mattmorris.org

I recently learned that Sears once sold mail-order, do-it-yourself kit homes. Just place your order, and soon a railroad car would arrive with all the materials and instructions needed to build your dream home. Many are still standing.

Sears Roebuck promised that “a man of average abilities could assemble a Sears kit home in about 90 days.” No detail was overlooked, as both manual and blueprints instructed homeowner as to the correct spacing of the 750 pounds of nails.

I almost wish I could try one of these just to see if I am a “man of average abilities.”

After reading that Comcast announced 1TB bandwidth caps, I took a look at our home bandwidth usage.

I can’t think of any one thing that I do that uses significant data. We just have two iPhones and a few computers doing normal things. (Online backups should considered a normal thing that everyone does.)

It’s clear that 1TB has to be the new minimum cap.

I’ve maintained a personal website since I got to college in 1998. My first few sites were hand-coded html and resided on the university’s Solaris server. Along the way, I tried Geocities, Microsoft Front Page, Dreamweaver, Blogger, and iWeb. At no point during the first decade did I manage to create a readable website.

/~mjm9

• 1998 – 2000
  This page is wonderfully bad. All it’s missing is an “under construction” animated gif. And WTF was I thinking when I collected these “ very useful or interesting links.” Ponderous.
• August 2001
  I think I built this page by hand with html and css. If you click around you’ll see I was into fencing at this time.
• December 2001
  A friend helped me build this version using Dreamweaver. Each cell of the navigation menu was an image, but they don’t all show up here. I probably have a copy of the original code on a Zip Drive somewhere.
• May 2004
  This is the only remaining evidence that I wrote my own blogging engine in PHP. The project lived at a different URL which was not scraped by archive.org.
• August 2004
  Looks like I tried Blogger for the first time. Wow, I’d totally forgotten that I’d written about my trips to Italy and Mexico.

matthew-morris.com

• November 2006
  This one was built with iWeb and lived on shared hosting somewhere.

mattmorr.is and matt.ph

• 2012 Onward
  I used Octopress, etc., on these domains. I’ve done scripted migrations from one platform to the other, but it looks like some of my old posts are missing.

Ghost is a great blogging platform, but I’ve migrated back to WordPress for a few reasons.

1. Ability to post from various iOS apps. (Check out Blogo)
2. Wider selection of themes
3. Support for link posts
4. Greater customizability

Oh and the migration took about 5 years and went WordPress → Octopress → Jekyll → Tumblr → Ghost → WordPress. Time is a flat circle.

In light of the recent Panama Papers scandal, I wanted to share two interesting Planet Money episodes in which they walk through the process of setting up an offshore company.

(Warning: These links may auto-play.)

#390: We Set Up An Offshore Company In A Tax Haven

#403: What Can We Do With Our Shell Companies?