. Sites that used relative widths to fit any screen and worked well no matter what device was accessing it.
-
-Marcotte's vision gave web developers a way to build sites that flex and rearrange their content based on the size and characteristics of the device in your hand. 
-
-Responsive web design isn't perhaps a panacea, but it's pretty close. 
-
-Responsive design started with a few more prominent developers making their personal sites responsive, but it quickly took off when Marcotte and the developers at the Filament Group redesigned the [Boston Globe][4] website to make it responsive. The Globe redesign showed that responsive design worked for more than developer portfolios and blogs. The Globe redesign showed that responsive design was the way of the future.
-
-While the Globe redesign was successful from a user standpoint, Marcotte and the Filament Group did run into some problems behind the scenes, particularly with images.
-
-Marcotte's original article dealt with images by scaling them down using CSS. That made them fit smaller screens and preserve the layout of content, but it also means mobile devices were loading huge images that would never be displayed at full resolution.
-
-For the most part this is still what happens on nearly every site you visit on a small screen. Web developers know, as the developers building the Globe site knew, that this is a problem, but solving it is not as easy as it seems at first glance.
-
-In fact solving this problem would require adding a brand new element to HTML.
-
-## Introducing the Picture Element
-
-The Picture element story begins with the developers working on the Boston Globe, including Mat Marquis, who would eventually co-author the HTML specification.
-
-In the beginning though, no one working on the Globe site was thinking about creating new HTML elements. Marquis and the other developers just wanted to build a site that loaded faster on mobile devices. 
-
-As Marquis explains, they thought they had a solution. "We started with an image for mobile and then selectively enhanced it up from there. It was a hack using cookies and JavaScript. It worked up until about a week before the site launched."
-
-Around this time both Firefox and Chrome were updating their prefetching capabilities and the new image prefetching tools broke the method used on the Globe prototypes.
-
-Browser prefetching was more than just a problem for the solution originally planed for the Globe site. It's actually the crux of what's so difficult about responsive images.
-
-When a server sends a page to your browser the browser first downloads all the HTML on the page and then parses it. Or at least that's what used to happen. Modern web browsers attempt to speed up page load times by downloading images *before* parsing the page's body. The browser starts downloading the image long before it knows where that image will be in the page layout or how big it will need to be. 
-
-This is simultaneously a very good thing -- it means images load faster -- and a very tricky thing -- it means using JavaScript to manipulate images can actually slow down your page even when your JavaScript is trying to load smaller images (because you end up fighting the prefetcher and downloading two images).
-
-Marquis and the rest of the developers working on the site had to scrap their original plan and go back to the drawing board. "We started trying to hash out some solution that we could use going forward... but nothing really materialized." However, they started [writing about the problem][5] and other developers joined the conversation. The quickly learned they were not alone in struggling with responsive images. 
-
-"By this time," Marquis says, "we have 10 or 15 developers and nobody has come up with anything." 
-
-The Globe site ended up launched with no solution -- mobile devices were stuck downloading huge images.
-
-Soon other prominent developers outside the Globe project started to weigh in with possible solutions, including Google's Paul Irish and Opera's Bruce Lawson. Still, no one was able to craft a solution that covered [all the possible use cases][6] developers had identified. 
-
-"We soon realized," says Marquis, "that, even if we were able to solve this with a clever bit of JavaScript we would be working around browser-level optimizations rather than working with them." In other words, using JavaScript meant fighting the browser's built-in image prefetching.
-
-Talk then moved to lower-level solutions, including a new HTML element that might somehow get around the image prefetching problems in a way that JavaScript never would. It was Bruce Lawson of Opera who first suggested that a new `<picture>` element might be in order. Though they did not know it at the time, a picture element had been proposed once before, but it never went anywhere. 
-
-## Welcome to Standards Jungle
-
-It is one thing to decide a new HTML element is needed. It's quite another thing to actually navigate the stratified, labyrinthine world of web standards. Especially if no one on your team has ever done such a thing. 
-
-Perhaps the best thing about being naive though is that you tend to plow forward without the hesitation that attends someone who *knows* how difficult the road ahead it will be.
-
-And so the developers working on the picture element took their ideas to the WHATWG, one of two groups that oversee the development of HTML. The WHATWG is made up primarily of browser vendors, which makes it a good place to gauge how likely it is that browsers will actually ship your ideas.
-
-To paraphrase Tolstoy, every standards body is unhappy in its own way, but, as Marquis was about to learn, the WHATWG is perhaps most unhappy when people outside it make suggestions about what it ought to do. Suffice to say that Marquis and the rest of the developers involved did not get the WHATWG interested in a new HTML element.
-
-Right around this time the W3C, which is where the second group that oversees HTML, the HTML WG, is based, launched a new idea -- community groups. Community groups are the W3C's attempt to get outsiders involved in the standards process, a place to propose problems and work on solutions. 
-
-After being shot down by the WHATWG, someone suggested that the developers start a community group and the [Responsive Images Community Group][7] (RICG) was born.
-
-The only problem with community groups is that no one in the actual working groups pays any attention to community groups. Or at least they didn't in 2011. 
-
-Blissfully unaware of this, Marquis and hundreds of other developers hashed out a responsive image solution in the community group. 
-
-Much of that effort was thanks to Marcos Caceres, now at Mozilla, who, unlike the rest of the group members, had some experience with writing web standards. That experience allowed Caceres to span the divide between two worlds -- web development and standards development. Caceres organized the RICG's efforts and helped the group produce the kind of use cases and tests that standards bodies are looking for. As Marquis puts it, "Marcos saw us flailing around in IRC and helped get everything organized."
-
-"I tried to herd all the cats," Caceres jokes. And herd he did. He set up the Github repos to get everything in one place, set up a space for the responsive images site and helped bring everything together into the first use cases document. "This played a really critical role for me and for the community," says Caceres, "because it forced us to articulate what the actual problem was... and to set priorities."
-
-After months of effort, the RICG brought their ideas to the WHATWG IRC. This also did not go well. As Caceres puts it, "standards bodies like to say 'oh we want a lot of input for developers', but then when developers come it ends in tears. Or it used to."
-
-If you read the WHATWG IRC logs from that time you'll see that the WHATWG members fall into a classic "not invented here" trap. Not only did they reject the input from developers, they turned around and, without considering the RICG's work at all, [proposed their own solution][8], something called `set`, an attribute that solved only one of the many use cases Marquis and company had already identified. 
-
-Developers were, understandably, miffed.
-
-With developers pushing Picture and browser makers and standards bodies favoring the far more limited and very confusing (albeit still useful) `set` proposal, it looked like nothing would ever actually come of the RICG's work.
-
-As Paul Irish put it in the [WHATWG IRC channel][9], "[Marquis] corralled and led a group of the best mobile web developers, created a CG, isolated a solution (from many), fought for and won consensus within the group, wrote a draft spec and proposed it. Basically he's done the thing standards folks really want "authors" to do. Which is why this this feels so defeating." 
-
-Irish was not alone. The developer outcry surrounding the WHATWG's counter proposal was quite vocal, vocal enough that some entirely new proposals surfaced, but browser makers failed to agree on anything. Mozilla killed the WHATWG's idea of `set` on `img`. And Chrome refused to implement Picture as it was defined at the time.
-
-If this all sounds like a bad soap opera, well, it was. This process is, believe it or not, how the web you're using right now gets made.
-
-## Invented Here.
-
-To the credit of the WHATWG, the group did eventually overcome their not-invented-here syndrome. Or at least partially overcame it. 
-
-Compromises started to happen. The RICG rolled support for many of the ideas in`set` into their proposal. That wasn't enough to convince the WHATWG, but it got some members working together with the Marquis and the RICG. The WHATWG still didn't like Picture, but they didn't outright reject it anymore either. 
-
-To an outsider the revision process looks a bit like a game of Ping Pong, except that every time someone hits the ball it changes shape.
-
-The big breakthrough for Picture came from Opera's Simon Pieters and Apple's Tab Atkins. They made a simple, but powerful, suggestion -- make picture a wrapper for `img`. That way there would not be two separate elements for images on the web (which was rightly considered confusing), but there would still be a new way to control which image the browser displays.
-
-This is exactly the approach used in the final version of the Picture spec.
-
-When the browser encounters a Picture element, it first evaluates any rules that the web developer might specify. Opera's developer site has a good article on [all the possibilities Picture offers][10]. Then, after evaluating the various rules, the browser picks the best image based on its own criteria. This is another nice feature since the browser's criteria can include your settings. For example, future browsers might offer an option to stop high-res images from loading over 3G, regardless of what any Picture element on the page might say. Once the browser knows which image is the best choice it actually loads and displays that image in a good old `img` element.
-
-This solves two big problems -- the browser prefetching problem -- prefetching still works and there's no performance penalty -- and the problem of what to do when the browser doesn't understand picture -- it falls back to whatever is in the `img` tag.
-
-So, in the final proposal, what happens is Picture wraps an `img` tag and if the browser is too old to know what to make of a `<picture>` element then it loads the fallback `img` tag. All the accessibility benefits remain since the alt attribute is still on the `img` element.
-
-Everyone is happy and the web wins. 
-
-## Nice Theory, but Show Me the Browser
-
-The web only wins if browsers actually support a proposed standard. And at this time last year no browser on the web actually supported Picture. 
-
-While Firefox and Chrome had both committed to supporting it, it might be years before it became a priority for either, making Picture little more than a nice theory.
-
-Enter Yoav Weiss, a rare developer who spans the worlds of web development and C++ development. Weiss was a independent contractor who wanted Picture to become a part of the web. Weiss knew C++, the language most browsers are written in, but had never worked on a web browser before.
-
-Still, like Caceres, Weiss was able to bridge a gap, in this case the world of web developers and C++ developers, putting him in a unique position to be able to know what Picture needed to do and how to make it happen. So, after talking it over with other Chromium developers, Weiss started hacking on Blink, the rendering engine that powers Google's Chrome browser.
-
-Implementing Picture was no small task. "Getting Picture into Blink required some infrastructure that wasn't there," says Weiss. "I had two options: either wait for the infrastructure to happen naturally over the course of the next two years, or make it happen myself."
-
-Weiss, who, incidentally, has three young children and, presumably, not much in the way of free time, quickly realized that working night and weekends wasn't going to cut it. Weiss need to turn his work on Picture into a contract job. So he, Marquis and others involved in the community group, set up a <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/picture-element-implementation-in-blink">crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo</a>.
-
-On the face of it it sounds like a doomed proposition -- why would developers fund a feature that will ultimately end up in a web browser they otherwise have no control over?
-
-Then something amazing happened. The campaign didn't just meet its goal, it went way over it. Web developers wanted Picture bad enough to spend their money on the cause.
-
-It could have been the t-shirts. It could have been the novelty of it. Or it could have been that web developers saw how important a solution to the image problem was in a way that the browser makers and standards bodies didn't. Most likely it was some combination of all these and more.
-
-In the end enough money was raised to not only implement Picture in Blink, but to also port Weiss' work back to WebKit so WebKit browsers (including Apple's iOS version of Safari) can use it as well. At the same time Marcos Caceres started work at Mozilla and has helped drive Firefox's support for Picture.
-
-As of today the Picture element will be available in Chrome and Firefox by the end of the year. It's available now in Chrome's dev channel and Firefox 34+ (in Firefox you'll need enable it in `about:config`). Here's a test page showing the new [Picture element in action][11].
-
-Apple appears to be adding support to Safari though the backport to WebKit wasn't finished in time for the upcoming Safari 8. Microsoft has likewise been supportive and is considering Picture for the next release of IE.
-
-## The Future of the Web
-
-The story of the Picture element isn't just an interesting tale of web developers working together to make the web a better place. It's also a glimpse at the future of the web. The separation between between those who build the web and those who create web standards is disappearing. The W3C's community groups are growing and sites like [Move the Web Forward][12] aim to help bridge the gap between developer ideas and standards bodies.
-
-There's even a site devoted to what it calls "[specifiction][13]" -- giving web developers a place to suggest tools they need, discuss possible solutions and then find the relevant W3C working group to make it happen.
-
-Picture may be almost finished, but the RICG isn't going away. In fact it's renaming itself and taking on a new project -- [Element Queries][14]. Coming soon to a browser near you.
-
-
-[1]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/how-a-new-html-element-will-make-the-web-faster/
-[2]: http://httparchive.org/interesting.php?a=All&l=Aug%2015%202014&s=Top1000
-[3]: http://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design
-[4]: http://www.bostonglobe.com/
-[5]: http://blog.cloudfour.com/responsive-imgs/
-[6]: http://usecases.responsiveimages.org/
-[7]: http://responsiveimages.org/
-[8]: http://www.w3.org/community/respimg/2012/05/11/respimg-proposal/
-[9]: http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20120510#l-747
-[10]: http://dev.opera.com/articles/native-responsive-images/
-[11]: https://longhandpixels.net/2014/08/picture-test
-[12]: http://movethewebforward.org/
-[13]: http://specifiction.org/
-[14]: http://responsiveimagescg.github.io/eq-usecases/
diff --git a/src/published/2015-01-24_how-to-write-ebook.txt b/src/published/2015-01-24_how-to-write-ebook.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 7163dad..0000000
--- a/src/published/2015-01-24_how-to-write-ebook.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,58 +0,0 @@
----
-title: How to Write an Ebook
-pub_date: 2015-01-24 12:52:53
-slug: /blog/2015/01/how-to-write-ebook
-metadesc: The tools I use to write and publish ebooks. All free and open source.
-
----
-
-When I set out to write a book I had little more than an outline in Markdown. Just a few headers and bullet points on each of what became the major chapters of my [book on responsive web design](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design). 
-
-It never really occurred to me to research which tools I would need to create a book because I knew I was going to use Markdown, which could then be translated into pretty much any format using [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/).
-
-Since quite a few people have [asked](https://twitter.com/situjapan/status/549935669129142272) for more details on exactly which tools I used, here's a quick rundown:
-
-1. I write books as single text files lightly marked up with Pandoc-flavored Markdown.
-2. Then I run Pandoc, passing in custom templates, CSS files, fonts I bought and so on. Pretty much as [detailed here in the Pandoc documentation](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/epub.html). I run these commands often enough that I write a shell script for each project so I don't have to type in all the flags and file paths each time.
-3. Pandoc outputs an ePub file and an HTML file. The latter is then used with [Weasyprint](http://weasyprint.org/) to generate the PDF version of the ebook. Then I used the ePub file and the [Kindle command line tool](http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765211) to create a .mobi file.
-4. All of the formatting and design is just CSS, which I am already comfortable working with (though ePub is only a subset of CSS and reader support is somewhat akin to building website in 1998 -- who knows if it's gonna work? The PDF is what I consider the reference copy.)
-
-In the end I get the book in TXT, HTML, PDF, ePub and .mobi formats, which covers pretty much every digital reader I'm aware of. Out of those I actually include the PDF, ePub and Mobi files when you [buy the book](https://longhandpixels.net/books/responsive-web-design).
-
-### FAQs and Notes.
-
-<strong>Why Not Use iBook Author?</strong>
-
-I don't want my book tied to a company's software which may or may not continue to exist. Plus I wanted to use open source software. And I wanted more control over the process than I could get with monolithic tools like visual layout editors. 
-
-The above tools are, for me anyway, the simplest possible workflow which outputs the highest quality product. 
-
-<strong>What about Prince?</strong>
-
-What does The Purple One have to do with writing books? Oh, that [Prince](http://www.princexml.com/). Actually I really like Prince and it can do a few things that WeasyPrint cannot (like execute JavaScript which is handy for code highlighting or allow for `@font-face` font embedding), but it's not free and in the end, I decided, not worth the money.
-
-<strong>Can you share your shell script?</strong>
-
-Here's the basic idea, adjust file paths to suit your working habits.
-
-~~~.language-bash
-#!/bin/sh
-#Update PDF:
-pandoc --toc --toc-depth=2 --smart --template=lib/template.html5 --include-before-body=lib/header.html -t html5 -o rwd.html draft.txt && weasyprint rwd.html rwd.pdf
-
-#Update epub:
-pandoc -S -s --smart -t epub3 --include-before-body=lib/header.html --template=lib/template_epub.html --epub-metadata=lib/epub-metadata.xml --epub-stylesheet=lib/print-epub.css --epub-cover-image=lib/covers/cover-portrait.png --toc --toc-depth=2 -o rwd.epub draft.txt
-
-#update Mobi:
-pandoc -S -s --smart -t epub3 --include-before-body=lib/header.html --template=lib/template_epub.html --epub-metadata=lib/epub-metadata.xml --epub-stylesheet=lib/print-kindle.css --epub-cover-image=lib/covers/cover-portrait.png --toc --toc-depth=2 -o kindle.epub Draft.txt && kindlegen kindle.epub -o rwd.mobi
-~~~
-
-I just run this script and bang, all my files are updated. 
-
-<strong>What Advice can you Offer for People Wanting to Write an Ebook?</strong>
-
-At the risk of sounding trite, just do it. 
