filed under: books, business, economics, government

27 February 2009

The article says it all, but to paraphrase: today’s political economic insanity was predicted (and warned against!) fifty years ago, in a great book.

(Thanks, Matt!)

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filed under: food, lent, life, religion, vegetarian

25 February 2009

Happy Lent! (It started today.)

As I mentioned last year, I give up something for Lent each year. It’s not for religious reasons; the purpose is really just to strengthen my self-discipline, and Lent happens to be a convenient reminder to do it each year.

Two years ago I gave up beef. Last year I became vegetarian, and somehow I’ve managed to stick with it. (Almost a whole year, now!) So this year I’m giving up food entirely.

Er, no. Not really.

But it has been a little tough to figure out what to give up – there isn’t really anything in my life that I feel is excessive right now (except maybe work). But my goal isn’t really “give something up” – it is “improve self discipline,” so that leaves other options. The two that seem most needed, in fact, are “take vitamins” and “exercise.” Both are things I’ve wanted to do but haven’t had the discipline to actually carry out.

But I’m not going to do both, and “exercise” scares me, without at least a little forethought. (I only realized yesterday that Lent starts today.) So, vitamins for me! Thankfully, I had a bottle of good vitamins already sitting around, so Day 1 was easy. I’ll need a little more planning ahead as I travel for work, but this one should be relatively easy. Hopefully, though, by the end of it vitamins will just be a valuable habit, and I’ll keep it up.

And next year’s Lent starts on February 17th, so I’ve marked that day on my calendar, and my plan is to use exercise as my discipline-improving technique next year :)

So, wish me luck. Hopefully, I’ll be a healthier, more energetic person come Easter. And if not, well, maybe my pharmacist friend is right that vitamins as just a good way to pee money down the drain ;)

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filed under: geek, rainskit.com

18 January 2009

After about 40 days of offline-ness, rainskit.com is back up, mostly. gwen.rainskit.com is still down, but the rest of the websites are up. tru_tags (and instructions) are back up. The gallery is working. From a visitor’s point of view, everything (except gwen.rainskit.com) is working as it was before.

Of course, all is not quite as it seems…

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filed under: dogs, driving, family, geek, kristina, lent, life, motorcycle, politics, rainskit.com, truist.com, tru_tags, vegetarian

8 December 2008

Wow, according to my last post, it’s been 144 days since I blogged. Too long, but it’s a sign of how busy life has been. I’m going to use this post just to catch up quickly, then future posts will hopefully be more insightful:

• I’m still a vegetarian
• The new job is good (and I was promoted!), but time-intensive
• The dogs are awesome
• Buying the Honda Element was very much the right decision – it is perfect for the dogs and for Kristina’s plant (and dirt!) hauling
• The new house is great
• I did buy that motorcycle I had my eye on (and I love it!)
• I sold my domain (truist.com) and replaced it with the one you see before you (rainskit.com). (And truist.com now has some very interesting content. But it’s a dumb name for a company.)
• We all finally hired the right president

But of course, all of that put a ton of stress on my life and my wife, and we are still trying to recover from it. Speaking of which, she (my wife) also:

• Turned 30, and got through a party that I think she would have preferred to delay
• Took care of the dogs while I was traveling
• Worked an internship
• Took over as president of Pi Alpha Xi at OSU, and has had a stellar experience
• Took a full load of classes this fall

Regular life things also happened. I’m sure I’ve forgotten many of them, but notable items include:

• Discovered Pistacia Vera, an absolutely life-changing “dessert botique” (in Columbus!), that we now go to every weekend
• Found DropBox and Carbonite, which are similar services that finally make file sharing and backup (respectively) just work the way they should have all along
• Found Woot and its associated sites and got addicted; we’ve probably ordered 10 things from them so far
• Amitai visited and during that visit, I bought a first-gen iPhone and hacked it to work with T-Mobile. (I love it!)
• Had a very good Thanksgiving at my dad’s house, at which we learned some great news (that isn’t quite yet public)
• Released two new versions of tru_tags, and used one of those releases to make this site’s archive page

So anyhow, it’s been really busy, and many parts of our life have fallen behind where we’d like them to be. The busyness hasn’t really been a problem… it’s just prevented us from doing other things we might want to be doing. I think our priorities are in the right place, though – I’m doing what I love, and Kristina is working toward a new life where she gets to do what she loves. I think that’s how things are supposed to be.

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filed under: business, motorcycle, truist.com

16 July 2008

Well, truist.com still looks like it’s just parked. But www.truist.com has something more interesting :) I wonder if they realize that they forgot about the non-www version?

So, I was right, and they were quick – they announced the new company (and the website) on Monday. Here’s a brief article about it, also. It’s strange to see the word “truist” used in a corporate setting, and have it mean something different than “me”. Huh.

