Blog

If you haven't noticed, I'm a bit of a sports fan. My two biggest sports are baseball and hockey. I grew up playing baseball, and have been playing ice hockey for the last 13 years. They're sports I love and follow. The one thing I haven't been all that great with is watching them.

Ever since Trump re-entered the White House in January 2025, one of his biggest targets has been the trans community. He and the GOP have been going after them, trying to strip away their rights and their dignity. In some ways it feels like they've become the right's punching bags which is upsetting in so many ways. But then I see articles like this one, and it brings me joy to see a group of women essentially snubbing their noses at them, and continuing on.

My wife and I recently did a re-watch (for me) of the HBO series Band of Brothers. It tells the story of Easy Company of the 101st Airborne in World War II. It's based on true stories and real people and I can't say enough good things about it. It was a fantastic miniseries that I would highly recommend to anyone.

I love music. It's not uncommon for me to have headphones on while working listening to whatever catches my ear. Something that's caught my ear lately has been alternate versions of albums and songs I love.

One of my favorite authors is Cory Doctorow. Both his blog and his books are phenomenal. I often wonder what it would be like to always have topics to write about in depth. He has a new long-form article out it seems every day and I heard on a recent podcast episode with Trevor Noah that he wrote 9 books during the COVID-19 pandemic. I know I'll never be as prolific a writer, but I wish I could come up with more interesting things to write about.

One thing I've been monitoring is my cell phone screen time. I've been doing pretty good lately, hovering around one hour a day. One thing I've been trying is to keep my phone in another room than whichever room I'm in. That goes along with me keeping the phone out of the bedroom at night.

Back in college and shortly after, I would hop between different Linux distributions. Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse, Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, and I’m sure a few others were all on my desktop at some point. It was fun trying to see what the differences were and which one I liked best. Now, it’s a little different.

It was a busy-ish June. Fortunately it did include a nice little vacation in the middle of the month.

A while back, I read Means of Control by Byron Tau. It was a book that talked about all the ways the government is using various services like social media and ad tech to get around the 4th amendment to track us. One of the suggestions on how to help avoid said tracking was to stop using both MacOS and Windows.

Over the last couple months, I've been using my desktop as my primary machine, only using my MacBook when sitting out on the couch or porch. On my desktop, I've remained on my Linux Mint partition, continuing to stick with Linux. Historically, I've never really done much with gaming on Linux as I've often had issues with getting Wine to work properly. Well, it's been a while since I've really tried to get games to work, and happily, a lot (of good things) has changed.

I was listening to Marketplace last week and they had a segment on how "Dad books" are struggling. This is disappointing to me.

At the beginning of the month, I started East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I'm now about a quarter of the way through and can't decide whether I should push through and finish, or just call it and move on.