Jeremy Staffeld

  • Primum

    “No, this is not the beginning of a new chapter in my life; this is the beginning of a new book! That first book is already closed, ended, and tossed into the seas; this new book is newly opened, has just begun! Look, it is the first page! And it is a beautiful one!” – C. JoyBell C.

    It’s been a while since I built a website for myself. Since 2016, I have been chasing other pursuits, and while I have built the odd website for others, I have mostly just been out of the game.

    So what am I doing here now? Well… I don’t know yet?

    I want this place to be a creative playground for myself, and very likely just to myself. My initial goal was just a server to make private apps to aid my work life.

    Oh lord, why a website then? Can’t I keep a journal and keep my saved projects on my hard drive? Sure. But maybe someday I’ll let others peek behind the curtain and see what a mess I have made of myself and whatever it is this thing (gestures broadly) might become.

    I’ll tell you that I’ve missed this. My god, have I devoted so much of my life to arranging invisible boxes via HTML and CSS, while pounding my head over Javascript and PHP… though I did have a lot of fun making games, and maps, and apps in the pursuit of learning such things.

    I guess that what I have missed most was the creativity of it all. As I have grown old and grizzled, my day-to-day work life has become more mundane than creative. To be honest, the days just blur together… and I’ve said that for years now… so let’s be fair, the years are now starting to blur together.

    I miss just putting shit out there! Even if nobody would ever care to see it.

    So let’s see what a new website shall bring, shall we? And since I haven’t made any of this public yet, by “we” I mean me and my demons.

    Cheers to a new book from a long story.

  • The Struggle is Real

    “Personal growth commences with an ego death. Self-pride blunts personal growth because the ego resists change. The ego wants to maintain the status quo by holding onto false notions of the self. The ego desires me to see all of my failures as someone else’s fault.”
    ― Kilroy J. Oldster

    I have been having a hard time writing recently. Part of it is laziness wrapped in exhaustion (quite the contradiction, huh?) The other part is just this over-stimulation of the political end of the world, which is just… everything… going on in the US under Trump’s first 90 days in his second term. As helpless as I am, it still consumes me. It consumes me to such a frightful point, even though I may be the last of the types of people affected by all of it. I won the lottery by being born a white male. This does not comfort me.

    Unfortunately, I somehow developed something called “empathy” somewhere along the way. I don’t know how or why. I can trace a very real path of narcissism ingrained within me and then reinforced through observing my father. I recall “Karen” indoctrination, where he was sure to instruct me that the correct way to handle telephone communication with businesses was to keep asking for the person’s manager on the phone until I got what I wanted. This sense of entitlement grew so much that I would rage at a speeding ticket and claim that by the end, “I WILL HAVE THAT COP’S BADGE”. What does that even mean? I don’t know.

    I eventually did a lot of hallucinogens and experienced “ego death” more times than I can count. Maybe I just cured the worst part of me while doing the worst possible things? Druggy me would say “yeah man, that’s what it does, dude!” But current me says, “I have no idea… maybe I just grew up?”

    If I could sum up the majority of my life, starting from puberty until… I don’t know… maybe a few years ago, it would be “existential crisis”. I did the quarter-life crisis like nobody has done before. I am being generous in my life’s timeline, even calling it a quarter-life crisis, as it will be miraculous if I live long enough for that math to check out.

    Something changed in my mid-Forties, and I don’t mean my body starting to tell me I am now about to slowly fall apart. Good Lord, why is Forty-Five when shit just gets real?

    They say Americans grow more conservative as they age. There is a quote on that which I won’t type because it is just stupid. Well, the opposite occurred with me.

    I may hate people, on principle, because I am an introvert. I may hate people, on principle, because I never dared to achieve what they have… usually on just blind urge. An urge I never had. I may hate people, on principle, because even though I was gifted every opportunity from the start and despite my best attempts to self-sabotage, the opportunities kept coming… and I… I… I just didn’t want them. Countless attempts at college that I would drop out of. Countless promotions in corporate America that I just didn’t want. They say a lot of rich people tend to fail forward. I am evidence of someone that forward fails… because I resisted every promotion and eventually collapsed into homelessness and despair. (Spoiler alert: I got better.)

    If you are wondering why I was so self-sabotaging? It was mostly of some strange idealistic view of the world in which employment meant something that it really does not in modern America, especially early 2000’s America. I would always say, “I am good at this thing (programming, tech support, etc.), and I want to keep doing this thing. I don’t want to manage people. I want to be the best at doing this thing!”

