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Thailand

OK, so April’s big trip was Bangkok, Thailand. Let’s get into it with the giant dumb bulleted list:

  • As always, this trip was booked just under a month before I left. No real reason on this one other than the pricing and timing of it, and it was a new country for me. I also liked Vietnam and Cambodia, so this was a logical next step. This would be my 25th country visited.
  • Had an overnight red-eye to Taipei, leaving at 12:50am on a Friday. I left for SFO at about 8 at night, after waking up for work at 4am that day. I hoped that would make me black out and get a few hours of sleep. Of course that didn’t really work out.
  • I paid too much for an upgrade to premium economy for the 14-hour flight to Taiwan on EVA. Dinner was, as always, completely inedible. With a combination of four different prescription and OTC medications, I got about four hours of sleep. I woke up to my neighbor vomiting profusely from motion sickness, which she continued to do for the last half of the flight. Power outlet was also dead. I inexplicably watched Good Will Hunting. No idea why.
  • The Taipei airport is weird because the gates are all themed and sponsored. So like instead of B4, the gate is a Sanrio Hello Kitty lounge. I landed at 5-something in the morning and had about two hours, but the lounges were all insanely full and there were almost no other meal choices, so my Taiwan experience was that I ate a Clif bar and brushed my teeth.
  • The four-hour flight to Bangkok was no big deal, except the guy next to me was wearing a Vision Pro and waving his arms around in the air wildly.
  • Bangkok immigration took forever. Lots of Russian tourists. Lots of people who waited in line for 20 minutes and then realized they were supposed to get a digital arrival card.
  • I had a driver from the hotel who showed up in a new Mercedes and drove like a stunt driver, but it still took an hour in traffic to get from the airport to the hotel.
  • I stayed at a Marriott executive apartment in Sukhumvit, which is a sort of trendy district with lots of shopping and nightlife, maybe 45 minutes from “old” Bangkok with the museums and palaces and such. The room was nice, a 27th-floor corner suite with a kitchen, living room, and even a washer/dryer, which was a game-changer. It was comfortable, but was also horribly generic and corporate. Fine by me, though.
  • First impression was that Thailand was much more like India than Vietnam or Cambodia. Bangkok is basically Bangalore but crammed into a quarter the footprint. Walking around, the streets were chaotic, full of traffic, and sidewalks required hyper-vigilance because of random edges and trenches and whatnot. Buildings were either ancient or super-modern. In Sukhumvit, over half of buildings were either American chains or things with ironic weird English names that were all chrome and glass.
  • Second impression, after giving it some thought and spending more time wandering, was that Bangkok was a total vaporwave city, a cyberpunk backdrop where the street level was gritty and confusing, but the rest of the city was either old temples or climbing towers of glass and concrete.
  • I was right down the way from three gigantic malls that all sit next to each other: Emporium, EmSphere, and EmQuartier. It was Saturday night and I hadn’t eaten a proper meal since lunch Thursday, so I searched for food, and immediately got The Fear. Everything in the malls were hawker stalls and food courts with lots of people shoulder-to-shoulder and confusing menus of foods I could not figure out, way outside my wheelhouse. I finally gave up and ended up at a McDonald’s, just to get some food down before I got back to the hotel and blacked out from jetlag.
  • Oh, also made one of about three dozen stops at a 7-Eleven next to my hotel to get some of the basics. Thailand’s 7-Elevens are notorious for their crazy assortment of Asian foods and skin care products. There’s very little in the way of western sodas or candies, but I was able to get enough Coke Zero to keep me going for the trip.
  • Went to the National Museum and the Grand Palace as a try-out run with public transit. They have two train systems, one underground and the other elevated. They’re both excellent and probably second only to the ones in Singapore.
  • The only problem with the trains, which was a consistent problem everywhere else, was the general super-cooling of full-tilt AC. Outside, it was in the mid/high-90s with a humidity of 60-80%. But go in a mall or hotel, and it’s like 64 degrees. Going back and forth between the two was disconcerting. The heat honestly wasn’t bad though, maybe because of the winds. I didn’t wear shorts the entire trip, and it felt like the heat broke quickly every night, instead of the New York or Vegas situation where triple-digit temps linger for hours and hours after the sun sets.
  • The malls were absolute madness. Ten stories tall, mazes of towers and walkways and large stores; Asian food courts and American chain food and gourmet grocery stores. The second night I ended up at this mall that had a Maserati dealership on the third floor, next to a Porsche showroom and a Lamborghini gallery. The mall itself had a supercar parking lot. Some of the stores had odd English hipster-ish names, like a clothes store called SOUP. Everything was glass and chrome and spiral walkways and indoor waterfalls and manicured trees. It looked like a 24th-century city inside.
  • I took two photo classes. The first was a walk through Chinatown with a Dutch photographer and another guy from Portugal. His work was absolutely amazing, and that was intimidating to me, because I’m way more timid about photography, and I’m mostly taking tourist snapshots. Super great teacher, but sometimes there’s a lot of value in learning what you don’t know, and that’s what happened. It was pretty awesome walking around the dark recesses of Chinatown, poking through tiny temples and cramped machine shops and bakeries and such.
  • The second class was a night class, with an instructor and a fixer, and we wandered around Chinatown and Yaowarat, the neon-lit main thoroughfare. We used a tripod and got some great long-exposure shots of the main crowded tourist drag and the tail lights passing by with the giant neon signs overhead. We also ducked into some alleys filled with hanging paper lamps and cut through the 24-hour flower market, which looked amazing.
  • Took a day-long van trip up to the Ayutthaya temples and Ayothaya floating market north of town. There were six other people, plus a driver and tour guide, and I think I was the only native English speaker, although the tour was in English. We first went to Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon, and saw the reclining Buddha. Then we went to the floating market, and then to Wiharn Phra Mongkhon Bophit. These were all cool to look at, although I didn’t get a lot of historical context, and need to look things up now. At the floating market, I ate at a noodle shop and I think it cost like $1.61.
  • Took a day trip up to the “death railway.” This is the railway built by the Japanese to Burma, as immortalized in The Bridge on the River Kwai, which is almost entirely fictitious, but the Burma Railway obviously wasn’t. I drove up to the Jeath war museum, along with three other people from Iowa and Wisconsin. After looking at the museum depicting the atrocities of the POWs being worked to death on the railroad, we got in a small speedboat and hit the Khwae Yai river and headed up to and under the bridge. This was a single-track iron bridge, and we went up and walked over it, which was slightly scary; OSHA is not a thing, and the railing was pretty minimal. After that, we caught a train going back for part of the way. This was a local third-class train half-filled with tourists, but half-filled with workers and students. The train had open windows, no AC, and just a few open-cage fans. The train wound into the mountains, past farms and across trestles, until we stopped in a camp on the river and ate lunch. I also got to walk on a trestle bridge on the side of the mountain and go in the Krasae cave, which has a small shrine in it. After we finished, our van was there waiting for us, and we headed back to Bangkok just in time for rush hour traffic.
  • Oh, in general, when I wasn’t using the metro or on a tour, I used the Grab app, Asia’s competitor to Uber. This was key, because traffic in the city is so bad. Grab rides were quick, easy, and ridiculously cheap.
  • The inevitable McDonald’s mini-review: I went the first time and just got a burger and fries, which was pretty much the standard. But I went another time and got only Thai items: a chicken bites with rice and the chicken was surprisingly spicy; some fried bread treat thing; a truffle cheese shaker thing with fries which was a neat gimmick, but any time you mess with stock McDonald’s fries, it seems wrong; and they had fried pineapple pies, which were amazing.
  • Felt a bit sick after being stuck in cars with other tourists all day, so I found a wellness spa near the hotel and got a B-12 IV treatment. The clinic was a nice little hidden oasis in a commercial area, and they do an amazing amount of treatment there, including stem cell therapy, PRP, and everything else. A Myers’ cocktail cost about a third the price it would in SF, and helped knock out the start of the cold.
  • The first big dinner was the Palmier at the Four Seasons. That hotel is beautiful, right on the river and landscaped and designed beautifully. The restaurant was… okay. Food was decent, but this was just a basic French bistro at a hotel, and not a big service-driven experience or anything.
  • The other dinner was phenomenal. I went to Sühring, a three-Michelin-star German restaurant that was absolutely insane. The Grab took me to this neighborhood that was mostly small commercial places, like printing shops, but when I went in, it felt like I was hidden away in the hills of Munich. This was a twelve-course thing and the food was excellent, but the service was absolutely over-the-top. Like before they served the Kagoshima Wagyu, they brought out a choice of knives and explained the blade steel and handle wood of each one. Or when they brought out the absolutely perfect assortment of breads, they presented the sourdough starter for inspection. Everything was absolutely excessive and incredible.
  • Every day, I would have a giant breakfast in the morning at the hotel, which was standard Western fare. Then I’d walk around in the heat and end up skipping lunch. Then dinner would, other than the above, be something dumb. Like I ate at two Gordon Ramsay chain restaurants; an IKEA; and a kind of crazy Japanese hole-in-the-wall in an alley. I did not go to Taco Bell.
  • Took the metro up north to see the Royal Thai Air Force museum. It was almost empty on a Saturday, but pretty well-kept with a nice assortment of planes. I specifically wanted to go because they have two of the O-1 Bird Dog planes my dad worked on when he was in the service (although not his exact plane) but they also had more than a few F-5s there, which they still operate. Same with the F-16. The Thai Air Force went through a crazy progression of hand-me-downs from the US, Sweden, France, Germany, and others, trainers that operated as attack aircraft, or older attack aircraft used well beyond their prime. It’s an amazing motley collection of things I normally would not see. (I.e. the Rhein-Flugzugbau RFB-400 Fantrainer is a weird one that doesn’t come up much.)
  • I was in Bangkok right before Songkran, the new year. If you saw White Lotus, you saw how this is celebrated: with squirt guns and crowds in the streets dumping buckets of water on each other. Sounds great when it’s 98 degrees outside; doesn’t sound as great when you’re hauling around camera gear. The first day of the New Year was the last day I was in town, so I did not witness any of this.
  • Speaking of, I greatly simplified my camera haul for the trip. I only brought the Canon EOS R10 mirrorless with two lenses, an Osmo Pocket 3, and my phone. I wasn’t super happy with the R10 at times, but it was much easier to haul around.
  • Trip back was through Hong Kong. I got there at 9:30 at night and had four hours, which was too short to leave and go wander, plus everything was probably closed. I think this was my sixth layover in HKG in the last 24 months, and the place is becoming far too familiar. I had an exit row but in basic economy with the most narrow seat imaginable. Also I had a bag with some Cokes in it in the overhead and a flight attendant managed to shift around the luggage and break them open, which was somehow my fault. No sleep on the way home, a very quick trip through Global Entry, and a long wait on luggage. My “day” ended about 30 hours after I woke up.

