Beginnings

I didn’t say that!

— Abraham Lincoln

It seems trendy to start a blog with a well-thought-out quote from Emerson, Thoreau, Elliot, or the like. But I’d be remiss to use such a quote given that I, admittedly, have never been an avid reader. Despite my love for continual learning and education, reading has been something I struggled to do consistently. It’s not for a lack of want, mind you. I’ve always been a technology-first sort of person. Given my upbringing, video games and computers were, let’s say, an easier escape.

So I figure I’ll start this blog off with a famous quote. One that we all know is entirely true and not just a legendary meme. After all, it’s the internet. If it’s said there, then it must be true!

Introductions

My name is Dereck Bearsong. Dereck Goolsby-Bearsong, to be more specific, but I simply go by Bearsong as my last name for simplicity’s sake. And no, please don’t ask me about my last name. Get to know me first. Buy me some dinner at least.

I am many things: a father, a gamer, a computer support engineer, a homebrewer, and a home cook. I love to hike but am terribly out of shape, love the mountains, enjoy drawing in my free time, exploring music more than I used to, and recently have gotten into self-hosting. I’m a martial artist (but again, am terribly out of shape and out of practice. I hope as my daughter grows up I can use her as an excuse to get back into shape), and I’m passionate about my work and all of my hobbies. You will never find a more outspoken individual who looks out for his team and his friends than I. I’m a fool who loves to learn and never stops growing, never stops moving.

This substack will be a place to document my latest crimes in hobbying, my current projects, lessons I’ve learned, and things along those lines. I don’t expect there to be a rhyme or reason to much of it, but maybe we’ll learn something along the way together!

Computer Projects

In particular, I plan on documenting my computer projects. I haven’t been using my desktop that much for a while, mostly playing Elden Ring, and with the looming Windows 10 end of life, I haven’t felt the desire to move on to bloated windows 11 with its always on telemetry and other negative privacy defeating attributes, so I switched it over to Linux Mint and converted it into a app server. So far, I’ve loaded SearXNG, Ollama, OpenWebUI, n8n, and Stable Diffusion on it in Docker containers. n8n and Ollama, in particular, I’m spending a lot of time with them as I expand my automation skills and work on learning more about using AI with automation. Expect to see plenty of articles on these topics in the future.

So come and join me on this wild adventure of “What Dereck is going to do next!”