Half-Globe with Meridians

From time to time I enjoy designing logos, or trying to anyways. It's an interesting challenge to come up with something recognizable, simple and meaningful. Recently I kept thinking of a logo that I knew I had seen but couldn't remember where. 

I knew it was a regular globe symbol with half of the meridians blacked out and that it was in some archival-type photo. Finally tracked it down...

Out of my various watches, more often than not I end up wearing my Seiko SKX007. However I recently noticed a speck of dust on the inside of the Hardlex crystal, just above the 2 index. I suspect it worked it's way in there the last time fiddled with the 7S26C movement.

Meshtastic is an open-source project that facilitates encrypted off-grid text communication between individuals and groups using low-cost radios. 

I've played with it intermittently for a few years but recently have gotten more involved. Thanks to talented devs and a passionate user-base, the community has grown significantly and the project matured.

I think it's a great way to learn about radio technologies, open-source projects and deploy a fairly inexpensive backup communication system across communities.

Having grown up in Eastern Oregon I took the clear nights and dark skies for granted. Now that I'm nearing a decade of living in Portland, with its clouds and light pollution, I find myself missing the ability to step out the back door and see the universe. 

That got me reminiscing about my beginner-level attempts at astrophotography and had a fun time going through old photos. Here are some of my favorites from EO and a few from recent years.

I was born and raised in a small town in north east Oregon called Hermiston, which among few other things is know for it's watermelons. Though I don't actually believe this town needs a flag of it's own I thought it interesting to give it a try:

I was wanting to create a website (this site) but have been out of the web-dev game for a long time. Though I've never done any significant web work, I look back fondly at my early days of learning HTML / JavaScript and how simply anyone could get started. The pages were simple and the dependencies straight forward.

However, that quickly gave way to using Dreamweaver, Wordpress and Drupal paired with ever increasing amount of libraries, plugins and databases. Each of these added functionality and convenience but at the expense of complexity. I found myself constantly worrying about security vulnerabilities, updates and managing servers rather than working on projects and writing posts. 

In the end, I scrapped the sites and forgot about the whole thing, which brings us to today. There has been a resurgence of static websites and tools to build them, enough so to spark my interest and start this site. I'll recap my experiences so far and intend to keep posting as part of the experiment.