Personal

Blog a day, or blog a week

New Year is the perfect time to raise hopeless hopes. Like any given Monday, or the first day of any month, it’s the time to start something that you hope to finish. People promise they will start (or stop) doing all sorts of things – quit smoking, start exercising, stop procrastinating, and so and so forth. This is non-sense of course, but that’s just what we, humans, do.

So in the spirit of a new era start, WordPress.com issued a challenge for 2011 – blog more. To help you complete the challenge, they created a separate website – DailyPost. This one will be updated daily with ideas and other bits of inspiration. All you need to do is post a single blog entry every day throughout 2011. If that sounds like too much, they have a lighter variation – a post a week. You don’t have to follow their subjects – post whatever you want. Just write something either daily or weekly. And to help others find and follow your stuff, tag your posts with postaday2011 or postaweek2011. That’s all.

I’ve done similar challenges before. Not necessarily they were centralized or aligned with someone else, but I did put myself to such a task before. And not only in blogging. For example, I’ve learned most that I know about photography in just a couple of months. It was when I followed someone advice to make a photograph every day. It didn’t matter what I was making a photograph of. Just that I made one. Of course, there were days when I didn’t have the camera around, or was too busy, or too lazy. But I was pretty close to a daily picture (see POTD – Picture Of The Day tag archives).And it did magic to my skills. And so did a blogging challenge.

Someone said somewhere that creativity requires fluency. In order to be creative, you have to be fluent. If you want to be creative in photography, your camera and equipment shouldn’t stay in your way. If you want to speak or write better, you shouldn’t need a dictionary for every other word. If you want to do experimental dancing, you should have good control of your body. And so on and so forth. But there is only one way to get better at something. It’s do that something. The more, the better.

So, if blogging sounds interesting to you, you should blog more. And it’s much easier to do it when you are not alone. Now is the time.

I’ve been quite busy last year. And I blogged much less than in previous years. I wanted to do more. And now I think I will. I will follow up with the challenge. Will you?

Bob, the fish

My son Maxim has been asking Santa for a gold fish. Among a billion of other things, of course. And while he wasn’t so sure about all those toys, he somehow was certain that Santa will bring him a gold fish this year. For it was an almost done fact. Something like tomorrows sunrise. It’s not here yet, but you know for sure it’s coming.

Neither me, nor my wife Olga know anything about fish. Except that it lives in the water and you can eat it in a variety of ways. But fish as a pet is weird. Still, we decided to go along with it. So, for the New Year’s Santa did bring Maxim a small glass bowl for aquarium with a gold fish in it.

Maxim was overjoyed. I think part of it was due to him expecting the gold fish for Christmas, and not getting it, sort of, downed his hopes a bit. And then he didn’t find the aquarium under the tree for the New Year’s. Santa was afraid that our cat will either eat the fish or knock off the aquarium and spill all the water, so he left the present on the table. And Maxim just didn’t check there. Yeah, I know, modern age kids. Back in our day we’d check everywhere! But I digress.

As I said, Maxim was very excited to have a fish. He wanted to do things with – watch it, feed it, put more water in the aquarium, move the aquarium around, put more stones on the bottom of the aquarium, feed the fish again, and watch it some more.

By the end of the day, I noticed that the water in the aquarium wasn’t as crystal clear as before. And the fish seemed to be swearing at us all. At least it looked that way. Now of course I think that the fish was trying to breath with its mouth. Anyway. Dirty water. So I changed it – spilled half of it out and put some new water in. The fish looked better. But not for long. The next day I felt like I need to change the water again. And again. And again.

Then it hit me – the Internet! I had to read at least something about the fish. Since I didn’t know which brand, model, class, or type this fish was, I just read a bit about gold fishes. And even that little that I read made me worried. Here is a list of things (I don’t dare call them facts yet) that I read:

Aquarium gold fish don’t exists in natural habitat. They were created by humans for humans. And while some of them are beautiful, they are very fragile. One small mistake and the fish is dead. One big mistake and the whole aquarium is cursed.
Aquarium fish is very sensitive to water. Preparing and maintaining the right water is almost as hard as sending human to Mars. Maybe not that expensive though. Aquarium has to be prepared with water before the fish goes in. Once the fish is in, it’ll take a couple of days for it to settle and adjust the water for itself. And then that’s what you’ll need to maintain.
Gold fish needs a lot of space. Suggestions varied between a 10 liters and 20 liters of aquarium space per each fish. Our fish bowl was under 2 liters.
Gold fish are a common present for office competitions, birthdays, and other holidays. But because most people don’t know how to take care of the fish, the fish usually survives only for 3-4 days. Oops!

