Years spent managing enterprise VMware infrastructure eventually resulted in some very capable retired hardware following me home. Today those former data-center servers run Proxmox, storage, virtual machines and whatever experiment comes next. 

Could useful AI run locally on hardware I already owned while keeping private information private? What started as a simple question became Docker, Ollama, Open WebUI, vision, image generation — and considerably more tinkering than expected. 

Sometimes an ordinary object carries an extraordinary amount of family history. My grandfather's pocket watch is one of those objects — and part of the reason I started thinking seriously about how easily family stories can disappear. 

A 1978 Glastron GT-150, a Mercury 115 “Tower of Power,” and the questionable decision to take an old boat completely apart. The rebuild became one of those projects where fixing one thing inevitably revealed three more things to fix. 

Turning 60 seemed like a perfectly reasonable excuse to buy a boat I absolutely did not need.

The 1968 Century Coronado is mahogany, powered by a 420-horsepower Holbrook-built engine, and about as practical as you'd expect a classic wooden boat to be. But practicality wasn't really the point.

I call her “My Cadillac,” and taking her out on the lake is one of those things that reminds me why some completely unnecessary purchases are worth every penny.

Long before firewalls became appliances you bought and plugged in, Smoothwall could turn an ordinary PC into one. I became one of the early U.S. resellers — selling boxed CDs, building systems and even compiling VPN support by hand. 

In 1996, building Webweaver.com meant hand-written HTML, manually created graphics, FTP uploads and plenty of trial and error. Thirty years later, its replacement was built in about three days — with Google Sites, AI, and not a single line of code.