Hello (again) World!

I don’t know why it happened, but sometime in 2008, I gave up a five-year run of blogging. Maybe it was social media, I don’t recall. But whatever the case, I last posted to my site on July 4, 2008; a post about buying a Kim McDonald art piece that I’m looking straight at as I write this a little more than 18 years later.

As I write this, AI has taken my industry by storm and quite honestly has really affected my personal situation. I’m convinced AI had lots to do with the restructuring that happened at my last job. Funny, I was probably more AI forward than just about anyone at that company. But alas, I digress.

In my work with AI, I’ve been needing to find enough of my own writing to capture my voice, so that I can have AI talk or write on my behalf. By the way, it’s me writing this right now. So I was pondering sources of my writings and I realized that I wrote a lot back in the day and if I could reclaim that writing cache, I would have all the writing I needed.

And so with some leftover tokens over the weekend, I had Claude go out and use the Wayback Machine to get my posts. And it did! Somewhere around 190 posts were harvested—complete with images, photos, and the occasional videos. By the way, I do use emdashes. Here’s a part of my newly generated voice profile that points this out:

I sent Claude down the path multiple times to get and reget posts. To recognize formatting patterns and correct them. To download photos from an old Flickr account and Google Photos. And even to try to get assets previously on an old CMS platform, TypePad.

Now, reading some of these posts is a bit cringe. It was a lighter time in my life back then. Somehow the years feel heavier since those writings, though all’s well. It’s just different in ways that I can feel when I read my writing and my topics.

But you know, we all forget things over time. I never realized this. People try to tell you things like this and eventually you realize they were right. I regret it’s taken so long to learn this and other things, but here we are and as they say, “18 years ago was the best time to plant a tree, but the next best time is today.” So here we are. The digging is over and with this post, the seed is in the ground.

For the curious, it won’t be WordPress, it’ll be Jekyll and GitHub Pages. My writing interface is Claude. Performance will be fast and the attack surface will be minimal. It’s just a repo.

One last thing: there’ll be a few broken links and a few charming references in the archives. And you’ll find the occasional photo of a younger version of me and Suzanne.

Hello…again.