Partial Dismantling

I was at this engineering seminar last Tuesday and ran into the local representative for Simpson Strong-Tie, whom I've known for quite a number of years now. He told me that he had been looking for my contact information online and came across my blog, but not Mosswood Engineering. I knew it was my blog because he mentioned the chickens. This is the second time that a colleague has looked for Nate, the engineer, and found Nate, the chicken farmer. That inspired me to do a little house cleaning that has been in the back of my mind for awhile.

I bought my domain over ten years ago but unfortunately didn't get natewilliams.com. Natewilliams.us isn't too bad, though, considering that these days I probably couldn't get anything remotely close to my name. It may seem a bit egocentric, but this was still back in the day when you needed a website to show off your photos or write about what you were doing. It's funny to think back about all the time I spent scanning photos, reducing the file sizes, writing in HTML, when now you can do it all with a few clicks. I sound like an old man reminiscing but this was only ten years ago.

Anyway, in the beginning I loved the idea of an online presence; I thought life should be an open book...share it all. I've come to my senses since then, but I did still have remnants of those shared moments that I thought better removed than available to anyone with the correct search string. So I just went through my website and deleted a lot of pages and collections of photos. I did keep a lot pages, though, mostly related to climbing, juggling, and traveling. There are a few stories I wrote that are still worth a re-read...early blog entries I suppose, or maybe more like memoirs. There's the Search for Sylver Goode, the Snake Dike Ascent, and the Weeping Wall Ascent. They could use some editing but maybe another time. I do wish I had done the same for my El Cap ascent but that one was just too much to take in and write about while it was still fresh.