    Fun fact: I manage people now… as basically the entirety of my job. I mean, I do real work too, but only because I want to. I do most of the stocking because someone has to, and the biggest nightmare of my job is the wrangling of cats, which is scheduling and payroll… so I do it myself. My peers just sit in their offices. I would go crazy. I am not saying this to make me sound good… I have a disease! Maybe a spark left of that dumb learned narcissism where I sooooo want to be the best at something. Alas, as I type that… nah, I just want to be good at something.

    Good is enough.

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  • Just a Case of the Mondays

    I am growing frustrated at all that I failed to keep up with in WebDev. My HTML/CSS and some of my JavaScript is perfectly sound still but WordPress has changed so much. I am resisting the urge to activate the Classic Editor plugin or just go back to static sites. I want to learn the modern practices. I yearn to code my theme in PHP, but these days everyone uses a builder. I mean, that would be better for my visual traits but old habits die hard.

    As to my other job… I don’t feel inspired anymore. With no cause or reason at all, I find myself bored, despondent, and my energy drained the moment I walk in the front door. Sleep beckons me while I am on the clock, yet the moment I am set free — I come alive!

    This past year I set out to enhance the store in all that it was lacking and I made no qualms to my boss that I was after his job. To be fair, that was a tongue-in-cheek way of saying “I’ll make your life easier” and he knew what I meant. One of the major changes I put forth was to modernize the store’s POS (Point Of Sale) systems. We got the test unit in April 2024. This week, almost a year later, we finally changed out all older POS systems with the new type that I had rigorously tested and built up inventory within, etc. A big win for me!

    Now I feel that I won’t be satisfied until I have a new challenge.

  • Why My Site Is So Lame

    “My site is shit because I am not getting paid for it.” – Random webdev on Reddit.

    Why is my website so obnoxiously minimalist?

    Well, the random developer’s quote above made me push several puffs of air through my nose in a snicker because he was spot on. I think you will find that web developers may spend some bit of time on their career portfolio websites (even those are barely worth the effort) but why go nuts on something that you aren’t getting paid for?

    For me, well… I am and have always been a minimalist when it comes to my tastes. Rarely does this come out when building for clients though… except for one opportunity to build a site for one of the Emmy Award winning producers of To Catch A Predator (notice I am not so minimalist enough to humble-brag?). He wanted a simple black and white site in WordPress so that he could edit it himself, and really… it suited his style. If you knew me in person, this style is just obvious.

    I study the trends and follow them because who am I to deny a client what works in the “now”? For a short time I even taught a class on User eXperience (UX) design and what to track and design for in User Interfaces (UI). But that is all marketing. That is all to sell something… maybe not at first, but eventually. It’s fascinating stuff, to be honest. I pursued that type of information and wanted to apply everything I learned wherever it made sense.

    But this site… I don’t even know what this site even is. I do know that it isn’t selling anything to anyone and it never will. It’s just a place for me to journal and try out coding projects… at least for now. Who knows… maybe I’ll fumble my way to creating THE hit new mobile app and nobody will ever read this because this site is now an ad for ____.

    Right now I just want to break all the rules and play…

    I want to play around like I did as a teenager discovering Microsoft FrontPage for the very first time and believing my own little Geocities site will be seen by the entirety of the world… even though I had nothing to say and sure had a ton of those animated “under construction” gifs.

    I miss skipping class in college to build weird websites with no purpose other than the art of the thing. To be fair, if I spent that time building websites with a purpose I would have sooooo many more zeros attached to my paycheck by now. But, whatever… I miss the fun of doing what feels good and has somehow been lost in today’s internet world.

    I just want to play.

  • Nerd Alert!

    “Once you make it to your point of making it, you’ll appreciate the struggle.” – Nas

    Today I set forth on the first of many experiments of which will likely be displayed on this website. I want to build an interactive task list for things needed to be done at my offline job. The easy way is to not use a website and just keep using the Google Sheets spreadsheet that I have been using at the store for a few months. Another easy way is to simply embed said spreadsheet into a page here. Easier still, why not just use one of the many apps and plugins that have already been developed? Nah! What fun is that? No, I want to develop it completely from scratch using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

    Now let me qualify why (spoiler alert!) this took me all day and I still could not get it running. It’s been a while since I have done anything but the bare minimum of each of those stated languages. If I am being honest, I still have HTML down pat and I never lost a step. CSS? The muscle memory was still there once I stretched a bit and got my heart pumping. However, JavaScript? It’s like every brain cell that ever contained memories of that language has been lost. And in that lies the problem.

    It was ever exceedingly fun to start my new project. Since it has been so long since I did any true coding, I discovered that I no longer have the tools that I am used to installed on my computer in order to do so. I naively fired up simple Notepad and quickly realized what fresh hell it would be to code all three languages at once via tablet and chisel that is simple Notepad. It was fine when just writing something quick to fix an issue with my established work website but holy lord it wasn’t gonna cut it for a full project. And while Notepad++ probably would have worked okay (in my snobby coding days it was always Notepad++ that I used probably just so I could tell that to hiring managers. If you know, you know). Today I can afford better than okay. Visual Studio Code was a must and free so… I mean, told you I could afford better.

