Tag: LJ

The year is drawing to a close, and for some of my friends it's already over. Everyone's looking back over the year, so I'll try to note what made the passing year memorable as well.

Work started playing a bigger role; I spent the year wading through tons of crappy PHP code, and the number of completed projects has probably topped a hundred — honestly, I lost count long ago. The only break I got from work was the week exactly a year ago, but that's not in the cards for me now, since the first week this year is a working one, which means I'll have to work despite being hundreds of kilometers away from the boss.   A couple of weeks ago I started building a mid-sized project from scratch on the Yii framework, and oddly enough, this is my first genuinely serious site — before that I used ready-made solutions, and I hope that in the new year I'll get to do more programming rather than digging around in someone else's code.

I got promoted to lead programmer, my salary went up — laughable for such a position, though normal for Kherson. It's enough for me for now, and the work isn't too stressful, sometimes interesting, and I keep growing. 

There were quite a few material acquisitions: two game consoles, a DSLR camera, a new laptop, an e-book reader... I think I've started switching to licensed games thanks to the PlayStation 3 and even the New Year sale on Steam. I lost an excellent Nokia E61 smartphone — one more argument, it turns out, not to rush to work in the mornings, since it only brings losses. Well, I can't fully grasp the point of a rigid work schedule for developers. To replace the lost phone I got the simplest one from the same company, the 2323 — happy with it in every way :)

My real-life social circle shrank due to finishing university and being busy at work. Which I'm even glad about — it's calmer this way, I can control who I talk to and, for example, I don't have to deal with the old senile guy who likes to humiliate and bully others. Online I picked up a few new interesting contacts, which I'm glad about. I started fighting with myself less.

This year I stopped seeing the world through rose-colored glasses even more. I became convinced of the universal idiocy, not-giving-a-fuck, and incompetence of people in all spheres. I'm increasingly becoming like that myself, but what can you do, the place and time are what they are. At least online you can still shut it out for now.

If you look at the results online, then first of all, this year I paid for virtual hosting with a domain and moved my site to it from my home computer. Though I have neither the time nor the desire to work on it, since it's just a home page. I attached several domains to it, including a Cyrillic one. Also, exactly a year ago minus 12 hours, I switched to a paid LiveJournal account; in the summer I found time to change the look of the blog, made it more white-lion-ish. I started being more active on the social networks Twitter and Facebook, but compared to everyone else my activity is low.

And now about the most important thing. This was the year of the tiger, the year of the big striped fluffy cat. And with the tigers I got really lucky. I managed to capture unique shots of a clash between two tigresses at the Mykolaiv Zoo, which then ended up in the British newspaper Daily Mail and in top blogs, and they also talked about them on the radio. You can see all the photos of the clash via the image link at the start of the post. I never did manage to get money for the photos, but that doesn't matter.

It's funny that I lost my phone on the day I wanted to buy a new camera, and in the end I only managed to get it a week later, after which I immediately headed to the zoo to test it out and photographed the tigers. If it weren't for losing the smartphone, maybe there wouldn't have been any photos — an interesting coincidence.

All in all, 2010 can confidently be given a "+", unlike its predecessor. Let's see what my year brings, and what it brings to those who'll be turning another decade. I wish everyone a happy New Year — the one that has arrived and the one still coming. Happiness, luck, and the accomplishment of your planned goals or successful progress in your chosen direction.

Got around to changing my journal's style. I'd gotten used to the Forest Green theme, which is based on the Bloggish layout, but in it only 470 pixels are allotted for the content, which is clearly not enough to comfortably place photos and read the friends feed.

I dug into Custom CSS and changed the size of the text field to 640 in width, and also increased the width of the sidebar, making the overall content width 1000. At the same time I bumped up the font sizes by a couple of points, since pixels on monitors keep getting smaller. For search engine optimization I moved the sidebar to the right, so the entry's content comes first and gets indexed, only it looks somewhat unusual, I'll have to move it back to the left and do an SEO layout; on my own site I managed to do this, and it'll work out in the blog too, a pity I don't know CSS well.

After changing the width of the main blocks, the blog's header turned out ugly, with a narrow image in it. I decided to put a more eye-pleasing picture in the header; a part of a photo of a white lion, which I mentioned here, worked well for this. After replacing the header, a change to the blog's color scheme followed; I picked the new colors with the eyedropper from the header. I didn't completely abandon the old greenish ones — I used them for the link colors. I decided not to change the background image either — it doesn't get in the way much and an alternative hasn't come to mind yet.