Welcome to my blog!

It's been a while, huh? The last time I made any real changes to this site was exactly 2 years ago today. A lot has changed since then, so I think it makes sense to go over that before I get into more details about this blog.

What even were the last 2 years?

On April 3, 2020, things were pretty different, to say the least. After 4 months of working in my first office job, I was adjusting to the idea of remote work. At this point, it still seemed like a return to the office was only weeks away, so I hadn't exactly been getting too settled into my new work style. These days, however, I'm hardly even considering returning to the office. On one hand, being able to use my own computer for much of my work has without a doubt helped me to be more productive, and I definitely appreciate being able to wake up later than I had been previously.

Not all of this has been a positive change though, as on the other hand, this increased productivity has come at the expense of my personal/hobby projects. Commuting to and from the office every day did provide a good separation between my work life and my personal life, and I also miss encountering both familiar and unfamiliar people on the bus each day as well as the varied social interactions that are only really possible in a physical office.

If I had to sum up my life in these past 2 years as briefly as possible, 2020 is the year where everything changed, 2021 is the year where I got stuck in a rut, and 2022 is the year where I get out of it. One of the primary goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year was to improve my work-life balance, get out of the bad habits I had gotten myself into in the last year, and to get back into the hobby projects that had helped me get here in the first place. I'll also be heading off to college in the fall, where I'm planning to major in Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

I may be being a bit hard on 2021 though, as it is also the year that I acquired a number of new friends and new hobbies, the most significant one being my newfound interest in typewriters. One of the first things that caught my eye while going through my paternal grandfather's things after his passing in early 2021 was his electronic typewriter. I've long been interested in vintage technology (particularly from the 1980s) and mechanical keyboards, yet electronic typewriters weren't something I had ever really encountered before despite often being examples of both. However, I quickly found that it was a very enjoyable way to write, and allowed me to get my thoughts out much more easily than on paper or on a computer. The relative obscurity of these machines as well as their easy availability on sites like eBay has led me to acquire somewhat of a collection, and so they will certainly feature in future posts on this blog. Speaking of which...

What's with this whole blog thing?

I had intended to start writing blog posts a while back, but the aforementioned work-life balance issues have led to nothing coming to fruition yet. With the number of things that have changed in the past 2 years though, there's really no better time to start on it than now! I have a lot of things floating around my head that I'm interested in writing about, but the main areas of focus here are most likely going to be:

• Programming
  • This will mostly revolve around my experiences trying out new libraries and languages, although I'll also work on some more tutorial-type posts that will be published on Unicorn Utterances, a site I contribute to, and linked here.
• Vintage technology
  • My primary interest at the moment is in daisy-wheel printing, which involves both typewriters and computer printers (and a few that can be both, which will surely be featured on here as well).
  • More recently, I've been messing around with a Canon Typestar 7 thermal typewriter, so that'll most likely be the topic of my next post.
• Public transit
  • I gained an interest in public transit in the summer of 2019, and from late 2019 until March 2020, I was regularly riding the local bus system. There are a lot of ways that transit in my area could be improved, so I may write some posts about that.

Special thanks

I couldn't have made it here without an absolutely insane number of people, so I want to give credit to some in particular who have helped to make this site exist:

• Burner
• Cendyne
• Corbin Crutchley
• James Fenn
• Evelyn Hathaway
• Philippe Loctaux
• Vukashin

There's many more people to whom I owe thanks, so if you helped me with my site and I forgot to include you here, please let me know. Anyway, time to work on more posts!