What I’m doing now

(This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one, too.)

Updated June 27th, 2026, from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

new servers and sysadmin

I love the low-level server sysadmin, tweaking OS and network things in the console. It’s so beautifully hype-free, closer to science than business.

I moved sive.rs, NowNowNow.com, MusicThoughts.com, and the rest of my sites (and email and Git and such) from a 4-year-old server in NYC to a new OpenBSD server at LAX. It was nice to start anew since the old server had accumulated some cruft. I do this with my home PC often: erase the hard drive, install a new OS from scratch, restoring only what I need from backup.

Along the way I revisit old config files and see what I can improve. Like this time I switched all my TLS certificates from LetsEncrypt’s tool to OpenBSD’s acme-client, making the “www.” prefix an alias instead of separate cert. Also improved nginx.conf and sshd_config, hardening.

I achived tech independence with my DNS! I set up my own private NSD server, and made it a hidden master. It was such a joy to learn about and make it work. DNS is underrated.

KeepSite.org

I’ve been talking about this idea for years, and it’s finally taking shape. I previously called it “hundred year hosting” or “digital legacy trust”. More on this, later.

great courses instead of podcasts

When I’m cooking or on a long drive, I sometimes reach for a podcast. They’re occasionally inspiring.

But now I keep “The Great Courses” queued up in my audiobook app, and have been listening to “History of the Ancient World” from The Great Courses. So good! So interesting.

I’m going to keep this up, defaulting to courses instead of podcasts.

world citizen daydreaming

I’m ready for another big life change, so I spend many hours a week daydreaming of possible futures. Usually it’s geographical, considering what it’d be like to move to China, India, Brazil, Tűrkiye, UAE, or ideally all of these and more. But my boy still needs me in New Zealand, so these are just daydreams.

rewrote my sive.rs site

Until a few months ago, this website was generated from static files on disk. No database.

But now I’ve moved everything into the database to make it easier for someone to dynamically search. Along the way, I improved the HTML and organization.

nownownow.com

… is more popular than ever, adding ~5 sites per day. I still maintain this by hand, and love it. So interesting to see all these personal sites.

rats are old

My pet rats are only two years (and one month) old but for a rat, that’s elderly, so they’re arthritic, hobbling, slow. But that means they like to cuddle more than ever. I really love them.

interviews paused indefinitely

I’ve been on over 250 podcasts, and spent hundreds of hours editing the transcripts to make them as accurate as can be, so no one has to listen to 500+ hours of me talking. You or a computer can read, search, or query the transcripts. But I’m going to stop doing podcasts for a while so I have all new stuff to talk about.

boy thriving at his new school

My son is in his second year of high school, and is so wonderfully insightful, philosophical, talkative, and creative. We talk like 20-30 hours a week.

programming

I’m enjoying a re-think and re-structure of all of my past code, doing even more inside of PostgreSQL. I’m in that phase where I do it until I fall asleep at night, then bounce out of bed at 5am to get right back to it. Doing Go for my first time.

I wrote a Mustache template parser in PostgreSQL, so now I can save my HTML templates in PostgreSQL, and call a single function with the minimum variable - like an HTTP cookie - and it will return the HTTP headers and HTML body, ready to return to the browser. It’s very simple and very exciting.

public code

Finally sharing my main code, which you can see at:

Migrating it in from an old non-Git directory, so it will appear piece by piece.