-
-Writing a book is not easy, or rather the writing is never easy, but I don't think it's ever been this easy to *produce* a book. It took me two afternoons to come up with a workflow that involves all free, open source software and allows me to publish literally any text file on my hard drive as a book that can then be read by millions. I type two key strokes and I have a book. Even if millions don't ever read your book (and, for the record, millions have most definitely not read my books), that is still f'ing amazing. 
-
-Now go make something cool (and be sure to tell me about it).
diff --git a/src/published/2015-04-02_complete-guide-ssh-keys.txt b/src/published/2015-04-02_complete-guide-ssh-keys.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 25d646c..0000000
--- a/src/published/2015-04-02_complete-guide-ssh-keys.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,128 +0,0 @@
----
-title: How to Setup SSH Keys for Secure Logins
-pub_date: 2015-03-21 12:52:53
-slug: /blog/2015/03/set-up-ssh-keys-secure-logins
-metadesc: How to set up SSH keys for more secure logins to your VPS.
-code: True 
-
----
-
-SSH keys are an easier, more secure way of logging into your virtual private server via SSH. Passwords are vulnerable to brute force attacks and just plain guessing. Key-based authentication is (currently) much more difficult to brute force and, when combined with a password on the key, provides a secure way of accessing your VPS instances from anywhere.
-
-Key-based authentication uses two keys, the first is the "public" key that anyone is allowed to see. The second is the "private" key that only you ever see. So to log in to a VPS using keys we need to create a pair -- a private key and a public key that matches it -- and then securely upload the public key to our VPS instance. We'll further protect our private key by adding a password to it.
-
-Open up your terminal application. On OS X, that's Terminal, which is in Applications >> Utilities folder. If you're using Linux I'll assume you know where the terminal app is and Windows fans can follow along after installing [Cygwin](http://cygwin.com/).
-
-Here's how to generate SSH keys in three simple steps.
-
-
-## Setup SSH for More Secure Logins
-
-### Step 1: Check for SSH Keys
-
-Cut and paste this line into your terminal to check and see if you already have any SSH keys:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-ls -al ~/.ssh
-~~~
-
-If you see output like this, then skip to Step 3:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-id_dsa.pub
-id_ecdsa.pub
-id_ed25519.pub
-id_rsa.pub
-~~~
-
-### Step 2: Generate an SSH Key
-
-Here's the command to create a new SSH key. Just cut and paste, but be sure to put in your own email address in quotes:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@example.com"
-~~~
-
-This will start a series of questions, just hit enter to accept the default choice for all of them, including the last one which asks where to save the file.
-
-Then it will ask for a passphrase, pick a good long one. And don't worry you won't need to enter this every time, there's something called `ssh-agent` that will ask for your passphrase and then store it for you for the duration of your session (i.e. until you restart your computer).
-
-~~~.language-bash
-Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): [Type a passphrase]
-Enter same passphrase again: [Type passphrase again]
-~~~
-
-Once you've put in the passphrase, SSH will spit out a "fingerprint" that looks a bit like this:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-# Your identification has been saved in /Users/you/.ssh/id_rsa.
-# Your public key has been saved in /Users/you/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
-# The key fingerprint is:
-# d3:50:dc:0f:f4:65:29:93:dd:53:c2:d6:85:51:e5:a2 scott@longhandpixels.net
-~~~
-
-### Step 3 Copy Your Public Key to your VPS
-
-If you have ssh-copy-id installed on your system you can use this line to transfer your keys:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-ssh-copy-id user@123.45.56.78
-~~~
-
-If that doesn't work, you can paste in the keys using SSH:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user@12.34.56.78 "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat >>  ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
-~~~
-
-Whichever you use you should get a message like this:
-
-
-~~~.language-bash
-The authenticity of host '12.34.56.78 (12.34.56.78)' can't be established.
-RSA key fingerprint is 01:3b:ca:85:d6:35:4d:5f:f0:a2:cd:c0:c4:48:86:12.
-Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
-Warning: Permanently added '12.34.56.78' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
-username@12.34.56.78's password: 
-~~~
-
-    Now try logging into the machine, with "ssh 'user@12.34.56.78'", and check in:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-~/.ssh/authorized_keys
-~~~
-
-to make sure we haven't added extra keys that you weren't expecting.
-
-Now log in to your VPS with ssh like so:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-    ssh username@12.34.56.78
-~~~
-
-And you won't be prompted for a password by the server. You will, however, be prompted for the passphrase you used to encrypt your SSH key. You'll need to enter that passphrase to unlock your SSH key, but ssh-agent should store that for you so you only need to re-enter it when you logout or restart your computer.
-
-And there you have it, secure, key-based log-ins for your VPS.
-
-### Bonus: SSH config
-
-If you'd rather not type `ssh myuser@12.34.56.78` all the time you can add that host to your SSH config file and refer to it by hostname. 
-
-The SSH config file lives in `~/.ssh/config`. This command will either open that file if it exists or create it if it doesn't:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-nano ~/.ssh/config
-~~~
-
-Now we need to create a host entry. Here's what mine looks like:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-Host myname  
-  Hostname 12.34.56.78
-  user myvpsusername
-  #Port 24857 #if you set a non-standard port uncomment this line
-  CheckHostIP yes
-  TCPKeepAlive yes
-~~~
-
-Then to login all I need to do is type `ssh myname`. This is even more helpful when using `scp` since you can skip the whole username@server and just type: `scp myname:/home/myuser/somefile.txt .` to copy a file.
diff --git a/src/published/2015-04-03_set-up-secure-first-vps.txt b/src/published/2015-04-03_set-up-secure-first-vps.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index ebb9b30..0000000
--- a/src/published/2015-04-03_set-up-secure-first-vps.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,147 +0,0 @@
----
-title: How to Setup And Secure Your First VPS
-pub_date: 2015-03-31 12:52:53
-slug: /blog/2015/03/set-up-secure-first-vps
-metadesc: Still using shared hosting? It's 2015, time to set up your own VPS. Here's a complete guide to launching your first VPS on Digital Ocean or Vultr.
-code: True 
-
----
-
-Let's talk about your server hosting situation. I know a lot of you are still using a shared web host. The thing is, it's 2015, shared hosting is only necessary if you really want unexplained site outages and over-crowded servers that slow to a crawl.
-
-It's time to break free of those shared hosting chains. It time to stop accepting the software stack you're handed. It's time to stop settling for whatever outdated server software and configurations some shared hosting company sticks you with.
-
-**It's time to take charge of your server; you need a VPS**
-
-What? Virtual Private Servers? Those are expensive and complicated... don't I need to know Linux or something? 
-
-No, no and not really.
-
-Thanks to an increasingly competitive market you can pick up a very capable VPS for $5 a month. Setting up your VPS *is* a little more complicated than using a shared host, but most VPS's these days have one-click installers that will set up a Rails, Django or even WordPress environment for you. 
-
-As for Linux, knowing your way around the command line certainly won't hurt, but these tutorials will teach you everything you really need to know. We'll also automate everything so that critical security updates for your server are applied automatically without you lifting a finger.
-
-## Pick a VPS Provider
-
-There are hundreds, possibly thousands of VPS providers these days. You can nerd out comparing all of them on [serverbear.com](http://serverbear.com/) if you want. When you're starting out I suggest sticking with what I call the big three: Linode, Digital Ocean or Vultr. 
-
-Linode would be my choice for mission critical hosting. I use it for client projects, but Vultr and Digital Ocean are cheaper and perfect for personal projects and experiments. Both offer $5 a month servers, which gets you .5 GB of RAM, plenty of bandwidth and 20-30GB of a SSD-based storage space. Vultr actually gives you a little more RAM, which is helpful if you're setting up a Rails or Django environment (i.e. a long running process that requires more memory), but I've been hosting a Django-based site on a 512MB Digital Ocean instance for 18 months and have never run out of memory.
-
-Also note that all these plans start off charging by the hour so you can spin up a new server, play around with it and then destroy it and you'll have only spent a few pennies.
-
-Which one is better? They're both good. I've been using Vultr more these days, but Digital Ocean has a nicer, somewhat slicker control panel. There are also many others I haven't named. Just pick one. 
-
-Here's a link that will get you a $10 credit at [Vultr](http://www.vultr.com/?ref=6825229) and here's one that will get you a $10 credit at [Digital Ocean](https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=3bda91345045) (both of those are affiliate links and help cover the cost of hosting this site *and* get you some free VPS time).
-
-For simplicity's sake, and because it offers more one-click installers, I'll use Digital Ocean for the rest of this tutorial.
-
-## Create Your First VPS
-
-In Digital Ocean you'll create a "Droplet". It's a three step process: pick a plan (stick with the $5 a month plan for starters), pick a location (stick with the defaults) and then install a bare OS or go with a one-click installer. Let's get WordPress up and running, so select WordPress on 14.04 under the Applications tab.
-
-If you want automatic backups, and you do, check that box. Backups are not free, but generally won't add more than about $1 to your monthly bill -- it's money well spent.
-
-The last thing we need to do is add an SSH key to our account. If we don't Digital Ocean will email our root password in a plain text email. Yikes. 
-
-If you need to generate some SSH keys, here's a short guide, [How to Generate SSH keys](/blog/2015/03/set-up-ssh-keys-secure-logins). You can skip step 3 in that guide. Once you've got your keys set up on your local machine you just need to add them to your droplet.
-
-If you're on OS X, you can use this command to copy your public key to the clipboard:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
-~~~
-
-Otherwise you can use cat to print it out and copy it:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
-~~~
-
-Now click the button to "add an SSH key". Then paste the contents of your clipboard into the box. Hit "add SSH Key" and you're done.
-
-Now just click the giant "Create Droplet".
-
-Congratulations you just deployed your first VPS server.
-
-## Secure Your VPS 
-
-Now we can log in to our new VPS with this code:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-ssh root@127.87.87.87
-~~~
-
-That will cause SSH to ask if you want to add the server to list of known hosts. Say yes and then on OS X you'll get a dialog asking for the passphrase you created a minute ago when you generate your SSH key. Enter it, check the box to save it to your keychain so you don't have to enter it again.
-
-And you're now logged in to your VPS as root. That's not how we want to log in though since root is a very privileged user that can wreak all sorts of havoc. The first thing we'll do is change the password of the root user. To do that, just enter:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-passwd
-~~~
-
-And type a new password.
-
-Now let's create a new user:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-adduser myusername
-~~~
-
-Give your username a secure password and then enter this command:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-visudo
-~~~
-
-If you get an error saying that there is no app installed, you'll need to first install sudo (`apt-get install sudo` on Debian, which does not ship with sudo). That will open a file. Use the arrow key to move the cursor down to the line that reads:
-    
-~~~.language-bash
-root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
-~~~
-
-Now add this line:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-myusername ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
-~~~
-
-Where myusername is the username you created just a minute ago. Now we need to save the file. To do that hit Control-X, type a Y and then hit return.
-
-Now, **WITHOUT LOGGING OUT OF YOUR CURRENT ROOT SESSION** open another terminal window and make sure you can login with your new user:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-ssh myusername@12.34.56.78
-~~~
-
-You'll be asked for the password that we created just a minute ago on the server (not the one for our SSH key). Enter that password and you should be logged in. To make sure we can get root access when we need it, try entering this command:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-sudo apt-get update
-~~~
-
-That should ask for your password again and then spit out a bunch of information, all of which you can ignore for now.
-
-Okay, now you can log out of your root terminal window. To do that just hit Control-D.
-
-## Finishing Up
-
-What about actually accessing our VPS on the web? Where's WordPress? Just point your browser to the bare IP address you used to log in and you should get the first screen of the WordPress installer.
-
-We now have a VPS deployed and we've taken some very basic steps to secure it. We can do a lot more to make things more secure, but I've covered that in a separate article: 
-
-One last thing: the user we created does not have access to our SSH keys, we need to add them. First make sure you're logged out of the server (type Control-D and you'll get a message telling you the connection has been closed). Now, on your local machine paste this command:
-
-~~~.language-bash
-cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh myusername@45.63.48.114 "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat >>  ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
-~~~
-
-You'll have to put in your password one last time, but from now on you can login via SSH.
-
-## Next Steps
-
-Congratulations you made it past the first hurdle, you're well on your way to taking control over your server. Kick back, relax and write some blog posts. 
-
-Write down any problems you had with this tutorial and send me a link so I can check out your blog (I'll try to help figure out what went wrong too).
-
-Because we used a pre-built image from Digital Ocean though we're really not much better off than if we went with shared hosting, but that's okay, you have to start somewhere. Next up we'll do the same things, but this time create a bare OS which will serve as the basis for a custom built version of Nginx that's highly optimized and way faster than any stock server.
-
diff --git a/src/published/2015-10-28_pass.txt b/src/published/2015-10-28_pass.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index f02998c..0000000
--- a/src/published/2015-10-28_pass.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,37 +0,0 @@
----
-title: Switching from LastPass to Pass
-pub_date: 2015-10-28 12:04:25
-slug: /src/pass
-tags: command line, security
-
----
-
-I never used to use a password manager. I kept all my passwords in my head used some tricks I learned from my very, very limited understanding of what memory champions like [Ed Cooke][1] do, to keep track of them. I generated strings using [pwgen][2] and then memorized them. As you might imagine, this did not scale well. Or rather it led to me getting lazy. I don't want to memorize a new strong password for some one-off site I'll probably never log in to again. So I would use a less strong password for those. Worse I'd re-use that password at multiple sites.
-
-Recognizing that this was a bad idea, I gave up at some point and started using LastPass for these sorts of things. But my really important passwords (email and financial sites), are still only in my head. I never particularly like that my passwords were stored on a third-party server, but LastPass was just *so* easy. Then LogMeIn bought LastPass and suddenly I was motivated to move on. 
-
-As I outlined in a [brief piece][3] for The Register, there are lots of replacement services out there -- I like [Dashlane][4], despite the price -- but I didn't want my password data on a third party server any more. I wanted to be in total control.
-
-I can't remember how I ran across [pass][5], but I've been meaning to switch over to it for a while now. It exactly what I wanted in a password tool -- a simple, secure, command line based system using tested tools like GnuPG. There's also [Firefox add-on][6] and [an Android app][7] to make life a bit easier. So far though, I'm not using either.
-
-So I cleaned up my LastPass account, exported everything to CSV and imported it all into pass with this [Ruby script][8]. 
-
-Once you have the basics installed there are two ways to run pass, with Git and without. I can't tell you how many times Git has saved my ass, so naturally I went with a Git-based setup that I host on a private server. That, combined with regular syncing to my Debian machine, my wife's Mac, rsyncing to a storage server, and routine backups to Amazon S3 means my encrypted password files are backed up on six different physical machines. Moderately insane, but sufficiently redundant that I don't worry about losing anything.
-
-If you go this route there's one other thing you need to backup -- your GPG keys. The public key is easy, but the private one is a bit harder. I got some good ideas from [here][9]. On one hand you could be paranoid-level secure and make a paper print out of your key. I suggest using a barcode or QR code, and then printing on card stock which you laminate for protection from the elements and then store it in a secure location like a safe deposit box. I may do this at some point, but for now I went with the less secure plan B -- I simply encrypted my private key with a passphrase. 
-
-Yes, that essentially negates at least some of the benefit of using a key instead of passphrase in the first place. However, since, as noted above, I don't store any passwords that would, so to speak, give you the keys to my kingdom, I'm not terribly worried about it. Besides, if you really want to get these passwords it would be far easier to just take my laptop and [hit me with a $5 wrench][10] until I told you the passphrase for gnome-keyring.
-
-The more realistic thing to worry about is how other, potentially far less tech-savvy people can access these passwords should something happen to you. No one in my immediate family knows how to use GPG. Yet. So should something happen to me before I teach my kids how to use it, I periodically print out my important passwords and store that file in a secure place along with a will, advance directive and so on.
-
-
-[1]: https://twitter.com/tedcooke
-[2]: https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=pwgen
-[3]: tk
-[4]: http://dashlane.com/
-[5]: http://www.passwordstore.org/
-[6]: https://github.com/jvenant/passff#readme
-[7]: https://github.com/zeapo/Android-Password-Store
-[8]: http://git.zx2c4.com/password-store/tree/contrib/importers/lastpass2pass.rb
-[9]: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/51771/where-do-you-store-your-personal-private-gpg-key
-[10]: https://www.xkcd.com/538/
diff --git a/src/published/2015-11-05_how-googles-amp-project-speeds-web-sandblasting-ht.txt b/src/published/2015-11-05_how-googles-amp-project-speeds-web-sandblasting-ht.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 5c443da..0000000
--- a/src/published/2015-11-05_how-googles-amp-project-speeds-web-sandblasting-ht.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,107 +0,0 @@
----
-title: How Google’s AMP project speeds up the Web—by sandblasting HTML
-pub_date: 2015-11-05 12:04:25
-slug: /src/how-googles-amp-project-speeds-web-sandblasting-ht
-tags: IndieWeb
-
----
-
-[**This story originally appeared on <a href="http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/googles-amp-an-internet-giant-tackles-the-old-myth-of-the-web-is-too-slow/" rel="me">Ars Technica</a>, to comment and enjoy the full reading experience with images (including a TRS-80 browsing the web) you should read it over there.**]
-
-There's a story going around today that the Web is too slow, especially over mobile networks. It's a pretty good story—and it's a perpetual story. The Web, while certainly improved from the days of 14.4k modems, has never been as fast as we want it to be, which is to say that the Web has never been instantaneous.