Overall, the trip was a nice break. I didn’t think of work at all, but I also did not write at all. There was no grand thesis of this, and although I saw things and learned things, there was no overwhelming catharsis like I had in Vietnam or Cambodia. I thought the trauma of the Death Railway would have some bigger effect on me, but the way it was framed or curated didn’t cause this. I shouldn’t complain. It was a great trip, but I’m struggling to fit everything together.

Still sorting out pictures, although a few have gone to Instagram. I’ll work on that, although I’m also wondering where I should be putting pictures these days. Flickr? Adobe? Anyway.

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Scrivener stuff, 2026 edition

 

I write my books with Scrivener. I have since 2011. It has a daunting learning curve, and I feel like I used 10% of the features on my first book with it, and slowly gained maybe 2% per book. I’ve previously written posts here and here on tips and tricks. I’m not trying to make this a “make big money self-publishing your books!” blog, but I have a need to write this stuff down so I don’t forget it and can find it later. So, here’s another crop of answers for you. Caveat emptor: there are probably better or more preferred ways of doing this. I just beat things until they work.

OK, here we go, in no particular order.

Show the number of files in a folder in the binder

View > Outline > Show subdocument counts in binder. (There is also a View > Outline option at the top of the View menu, which is confusing.)

Show where the current scriv is in the binder

Navigate > Reveal in Binder. Or Cmd-Opt-R. Memorize that; I use it 50,000 times a day.

Exporting keywords

  1. Create a blank text document.
  2. Open the keywords (Project > Show Project Keywords, or Cmd-Shift-K)
  3. Click the first one; shift-click the last one.
  4. Drag them into the blank text document. This exports a comma-delimited text list of the keywords

Adding your own icons

  1. Go to https://www.iconsdb.com and download a 32x32px PNG.
  2. Right-click an item in the binder,
  3. Change Icon > Manage Custom Icons, and add your PNG. Note the name in the menu will be the name from the PNG, so rename the PNG accordingly.

WordPress import

  • You can drag HTML files into the Research section of Scrivener, but not Draft.
  • After they are dragged in, they are uneditable web archives. Go to Document > Convert > Web Page to Text
  • There was a wp2epub plugin that would also do html, but it’s broken in new WordPress versions, hasn’t been updated in 167 years.
  • Tried WP2Static for this… it was slow so I stopped
  • There was an XSL for this see https://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=34656&p=223492#p223492 but it no longer works, I get errors.
  • This is horrible but you could export WordPress to Jekyll…
  • Another option: https://wordpress.org/plugins/aspose-doc-exporter/ – couldn’t get this to work
  • wp2static – crashes
  • I might have to do this again soon, so stay tuned.

The delete comment bug

If you add a comment to some text, then remove the comment and edit the text, the hyperlink text comes back, but with no attached comment

Workaround: highlight the text, delete the comment, cut the text, then Paste and Match Style it back.

Background image

Scrivener 3 – change the background image in compose mode: Project > Project Settings > Background Images (this moved since 2)

Searches and collections

You can turn on and off viewing collections with View > Hide Collections and View > Show Collections. Normally I turn them off because it drives me nuts to have them there and waste space in the binder.

But, here’s how you use them.

  1. Do a search on the project, Cmd-Shift-F
  2. Search on something fun, like do a search on a keyword or a status
  3. Click the magnifying glass to the left of the search term again. Scroll all the way to the bottom and select Save Search as Collection.

