Jason dV

John Mayer’s Battle Studies is supposed to be good. Not great, but good enough to add to my collection. And the newly-released 4-CD live recording of Ella Fitzgerald at the Crescendo (Twelve Nights in Hollywood) has me drooling.
Neither of the two seem to be available in local stores yet. I know I can snag them off the iTunes Store, but I’d rather get the real CDs, even if I have to wait a while.

After nine months of inactivity, I’ve decided to give blogging another try. I’m semi-retired from Facebook, after a minor but really uncomfortable incident (someone gave me flak after reading far, far too much in a status update), and while Twitter is a great way to stay in touch with a select group of friends, it’s nearly impossible to talk about more substantial stuff in 140 characters. I’m also not writing much these days [no more Mobile Philippines], and have been longing to have another outlet.

No more pretensions about writing regularly [not even 100 words a day] — I’ll just write when I feel like it. I got a nice new theme [Elegant Grunge, by Michael Tyson], updated my WordPress installation to 2.8.2, and will be dusting off my HTML and CSS manuals to try and make this site look more personal in the weeks and months ahead.

I’m looking forward to writing again. Full steam ahead!

 

I was supposed to spend the afternoon grading presentations submitted by my students last week but I got sidetracked by a new book — slide:ology, by Nancy Duarte. I opened it with the idea of just browsing the contents very quickly, but within seconds I got sucked in.

 

After flipping through the book’s pages, I sought out more info and found the author’s blog, where extra resources (mainly sample PowerPoint slides that are featured in the book) were available. I wanted my own copy so I went to the publisher’s site and found out that a DRM-free PDF copy of the book was available for purchase, and within minutes I was $28 poorer. I did a little more surfing and found a collection of videos by Duarte Design over on video-sharing site Vimeo, and started downloading them as well. Before I knew it, nearly three hours had passed, and now I will have to work on a Sunday to be able to send my students their class standing by Monday.

 

That scanned file that was the result of the fortuitous combination of a new MacBook, intense curiosity, and an available x-ray machine multiplied traffic to the old site by a hundredfold and caused my account to exceed the bandwidth cap about a week and a half later. Since my hosting contract was due to expire in another couple of weeks and I had already arranged to move to another hosting service, I just let the deadline lapse.

 

I originally wanted to move everything from the old site to the new one but I quickly realized that I did not have the coding chops required to both recreate the mySQL database and upgrade the WordPress installation from version 2.3 to version 2.7, and ended up deciding to start all over again.

For what it’s worth, the new look (I’m using the Sirup theme) jibes much more with the “simplify everything” mantra that I am trying to follow this year. In short, I hope to do more writing and less design tweaking on the blog this year.

Longish story behind the downtime. I’ll be tweaking the blog’s looks and contents little by little over the next few days. Stay tuned.