Andrew L. Van Slaars

It has been a long time since I actually wrote anything here. Things come up, life changes and sometimes priorities shift quite a bit. Part of the reason I stopped was that I tried too hard to maintain a technical focus and when I wanted to write about other topics, I attempted to start independent blogs, which required me to write enough content to justify the creation of another site. This started getting out of hand, and it became overwhelming.

I was recently inspired by a friend who started blogging, he writes whatever he wants and manages to be quite entertaining while doing it. I figured, hey this is my blog, I can do whatever I want with it! So no more focus, no more independent sites by topic, no more wanting to write but not feeling like I have the right place to do it. I’m putting it all here. Read what you like, ignore the rest or ignore the whole thing, I am now writing simply because I want to.

Uncategorized

Apparently, people shooting guns into the air at midnight is a major issue. It must be because on my way home from work today, there was an announcement on the radio reminding people that it is a bad idea.

Some of the wording in the short announcement included:

Bullets that go up in the air have to come down!

I wasn’t aware that gravity worked on bullets… did this really need to be announced?

I certainly hope that nobody heard that announcement and changed their plans…if you were planning to shoot a gun into the air and weren’t aware that it would come back down, you need to point that gun somewhere else!

How about not shooting guns into the air because you usually shouldn’t shoot guns in residential areas and there are probably some legal ramifications.

Sometimes I hear something that just amazes me. This was one of those things.

So keep the guns locked up and have a happy new year!

Uncategorized bad ideas, new year

With the move to vanslaars.net, I am starting over. I will be pulling worthwhile posts from the old vanslaars.com blog and posting them, in one way or another, here on vanslaars.net.

So why have I made this change? I’m glad you asked. I have decided to change the focus of my blog as well as the platform that I use to manage the blog.

Let’s start with the technology decision. I used a couple of different blogging engines for vanslaars.com over the years and most recently, I was using Subtext. Subtext is an excellent platform with a bright future and my choice was not based on any shortcomings of Subtext. This choice is based on cheaper hosting. Hosting with a windows account is more expensive than a server running *nix. I know I could get a free blog hosted on blogger or wordpress.com, but I still like the option of controlling my installation and being able to host other sites. So, I am now using wordpress, hosted on bluehost.

The second, more interesting, reason for making the change is focus. I am changing the focus of my blog. I am not abandoning posts about technology, but I am expanding my focus. I am going to write about a broader range of technology, marketing, teaching/learning and anything else that I feel I have something to say about. My next post will explain this in more detail.

While I write this post, I have a list of things I need to do, such as pick a WP Theme, install some plug-ins that I plan to use, copy important posts from vanslaars.com, etc. So the full transition from vanslaars.com to vanslaars.net will take a few days (maybe longer) but it will happen soon.

Hopefully you will find some of my new topics interesting and continue to read. If you do not like this direction and choose not to read, I apologize and will miss you as a reader, but this is something that I feel strongly about.

Uncategorized change, new blog