DB Markham Home

today's newspaper
New News
Daniel B Markham
Your humble author /s

My New Digs

This is the new site. It’s going to take a while to get set up. I’m giving myself until 2026 to replace my EC2 server with this (hopefully) totally static yet interactive blog/site/portal

I’m playing around with a lot of stuff, seeing how dynamic and pain-free I can make blogging, so bear with me. It’s all coming together, but it’s going to be a while. Meanwhile, I believe the RSS feed is up. Just use index.xml

man typing email
working

Hard at Work

The new site architecture is coming along. I think I have the basic flow down and scripted. I’m now testing the script. Eventually I’ll put some dynamic stuff on here, including commenting. You guys will probably want to see that in a fully static blog! I know I will. I have no idea how I’m going to pull it off. That’s why I love coding so much! So bear with me. I hope to have it all done and working — at least the mission critical parts — by the first of the year.

ALTTEXT
our discord

Test Blog Entry

Hello World

What kind of stuff are you going to talk about?

I don’t know. I’m not “staying on message” and I don’t have anything to sell to you. So far in my writing life I’ve talked about these things:

Programming

What makes for a good program? A good programmer? Why is hiring and running teams such a painful unsolved problem in the industry? How can you decide which new tech to chase and which to let slide on by?

Philosophy

Books I’ve Written

Science-Fiction/Fantasy

The Door To Nowhere

Debian Newbury is an oddball flight instructor from a small town in rural Virginia. Samuel Featherstone is an outstanding student finishing his post-grad work in cyber security and Large-Language Models. Together they fight their way through secrets that their family, job, and society have kept from them to touch the reality behind the world we experience.

Fans of Greg Egan, Clive Barker, and M. Night Shymalan will love this mind-bending adventure! Buy The Door To Nowhere

First Light

The worst part of Tuesday wasn’t writhing in pain, having flames shoot from her head, voiding her bowels and dying in screaming agony in front of a crowd of cheering onlookers. No, the worst part of Tuesday for Beverly Castler was finding out that the afterlife began in Newark, New Jersey. What a dump…

For Lem, his day ended in being abducted by drug runners in a magic truck full of corncobs and cocaine. It didn’t seem right to Lemuel Rickenbacker that it started with desperately wanting to boil the children in hot oil, but it did. Perhaps that was the punishment. There was also the matter of why anyone would want 24,000 pounds of chicken beaks and an assortment of items including a pile of rusty tricycles and three pairs of brand-new Canadian Sauna Pants…

And so begins an epic tale of life, death, faith, doubt, good, evil, serial kills, sauna pants, corncobs, meaning and redemption in a world both part of our everyday lives and far beyond them. Buy First Light

Daily Newspaper

I feel sad that modern journalism has fallen so low, so I decided to make some sort of automated/curated newspaper. The links are above. The idea is to make it as bogus-slant-BS free as possible.

My Imaginary Team

One of the more fun things I’m doing is creating a virtual problem-solving team to help clarify problems and solve them easier.

The first step is to find as many hard problems as I can for MIT to solve. Here’s the current list:

  • Digital Holodeck Memorial
  • Christmas Tree Machines
  • Making history podcasts even better
  • Starting a restaurant
  • The New News (which ended up actually being a thing. See above.)
  • Subcontracting a landscaper
  • Digital Picture What’s Playing Frame
  • The Drone biz

I’ll update as we go along, but since it involves LLMs, I feel like I must include some sort of fancy diagram.

Signature of Daniel B. Markham
I made this