-
-Curiously, rather than a focus on possible cures, like increasing network speeds, finding ways to decrease network latency, or even speeding up Web browsers, the latest version of the "Web is too slow" story pins the blame on the Web itself. And, perhaps more pointedly, this blame falls directly on the people who make it.
-
-The average webpage has increased in size at a terrific rate. In January 2012, the average page tracked by HTTPArchive [transferred 1,239kB and made 86 requests](http://httparchive.org/trends.php?s=All&minlabel=Oct+1+2012&maxlabel=Oct+1+2015#bytesTotal&reqTotal). Fast forward to September 2015, and the average page loads 2,162kB of data and makes 103 requests. These numbers don't directly correlate to longer page load-and-render times, of course, especially if download speeds are also increasing. But these figures are one indicator of how quickly webpages are bulking up.
-
-Native mobile applications, on the other hand, are getting faster. Mobile devices get more powerful with every release cycle, and native apps take better advantage of that power.
-
-So as the story goes, apps get faster, the Web gets slower. This is allegedly why Facebook must invent Facebook Instant Articles, why Apple News must be built, and why Google must now create [Accelerated Mobile Pages](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/googles-new-amp-html-spec-wants-to-make-mobile-websites-load-instantly/) (AMP). Google is late to the game, but AMP has the same goal as Facebook's and Apple's efforts—making the Web feel like a native application on mobile devices. (It's worth noting that all three solutions focus exclusively on mobile content.)
-
-For AMP, two things in particular stand in the way of a lean, mean browsing experience: JavaScript... and advertisements that use JavaScript. The AMP story is compelling. It has good guys (Google) and bad guys (everyone not using Google Ads), and it's true to most of our experiences. But this narrative has some fundamental problems. For example, Google owns the largest ad server network on the Web. If ads are such a problem, why doesn't Google get to work speeding up the ads?
-
-There are other potential issues looming with the AMP initiative as well, some as big as the state of the open Web itself. But to think through the possible ramifications of AMP, first you need to understand Google's new offering itself.
-
-## What is AMP?
-
-To understand AMP, you first need to understand Facebook's Instant Articles. Instant Articles use RSS and standard HTML tags to create an optimized, slightly stripped-down version of an article. Facebook then allows for some extra rich content like auto-playing video or audio clips. Despite this, Facebook claims that Instant Articles are up to 10 times faster than their siblings on the open Web. Some of that speed comes from stripping things out, while some likely comes from aggressive caching.
-
-But the key is that Instant Articles are only available via Facebook's mobile apps—and only to established publishers who sign a deal with Facebook. That means reading articles from Facebook's Instant Article partners like National Geographic, BBC, and Buzzfeed is a faster, richer experience than reading those same articles when they appear on the publisher's site. Apple News appears to work roughly the same way, taking RSS feeds from publishers and then optimizing the content for delivery within Apple's application.
-
-All this app-based content delivery cuts out the Web. That's a problem for the Web and, by extension, for Google, which leads us to Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project.
-
-Unlike Facebook Articles and Apple News, AMP eschews standards like RSS and HTML in favor of its own little modified subset of HTML. AMP HTML looks a lot like HTML without the bells and whistles. In fact, if you head over to the [AMP project announcement](https://www.ampproject.org/how-it-works/), you'll see an AMP page rendered in your browser. It looks like any other page on the Web.
-
-AMP markup uses an extremely limited set of tags. Form tags? Nope. Audio or video tags? Nope. Embed tags? Certainly not. Script tags? Nope. There's a very short list of the HTML tags allowed in AMP documents available over on the [project page](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-html-format.md). There's also no JavaScript allowed. Those ads and tracking scripts will never be part of AMP documents (but don't worry, Google will still be tracking you).
-
-AMP defines several of its own tags, things like amp-youtube, amp-ad, or amp-pixel. The extra tags are part of what's known as [Web components](http://www.w3.org/TR/components-intro/), which will likely become a Web standard (or it might turn out to be "ActiveX part 2," only the future knows for sure).
-
-So far AMP probably sounds like a pretty good idea—faster pages, no tracking scripts, no JavaScript at all (and so no overlay ads about signing up for newsletters). However, there are some problematic design choices in AMP. (At least, they're problematic if you like the open Web and current HTML standards.)
-
-AMP re-invents the wheel for images by using the custom component amp-img instead of HTML's img tag, and it does the same thing with amp-audio and amp-video rather than use the HTML standard audio and video. AMP developers argue that this allows AMP to serve images only when required, which isn't possible with the HTML img tag. That, however, is a limitation of Web browsers, not HTML itself. AMP has also very clearly treated [accessibility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_accessibility) as an afterthought. You lose more than just a few HTML tags with AMP.
-
-In other words, AMP is technically half baked at best. (There are dozens of open issues calling out some of the [most](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/517) [egregious](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/481) [decisions](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/545) in AMP's technical design.) The good news is that AMP developers are listening. One of the worst things about AMP's initial code was the decision to disable pinch-and-zoom on articles, and thankfully, Google has reversed course and [eliminated the tag that prevented pinch and zoom](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/592).
-
-But AMP's markup language is really just one part of the picture. After all, if all AMP really wanted to do was strip out all the enhancements and just present the content of a page, there are existing ways to do that. Speeding things up for users is a nice side benefit, but the point of AMP, as with Facebook Articles, looks to be more about locking in users to a particular site/format/service. In this case, though, the "users" aren't you and I as readers; the "users" are the publishers putting content on the Web.
-
-## It's the ads, stupid
-
-The goal of Facebook Instant Articles is to keep you on Facebook. No need to explore the larger Web when it's all right there in Facebook, especially when it loads so much faster in the Facebook app than it does in a browser.
-
-Google seems to have recognized what a threat Facebook Instant Articles could be to Google's ability to serve ads. This is why Google's project is called Accelerated Mobile Pages. Sorry, desktop users, Google already knows how to get ads to you.
-
-If you watch the [AMP demo](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/10/introducing-accelerated-mobile-pages.html), which shows how AMP might work when it's integrated into search results next year, you'll notice that the viewer effectively never leaves Google. AMP pages are laid over the Google search page in much the same way that outside webpages are loaded in native applications on most mobile platforms. The experience from the user's point of view is just like the experience of using a mobile app.
-
-Google needs the Web to be on par with the speeds in mobile apps. And to its credit, the company has some of the smartest engineers working on the problem. Google has made one of the fastest Web browsers (if not the fastest) by building Chrome, and in doing so the company has pushed other vendors to speed up their browsers as well. Since Chrome debuted, browsers have become faster and better at an astonishing rate. Score one for Google.
-
-The company has also been touting the benefits of mobile-friendly pages, first by labeling them as such in search results on mobile devices and then later by ranking mobile friendly pages above not-so-friendly ones when other factors are equal. Google has been quick to adopt speed-improving new HTML standards like the responsive images effort, which was first supported by Chrome. Score another one for Google.
-
-But pages keep growing faster than network speeds, and the Web slows down. In other words, Google has tried just about everything within its considerable power as a search behemoth to get Web developers and publishers large and small to speed up their pages. It just isn't working.
-
-One increasingly popular reaction to slow webpages has been the use of content blockers, typically browser add-ons that stop pages from loading anything but the primary content of the page. Content blockers have been around for over a decade now (No Script first appeared for Firefox in 2005), but their use has largely been limited to the desktop. That changed in Apple's iOS 9, which for the first time put simple content-blocking tools in the hands of millions of mobile users.
-
-Combine all the eyeballs that are using iOS with content blockers, reading Facebook Instant Articles, and perusing Apple News, and you suddenly have a whole lot of eyeballs that will never see any Google ads. That's a problem for Google, one that AMP is designed to fix.
-
-## Static pages that require Google's JavaScript
-
-The most basic thing you can do on the Web is create a flat HTML file that sits on a server and contains some basic tags. This type of page will always be lightning fast. It's also insanely simple. This is literally all you need to do to put information on the Web. There's no need for JavaScript, no need even for CSS.
-
-This is more or less the sort of page AMP wants you to create (AMP doesn't care if your pages are actually static or—more likely—generated from a database. The point is what's rendered is static). But then AMP wants to turn around and require that each page include a third-party script in order to load. AMP deliberately sets the opacity of the entire page to 0 until this script loads. Only then is the page revealed.
-
-This is a little odd; as developer Justin Avery [writes](https://responsivedesign.is/articles/whats-the-deal-with-accelerated-mobile-pages-amp), "Surely the document itself is going to be faster than loading a library to try and make it load faster."
-
-Pinboard.in creator Maciej Cegłowski did just that, putting together a demo page that duplicates the AMP-based AMP homepage without that JavaScript. Over a 3G connection, Cegłowski's page fills the viewport in [1.9 seconds](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151016_RF_VNE/). The AMP homepage takes [9.2 seconds](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151016_9J_VNN/). JavaScript slows down page load times, even when that JavaScript is part of Google's plan to speed up the Web.
-
-Ironically, for something that is ostensibly trying to encourage better behavior from developers and publishers, this means that pages using progressive enhancement, keeping scripts to a minimum and aggressively caching content—in other words sites following best practices and trying to do things right—may be slower in AMP.
-
-In the end, developers and publishers who have been following best practices for Web development and don't rely on dozens of tracking networks and ads have little to gain from AMP. Unfortunately, the publishers building their sites like that right now are few and far between. Most publishers have much to gain from generating AMP pages—at least in terms of speed. Google says that AMP can improve page speed index scores by between 15 to 85 percent. That huge range is likely a direct result of how many third-party scripts are being loaded on some sites.
-
-The dependency on JavaScript has another detrimental effect. AMP documents depend on JavaScript, which is to say that if their (albeit small) script fails to load for some reason—say, you're going through a tunnel on a train or only have a flaky one-bar connection at the beach—the AMP page is completely blank. When an AMP page fails, it fails spectacularly.
-
-Google knows better than this. Even Gmail still offers a pure HTML-based fallback version of itself.
-
-## AMP for publishers
-
-Under the AMP bargain, all big media has to do is give up its ad networks. And interactive maps. And data visualizations. And comment systems.
-
-Your WordPress blog can get in on the stripped-down AMP action as well. Given that WordPress powers roughly 24 percent of all sites on the Web, having an easy way to generate AMP documents from WordPress means a huge boost in adoption for AMP. It's certainly possible to build fast websites using WordPress, but it's also easy to do the opposite. WordPress plugins often have a dramatic (negative) impact on load times. It isn't uncommon to see a WordPress site loading not just one but several external JavaScript libraries because the user installed three plugins that each use a different library. AMP neatly solves that problem by stripping everything out.
-
-So why would publishers want to use AMP? Google, while its influence has dipped a tad across industries (as Facebook and Twitter continue to drive more traffic), remains a powerful driver of traffic. When Google promises more eyeballs on their stories, big media listens.
-
-AMP isn't trying to get rid of the Web as we know it; it just wants to create a parallel one. Under this system, publishers would not stop generating regular pages, but they would also start generating AMP files, usually (judging by the early adopter examples) by appending /amp to the end of the URL. The AMP page and the canonical page would reference each other through standard HTML tags. User agents could then pick and choose between them. That is, Google's Web crawler might grab the AMP page, but desktop Firefox might hit the AMP page and redirect to the canonical URL.
-
-On one hand, what this amounts to is that after years of telling the Web to stop making m. mobile-specific websites, Google is telling the Web to make /amp-specific mobile pages. On the other hand, this nudges publishers toward an idea that's big in the [IndieWeb movement](http://indiewebcamp.com/): Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (or [POSSE](http://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE) for short).
-
-The idea is to own the canonical copy of the content on your own site but then to send that content everywhere you can. Or rather, everywhere you want to reach your readers. Facebook Instant Article? Sure, hook up the RSS feed. Apple News? Send the feed over there, too. AMP? Sure, generate an AMP page. No need to stop there—tap the new Medium API and half a dozen others as well.
-
-Reading is a fragmented experience. Some people will love reading on the Web, some via RSS in their favorite reader, some in Facebook Instant Articles, some via AMP pages on Twitter, some via Lynx in their terminal running on a [restored TRS-80](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/surfing-the-internet-from-my-trs-80-model-100/) (seriously, it can be done. See below). The beauty of the POSSE approach is that you can reach them all from a single, canonical source.
-
-## AMP and the open Web
-
-While AMP has problems and just might be designed to lock publishers into a Google-controlled format, so far it does seem friendlier to the open Web than Facebook Instant Articles.
-
-In fact, if you want to be optimistic, you could look at AMP as the carrot that Google has been looking for in its effort to speed up the Web. As noted Web developer (and AMP optimist) Jeremy Keith [writes](https://adactio.com/journal/9646) in a piece on AMP, "My hope is that the current will flow in both directions. As well as publishers creating AMP versions of their pages in order to appease Google, perhaps they will start to ask 'Why can't our regular pages be this fast?' By showing that there is life beyond big bloated invasive webpages, perhaps the AMP project will work as a demo of what the whole Web could be."
-
-Not everyone is that optimistic about AMP, though. Developer and Author Tim Kadlec [writes](https://timkadlec.com/2015/10/amp-and-incentives/), "[AMP] doesn't feel like something helping the open Web so much as it feels like something bringing a little bit of the walled garden mentality of native development onto the Web... Using a very specific tool to build a tailored version of my page in order to 'reach everyone' doesn't fit any definition of the 'open Web' that I've ever heard."
-
-There's one other important aspect to AMP that helps speed up their pages: Google will cache your pages on its CDN for free. "AMP is caching... You can use their caching if you conform to certain rules," writes Dave Winer, developer and creator of RSS, [in a post on AMP](http://scripting.com/2015/10/10/supportingStandardsWithoutAllThatNastyInterop.html). "If you don't, you can use your own caching. I can't imagine there's a lot of difference unless Google weighs search results based on whether you use their code."
diff --git a/src/published/2019-04-07_why-and-how-ditch-vagrant-for-lxd.txt b/src/published/2019-04-07_why-and-how-ditch-vagrant-for-lxd.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index e83d8e3..0000000
--- a/src/published/2019-04-07_why-and-how-ditch-vagrant-for-lxd.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,216 +0,0 @@
-* **Updated July 2022**: This was getting a bit out of date in some places so I've fixed a few things. More importantly, I've run into to some issues with cgroups and lxc on Arch and added some notes below under the [special note to Arch users](#arch)*
-
-I've used Vagrant to manage my local development environment for quite some time. The developers I used to work with used it and, while I have no particular love for it, it works well enough. Eventually I got comfortable enough with Vagrant that I started using it in my own projects. I even wrote about [setting up a custom Debian 9 Vagrant box](/src/create-custom-debian-9-vagrant-box) to mirror the server running this site. 
-
-The problem with Vagrant is that I have to run a huge memory-hungry virtual machine when all I really want to do is run Django's built-in dev server. 
-
-My laptop only has 8GB of RAM. My browser is usually taking around 2GB, which means if I start two Vagrant machines, I'm pretty much maxed out. Django's dev server is also painfully slow to reload when anything changes.
-
-Recently I was talking with one of Canonical's [MAAS](https://maas.io/) developers and the topic of containers came up. When I mentioned I really didn't like Docker, but hadn't tried anything else, he told me I really needed to try LXD. Later that day I began reading through the [LinuxContainers](https://linuxcontainers.org/) site and tinkering with LXD. Now, a few days later, there's not a Vagrant machine left on my laptop.
-
-Since it's just me, I don't care that LXC only runs on Linux. LXC/LXD is blazing fast, lightweight, and dead simple. To quote, Canonical's [Michael Iatrou](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/01/26/lxd-5-easy-pieces), LXC "liberates your laptop from the tyranny of heavyweight virtualization and simplifies experimentation."
-
-Here's how I'm using LXD to manage containers for Django development on Arch Linux. I've also included instructions and commands for Ubuntu since I set it up there as well.
-
-### What's the difference between LXC, LXD and `lxc`
-
-I wrote this guide in part because I've been hearing about LXC for ages, but it seemed unapproachable, overwhelming, too enterprisey you might say. It's really not though, in fact I found it easier to understand than Vagrant or Docker.
-
-So what is a LXC container, what's LXD, and how are either different than say a VM or for that matter Docker?
-
-* LXC - low-level tools and a library to create and manage containers, powerful, but complicated.
-* LXD - is a daemon which provides a REST API to drive LXC containers, much more user-friendly
-* `lxc` - the command line client for LXD.
-
-In LXC parlance a container is essentially a virtual machine, if you want to get pedantic, see Stéphane Graber's post on the [various components that make up LXD](https://stgraber.org/2016/03/11/lxd-2-0-introduction-to-lxd-112/). For the most part though, interacting with an LXC container is like interacting with a VM. You say ssh, LXD says socket, potato, potahto. Mostly.
