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Blog Resuscitation

May 26, 2009 | 4 comments

Well, something must be done. I’m the same boat that Cas was in a few days back. Unless I want my blog to “wither and die like week-old cut flowers in a vase” (Cas’s words), I’m going to have to get back into the groove. I can no longer whip out the standby excuse that I’m “busy with school stuff”, because school is no longer in session for me. I have the summer off, and won’t be returning to a classroom until August something-or-other.

So what is my deal? Meh; I don’t know. I’ve been busy doing other things lately, and my blog has been pushed into a dusty corner. I’ve been busy with language learning, where my list of target languages has grown rather large – perhaps unbearably large. As of right now, I’m actively studying German, Russian, French, and Spanish. Oh, and I have materials on the way for Dutch, as it seems like a pretty easy target knowing English and German.

I’ve been gardening a bit (gardening, great gods), and quite enjoying it. Not only is it relaxing, the fruits of it shall be wonderful on homemade club sandwiches (we’re growing tomatoes, among other things). The one thing I’m not so fond of: the bits of dirt that I can’t get out from my hands. Scrub as I might, I can’t get it out.

I’m still chugging along with No-S and shovelglove. I had to climb back onto the No-S wagon after falling off of it during holidays, but I’m back on now and holding on for dear life. Shovelglove never fell off my radar, and I’m actually considering upgrading my sledgehammer to a slightly heavier version. While I still break a sweat, my arms are no longer burning by the time I’m done; I daresay swinging the hammer around has become routine. That’s a Good Thing (TM), but I think I need to kick it up a notch (two T.V. star phrases in one sentence, that must be worth a gold star or something).

While shovelgloving, I generally watch a bit of a Stargate SG-1 episode; sometimes only 15 minutes, but sometimes I go ahead and finish the episode when I’m done exercising. With such a steady rate, I’m now up to episode 4 of Season 6. Just over halfway to the end; when I’m done with it, I’m going to be rather sad. Shovelgloving and SG-1 are like peanut butter and jelly for me at this point…

I guess all of that was a roundabout way of saying: I have plenty to blog about, I’m just not doing it. I’ve been too busy doing the whole, um, life thing to blog about it. But I do miss doing so. I may try a post schedule, say 3 posts a week, or something like that. Cas went for a daily post, Monday through Friday, but I know I wouldn’t stick to such a thing, so I won’t even bother attempting it. Maybe I’ll even take a look at some memes; I used to do Friday’s Feast (which is either dead or just not working right now).

Quick, someone motivate me!

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A Quick Note

June 10, 2008 | 2 comments

I just wanted to toss up a quick post to let you all know that I have, indeed, not fallen off the face of the earth. I’ve still been twittering, but I’ve been struggling with a bit of blogger’s block – that is, I’ve not really had much to say, or at least haven’t found the way in which I want to say it. Maybe I’m just not digging deep enough, though.

In either case, a regular, more substantive post shall be forthcoming relatively soon. I promise. If nothing else, I’m going on a day long Viking boat voyage on the Ohio river this Saturday, which should give me something interesting to write about. Hopefully it amounts to more than “damn, do I have a bad sunburn!”

In the meantime, I hope all of you stay well!

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Google Maps and the Isle of Lindisfarne

May 9, 2008 | 6 comments

Earlier today I was reading some of Magnus Magnusson’s Scotland: Story of a Nation, which led me off on a bit of a peculiar web path. In the text, Lindisfarne Island was mentioned a few times, which is the site of the first Viking Age invasion in England. They attacked on June 8th of 793AD, sacking the abbey there.

I realized that while I was very familiar with the tale of the Viking’s attack, I wasn’t sure where exactly Lindisfarne Island was. I had it in my head that it was on the west coast of the England, but this ended up being wrong. Wikipedia informed me that it’s actually on the northeast coast of England. The article also told me that Lindisfarne is a tidal island. I wanted to get a better overall feel of the area, so I looked up the island on Google Maps, and in playing around with the zoom, I realized that one shot that was in use had caught the island during high tide; the other, during low tide. It’s actually pretty neat to see:


Lindisfarne at high tide

Lindisfarne island, minus the surrounding water
Lindisfarne at low tide

While you can see the differences here, it’s actually easier to see it at Google Maps, where you can zoom in and out to see the transition. Just punch in these coords at Google Maps: 55.679°N, 1.808°W (or just click here).

