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.
Recently added
The public version of SoCalNomad looked simple enough: a WordPress site, a calendar subdomain, some articles, event pages, ads, and links out to ticket vendors. The inside was more interesting. Behind Cloudflare was a small home-origin production stack running on residential fiber with a business account. It was not large infrastructure, but it was layered … Read more
How a dining-room table, inherited camera gear, and unclaimed time during lockdown became a photography education.
An n8n AI Agent repeatedly called one tool until its iteration limit, leading to a version workaround and stronger repetition guards.
Documentation becomes a liability when current instructions, decisions, and historical evidence compete for authority.
Large workflow payloads, database results, and repeated documentation turned an AI coding session into a bounded-resource failure.
A stale identifier in conversational memory showed why consequential operations need structured intent binding rather than model recall.
A partial-success incident exposed fifty-five WordPress posts whose internal workflow state never reached published.
Why SoCalNomad divided research, editorial judgment, publishing, and marketing into specialized workflows instead of one large AI agent.
Advertising was part of the SoCalNomad plan from the beginning. That did not mean dropping third-party ad tags into a sidebar and hoping for revenue. The infrastructure had to support ads in a way that fit the site’s constraints: self-hosted origin, Cloudflare edge, WordPress theme integration, calendar placements, affiliate campaigns, and ad blockers that reasonably … Read more
An early SoCalNomad experiment separated probabilistic publication timing from deterministic editorial rules, quotas, and safety controls.