The New SSS Blog

Greetings All!

Welcome to my new blog, built with the Franklin.jl package and the Julia programming language. It should be quicker than the old WordPress-based site, and I learned a lot during the process of setting it up.

In addition to my travel, photography, cycling, and programming posts, I intend to write posts that are speculative. These posts are "devil's advocate" posts – that is, they contain content I may not completely (or even mostly) believe. They are intended to get the reader thinking. Agree, disagree, partially agree, all reactions are acceptable apart from apathy.

A question you may have is, "Why should I bother reading your posts?" For those who don't know me (and perhaps for those who do), I offer the following:

• I'm a smart guy. You'll have to trust me on this one.

• I have experience and knowledge in many different areas. As an attorney I worked for a federal judge, several large law firms, as in-house corporate counsel, and for local government.

• I'm well-read. My college degree was in political science and history. I have a solid understanding of U.S. Constitutional Law. I have more knowledge than most about European history. But I also know quite a bit about economics and finance, and love math.

• I'm a self-taught programmer. I've dabbled in various languages (Python, Julia, Clojure, Haskell, F#), though I've focused on Julia.

• I'm a Francophile. I learned French in my mid-40s, and my wife and I are now part-time residents of France, having bought an apartment in the Atlantic Coast city of La Rochelle.

• I love photography and cycling, which along with programming occupy a fair amount of my free time.

• Politically, I'm center-left on some issues and dead center on others. But I am appalled at the takeover of the Republican party by Trump and the MAGA movement, and firmly believe we need to focus our efforts on defeating them. Their tendencies toward fascism and authoritarianism are contrary to America's spirit and traditions.

Not convinced? Well, try reading some of the posts (which you can see by clicking on the "Blog" link above).

I've kept the original site where you can view blog posts prior to 2022. Click the link to go back in time.

One of the downsides of a less complex blog system is the lack of an easy way to implement a comment system. I will post a link to any new post on my Facebook page, so if you have a burning desire to comment, you can do it there.

I hope to add functionality to the site as I go along. In the meantime ... enjoy!