In other news, though, I plan to buy a (used) Kawasaki KLR650 as soon as I can find one for sale nearby :)

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filed under: dogs, pictures

12 July 2008

I created a new album specifically for pictures of Sophia & Kodiak, and uploaded everything I’ve taken so far :) The first 6 pictures are from right after we got them. The rest were taken just a few days ago.

You can see other puppy pictures (from right after we got them) in April’s album of pictures from Kristina’s birthday party.

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filed under: business, links, rainskit.com, truist.com

8 July 2008

As of this afternoon, truist.com is no longer mine. I had it for 8 years, 4 months, and I find that I’m very sad to see it go :-(

But as Drew says: “think of the motorcycles” – and that is helping :)

So now that the sale is actually done, here’s the story:

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filed under: rainskit.com, truist.com, tru_tags

5 July 2008

Today marks the beginning of rainskit.com – welcome! It looks a lot like that other site, truist.com… but actually, it’s totally different. See, you have to type R-A-I-N-S-K-I-T now instead of T-R-U-I-S-T. I keep getting that all wrong. I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually.

I think everything has been moved over – email, web, other sites I host, other email addresses, redirects, telling every company on the planet not to use my old email address, etc. If you spot something that still says “truist.com” and looks like it’s an accident, please let me know. (Note that I left the truist.com tag on a few posts, intentionally.)

If you are following the RSS feed and/or are subscribed to the email list – you need to update your URLs and/or resubscribe to the emails. I’ve made the email service much more reliable and much easier to use, by hosting it myself. Just wander over to the sidebar, find the section titled “Subscribe” with the text field that says “email” and type your email address in. Hit enter. That’s it, you’re subscribed. I still need to work out a few improvements to the email service, but for now, that will ensure that you hear about each new post. The best way to follow this blog, though, is still through the RSS or Atom feeds.

The planned transfer of truist.com to its new owner will be Tuesday evening (-ish). It looks like google has already recognized rainskit and is starting to find the new home of tru_tags, but it’s lagging a little behind on finding the new home of Nathan Arthur. Hopefully they will figure it all out before Tuesday :)

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filed under: rainskit.com, truist.com

1 July 2008

Heads up! I’m selling truist.com and moving this entire site over to rainskit.com. As of next Tuesday (July 8th), truist.com will no longer work.

My email address(es) (and Kristina’s) are changing; in fact, they have already changed. You can now reach me “@rainskit.com” instead of “@truist.com”. Anything sent to truist.com after the 8th will go to somebody else :)

As of this writing, rainskit.com doesn’t look like much, but that will be changing as soon as possible, to give the search engines as much time as possible to figure it out. As soon as I make the switch, http://www.truist.com/ will automatically forward to http://www.rainskit.com/... until the 8th, that is. After the 8th, you’ll have to go straight to rainskit.com.

Those of you following this blog through the RSS or Atom feeds will need to update your readers, once the switch is made. I’m not sure what will happen during this interim period. The best thing to do is to manually switch over in a few days. This will also be true for the gallery RSS feed.

Those of you following this blog through email will have to re-subscribe on the new website, once it is up. Sorry :-(

And I’m sure you’re all wondering “why RainSkit.com???” Well, I chose it because it was available, short, easy to remember, easy to spell, and had very few hits on Google. I found it by taking anagrams of words that had meaning to me. I’ll leave it to you to figure out the source word :)

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filed under: dogs, kristina, life, pictures, truist.com

22 June 2008

Two posts ago, I mentioned how we were stirring our lives up, in a number of specific ways:

• new job
• new car
• new house
• new dogs
• birthday party
• uncertain motorcycle

And I forgot to mention that Kristina would be starting an internship at Franklin Park Conservatory.

So, all that stuff happened. I have the new job (in Cleveland, so I’m traveling there 50% of the time), we have the new car (described previously), we found a house in Harrisburg (Ohio), we have two new Great Pyrenees puppies (details below), the birthday party went well, Kristina started her internship, and the motorcycle is still uncertain.

Yeah, it’s been stressful.

I don’t have pictures of the birthday party, although some of the guests will probably send me some of theirs. I also don’t have pictures of the puppies because the camera is still in a box somewhere, but you can see a picture of Kodiak (the 11-week-old) on this page (with the little blond girl on the right side of the page) and Sophia (the 11-*month*-old) on this page.

As you can imagine, we’re pretty much stressed out, especially Kristina who did everything I did, plus started the internship, plus had to be home a few days with the dogs without me. But we’re getting through it.

Oh yeah – and some guy called me and offered to buy truist.com. I think I’m going to sell it to him (he offered a lot of money). I’ll post about that soon, but for now – I need a replacement domain name, and I’m running low on ideas. If you have any, please email me or post them here as comments.

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