    Working out the HTML and CSS went smoothly and easily. I created exactly what I first envisioned in my mind and at times over stylized it because as you know, this site is meant to be extremely minimalist… almost to an obnoxious degree. For that I ended up stripping a lot of the styles out of my CSS.

    Then came the functionality and so I had to face my old nemesis JavaScript. Alright. No problem. The ol’ interwebs may have devolved into nightmare fuel for social media and news in the last decade or two but they have certainly improved in information finding and tech support, right? Yes, indeed they have and I was able to hack out a functional JS code that completed my project on a static page. Success! Now it will be as simple as embedding this into WordPress and maybe watch a movie or something since the night is still young.

    Wrong.

    Modern WordPress apparently doesn’t want people to add custom CSS/JavaScript easily. Sure, I could just copy/paste the code in a child theme or embed a static page from the server but apparently I have been feeling too cocksure of myself lately so what I actually did was set upon a journey that would lead deep into the night and end without success.

    First, find the right plugin. I want to repeat the processes that went into this experiment, so instead of hard coding, I want a plugin. Well that took a while to find. I went with Simple Custom CSS and JS. It worked great! But my code doesn’t. The CSS does… the JavaScript does not. Keep in mind that the little “app” I made works fine on a static server but not within a WordPress page.

    So I stopped after several hours of going back over my code and trying to research what would be the difference or interference within the WordPress environment. I stopped long enough to watch a few silly YouTube videos and then to write this post.

    But I shall return! And I shall conquer this beast!

  • Fin De Un Imperio

    All great empires die from within.

    – Terry Bradshaw

    I chuckled at my pick of the lead quote to this. Strange, probably, that it may be the only person I shall quote that I have been in the same room with. However, that is an odd tale for another time. I may keep using quotes from the least likely people. It does help not to sound pretentious.

    Let me fill future readers in on today’s current events…

    OK… I can’t. It all reads ridiculous. The entirety of the current American existence is ridiculous. I hope history will explain things better than I ever could… but at this point, I even doubt history won’t be sabotaged and the truth just left to scatter like dust in a gush of bullshit.

    What I can honestly say is that I am so ashamed of my country right now.

    I love this country!

    I was a child of the 1980s and consumed so much nationalist sugar that I got hooked and hooked hard. Remember the movies of that time? Rocky IV? Red Dawn? It seemed like so much public enthusiasm was in Pro-USA and Anti-Russia. Propaganda? Sure… but the nationalism still seemed on a healthy level, at least to me.

    Today, Trump is attacking our closest allies and cozying up to Putin’s Russia in a way that is just so disturbingly bizarre. All while the opposition party, Democrats, are just… WTF? Sitting on their hands and seemingly incapable of taking any action. I don’t want to go into detail but history is recording this crap so anyone is able to see what Feb/March 2025 Democrats are like in response to all that is going on. Unless, of course, history is erased by this administration.

    I don’t want my site to be entirely political. These are just my observations at the time that I write them. The more I type political banter, the more I wish I were talking about something else. I hate that this crap is a stamp on this particular time.

    Wouldn’t it be better if I could be journaling about landing on Mars? Or if we solved homelessness? Or if we cured cancer? Or if WebDevs became Rockstars instead of chaff for our artificial intelligence overlords?

    cue “music to drink bourbon to” playlist

  • Not much to say…

    I have the day off so I plan to fix a flat on the back tire of my E-bike — no small task since E-bikes have an electric system powering a rear hub motor. After that, I may hold off on grocery shopping since funds are low. While I successfully demanded a raise and received it last pay period, I fear that I was a little too liberal in paying off bills in one fell swoop. The good news is that the entirety of my next check can be saved and used for fun, as all bills are covered. The bad news is that next check is over a week away. God, journal entries have become boring now that I am old!

    Outside of myself and my cozy little absorption of work, eat, work, eat, fuck, eat, work, etc. the world, at least the United States, is becoming scary. Trump, Musk, and the sycophantic GOP are going full bore with the tech-bro style “move fast and break stuff” governance. Part of me smiles at this because they are proving all my protests and warnings to be true. But people are getting hurt.

    Our nation has already lost so much respect and confidence from the rest of the world and this only the beginning. I’m scared. I’m disgusted. I am sort of silent protesting by wearing T-shirts that say “Deport Elon”, “Eat The Rich”, and such… but that does nothing.

    Slacktivism:
    characterized as involving very little effort or commitment.

    But what can I really do?