Miscellaneous babble

October 16, 2026October 16, 2026

RIP Jared

I was saddened to hear yesterday about the death of Jared Smith.

Most people today know him as the guy behind CHSWX where he did a lot of local weather reporting, and quickly became the source for information during severe weather events for lots of people across the Lowcountry.

I know him as an tech and weather geek who spoke about everything with excitement and enthusiasm.

I first met him a long, long time ago (if you call 20 years a long time) in a place not far away, when a group of local bloggers started getting together in person. Jared wasn’t part of the group of bloggers, but he was one of those “Twitter” people who joined us at our quasi-regular meetups.

Jared with Dan Conover (L) and Mike Courtney (R) at a Lowcountry Bloggers picnic, September 2006

Tech, baseball, and weather (not necessarily in that order) were the things he was always enthusiastically talking about.

Lowcountry Bloggers meetup at a Riverdogs game, April 2008

Jared’s death is a huge loss for all of us who knew him, and I know we’ll all miss him.

December 7, 2024December 7, 2024

Rescued slide rule case

While browsing around my local Habitat for Humanity ReStore a week or so ago, I came across a Pickett slide rule case sitting on one of the shelves. Got super excited, and then got super disappointed when it turned out to be just an empty case. It was priced at $10, which I decided was a little too high for just an empty case, so I decided to pass on it.

Fast forward to today, the case was still there on the shelf. With a 50% off holiday sale going on, I decided $5 wasn’t a terrible price for the empty case, so I bought it.

It’s a black case, worn but still in pretty decent shape. The Pickett logo is partly worn off but still readable. No other identifying marks on it though.

Front view of a Pickett slide rule case for a 12 inch slide rule

Back of aPickett slide rule case for a 12 inch slide rule

Now I need to find another Pickett slide rule to put in it.

June 23, 2024June 21, 2024

First blog post + 21

First blog post was 21 years ago!

Old enough to go out to the bar for a drink most everywhere now.

Post volume hasn’t gone up like I planned or thought it might a few years ago. I’ve definitely got more projects to ramble on about, but the free time thing is lacking. I’ll just keep posting when I can I suppose.

April 21, 2024April 21, 2024

Email subscribers

The small handful of email subscribers to this blog might have noticed the lack of email notifications of new posts for the last little while.

I had been running into some weird blog posting issues that I thought might have been due to the Jetpack plugin, so I removed it a while back. The blog posting issues seemed to go away, so I went along on my merry way.

I’d forgotten that email subscriptions were handled by Jetpack until someone asked recently. I’ve reinstalled the Jetpack plugin, and hopefully won’t run into those weird problems I had with it before.