Digenis.org

There have been quite a few important events in the last few months and I felt impelled to take a hiatus from blogging in order to enjoy each of them to the fullest extent, soaking in the significance of each moment.

Most notably, Katya and I were married on September 8th. Planning a ‘western’ style wedding in Moscow proved to be an arduous undertaking, regardless of the fact that we set aside eight months to do so. I feel like I could write a book (or at least a few blog posts) about it all. Surprisingly enough, the simplest part was actually the legal paperwork, something which is usually a terribly long and bureaucratic process in Russia. The ZAGS ceremony, which was at the end of June, was actually a breath of fresh air. We kept it simple, just showing up with a handful of friends and family and signing on a few dotted lines, but the day was still a special and memorable one.

Then on September 8th, two years to the day since we started seeing each other, we sealed the deal po Amerikansky with an all out traditional wedding at a local Protestant church, followed by a reception at the Marriott Courtyard. Family and friends flew in from abroad (the US, Haiti, and Switzerland) to celebrate with us. Though the 8 months of planning was laden with unexpected changes of plans which were out of our control, the Big Day itself went on without a hitch!

We took a short trip to St. Petersburg and are now enjoying settling into our new apartment.

I’m also working in a new job as of May. Things are going well, though I’ve had to work extra hard to climb the learning curve in an industry that’s quite new to me. Perhaps I’ll share more about that later. I’ve also finished up the two side projects I took on with Moscow State University Geography Department and Russian Standard Insurance.

Needless to say, I anticipate having a schedule slightly more conducive to blogging. Along with more frequent posting, I intend to do some housecleaning as a restored Wordpress backup seems to have botched up the Cyrillic encoding of some older entries. Do let me know if you see anything quirky or have any suggestions.

Cheers!

Harvey Kane has a great article in the latest A List Apart on creating an automatic magazine layout for photos with a simple PHP script.

Well, Digenis.org is back after a few days of downtime caused by another server failure over at my former hosting provider. They lost everything. Even the backups. This prompted me to swiftly bring my business elsewhere, but I was still stuck for about three days without e-mail. (If you wrote to me at this domain, you probably had the message bounce back. Things are all in order now) My site is now hosted by Site5, and so far it’s been a pleasant experience.

I did lose a lot of files through this whole debacle, however, and I was pretty ticked about it at first. It was my own fault for not getting around to setting up a backup CRON job after their last outage and, needless to say, I’ve definitely learned my lesson. I was able to restore my entries from 2002 through late January from an old SQL backup and luckily Google cache was able to help with everything (not much, as my posting has been incredibly light this year) since then. Still, many comments and trackbacks are forever lost into the digital abyss…

Posting will still remain light as I’ve got a pretty busy schedule in the near future and I’ll be moving to a new apartment at the end of this month.

Thanks to those of you who have stuck around despite the dismal and infrequent updates to this site in the last couple months. I’ve had far more important and exciting things to do than blog, so digenis.org was moved to the back-burner. With this entry, however, I will return to blogging.

I’ve got quite a few ideas in the pipeline and several of them should be manifested into full-fleged posts by the end of the week, so keep your eyes peeled for:

• A ten-part series on the Seven Sister Stalinist skyscrapers of Moscow
• A few posts on language and spelling reform in Russian and Dutch
• The differences between ‘joy’ and ‘happiness’ in Russian
• Some other random things…

I’ve also given the site a temporary makeover. As always, everything here is strictly valid by W3C XHTML and CSS standards. Let me know if you see anything quirky.

Don’t be a stranger.