It’s been over two years since I last posted anything substantive on the net.

From 1994 through roughly 2003 I ran my own website, hosted on servers I controlled. Starting in 2003 I followed the same path as much of the internet: to LiveJournal, to Blogger, to Facebook. From long-form writing to 140-character quips. From running my own email server to routing all my correspondence through a large multinational corporation. I gave up control, in what I thought was a bargain for convenience — but which was really just a bargain for less control.

And somewhere in 2008 I simply stopped posting. Oh, sure, the artifacts of my work kept appearing online — code on BitBucket, designs and mechanisms on Thingiverse — but as side effects, not intentional acts of communication. In short, I stopped writing.

From time to time I would write something, but it remained unpublished. Tutorials on using software to generate NTSC video. A discussion of using lazy evaluation in Haskell to short-circuit several common Silicon Valley interview questions. An even faster variation on my (apparently world-famous) Luhn check algorithm. None of these pieces were appropriate for my old linear blogs, and certainly not for places like Facebook — so they went nowhere.

I’ve created this site as a sort of geeky “back to the land” exercise — an exercise in re-decentralizing the network, and trying to regain some of what we’ve lost by the past five years of gleeful consolidation under the guise of “2.0.” By taking back control, I can also shape the platform to my needs… which, I hope, will encourage me to use it.

The likelihood that you’re reading this in 2014 with no new posts since 2012 is high (and not because of any misinterpretation of the Mayan calendar). But I can hope….

Editor’s note from 2019: well, as you can see, my prophecy was correct.