This evening I was logging into my site and it hit critical mass. Unreferenced tables in some MySQL table. I’d just written about not wanting to do updates and simply focusing on content just a few days ago.

I was on the recliner, my Echo was playing Marillion’s Montreal, and as I looked around for something else, the title of this post came up in the lyrics.

17 minutes later, I had a WordPress managed site. Years and years of Drupal, managing my own site, etc. Sure, I paid. When I want to write, I want to write. Drupal had become too bulky for me to manage despite their best efforts otherwise. Well, maybe not their best. They’ve had other priorities. I am not one of the priorities.

But this isn’t about Drupal or managed WordPress sites (I didn’t sell out, I bought out). It’s about technology getting in the way, and it’s probably one of the things I hate the most about the world.

I’ve been working in technology for decades now. Most of what I see these days is glaringly in the way. People playing on phones and ignoring the person in front of them. The miscommunications so easily had when reading comprehension and writing ability are ill matched. The way I get buried in tabs on a browser because the damned browsers are designed around a concept 21 years old.

The way emails pile up because of the ongoing saga of spammers and marketers – and the imaginary line between the two. The way a speakerphone can garble interactive voice recognition systems.

We, as a society, seem intent on burying ourselves in shells of technology.

That is going to be the key theme of my writing here, I think – at least for a while. Sure, there will be technical stuff I wish to share, but only because I don’t believe that we should be tied to technology in such a way that a digital Thoreau might laugh from the binary void, shouting “Men have become the tools of their tools.”

Yeah, that’s not why I started in technology. That’s not why I started programming. I saw it as a way of making the world simpler, where I could focus more on living and less on the minutiae this world requires of us.