Large logo with Rust's empty turbofish operator (two colons followed by a less than and a greater than sign)
Choom's Day

Choom's Day

Me in T-shirt and pants wearing sunglasses and holding my white cane with some pruned bushes and overcast sky in the background

My name is João Santos, I am known around the Internet as Choom, Choominator, or Fridux, I've been totally blind due to the natural degenerative progression of a congenital glaucoma since 2014, and this is my humble personal web site.

Names

The name Choom is slang for friend or homie in parts of the United States, Choominator is an alternative variant that I use where Choom is taken and is inspired by the dorky Chuck [the Sherminator] Sherman in American Pie. The name Fridux is a more complicated story: back in the early 90s there was a paranormal TV show here in Portugal where an alleged medium channeled healing from the ghost of a dead surgeon whose surname was Fritz; frustrated with not being able to recover my original account on reddit named Choominator after deleting it in 2012, I had an entity crisis for quite some time until in 2020 I decided to settle with Fridux, the closest available name to Fritz that I could come up with on reddit.

Historically I also had other names, like JayElvee in 1997, which was the English pronunciation of the Initials for João Loves Vera; Rad in 1998 after Raditz, Goku's Saiyan brother in Dragon Ball Z; Dowd in 2000 after a character named Stanton Dowd in the original Deus Ex game; flock in 2002 after the BSD system call with the same name; all before settling with Choom in 2006.

The name of this site, as well as its domain, are both a pun on the word doomsday, which essentially means the day when a catastrophic event with cataclysmic proportions causes the end of human civilization as we know it, or even total human extinction, but it's also intended to convey its nature as my online diary or web log.

Scope

The purpose of this site is to show the world my uncensored opinionated passion for technology and other subjects in a space where I get to decide what is published. This site's logo is Rust's empty turbofish operator, which I find fitting because it's mostly a technology site and I love Rust.

Nothing written here is or will ever be generated by any kind of large language model, because in my opinion only humans are entitled to be sloppy. Most of the subjects that I talk about here are highly technical, but I am actually a high-school drop-out who just happens to love technology and has n extreme curiosity for how everything works. This means that what I write here might be totally wrong even when it works in practice.

Technology

All the text content here is written in Markdown and processed along with some templates that I wrote. The site is purely static, to generate it I used Zola, and it's served by a bunny.net pull zone which delivers it through its worldwide edge servers. The DNS is hosted at Gandi, which is a fully accessible DNS and VPS provider.