About the Author
Hi, I’m Carson Chittom.
I currently work in internal operations at a software company. In the past I’ve done technical support (both for that company and others), written and implemented government policy as a state bureaucrat, served two military deployments in southwest Asia, and worked as a chef. Briefly, I was also paid to feed fish. Needless to say, those opinions I mentioned don’t necessarily represent those of my current or past employers.
My wife Rebecca is a college professor. We met at the University of Mississippi, where I was finishing up my bachelor’s degree after those military deployments and she was doing a doctorate in vocal pedagogy. We’ve been married since 2005.
In 2009, we moved south from Oxford, Mississippi, to the Jackson, Mississippi, area with our first two children. In the subsequent years, we had six more. Having a big family can have its challenges, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
In 2026, I was ordained as a deacon in the Orthodox Church, so formally I am also “The Reverend Deacon Michael1 Chittom.” Wistly is just my personal site, not a forum for theology or apologetics; but obviously the Church is a big part of my life, and I expect it to be mentioned here from time to time.
About the Site
Wistly is created and served using TextPattern, and therefore posts are written in Textile, which is not my favorite (that would be OrgMode) but does the job. The site theme is the default which comes with TextPattern.
I host the site myself from my house in an OmniOS zone on an old Dell R210 II that I can reach out and touch.
Privacy
This site has no real analytics, because I don’t care.
I do keep normal webserver logs for a few months, which record things like what pages are accessed from which IP address, browser User-Agent, referrer URL, and so on, in case I need to troubleshoot a problem or validate that something is working. These logs are not looked at otherwise—again, don’t care—and are eventually discarded.
1 Michael is my baptismal name.