the-shrike.net

I am not dead.
I actually feel quite ashamed but my latest blogging-self, and even if apologizing here is more or less like apologizing to a mirror, I feel like doing it.
It is strange, it’s just a period when writing a blog post, even if I have quite some ideas, it’s not something that seems to be able to find any place in my days. I think this could be because I’m actually writing something else, a sort of literary experiment (definitely a first time for me) eXalted related for my friend back in Italy, and this is actually consuming all the flow of my thoughts out of my mind into the keyboard. It may sound strange, but I’ve never been anything close to a writing person, and the fact that I’m trying to concentrate on the slow (and most of the time painful) process of producing something like that could well be the cause of my lack of energy for the every-once-in-a-while blogging activity.
Nevertheless, I felt that necglecting this experiment would be a great loss, as the-shrike.net is still my attempt to put a foot in the blogosphere out there, so I decided to try find some time for it.
It’s not a real restart, but… we’ll see.

Anyway, what better way to give some boost to this blog than to screw completly my WordPress 2.1 installation, mess around at 2am on a Saturday night to install WordPress 2.5 and change to a new (yes, I’m going more and more minimalistic :p) theme? Nothing like the pleasure of hacking CSS style file in the middle of the night before crushing to bed at 3:15am, right?

In some way, I was kind of missing writing here.
Let’s see if I’m somehow able to start babbling again.

Let’s try it, and if it works, is pure geek-happiness!
I’m playing with this, and it appears to do what it is supposed to, definitely
something that’s going to change completly my way of blogging on Wordpress.
It’s a very simple & nice script to post to a Wordpress blog using VIM which happens to be my
favourite text editor.
So far so good… I’m leaving in less than 2 hours for a 8 days trip to Japan and India (work, of course!) so I will test (and eventually post something more about this) when I’ll be back next Monday.

I just discovered that I can log-in to blogger.com to comment on a blog hosted there (and to create a personal profile, blog, whatever…) using my google account login&password.
That’s probably something not new, but definitely a surprise for me.

I am not sure if I like that: the good old google is day by day becoming just like something scary in its outstanding run to conquer every corner of the Internet. Feels like someone is watching ;p

It has been a hell of a month (and half).
Well, actually, not so bad in a negative way: just full of things to do. And it is not over, yet.

My training contract with Livingston ended 3 days ago, I’m then both officially grounded and unemployed, jobless for the first time since 2001. It’s not a pleasurable feeling, checking my bank account evey 5 minutes knowing that it will only get little and little in the next (I hope not for long) future. Yes, I’m looking, frenetically moving my eyes from one airline’s website to another, still with the strong will to leave Italy to keep working as a Flight Attendant.
One more step here (the National Aviation Authority exam to certify me as a F/A on the 19th of February) and then I’ll try to build my life… possibly somewhere else.

On the geek side, things went the same: messy and convulsion as always.
The wordpress update from 2.0.4 to 2.1 let me down without a working PHP installation on my server, it took a while to figure out the problem (I experimented with NanoBlogger in the meanwhile) but as you may (or may not) be checking now, everything got resolved (thanks to my hosting help-desk too). Now WP 2.1 is working flawlessly, fast and stable since a couple of days, and everything seems to have been back to normal by now.
On a more personal side, after about 5 years I left down Fluxbox as a Window Manager in favor of the quite minimalistic dwm. Quite a shock at first, but actually the most productive, flexible, and exciting experience I’ve ever had with a WM. It rocks!
Belial is undergoing its first huge working-on/reinstall, in order to customize a very light and fast Gentoo installation on it, and as you may imagine: this is pure fun. The X60s is an incredible machine, and the more I work on it, the more I love it.

Well, it’s pretty everything as a summary of my last month and half… more will follow, I feel like I have a gap to fill after my absence from blogging lately.

I just came across (thanks to this post from Taking Aim) a nice interesting roundup of Russian related blogs written in English.
As a matter of fact, I’m studying russian (end enjoying it…) but it’s very nice to have some insight of Russia written in a 100% understandable way!

Here is it: Introduction to Russian Blogosphere.

Enjoy it, I think my bookmarks are going to become larger today! :)