About

I’m Mike Howells. I live in Missouri, work in IT, and write here about the systems behind everyday life.

This blog started in 2010, ran for a few years, and then went quiet for about a decade. I came back to it in 2026 because I’d gotten interested in something I didn’t expect to find interesting: my electric bill. That led me down a longer path into how the power grid actually works, and from there into a four-part series about what I learned. Whatever else this blog becomes, that’s the project that brought me back to writing.

Before IT, I trained as a pilot in the early 1990s and flew small aircraft for about a decade. One of the more memorable stories from that period is still on this blog: My Worst Flight, a 1991 cross-country with my family that didn’t go according to plan. I haven’t flown since 2000, but the habits of thinking that aviation built into me, especially around system failure and the limits of human judgment under pressure, still show up in how I approach almost everything else.

I tend to follow questions that look small and turn out to be larger than they first appeared. Why does my utility charge me a different rate at 10 PM than at 9 PM? Why does every power supply in my house say “100-240V”? Why is one specific DNS query showing up in my Pi-hole logs every hour? These are the kinds of questions I write about. Sometimes they go somewhere big. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, the act of writing about them helps me think more clearly than I would otherwise.

I write for someone who’s curious about how the systems they depend on actually work but isn’t necessarily an expert in any of them. If you’re that person, I think you’ll find something useful here.

This is a personal site, not a business or a brand. I’m not building an audience, optimizing for SEO, or trying to monetize anything. The goal is clarity of thinking and the occasional well-told story. If a post resonates with you, that’s a nice bonus.

If you want to start with a series, the Coming Grid Crisis series is probably the best entry point.

Thanks for reading.

If you want to reach me, contact@mikehowells.com