Apparently I’m back.
I’d say I’ve been away, but that makes it sound like I spent the last few years somewhere pleasant, possibly with a drink in my hand and no access to Microsoft Teams.
Instead, there was COVID.
Hell of a vacation.
A lot happened while this place was quiet. The world caught fire, everyone learned what a supply chain was, Zoom became a verb, and I somehow decided that the middle of all of this was an excellent time to go back to graduate school.
Grad school was useful, educational, occasionally infuriating, and a very effective reminder that you really can’t go home again.
You can go back to school. You can sit in classrooms again. You can write papers at deeply unreasonable hours and convince yourself that this is somehow a good use of a weekend.
But you are not the same person who was there the first time.
Which, in retrospect, was probably the point.
I’m older now. Arguably wiser. Definitely more opinionated.
I have spent a truly irresponsible amount of time thinking about technology, IT, cybersecurity, organizations, artificial intelligence, and why supposedly intelligent people continue to build systems that require fourteen clicks to accomplish something that should take two.
So, naturally, I decided it was time to start writing again.
Darknoise is the latest incarnation of whatever this thing has always been.
The old posts are still here. I considered cleaning them up, curating them, perhaps quietly burying some of them behind the shed.
Then I remembered who I am.
They stay.
Some are good. Some are weird. Some were written by a version of me who clearly needed more sleep and possibly adult supervision. But they happened, and I’m not particularly interested in pretending the Internet began the moment I decided to redesign the site.
As for me?
Still insane.
Still a meat-fueled rage machine.
Still professionally suspicious of anyone who says, “We just need to automate the process,” without first asking whether the process should exist at all.
I continue to defy God every day, mostly through caffeine, questionable decision-making, and an apparently inexhaustible willingness to work in enterprise IT.
These days I’m particularly interested in AI, automation, agentic systems, IT operations, leadership, and what happens to technology organizations when the machines stop being tools we operate and start becoming things we delegate work to.
I have opinions.
This should surprise absolutely no one.
There will also be other things here, because I have never been particularly good at staying in one lane. Technology. Culture. Games. Life. Things that annoy me. Things that fascinate me. Things I probably should have kept to myself.
You know.
The usual.
Somewhere in all of this, I will also continue my two great unfinished scientific quests:
Solving cold fusion.
And creating the perfect egg cream.
Frankly, I’m starting to suspect the egg cream may be the harder problem.
Anyway.
I’m back.
The Internet remains a terrible idea.
Let’s see what happens.
// trust your technolust.