As of the timestamp on this article, I am 38 years old. Of the few people that read this, some will think I’m old as dirt while others will think I’m way too young to be writing an article like this. Neither of these groups are fully correct but it’s my site and I get to choose what to put on it.
When I was growing up I always wanted to be older. I am the youngest in my immediate family, separated from my brother by 17 years. My parents had me later than most and I hated being “just a kid”. It’s even the reason I changed my name: I thought that the last syllable in “Jacob” sounded like “cub” as in a baby animal. I felt I was smarter and more mature than the kids my age since I was so comfortable around people older than myself, so why did I have to go through all this trouble of growing up and being a stupid kid when I could just be an adult?
While my go-to personal computer has been a Mac for a long time I’ve used Linux (mainly Ubuntu) off and on since probably Hoary (5.04). I remember back then you could ask Canonical to send you CDs, and I’d order packs of them. There’s probably still a few around my parents’ house! Getting it to install was one of my early computer achievements, as I was only just getting into writing software back then and it was all on Windows at the time. Of course, I’ve used Linux (many flavors, lots of RHEL) in my career since and gotten quite comfortable working on it as a server operating system, but I never really got the hang of using it as my personal desktop for one reason: games.
My father’s name was Joe Basile. He was born in 1946 and passed away in 2014. Even though it’s been almost a decade now, I still miss him nearly every day. Since yesterday was Father’s Day, he’s been on my mind especially. So, I thought I’d take some time to write out some of my memories of him in no particular order.
My dad wasn’t what you’d call a “computer guy,” but he had a genuine love for computers. He never learned how to type with more than two fingers, but he always wanted to have the latest and greatest. He used computers to sell speakers and vintage audio equipment on eBay for years, and the money he made from that helped raise me.
I had fun setting up and deploying this site, but throughout the process, I had this nagging voice in my head alternating between “No one will visit this.”, “Isn’t it vain to have a personal site?”, and “Why are you using a static site generator instead of writing it?” As an exercise and a form of self-soothing, I will attempt to answer these questions/accusations.
This one… is probably true. I am not a well-known person outside my extremely small social circle, and I’m not cool enough to write interesting technical blogs that will make it to the top of Hacker News. But my family loves seeing the photos I take, so if nothing else, this gives me a way to share that with them that they can share with others in turn, without relying on a third-party social network.
