About Me

I’m an old-school tech nerd living in Canton, GA, though I usually just say “Atlanta” because it’s easier than explaining where Canton is, how to get there, and why I live there. This blog is where I put whatever I’ve been chewing on lately. It wanders, and I’m fine with that.

Tech 💻

I’ve been doing this since floppy disks were actually floppy, and I still can’t figure out why my smart home turns off the lights while I’m in the room. By day I do technical pre-sales for data center equipment in the Brocade division of Broadcom, which makes me a hit at parties. This is my personal blog, though. I don’t speak for Broadcom here.

After hours I build things, lately with AI doing a lot of the typing. The biggest is MisterDiagram: tell Claude what you want drawn, in plain English, and get back a real Visio file, no Visio required. It’s open source and written in Rust, and I built it with Claude Code and Codex as very fast coworkers. I also send the occasional fix to AstroPaper, the theme this site runs on, and four of mine shipped in its 7.1 release. Everything else, finished or not, is on my GitHub. Here on the blog it turns into posts like the $5.50 reverse proxy and the arcade game Claude built me.

Live Music 🎵

I don’t get out as often as I used to, but I still love it, especially small venues, Americana and singer-songwriters. And a great cover band in a local bar can still make my whole night. I help musician friends with their websites from time to time, for free, like the ones for Thomas Hinds and Spencer Scott Smith & The Cherokee Roses. The music that does show up here belongs to Bubba Zuckermusk, my AI country alter ego, who has a few hundred songs to his name.

The Road 🛣️

For a while I was deep into planning a nomadic retirement: camper vans, EV range, which cities have the best summer weather. Looking back, some of that was escapism, and it’s on the shelf for now. The research wasn’t wasted, and it’s all here if I pick it back up. Deciding Where to Live Without Fooling Yourself and the no-build camper are good places to start. I still love a road trip with no firm plans and only a vague destination.

Fiction 📖

My newest habit is short fiction, mostly crossovers between the science fiction I grew up on: the Doctor landing on Moonbase Alpha, a Vulcan sizing up Gaius Baltar. I post one whenever inspiration strikes, and the Fan Fiction tag has them all.

This Site 🌐

Everyone needs a corner of the internet that’s truly theirs, and this is mine. It runs on Astro and AstroPaper, on a DigitalOcean VPS: a tiny Linux VM sitting in someone else’s data center, pretending to be the cloud. I write everything in Markdown. If you want help spinning up your own, get in touch.

Get in Touch 📬

• X: @charleshood is where I’m most likely to see it.
• LinkedIn: my profile, for anything work-related.
• Facebook: Yeah, I still use Facebook. I’m in my 50s! 😄
• Comments: or leave one on any post (you’ll need a GitHub account).

☕️ Want to support my projects? Buy me a coffee!