Who is Nick?

Asking all my life.

Author: Nick Kempinski

  • Weeknotes 2025-10-01

    Photo by Shaylyn on Unsplash

    Boo!

    ‘Tis the season where my child wants me to be some advanced cosplay outfit maker. I admit I like it a bit, but oh the cardboard! This year sounds pretty advanced. We’ll see what kind of blueprints he makes at 7.

    Should I teach him AutoCAD? Probably a bad idea, considering I tried to teach him to play Minecraft with a computer keyboard and mouse on the weekend so he could play the “real” poisonous potato; it did not go well.

    More AP WP woes

    As anyone who’s read my previous weeknotes, you may have noted my woes with AP WP and my new host. It’s an on again off again curse of a relationship. It was working, then it wasn’t. Smashing head to table, plugins on and off and on and off. Now all caching plugins are off and other under the hood plugins are in use… it seems to be… better. We’ll see what lasts.

    Still Edu-ma-cating

    Still working towards that AIPMM CPM designation. Slowly but surely watching those percents go up and up every day.

    What Else?

    Let’s see….

    • Ikea furniture madness
      • I shouldn’t be hacking away at walls with saws, but I did, and it kinda looks good
    • Tinkering a bit, brushing off cobwebs on Symfony & Rails.
      • I know, I know… different languages, but hey, why not.
    • Actually giving AI a bit of a chance. Though very timid on it all still.
    • Lot’s of talking and searching, and exploring on the j-o-b front.
      • All in all in that questioning everything place.

    Well, that’s all I’ve got. Typing for typing-sake on this one.

    L8rs

  • Weeknotes 2025-09-23

    Photo by Sina Saadatmand on Unsplash

    “That rug really tied the room together… man”

    So after being on the web for a very long time, I’m working to get me all certified. Product Manager certified.

    So – let the schooling being. I’m going through ProductSide

    Why Product Manager?

    As the quote says, it does tie the room together. I’ve got a little of this, and a little of that in my tool belt. PMs need to straddle multiple perspectives and skills. A bit of design, a bit of tech, a bit of marketing and a bit of biz, all with the objective of making products better.

    Every company I’ve worked for at some point let’s me be me, and I mash, assimilate info, and create: MVPs, POCs, experiments, pilot programs, and more.

    Unfortunately, for me, I’ve never been with a company with an official Product team. Hopefully an AIPMM CPM certification can open that door. 🤷

  • Weeknotes 2025-09-15

    Photo by Ivan N on Unsplash

    The great digital move of 2025

    It was a bit of a learning curve, but for the most part it’s done. I’m now hosting on Canadian soil.

    I started with my previous host in 2006! Before I say 15+, but it was more like almost 20! Boy oh boy the mess in the wake of that many years.

    It was a reminder to always clean my toys when I’m done playing with them and what happens if you don’t. It was also a very good exercise to purge, and prep to purge.

    Too many domains I’m squatting on that I thought, at the time where cool, but now look back, I set them to “Don’t Auto Renew”.

    One last task to take me about a year, is to transfer domains when I need. Paying to transfer all at once is a bit out of budget.

    WP Activitypub plugin and Nginx issue

    In the process, and for lessons. I did have one problem with porting ActivityPub over. Seems my new host adds an Nginx cache to sites to give ’em a bit of a boost. However… turns out it broke this site and ground it all to a halt.

    Seems unless configured specifically using Nginx cache doesn’t like to swap content types. So when a page is rendered as HTML one moment, and then asked to render again as JSON-LD for activity pub, things go a bit off the rail.

    Sadly that means I had to turn this feature off with my host, as they currently don’t allow for individual customization at the moment. But happily that I could, and this site in all it’s ActivityPub glory, can continue.

    Back to AP and Statamic

    A while back I mentioned about getting AP working for Statamic, and now that my hosting move is complete, back to this pet project. Keep you posted in my next weeknotes.

  • Words are signs, everywhere!

    Photo by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash

    Perhaps this, and this alone, is the one psychodynamic of an oral culture that no matter how I think of it, play and ponder, I don’t think a postliterate society will likely ever have.

    Words are not Signs

    Even when glanced quickly, the aliterate can still take simple phonetic symbols to translate words: “Stop”, “Play”, “Pause”, “Danger”

    Around the world we are inundated with words as signs on almost every device, ad, package and surface.

    No matter how aliterate someone is, they can read they just choose not to. When we dictate texts and emails, we clearly indicate our understanding of punctuation, “comma, exclamation point!” And we always proof read the message before hitting send.

    Will there be a day when and “S” becomes more like a strange latin character or hieroglyph? Will the letters of “STOP” only be looked at as a series of strange curves and lines, like the octagon they sit on? The shape alone translating in the minds eye not to stop, but “halt” or “cease” or “end”.

    Who knows, that’s a far future that I can’t even imagine.

    Broken Words

    Something I found very interesting, Ong outlined an interesting design choice of printers as print media bacome dominant and literacy hit the tipping point. He show it as evidence of auditory dominance in the printer and their audience.

    “Sixteenth-century title pages very commonly divide even major words, including the author’s name, with hyphens presenting the first part of a word in one line in large types, and the latter in smaller type…” Here’s the example.

    However, what’s so different from that and any of these?

    We are just as careless about letter placement and brake up words all around. We excuse this for design aesthetics, but we can still easily stitch the pieces together. Perhaps as when orality phased out, it’s evidence of the return of auditory dominance?

    Fediverse Reactions

  • Huzzah, federated again!!

    What happened? My new host has a nice little feature for Nginx caching. But author pages can, and would, return different content types. Which seemed to make it loose it’s mind. So, feature turned off for now. Ticket submitted.

    Fediverse Reactions