srand.info is my personal knowledge base: a collection of projects, technical notes, lessons learned, experiments, and occasional detours. My career and interests have crossed software, infrastructure, photography, automotive work, and independent media.
The categories will evolve, but the purpose is simple: document what I build, preserve what I learn, and share anything that might be useful or interesting to someone else.
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Archive note, November 20, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad operations notes about WordPress, Breeze, ticker API caching, and Cloudflare purge behavior. The fastest version of a site is often the one that refuses to change. That is the bargain caching offers. SoCalNomad needed aggressive caching because it was running from modest infrastructure behind … Read more
Archive note, November 2025: This post is based on BDC.aztexsystems template-builder documentation and field inventory notes. Automotive email campaigns look simple from the outside. A vehicle photo. A price. A button. Maybe a logo and a disclaimer. Send it to customers and move on. Inside the workflow, it is messier. There are single-vehicle offers, multi-vehicle … Read more
Archive note, November 14, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad infrastructure, security, and operations notes. Running a public site from a home origin changes the meaning of “free tier.” Cloudflare’s free services were not a convenience for SoCalNomad. They were part of the architecture. The project ran on a residential fiber connection with a … Read more
A practical home-lab experiment using Proxmox, TrueNAS, ZFS, and three USB-attached drives for a photography workflow.
Two strings looked redundant in an automotive email builder, but one identified a campaign and the other identified a saved revision.
Archive note, November 6, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad newsfeed deployment and feed-reliability documentation from October 2025. AI was never the first hard problem in the SoCalNomad newsfeed. The first hard problem was getting ordinary RSS feeds into a database reliably. That sounds less interesting than clustering, summarization, or automated publishing. It was … Read more
Archive note, October 30, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad data-mart and PostgreSQL documentation from late 2025. At some point, a media site stops being only a collection of posts. For SoCalNomad, that point arrived when the same facts needed to serve several products: A newsfeed. A calendar. Artist pages. Venue pages. Ticker items. … Read more
The practical difference between Docker named volumes and bind mounts, learned while building a live-editing WordPress theme workflow.
Importing production WordPress data also imported security assumptions that made the local administrator login unusable.
An early SoCalNomad clustering experiment exposed the need for multi-story article membership and a better separation between deterministic code and semantic judgment.