I'm pretty stoked today.

Last night I finished converting all the content from my old WordPress Dr.Gerg site into markdown.

Another reason I'm happy is after literally decades of contemplation and half-hearted attempts, I finally made headway into IRC. That may not seem like much to most of you, but to me it satisfies a long-lived curiosity. At the same time, I was able to get a truly valuable answer to a tech question from someone in the IRC chatroom dedicated to the piece of software I was having a problem with. That was wonderful.

When I first got started messing around with computers (Some history is here.) doing anything was just horrendously expensive. When you are a young husband/father with kids, it's hard to spend the kind of money it took to get hardware, buy domains, pay for hosting and software. It all added up to a pretty expensive hobby compared to things like gardening or hiking.

These days you can get into computing with very little money. Of course, you can still spend vast quantities of cash, but you don't have to. If you're really interested in knowing how the digital world works, you can learn a LOT on an old computer or a Raspberry Pi. Linux is free, so you don't have to spend a dime on an operating system anymore.

Domains are way cheaper than they once were. And hosting this server on the web costs me five dollars a month. You all spend more than that on coffee in a couple of days.

Now that I'm done translating this blog over to Pelican, I feel a long-standing dissatisfaction is settled. I'm really happy with how this turned out. And I'm happy with how I got here, and I'm happy with the tools I use to maintain it. Wow. That's a lot of happy.

BTW, I just discovered Pelican is not the only free, Python-based blog creation system out there. There is also Nikola which looks and feels amazingly like Pelican but seems to have a more 'commercial' face.

So, today, the world is a wonderful place. Finally getting all (some?) of my ducks in a row is certainly a Thing That Works.