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So Much Stuff To Do, So Little Time!

February 16, 2008 | No comments

Hi, readers! (I do still have some of those here, right?) I wanted to let you all know that I’m still alive and well, and that I’ve not decided to up and stop blogging all at once. It’s definitely something I want to continue doing, and will continue doing. So, what gives? Why have the posts been sporadic lately, and what’s with the increasingly large time gaps? Basically, I’m whipped, busy putting out fires here and there on class assignments, and at the end of the day, I don’t have much energy (or will, to be honest) to write more.

This semester is proving to be more difficult than the last one, or at least more time consuming. I’m not struggling with any of the course content, there’s just so much course content to take in. I feel like I’m running on a treadmill, and if I try to take a break, I’ll just slip off into the abyss (or at least, my GPA will drop like a sack of rocks). I don’t want to drop into the abyss, and I really don’t want my GPA to drop like a sack of rocks. I know it’s “just a number”, but it’s a number I’ve worked hard on keeping where it is now. And so, I guess for now, I have to just keep running.

So, despite metric tons of assigned reading and schoolwork, System 13 isn’t going anywhere. Expect posts to continue to be a little sporadic for a while, but expect them nonetheless. If no new posts disappear for say, a month, it’s more likely that I’ve been abducted by aliens, rather than I’ve given up blogging.

I’m getting ready to go to a board meeting for the Viking boat group I’m in. The meeting is a few hours away, and with travel time plus meeting time factored in, I probably won’t be home until this evening, so certainly, I won’t be writing anymore today. So, I’ll leave you with this: MacroHistory. Lots and lots of history articles, spanning everything from the Stone Age to the present. There are maps and timelines, too. Enjoy!

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52 Books in 52 Weeks – Looking Back

January 13, 2008 | 4 comments

We’re halfway into the first month of the new year, and I’ve not said anything about 52 Books in 52 Weeks for a while. What gives?

For anyone who was keeping track, I fell woefully short of the 52 book mark, ending the year having read 36 books (and started 4 others, which weren’t completed when my clock clicked over to 2008). I think I ended up not reaching 52 total because I got hung up on some of the books near the end – specifically, the books for classes, most of which were history, which typically take me longer than a week to read. I suppose it goes without saying that the time and mental effort it takes to read a Harry Potter book is a bit less than that needed to read A History of India.

Am I going to do it again? No, I don’t think so. It made reading for pleasure too much like work for me. With school, I have enough deadlines to meet without creating more for myself. As can be seen by looking at the 2007 list, I skipped writing posts for quite a few books, and most of those ended up being books I read for university courses. For most of those books, I had to write responses / papers on them for class – the last thing I wanted to do was turn around and write a blog entry for them. But more importantly, like I said, the 52 books in 52 weeks thing just made pleasure reading too much like work. If I fell behind, I felt crappy about it, which generally just made me fall more behind. The more I fell behind, the more nasty the idea of rushing through a dozen books to “catch up” sounded. I didn’t want to rush through books I was reading for fun – I wanted to take them at whatever pace seemed appropriate.

Perhaps – indeed, I’d say almost certainly – I’ve taken this, and blown it out of proportion. But ultimately, I didn’t like setting myself a goal – even if it was as silly as reading 1 book a week and blogging about it – and then falling short of it. I’m going to obviously continue reading books, and I’ll continue to blog about them. But no more scheduled reading for me, unless the schedule is handed to me by someone I usually address as “professor.”

Incidentally, while I don’t plan on forcing myself to stick to a reading schedule, the 52 books in 52 weeks experiment did lead to me seeing how many books I can read, if I stick to (mostly) one at a time, and focus on getting through it. Certainly, 2007 is the year in which I’ve read the most books thus far.

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