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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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 Cloudflare. The site needed to be fast for readers and credible to crawlers. Cloudflare made that possible. Then publishing exposed the tax. The … Read more
Video and email have never had an easy relationship. A dealership may have a short MP4 that works on social media or a landing page, but inserting that file into an email campaign is unreliable across clients. An animated GIF is less sophisticated, yet it remains a practical common denominator for short motion assets. The … Read more
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 inventory campaigns, holiday promotions, service offers, re-engagement emails, legal disclaimers, tracking links, logos, phone numbers, footer … Read more
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 business account. The origin could serve the site, but I did not want the home network … 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.
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 also more important. If the intake layer is unreliable, every clever downstream step inherits bad assumptions. The 54-Feed Problem … Read more
At some point, I stopped treating the media site as 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. Future newsletters and social posts. WordPress could store published content, but it was not the right … 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.