When I reached a milestone along my weight loss route to health and happiness I rewarded myself with a pair of new jeans. These Levi’s “Ribcage Wide Leg” pants in size 32W/30L are currently very popular. The high waist and full length make my legs seem longer. Worn with a belt they accentuate the waistline. I like this style because it makes me feel confident and comfortable at the same time.
It’s also remarkable, how fashion went full-circle in the last fifty years. The same style of pants was just as popular in 1975 and I liked it back then too, for the same reasons.
My hairdo and glasses, though, I had to modify between March 1975 and May 2025. Super-long hair is just not practical, and those glasses were very heavy, leaving deep pressure marks on my nose.
I publish this blog because I like to communicate. I want people to read my stories, maybe even engage in conversation. Of course any public appearance can also attract the wrong kind of crowd. Especially on the internet, where about 70% of all traffic comes from bots, crawlers, scrapers, search engines, AI agents, hackers, scammers, spammers….. and only a few legitimate visitors.
My blog is protected with a premium security plugin and I watch the logs on a regular basis.
Lately I’ve seen a surge in visits from a user agent called “Bytespider”. That thing was trying to get onto my pages continuously, supposedly from Singapore. Thousands of blocked attempts every day. I was curious. Turns out that this is an AI scraper designed to train the Chinese LLM “DeepSeek”. I really don’t want to help feed any AI machine for free! So, even though none of these bad agents made it through my firewall (yet), I educated myself on a few other strange visitors to my webspace and hardened certain aspects of my WordPress backend.
A few more plugins installed, certain IP-ranges blocked, and voilá – less unwanted visitors.
In the summer of 2015 I bought my first smart phone. That Nexus 5X was a big step up from my previous favorit Motorola RAZR, not just in technology but also in size. I had a problem with that. How do you carry this “huge” thing around without turning into a dork? So, after toying around the idea of making my own phone carrier pouch for a while, building a prototype out of cardboard, perfecting my design, I came up with this device that I call “ExxoPok”. invention of the ExxoPok
As soon as people saw me sporting that invention I got requests to make them one for their phone. After giving away about a dozen to friends and family, I set up an Etsy shop and made my first sale in December of 2015. Over the years I made and sold about 150 of my phone pouches. The price I charged was just about enough to cover the cost of making them. I never intended to turn this into a serious source of income, it was just a fun hobby. In September of 2019 we moved to Germany, so I put my Etsy shop on “vacation” to give me time to settle into my new life.
When I thought I was ready I opened up an Etsy shop in Germany and also built my own shop on my personal webspace – to practice HTML5, using a free shop with ECWID. buy an ExxoPok from me
Since I didn’t advertise and didn’t really care if I sold anything or not, there was hardly any activity on Etsy, or on my personal page. In December of 2023 I made one sale on Etsy. Somebody bought a Christmas present for her friend. At that point I calculated Etsy’s listing fees against my “profit” from that one sale in four years and decided the whole thing wasn’t worth it. I closed the Etsy shop and removed the payment methods from my personal ECWID shop. Done.
Along came December 2024 when I received an email from Eve in Oklahoma. She had found my personal website and tried to purchase an ExxoPok for her iphone 7. Because there was no payment method linked to that shop anymore she couldn’t pay.
So I made an exception for her and I also linked my Paypal to the ECWID shop again. Today I received a very nice message from my surprise customer with a picture of herself carrying ExxoPok number 160. She likes it.
When I reached a milestone along my weight loss route to health and happiness I rewarded myself with a pair of new jeans. These Levi’s “Ribcage Wide Leg” pants in size 32W/30L are currently very popular. The high waist and full length make my legs seem longer. Worn with a belt they accentuate the waistline. I like this style because it makes me feel confident and comfortable at the same time.
Along came December 2024 when I received an email from Eve in Oklahoma. She had found my personal website and tried to purchase an ExxoPok for her iphone 7. Because there was no payment method linked to that shop anymore she couldn’t pay.