Meta on Brian Trammell

State of the Blog, 2026

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

And welcome, once again to my blog, the last seven years of which seem dominated by me talking about the technical aspects of keeping my blog up to date. As I sat back and watched Claude migrate my Blogger and Wordpress content from a bitrotted Hugo template to one with an apparent present, it occurred to me that this most recent migration provides a pretty good excuse to explore what works about the Internet in 2026, and what doesn’t.

Down the Rabbit Hole, Part One

Sun, 19 Dec 2021 13:00:00 +0000

That people “disappear” into Google after joining (especially from academia) is a complaint so often told that it’s nearly a cliche… says the Googler whose last blog post, about joining Google, was over two and a half years ago.

I didn’t just go down the rabbit hole of compute infrastructure at Google in the intervening quarter-decade. I also picked up a synth or six, and, as a bonus, some actual rabbits.

Another year, another website, redux

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 22:00:00 +0000

Wasting time at Christmas by burning the site to the ground and starting over seems to be a tradition around here…

A Degenerate Binary Tree

Sun, 31 Aug 2014 09:27:50 +0000

Shamelessly inspired by Alexander Calder, who I followed from Atlanta to Pittsburgh to Zürich, and inexpertly crafted from stuff I found at Migros, I present my first attempt at a mobile.

(And for those of you who have not yet heard, yes, this commission has a customer: we’re expecting a daughter in a few weeks. We won’t be boring the Internet at large with piles of baby pictures, though.)

2013 in Review

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 10:06:22 +0000

It’s a good thing that keeping the blog up to date wasn’t actually a resolution of mine for last year, because I did as well as, well, one usually does with one’s New Years’ resolutions. So here’s all the stuff I didn’t post last year.

Die Hauptstadt der Vergangenheit

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 12:43:16 +0000

I’m packing for a trip to Memphis, for what will probably be the last time in the foreseeable future. I can’t really say that I’ll miss it. It’s a great place to be from, I guess, and the instant Elvis-and-Jack-Daniels association it has in the eyes of Europeans has started many an interesting train conversation. But most everyone I know, save a couple of friends and a pile of Facebook acquaintances, has moved on. My mother was a compelling reason to book a flight, but she’s gone now, too, and my stepfather moved shortly thereafter to San Diego. Even the Last Cat Standing in the ten year battle over the house has found a new home. All that’s left is the house itself, full of stuff. Most of this stuff is future garbage, if it isn’t already present garbage, which I’m off to dig through in order to find the small bits that aren’t.

This is doubly weird, as Memphis is basically the capital of my past, and it’s pretty much impossible to travel there without also traveling in time.

grüezi, y’all

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 10:31:32 +0000

Welcome to trammell.ch, yet another in a long line of periodically updated versions of my web presence. This is all somewhat under construction, as is everything, always.

The old weblog, My Ridiculously Circuitious Plan, has been incorporated into the archives here (as of December 2013).

Welcome to 2009

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:47:00 +0000

Happy New Year, all! 2009’s turning out to be a good one. So far, I’ve learned how not to play the digiridoo and how not to ski. At this rate, I’ll have learned how not to do about 240 new things by the time the year’s out.

Once More Onto the Blog

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:33:00 +0000

All right. Let’s try this a fourth time then, shall we?

I've had a long and incredibly sparse career as a blogger. I was a bit late to the game, starting my first one, Elmer and Bellefonte, on the twenty-third of August, two thousand one, largely for the purpose of hearing myself rant about various topics of high geekdom. It's no longer online, which is no great loss as the only real post of any note on it was a long one, entitled Ramblings on the American Response, dated the twentieth of September of that year, in which among other things I expressed concern that "[a]s the shock of seeing New York burn wears off, authoritarian interests within our nation are scrambling to make things safer for us (because, of course, they know better) at the expense of civil liberties," and vowing without any real conviction that "[i]f we [do not resist the temptation to authoritarianism], terror wins, America becomes a third world tinpot totalitarian state, and you can reach me at my new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe."

Well. A little under seven years later, through a much more, well, ridiculously circuitous course of events in which angst about eroding civil liberties does, I must admit, play a minor supporting role, I'll have a new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe soon enough. In forty six days, five hours, my one-way flight to Zurich lands.

(As an aside for the record, there was a second blog, completely lost to the sands of time; and a third, Tales from the Centerline, which was largely concerned with the summer-long renovation of my Depression-era house atop Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill in 2005. You're not missing anything by my never mentioning either of these again.)

So, welcome to my fourth blog. I'm starting this one to keep in touch with the people I'm leaving behind here, and to have a public record of what it was like to pick up at thirty and start over (not quite from scratch, mind you) an ocean and a few mountains away. I promise I'll try to keep it from going all "an American in Switzerland" on you.