andiamo

The following entry is the introduction to RW in italia: my new blog home for the next 2 months. Please add it to your bookmarks :)

I finally felt like my preparations were under control. Months of work, weeks of planning, and a good number of days searching, buying, packing, forgetting, and remembering, led to this day. Not the day of departure, but the day of relaxation. The day of enjoying Vancouver one last time before I leave for 2 entire months. Summer, late to arrive, was in full swing, and the sun was setting. In good company, I walked the sea wall, watching crowds of fellow beachgoers lounge and laugh and watch the beach performers. The water perfectly reflected the glowing clouds above, edges brushed a vibrant pink, setting them apart from the saturated blue sky and lush green trees. I couldn’t remember the last time the world was so colourful, and I could barely make time to blink.

italia

Yeah. I've been absent for almost a month! It was quite a month. Too busy for me, but the semester has since ended, and winter has returned. Really, we've had snow more than a few times in April, and the average highs is still around 10 degrees celsius. Last year we had summer-like weather beginning in March. This year, the east side of the country is finally enjoying our summer weather while we're stuck with their winter. Odd.

alcatraz

What can I say. When I'm on a roll, I'm on a roll.. and I had a bit of a day off with a list of possible plans, none of which turned out, so I figured... why not do another redesign! And here it is.

The banner photo was shot in San Francisco (somewhat obviously perhaps) on the same roadtrip as the previous banner. It was April, 2007. A friend and I drove from Vancouver down to LA and back in 6 days and tried to see as much as we could along the way. Not an easy task, but we did it, even if we took too many photos, met too many coppers, and sort of missed the regular tourist attractions, but is that really a bad thing? no. No it's not.. It makes for better stories :)

passenger

If it looks like I'm back, you'd be right. I enjoy this blog too much to leave it, and although I had intentions of setting up a much more visual/media rich site, it never happened. I'm not that much of a programming wonder quite yet.. so instead, I reworked the existing site and added a bit to make it something like what I wanted. In the end, my real goal is to share my life with you. And in doing so, share it with myself in a way I wouldn't otherwise experience. That, in itself, has been enough to motivate me to enjoy my time here more than I was able to in the past.

fin/past

I created a new style for the site a little while before I decided to stop posting last year.. to give it some continuity and neutrality. It's boring, now that I'm updating again.. so I've added the style options again to the side menu. Some of the styles may appear .. not-quite-right in your browser, and certain parts like the top menu (blog, about, archives, links) aren't going to look the same because I recoded it. I'll change that when I have the energy, and hopefully add a new design that better reflects my current life situation. So take a look at them. It should save in your browser if you have cookies enabled.

traveling

It's time for me to move on. Au revoir mes amis.

watching, waiting

New design: Prodigal. If you use it, it may take a little getting used to. Also, I might widen the text area a bit to make things a slight bit easier to read. We'll see though.

I don't really know what to write anymore. I feel like I'm done telling whatever sort of story I wanted to tell. I have a better idea of who I am now, although in some ways that idea is even less clear than it was before... but it feels like it works. My task now is not to try and understand life and put everything in nice little boxes. Instead, as I've been mentioning more frequently lately, as well as various commenters, my task is to get up and start living. Even if I wanted to write about the daily occurences of my life like some other bloggers, I wouldn't be able to because there is so little of interest that goes on the the daily life of me.

paradise

Well, sorry to all you internet explorer-using visitors, that last design+layout was a bit.. not right (I finally got a chance to see what it looked like the other day). So I decided to stick with a design that I knew worked, and give it an update. Some of the colours still need tweaking, but I'm happy enough with it to replace what I had before. The main photo is a small portion of the view from the condo the 'rents rented in Hawaii last week. The scale of the beach and waves still messes with my mind (that man should be at least 2x bigger than he is... shouldn't he?)