-
-An LXC container is not a container in the same sense that Docker talks about containers. Think of it more as a VM that only uses the resources it needs to do whatever it's doing. Running this site in an LXC container uses very little RAM. Running it in Vagrant uses 2GB of RAM because that's what I allocated to the VM -- that's what it uses even if it doesn't need it. LXC is much smarter than that. 
-
-Now what about LXD? LXC is the low level tool, you don't really need to go there. Instead you interact with your LXC container via the LXD API. It uses YAML config files and a command line tool `lxc`.
-
-That's the basic stack, let's install it.
-
-### Install LXD
-
-On Arch I used the version of [LXD in the AUR](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/lxd/). Ubuntu users should go with the Snap package. The other thing you'll want is your distro's Btrfs or ZFS tools. 
-
-Part of LXC's magic relies on either Btrfs and ZFS to read a virtual disk not as a file the way Virtualbox and others do, but as a block device. Both file systems also offer copy-on-write cloning and snapshot features, which makes it simple and fast to spin up new containers. It takes about 6 seconds to install and boot a complete and fully functional LXC container on my laptop, and most of that time is downloading the image file from the remote server. It takes about 3 seconds to clone that fully provisioned base container into a new container. 
-
-In the end I set up my Arch machine using Btrfs or Ubuntu using ZFS to see if I could see any difference (so far, that would be no, the only difference I've run across in my research is that Btrfs can run LXC containers inside LXC containers. LXC Turtles all the way down).
-
-Assuming you have Snap packages set up already, Debian and Ubuntu users can get everything they need to install and run LXD with these commands:
-
-~~~~console
-apt install zfsutils-linux
-~~~~
-
-And then install the snap version of lxd with:
-
-~~~~console
-snap install lxd
-~~~~
-
-Once that's done we need to initialize LXD. I went with the defaults for everything. I've printed out the entire init command output so you can see what will happen:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo lxd init
-Create a new BTRFS pool? (yes/no) [default=yes]: 
-would you like to use LXD clustering? (yes/no) [default=no]: 
-Do you want to configure a new storage pool? (yes/no) [default=yes]: 
-Name of the new storage pool [default=default]: 
-Name of the storage backend to use (btrfs, dir, lvm) [default=btrfs]: 
-Create a new BTRFS pool? (yes/no) [default=yes]: 
-Would you like to use an existing block device? (yes/no) [default=no]: 
-Size in GB of the new loop device (1GB minimum) [default=15GB]: 
-Would you like to connect to a MAAS server? (yes/no) [default=no]: 
-Would you like to create a new local network bridge? (yes/no) [default=yes]:
-What should the new bridge be called? [default=lxdbr0]: 
-What IPv4 address should be used? (CIDR subnet notation, “auto” or “none”) [default=auto]: 
-What IPv6 address should be used? (CIDR subnet notation, “auto” or “none”) [default=auto]: 
-Would you like LXD to be available over the network? (yes/no) [default=no]:    
-Would you like stale cached images to be updated automatically? (yes/no) [default=yes] 
-Would you like a YAML "lxd init" preseed to be printed? (yes/no) [default=no]: yes
-~~~~
-
-LXD will then spit out the contents of the profile you just created. It's a YAML file and you can edit it as you see fit after the fact. You can also create more than one profile if you like. To see all installed profiles use:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc profile list
-~~~~
-
-To view the contents of a profile use:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc profile show <profilename>
-~~~~
-
-To edit a profile use:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc profile edit <profilename>
-~~~~
-
-So far I haven't needed to edit a profile by hand. I've also been happy with all the defaults although, when I do this again, I will probably enlarge the storage pool, and maybe partition off some dedicated disk space for it. But for now I'm just trying to figure things out so defaults it is. 
-
-The last step in our setup is to add our user to the lxd group. By default LXD runs as the lxd group, so to interact with containers we'll need to make our user part of that group.
-
-~~~~console
-sudo usermod -a -G lxd yourusername
-~~~~
-
-#####Special note for Arch users. {:#arch } 
-
-To run unprivileged containers as your own user, you'll need to jump through a couple extra hoops. As usual, the [Arch User Wiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Linux_Containers#Enable_support_to_run_unprivileged_containers_(optional)) has you covered. Read through and follow those instructions and then reboot and everything below should work as you'd expect.
-
-Or at least it did until about June of 2022 when something changed with cgroups and I stopped being able to run my lxc containers. I kept getting errors like:
-
-~~~~console
-Failed to create cgroup at_mnt 24() 
-lxc debian-base 20220713145726.259 ERROR conf - ../src/lxc/conf.c:lxc_mount_auto_mounts:851 - No such file or directory - Failed to mount "/sys/fs/cgroup"
-~~~~
-
-I tried debugging, and reading through all the bug reports I could find over the course of a couple of days and got nowhere. No one else seems to have this problem. I gave up and decided I'd skip virtualization and develop directly on Arch. I installed PostgreSQL... and it wouldn't start, also throwing an error about cgroups. That is when I dug deeper into cgroups and found a way to revert to the older behavior. I added this line to my boot params (in my case that's in /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf):
-
-~~~~console
-systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0
-~~~~
-
-That fixed all the issues for me. If anyone can explain *why* I'd be interested to hear from you in the comments.
-
-### Create Your First LXC Container
-
-Let's create our first container. This website runs on a Debian VM currently hosted on Vultr.com so I'm going to spin up a Debian container to mirror this environment for local development and testing.
-
-To create a new LXC container we use the `launch` command of the `lxc` tool. 
-
-There are four ways you can get LXC containers, local (meaning a container base you've downloaded), images (which come from [https://images.linuxcontainers.org/](https://images.linuxcontainers.org/), ubuntu (release versions of Ubuntu), and ubuntu-daily (daily images). The images on linuxcontainers are unofficial, but the Debian image I used worked perfectly. There's also Alpine, Arch CentOS, Fedora, openSuse, Oracle, Palmo, Sabayon and lots of Ubuntu images. Pretty much every architecture you could imagine is in there too. 
-
-I created a Debian 9 Stretch container with the amd64 image. To create an LXC container from one of the remote images the basic syntax is `lxc launch images:distroname/version/architecture containername`. For example:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc launch images:debian/stretch/amd64 debian-base
-Creating debian-base
-Starting debian-base
-~~~~
-
-That will grab the amd64 image of Debian 9 Stretch and create a container out of it and then launch it. Now if we look at the list of installed containers we should see something like this:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc list
-+-------------+---------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------------+------------+-----------+                                                                                         
-|    NAME     |  STATE  |         IPV4          |                     IPV6                      |    TYPE    | SNAPSHOTS |                                                                                         
-+-------------+---------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------------+------------+-----------+                                                                                         
-| debian-base | RUNNING | 10.171.188.236 (eth0) | fd42:e406:d1eb:e790:216:3eff:fe9f:ad9b (eth0) | PERSISTENT |           |                                                                                         
-+-------------+---------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------------+------------+-----------+  
-~~~~
-
-Now what? This is what I love about LXC, we can interact with our container pretty much the same way we'd interact with a VM. Let's connect to the root shell:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc exec debian-base -- /bin/bash
-~~~~
-
-Look at your prompt and you'll notice it says `root@nameofcontainer`. Now you can install everything you need on your container. For me, setting up a Django dev environment, that means Postgres, Python, Virtualenv, and, for this site, all the Geodjango requirements (Postgis, GDAL, etc), along with a few other odds and ends. 
-
-You don't have to do it from inside the container though. Part of LXD's charm is to be able to run commands without logging into anything. Instead you can do this:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc exec debian-base -- apt update
-lxc exec debian-base -- apt install postgresql postgis virtualenv
-~~~~
-
-LXD will output the results of your command as if you were SSHed into a VM. Not being one for typing, I created a bash alias that looks like this: `alias luxdev='lxc exec debian-base -- '` so that all I need to type is `luxdev <command>`.  
-
-What I haven't figured out is how to chain commands, this does not work:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc exec debian-base -- su - lxf && cd site && source venv/bin/activate && ./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
-~~~~
-
-According to [a bug report](https://github.com/lxc/lxd/issues/2057), it should work in quotes, but it doesn't for me. Something must have changed since then, or I'm doing something wrong.
-
-The next thing I wanted to do was mount a directory on my host machine in the LXC instance. To do that you'll need to edit `/etc/subuid` and `/etc/subgid` to add your user id. Use the `id` command to get your user and group id (it's probably 1000 but if not, adjust the commands below). Once you have your user id, add it to the files with this one liner I got from the [Ubuntu blog](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2016/12/08/mounting-your-home-directory-in-lxd):
-
-~~~~console
-echo 'root:1000:1' | sudo tee -a /etc/subuid /etc/subgid
-~~~~
-
-Then you need to configure your LXC instance to use the same uid:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc config set debian-base raw.idmap 'both 1000 1000'
-~~~~
-
-The last step is to add a device to your config file so LXC will mount it. You'll need to stop and start the container for the changes to take effect.
-
-~~~~console
-lxc config device add debian-base sitedir disk source=/path/to/your/directory path=/path/to/where/you/want/folder/in/lxc
-lxc stop debian-base
-lxc start debian-base
-~~~~
-
-That replicates my setup in Vagrant, but we've really just scratched the surface of what you can do with LXD. For example you'll notice I named the initial container "debian-base". That's because this is the base image (fully set up for Djano dev) which I clone whenever I start a new project. To clone a container, first take a snapshot of your base container, then copy that snapshot to create a new container:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc snapshot debian-base debian-base-configured
-lxc copy debian-base/debian-base-configured mycontainer
-~~~~
-
-Now you've got a new container named mycontainer. If you'd like to tweak anything, for example mount a different folder specific to this new project you're starting, you can edit the config file like this:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc config edit mycontainer
-~~~~
-
-I highly suggest reading through Stéphane Graber's 12 part series on LXD to get a better idea of other things you can do, how to manage resources, manage local images, migrate containers, or connect LXD with Juju, Openstack or yes, even Docker.
-
-#####Shoulders stood upon
-
-* [Stéphane Graber's 12 part series on lxd 2.0](https://stgraber.org/2016/03/11/lxd-2-0-blog-post-series-012/) - Graber wrote LXC and LXD, this is the best resource I found and highly recommend reading it all.
-* [Mounting your home directory in LXD](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2016/12/08/mounting-your-home-directory-in-lxd)
-* [Official how to](https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/getting-started-cli/)
-* [Linux Containers Discourse site](https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/deploying-django-applications/996)
-* [LXD networking: lxdbr0 explained](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2016/04/07/lxd-networking-lxdbr0-explained)
-
-
-[^1]: To be fair, I didn't need to get rid of Vagrant. You can use Vagrant to manage LXC containers, but I don't know why you'd bother. LXD's management tools and config system works great, why add yet another tool to the mix? Unless you're working with developers who use Windows, in which case LXC, which is short for, *Linux Container*, is not for you.
diff --git a/src/published/arch-philosophy.txt b/src/published/arch-philosophy.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index ff18521..0000000
--- a/src/published/arch-philosophy.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,24 +0,0 @@
-Everyone seems to have a post about why they ended up with Arch. This is mine.
-
-I recently made the switch to Arch Linux for my primary desktop and it's been great. Arch very much feels like the end of the line for me --the bottom of the rabbit hole as it were. Once you have a system that does everything you need it to do effortlessly, why bother with anything else? Some of it might be a pain at times, hand partitioning, hand mounting and generating your own fstab files, but it teaches you a lot. It pulls back the curtain so you can see that you are in fact the person behind the curtain, you just didn't realize it.
-
-<img src="images/2020/desktop042020_uAICE8n.png" id="image-2325" class="picwide caption" />
-
-**[Updated July 2021: Still running Arch. Still happy about it. I did switch back to Openbox instead of i3, but otherwise my setup is unchanged]**
-
-Why bother? Control. Simplicity. Stubbornness. The good old DIY ethos, which is born out of the realization that if you don't do things yourself you'll have to accept the mediocrity that capitalism has produced. You never learn; you never grow. That's no way to live.
-
-I used to be a devoted Debian fan. I still agree with the Debian manifesto, such as it is. In practice however I found myself too often having to futz with things.
-
-I came to Arch for the AUR, though the truth is these days I don't use it much. Then for a while I [ran Sway](/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway), which was really only practical on Arch. Since then though I went back to X.org. Sorry Wayland, but much as I love Sway, I did not love wrestling with MIDI controller drivers, JACK, and all the other elements of an audio/video workflow in Wayland. It can be done, but it’s more work, and I don’t want to work at getting software to work. I’m too old for that shit. I want to plug in a microphone, open Audacity, and record. If it’s any more complicated than that -- and it was for me in Wayland with the mics I own -- I will find something else. I really don’t care what my software stack is, so long as I can create what I want to create with it.
-
-Wayland was smoother, less graphically glitchy, but meh, whatever. Ninety percent of the time I’m writing in Vim in a Urxvt window. I need smooth scrolling and transitions like I need a hole in my head. I also set up Openbox to behave very much like Sway, so I still have the same shortcuts and honestly, aside from the fact that Tint2 has more icons than Waybar, I can’t tell the difference. Well, that’s not true. Vim works fine with the clipboard again, no need for Neovim.
-
-My Arch setup these days is minimalist: [Openbox](http://openbox.org/wiki/Main_Page) with [tint2](https://gitlab.com/o9000/tint2). I open apps with [dmenu](http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/) and do most of my file system tasks from the terminal using bash (or [Ranger](http://nongnu.org/ranger/) if I want something fancier). Currently my setup uses about 200MB of RAM with no apps open. Arch doesn't have quite the software selection of Debian, but it has most of the software you'd ever want. My needs are simple: bash, vim, tmux, mutt, newsboat, mpd, mpv, git, feh, gimp, darktable and dev stuff like python3, postgis, etc. Every distro has this stuff. 
-
-meaning I have no need to spend more than $400 on a laptop.
-
-
-Arch's real strength though is how amazingly easy it is to package your own software. Because even Debian's epically oversized repos can't hold everything. The Debian repos pale next to the Arch User Respository (AUR), which has just about every piece of software available for Linux. And it's up-to-date. So up-to-date that half the AUR packages have a -git variant that's pulled straight from the project's git repo. The best part is there are tools to manage and update all these out of repo packages. I strongly suggest you learn to package and install AUR repos by hand, but once you've done that a few times and you know what's happening I suggest installing [yay](https://github.com/Jguer/yay) to simplify managing all those AUR installs.
-
-I've installed Arch on dozens of machines at this point. I started with my Macbook Pro, which I've since sold (no need for high end hardware with my setup), but it ran Arch like a champ (what a relief to not need OS X). Currently I use a Lenovo x270 that I picked up off eBay for $300. I added a larger hard drive, a second hard drive, and 32-gigabytes of RAM. It runs Arch like a champ and gives me all I could ever want in a laptop. Okay, a graphics card would be nice for my occasional bouts of video editing, but otherwise it's more than enough.
diff --git a/src/published/backup-2.txt b/src/published/backup-2.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 4012668..0000000
--- a/src/published/backup-2.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,23 +0,0 @@
-I wrote previously about how I [backup database files](/src/automatic-offsite-postgresql-backups) automatically. The key word there being "automatically". If I have to remember to make a backup the odds of it happening drop to zero. So I automate as I described in that piece, but that's not the only backup I have.
-
-The point for me as a writer is that I don't want to lose these words.
-
-Part of the answer is backing up databases, but part of my solution is also creating workflows which automatically spawn backups. 
-
-This is actually my preferred backup method because it's not just a backup, it's future proofing. PostgreSQL may not be around ten years from now (I hope it is, because it's pretty awesome, but it may not be), but it's not my only backup.
-
-In fact I've got at least half a dozen backups of these words and I haven't even finished this piece yet. Right now I'm typing these words in Vim and will save the file in a Git repo that will get pushed to a server. That's two backups. Later the containing folder will be backed up on S3 (weekly), as well as two local drives (one daily, one weekly, both [rsync](https://rsync.samba.org/) copies). 
-
-None of that really requires any effort on my part. I do have to add this file to the git repo and then commit and push it to the remote server, but [Vim Fugitive](https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive) makes that ridiculously simple.
-
-That's not the end of the backups though. Once I'm done writing I'll cut and paste this piece into my Django app and hit a publish button that will write the results out to the flat HTML file you're actually reading right now (this file is another backup). I also output a plain text version (just append `.txt` to any luxagraf URL to see a plain text version of the page).
-
-The end result is that all this makes it very unlikely I will loose these words outright.
-
-However, when I plugged these words into the database I gave this article a relationship with other objects in that database. So even though the redundant backups built into my workflow make a total data loss unlikely, without the database I will lose the relationships I've created. That's why I [a solid PostgreSQL backup strategy](/src/automatic-offsite-postgresql-backups), but what if Postgres does disappear?
-
-I could and occasionally do output all the data in the database to flat files with JSON or YAML versions of the metadata attached. Or at least some of it. It's hard to output massive amounts of geodata in the text file (for example the shapefiles of [national parks](https://luxagraf.net/projects/national-parks/) aren't particularly useful as text data). 
