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In college, I once won an ice cream flavor naming contest with "Cannibal Crunch Surprise".

I have solved a Rubik's cube in 40 seconds. I solve it in under 60 seconds pretty consistently.

Enough people have seen me play guitar on youtube to sell out a 2-week engagement at Madison Square Garden.

I have been 14 miles away from the nearest paved road. I walked there.

The longest straight stretch I have ever lived solely on what I could carry on my back, including all food, shelter, and supplies, was 3 weeks.

The longest straight stretch of nights I ever slept outdoors in a tent was 3 months.

The longest straight stretch of nights I ever lived on someone else's couch was 6 months.

The longest straight stretch I have ever been without a fixed address or direct phone number was 7 years.

I…

An incomplete list of my favorites of various sorts of things.

• Network

• Pink Floyd
• Jethro Tull
• The Who
• David Bowie
• Cat Stevens
• Harry Chapin

• Maurice Ravel
• J.S. Bach

• Pink Floyd, Animals
• Mike Oldfield, Hergest Ridge
• J.S. Bach, Trio Organ Sonatas, played by Wolfgang Rübsam (Yeah, everybody hates this version, it's the first one I ever heard and I stand by it.)
• Special category: Bluegrass covers of non-bluegrass music
  • Tim O'Brien - Red On Blonde - Bluegrass covers of Bob Dylan
  • Luther Wright & The Wrongs - Rebuild The Wall - Nothing I can say will pursuade you how good this is. The liner notes say, "For 30 years, a great bluegrass album has been held prisoner by rock & roll. We've set it free." Pink Floyd's "The Wall" from start…

Once, I was a man like most others—a worldly man, seduced and jaded by material things. These are some of those things.

• 1994 MIM Standard Stratocaster
• Washburn R15R resonator guitar
• Simon & Patrick 2006 Cutaway Dreadnaught
• Gretsch G9500 "Jim Dandy" parlor guitar reissue
• Les Paul Deluxe of mysterious origins; likely frankensteined together from vintage parts

• Fender Champion 20 modeling amp

• Hotone Xtomp modeling effects pedal
• Hotone Ampero modeling multi-effects unit

• Tortex purples
• Bakersfield whites

• Gibson Pure Nickel

• Dean Playmate EABC Cutaway Acoustic-Electric
• Fender Korea P-Bass

• King Super 20 alto
• Jupiter Capital Edition CES770 tenor

• Aulos garkleit, sopranino, soprano, alto recorders
• Yamaha tenor recorder
• Hopf chalumeau
• Maui xaphoon

• Selmer Paris Series 9
• Vito Reso-Tone 3

…

Be aware, as a Mac user, sometimes I am stuck with what software is available. Inclusion in this list doesn't mean I recommend it, it just means it is the least bad of all the available alternatives.

• • Code editors: BBedit, VS Code, Cursor
  • Database: FileMaker Pro
  • Spreadsheet: MS Excel
  • Browser: Firefox (Extensions: Tab Session Manager, uBlock Origin, Singlefile, Form History Control (II), Web Stickies, Go To Playing Tab, Save A Link To The Current Tab)
  • Notes: Apple Notes.app
  • File Synching: Syncthing
  • Home Automation: Home Assistant
  • Security video recorder: SecuritySpy
  • Security camera control: Bitbar with homebrewed BASH scripts
  • Backup: Backblaze
  • Anti-Malware: Little Snitch, BlockBlock
  • OS Utils: LaunchControl
  • Filesystem management utils: GrandPerspective, DupeGuru
  • OS: MacOS 12.7.6 Monterey
  • Email: Thunderbird…

These are my musical skills, roughly in descending order of competency:

Guitar (Acoustic & Electric, flat-picked & finger-picked)
Keyboards (Electronic, Piano, Organ)
Recorder & Chalumeau (Garkleit, Sopranino, Soprano, Alto, Tenor)
Mandolin
Bass (Electric)
Vocals
Saxophone
Clarinet
Hand drums
Lyre (24 string)
Harmonica

• Music, both listening and making.
• Photography.
• Creative nonfiction writing.
• Generative art.
• Software engineering.
• Stock option trading.
• Electronics.
• Rubik's cube and similar puzzles.
• Indoor gardening/raising houseplants

• Oceanography, on an amateur or pop-science level.
• Language & Grammar.
• Movie special effects, especially the old practical effects masters.
• Physics.
• Psychology: Cognition, Persuasion & manipulation,  etc.

