I recently took a stroll through the Princeton Cemetery. It is an interesting place to explore. You have a former president and a former vice president among those interred.
When walking through the cemetery, you can’t help but notice one grave — it is the only one with a statue of the deceased on top. This grave comes with its own mythology, passed down over the years.
The story I’ve heard countless times has never really changed. Paul Tulane who was born in Princeton, moves to New Orleans, becomes very wealthy, comes back to his hometown and attempts to give a sizable donation to Princeton University (then known as the College of New Jersey) and his one condition was that the university change its name to reflect his generous donation.
After being rebuffed by Princeton University, he would then proceed give his money to the Medical College of Louisiana which did accept his gift and renamed themselves to Tulane University in his honor.
The story continues with Tulane’s passing that the statue on his grave would be erected with his back facing the very university that refused his generous gift, forever shunning Princeton University.
As fascinating this story is, it has been mostly been debunked, though it doesn’t stop students from both Princeton and Tulane keeping the story alive through the years.
The more I researched this for my own curiosity, the more I kept asking myself — how many other pieces of history does oral tradition perpetuate something that is inaccurate or false? And does this happen simply because it is more entertaining than the true story?
Who knows for sure, but it does make for some interesting reading for those of us whom enjoy going down rabbit holes.
Cheers,
–Jon
Sometimes we take on personal pet projects that we have expectations for, but then get side-tracked with other more-pressing matters.
This blog has been no different. I wanted to get a quick start to it so I set it up in a managed hosting environment. That’s fine to get something going quick, but then you realize you lose a lot of granular control in a shared hosting environment.
Unfortunately, due to being busy at work, getting my daughter ready for college, adopting another dog, and dealing with some health issues, my blog took the backseat.
Fortunately I am finally able to reclaim some time and work on it once again.
First step which I completed last night was spinning up a new droplet on DigitalOcean and setting up my stack. Got everything configured and moved my files over.
Next step which I’ve been debating is if I should restore all my old blog posts from like 15 years ago or not. I finally found all the backups and while 90% of that content is no longer relevant I kind of feel it belongs here.
Hopefully now that I am finally able to work on this site again I can get back to writing some original content.
Cheers,
–Jon
When I decided to start blogging again for the first time in many years I decided to use this as an opportunity to level up my skills with Tailwind and accessibility, etc.
I think I had two iterations of this template that I built in Tailwind, but could not get them to look how I wanted. Just little tweaks here and there that were not as easy to iron out as I had hoped. When choosing to use a UI framework you sometimes obscure the complexity of things.
So back to the basics. This actually turned out to be a good time to refresh my CSS skills and learn some of the newer stuff added to CSS over the last ten years such as the light-dark( ) function for defining different color schemes for light or dark mode browsing.
Digging into the colors, I managed to hit WCAG 2.2 AAA for color contrast for all my text elements in both light and dark mode.
Next step is cleaning up some more of the ARIA markup to make the site work better for those using assistive devices.
Once I am done with the various housekeeping tasks I can get back to actually writing.
Cheers,
–Jon
I used to be diligent with my blogging back in the aughts, and would post at least two or three times a month. It was mostly an expressive exercise to keep my mind sharp.
But as with many things that interest us in life, sometimes other things end up eating into our available time, we lose focus or interests wanes.
Here we are in 2025, and I feel I need to start writing again. The last time I actively maintained my old blog I was in my 30s. Now I am in my 50s and feel the need to write more than ever.
So consider this the point of origin of Jon’s Journal 2.0 where I will be sharing my thoughts about life, politics, programming, hockey, hiking or whatever else interests me on any given day.
Cheers,
–Jon