-
-I'm not sure what the answer is really, but lately I've been thinking that maybe the answer is just to let it go? The words are the story, that's what my family, my kids, my friends, and whatever few readers I have really want. I'm the only one that cares about the larger story that includes the metadata, the relationships between the stories. Maybe I don't need that. Maybe that it's here today at all is remarkable enough on its own.
-
-The web is after all an ephemeral thing. It depends on our continued ability to do so many things we won't be able to do forever, like burn fossil fuels. In the end the most lasting backup I have may well be the 8.5x11 sheets of paper I've recently taken to printing out. Everything else depends on so much.
diff --git a/src/published/command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt b/src/published/command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 7bb149b..0000000
--- a/src/published/command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,116 +0,0 @@
-Snippets are bits of text you use frequently. Boilerplate email responses, code blocks, and whatever else you regularly need to type. My general rule is, if I type it more than twice, I save it as a snippet.
-
-I have a lot of little snippets of text and code from years of doing this. When I used the i3 desktop (and X11) I used [Autokey](https://github.com/autokey/autokey) to invoke shortcuts and paste these snippets where I need them. In Autokey you define a shortcut for your longer chunk of text, and then whenever you type that shortcut Autokey "expands" it to your longer text.
-
-It's a great app, but I [switched to a Wayland-based desktop](/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway) ([Sway](https://swaywm.org/)) and Autokey doesn't work in Wayland yet. It's unclear to me whether it's even possible to have an Autokey-like app work within Wayland's security model ([Hawck](https://github.com/snyball/Hawck) claims to, but I have not tested it). 
-
-Instead, after giving it some thought, I came up with a way to do everything I need in a way like even better, using tools that I already have installed. 
-
-###Rolling Your Own Text Snippet Manager
-
-Autokey is modeled on the idea of typing shortcuts and having them replaced with a larger chuck of text. It works to a point, but has the mental overhead of needing to remember all those keystroke combos. 
-
-Dedicating memory to digital stuff feels like we're doing it wrong. Why not *search* for a snippet instead of trying to remember some key combo? If the searching is fast and seamless there's no loss of "flow," or switching contexts, and no need to remember some obtuse shortcut. 
-
-To work though the search must be *fast*. Fortunately there's a great little command line app that offers lighting-fast search: [`fzf`](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf), a command line "fuzzy" finder. `fzf` is a find-as-you-type search interface that's incredibly fast, especially when you pair it with [`ripgrep`](https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep) instead of `find`.
-
-I already use `fzf` as a DIY application launcher, so I thought why not use it to search for snippets? This way I can keep my snippets in a simple text file, parse them into an array, pass that to `fzf`, search, and then pass the selected result on to the clipboard. 
-
-I combined Alacritty, a Python script, `fzf`, `sed`, and some Sway shortcuts to make a snippet manager I can call up and search through with a single keystroke. 
-
-###Python 
-
-It may be possible to do this entirely in a bash script, but I'm not that great at bash scripting so I did the text parsing in Python, which I know well enough.
-
-I wanted to keep all my snippets in a single text file, with the option to do multiline snippets for readability (in other words I didn't want to be writing `\n` characters just because that's easier to parse). I picked `---` as a delimiter because... no reason really. 
-
-The other thing I wanted was the ability to use tags to simplify searching. Tags become a way of filtering searches. For example, all the snippets I use writing for Wired can be tagged wired and I can see them all in one view by typing "wired" in `fzf`. 
-
-So my snippet files looks something like this:
-
-````
-<div class="cluster">
-    <span class="row-2">
-    </span>
-</div>
-tags:html cluster code
-
----
-```python
-
-```
-tags: python code
-
----
-````
-
-Another goal, which you may notice above, is that I didn't want any format constraints. The snippets can take just about any ascii character. The tags line can have a space, not a have space, have commas, semicolons, doesn't matter because either way `fzf` can search it, and the tags will be stripped out before it hits the clipboard. 
-
-Here's the script I cobbled together to parse this text file into an array I can pass to `fzf`:
-
-~~~python
-import re
-with open('~/.textsnippets.txt', 'r') as f:
-    data = f.read()
-snips = re.split("---", data)
-for snip in snips:
-    # strip the blank line at the end
-    s = '\n'.join(snip.split('\n')[1:-1])
-    #make sure we output the newlines, but no string wrapping single quotes
-    print(repr(s.strip()).strip('\''))
-~~~
-
-All this script does is open a file, read the contents into a variable, split those contents on `---`, strip any extra space and then return the results to stdout. 
-
-The only tricky part is the last line. We need to preserve the linebreaks and to do that I used [`repr`](https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/functions.html#repr), but that means Python literally prints the string, with the single quotes wrapping it. So the last `.strip('\'')` gets rid of those. 
-
-I saved that file to `~/bin` which is already on my `$PATH`.
-
-###Shell Scripting
-
-The next thing we need to do is call this script, and pass the results to `fzf` so we can search them.
-
-To do that I just wrote a bash script. 
-
-~~~.bash
-#!/usr/bin/env bash
-selected="$(python ~/bin/snippet.py | fzf -i -e )"
-#strip tags and any trailing space before sending to wl-copy
-echo -e "$selected"| sed -e 's/tags\:\.\*\$//;$d' | wl-copy
-~~~
-
-What happens here is the Python script gets called, parses the snippets file into chunks of text, and then that is passed to `fzf`. After experimenting with some `fzf` options I settled on case-insensitive, exact match (`-i -e`) searching as the most efficient means of finding what I want. 
-
-Once I search for and find the snippet I want, that selected bit of text is stored in a variable called, creatively, `selected`. The next line prints that variable, passes it to `sed` to strip out the tags, along with any space after that, and then sends that snippet of text the clipboard via wl-copy.
-
-I saved this file in a folder on my `PATH` (`~/bin`) and called it `fzsnip`. At this point in can run `fzsnip` in a terminal and everything works as I'd expect. As a bonus I have my snippets in a plain text file I can access to copy and paste snippets on my phone, tablet, and any other device where I can run [NextCloud](https://nextcloud.com/).
-
-That's cool, but on my laptop I don't want to have to switch to the terminal every time I need to access a snippet. Instead I invoke a small terminal window wherever I am. To do that, I set up a keybinding in my Sway config file like this:
-
-~~~.bash
-bindsym $mod+s exec alacritty --class 'smsearch' --command bash -c 'fzsnip | xargs -r swaymsg -t command exec'
-~~~
-
-This is very similar to how I launch apps and search passwords, which I detailed in my post on [switching from i3 to Sway](/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway). The basic idea is whatever virtual desktop I happen to be on, launch a new instance of [Alacritty](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty), with the class `smsearch`. Assigning that class gives the new instance some styling I'll show below. The rest of the line fires off that shell script `fzsnip`. This allows me to hit `Alt+s` and get a small terminal window with a list of my snippets displayed. I search for the name of the snippet, hit return, the Alacritty window closes and the snippet is on my clipboard, ready to paste wherever I need it.
-
-This line in my Sway config file styles the window class `launcher`:
-
-~~~.bash
-for_window [app_id="^smsearch$"] floating enable, border none, resize set width 80 ppt height 60 ppt, move position 0 px 0 px
-~~~
-
-That puts the window in the upper left corner of the screen and makes it about 1/3 the width of my screen. You can adjust the width and height to suite your tastes.
-
-If you don't use Alacritty, adjust the command to use the terminal app you prefer. If you don't use Sway, you'll need to use whatever system-wide shortcut tool your window manager or desktop environment offers. Another possibility it is using [Guake](https://github.com/Guake/guake) which might be able to this for GNOME users, but I've never used it.
-
-###Conclusion
-
-I hope this gives anyone searching for a way to replace Autokey on Wayland some ideas. If you have any questions for run into problems, don't hesitate to drop a comment below.
-
-Is it as nice as Autokey? I actually like this far better now. I often had trouble remembering my Autokey shortcuts, now I can search instead. 
-
-As I said above, if I were a better bash scripter I get rid of the Python file and just use a bash loop. That would make it easy to wrap it in a neat package and distribute it, but as it is it has too many moving parts to make it more than some cut and paste code.
-
-####Shoulders Stood Upon
-
-- [Using `fzf` instead of `dmenu`](https://medium.com/njiuko/using-fzf-instead-of-dmenu-2780d184753f) -- This is the post that got me thinking about ways I could use tools I already use (`fzf`, Alacritty) to accomplish more tasks.
diff --git a/src/published/technology.txt b/src/published/technology.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index cb613cb..0000000
--- a/src/published/technology.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,56 +0,0 @@
-Sometimes people email me to ask how I make luxagraf. Here's now I do it: I write, take pictures and combine them into stories.
-
-I recognize that this is not particularly helpful. Or it is, I think, but it's not why people email me. They want to know about at the tools I use. Which is fine. I guess. Consumerism! Yeah! Anyway, I decided to make a page I can just point people to, this one. There's no affiliate links and I'd really prefer it if you didn't buy any of this stuff because you don't need it. I don't need it. I could get by with less. I should get by with less.
-
-Still, for better or worse. Here are the tools I use.
-
-### Notebook and Pen
-
-My primary "device" is my notebook. I don't have a fancy notebook. I do have several notebooks though. One is in my pocket at all times and is filled with illegible scribbles that I attempt to decipher later. The other is larger and it's my sort of captain's log, though I don't write in with the kind regularity captain's do. Or that I imagine captain's do. Then I have other notebooks for specific purposes, meditation journal, etc.
-
-I'm not all that picky about notebooks, if they have paper in them I'm happy enough, but I could devote thousands and thousands of words to pens. For what seems like forever I was religiously devoted to the Uniball Roller Stick Pen in micro point, which I used to swipe from my dad's desk drawer back in high school. It's a lovely pen, I was gratified to note it was the pen of choice at the lawyer's office where we finalized the sale of our house. And yes, I totally took one.
-
-Once I bought a fancy pen from Japan that takes Parker ink refills, and it's my pen of choice. I can't remember the brand or anything which sucks because I'd love to get another.
-
-When that's not handy I use Uniball Vision pens, which also fill my two primary requirements in a pen: 1) it writes well 2) I can buy it almost anywhere for next to nothing.
-
-### Camera
-
-This is what everyone wants to know about. I used a Sony A7ii. It's a full frame mirrorless camera that happens to make it easy to use legacy film lenses. I bought it specifically because it's the only full frame digital camera available that lets me use the old lens that I love. Without the old lenses I find the Sony's output to be a little digital for my tastes, though the RAW files from the A7ii have wonderful dynamic range, which was the other selling point for me. 
-
-That said, it's not a cheap camera. You should not buy one. The Sony a6000 is very nearly at good and costs $500 ($400 on eBay). In fact, having tested dozens of cameras for Wired over the years I can say with some authority that the a6000 is the best value for money on the market period, but doubly so if you want at cheap way to test out some older lenses.
-
-All of my lenses are old and manual focus, which I prefer to autofocus lenses. I like the fact that they're cheap too, but really the main appeal for me with old lenses was the far superior focusing rings. I grew up using all manual focus cameras. Autofocus was probably around by the time I picked up a camera, but I never had it. My father had (still has) a screw mount Pentax. I bought a Minolta with money from a high school job. Eventually I upgraded to a Nikon F3 which was my primary camera until 2004. While there are advantages to autofocus, and certainly modern lenses are much sharper in most cases, neither autofocus nor perfect edge to edge sharpness are significant for the type of photos I like to make. 
-
-####lenses
-
-One thing about shooting manual lenses is that there are a ton of cheap manual lenses out there. I have seen amazing photos produced with $10 lenses. Learn to manual focus a lens is like opening a door into a secret world. A secret world where lenses are cheap. The net result of my foray into this world is that I have a ridiculous collection of lenses. And we live in a bus, lord knows what I'd have if we had more space.
-
-That said, about 90% of the time I have a very fast, relatively lightweight Canon FD 50 f1.4. I love this lens. I love love love it. The other fifty I love love love is my minolta 50 f/2, which is the slow one in the Minolta 50 family, but man is a great lens. I bought it for $20.
-
-At the wide end of the spectrum I have another Canon, the FD 20mm f2.8. For portraits I use the Minolta MD 100 f2 and an Olympus M Zuiko 100 f/2.8. I also have this crazy Russian fisheye thing I bought one night on eBay after I'd been drinking. It's pretty hilarious bad at anything less than f8, but it's useful for shooting in small spaces, like the inside of the bus.
-
-I also have, cough, a few other lenses that I don't use very often or that I use for a while and pass along via eBay. Right now I have a Minolta 58 f/1.4 that I really like, a Pentax 28 f/3.5 that doesn't do much for me (28mm just isn't how I see the world) and Canon 35 f/1.8 that I like alot but won't mount on any adapter I have. I need to get it serviced. 
-
-
-### laptop
-
-My laptop is a Lenovo x250 I bought off eBay for $300. I upgraded the hard drives and put in an HD screen, which brought the total outlay to $550, which is really way too much to spend on a computer these days, but my excuse is that I make money using it. 
-
-Why this particular laptop? It's small and the battery lasts quite a while (like 15 hrs when I'm writing, more 12 when editing photos). It also has a removable battery and can be upgraded by the user. I packed in almost 3TB of disk storage, which is nice. It does make a high pitch whining noise that drives me crazy whenever I'm in a quiet room with it, but since I mostly use it outdoors, sitting around our camps, this is rarely an issue.
-
-Still, like I said, I could get by with less. I should get by with less.
-
-The laptop runs Linux because everything else sucks a lot more than Linux. Which isn't too say that I love Linux, it could use some work too. But it sucks a whole lot less than the rest. I run Arch Linux, which I have written about elsewhere. The main appeal of Arch for me is that once I set it up I never have to think about it again. Because I test software for a living I also have a partition that hosts a revolving door of other Linux distros that I use from time to time, but never when I want to get work done. When I want to get work done, I use Arch.
-
-Because I am hopelessly bored with technology, I stick mainly with simple, text-based applications. Almost everything I do is done inside a single terminal (urxvt) window running tmux, which gives me four tabs. I write in Vim. For email I use mutt. I read RSS feeds with newsbeuter and I listen to music via mpd. I also have a command line calculator and a locally-hosted dictionary that I use pretty regularly.  
-
-I do use a few GUI apps: Tor for browsing the web, Darktable and GIMP for editing photos, Stellarium for learning more about the night sky, and LibreOffice Calc for spreadsheets. That's about it. 
-
-### ithing/tablet/drone/wrist tracking device thingy
-
-Yeah I don't have any of those. I'm one of those people. I pay for everything in cash too. Fucking weirdo is what I am. I told you you didn't want to know how I make stuff.
-
-<hr />
-
-So there you have it, my technology stack. I am of course always looking for ways to get by with less technology, but I think, after years of getting rid of stuff, I reached something close to ideal. 
diff --git a/src/qutebrowser-notes.txt b/src/qutebrowser-notes.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 584a47a..0000000
--- a/src/qutebrowser-notes.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,18 +0,0 @@
-handy commands:
- :download
-
-## shortcuts
-
-xo - open url in background tab
-go - edit current url
-gO - edit current url and open result in new tab
-gf - view source 
-;y - yank hinted url
-;i - hint only images
-;b - open hint in background tab
-;d - download hinted url
-PP - Open URL from selection in new tab
-ctrl+a Increment no. in URL
-ctrl+x Decrement no. in URL
-
-Solarized theme: https://bitbucket.org/kartikynwa/dotty2hotty/src/1a9ba9b80f07e1f63b740da5e6970dc5a97f1037/qutebrowser.py?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default
diff --git a/src/src-guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway.txt b/src/src-guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 20cff23..0000000
--- a/src/src-guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,161 +0,0 @@
-[*Updated April 2021: I added some solutions I've found to a few of the issues below. And yes, I continue to use Sway.*]
-
-I recently made the switch from the [i3 tiling window manager](https://i3wm.org/) to [Sway](https://swaywm.org/), a Wayland-based i3 clone. I still [run Arch Linux on my personal machine](/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux), so all of this is within the context of Arch.
-
-I made the switch for a variety of reasons. There's the practical: Sway/Wayland gives me much better battery life on my laptop. As well as the more philosophical: Sway's lead developer Drew Devault's take on code is similar to mine[^1] (e.g. [avoid traumatic changes](https://drewdevault.com/2019/11/26/Avoid-traumatic-changes.html) or [avoid dependencies](https://drewdevault.com//2020/02/06/Dependencies-and-maintainers.html)), and after reading his blog for a year he's someone whose software I trust. 
-
-I know some people would think this reason ridiculous, but it's important to me that the software I rely on be made by people I like and trust. Software is made by humans, for humans. The humans are important. And yes, it goes the other way too. I'm not going to name names, but there are some theoretically good software out there that I refuse to use because I do not like or trust the people who make it.
-
-When I find great software made by people who seem trustworthy, I use it. So I switched to Sway and it's been a good experience.
-
-Sway and Wayland have been very stable in my use. I get about 20 percent more out of my laptop battery. That seems insane to me, but as someone who [lives almost entirely off solar power](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome) it's a huge win I can't ignore.
