I’m generally not against spending money. I am however generally against buying things. This is a point I’ve surely beaten well beyond death by now, so I won’t belabor it much further. It’s just to say that I want to be really sure something makes sense within the larger context of my life before I buy it and have to deal with it forever.

I only mention this because I’ve been on a bit of a purchasing spree (by my standards) as of late, which is at least part of the reason I’ve been so quiet on here for the past two months. The other part of the reason is that I’m just generally bad at blogging. Anyway, this post (and the next two), will talk about some of the purchases I’ve made, mostly over the past few weeks. This first one’s not all that contentious, but I promise they’ll get more questionable as we go. Okay, on to the post.

The future scares me.

Not in a “the icecaps are melting” sense, more of a “what am I doing with my life” sense.

I spend a lot of my words on this blog talking about the future. Saving for it. Planning for it. Picking travel destinations.

So imagine my surprise when I sat down one day to think about it, and I found that I had no idea what I actually wanted to do with my life.

This may not be my first post of 2018 (or even my second, for that matter), but hey, better late than never.

Happy 2018!

I’ve said before that I’m not a big fan of New Years’ resolutions. That’s still true. But I am a fan of taking the time to evaluate how my life is going, and course-correcting as necessary. I try to do it every few months, but the start of a year is as good a time as any to take a good hard look in the mirror, so let’s do it.

Obligatory warning: This post is about some of the inner technical workings of the site. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, you might find this unfathomably boring.

Sometimes, when I’ve exhausted all other interesting or productive things to do, I’ll blow the dust off the code that makes this site hum along, and tweak it in one way or another. I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty thankless task. Brandon in 2015 didn’t really know what he was doing when it came to building web services in Golang, so the core codebase has historically been…unkempt, to say the least. To say the most, it looked like it was haphazardly slapped together by a team of monkeys banging on typewriters in the wee morning hours at the end of a hackathon.

‘Tis the season for belated blog posts! Seriously though, I know my posting track record is terrible to begin with, but it’s especially terrible November to January…which I understand is a non-negligible chunk of the year. If it’s any consolation, most of that time goes to building gag websites of questionable utility as gifts for my friends and family, and traveling to and from the east coast to showcase said gifts. Anyway, I’m glad to be back, now let’s get to the topic du jour: managing truck expenses.