Now, that search is going to be in the Collection part of the binder. It’s also going to be dynamic. So for example, if you have a keyword for a character (or whatever) and you save a search as a collection, that collection will enable you to quickly pull up that list of documents.

Numbering problems

This is confusing, bear with me.

Let’s say you have a book that’s three acts and a hundred scenes in each act. You want each act to have a title page, and then each scene is its own deal.

Then let’s say you want number the scenes, like with a number at the top of each one. What’s going to happen is the title page is 1, and your first scene is numbered 2, and you probably want it to start at 1, right?

  1. File > Compile
  2. Select a Format in the left column (or create a new one).
  3. In the right column, set all of the scrivs to a section type. For this example, I’m using Chapter Heading and Scene, plus Front Matter for stuff that’s not part of the book itself.
  4. Click Assign Section Layouts. Select Scene.
  5. (Tip: if you do this 19 times in a row because you keep changing this, it will always open at the first section type. You’re inevitably not editing the first section type. You open it, you’re in the first type, and it doesn’t look right, and you’re sure this stupid program burned you again. It’s because you’re in the wrong section type. Always click the right one first. This is annoying that it doesn’t persist your selection, but here we are.)
  6. Pick a layout for the Scene. Hover over it and click the pencil in the upper right to edit it. Then click Edit <whatever> Layout.
  7. If you’re using a number and a title, click Title Options and in Title Prefix, put <$n:scene>. Don’t put <$n> or it will increment when the title pages are incremented.
  8. If you want only a number, don’t do that. Go to Prefix, and in the Section prefix, put <$n:scene> and center it or whatever you need to do.

Start numbering at 0

We get it, you studied computer science.

Use a placeholder <$n-1> instead of <$n>. Or <$n:scene-1>. Internally the counter is still 1, 2, 3 etc. But when you display it, you are subtracting one so it’s 0, 1, 2, etc. (It doesn’t actually modify the value of the counter. It just displays it one lower.)

Yes, Scrivener doesn’t call them variables. They’re called placeholders. If you’re searching their manual, it’s called a placeholder, not a variable. I’ll use the words placeholder and variable once again so this actually shows up in search, like it doesn’t in their manual. Placeholder=variable.

How many comments are in my document?

grep -r "Comment ID" my-book-file.scriv/Files/Data | wc -l

Let me know if any of these are helpful or blatantly wrong. Like I said, I don’t always know what I’m doing, but I’m sure I’ll need to know the same exact thing later.

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Diego, Zuzu, SSL, WordPress

I went to show someone my web site yesterday, and the SSL certificate expired a month ago. (And every modern web broswer freaks out about that, and prints warnings and blocks everything and acts like I’m scraping credit cars and stealing identities, even though there’s nothing here that could do anything involving any PII whatsoever.) That shows how on top of things I have been here. I haven’t even thought about the blog in months. I mean, it’s mid-March and I don’t even think it’s 2026 yet. I’ve completely lost the thread on time. Anyway.

Diego
Zuzu

First big news is that we adopted two cats last month: Diego and Zuzu. They are brother and sister, from the same litter. But Diego is like twice as big. He’s all muscle, incredibly strong and fast, constantly moving. Zuzu is tiny, all fluff, and absolutely beautiful. Diego was pretty outgoing from the start, and has bonded more to Sarah, sleeping on the bed every night and following her around. Zuzu has been extremely skittish, hiding in the closet and always running away, but she’s slowly made progress. Diego is very protective of her, and they play well together, despite the size difference. It’s been great to have companions again, even if they’re tearing the house apart at 2am every night.

I have to admit there is a slight bittersweet feeling if comparing them to Squeak and Loca. They were both very cuddly, especially in their old age. And Loca was my soul cat, and would spend all day and night with me. I can’t even pick up Zuzu right now, and Diego is not a cuddler. Maybe that will change as they get older, but thinking about the years with Loca and the reality that she’s gone is still painful.

* * *

Speaking of pain, I had to renew that SSL certificate, and a two-second job turned into like five hours of hurt. There’s this big schism between bncert and certbot and I think I started with bncert last year, then tried to get certbot going, and it completely screwed my site. Lots of panic, tons of floundering, and I could not get it to work. I eventually got the HTTPS stuff going and the permalinks were screwed up. Any configuration of the .htaccess made it worse. I don’t know what I did, but I eventually beat it enough to get it back to operational. But I will forget all of this, and in six months when the cert expires and the auto-renew script fails, I will screw it up again. (Note to self if you find this in August: don’t start chasing certbot; you used bncert.)

Anyway, if you find broken anything here, let me know.

* * *

Nothing else. Giant release at work, which I won’t talk about here, but that was 100% of my bandwidth for a while. Trip booked for first week and a half of April, but I still need to flesh out what I’m doing. It’s not to any current war zone, but who knows how much that will change in the next month.

I’m currently heads down with Atmospheres 2. Every month since like a year ago, I said I would wrap it up in a month. I think I’m close to that, or at least I want to get a feature-complete draft by the time I leave on April 2. It’s getting there, but it’s over 500 pages now, so it’s a slow process. I think I started this book in 2014, so I really need to end it. Also, I have published 19 books, and I don’t want the 20th to be some dumb compilation zine thing, so I really need to keep on this until it’s done.

Nothing else. Everything else. I’ll try to remember I have a blog before the summer is over or whatever.

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Mexico

For my birthday this year, Sarah and I headed down to Mexico. This was a bit of an unusual vacation that didn’t really feel like a vacation, but in the opposite of the usual “we went to somewhere because we had to, and now need a week of vacation.” It was also noticeably different than my usual solo trips to oddball places that are more of an experience than actual rest.

So the deal: we flew in to Cancun, but actually stayed at a medical wellness spa about ten miles north, at Costa Mujeres. Flight in was delayed by three hours due to a broken plane, but it was a straight shot from SFO, maybe five hours. Got there and had a driver waiting, so we didn’t have to run the gauntlet of transportation people on the way out. We got loaded into an SUV and drove through Cancun at night, looking at the surrounding stuff on 307, but going straight to the facility.

I think the first question I kept getting was if I was worried about immigration or about the general safety, which is a bit silly. Immigration in and out was absolutely minimal. Coming back to the US, I’m pre-vetted with Global Entry and don’t even talk to a person. The immigration into Mexico was only a “how many days/where are you staying” and a stamp in the passport. As far as safety, we stayed at the facility the entire time, and it was roughly five times safer than an upscale Disney vacation. We were talking about this and I was trying to think of the most unsafe place I’ve ever been, and it would definitely be the United States. I mean, I caught RSV in Dubai, and I went to a statistically unsafe beach in Iceland because of the cold and brutal sneaker waves. But every time I’ve ever felt imminent danger, it’s been in the US. Anyway, Mexico was entirely safe.

The resort was insanely beautiful. It was a single curved row of suites, made to look like a strand of DNA from the top. Every unit had a view of the water and a private balcony, and the door opened up to a long balcony walkway that looked out over a mangrove forest. They built the place maybe two years ago, and it all looked ultra-modern and high-tech. There were infinity pools and fountains facing the water, with a white sand beach below. The entire facility was impeccable. Our room was giant, a suite with a living area, a balcony, and a bathroom roughly as big as our living room back home. It was all truly five-star.