• Horror, sci-fi, and true survival movies.
• Comedy & Humor.
• Conversation with people with thoughtful perspectives, something to teach, or something to learn.
• Off-and-on Social Media addict

• Free Travel/Vagabonding.
• Urban Exploration.
• Camping and the outdoors.

The secret is out!

I'm some sorta guy, I have no fucking idea what, at this point. Actually nowadays I feel more like a bug than a person—a specimen, not an individual. I'm good with it, though. My burrow is cozy. I am a zen insect.

Right now, the site feed is live at feed://michaelkupietz.com/feed. It doesn't validate properly—I'm working on that—but it does work in my FreshRSS reader, so it should be ok.

Alternatively you can see the most recent site updates listed in the browser on /changes.

I've got this site's front page "hero" (featured posts) section and all archive pages—that's all pages listing articles on this site by any kind of category, tag, or author name (of which there's only me) tagged with the more modern h-feed microformat for reading in h-feed readers (such as, for example, the previewer at https://monocle.p3k.io/preview). This is a microformat (a set of codes added to a web page) recommended by the Indieweb folks that allows modern feed readers to directly read your web pages…

While I'm still transitioning to using default slashpages, this is just a mirror of info on my main Bio & Contact Info page.

If you have any questions or concerns, I'm absolutely here to help. To get in touch, come to San Francisco and walk down each street shouting my name.
Here's a map:

Kidding.
Your best bet to reach me about my creative work or issues about this site is email.

If you email me: As an anti-spam measure, you're going to have to make sure your subject contains "email re website", or my mail filters will assume you're a spambot and trash it without me seeing it. Also…

Primarily as an interim measure as I adapt my site to using slashpages, this page largely repeats things you can find written about at greater length and in a way less exhausted state elsewhere on the site's About menu.

This site runs at home.

This is served by Wordpress running on a Debian 12 VM running in VMware on a 2012 Mac mini in my living room (then routed for protection through some things I won't name and then, out on the internet, some reverse proxies and CDNs and caches and other stuff. But you know that because you already ran a traceroute. I saw you coming.)

The theme is an extremely customized version of an obsolete, apparently abandoned wordpress theme called Sinatra that looked good when I started but I have since discovered was written really inefficiently. I've changed huge chunks of…

I've never eaten at Chipotle, so I don't really know. People actually eat at that place?

I guess pick me up some nachos. With meat. Make sure there's jalapeños. Hard to go wrong with that.

My everyday carries are pretty simple:

1. Keys, chained to my belt so I can't lose them.
2. Cellphone, currently 1st generation iPhone SE as of this writing.
3. ID & similar wallet stuff, carried loose in a pocket so I can't lose them all at once.

I'm a pretty simple guy.

Optional - things I frequently carry but not always:
4. Pen knife (when traveling/camping, often a pen knife and utility knife... different tools for different uses.)
5. Rubik's cube or similar twisty puzzle.
6. USB phone charger and USB cable.
7. Tobacco pipe & pouch of tobacco, as an aid in self-destruction, but not as bad a one as I used to use.

Thrilling, huh.

Let's make this easy. Here's my OPML file from my RSS reader.

Some links or feeds may be obsolete. Inclusion in this list does not imply endorsement, just some sort of possibly perverse interest.

feeds_2024-10-24.opml

"La flauta es dulce": recorder is sweet » Feed: RSS Url web page
Abnormal Returns: RSS Url web page - Forecast-free since 2005
A Druid Way: RSS Url web page
AdventuresInCapitalism | Small Companies–Big Upside: RSS Url web page - Small Companies--Big Upside
AI Alignment: RSS Url web page - Aligning AI systems with human interests. - Medium
Alice Bradley — Finslippy: RSS Url web page
All Articles on Seeking Alpha: RSS Url web page - © seekingalpha.com. Use of this feed is limited to personal, non-commercial use and is governed…

Note: This page is a mirror of my about/contact page at a href="https://michaelkupietz.com/?p=9103">https://michaelkupietz.com/?p=9103, just for consistency with the other slashpages. You should probably just read it there.