Performance Zen

Category: Personal Musings

  • Retiring an old friend

    On July 10 2026, I retired the 2008 13″ Macbook Aluminum that has been running as my web server/firewall/testbed for the last 4-5 years. A couple of unexpected power events and complete server lockups indicated that this old friend needed a rest.

    I replaced it with this — no endorsement on my part; just stating the facts. While a small homelab/office workstation cube may not be to everyone’s liking, I can tell you that with resource-constrained applications where the old Macbook had struggled, the new machine is more than capable.

    I had considered buying an old laptop to serve the purpose, but this little box is quiet, unobtrusive, and does what I ask it too.

    I’m a little sad to see a laptop that I have been using since 2008 fall out of service, but there comes a point where it just doesn’t do any job anymore.

    I’m not getting rid of it. I’m sure I will find a use for it some day. Just like everytime I thought that it was permanently retired. There is always a use for computer hardware of all kinds.

  • On 22 years of posts

    I am always amazed that there are 22 years of history on this blog.

    I know that these days I go years between posting bursts, but in the early days, I was putting up new posts 1-2 times a day. Ah, the early days of blogging — the B.T. (Before Twitter) era.

    A lot of those early posts are personal musings on topics of the day, goings on in my family, discussion on GrabPERF, my experiment in developing a distributed web performance measurement system while I worked at a company that did that for real, and Web Performance.

    Now its primarily Web Performance, Climate Change, and how to protect a system that runs on coal and steam from the idiocy of the modern internet.

    Still, 22 years is a long time. Especially now when the news cycle is compressed into minutes, the availability of information is staggering, and the ability to take a breath and think about what is happening is non-existent.

    Welcome to the next decade of history this week.