There are 447 blog posts for you to enjoy.
Finding the Quiet: Why My Shortlist for a New Home Ignores the Coast
March 5, 2026
What is it about coastal towns that makes them pretty much always "messier"? I'm talking specifically about these countries: Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, Chile, and Uruguay. The vast majority of interior towns are almost always cleaner, friendlier, prettier, etc.
I'm not imagining it. This pattern shows up everywhere I've been, and that includes 7 countries and over 300 towns/cities (in South America), and it’s not a cultural coincidence. It’s geography, economics, and human behavior piling up in the same places.
Here’s the straight, unsentimental anatomy of why coastal towns skew messier, while interior towns often feel cleaner, calmer, and more human. The comparisons below are to be taken with a very general understanding.
Read More
Máncora, Perú - A Beach City for Beach Lovers, But Not Much Else
March 1, 2026
Máncora, Perú, is located on the north coast of Perú. It is considered a beach resort city, though it is a small city of about 45,000. The beach is quite nice, all clean sand for a long way along the coast. It's also a big fishing port. The town is loaded with seafood restaurants. They say this is an ideal surfing, watersports, and fishing area - the northern coast of Perú - due to the two major ocean currents - the Humboldt and the El Niño. According to Wikipedia, 51% of the population is foreign-born. Though during my visit, I came across no one who could speak English other than a couple of tourists from Sweden who were just passing through.
Reference: Wikipedia
Read More
Corrales, EC - A Small Piece of Coastal Unexcitement
February 25, 2026
Corrales, Perú, just a few kilometers south of Tumbes, which is 30 kilometers south of the border with Ecuador. I've visited Corrales once before, here's the blog. That blog has some of the history and my initial observations. The town hasn't changed in the last 3 years.
Read More
Huaquillas, Ecuador - A Border town that's not really Interesting
February 21, 2026
Huaquillas, Ecuador, sits on the border with Perú. I wrote a blog about this town on January 17, 2023. This town is nothing special, not all that clean, noisy, and simply not worth a visit. The only redeeming quality I can find is that some of the bakery/coffee shops and dessert shops play soft jazz. Maybe they do that to give people a respite from the noise and congestion of the downtown streets.
Read More
Dark Patterns - the Modern Internet Part 8
February 18, 2026
Have you ever wondered, Why can't websites be built in a way that actually works properly, makes sense, and are truly useful? For example: Facebook (full of problems - I'm logged in, of course, and looking at my profile page and I used the search to find, for example, all posts with "Marx" - searching for Groucho Marx quote-memes. There are 5 of them. There they are, fully visible, in all their glory, and a 3-button hamburger menu. Oh, but what is that? A menu with only one option? Does that qualify as a menu? Not in my opinion. That one option is to save the post. So, if I want to delete the post I'm looking at, I have to click the post to look at the same post in another view, then I get a menu with many options. Why can't they just put that menu on the previous view of the post? Seriously, building a working website is not rocket science.
Ha! Welcome to the modern web, where billion-dollar companies somehow still can't design a menu that behaves like...you know...a menu.
The thing is, these sites could be built sensibly. They just aren't. And it's not because the engineers don't know how, it's because the entire product philosophy of Big Web is, well, dumb by design.
Read More