On the first day, we started the program. We weren’t on a particular plan, but they offer different plans like for weight loss, smoking cessation, women’s health, longevity, performance training, and so on. I began with a battery of tests and evaluations, scans and measurements and blood draws, meetings with doctors, a dentist, various specialists, and a nutritionist. I got set up with a specific nutritional plan for the trip, and met with a coordinator to register for the various activities and treatments I wanted for the week. Everything’s done in an app, which keeps your schedule, shows activities available, and keeps your test results and meal menus for the week.

So there’s one dining facility you go to three times a day, and your meal times are scheduled. It’s a pretty swanky restaurant, with inside and outside seating. The food was all insanely good. I wasn’t programmed in for weight loss or for sugar detox, and was given extra protein for each meal, usually either additional tofu or tempeh, or sometimes a protein shake. The food was vaguely a Mediterranean diet, with no red meat or chicken, occasional fish, and mostly vegetable protein, but not strictly vegetarian or vegan. Portions were controlled, but no more so than any fancy restaurant that isn’t shoveling out buffet food. Everything looked and tasted incredible, and the staff were also great to work with at each meal. (Also, not on the menu, but Sarah somehow bribed someone in the kitchen, and on the night of my birthday, I got a slice of flourless chocolate cake. I don’t know if it was my general sugar depravation or not, but it was insanely good. Definitely not nutritionist-approved.)

I won’t get too into the medical stuff in a public post, but I did some physiotherapy and osteopathy on my back, and worked with a trainer to stretch more. There was a world-class gym on the top floor, and I went there every day. The bottom floor had a hydrotherapy circuit, which was fun: a walk-through pool of freezing cold water, then a Jacuzzi of boiling hot water. The main pool was warm, and had these water jet things that ranged from a pleasing massage to enough pressure to remove paint from a car. We also took a healthy cooking class, where we learned how to make various vegetable protein snacks and foods.

It’s hard to write much more about the week because it wasn’t about what did happen, but what didn’t happen. It was probably the lowest amount of stress I’ve had in my life since I was a teenager. There was no itinerary of museums and shops and landmarks I had to see. I didn’t do the usual ritual of filling dead space in the day by shoveling calories into my head. The TV never got turned on. I didn’t think of work at all. I just walked, exercised, ate long meals and talked with Sarah, and did nothing. It was incredible.

Another odd thing was that there weren’t many people there, and you seldom saw anyone. I think they scheduled meals in such a way that there were never crowds, and there were maybe a dozen or a dozen and a half guests there at any time. The people I saw – this was a real White Lotus situation, absurdly beautiful women and rich guys who if you asked them what they do, they would scoff and say, “Well, a little investing, and I’m on a few boards” and it turns out they’re like the COO of GE Healthcare or something. No kids, either. Overall, it was an extremely quiet situation, and everyone treated everyone else like how you act as a New Yorker when you run into someone famous. The brief head nod, ignore them otherwise.

Unfortunately, it all ended on Saturday. I had one more treatment that morning, and we had breakfast and lunch, then we said our goodbyes, paid up the tab, and a driver brought us back to the airport. It was an abrupt culture shock, as the Cancun airport is always cramped and crowded. I immediately fell off the wagon and got a Coke Zero. Flight back was pretty uneventful. I had Global Entry and got back in the country without even talking to anyone.

I immediately was back into the fray with work and house stuff. (We got the place painted while we were gone, and had to move everything back into place, which took a few days.) I am still trying to figure out exactly how this could work, how I could capture a few practices from the trip and make the other 51 weeks of the year match the pattern a bit more. Looking at my numbers, and my sleep and HRV were way better there. I didn’t gain or lose weight on the trip, but there was some non-tangible improvement in my general digestive health. Not looking for answers here, and I know some of them. It’s just a matter of building routines to support things better.

Anyway. Good stuff. I’d love to go back, or do a similar thing in another country. Maybe in the fall. First, I think there will be another dumb trip in late spring. I’ll start thinking about that in a month or two.

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55

gfafbI am fifty-five today.

I feel a strong need to write something here to keep up with tradition, but I’m actually writing this weeks before my actual birthday, because my time management is so horrible, I will otherwise forget to do this and suddenly remember in mid-July. Also, I’ll be in Mexico on the actual day of my birthday, so I should figure this post out now.

55 is the 11th number in the Fibonacci sequence. The previous number was 34, and the year 2005 seems like three lifetimes ago. The next one is 89 and I honestly don’t expect to make it that far. 89 is also the year I graduated high school, so if there’s some miracle in stem cell therapy that keeps me going, expect an oddly nostalgic post 34 years from now.

55 is a nice round number that’s probably the end of middle age and the beginning of the senior years, which really doesn’t sound or feel right. I think about this far too much, the need to divide my life into three clean acts, and that act 3 is probably starting now, if it hasn’t already. I’ve read too many self-help books about midlife crisis and finding your purpose at the end of your life, and the only consensus that I’ve found is “do what makes you happy” or some similar advice I can’t entirely follow.

The IRS has something called the Rule of 55, which I’m now eligible for, I guess. After you turn 55, you can withdraw from the 401K at your current employer without penalty if you leave your job. I don’t plan on retiring this year, but it’s nice to know I won’t take a 10% hit immediately if I had to use this money to survive. The “when do I retire?” question seems to come up more now, and this nice round number presses the issue a bit more. Other magic numbers on the calendar include 59 1/2 (when I can withdraw from any retirement account without penalty), 62 (Social Security early retirement age), and 65 (Medicare eligibility.) I fully expect both Social Security and Medicare to be gone in the next three years, so remove those from the equation. (Actually, I expect it to be fully functional for everyone born before January 20, 1971, and that’s when the retirement age will be changed to 90 or something.)

55 is into this weird bubble with regard to health and death. When I was 34 or whatever and a classmate died, it was either a rare cancer or a spectacular car crash. I think after your young and stupid years are over, you enter a few decades where you’re probably not going to suddenly die, provided you wore a seat belt and didn’t sniff any questionable white powders. Now I’m firmly in the era of people just dying. I wouldn’t say “old age” but now people my age die, and there’s a lot less “too soon” about it.

So lots of famous people lived to the ripe old age of 55 and then didn’t. And some of them aren’t health things: Will Rogers had a plane crash at 55; Kate Spade killed herself at 55. So did Del Shannon. Johnny Ramone had cancer; so did Robert Urich. Woody Guthrie had Huntington’s. Paul Lynde had a heart attack. I think if I was in college and you asked me about Friedrich Nietzsche’s death, my answer would be, “Yeah, he was old.” Well, now I’m the same age as him.

Writing this entry 20 days after writing my end-of-year summary always sort of sabotages things here. I just about all of the quantifiable things of the last year: how much I wrote, walked, published, ate, flew, whatever. I guess I’m supposed to write about what I feel here, in some philosophical sense? All I feel is that I should keep writing. And I am.

My house is currently all half-dismantled because we’re getting it painted next week (or this week, I guess), and all of my paper journals are buried behind six metric tons of books in crates right now, which is great because I won’t go back and read what I wrote on my birthday 22 years ago or whatever (and also have a severe dust mite reaction that will require an Epi-Pen and a Benadryl sandwich). I have many birthday entries here, and I just started reading them, but I need to stop and actually write. So I’ll stop here and do that.

