karl.tsakos.us/blog

You know, there are certain things I want for my site that it just being a blog isn’t doing for me. I want to have better galleries and places for other content. Right now I can’t (easily) put that content here. I have plans to change that.

The blog isn’t going away. No, in fact it is still an important part of the site. The place I can put new written content. But it will become just a component of the site. The main portion will be more static and therefor doesn’t need to be as “live” as the blog.

Before I went with the blog I designing a new site. When I go back and look at it, it is a design I still like. I also like the way I designed it to manage my content and how I managed to integrate the photo galleries from Aperture into it fairly seamlessly.

Ultimately, it means the blog will get a new address which mean the RSS feed will change. So, that’s the real reason for this post, to give you a heads up that the change is in the works.

Stay tuned for more.

Well, more like rain and slush day. And, not for me as much as for others.

Huh?

I don’t know if I ever mentioned that I work for a school district. That means when the winter weather turns south here in the Northeast we could have a cancelation. As we had today. Of course, that means I get the 5:00 AM phone call to put the notice on the website. At five this morning it was a two hour delay. Around six it was changed to a cancelation since the highway department was behind schedule. While most of my colleagues were back in bed, I was on the phone with the network engineers we have down from Buffalo to install and configure the district’s new network.

As is the tradition with my department, a couple of my coworkers and I will be going in to do some of the ever-pressing work we can’t do when people are around. Well at least the pay is good. When one thinks about it, it doesn’t seem like a bad day of work really. I will be able to work at a comfortable pace and won’t have any meetings taking up my time. Dang, I’ll probably be more productive then I normally am.

Sure I was born in 1969, so you would think I was born in the year of the rooster, or the cock as I like to say, according to the Chinese Calendar. I went under the assumption I was a cock until my mid 30’s when I actually looked up the Chinese calendar. Turns out I’m a monkey.

We in the west have paid little attention to the Chinese New Year, instead relying on the place mats in our favorite restaurants for our Chinese astrological information. It is vein of us to assume the Chinese calendar falls exactly where the western calendar begins and ends; we are wrong in doing so. The Chinese calendar is based on a lunisolar system. Clearly the new years will not start on the same date as the Gregorian calendar we use. That being said, 1969 is generally thought of as the Year of the Cock. However, the Year of the of the Cock did not start until February 17, 1969. On February 9, 1969, the day I was born, we were still in the last waning days of the Year of the Monkey.

Of course, the date for Chinese New Year falls scatter shot around my birthday meaning the year can change before or after. In 2008 it landed before so we are now in the Year of the Rat which started on February 7, or two days ago. It is fitting then that I embrace this zodiac year along with the realization that in one year from today I will be forty years old.

And that’s just it, instead of whimpering for the next year, I intend to embrace my age. I don’t feel that old anyhow. How’s that ad with Dennis Hopper go? “… the 30’s are the new 20’s, the 40’s are the new 30s…” Or something like that, I’m paraphrasing. Either way, it’s very true. So I decided to look at things this way, the next year is all about me. If you think about it, I am, in a sense, in my fortieth year already. So, starting today, will be a yearlong celebration of me culminating in my fortieth birthday.

I’m not sure how I intend on celebrating me as of yet. It will no doubt involve public as well as internal moments. Mostly I think it will just be me reminding everyone that the whole year is about me. Everything they do is about me. I’m sure it will wear thin soon but it doesn’t matter. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about me.

Welcome to the year of the rat, the year of me.

What’s unique about this blog post is that it is completely writer on my new iPhone. The keyboard is abut small for typing all ofthe time but none the less, it is clearly useable when on the go.

One very nice feature is the intelligent typing which really does work. As I type I keep hitting wrong keys and clearly producing typos. However,the software cam figure out from the nearby letters what I most likely meant to type and corrects the word on the fly. I have already started feeling more confident as I type and my speed is increasing.

As I said, amazing what they can do these days.

(Note: The predictive typing is not fool proof [I am the fool who proves that]. I left the errors in on purpose since that is what I typed during the test.)