Archive: November, 2026

It's election night, and while I'm watching results come in, I think about the disappointment of 2020 and 2024. Sure, we've watched Trump be the punchline of jokes for an entire decade now. These days he's talking about strong mens' asses, ballrooms and pools, and nothing about actual problems or challenges that people face. Nothing is surprising about him anymore at this point. What makes me sad is all of the people that have bought into his nonsense. He's a horrible man toward others, a felon, responsible for sexual assault, and a grifter profiting from the presidency. The MAGA crowd just doesn't care.

The culture war nonsense doesn't change record deficit spending. Calling Democrats "elites" doesn't make Trump any less of a billionaire. He lies, but it's OK because he "owns the libs." And if you don't think America sucks the way he says it does, you're not patriotic. The upper class is fine as long as they're racist.

If you look at what the right is selling, these are apparently the things you need to believe to be "conservative:"

• Women are inferior to men, and are not entitled to body autonomy.
• Deficits no longer matter.
• The press is the enemy instead of those holding government accountable.
• It's OK for presidents to berate the people they serve.
• Racism, misogyny and homophobia are fine.
• A nation founded by immigrants should reject immigrants (unless they're white).
• Intellectuals and the educated are not to be trusted.
• Science isn't real.
• Climate science is a hoax.
• You must dislike anyone different than you.
• Separation of church and state is just a suggestion.
• Facts are open to interpretation.
• Democrats and moderate Republicans must be hated.
• Mistrust government, unless it's governed by the right tribe.
• Isolationism is the only patriotism.

I think the American electorate might finally be coming to its senses. All of the above do nothing to move us forward, nothing to improve our lives. I'm not saying that all Republicans are like this, but you're either trying to right your party, or you're complicit in allowing a president be corrupt and self-serving.

The last year has seen an insane increase in bot traffic to China to my sites. Every year, I kept looking at the analytics and wondering why I was seeing so many more users but not ad revenue. It never occurred to me to break the numbers down by country or other dimensions. It turned out about 20% of my page views were coming from not the US. Of that, most of it was from China, with honorable mention going to Pakistan. Not a lot of roller coasters there, so pretty safe to say that's not legit traffic.

I learned today that Cloudflare actually has a free tier, and I signed up immediately. I put CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz behind it. They do this because having larger samples of site traffic to analyze allows them to better find trends, which benefits their big corporate customers. You don't get all of the functionality, but you do get the important stuff. It'll block bots and AI scrapers for sure. You can also knock out an entire country, if you want. So that's easy enough, block all of China.

What's staggering is that, as I sit here after midnight on an early Tuesday, I've watched it block a thousand requests from there just in the last hour. I have no idea what they're trying to find, but a lot of it looks like the usual exploits, including the PHP stuff that's melting the Internet right now. I don't run that stuff, fortunately.

There's some other cool stuff that I get for free, including CDN functionality, with the caching goodness that comes with that. A CDN (content delivery network) allows people to reach your site by way of points that are closer to them, all over the world. And they cache static files, like images or scripts, so those requests never even reach my site. It's so great.

I'm going to get the first real look at my traffic in many years. Not sure how I didn't realize this was a thing sooner.

We have this thing we do now and then, called the Coronado Crawl. Basically it involves visiting a few of the bars and a really good restaurant at Coronado Springs on the Disney property. It's all eating and drinking, with some nice walks in between. I wouldn't describe it as "expensive," relative to, well, everything right now, but it inevitably costs around $200. So it's cheaper than a night at that hotel, two tickets to any show, two tickets to a theme park, flights anywhere, etc. For a half-day of entertainment, we find it worth it.

It's a nice perk of living here that we can do vacation things without taking a vacation. It's not a substitute for real travel by any means, but when I'm inventorying memories, a lot of the best ones involve stuff like this. We've done the crawl three times this year, and especially in a year where we've spent half as much on travel (because I worked half as much), it's been nice to do something without a lot of hassle. Simon doesn't mind being our Uber, either.

I think a lot, too much probably, about what our future life looks like. With Simon less than two years away from adulthood, things will change. Part of financial planning is figuring out what kind of lifestyle you hope to have after you offboard (what I call "retirement," since I'm sure we'll work doing something). But I don't want that to hold us back from living now, while we're both relatively healthy. Those bridge years, between offboarding and being able to use retirement funds and (hopefully) collect social security, are the real wild card. Ideally, I want that period to be as long as possible.

Two years from now, things will be somewhat more flexible. I wonder what our version of the crawl will be then?