The complete flatline on this blog means I’ve obviously been a little busy lately. The good news is that I’m pretty much done with my UCLA Extension certificate program – I’m taking one last JavaScript class right now, but everything else is done.

The bad news is that in order to actually get someone to hire me, I need to start writing applications that will easily indicate to people who are doing the hiring, “See, I know what I’m doing even though I have no professional experience with this!”

This is, as you might imagine, a little time-consuming.

I also have been working on a bunch of other projects, including updating Designated Nerd, my tech consulting/programming website, which is going to get a lot crazier in the months to come. Lots of back-end stuff I need to work on, but we’ll see how it all goes.

I’ll probably post a bit more here when I’ve got some real, published projects to show off, or when something colossally awesome/stupid happens to me.

But for now, I’m just going to have to put up the “PARDON OUR DUST” banner.

I’m going through all of my photos and writing from Spain, trying to collect everything into something resembling coherence. It’s a little harder than I thought, mostly due to the fact that between jetlag and the intensity of my touristing, I was fucking exhausted for most of the trip.

A few notes about these little travelogue pieces before they start going up (hopefully tomorrow):

• Until I get to Córdoba, a few days into the trip, all of these posts were actually written while I was in Spain – mostly tapped out on my iPad or iPhone while I was on long train or bus rides, or when I couldn’t sleep because of jetlag. I’ve corrected some spelling errors and tenses (I thought I was going to be able to post as I went, but I was just too exhausted), but mostly they’re exactly what I was thinking while I was going around.

• Unfortunately, everything after Córdoba is going to have to rely on my slightly fuzzy memory, since at that point the touristing went into about 11th gear and I was just too tired to keep writing. I’m kicking myself for not writing those cities up on the plane back to NYC, but at that point I was so burnt out with travel insanity (you’ll read why when you get to the Barcelona post) that I just wanted to veg.

• Everything’s going to be broken down city by city. This should work fairly well since I didn’t spend more than 3 days in any single city. Pictures will go up on Flickr first, then I’ll try to link photos throughout each post at the relevant points.

• This will probably take a while – I’m still in school and my classes this quarter are a bit more intense than they were last quarter. However, this is an excellent excuse to procrastinate, so we’ll see how those two factors balance out.

I hope you guys enjoy all this – I’ll post a wrap-up when this is all done, but the bottom line is: Get to Spain as soon as you have a chance. It’s awesome.

Thanks to Haloscan’s decision to shut down, I’ve finally been able to get all my comments out of their system for free. Took a lot of tweaking my old Blogger stuff and a bunch of help from this awesome Haloscan on Blogger > WordPress script and its author, but I managed to get 1413 of 1420 comments transferred.

And frankly, I’m not going looking for the seven comments that didn’t make it. I feel like a 99.5% success rate on something this complicated is good enough, particularly given how much time I already sank into getting it this far.

But the good news is there are now comments going back to 2003, about a year after I started this blog. It’s kind of amazing to realize that although posting has fallen off substantially over time, I’ve been writing this blog for almost eight years.

It only took a year after I switched from Blogger to WordPress and moved the location of the blog, but I put up an HTML redirect for the old page and XML redirects for the old RSS feeds, which will hopefully redirect everyone who thought I gave up on blogging here.

So if you haven’t seen me for a while…hi!

Well, it only took a month, but I’ve now corrected the times on all 1890 posts that came over from Blogger.

I need a hobby.

This whole WordPress bit is largely up and running now, so I’m going to start posting over here.

A few minor housekeeping bits:

• Here are links to the Main RSS Feed and the Comments RSS Feed. You’ll see a few comments from my brief (failed) attempt at using Blogger comments, but I’m still trying to figure out if/how I can import all my Haloscan comments.

• I am leaving the old version of blog up, if only for the simplicity of not having to go through and change all the damn URLs in the old permalinks.

• If there’s anything you particularly hate about this design, let me know, and I’ll see what I can work on. I’m going to futz with the size in the posts a bit since I spend too much time staring at a computer and am therefore starting to go a bit blind, so the font’s a wee bit smaller than I’d like.

• I’ve gotten about halfway through the draining task of updating the times on all my posts, but that shit’s going to take a while. The whole index page is fixed up, as is the April ’02-Oct ’04, but the rest will probably take me longer as I’m going to be traveling (more to come on that).

• One fun thing to come from having to correct the time on all my archives is going through and glancing at all my old posts and remembering things I’d forgotten. Like Chaplin is a year older than I remembered he was. I’d apparently been misremembering that he was between 1-2 when I got him, but this post from the day he came home says 2-3. Oops!

Anyway, that’s about the long and short of it for now, more details on my upcoming travels to come either later tonight or tomorrow morning.