Welcome Back :)

Hello again.

I'm back on SomethingWonderful:)

A little history: Back around 1997, I was working for Scripps Howard News Service. In those days, the internet was new for most people (not for me, I had been on it since the late 80s). As a photojournalist in a team of three on the photo desk, we had been already using Adobe Photoshop to edit pictures on the fly. Most of our journalists were still getting used to Windows and terminals from the 70s and 80s were being replaced with PCs over time. Then they installed the internet and needed some people to run it. Being that we were the youngest guys (in our 20s) in the place, and seeing as how we "knew about computers", they gave that job to us. I got the job of webmaster at first, and I had to learn how to create my own site before I made one for Scripps Howard.

So I did. I made my own personal site. It was called SomethingWonderful:) It's taken from a line in the movie 2010 when Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) asks the apparition of Frank Bowman (Keir Dullea) what is going to happen. And Bowman smiles a little enigmatically and replies: "…something… wonderful."

I always liked that line so I took it as a domain and based a site off of it. It later became my photo portfolio for a while and, when I branched out into 3D art a year or so later, became my portfolio site for that as well, with little "adventure stories" in the style of Traveling Uncle Matt from Fraggle Rock. He was always sending back postcards of his adventures in the world of people and describing how strange it was. That was sort of the style I was going for with my 3D pictures.

I revamped my site a few times over the years but I stopped updating it around 2005 or so and I just let it die around 2013. It got snapped up by some DJ event (which I just checked and it seems to have vanished now?) - no bad feelings there at all. I really wasn't inspired to do anything with it for the longest time and I'm glad if it was making a lot of people happy and enjoy a fun time together.

However, I did feel like I wanted to return to it someday. I had many blogs in the meantime under various titles, but they never felt like they would last for more than a few years. The fact that I'm coming back to this one again after so long means it probably will.

This time, however, I'm not on a .com - and I'm grateful that I got a non-US based domain because even if the .com one is available, I wouldn't take it. You see, I've been living in Europe for the last ten years. I'm American, but I'm also French. And I believe in Europe - now more than ever. So, to that end, over the last month or so, I have been getting off of iCloud and into independence, and that includes getting European domains which are subject to GDPR protection and laws about privacy, and remain out of the hands of an insane and fascist American regime. I like having a .eu domain now. It's a bit of a point of pride at this juncture. In fact, there is a growing movement for European independence from the American Tech Stack (and Americans are also joining in as well).

I wrote a column about it on my other blog but since my other domain is a .dev, and that is controlled by Google, I am going to let that domain die in a few months (I just turned off auto-renew yesterday). So, I will publish my (very lengthy) column here in the hopes that it may help others do what I did - in full, or in part, or even go further than I have. My other blog will vanish and this one will stay up. I now control my servers in the EU on an EU Tech Stack, under GDPR, and I run my own cloud for friends and family (which some are really loving by now). I'm having a lot more fun with this than I probably should since it lets me do anything I want to do after getting off of iCloud.

Anyway, I'll publish all of those details here very shortly and I'll keep posting here. I'm glad I'm back - it's been a very long time since i actually owned and even longer, used, SomethingWonderful:) and I feel as if I've come a bit full circle.

Thanks for stopping by.

– N.