End of year Round up – Post #009

Well here we are. It’s December 2022 and just seems like it’s been one hell of a ride. Had a few vacations. Had a bout with Covid. Been getting allergy shots so that the prospect of a dog can happen.

One thing that has been a frequent occurrence. Is that on occasion have been babysitting my sisters dog. Which has been pretty fun he is a cute little dog. My sister is taking a trip to Hawaii in January. Going to be watching the little dude for over a week. So been shopping for a dog bed to put in my office. Hang out with me during the day when getting some work done. Should be a fun and epic start to 2023.

I guess the next thing I am working on is trying to figure out some basic electrician stuff. Want to convert an outlet into an outlet and a switch and drive two LED lights to add some more light to the driveway. Been watching lots of YouTube on the matter and studying electric diagrams. But get to make another run to Home Depot or Lowe’s get a few more items to finish the project.

Took a cruise up to Alaska in October and that was a cool experience. Got a last minute deal with some time off. Had a plan to got to Dubai. But those plans fell through. So Cruise it was since from Seattle it’s just a quick drive down to the waterfront and rather easy. The most difficult part is getting off the boat. Had a great time during the evenings enjoying cigars in the cigar lounge with fine whiskeys.

Well it’s 1:30am and getting rather late. Thanks for taking the time to read and look forward to talking with more people soon.

Setup a Mastadon account with what looks like Twitter imploding under the reign of musk. If you want to be pals on there https://oldbytes.space/tristan

2022 — Post #008

Man I am not good at writing blogs. I recall the days when I started blogging. Back in 2003 or so when I read about this article on https://slashdot.org about Google buying Blogger.

That’s when I setup an account and started just dumping my mind onto the internet. Thinking nobody would ever stop to read. I couldn’t get into MySpace. Facebook wasn’t a thing and I just wanted to get thoughts out there. I think LiveJournal was a thing but was never really into that. I think I still have an account over there. The most social networking then was done over AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and good old IRC.

Back then the internet was a ton of fun with a ton to explore with bunches of little silos all over the place. Forums and so for I got really into php and working with phpBB to moderate forums. Crazy how far we have come in that regard. Forums are still around but I don’t participate much these days. I deleted my Facebook account and just been trying to disconnect from most social networking. I am not sure why I keep this blog around. Perhaps I just like to have some internet presence to stay connected to the world.

So lets see how 2022 has been going. Started off the year pretty generic nothing much new. February went to Maui and got to enjoy a bit of a vacation for once in two years. Was happy to get down under 300lbs and into a size 38×34 pants. I can’t recall if I was even that size in high school. Took the diabetes from an A1C of 13 down to a 4.9. Blood pressure is under control and life is good health wise.

Rest of the time just been doing the home thing. In July went to Mexico and brought Covid-19 back. That was no fun and I do not recommend getting it at all. I am getting the next COVID booster at the end of this month. (September 2022) looking forward to that.

Other than that just been enjoying fires and hanging out with people. Having cigars and trying to figure out how to take on home projects in a more efficient manner. But would love to hear from anyone that is still reading this text on the internet.

2021 – Post #007

Well here we are a little over half way into 2021. Coming back to one of the blogs of days past to write something yet again. Happy to be fully vaccinated back in May. Felt compelled to finally put my money where my mouth is and convert that sand pit in my yard to an actual fire pit. Finished that right before we had the hottest temps in the USA.

Have a 20 year high school reunion coming up. Not so sure how I feel about that. Excited to go but also indifferent. I did only find out about the event because the website to sign up linked to a video of the high school slideshow I encoded about 11 years ago. I ponder about how many people I am still connected to are going to be going. So far the number seems very low.

Had a bit of a health revelation and been kicking ass with that. Currently down about 90lbs since coming back from Vietnam at the start of the pandemic.

Did see some family again for Mother’s day. Was nice to hang out without masks since everyone is vaccinated.

I have lost some friends over the past year. Mostly because they seemed to get wrapped up in that stupid Q-unacy crap. Hard to be friends with people that live in a different reality. I attempt to reach out now and then to see where they stand on things. Apparently being vaccinated I will be dead in 6 months to 3 years. Seems like an odd theory to have from those people.

I look out at the landscape of the internet and seems like a totally different place. I miss the days when people had their own little pages written in very basic HTML. Now everyone has an identity of a social media profile. I used to think I was going to make it as a blogger. But I am pretty happy with where life has gone.

I hope everyone out there in internet is doing well and would love to hear from anyone still reading. Drop me a line tristan@pipo.me

2020 – Post #006

Man what a year so far. Been 3 years since I have put anything on this site. I think I want to get back into adding content again. It’s just a different world compared to what things used to be like. I would publish frequently. I wanted to have a blog of substance something I could reflect on later in life. It’s 2020 and things are just so bizarre. I am not sure how to comprehend where we currently are as the human race.

Perhaps I should dive into that a little bit. Even the back end for this this has changed so much that I am not sure I frankly understand it anymore. More research is needed. The blog has never been forgotten. Just ignored. I started blogging when I read an article about Google buying the service Blogger and figured I should start one of those sometime in 2003. Tried a podcast for a while. Here it is September of 2020.

It has been an amazing journey between then and now. Perhaps I have built a life. Not sure I’m always proud of everything. But I constantly hope to learn more and see expand horizons. I can’t know everything but I would always like to learn more. But it’s almost 1:00am on a Saturday. Err Sunday now.

Let’s see where this goes. Thanks for reading.

New Project – Post #005

So back in the end of March I really had to get present to myself. I was finally working on finishing the last part of this curriculum I had been taking for Landmark. I did the initial Landmark Forum back in July of 2016. I did the Advanced Course in September of 2016 and started the final part called the Self Expression and Leadership course in March of this year.

