Rihards Unplugged

Yes, I’m still alive and kicking. It has been a while since I last updated this blog, and I’m planning on reviving it. At least a little. I’ve upgraded it to the latest version, fixed up some plugins, chucked out some uneeded stuff, and will no doubt probably keep tinkering with it over the next few days.

Quite a lot of things have happened since my last post. For one, I’ve moved to a new place (yay for living alone, and having to cook, do laundry, and wash dishes yourself!), secondly I’ve been doing a fair share of interesting projects in my spare time. One such project would be a blog for my popmundo character Björn Nywald.

I’ve also been checking out Facebook API and working on a Popmundo application for it (gee, looks like almost everything revolves around Popmundo), and the second version of it should be done soon.

And then there’s of course Spore. Been playing it when I can. So far I have a vicious race of creatures that wipe out everything that moves, and of course a race of creatures who are completly oppposite (bunch of music loving social hippies!). I hope that Maxis/EA have fixed the Spore webpage already, because then you can have a look at all my creations on my profile page.

It has been out for a week now, and I thought, well why not? And upgraded to the latest version. Visually, there really isn’t anything new. There’s a lot of changes on the backend though, and many of those changes will no doubt make many bloggers happy.

Native tagging support, plugin update notifications, extended WYSIWYG editor interface, improved JS and many more things. As always there’s quite a lot of bug fixes as well, which I always find strange. Developers keep on fixing hundreds of bugs, and I still haven’t run into any. But that’s a good thing anyway.

I also upgraded some of the plugins, and removed others, so hopefully the blog will be at least a little faster now. Tagging all the old posts might take some time though, as I’m still coming up with a list of tags that I’ll be using, and I’ve got quite a lot of posts to tag as well.

Well, I’m back from the first part of my vacation, and boy was it great or what. A lot of really positive changes in Latvia over the past few years, at least from my viewpoint. For one, smoking ban in locales and other public indoor places is just great. I think I went the whole week without smelling any cigarette smoke whatsoever. And once I got back to the Austria, one of the first things that I got to experience here was second hand smoke, really great.

Got to love shopping in Latvia as well. None of those crappy opening times that they have here in Austria, or the fact that shops are open on Sundays as well. There’s a lot more, but I’d like to get back to blog related things as well. Right now I’m thinking about reducing the blogging from daily to something along the lines of, “If something good comes along post it”.

As to reasons why I’d like to do that, is that I don’t want to feel forced to post something everyday, and secondly I think if I reduce the posting, I can concentrate on my other projects more, as well make higher quality posts overall. Not that most people seem to be unhappy with my posts so far (3.88 stars average out of 40 or so ratings).

Sweet, sweet vacation time has finally arrived. And it’s long overdue as well. Having said that, I’ll be without internet most of the time, and won’t have much free time to post on the blog anyway. So, as of today the blog will be in a vacation mode, and no new posts, will be made until I return from my vacation.

I’ll be returning next Saturday, the 28th of July, at which point, expect photos, and maybe few stories about it. Until then, take care, and enjoy your summers. Ciao.