-
-### Before You Begin
-
-I did not blindly switch to Sway. Or rather I did and that did not go well. I switched back after a few hours and started doing some serious searching, both the search engine variety and the broader, what am I really trying to do here, variety. 
-
-The latter led me to change a few tools, replace some things, and try some new work flows. Not all of it was good. I could never get imv to do the things I can with feh for instance, but mostly it was good.
-
-One thing I really wanted to do was avoid XWayland (which allows apps that need X11 to run under Wayland). Wherever I could I've opted for applications that run natively under Wayland. There's nothing wrong with XWayland, that was just a personal goal, for fun.
-
-Here's my notes on making the transition to Wayland along with the applications I use most frequently.
-
-##### Terminal
-
-I do almost everything in the terminal. I write in Vim, email with mutt, read RSS feeds with newsboat, listen to music with mpd, and browse files with ranger.
-
-I tested quite a few Wayland-native terminals and I really like [Alacritty](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty). Highly recommended. [Kitty](https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty) is another option to consider.
-
-<span class="strike">That said, I am sticking with urxvt for now. There are two problems for me with Alacritty. First off Vim doesn't play well with the Wayland clipboard in Alacritty. Second, Ranger will not show image previews in Alacritty.</span>
-
-*Update April 2021:* I have never really solved either of these issues, but I switched to Alacritty anyway. I use Neovim instead of Vim, which was a mostly transparent switch and Neovim support the Wayland clipboard. As for previews in Ranger... I forgot about those. They were nice. But I guess I don't miss them that much.
-
-
-##### Launcher
-
-I've always used dmenu to launch apps and grab passwords from pass. It's simple and fast. Unfortunately dmenu is probably never going to run natively in Wayland. 
-
-I tested rofi, wofi, and other potential replacements, but I did not like any of them. Somewhere in my search for a replacement launcher I ran across [this post](https://medium.com/njiuko/using-fzf-instead-of-dmenu-2780d184753f) which suggested just calling up a small terminal window and piping a list of applications to [fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf), a blazing fast search tool.
-
-That's what I've done and it works great. I created a keybinding to launch a new instance of Alacritty with a class name that I use to resize the window. Then within that small Alacritty window I call `compgen` to get a list of executables, then sort it to eliminate duplicates, and pass the results to fzf. Here's the code in my Sway config file:
-
-~~~console
-bindsym $mod+Space exec alacritty --class 'launcher' --command bash -c 'compgen -c | sort -u | fzf | xargs -r swaymsg -t command exec'
-
-for_window [app_id="^launcher$"] floating enable, border none, resize set width 25 ppt height 20 ppt, move position 0 px 0 px
-~~~
-
-These lines together will open a small terminal window in the upper left corner of the screen with a fzf search interface. I type, for example, "dar" and Darktable comes up. I hit return, the terminal window closes, and Darktable launches. It's as simple as dmenu and requires no extra applications (since I was already using fzf in Vim).
-
-If you don't want to go that route, Bemenu is dmenu-like launcher that runs natively in Wayland.
-
-##### Browsers
-
-I mainly use [qutebrower](https://qutebrowser.org/), supplemented by [Vivaldi](https://vivaldi.com/)[^2] for research because having split screen tabs is brilliant for research. I also use [Firefox Developer Edition](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/) for any web development work, because the Firefox dev tools are far superior to anything else.
-
-All three work great under Wayland. In the case of qutebrowser though you'll need to set a few shell variables to get it to start under Wayland, out of the box it launches with XWayland for some reason. Here's what I added to `.bashrc` to get it to work:
-
-~~~bash
-export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland 
-export GDK_BACKEND=wayland
-~~~
-
-One thing to bear in mind if you do have a lot of X11 apps still is that with this in your shell you'll need to reset the `GDK_BACKEND` to X11 or those apps won't launch. Instead you'll get an error, `Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0`. To fix that error you'll need to reset `GDK_BACKEND=x11`, then launch your X11 app.
-
-There are several ways you can do this, but I prefer to override apps in `~/bin` (which is on my $PATH). So, for example, I have a file named `xkdenlive` in `~/bin` that looks like this:
-
-~~~bash
-#! /bin/sh
-GDK_BACKEND=x11 kdenlive
-~~~
-
-Note that for me this is easier, because the only apps I'm using that need X11 are Kdenlive and Slack. If you have a lot of X11 apps, you're probably better off making qutebrowser the special case by launching it like this:
-
-~~~bash
-GDK_BACKEND=wayland qutebrowser
-~~~
-
-##### Clipboard
-
-I can't work without a clipboard manager, I keep the last 200 things I've copied, and I like to have things permanently stored as well.
-
-Clipman does a good job of saving clipboard history.
-
-You need to have wl-clipboard installed since Clipman reads and writes to and from that. I also use wofi instead of the default dmenu for viewing and searching clipboard history. Here's how I set up clipman in my Sway config file:
-
-~~~bash
-exec wl-paste -t text --watch clipman store --max-items=60 --histpath="~/.local/share/clipman.json"
-bindsym $mod+h exec clipman pick --tool="wofi" --max-items=30 --histpath="~/.local/share/clipman.json"
-~~~
-
-Clipman does not, however, have a way to permanently store bits of text. That's fine. Permanently stored bits of frequently used text are really not all that closely related to clipboard items and lumping them together in a single tool isn't a very Unix-y approach. Do one thing, do it well.
-
-For snippets I ended up bending [pet](https://github.com/knqyf263/pet), the "command line snippet manager" a little and combining it with the small launcher-style window idea above. So I store snippets in pet, mostly just `printf "my string of text"`, call up an Alacritty window, search, and hit return to inject the pet snippet into the clipboard. Then I paste it were I need it. 
-
-##### Volume Controls
-
-Sway handles volume controls with pactl. Drop this in your Sway config file and you should be good:
-
-~~~bash
-bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ +5%
-bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -5%
-bindsym XF86AudioMute exec pactl set-sink-mute @DEFAULT_SINK@ toggle
-bindsym XF86AudioMicMute exec pactl set-source-mute @DEFAULT_SOURCE@ toggle
-~~~
-
-##### Brightness 
-
-I like [light](https://github.com/haikarainen/light) for brightness. Once it's installed these lines from my Sway config file assign it to my brightness keys:
-
-~~~bash
-bindsym --locked XF86MonBrightnessUp exec --no-startup-id light -A 10
-bindsym --locked XF86MonBrightnessDown exec --no-startup-id light -U 10
-~~~
-
-### Quirks, Annoyances And Things I Haven't Fixed
-
-There have been surprisingly few of these, save the Vim and Ranger issues mentioned above.
-
-<span class="stike">I haven't found a working replacement for xcape. The only thing I used xcape for was to make my Cap Lock key dual-function: press generates Esc, hold generates Control. So far I have not found a way to do this in Wayland. There is ostensibly [caps2esc](https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/caps2esc), but it's poorly documented and all I've been able to reliably do with it is crash Wayland.</span>
-
-*Update April 2021*: I managed to get caps2esc working. First you need to install it, for Arch that's something like:
-
-~~~bash
-yay -S interception-caps2esc
-~~~
-
-Once it's installed you need to create the config file. I keep mine at `/etc/interception/udevmon.d/caps2esc.yaml`. Open that up and paste in these lines:
-
-~~~yaml
-- JOB: "intercept -g $DEVNODE | caps2esc | uinput -d $DEVNODE"
-  DEVICE:
-    EVENTS:
-      EV_KEY: [KEY_CAPSLOCK, KEY_ESC]
-~~~
-
-Then you need to start and enable the `udevmon` service unit, which is what runs the caps2esc code:
-
-~~~bash
-sudo systemctl start udevmon
-sudo systemctl enable udevmon
-~~~
-
-The last thing to do is restart. Once you've rebooted you should be able to hold down caps_lock and have it behave like control, but a quick press with give you escape instead. This is incredibly useful if you're a Vim user.
-
-The only other problems I've run into is the limited range of screen recording options -- there's wf-recorder and that's about it. It works well enough though for what I do. 
-
-I've been using Sway exclusively for a year and half now and I have no reason or desire to ever go back to anything else. The rest of my family isn't fond of the tiling aspect of Sway so I do still run a couple of laptops with Openbox. I'd love to see a Wayland Openbox clone that's useable. I've played with [labwc](https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc), which is promising, but lacks a tint2-style launcher, which is really what I need (i.e., a system tray with launcher buttons, which Waybar does not have). Anyway, I am keeping an eye on labwc because it looks like a good project.
-
-That's how I did it. But I am just one person. If you run into snags, feel free to drop a comment below and I'll see if I can help.
-
-### Helpful pages:
-
-- **[Sway Wiki](https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki)**: A good overview of Sway, config examples (how to replicate things from i3), and application replacement tips for i3 users (like this fork of [redshift](https://github.com/minus7/redshift/tree/wayland) with support for Wayland).
-- **[Arch Wiki Sway Page](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sway)**: Another good Sway resource with solutions to a lot of common stuff: set wallpaper, take screenshots, HiDPI, etc.
-- **[Sway Reddit](https://old.reddit.com/r/swaywm/)**: There's some useful info here, worth searching if you run into issues. Also quite a few good tips and tricks from fellow Sway users with more experience. 
-- **[Drew Devault's Blog](https://drewdevault.com/)**: He doesn't always write about Sway, but he does give updates on what he's working on, which sometimes has details on Sway updates.
-
-
-[^1]: That's not to imply there's anything wrong with the i3 developers.
-
-[^2]: Vivaldi would be another good example of me trusting a developer. I've been interviewing Jon von Tetzchner for many years, all the way back to when he was at Opera. I don't always see eye to eye with him (I wish Vivaldi were open source) but I trust him, so I use Vivaldi. It's the only software I use that's not open source (not including work, which requires quite a few closed source crap apps).
diff --git a/src/src-ranger.txt b/src/src-ranger.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index f66a707..0000000
--- a/src/src-ranger.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,63 +0,0 @@
-[Ranger](http://nongnu.org/ranger/) is a terminal-based file browser with Vim-style keybindings. It uses ncurses and can hook into all sorts of other command line apps to create an incredibly powerful file manager.
-
-If you prefer a graphical experience, more power to you. I'm lazy. Since I'm already using the terminal for 90 percent of what I do, it make sense to not leave it just because I want to browse files. 
-
-The keyword here for me is "browse." I do lots of things to files without using Ranger. Moving, copying, creating, things like that I tend to do directly with `cp`, `mv`, `touch`, `mkdir` and so on. But sometimes you want *browse* files, and in those cases Ranger is the best option I've used.
-
-That said, Ranger is something of a labyrinth of commands and keeping track of them all can be overwhelming. If I had a dollar for every time I've searched "show hidden files in Ranger" I could buy you a couple beers (the answer, fellow searchers, is `zh`). 
-
-I'm going to assume you're familiar with the basics of movement in Ranger like `h`, `j`, `k`, `l`, `gg`, and `G`. Likewise that you're comfortable with `yy`, `dd`, `pp`, and other copy, cut, and paste commands. If you're not, if you're brand new to ranger, check out [the official documentation](https://github.com/ranger/ranger/wiki/Official-user-guide) which has a pretty good overview of how to do all the basic stuff you'll want to do with a file browser. 
-
-Here's a few less obvious shortcuts I use all the time. Despite some overlap with Vim, I do not find these particularly intuitive, and had a difficult time remembering them at first:
-
-- `zh`: toggle hidden files
-- `gh`: go home (`cd ~/`)
-- `oc`: order by create date (newest at top)
-- `7j`: jump down seven lines (any number followed by j or k will jump that many lines)
-- `7G`: jump to line 7 (any number followed by `G` will jump to that line
-- `.d`: show only directories
-- `.f`: show only files
-- `.c`: clear any filters (such as either of the previous two commands)
-
-Those are handy, but if you really want to speed up Ranger and bend it to the way you work, the config file is your friend. What follows are a few things I've done to tweak Ranger's config file to make my life easier.
-
-###Ranger Power User Recommendations
-
-Enabling line numbers was a revelation for me. Open `~/.config/ranger/rc.conf` and search for `set line_numbers` and change the value to either `absolute` or `relative`. The first numbers from the top no matter what, the `relative` option sets numbers relative to the cursor. I can't stand relative, but absolute works great for me, YMMV.
-
-Another big leap forward in my Ranger productivity came when I discovered local folder sorting options. As noted above, typing `oc` changes the sort order within a folder to sort by date created[^1]. While typing `oc` is pretty easy, there are some folders that I *always* want sorted by date modified. That's easily done with Ranger's `setlocal` config option. 
-
-Here's a couple lines from my `rc.conf` file as an example:
-
-~~~bash
-setlocal path=~/notes sort mtime
-setlocal path=~/notes/reading sort mtime
-~~~
-
-This means that every time I open `~/notes` or `~/notes/reading` the files I've worked with most recently are at the top (and note that you can also use `sort_reverse` instead of `sort`). That puts the most recently edited files right at the top where I can find them.
-
-Having my most recent notes at the top of the pane is great, but what makes it even more useful is having line wrapped file previews so I don't even need to open the file to read it. To get that I currently use the latest Git version of Ranger which I installed via [Arch Linux's AUR](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ranger-git/).
-
-This feature, which is invaluable to me since one of my common use cases for Ranger is quickly scanning a bunch of text files, has been [merged to master](https://github.com/ranger/ranger/pull/1322), but not released yet. If you don't [use Arch Linux](/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux) you can always build from source, or you can wait for the next release which should include an option to line wrap your previews.
-
-###Bookmarks
-
-Part of what makes Ranger incredibly fast are bookmarks. With two keystrokes I can jump between folders, move/copy files, and so on. 
-
-To set a bookmark, navigate to the directory, then hit `m` and whatever letter you want to serve as the bookmark. Once you've bookmarked it, type ``<letter>` to jump straight to that directory. I try to use Vim-like mnemonics for my bookmarks, e.g. ``d` takes me to documents, ``n` takes me to `~/notes`, ``l` takes me to the dev folder for this site, and so on. As with the other commands, typing just ``` will bring up a list of your bookmarks.  
-
-###Conclusion
-
-Ranger is incredibly powerful and almost infinitely customizable. In fact I don't think I really appreciated how customizable it was until I wrote this and dug a little deeper into all the ways you can map shell scripts to one or two character shortcuts. It can end up being a lot to keep track of though. I suggest learning maybe one or two new shortcuts a week. When you know longer have to think abut them, move on to the next couple.
-
-Or you can do what I do, wait until you have something you want to do, but don't know how, figure out how to do it, then write it down so you remember it.
-
-####Shoulders Stood Upon
-
-* [Dquinton's Ranger setup details](http://dquinton.github.io/debian-install/config/ranger.html) - I have no idea who this person is, but their Ranger setup and detailed notes was hugely helpful. 
-* [Ranger documentation](https://ranger.github.io/ranger.1.html) - The docs have a pretty good overview of the options available, though sometimes it's challenging to translate that into real world use cases.
-* [Arch Wiki Ranger page](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ranger) - Where would we be without the Arch Wiki?
-
-
-
-[^1]: In fact, just type `o` and you'll get a list of other sorting options (and if you know what `normal` means, drop me a comment below, I'm still trying to figure out what that means).
diff --git a/src/src-solving-common-nextcloud-problems.txt b/src/src-solving-common-nextcloud-problems.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index b32a629..0000000
--- a/src/src-solving-common-nextcloud-problems.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,92 +0,0 @@
-I love [NextCloud](https://nextcloud.com). Nextcloud allows me to have all the convenience of Dropbox, but hosted by me, controlled by me, and customized to suit my needs. I mainly use the file syncing, calendar, and contacts features, but Nextcloud can do a crazy amount of things.
-
-The problem with NextCloud, and maybe you could argue that this is the price you pay for the freedom and control, is that I find it requires a bit of maintenance to keep it running smoothly. Nextcloud does some decidedly odd things from time to time, and knowing how to deal with them can save you some disk space and maybe avoid syncing headaches.
-
-I should note, that while I call these problems, I **have never lost data** using Nextcloud. These are really more annoyances and some ways to prevent them than *problems*.
-
-### How to Get Rid of Huge Thumbnails in Nextcloud
-
-If Nextcloud is taking up more disk space than you think it should, or your Nextcloud storage space is just running low, the first thing to check is the image thumbnails directory. 
-
-At one point I poked around in the Nextcloud `data` directory and found 11-gigabytes worth of image previews for only 6-gigabytes worth of actual images stored. That is crazy. That should never happen. 
-
-Nextcloud's image thumbnail defaults err on the side of "make it look good in the browser" where as I prefer to err on the side of keep it really small. 