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general

Wisconsin, Indiana

Wauwatosa at nightIn the mad flurry of book release stuff and end-of-year stuff, I forgot to write down anything about the trip to the Midwest last month, so I’ll jot down a few things in case I need to remember it ten years from now.

  • Total trip was a Saturday to Sunday thing, eight nights. But I took a side trip, drove to Indiana on the morning of the 24th and back the night of the 26th.
  • There was a lot of stress about getting out of Oakland because it was zero visibility and flights were starting to get delayed or cancelled. We left a half-hour late, but made it up in the air. Had a very brief layover in Denver, then headed out to MKE. The flight felt insanely quick, with two segments that were just over 90 minutes each, and zero hassles on both.
  • Hertz is officially on the no list forever. We landed at like 7:00 and when I went to the Hertz counter to get my car, it had closed completely at 5:00, with a phone number that said, “Sorry, closed.” Not sure why they didn’t tell me that when I rented the car. The rental thing said “your name will be on the board and you can take your car and leave.” It wasn’t. We hurried over to National and got set up there. After 20 minutes in the Hertz AI madness phone tree, I talked to a person who was going to charge me $300 for the privilege of not getting a car.
  • We stayed at a Marriott Residence Inn in Wauwatosa. It’s in some weird “research park” thing built on top of a former sanitarium or something, and it’s a super-modern road with roundabouts and a bunch of empty buildings. The room was identical to the one I had in El Segundo in 2021. I think it’s the same as what I had in Denver and in Chicago in 2022. That’s always a weird experience.
  • It was like 20 degrees the whole time I was there. No real snow. Insanely high winds, like Iceland-rip-your-car-door-off winds. Losing half my body fat made this rough. But the hotel had an incredible warmth to it, which always felt nice.
  • There were three days of family stuff with Sarah’s family, but the out-of-town contingent wasn’t there yet, so this was mostly quiet time with her mom or dad. We went to a mall, which was busy, like almost mid-00s busy. I expected it to be quiet, given the economy. Went to Boswell Books, which was pretty packed. Always good to see people buying analog.
  • I don’t know why, but any time I stay at a Marriott, anywhere in the world, any time I go to the gym, there’s an older Asian woman on the elliptical for like four hours straight. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Schaumburg or Helsinki or Nuremberg or Orlando. I think they fly them in. It’s almost refreshing in a weird way.
  • The drive to South Bend was pretty uneventful, and much faster than I remember. I feel like when me and Ray drove to the Milwaukee Metalfest in 1993, it took like six or seven hours, and this was maybe three hours plus an hour of time shift.
  • I stayed at this weird Hilton vacation property that’s off Main Street in Mishawaka, by the UP mall. I think it was built in 1995 and not touched since. It has all of this college football stuff in it and probably makes all of its money on home games. I told my sister it looked like a Notre Dame themed funeral home. She told her friend who works for Hilton and he thought it was hilarious.
  • I didn’t pay for the hotel (thanks, Amex) and I’m glad, because it had a million little annoyances: a kitchenette that was a dorm fridge and microwave and nothing more; bad plumbing; lots of noise from the pool below; a completely unusable exercise room containing I think the Sears treadmill my mom threw out in 1997. Good location, except there’s a real Hilton just north of it, and that’s confusing when you give someone directions.
  • I went to University Park mall on Christmas Eve. I managed to lose my Pocket 3 camera, which sort of soured the whole trip for me.
  • Went to my sister’s twice, had Christmas there. Saw my dad for brunch the next day, then headed out.
  • The trip was very odd, because I did not feel like I was in Indiana, at all. Part of this was the short amount of time I had, and I didn’t get to wander. Part of it is things have changed so much. I remember walking the mall (and recording it on video, which of course I lost) and wondering what was still there from when I used to frequent the place in the late 80s/early 90s, and the answer is absolutely nothing. I guess JC Penney still remains, but there’s been 100% turnover, plus a giant food court that’s alien to me, new carpet, new skylights, new parking lot layout, and now the Sears is dead. Most of my time in Indiana was like this, which astounds me, considering how slow-moving things are there, and I used to come back and places would have the same exact signage from when I was a kid in like 1975.
  • I think a big part of this is I’ve turned a corner on the Nostalgia Problem. Looking at old journals, I used to ruminate way too much on things like Bloomington or the one weird year I spent working at IUSB or my old haunt, the Concord Mall. Now I don’t care. I don’t think about it. That strong sentimentality is gone. I have a few theories on this, and maybe I worry about it slightly, but I’m glad I have reached this point.
  • Quick trip back to Milwaukee. All I will say about the trip around Chicago: you should not be able to legally call something an express lane if the speed limit is 55.
  • Because I missed the 24th/25th festivities, I arrived in MKE just in time for the post-holiday wind-down, and basically had a day in which to pack and jettison trash and get ready for the flight home.
  • There was something almost Scandinavian about the street at that Discovery Ignition whatever park in Wauwatosa. It reminded me of the layout in Iceland or Oslo or something. Maybe it was an odd sense memory of the temperature and wind outside, but I liked it.
  • Also, there is a county park across the way that’s nothing but some slight hills covered in golden grass that’s waiting for the spring showers. I had this ASA drone test book with a picture of someone flying a sUAS standing on a hill like this, and it made me wish I had brought a drone with me, although the winds would have made it tough, plus standing outside in 20 degree weather for an hour or two isn’t ideal. I spent the first half of the trip thinking I should drive to Costco and buy a cheap Potensic Atom 2 to take a few flights there. Then I lost that stupid camera and was out $500 and realized this was a dumb idea.
  • Trip back was pretty stress-free. But it’s sad to come home and not have anyone waiting for you. I really miss returning to the cats after having been gone and having both of them be total velcro for a few days.

Overall, it was a pretty quick and uneventful trip, but I’ll take it. I was happy to see everyone and we had some quality time in there, but it was almost strange how it went down. And miracle of miracles: I came back with no flu, no Covid, not even a cold. That’s a good start to 2026.

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general

Out now: Statue of Limitations

Statue of Limitations book coverI’m happy to announce that my new book Statue of Limitations is out now!

TL;DR:

  • Kindle
  • Print
  • It’s 978-1-942086-23-9 if you want to order it from anywhere that does Ingram

This book is a collection of 30 stories, flash fiction, and other fragments and zine articles and stuff. It’s similar in theme to my 2019 book Ranch: The Musical, and a bit more lightweight than last year’s Decision Paralysis. I’m happy I was able to get this one in right under the wire in the last few hours of 2025, so I can clear the deck and start working on something new.

I spent most of 2025 trying to land a sequel to Atmospheres and got pretty close, but life sort of fell apart for a minute back in September, and I probably lost a good month there. I can’t remember when I wrote down this title, but I started throwing various zine articles that were never published, dream journals, listicles, and parts of stories into a draft towards the end of October, with a goal of getting a 20,000-word quickie done in 2025.

