There are 447 blog posts for you to enjoy.
Puyo, Ecuador: A Pleasant Amazon Town That Just Works
January 31, 2026
Puyo, Ecuador - on the Amazon side of the Andes Mountains in central Ecuador, has a population of
around 34,000 in the town and maybe closer to 40,000 in the metropolitan area. I've been here for four days. This is my
fourth visit. That brings me to ten days here. Puyo is an Amazon town, surrounded by the rain forest, with the Rio Pindo
Grande running through the town on one side, and the Puyo River running along the other side. Across the Puyo River is
all jungle. The town, while not historic or loaded with historic buildings, is a very pleasant place to stay if you're
passing through this region.
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Dark Patterns - the Modern Internet Part 5
January 28, 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.
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Loreto, Ecuador: A Jungle Town, Not a Tourist Stop
January 24, 2026
Loreto, Ecuador sits in Orellana Province, deep in the Amazon Basin within the Napo River watershed.
It's a small cantonal seat with only a few thousand people in town, but the canton itself is massive - more
than 2,200 square kilometers (850 square miles) of jungle, rivers, hills, and rough terrain. That territory stretches from lowland rainforest up toward the slopes of Volcano Sumaco and the Galeras range. The town lies along the E20 highway, between Coca and deeper Amazon forest, and functions more as a service and transit hub than anything resembling a tourist destination.
Most of the canton is rural; roughly 90% of the population lives outside the town, including
Kichwa Indigenous communities and mestizo settlers - with Loreto itself occupying only a small, settled slice of
the larger landscape. It's hot, humid, green, and practical, not a place of tidy plazas or Andean charm. Loreto
was officially designated a canton in August 1992, making it a relatively new administrative unit, even though the land
and its people have a much longer history.
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Dark Patterns - the Modern Internet Part 4
January 21, 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.
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Baeza, Ecuador: Where the History Outgrew the Town
January 17, 2026
Baeza, Ecuador, sits in the lower slopes of the Eastern Andes Mountains in northern Ecuador. Sitting in a valley at an elevation of 1914 meters (6280 feet), this very small town of around 5000, was founded in 1559. Other than stopping for a meal, there's nothing here to see or do. There's a nature reserve a short drive outside of town, and looking at the Wikipedia page and its mention of a "municipal integrated farm" - well I didn't see any such thing in walking all over the tiny town, and Google maps shows "zoologico" which is typically a zoo or zoo-like place. Are they the same? I don't know, can't help you on that one. And there's the "Old Baeza" neighborhood just a few minutes walk out of the town proper. It's a neighborhood with its own church, a very unkempt "park" or plaza, maybe originally, a few hostals, and a tiny convenience store. At the front, alongside the highway, is a tiny park area with a couple of statues and the city name sign (pics in the photo album). It's all rundown, tired, and not at all what the Wikipedia describes it as.
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