-
-I did some research and came up with a few solutions. First, it looks like my runaway 11-gigabyte problem might have been due to a bug in older versions of Nextcloud. Ideally I will not hit that issue again. But, I don't admin servers with hope and optimism, so I figured out how to tell Nextcloud to generate smaller image previews. I almost never look at the images within the web UI, so I really don't care about the previews at all. I made them much, much smaller than the defaults. Here's the values I use:
-
-~~~bash
-occ config:app:set previewgenerator squareSizes --value="32 256"
-occ config:app:set previewgenerator widthSizes  --value="256 384"
-occ config:app:set previewgenerator heightSizes --value="256"
-occ config:system:set preview_max_x --value 500
-occ config:system:set preview_max_y --value 500
-occ config:system:set jpeg_quality --value 60
-occ config:app:set preview jpeg_quality --value="60"
-~~~
-
-Just ssh into your Nextcloud server and run all these commands. If you followed the basic Nextcloud install instructions you'll want to run these as your web server user. For me, with NextCloud running on Debian 10, the full command looks like this:
-
-~~~bash
-sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ config:app:set previewgenerator squareSizes --value="32 256"
-sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ config:app:set previewgenerator widthSizes  --value="256 384"
-# and so on, running all the commands listed above
-~~~
-
-This assumes you installed Nextcloud into the directory `/var/www/nextcloud`, if you installed it somewhere else, adjust the path to the Nextcloud command line tool `occ`.
-
-That will stop Nextcloud from generating huge preview files. So far so good. I deleted the existing previews and reclaimed 11-gigabytes. Sweet. You can pre-generate previews, which will make the web UI faster if you browse images in it. I do not, so I didn't generate any previews ahead of time.
-
-### How to Solve `File is Locked` Issues in Nextcloud
-
-No matter what I do, I always end up with locked file syncing issues. Researching this led me to try using Redis to cache things, but that didn't help. I don't know why this happens. I blame PHP. When in doubt, blame PHP. 
-
-Thankfully it doesn't happen very often, but every six months or so I'll see an error, then two, then they start piling up. Here's how to fix it.
-
-First, put Nextcloud in maintenance mode (again, assuming Debian 10, with Nextcloud in the `/var/www/nextcloud` directory):
-
-~~~bash
-sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --on
-~~~
-
-Now we're going directly into the database. For me that's Postgresql. If you use Mysql or Mariadb, you may need to adjust the syntax a little. 
-
-~~~bash
-psql -U yournextclouddbuser -hlocalhost -d yournextclouddbname
-password:
-nextclouddbname=> DELETE FROM oc_file_locks WHERE True;
-~~~
-
-That should get rid of all the locked file problems. For a while anyway.
-
-Don't forget to turn maintenance mode off:
-
-~~~bash
-sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --off
-~~~
-
-### Force a File Re-Scan
-
-If you frequently add and remove folders from Nextcloud, you may sometimes run into issues. I usually add a folder at the start of a new project, and then delete it when the project is finished. Mostly this just works, even with shared folders, on the rare occasion that I used them, but sometimes Nextcloud won't delete a folder. I have no idea why. It just throws an unhelpful error in the web admin and refuses to delete the folder from the server.
-
-I end up manually deleting it on the server using: `rm -rf path/to/storage/folder`. Nextcloud however, doesn't always seem to notice that the folder is gone, and still shows it in the web and sync client interfaces. The solution is to force Nextcloud to rescan all its files with this command:
-
-~~~bash
-sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --on
-sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ files:scan --path="yournextcloudusername/files/NameOfYourExternalStorage"
-sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --off
-~~~
-
-Beware that on large data directories this can take some time. It takes about 30 seconds to scan my roughly 30GB of files.
-
-### Mostly Though, Nextcloud is Awesome
-
-Those are three annoyances I've hit with Nextcloud over the years and the little tricks I've used to solve them. Lest anyone think I am complaining, I am not. Not really anyway. The image thumbnail thing is pretty egregious for a piece of software that aims to be enterprise grade, but mostly Nextcloud is pretty awesome.
-
-I rely on Nextcloud for files syncing, Calendar and Contact hosting, and keeping my notes synced across devices. Aside from these three things, I have never had a problem.
-
-####Shoulder's Stood Upon
-
-* [Nextcloud's documentation](https://docs.nextcloud.com) isn't the best, but can help get you pointed in the right direction.
-* I tried a few different solutions to the thumbnail problem, especially helpful was this post on [Understanding and Improving Nextcloud Previews](https://ownyourbits.com/2019/06/29/understanding-and-improving-nextcloud-previews/), but nachoparker.
-* The [file lock solution](https://help.nextcloud.com/t/file-is-locked-how-to-unlock/1883) comes from the Nextcloud forums.
-* The solution to scanning external storages comes from the [Nextcloud forums](https://help.nextcloud.com/t/automate-occ-filescan/35282/4).
diff --git a/src/src-why-i-built-my-own-mailing-list-software.txt b/src/src-why-i-built-my-own-mailing-list-software.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index b9877cf..0000000
--- a/src/src-why-i-built-my-own-mailing-list-software.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,52 +0,0 @@
-This is not a tutorial. If you don't already know how to write the code you need to run a mailing list, you probably shouldn't try to do it yourself. Still, I wanted to outline the reasons I built my own mailing list software in 2020, when there are dozens of commercial and open source projects that I could have used.
-
-At the core of my otherwise questionable decision is the notion that we ought to completely understand the core infrastructures in our lives. Why? Because it adds value and meaning to your life in the form of understanding. And that understand doesn't stop with the thing you understand either, it becomes part of you, you will find other places this understanding helps you. 
-
-It's also just not that hard to do things yourself. It makes maintaining the system easier, and it often saves time (or money) in the long term. 
-
-The only way to really understand a thing is to either build it yourself from scratch or completely disassemble it and put it back together. 
-
-This is true for software as well as the rest of the world. I ripped all the electrical, propane, plumbing, and engine systems out of my home ([a 1969 RV](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome)) because I needed to know how every single piece works, and how they all work together. 
-
-I understand those systems now because I built them myself (with expert help when needed), and that makes maintaining them much easier. Otherwise I would always be dependant on someone else to keep my home running and that's no way to live.
-
-The same is true with software. If the software you're considering is a core part of your personal or business infrastructure, you need to understand every single part of it and how all those parts fit together. 
-
-The question is, should you deconstruct an existing project or write your own from scratch? The answer depends on the situation, the right choice won't always be the same in every case. I do a mix a both and I'm sure most other people do too. There's no one right answer, which means you have to think things through in detail ahead of time. 
-
-When I decided I wanted to [start a mailing list](/jrnl/2020/11/invitation), I looked around at the software that was available and very quickly realized that I had different goals than most mailing list software. That's when you should write your own.
-
-The available commercial software did not respect users privacy and did not allow me any control. There are some services that do provide a modicum of privacy for your subscribers, but you're going to be working against the software to enable it. 
-
-*If you know of a dead simple commercial mailing list software that's built with user privacy in mind, please post a link in the comments, I'd love to have somewhere to point people. *
-
-I also wanted to be in complete control of the data. I host my own publishing systems. I consider myself a writer first, but publisher is a close second. What sort of publisher doesn't control their own publishing system?[^1] What makes email such a wonderful distributed publishing system is that no one owns the protocols that dictate how it works. That's great. I don't want to control the delivery mechanism, just the product at either end. 
-
-Email is more or less the inverse of the web. You send a single copy to many readers, rather than many readers coming to a single copy as with a web page. The point is, there's no reason I can't create and host the original email here and send out the copies myself. The hard part -- creating the protocols and low-level tools that power email -- was taken care of decades ago.
-
-With that goal in mind I started looking at open source solutions. I use [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com) to publish what you're reading here, so I looked at some Django-based mailing list software. The two I considered most seriously were [Django Newsletter](https://django-newsletter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) and [Emencia Django Newsletter](https://github.com/emencia/emencia-django-newsletter). I found a few other smaller projects as well, but those seem to be the big two in what's left of the Django universe. 
-
-Those two, and some others influenced what I ended up writing in various ways, but none of them were quite what I wanted out of the box. Most of them still used some kind of tracking, whether a pixel embedded in the email or wrapping links with individual identifiers. I didn't want either of those things and stripping them out, while staying up-to-date with upstream changes would have been cumbersome. So, DIY then.
-
-But running a mail server is... difficult, risky, and probably going to keep you up at night. I tried it, briefly.
-
-One of the big problems with email is that, despite email being an open protocol, Google and other big corps are able to gain some control by using spam as a reason to tightly control who gets to send email[^2] That means if I just spin up a VPS at Vultr and try to send some emails with Postfix they're probably all going to end up in, best case, you Spam folder, but more likely they'd never be delivered. 
-
-So while I wrote the publishing tools myself, host the newletter archive myself, designed everything about it myself, I handed off the sending to [Amazon's SES](https://aws.amazon.com/ses/), which has been around long enough, and is used by enough big names that mail sent through it isn't automatically deleted. It may possibly still end up in some Spam folders, but for the most part in my early testing (thank you to all my friends who helped out with that) that hasn't been an issue.
-
-In the end what I have is a fairly robust, loosely-joined system where I have control over the key elements and it's easy to swap out the sending mechanism down the road should I have problems, or just find something better (preferably something not owned by Amazon).
-
-###Was it Worth It?
-
-So far absolutely not. But I knew that when I started.
-
-I could have signed up for Mailchimp, picked some pre-made template, and spent the last year sending out newsletters to subscribers, and who knows, maybe I'd have tons of those by now. But that's okay, that was never the goal. 
-
-I am and always have been playing a very long game when it comes to publishing. I am building a thing that I want to last the rest of my life and beyond if I can manage it. 
-
-I am patient. I am not looking for a ton of readers, I am looking for the right readers. The sort of people who are in short supply these days, the sort of people who end up on a piece like this and actually read the whole thing. The people for whom signing up for Mailchimp would be too easy, too boring.
-
-I am looking for those who want some adventure in everything they do, the DIYer, the curious, the explorers, the misfits. There's more of us than most of us realize. If you're interested feel free to [join our club](/newsletter/friends).
-
-[^1]: Sadly, these days almost no publisher retains any control over their systems. They're all beholden to Google AMP, Facebook News, and whatever the flavor of year happens to be. A few of them are slowly coming around to the idea that it might be better to build their own audiences, which somehow passed for revolutionary in publishing today. But I digress.
-[^2]: Not to go too conspiracy theory here, but I suspect that Google and its ilk generate a fair bit of the spam themselves, and do nothing to prevent the rest precisely because it allows for this control. Which is not to say spam isn't a problem, just that it's a very *convenient* problem.
diff --git a/src/switching-to-lxc-lxd-for-django-dev-work-cuts.txt b/src/switching-to-lxc-lxd-for-django-dev-work-cuts.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index d146c3f..0000000
--- a/src/switching-to-lxc-lxd-for-django-dev-work-cuts.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,201 +0,0 @@
-***Updated July 2022**: I've run into to some issues with cgroups and lxc on Arch and added some notes below under the [special note to Arch users](#arch)*
-
-I've used Vagrant to manage my local development environment for quite some time. The developers I used to work with used it and, while I have no particular love for it, it works well enough. Eventually I got comfortable enough with Vagrant that I started using it in my own projects. I even wrote about [setting up a custom Debian 9 Vagrant box](/src/create-custom-debian-9-vagrant-box) to mirror the server running this site. 
-
-The problem with Vagrant is that I have to run a huge memory-hungry virtual machine when all I really want to do is run Django's built-in dev server. 
-
-My laptop only has 8GB of RAM. My browser is usually taking around 2GB, which means if I start two Vagrant machines, I'm pretty much maxed out. Django's dev server is also painfully slow to reload when anything changes.
-
-Recently I was talking with one of Canonical's [MAAS](https://maas.io/) developers and the topic of containers came up. When I mentioned I really didn't like Docker, but hadn't tried anything else, he told me I really needed to try LXD. Later that day I began reading through the [LinuxContainers](https://linuxcontainers.org/) site and tinkering with LXD. Now, a few days later, there's not a Vagrant machine left on my laptop.
-
-Since it's just me, I don't care that LXC only runs on Linux. LXC/LXD is blazing fast, lightweight, and dead simple. To quote, Canonical's [Michael Iatrou](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/01/26/lxd-5-easy-pieces), LXC "liberates your laptop from the tyranny of heavyweight virtualization and simplifies experimentation."
-
-Here's how I'm using LXD to manage containers for Django development on Arch Linux. I've also included instructions and commands for Ubuntu since I set it up there as well.
-
-### What's the difference between LXC, LXD and `lxc`
-
-I wrote this guide in part because I've been hearing about LXC for ages, but it seemed unapproachable, overwhelming, too enterprisey you might say. It's really not though, in fact I found it easier to understand than Vagrant or Docker.
-
-So what is a LXC container, what's LXD, and how are either different than say a VM or for that matter Docker?
-
-* LXC - low-level tools and a library to create and manage containers, powerful, but complicated.
-* LXD - is a daemon which provides a REST API to drive LXC containers, much more user-friendly
-* `lxc` - the command line client for LXD.
-
-In LXC parlance a container is essentially a virtual machine, if you want to get pedantic, see Stéphane Graber's post on the [various components that make up LXD](https://stgraber.org/2016/03/11/lxd-2-0-introduction-to-lxd-112/). For the most part though, interacting with an LXC container is like interacting with a VM. You say ssh, LXD says socket, potato, potahto. Mostly.
-
-An LXC container is not a container in the same sense that Docker talks about containers. Think of it more as a VM that only uses the resources it needs to do whatever it's doing. Running this site in an LXC container uses very little RAM. Running it in Vagrant uses 2GB of RAM because that's what I allocated to the VM -- that's what it uses even if it doesn't need it. LXC is much smarter than that. 
-
-Now what about LXD? LXC is the low level tool, you don't really need to go there. Instead you interact with your LXC container via the LXD API. It uses YAML config files and a command line tool `lxc`.
-
-That's the basic stack, let's install it.
-
-### Install LXD
-
-On Arch I used the version of [LXD in the AUR](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/lxd/). Ubuntu users should go with the Snap package. The other thing you'll want is your distro's Btrfs or ZFS tools. 
-
-Part of LXC's magic relies on either Btrfs and ZFS to read a virtual disk not as a file the way Virtualbox and others do, but as a block device. Both file systems also offer copy-on-write cloning and snapshot features, which makes it simple and fast to spin up new containers. It takes about 6 seconds to install and boot a complete and fully functional LXC container on my laptop, and most of that time is downloading the image file from the remote server. It takes about 3 seconds to clone that fully provisioned base container into a new container. 
-
-In the end I set up my Arch machine using Btrfs or Ubuntu using ZFS to see if I could see any difference (so far, that would be no, the only difference I've run across in my research is that Btrfs can run LXC containers inside LXC containers. LXC Turtles all the way down).
-
-Assuming you have Snap packages set up already, Debian and Ubuntu users can get everything they need to install and run LXD with these commands:
-
-~~~~console
-apt install zfsutils-linux
-~~~~
-
-And then install the snap version of lxd with:
-
-~~~~console
-snap install lxd
-~~~~
-
-Once that's done we need to initialize LXD. I went with the defaults for everything. I've printed out the entire init command output so you can see what will happen:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo lxd init
-Create a new BTRFS pool? (yes/no) [default=yes]: 
-would you like to use LXD clustering? (yes/no) [default=no]: 
-Do you want to configure a new storage pool? (yes/no) [default=yes]: 
-Name of the new storage pool [default=default]: 
-Name of the storage backend to use (btrfs, dir, lvm) [default=btrfs]: 
-Create a new BTRFS pool? (yes/no) [default=yes]: 
-Would you like to use an existing block device? (yes/no) [default=no]: 
-Size in GB of the new loop device (1GB minimum) [default=15GB]: 
-Would you like to connect to a MAAS server? (yes/no) [default=no]: 
-Would you like to create a new local network bridge? (yes/no) [default=yes]:
-What should the new bridge be called? [default=lxdbr0]: 
-What IPv4 address should be used? (CIDR subnet notation, “auto” or “none”) [default=auto]: 
-What IPv6 address should be used? (CIDR subnet notation, “auto” or “none”) [default=auto]: 
-Would you like LXD to be available over the network? (yes/no) [default=no]:    
-Would you like stale cached images to be updated automatically? (yes/no) [default=yes] 
-Would you like a YAML "lxd init" preseed to be printed? (yes/no) [default=no]: yes
-~~~~
-
-LXD will then spit out the contents of the profile you just created. It's a YAML file and you can edit it as you see fit after the fact. You can also create more than one profile if you like. To see all installed profiles use:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc profile list
-~~~~
-
-To view the contents of a profile use:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc profile show <profilename>
-~~~~
-
-To edit a profile use:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc profile edit <profilename>
-~~~~
-
-So far I haven't needed to edit a profile by hand. I've also been happy with all the defaults although, when I do this again, I will probably enlarge the storage pool, and maybe partition off some dedicated disk space for it. But for now I'm just trying to figure things out so defaults it is. 
-
-The last step in our setup is to add our user to the lxd group. By default LXD runs as the lxd group, so to interact with containers we'll need to make our user part of that group.
-
-~~~~console
-sudo usermod -a -G lxd yourusername
-~~~~
-
-#####Special note for Arch users. {:#arch } 
-
-To run unprivileged containers as your own user, you'll need to jump through a couple extra hoops. As usual, the [Arch User Wiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Linux_Containers#Enable_support_to_run_unprivileged_containers_(optional)) has you covered. Read through and follow those instructions and then reboot and everything below should work as you'd expect.