Well, at least we tried. With water changing and everything. But that didn’t help. Today morning I woke up to a dead fish. Bob-the-fish was its name. And it survived in our custody from December 31st, 2010 to January 5th, 2011. That’s almost a week. And somewhat longer than the average for a gold fish present. Not even long enough for me to make a photograph of it. Sad.

Today we’ll probably have a family meeting to decide if we want to try again. And as much as I am for having pets in homes where children grow up, I am against torture and animal cruelty. If we are to try, we’ll need better preparations this time. We’ll need to learn something. And we’ll need to get a bigger aquarium. That’s for sure.

Blogging milestone : 5,000+ posts

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you post number 5,005. I nearly missed it altogether, so please excuse a not exactly a round number. And now, before you throw things at me, let me highlight some disclaimer points:

I’ve written more than 5,000 blog posts in my life. But quite a few of them went down, disappeared, or are blocked behind corporate firewalls. Today’s celebration is only about my personal blog.
Not all of these blog posts were written by hand. Some are aggregates from Twitter, Delicious, or some other third-party service that I used. But I count them anyway, because they compensate for those lost posts, and because the spirit of sharing even via a third-party is too similar to blogging. I found something worth sharing, I shared it, and it ended up on my blog in one form or the other.
Most of these posts are utter crap that nobody will ever read or use. But I still celebrate them, because I took the effort to write them, and because they were important to me at some point in time.
On top of that, I celebrate all these posts that survived over multiple blog software migrations, hosting changes, restructuring and reorganizations. While they are a huge mess that many of you would be glad to throw away, they constantly remind me of all those transformations that I went through. And if nothing else, they provide me with an extra leverage in any data organization argument. After all, thousands of posts and comments over 10 years of blogging should count for some experience.

Let the celebrations begin!

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!

First of all, Happy New Year and Merry Christmas to all of you! Best wishes to you, your families, and friends. I hope all your disappointments and mischiefs will stay in 2010 and that 2011 will bring only the good stuff.

Looking back at 2010, I see a very rocky year. So many things came and went, started and finished, appeared and disappeared that it’s hard to keep the track of. I found and left two jobs. I moved back to the apartment from the rented house. My wife found the job, but not for long. Maxim started school. My mother moved to another apartment and got back to her blog, even though in a completely different way. My dad took over a website and became a webmaster in just the few month that he was online. With all these changes around me, I didn’t focus as much on blogging, photography, and technological trends. But now that most of these changes are (hopefully) over, I’ll get back to my interests.

I don’t have any big plans or hopes for 2011. I hope that everyone around me stays healthy and wealthy. I hope I’ll get out of the country for a few days (not much travel happened in 2010, but that was well compensated by 2009). I hope I’ll finally get myself one of those Android phones. And maybe even an Amazon Kindle. These gadgets interest me enough to review my programming skills, which I hope will see some refurbish this year.

With that, I once again wish you all the best, and hope you’ll share your year reviews and hopes for 2011 in the comments. Have fun, enjoy, and celebrate. Happy New Year!

Scholar

– How’s school?

– Too early in the morning and too boring.

– Too early, eh?

– Yes, I want to sleep. (classes start at 7:30am)

– Son, welcome to the adult life. Everyone wants to sleep here.

– Really?

– Yes. So, what was so boring about school?

– It’s not like kindergarten. We have to sit, listen, and keep quiet. We only have breaks to play.

– Well, that’s another thing about being adult. You have to do much more boring stuff than before.

– Adult life sucks and it is confusing. (I am paraphrasing here)

– Yes, it does and yes, it is.

Maxim is now a first grader at Logos School of English Education.