It’s been a rather interesting undertaking and been getting present to a few things that I never really thought about. But one aspect of the final program is take a community that you’re connected to and have a way to transform it. The community I wanted to transform into something new had to be my family. I had a few things I wanted to do.

  1. Share myself in a real matter with my family as I feel like they don’t really get who I am.
  2. Figure out where the hell we came from and get that outlined somehow.
  3. Learn more about my family and who they are.

Currently with my family things are always a bit odd. We show up and everything is rather generic in communication. It would appear that things have also gotten distant after my grandmother passed away in November of 2015.  While that was hard I just want to be present and share myself. I want to take the stand that everyone wins.

So to do that I came up with the following. To accomplish #1 I thought about what I have done over the years and I had a pretty odd blog where I just wrote things down for a good run daily and weekly for around 10 years. I wanted to expand on any content on there and basically get my life written down into something that I could share and look at what I did. Here is who I am and get that put into a new blog or perhaps a book.

To accomplish #2 I signed up for an ancestry.com account and paid for a few months to do some research. I also paid for a DNA test and wanted to have the end goal of learning about some stranger in my family and get to know them.

I plan on writing about that experience on this site later.

The third thing I wanted to do was interview my family members. Get to know them better and have them write a story about what their experience of life is. Something about themselves just create a clearing for sharing everything.

Now I had three months to do this in the course but what I have learned is writing a book and doing research which now turns out to be 100’s of people isn’t easy. Some of those ancestors in the 1800’s had 12 kids. Going down those tree’s hasn’t been the easiest thing in the world either. So here I am in the program with a few weeks left and nowhere near where I would like to be. But I will carry on and press forward to get this done.

If anyone has any ideas or thoughts I would love to hear them.

Welcome to May – Post #004

So after starting this blog up I was thinking about the main purpose. The big purpose was to get back into writing again. I haven’t really been spending much focus on doing that. So here we are in May and wanted to talk about what I’m working on.

I have been researching my family history to get a better understanding of where I came from. I setup an ancestry.com account and just started building out a family tree. I hit two road blocks with my grandpa after I found out he was adopted. So I have been looking into how to figure out who his real parents are. So that has been an interesting and fun challenge.

The other thing I was wanting to do in learning more about my family was get to know my local family. I wanted to sit down with as many of them as I could. I wanted to know who they were on a deeper level. I want to know how I occur to people. So that is next on my project. The end goal is to hopefully self publish a book on the matter of my family. I will need some help with that and looking forward to see what I can come up.

Thanks for reading =)

Facebook Updates That Don’t Get Posted – Post #003

I took the weekend off but that doesn’t mean things didn’t happen. When I was looking for things to talk about I was looking for things that I was going to write on Facebook but didn’t. What I didn’t was this review of my experience watching the film passengers.

I was trying to think of the last time I went to a movie theater where I didn’t find myself saying “Shhhhh!” The last movie I went to see in the theater was “Passengers” for some reason there was a chinese tourist group in there all talking and texting. After “Shhhh-ing” them multiple times I gave up and went and found a manager. The manager came and asked them to leave. The 15 or so people seemed annoyed by this. They could have just shut the fuck up and life would have been great for everyone. My review of Passengers is “Meh.” Basically Titanic in Space where a guy wanted company so he found the hottest woman to defrost to die with her.

I wonder what my thought process was for not posting that on Facebook. Probably because I get the impression that Facebook is very superficial. So I opted to not post something real that I did and felt. I get a secret joy having people kicked out of movie theaters. Last movie I saw was Beauty and the Beast. I ended up having to report some jerk who decided to bring their young child to the movie. The kid was running back and forth across the front of the theater. I went to go speak to the manager. He followed me and had it dealt with. Pretty awesome feeling to have people removed from ovie theaters.

Owning a House – Post #002

Last December I had the joy of becoming a homeowner. Our offer got accepted on the night Trump won the election. That was a bit of a bittersweet day. On one hand I became a home owner. On the other the worst possible person to become a president was now president elect.

I have found that owning a house is interesting because there is always some new project to take on. With a first few weeks of owning the place I found myself having to rewire a garage door. Had to learn how to strip wires and run those. What had happened was the sensor wire had gotten caught in the garage door opening process and ripped it apart.

Had to order a new wire from Amazon, Wire Stripper/Cutter, Zip ties, Electrical Tape. Tried to splice in wires in the split. That failed. So I just reran the wire and installed it. Fairly easy process once I figured out what I was doing. Ordered some new garage door openers and life has been pretty great with the garage.

I decided to build a website for the house running on my Raspberry Pi on my internal network. I keep all the goals and future projects on there. Did some simple things like installed a Nest Thermostat. Still need to take on a Fire Pit in the backyard and get a grill. One thing at a time I suppose.

Tristan Pipo – Blogging – Season 2 – Post #001

Hello dear readers. It has been a long time since I have really been into the blogging thing. The last blog ran from November of 2003 until November of 2014. With the last few years having a blog maybe once a year. That’s not really a good end to the last blog. But I have archived and it’s available at http://blog.tristanpipo.com if you would like to revisit the past.

Man what a time to be alive. The last few years have been a bit crazy and I hope to catch you all up soon with stories from the past. Dreams of the future and everything in between. Which doesn’t make a great deal of sense since everything is in the past or a dream. This is getting a bit redundant at this point.

I bought a new laptop to make this new blog a reality and going to see how many times we can increase that number between now and a year from now. If you would like to connect on social media hit me up on twitter @tristanpipo

I really hope to try and connect with any past, present or future readers. Thanks for taking the time to read this fairly tame introduction post.