Tag: blogging

The year 2005 in review

With some time on my hands I went through blog archives for year 2005. Once again I am glad that I kept blogging no matter what.

The highlight of the year is, of course, the birth of my son – Maxim. This is much bigger than the event of the year. This is the event of my life. Truly and honestly, nothing even comes close in comparison. I am sorry for all those of you who got offended – I didn’t mean to.

Preparations for Maxim’s birth and the birth itself have changed my life in so many ways, that I couldn’t even start to imagine the year before that. My house is different. My daily routine is different. My thinking is different. My relationships with so many people are different. I am different. This is like another life – some things are familiar and recognizable, but practically nothing is the same anymore.

Slightly more than 10 month passed. I calmed down a little, but I am still pretty amazed with the whole thing. And with the whole new human being. This still needs much thinking over.

In comparison – everything else was pretty unimportant. But still things happened. I lost some friends. Noone died, just we became less close than we used to. I found some new ones too. People change and I guess this year changed me more than any other – thus the friend shaking. Again, I am sorry if I offended anyone – I didn’t mean to.

This year was pretty healthy. I don’t remember being seak – except for a few indigestions and hangovers. Olga was fine too. I had a few worries about Maxim, but they all seem to come to a good ending. Things could have been a little better in this department, but they could have been much worse than they were. And so I am greatful that they weren’t.

Another good thing is that I am still employed. I have food on my table and much more than that. Things at work are somewhat good. I am not enjoying my office work as I used to, but it is still much better than painful. I also have got a few ideas on how to apply my creativity and love for new technologies and get something financially valuable in return. I have started a couple of projects and I hope to see them all succeed in the coming year.

I learned a lot of new stuff. Mostly I was dealing with Perl programming language applied to web development and RSS technologies. I wasn’t trying to limit my exposure to other things, but I was focusing more on these two. This should pay off.

I have continued to improve my photography skills. Though I have to admit that I was very narrow with my subject chosing – Maxim was the main subject of the year. I have made a few thousand pictures of him alone. But I tried. And there is proof that I was looking at other subjects too. From my opinion – I got a little better. But you are better judges here.

I watched many movies, although I could easily live without many of them. The film of the year is, with no doubt, “Sin City“. By far. And it is one of the best movies that I’ve ever seen. And I am saying something here.

On the down sides – this year wasn’t the best for my car. It was hit twice on the parking and it was seriously destroyed in the accident few days ago. Hopefully things will turn out better next year.

This seems like a good round-up of what I was up to the whole year.

Happy New Year and enjoy the holidays!

WordPress 2.0 is released!

While there are no updates on WordPress blog yet, the Download section already has WordPress 2.0. Things should be easier, faster, and nicer now.

I am planning to upgrade this site eventually, but I’ll need some feedback from other users, especially regarding themes and plugins. The upgrade won’t happen this year though. Holidays’ve filled my schedule already. And even if they haven’t, debugging weird PHP code is the last thing I want to do on New Year’s Eve.

I am also planning to release a couple of new sites and those will start off on WordPress 2.0 platform. You’ll hear more soon too. Really. I promise.

Why blogs are better than mainstream news

Every day I read more and more blogs and less and less mainstream news. Why? Because mainstream news suck! Most of the mainstream news agencies carry the heavy burden of the printed press and a century of mass media from before the Internet.

Picture is a thousand words they say. Here is a graphical example for you. Cool Tech Zone – “A Division of iTech Media.” Blah blah blah. One of the recent news items is titled “Microsoft Buys Out Opera“. Catching, isn’t it? It is.

In 5 paragraphs of text to follow, they tell that Microsoft is closing a deal purchasing Opera Software. Google is mentioned and so on and so forth. Makes one read a lot, wonder, think, wonder, think, and read some more…

6th paragraph reads:

Update: Opera recently confirmed that Microsoft has not approached the browser maker and there is no active acquistion deal between the two companies currently.

In plain English? OK. “All you’ve just read above is bullcrap. Lies. We just made it up.” Yeah. They just wasted a whole bunch of your time. And they are not sorry. “Opera recently confirmed…” Confirmed? Confirmed what? They didn’t confirm anything. In fact, they contradicted. It should have read something like “Opera recently contradicted this whole article.”

I’m telling you – blogs rule…

P.S.: Slashdot post

The Dilbert Blog. Again.

There is much to learn about good writing. And by learning one could improve greatly. But whatever you do – you’ll never even come close to people who have talent. Talant can be recognized from a mile away. Scott Adams of the Dilbert fame has talant. And, although, he is mostly popular for his comics cartoonist talant, I have to say that I enjoy his writing equally or even more.

Here are a couple of examples for you to enjoy.

In his Thanksgiving post he mentions how he felt after an recent operation:

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that last week was about as pleasant for me as (pick one):

a. using a rabid porcupine to loofah.

b. having a head that looks exactly like a soccer ball and living in Brazil.

c. being Darth Vader about an hour before he gets the helmet.

In another post he talks about how difficult it was, until recently, to find a good sitting place in Mongolia:

In the old days, this restlessness probably caused the Mongols to invade neighboring countries looking for a warm, dry spot to relax and put their feet up. It’s a little known fact that the name Ghengis Khan means “I’m serious man, I need a chair.” But these days, thanks to IKEA, the Mongolians no longer need to stun a yak to find a seat that won’t move.

And his post on interrogation techniques is just brilliant:

It occurred to me recently after having surgery for my deviated septum that lots of Al Qaeda members must need that same procedure. When Amnesty International finds out that we gave free medical care to prisoners, that won’t sound so bad. And yet I can tell you from my own experience that by the second day I would have given up the missile launch codes to make the pain stop. And if I didn’t know the codes I would be willing to torture someone who did until I got them.

Go read his blog. It’s one of the best on the web. Seriously!

Blogs vs. good memory

Once in a while I come across someone who says that blogging (or any other form of diary) is useless to him/her because of his/hers good memory. This argument sounds somewhat funny to me. You see, I thought that my memory was good too. I could remember all important things in my life and trace them back to, well, as far as I could remember.

That was before I started to blog. Now I have close to 3,000 posts that constantly remind me how bad my memory is and how easy it is to forget those little precious moments in life.

I still try to remember as much as I can. But I don’t rely on my memory as much as I used to, because it was proven to be rather faulty. Instead I blog about things that are important to me, or things that can remind me of important things that I want to remember. So far it works very good.

Also, since I mentioned it – indirect blogging works for me very well too. There are some things that I don’t want the public to know, but that I don’t want to forget either. I tried using private posts for these, but it just wasn’t fun. So, instead, I switched to indirect blogging. That is I write about private and secret things in public, but I do so in such a way that only I can figure out the second meaning. (Hint: if you come across a post that makes no sense at all, maybe it’s just one of those indirect posts that I wrote for myself.)