Maybe I'll write something more later. ArrivederLa amici.

the wings

I feel very different. I've tried over the past few days to form some sort of concrete thought to describe it. I've been unable to. The closest I can come is that the world feels very real to me... or maybe less real. And I feel as though I'm missing something. I don't know if it's something I ever had in the first place, or even if it is a thing at all.. maybe I'm missing memories, or the past in general? Or maybe I'm missing a future I haven't yet experienced? Either way, something seems off and I wish I knew what it was so I could start seeing what I could do to fix it.

academic reflection

SFU is built on something of a mountain, so it is often up in the clouds and the rain and the gloom while the rest of the city enjoys sun. Sometimes, however, we're lucky enough to switch that around and get our share of sunshine. Earlier this week we got to experience that change, the the outcome was amazing. The air was completely still, the sky almost completely blue, and the sun was as bright and almost warm as one would expect it to be in September. Perhaps the most amazing part of this, was how the entire city was covered in a layer of fog so dense that it looked like we were sitting on top of the clouds... although I suppose, literally, we were.

so get this

I'm back.

addendum: the return

First I had a blog. Then I had a second blog and posted in it nightly for 5 months before deleting it. Then I had a third blog, and stopped using the first blog. Then I stopped using the third blog, saved the archive, and posted a couple more times before my host died. This is that blog.

autumn sun

I made a new design. I like it. I like it a lot. What do you think? I also changed the XML feeds a bit, so now they show the same preview as on the site (before clicking the "continue reading" link). They're available on the side under Content. The Links and About pages now have something there. Still working on Fotos. Oh. And if you're still using internet explorer, STOP IT.

revolutionaries

that was a nicely annoying bit of downtime. I spend a few hours on a redesign the other day, but I don't think I'll use it. I know I'll just grow tired of it after a few days, and I know other people would get tired of staring at my face for those few days it's up.

I also know that bethany dillon is an uber person and artist. How do you have such good taste in music, aaron?

reconfigured

Well Bingo, it may have looked good to you, but then the error comes again and it's all messed. I was tired of dealing with it so I exported everything, imported it into a new blog, copy and pasted all the templates and other settings, and here we are. Everything is in *.html cause I'm pretty sure it was the .php that was causing the annoyances (though i'm not sure why)

but hey, at least it works. let the commenting commence.

gabble gabble hay

seemed to be ok, then I tried adding a comment, and it's just messed. I tried to find other internet-ers who experienced this problem, and only found one so far who had. He solved it by exporting his entries and importing them into a new blog, deleting the old blog, and changing the new directory structure to how it was before. too much work for me.

what

I don't know why, but my site seems to like slipping into internal server errors now. It all works again after I rebuild everything... however I can't sit here and do that every time it messes up again. Hopefully it can be fixed soon. In the meantime, please refrain from posting comments because I think that's the problem (somehow)

If you want to let me know what you think, email meNOatSPAMrobertwesley.com minus the no spam of course.

landscape of life

I've added a new design to the site. If you've visited before, you probably have a cookie saved on one of the other designs. To see the new one, click "landscape" under Style Sheets on the menu. The top photo was taken just outside kamloops and is soooo good. Note - not for use elsewhere without permission. The layout and colours and fonts aren't exactly how I would like them, so expect them to be tweaked a bit over the next few days. If you're still using Internet Explorer, stop it. The site won't display correctly for you.

And a reminder: if you don't like this design, you can change it back to one of the other ones by going over to the side menu under Style Sheets. (prairie blue was the most recent before this)

prairieblue

Who says that just because I only made the previous design a little over a week ago I cant redesign it? No one. That's why I redesigned it. Designing makes my brain feel better, especially when mixed with a nice dose of chopin (even when it means I don't go to bed till sunrise). Expect redesigns to come frequently... but hopefully not this frequently.. I just felt that the first design was too.. not me, and I didn't see why I had photography & design in the title anyway. That also wasn't my photo and I like to use my own photos in my designs.

A reminder, if you don't like this new design, change it back to how it was by selecting "heavenly" on the menu at the right under the heading Stylesheets.

vancouver fog

I'm trying to figure out how I can get a photo gallery embedded into this blog without the use of photo editing perl modules or highly customized movable type stuff.. and it's not really working. There's probably a plugin I should download... so ima get right on that.

#edit, i've decided against incorporating fotos into this site. I'll just keep the home domain as the folio and foto area and this can stay textual. Also, thanks to a link apart, I have added the ability to switch styles for the site (comes in useful for those of you using not firefox - so you can actually view the site relatively normal, without seeing the layout all thrown around like it got broken into during the night.

first post

it was time for a change, so i have created a new online space for myself. hopefully i'll actually be able to post meaningful content on here now that i don't feel limited by the mental capacity of my audience (especially due to the fact that right now, i am my only audience). here's to good times ahead.