This is the third time I’ve done this, and it’s sort of akin to the Agile development process. Ship early, ship often; I do these much more lightweight books that are cheap and can be written fast, read fast, published fast. I hate to use the term “punk rock” to describe anything, but the idea here is that instead of spending years chipping away at an 800-page tome that eventually nobody will read, I’d rather push out these quick DIY dispatches and keep the river flowing. Maybe they aren’t perfect; maybe they’re filled with typos or dead ends. But the goal is to keep them going and constantly improve, get the next one slightly better than the last.

On October 19 (my anniversary), I had a new project with 14 documents, 11,000 words and a potential title but no story for it. I think by Thanksgiving, I’d broken 25,000 words, and it got up to 30K shortly after that. The word count is deceptive, because maximalist writers like David Foster Wallace will have sentences that long, but this writing is so dense and concentrated, a 500-word story can have a ton of work in it.

I took two weeks off in December, and hoped I could catch up a bit. November was rough because of the death of Loca, but I kept at it, chipping away. My hope dwindled on getting it done by the 31st, but I trudged on, thinking at least I could wrap it up by the end of January. I got almost no work done on the trip to Wisconsin and Indiana, and when I got back, I opened the manuscript and just stared at it, thinking it would take me a week or two to get moving from a dead stop.

I don’t know what happened, but I woke up at five in the morning on the 31st and thought, “I have to finish this today.” I spent the next twelve hours at full combat speed, rushing through each piece, writing what needed to be finished, junking a couple of stories and rounding as many corners as possible. I had to do the Kindle layout, which required a Scrivener upgrade that I thought for sure was going to doom me. I decided to defer the print version and my usual “long last look” pass just to get the Kindle draft out, knowing I could do another editing pass and get the wraparound cover and print layout done on the first. At 0500 I didn’t even have the titular story started. By dinner time, the book was submitted.

Another quick announcement I’ll get into later: this is the first book on a new imprint called Rumored Books. I’ll use it going forward for my stuff. I don’t know what else I will do with it or how I’ll market it. You’re looking at the URL for it (rumored.com) although I’ve got rumoredbooks.com registered and it’s pointed here for now. Maybe I will spin up a fancy site nobody will read for the imprint. Maybe it will become a different blog. Maybe I will publish other stuff. More on this later I guess.

What I do know is I have to keep going. This is my 19th book, and I have at least two dozen ideas, half-done manuscripts, and other things up on blocks right now, so I have to keep the river flowing. Stay tuned.

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general

2025

endIt’s the end of the year, so like I’ve done previously, it’s time for the big dumb summary of the last 365 days. I’m actually doing this a day early, but I don’t expect much to happen in the next 24 hours. Anyway:

  • In January, I went to Norway for my birthday. I liked the city, but January isn’t the best time to go, obviously. Had a really good dinner at Mikael Svensson’s two-Michelin-star Kontrast; met a former employee from India I’d never met face-to-face, and wandered the snow a bit in the short winter days. Oslo was a wonderful city, but you might want to go in like July.
  • In April, I went to Cambodia. This trip was an extreme mixture of awesome, traumatic, confusing, and amazing sights, all juxtaposed in the most random way.
  • In June, I went to Cleveland for a quick weekend and a book reading. I read from a book I still haven’t finished, which I was supposed to finish in 2025, but here we are.[
  • In August, I went to Mongolia. I also tacked on a few hours in Hong Kong on the way back. Ulaanbaatar and the nature around it was interesting and strange and a mix of central Asian remote nothingness with a very Soviet-looking city. Had a couple of long trips to the middle of nowhere, and unfortunately got sick halfway through. This was probably one of the most out-of-comfort-zone trips I’ve taken.
  • In September, Squeak died. We had her for almost 18 years, and she’d been in a slow decline for a while. This was the first time I’d gone through this experience, and it was incredibly hard.
  • Then in November, Loca died. Her decline was rapid and painful to watch, and she was “my” cat, so this one really hurt.  Also having no cats anymore is a huge emptiness for me.
  • I also lost my oldest aunt and a second cousin this year. It’s amazing to me that I had 13 aunts and uncles, and now I’m down to three.
  • I got my Part 107 drone license. I also got a second drone, a DJI Mavic Air 3s. Of course, now the government has banned new DJI drones from coming in the country, and I’m very paranoid about crashing one of my drones and not being able to get a replacement.
  • In December, I went to Wisconsin and Indiana. Pretty uneventful and painless trip, except I lost my DJI Osmo Pocket 3 camera at the University Park Mall and am still pissed about that. (I bought a replacement. I now need to use it more.)
  • I started the year working on a sequel to Rumored to Exist, and added this subplot that got far too plotty, so I removed it and set it aside to make another book out of it. I ended up finishing neither of those.
  • I shifted to a sequel of Atmospheres I’ve been trying to land for ten years now. Every month, I thought it was close to finishing by the next month. In about September, a confluence of bad things completely shut down my writing, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to escape that.
  • I started working on a short book, built around some already-published stories from zines. This was intended to be a quickie thing I could publish by the end of the year. That didn’t happen, but I did keep writing all year.
  • All in, my net new total writing in Scrivener this year was 154,288 words.
  • I kept up the weight loss. When I started this round in October of 2024, I weighed about 230 pounds. By December of 2025, I was 162. My body fat went from like 35% to 19%. I found that this makes winter somewhat excruciating now, even when “winter” in SF is like 47 degrees.
  • I still don’t know how to get any quantifiable data out of Apple Health to say how many steps I took or whatever. I did walk or work out every day. I didn’t regularly meditate. I know my numbers are down, but maybe I should stop tracking this entirely.
  • I flew 38,876 miles, 7 countries, a total of 3d 13h in the air. (My record is 2023: 9 countries, 69,316 miles.)
  • I took 9,019 pictures, which honestly is way more than I thought. I only took 3,384 in 2024. My high is 2022 at 12,604.
  • I had no resolutions last year, so 100% there.

I don’t know what resolutions I have and I sort of don’t believe in the pressure of that, but maybe it’s time. Here are some vague things I want to work on in 2026:

  • Finish this “quick” book and get another big book out. And more writing in general.
  • I either need to cancel subscriptions or start using them. I have a bad habit of subscribing to self-improvement things and then never actually doing anything.
  • I say this every year, but I seriously need to throw out, donate, or sell like half the stuff I own. I’ve slowly been working on it, but I need to make more progress on this. And it would probably help if I got rid of stuff faster than I bought it, so maybe I should slow my roll there.
  • Take more pictures. More film. I bought something like 20 rolls of 35mm film for Mongolia and ended up not taking a film camera, so that stuff is just sitting here.
  • Fly more. I only flew a few times in March, then did as much as I could in spite of weather in November/December, and that was something like 22 total hours of total flight time. So, more.
Categories
general

The death of Pair

I recently moved this site. It’s still at rumored dot com, of course. And it’s hopefully somewhat of an invisible transition. But it was pulling teeth there for a bit. Let me explain.

I first registered this domain on November 16, 1998. Prior to that, this blog (which wasn’t called a blog yet, because that term barely existed) lived over at Speakeasy, the hosting provider that was previously an internet cafe in Seattle. In 1998, I registered for a hosting account at Pair dot com, probably because Michael was using them for his site. I also registered the domain rumored dot com. The site went through various iterations of a static site, eventually using a static site generator I wrote before static site generators were A Big Thing, and then eventually it ended up in self-hosted WordPress.