-
-### Create Your First LXC Container
-
-Let's create our first container. This website runs on a Debian VM currently hosted on Vultr.com so I'm going to spin up a Debian container to mirror this environment for local development and testing.
-
-To create a new LXC container we use the `launch` command of the `lxc` tool. 
-
-There are four ways you can get LXC containers, local (meaning a container base you've downloaded), images (which come from [https://images.linuxcontainers.org/](https://images.linuxcontainers.org/), ubuntu (release versions of Ubuntu), and ubuntu-daily (daily images). The images on linuxcontainers are unofficial, but the Debian image I used worked perfectly. There's also Alpine, Arch CentOS, Fedora, openSuse, Oracle, Palmo, Sabayon and lots of Ubuntu images. Pretty much every architecture you could imagine is in there too. 
-
-I created a Debian 9 Stretch container with the amd64 image. To create an LXC container from one of the remote images the basic syntax is `lxc launch images:distroname/version/architecture containername`. For example:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc launch images:debian/stretch/amd64 debian-base
-Creating debian-base
-Starting debian-base
-~~~~
-
-That will grab the amd64 image of Debian 9 Stretch and create a container out of it and then launch it. Now if we look at the list of installed containers we should see something like this:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc list
-+-------------+---------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------------+------------+-----------+                                                                                         
-|    NAME     |  STATE  |         IPV4          |                     IPV6                      |    TYPE    | SNAPSHOTS |                                                                                         
-+-------------+---------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------------+------------+-----------+                                                                                         
-| debian-base | RUNNING | 10.171.188.236 (eth0) | fd42:e406:d1eb:e790:216:3eff:fe9f:ad9b (eth0) | PERSISTENT |           |                                                                                         
-+-------------+---------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------------+------------+-----------+  
-~~~~
-
-Now what? This is what I love about LXC, we can interact with our container pretty much the same way we'd interact with a VM. Let's connect to the root shell:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc exec debian-base -- /bin/bash
-~~~~
-
-Look at your prompt and you'll notice it says `root@nameofcontainer`. Now you can install everything you need on your container. For me, setting up a Django dev environment, that means Postgres, Python, Virtualenv, and, for this site, all the Geodjango requirements (Postgis, GDAL, etc), along with a few other odds and ends. 
-
-You don't have to do it from inside the container though. Part of LXD's charm is to be able to run commands without logging into anything. Instead you can do this:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc exec debian-base -- apt update
-lxc exec debian-base -- apt install postgresql postgis virtualenv
-~~~~
-
-LXD will output the results of your command as if you were SSHed into a VM. Not being one for typing, I created a bash alias that looks like this: `alias luxdev='lxc exec debian-base -- '` so that all I need to type is `luxdev <command>`.  
-
-What I haven't figured out is how to chain commands, this does not work:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc exec debian-base -- su - lxf && cd site && source venv/bin/activate && ./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
-~~~~
-
-According to [a bug report](https://github.com/lxc/lxd/issues/2057), it should work in quotes, but it doesn't for me. Something must have changed since then, or I'm doing something wrong.
-
-The next thing I wanted to do was mount a directory on my host machine in the LXC instance. To do that you'll need to edit `/etc/subuid` and `/etc/subgid` to add your user id. Use the `id` command to get your user and group id (it's probably 1000 but if not, adjust the commands below). Once you have your user id, add it to the files with this one liner I got from the [Ubuntu blog](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2016/12/08/mounting-your-home-directory-in-lxd):
-
-~~~~console
-echo 'root:1000:1' | sudo tee -a /etc/subuid /etc/subgid
-~~~~
-
-Then you need to configure your LXC instance to use the same uid:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc config set debian-base raw.idmap 'both 1000 1000'
-~~~~
-
-The last step is to add a device to your config file so LXC will mount it. You'll need to stop and start the container for the changes to take effect.
-
-~~~~console
-lxc config device add debian-base sitedir disk source=/path/to/your/directory path=/path/to/where/you/want/folder/in/lxc
-lxc stop debian-base
-lxc start debian-base
-~~~~
-
-That replicates my setup in Vagrant, but we've really just scratched the surface of what you can do with LXD. For example you'll notice I named the initial container "debian-base". That's because this is the base image (fully set up for Djano dev) which I clone whenever I start a new project. To clone a container, first take a snapshot of your base container, then copy that snapshot to create a new container:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc snapshot debian-base debian-base-configured
-lxc copy debian-base/debian-base-configured mycontainer
-~~~~
-
-Now you've got a new container named mycontainer. If you'd like to tweak anything, for example mount a different folder specific to this new project you're starting, you can edit the config file like this:
-
-~~~~console
-lxc config edit mycontainer
-~~~~
-
-I highly suggest reading through Stéphane Graber's 12 part series on LXD to get a better idea of other things you can do, how to manage resources, manage local images, migrate containers, or connect LXD with Juju, Openstack or yes, even Docker.
-
-#####Shoulders stood upon
-
-* [Stéphane Graber's 12 part series on lxd 2.0](https://stgraber.org/2016/03/11/lxd-2-0-blog-post-series-012/) - Graber wrote LXC and LXD, this is the best resource I found and highly recommend reading it all.
-* [Mounting your home directory in LXD](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2016/12/08/mounting-your-home-directory-in-lxd)
-* [Official how to](https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/getting-started-cli/)
-* [Linux Containers Discourse site](https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/deploying-django-applications/996)
-* [LXD networking: lxdbr0 explained](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2016/04/07/lxd-networking-lxdbr0-explained)
-
-
-[^1]: To be fair, I didn't need to get rid of Vagrant. You can use Vagrant to manage LXC containers, but I don't know why you'd bother. LXD's management tools and config system works great, why add yet another tool to the mix? Unless you're working with developers who use Windows, in which case LXC, which is short for, *Linux Container*, is not for you.
diff --git a/src/vagrant-custom-box.txt b/src/vagrant-custom-box.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index d73019d..0000000
--- a/src/vagrant-custom-box.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,171 +0,0 @@
-I'm a little old fashioned with my love of Vagrant. I should probably keep up with the kids, dig into to Docker and containers, but I like managing servers. I like to have the whole VM at my disposal. 
-
-Why Vagrant? Well, I run Arch Linux on my laptop, but I usually deploy sites to either Debian, preferably v9, "Stretch", or (if a client is using AWS) Ubuntu, which means I need a virtual machine to develop and test in. Vagrant is the easiest way I've found to manage that workflow.
-
-When I'm deploying to Ubuntu-based machines I develop using the [Canonical-provided Vagrant box](https://app.vagrantup.com/ubuntu/boxes/bionic64) available through Vagrant's [cloud site](https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search). There is, however, no official Debian box provided by Debian. Worse, the most popular Debian 9 box on the Vagrant site has only 512MB of RAM. I prefer to have 1 or 2GB of RAM to mirror the cheap, but surprisingly powerful, [Vultr VPS instances](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=6825229) I generally use (You can use them too, in my experience they're faster and slightly cheaper than Digital Ocean. Here's a referral link that will get you [$50 in credit](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7857293-4F)). 
-
-That means I get to build my own Debian Vagrant box. 
-
-Building a Vagrant base box from Debian 9 "Stretch" isn't hard, but most tutorials I found were outdated or relied on third-party tools like Packer. Why you'd want to install, setup and configure a tool like Packer to build one base box is a mystery to me. It's far faster to do it yourself by hand (which is not to slag Packer, it *is* useful when you're building an image from AWS or Digital Ocean or other provider).
-
-Here's my guide to building a Debian 9 "Stretch" Vagrant Box.
-
-### Create a Debian 9 Virtual Machine in Virtualbox
-
-We're going to use Virtualbox as our Vagrant provider because, while I prefer qemu for its speed, I run into more compatibility issues with qemu. Virtualbox seems to work everywhere. 
-
-First install Virtualbox, either by [downloading an image](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) or, preferably, using your package manager/app store. We'll also need the latest version of Debian 9's netinst CD image, which you can [grab from the Debian project](https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/) (scroll to the bottom of that page for the actual downloads).
-
-Once you've got a Debian CD, fire up Virtualbox and create a new virtual machine. In the screenshot below I've selected Expert Mode so I can go ahead and up the RAM (in the screenshot version I went with 1GB).
-
-<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-virtualmachine.jpg" id="image-1859" class="picfull" />
-
-Click "Create" and Virtualbox will ask you about the hard drive, I stick with the default type, but bump the size to 40GB, which matches the VPS instances I use.
-
-<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-virtualdisk.jpg" id="image-1860" class="picfull" />
-
-Click "Create" and then go to the main Virtualbox screen, select your new machine and click "Settings". Head to the audio tab and uncheck the Enable Audio option. Next go to the USB tab and disable USB.
-
-<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-no-audio.jpg" id="image-1855" class="picfull" />
-<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-no-usb.jpg" id="image-1856" class="picfull" />
-
-Now click the network tab and make sure Network Adapter 1 is set to NAT. Click the "Advanced" arrow and then click the button that says Port Forwarding. Add a port forwarding rule. I call mine SSH, but the name isn't important. The important part is that the protocol is TCP, the Host and Guest IP address fields are blank, the Host port is 2222, the Guest port is 22. 
-
-<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-port-forward_EqGwcg4.jpg" id="image-1858" class="picfull" />
-
-Hit okay to save your changes on both of those screens and now we're ready to boot Debian. 
-
-### Install Debian
-
-To get Debian installed first click the start button for your new VM and Virtualbox will boot it up and ask you for the install CD. Navigate to wherever you saved the Debian netinst CD we downloaded earlier and select that. 
-
-That should boot you to the Debian install screen. The most important thing here is to make sure you choose the second option, "Install", rather than "Graphical Install". Since we disabled USB, we won't have access to the mouse and the Debian graphical installer won't work. Stick with plain "Install".
-
-<img src="images/2019/debian9-vagrant-base-box-vm-install.jpg" id="image-1861" class="picfull" />
-
-From here it's just a standard Debian install. Select the appropriate language, keyboard layout, hostname (doesn't matter), and network name (also doesn't matter). Set the root password to something you'll remember. Debian will then ask you to create a user. Create a user named "vagrant" (I used "vagrant" for the fullname and username) and set the password to "vagrant".
-
-Tip: to select (or unselect) a check box in the Debian installer, hit the space bar.
-
-Then Debian will get the network time, ask what timezone you're in and start setting up the disk. I go with the defaults all the way through. Next Debian will install the base system, which takes a minute or two.
-
-Since we're using the netinst CD, Debian will ask if we want to insert any other CDs (no), and then it will ask you to choose which mirrors to download packages from. I went with the defaults. Debian will then install Linux, udev and some other basic components. At some point it will ask if you want to participate in the Debian package survey. I always go with no because I feel like a virtual machine might skew the results in unhelpful ways, but I don't know, maybe I'm wrong on that.
-
-After that you can install your software. For now I uncheck everything except standard system utils (remember, you can select and unselect items by hitting the space bar). Debian will then go off and install everything, ask if you want to install Grub (you do -- select your virtual disk as the location for grub), and congratulations, you're done installing Debian. 
-
-Now let's build a Debian 9 base box for Vagrant.
-
-### Set up Debian 9 Vagrant base box
-
-Since we've gone to the trouble of building our own Debian 9 base box, we may as well customize it. 
-
-The first thing to do after you boot into the new system is to install sudo and set up our vagrant user as a passwordless superuser. Login to your new virtual machine as the root user and install sudo. You may as well add ssh while you're at it:
-
-~~~~console
-apt install sudo ssh
-~~~~
-
-Now we need to add our vagrant user to the sudoers list. To do that we need to create and edit the file:
-
-~~~~console
-visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant
-~~~~
-
-That will open a new file where you can add this line:
-
-~~~~console
-vagrant ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
-~~~~
-
-Hit control-x, then "y" and return to save the file and exit nano. Now logout of the root account by typing `exit` and login as the vagrant user. Double check that you can run commands with `sudo` without a password by typing `sudo ls /etc/` or similar. If you didn't get asked for a password then everything is working.
-
-Now we can install the vagrant insecure SSH key. Vagrant sends commands from the host machine over SSH using what the Vagrant project calls an insecure key, which is so called because everyone has it. We could in theory, all hack each other's Vagrant boxes. If this concerns you, it's not that complicated to set up your own more secure key, but I suggest doing that in your Vagrant instance, not the base box. For the base box, use the insecure key.
-
-Make sure you're logged in as the vagrant user and then use these commands to set up the insecure SSH key:
-
-~~~~console
-mkdir ~/.ssh
-chmod 0700 ~/.ssh
-wget https://raw.github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/master/keys/vagrant.pub -O ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
-chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
-chown -R vagrant ~/.ssh
-~~~~
-
-Confirm that the key is in fact in the `authorized_keys` file by typing `cat ~/.ssh/authorized_keys`, which should print out the key for you. Now we need to set up SSH to allow our vagrant user to sign in:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
-~~~~
-
-Uncomment the line `AuthorizedKeysFile ~/.ssh/authorized_keys ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2` and hit `control-x`, `y` and `enter` to save the file. Now restart SSH with this command:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo systemctl restart ssh
-~~~~
-
-### Install Virtualbox Guest Additions 
-
-The Virtualbox Guest Addition allows for nice extras like shared folders, as well as a performance boost. Since the VB Guest Additions require a compiler, and Linux header files,  let's first get the prerequisites installed:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo apt install gcc build-essential linux-headers-amd64
-~~~~
-
-Now head to the VirtualBox window menu and click the "Devices" option and choose "Insert Guest Additions CD Image" (note that you should download the latest version if Virtualbox asks[^1]). That will insert an ISO of the Guest Additions into our virtual machine's CDROM drive. We just need to mount it and run the Guest Additions Installer:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
-cd /mnt
-sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
-~~~~
-
-Assuming that finishes without error, you're done. Congratulations. Now you can add any extras you want your Debian 9 Vagrant base box to include. I primarily build things in Python with Django and Postgresql, so I always install packages like `postgresql`, `python3-dev`, `python3-pip`, `virtualenv`, and some other software I can't live without. Also edit the .bashrc file to create some aliases and helper scripts. Whatever you want all your future Vagrant boxes to have, now is the time to install it.
-
-### Packaging your Debian 9 Vagrant Box
-
-Before we package the box, we're going to zero out the drive to save a little space when we compress it down the road. Here's the commands to zero it out:
-
-~~~~console
-sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zeroed bs=1M
-sudo rm -f /zeroed
-~~~~
-
-Once that's done we can package up our box with this command:
-
-~~~~console
-vagrant package --base debian9-64base
-==> debian9-64base: Attempting graceful shutdown of VM...
-==> debian9-64base: Clearing any previously set forwarded ports...
-==> debian9-64base: Exporting VM...
-==> debian9-64base: Compressing package to: /home/lxf/vms/package.box
-~~~~
-
-As you can see from the output, I keep my Vagrant boxes in a folder call `vms`, you can put yours wherever you like. Wherever you decide to keep it, move it there now and cd into that folder so you can add the box. Sticking the `vms` folder I use, the commands would look like this:
-
-~~~console
-cd vms
-vagrant box add debian9-64 package.box
-~~~
-
-Now when you want to create a new vagrant box from this base box, all you need to do is add this to your Vagrantfile:
-
-~~~~console
-Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
-  config.vm.box = "debian9-64"
-end
-~~~~
-
-Then you start up the box as you always would:
-
-~~~~console
-vagrant up
-vagrant ssh
-~~~~
-
-#####Shoulders stood upon
-
-* [Vagrant docs](https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/virtualbox/boxes.html)
-* [Engineyard's guide to Ubuntu](https://www.engineyard.com/blog/building-a-vagrant-box-from-start-to-finish)
-* [Customizing an existing box](https://scotch.io/tutorials/how-to-create-a-vagrant-base-box-from-an-existing-one) - Good for when you don't need more RAM/disk space, just some software pre-installed.
-
-[^1]: On Arch, using Virtualbox 6.x I have had problems downloading the Guest Additions. Instead I've been using the package `virtualbox-guest-iso`. Note that after you install that, you'll need to reboot to get Virtualbox to find it.
diff --git a/src/w3m-guide.txt b/src/w3m-guide.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 2b008ed..0000000
--- a/src/w3m-guide.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,17 +0,0 @@
-ah the irony of the number of websites that want to tell you how to use w3m, but don't themselves load in w3m because they are totally JS dependant.
-
-How do you open a link in a new tab? meh, you don't really need to, just hit "s" for the buffer selection window which has your whole browsing history.
-
-okay back is shift-b. s to list buffers. esc-e to edit, that seems to be the basics. 
-
-Meta U to get the equivelant of ctrl-l (select URL bar), then bash shortcuts work:
-
-ctrl -u to delete everything behind the cursor
-Ctrl-a Move cursor to beginning of line -- doesn't work
-Ctrl-e Move cursor to end of line
-Ctrl-b Move cursor back one letter
-Ctrl-f Move cursor forward one letter 
-
-Need to figure out how to save current buffers to file
-
-you can bookmark with esc-a to add esc b to view