About me

Hi. I'm Tintin (pen name, like the comic book hero), a middle-aged guy roaming around the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Like Tintin, I embody curiosity, athleticism, silly adventuring, problem-solving abilities, and a knack for getting in trouble. I'm also a bit of a lone wolf, which fits just fine with the sports I like.

These days I do a lot of running, cycling both off-road and on tarmac, and weightlifting. When I'm near the ocean I swim often in open water.

You might run into me on the local trails: Des Plaines, North Branch, Fox River, etc. I hope we can be friends.

Read more about my fitness background here.

How I get inspiration

I've been meaning to start this blog for years, but I kept getting blocked (or at least used it as an excuse to procrastinate) by not having the right domain, or not having nailed down what blog engine I want to use. In the meantime I've been collecting headlines and ideas for blog posts.

Every time I ride my bike, I get cycley ideas. When I run, I get runny thoughts. I jot them down when I get home. Now I can expand on them and flesh them out into complete articles. I don't think I'll run out of ideas anytime soon.

About this site

The site and blog are built on Jigsaw, a static engine with Laravel/PHP underpinnings. The site is deployed on Cloudflare.

I write blog posts in plain markdown. The blog engine chews them up and spits them out as html.