That was going okay for decades I guess. I’d get a big bill every November, I’d pay it, and I’d have somewhat average service for the next 12 months. Pair was never blindingly fast or very leading-edge on their offering, but it worked reliably, and there was little fuss. Using some new wiz-bang hosting thing like Vercel or whatever would give me one-click whatever and the latest stacks and toys and apps and whatnot. But for just straight-up Apache/PHP/MySQL and no complications, Pair worked.

For a while, this was slightly frustrating because I was working with Ruby on Rails, then learning way more PHP, and I had grandiose ideas of doing the Next Big Multimedia Thing somehow, writing a database-backed CMS that had some weird image component or collaborative wiki something-or-other. And I’d write Rails stuff on my home machine and then not really have a way to deploy it to Pair. Or I’d come up with some PHP behemoth and then copy it over, and it would constantly time out on their machines. I gave up on that eventually. WordPress more or less worked. I thought about moving to Ghost or some real CCMS system, but once you get well past a thousand entries into a WordPress blog, moving it elsewhere is like moving houses when you have more than 20,000 books. You can’t do it on a whim.

So life went on. And then this year, my annual bill went up like 75%, to $455, and was promptly autocharged to my card without me thinking about it. My fault for not paying attention, I guess. But then I went to dig into exactly which plan I had, and it turns out I was grandfathered into an ancient plan that didn’t exist anymore, and was stuck on some old hosting system or something. Like I was paying something like $42 a month, and a $5.99 a month plan on their pricing page touted like ten times the disk space and bandwidth I was throttled down to. Also, $42 a month isn’t your annual bill. These are GrubHub prices; order a $5 hamburger and a $5 drink, and your total after all the chickenshit fees is $47.

Pair used to be a great independent company, and they got bought and then sold and bought again, and they’re now owned by some Dutch company who has an About Us page that looks like it was written by ChatGPT. My billing inquiry was answered accordingly, and instead of any attempt to work with me or give me a slight discount, I got a big cut and paste of a press release or something, and was informed I could move my stuff to another hosting system, which see above about moving a giant site. And why should I reward this place with my business for running in this fashion?

I told S about this and she mentioned working on a marketing project for a large bank who shall go unnamed (they have “of America” in there somewhere) and when she asked why people would stay even thought they planned on screwing up rates and terms, the bank’s one-word answer was “inertia.” I felt the same way when a savings account I had for twenty years was suddenly paying a fifth the interest as an account that any new customer would get. In that case, I just opened a second account and moved my money over. But that didn’t involve a maze of redirected URLs, byzantine scripts I wrote ten years ago and have completely forgotten about, and a gigantic MySQL database.

Anyway. I looked at my options, and chose the path of least resistance. I went over to AWS and spun up a Lightsail WordPress instance with something like 40x as much disk space and who knows how much faster for $7 a month, and the first three months were free. I exported the old WP instance, imported it to the new one, and after maybe a few hours of futzing, I had it more or less working the same. So I pointed the domain to the new one, and that’s that.

There are a few things that did not make the move, which is fine. I had a bunch of loose pages outside of WordPress for books that aren’t even published anymore, and those are gone. The old Paragraph Line web site that has zero traffic is dust. I think there are some little theme-based things that may be off, but it’s all mostly fine. HTTPS was a brief bump in the road, but it’s now working. The Lighthouse score is about 5 higher, and the rest of that is the fault of WordPress. And if I ever decide I need another site or a CDN or any of the other 863 things AWS does, it’s a click or three away.

A side note I almost forgot about: email. Pair has a system for putting a bunch of email addresses on the domain. There’s a largely useless webmail page and a completely useless spam filtering system, so I was just routing all of it to a free gmail account. Setting up an mx rule at the domain level to send all of the email to Google was a problem (I forget why) and shopping for some other place to handle my email was a nightmare. I could definitely throw fifty bucks a month at some SaaS Solution For Your Enterprise Email Needs. It was far easier to hold my nose and sign up for a Google Workspace account and point Rumored at that. I ran into some circular argument auth crap when I set this up, trying to keep jkonrath@gmail alive and point jkonrath@rumored at it, but I eventually got that figured out. This $7 a month is $7 more than 0, but it increased my disk space from 15 to 60GB and added a whole suite of Google apps I will probably never use.

There is some nostalgic thing about walking away from something you’ve used daily for 27 years. The Pair account reminds me of the start of my writing in Seattle, and all the years I blogged in New York, and the various book sites and other schemes I ran from that host. It makes me reminisce about the era when PHP was king and I was struggling to learn more about it. It was a constant through many moves and cities and eras and lifetimes. But, it’s just a host, I guess. I’m still sitting at a Bash prompt when I ssh to the new place. I’m still typing into the same WordPress editor as I write this. Everything’s changed, but nothing’s changed.

Anyway. I’m out that $455, which is stupid. If I get time, I’ll start doing more new stuff with the new hosting, maybe. Or maybe I’ll start actually posting here more next year.

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general

107

SFO sectional mapSo, I’m now officially, according to the FAA, a remote pilot, with an sUAS rating. I just passed my Part 107 exam and got my license in the mail yesterday. I’d had a Temporary Airman Certificate since last month, but I now have the real FAA card in my wallet.

Flying drones in controlled airspace involves a few hurdles, depending on what you’re doing. The FAA is not keen on a few pounds of plastic and metal getting ingested into a 737’s engine on takeoff, so they’ve established rules you’re supposed to follow, and the technology forces the issue a bit. Drones that weigh more than 250g now require something called Remote ID, which broadcasts the drone’s location, altitude, and speed, plus the operator’s position. And drones have to be registered by the FAA, which requires the operator to take a 20-some question multiple-choice test online.

If you do that, you can fly recreationally, which means you can’t perform any commercial missions, like making real estate videos or shooting a movie or anything else. This also (arguably) includes posting content on monetized social media platforms, although this is a gray area. Most people do this anyway, but there was a high-profile case in 2020 where someone was fined $200,000 for repeatedly breaking this rule. They were a high-profile influencer, and were also flying recklessly and breaking a bunch of other rules, but still.

There are a bunch of other rules, of course. You can’t fly above 400 feet AGL; you can’t fly in low visibility; you have limitations based on the controlled airspace above you; you are the lowest level of right-of-way in the sky; and so on. But the biggest one is intent. And I didn’t plan on getting a job doing aerial building inspections, but the whole thing is a challenge, and I’ve always thought I should study and take the Part 107 exam ever since I first flew a drone in 2020. So…

I bought a couple of books on Amazon a while back, and thumbed through them but never committed to studying anything. And after I finished my MSML degree in 2023, I bought an online course at pilotinstitute.com with hopes of completing all the video lessons and then taking the test, and of course that didn’t happen. I’d barely even been flying since 2023, and had a total lack of inertia on any of this.

Back in October, I started flipping through one of the test prep books one night, and decided I needed to just force the issue. I went to the FAA web site, looked up how to register for the Part 107 exam, and booked a date ten days later. Now I’d have to force myself to study, or lose the $175 fee.

