The long-overdue "I know what I did last summer" post

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5580 days ago

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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The final disposition of truist.com

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5725 days ago

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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Well, it's gone - and the story of how it went

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5732 days ago

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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Welcome to rainskit.com!

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5736 days ago

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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The end of truist.com

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5739 days ago

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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Stirred, not shaken

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5749 days ago

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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Outage

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6395 days ago

You may have noticed that all my sites were down for a few days – truist.com, gwen.truist.com, and paul.medgyessy.com. My apologies for that – there was a problem with the network connection where my server is hosted. Everything should be back up now.

And of course, all my email got through :)

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