The FAA’s Part 107 exam is a 60-question multiple-choice test that takes two hours, and you’re required to score 70% or higher. The test encompasses about a dozen different areas of knowledge, from airspace regulations to reading maps to weather systems knowledge to emergency procedures to those little signs on the side of the runway that tell your pilot where that taxiways are at an airport. The test is in some ways a subset of the Part 61 exam you take as a private pilot, and for both, you study from the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, a 522-page behemoth of a manual that covers all of this and more.

The funny part about the Part 107 test is there’s a lot of stuff you’re tested on that doesn’t entirely apply to drones. For example, you’ll need to know about radio communications, but you can’t transmit and don’t need to announce your actions over the radio. You need to learn all about airport operations, but you for the most part can’t operate at an airport. You need to know all about weather and how to decrypt a METAR report, but the bottom line is you’re probably going to fire up an app to take a glance at the forecast, and if it’s anything but nice outside, you won’t fly. A lot you need to study won’t apply to you when flying drones, but I guess if you have an intellectual curiosity around this, it’s interesting to read about it.

There’s a whole cottage industry of classes, videos, books, and web sites on passing the 107, many of them somewhat dubious, and all of them highly variable depending on how you learn. Here’s basically how I studied:

  • The Pilot Institute course was great, but incredibly detailed, and it felt like it would take me months to watch all the videos. I worked on that, but seriously, it’s like 322 videos and quizzes, and I think I finished 40% of them.
  • I also watched some YouTube videos that were like an hour long and a total overview. These varied greatly in quality. I won’t link to specific examples, but they’re out there.
  • I think I read five or six different books, plus the PHAK, the FAA test supplement book, and the FAA’s Remote Pilot Study Guide. The ASA Test Board guide was the one most helpful to me, and it also gave me a set of practice tests online which were helpful.
  • https://free-faa-exam.kingschools.com/drone-pilot is the most helpful practice test site. You can pick how many questions and which of the six big categories they are from. What I did after a week or so of deep study was to take 20 questions a day, then write down every single thing I missed and go back and research them.
  • I also created a note in Apple Notes that was basically an abbreviated list of everything on the test, including various mnemonics and things I had to be careful to remember. (I.e. the controlled airspace classes are Above, Busy, Crowded, Dinky, Everything else, and Go for it.) I looked at these notes constantly, any time I had my phone out.
  • Although I don’t 100% trust it, ChatGPT was pretty good at answering basic questions or listing information on the test. Like if I had some meteorological question about cloud formation or I wanted an explanation of a symbol on a chart, it was pretty good at giving me an answer.
  • Another random tip: when you take the test, they give you a book called the Airman Knowledge Testing Supplement for Sport Pilot, Recreational Pilot, Remote Pilot, and Private Pilot. It’s a bunch of examples and diagrams, so on the test, they can ask “On Figure 20 Sectional Chart Excerpt, what is…” You can buy or download the book on your own. There is a legend at the front of the book which basically describes every item that appears on a sectional chart. I was trying to memorize all of these symbols and lines. You don’t have to; just look them up.

I continued on this, but during my first week, Squeak died, and that threw off the whole thing. Also, I was taking these practice tests and kept getting hung up on questions, especially ones that required a lot of memorization. I pushed out my exam date by two weeks, and kept going on my study.

There’s a small maze of logins and applications you have to do to take the test. You create an IACRA login. You apply for an FTN number. You create a PSI login. You apply for a test date. You pay for the test. I think there was a login.gov step in there. All of these sites are different than the FAA site where you register a drone, the third-party site where you took that 20-question TRUST test for recreational flying, or the FAA site where you request flight authorization in controlled airspace via LAANC. All of these web sites look like a DMV web site from 1997. Bookmark everything, take notes on what logins you used where, and don’t do what I do and use two different emails. Also, check your spam folder regularly, because all of these confirmations get flagged as spam.

I finally took the test early on a Saturday morning. It was at a nondescript four-story office building out by what used to be Candlestick Park. It looked like a typical office park thrown down in the early 80s on the peninsula during that particular tech boom, and the inside lobby definitely had that vibe. I sat in my car and did some last-second cramming on my phone before I went inside. I wish I could have taken pictures, but I was not allowed to even bring in my phone.

The security situation was bizarre. No phone, no watch, no coat, no jacket. I had to take off my hooded sweatshirt, empty all my pockets, put everything in a locker. They checked my glasses, patted me down, checked underneath the cuffs of my pants, and did everything but made me disrobe. I was allowed to bring specific things in; they gave me a copy of the testing supplement and a pencil. I was allowed to bring in a four-function calculator, a magnifying glass, and a clear magnifying ruler. I didn’t know if those rules were from 1974 or if I really needed that stuff, but why not.

This was a third-party test site, and I guess I assumed it was only pilot testing, but I guess they do all sorts of secure exams, like for pharmacists and TSA workers and whatever else. I think I was the only one taking a pilot’s test, because I was the only person with the test supplement and an armful of rulers and calculators and junk. They brought me in to a room of study carols, each with a computer. The test fired up on there, and it was a typical DMV-style online exam thing, with the worst interface imaginable. It also had an insane number of pre-test things you had to accept and calibrate and click OK on, the worst LMS setup imaginable. After what seemed like 20 minutes of prep, I started on my questions.

The test questions were pretty much like the practice tests. Actually, some of the questions were exactly like the ones on the practice test. I read through them carefully, to make sure they didn’t add a “not” or something and change an answer. The other anomaly is you get a few “test” questions that don’t count, like maybe they are trying out a new question. And one of these specifically was wrong. It asked a question about an airport on a sectional, and that airport was completely not on the map; it was a map for a totally different part of the country. On any question, you could report a problem, so I put that in and hoped I wasn’t just looking at it wrong.

I had two hours to take the test, but I swear they were far easier than the practice tests I took. I think it took me 20 or 30 minutes to go through all 60-some questions, so I went back to the start and examined every question a second time. Then I finally submitted everything, and got up and left. In the reception room, I handed over my stuff, and the attendant went through this big spiel about how if I had any issues I could go to the FAA site and blah blah blah and all I’m thinking is DID I PASS. Finally, he handed me a piece of paper and I looked at it: 93%. I did.

Of course, here comes the fun part. You aren’t immediately handed a license like you’re at the DMV. You are given an exam ID, and you have to go back to the IACRA site and submit an 8710-13 with the 7-digit FTN and 17-digit exam ID. Then you get a TSA background check. Then it goes to the FAA. Then after processing you can log into the IACRA and get a temporary license until they mail you. Problem was: the government was shut down. The FAA was (sort of) keeping flights in the air, but nobody was in the office, so I had no idea how long any of this would take.

That IACRA stuff worked, but I sat and waited on the TSA thing. I could officially fly 107 flights, but it took a total of five weeks end-to-end until I actually had a license.

In the meantime, I ended up buying another drone, the DJI Mavic Air 3S. I had to re-register my old drone and the new one so they had hull numbers I could use for 107 flights. That’s all automated, and wasn’t a problem.

Anyway, no idea what’s next, except I can post video now. I’ve got a YouTube playlist that I’ll start using, and I am posting some pictures and videos in the usual places. Should be fun. Of course, all of this isn’t writing, and I need to get back to that.