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Good grief! My last blog post was in December 2009, like 3 months ago!

It's been a busy new year.

• We bought a house and moved in January.
• No internet for 2 weeks during the move, tons of house tasks after the move.
• I hit the 1 1/2 year mark at Microsoft.
• My work load went through the roof.
• Swine flu made its rounds (although I got a cool vaccination).

Yes, its been a busy few months but there has been a lot to blog about. I have a number of work-related posts to finish up and gaming never stops.

So happy new year in March.

I havent done any work on my blog in many months. There are a lot of changes I have wanted to make but there just hasnt been the time.

Right now I am focused on a single change: connecting my blog posts to my facebook page.

At the moment I am experimenting with an app called NetworkedBlogs. It seems to be what I want but I still cant tell.

While some things last forever, others dont.

Since I started this blog, I have been doing my posts and managing the blog with Excto 2.4 on my Mac. I tried a few other products but this is the one I liked. It had a few quirks but I used it for my Amazon associates links and it just worked for me.

A while back, Ecto got sold to a new company and they brought out Ecto 3.0. I tried it and stuck with 2.4.

But now it looks like Amazon has changed their API and Ecto 2 will no longer do product queries. So if I want to link to Amazon product images, I am forced to update my tools... Dont be surprised if there is a delay as I look into my options here.

Six months ago, I moved my blog to a new webhost. With the holiday break, I set aside some time to fix problems from that last move.

I fixed a number of backend problems but the main change you will notice is the ability to add comments.

You can now comment anonymously using those pesky Captcha words or you can register a permanent account. Previously the only registered accounts I accepted were TypeKey. Now I accept accounts on several different systems. Eventually you will be able to register an account specifically on this blog but currently that feature is broken.

The other thing I fixed was two-part blog postings. To keep the mainpage shorter, I used to post an intro paragraph or two and then you had to follow the continue-link to see the rest of the article. Unfortunately, in the last move the additional blog content was not being shown when you followed the continue links - that is fixed now.

For those of you that actually come to the website to read, I spent a few hours tonight and fixed things.

As I wrote earlier, moving to the MT4.1 templates was a mistake. I find the MT template system to be overly complicated and I wish I had time to rip it all out and completely start over. But I dont.

Instead I fixed all the big problems tonight. Although I lost some of the nicer custom pages I had done on my previous webhost, I was able to fix the menu, fix the browser script, fix image links, fix the page layouts.

Ironically I made the switch in large part so that I could start using the tag cloud feature but it looks like that wont happen for a while. Instead I have been focusing on writing Rails applications so unless something is terribly wrong on the blog, this is the way it will be for a while.

In case it was not obvious, I moved this blog to a new webhost last month. In the process a lot of things broke, including formating, page layouts, and URLs.

Although I knew there were problems, I have not had the time to fix these issues. I havent even been blogging much.

Although the new host, Joyent.com, seems to be working quite well, I made the cardinal mistake: I changed two things at once.

Moving to the new host was fairly smooth but I also decided to change from version 3.33 of Moveable Type, my blog software, to version 4.1. Although version 4 is backwards compatible, it changed a lot of things (a major upgrade) and I (foolishly) opted to convert to the new templates. Big mistake given the time and energy I have to put into a blog right now.

You should also be aware that I changed the URL of the blog itself and the archived posts so you may have to update your bookmarks or reader links.

the old blog was www.purplevision.us/weblog/

the new blog is simply www.purplevision.us. I felt the /weblog was unnecessary.

So my apologies for the mess.

It's about that time for basketball magic but my madness started back in February when I decided to move this blog to a different webhost.

The move has taken much more time and effort than I expected (which one should always expect) so I have not been posting. But if you are reading this, the move to the new server is complete.

All the entries are here but the formatting I used before is messed up. Please bear with me for the next month or two while I fix things.

Just wanted to give you a heads up that I am changing my ISP's and will be moving this blog. Hopefully this month.

I want to thank those of you that commented on my lack of blog posts. (For the sake of argument, I will assume you werent telling me because you were happy I stopped :)

The past 4 months have been rather busy. We moved to a new town (about 15 miles from our old place). I started a new job. And we still have a 1-year old. Overall Im quite happy with all of it but the workload has been rather startup-ish.

This holiday week(end) will be my first real break in the action and I hope to do some blog posts while I try to decompress. Even if I have not been writing, there has been a lot to write about in Q2 2007.

I've been on a blog hiatus due to a lot of personal changes. I took a new job at Amazon.com and I moved to a different city. In addition to caring for Claire, who is almost 1 year old now, this has turned out to be a HUGE amount of work :)

I hope to return to a normal routine soon and keep the posts coming.

Close to the end of February and we finally seem to be recovering from two solid weeks of being sick. *blech* It has been the worst stretch of recurrent crud that I can remember and has definitely lowered our household morale and productivity. Seattle's winter gloom hasnt helped much either.

As for the blog, I have a bunch of posts in the works but will try to release one per day from now on instead of doing a whole batch followed by nothing.

You may also notice that I added some PHP and javascript scripts to the site in January as well as some minor layout tweaks. More to come as I get time.

2006 ended with a bang - a major power loss followed by massive snow in Denver. Fortunately for us it was inconvenient but not tragic and produced a lot of discussion/stories.

To start off the year, I am endeavoring to finish up a lot of partial posts that did not get finished last year. Given the time of year, there are also a lot of articles out there about trends from last year and predictions for 2007 that I want to address.

I continue to make changes to the blog format. You will notice that all pages are now php instead of html. This will allow more dynamic content in the future, such as the Stuff module in the sidebar which refreshes with each page load.

I havent been posting as much lately because I have been busy on my job search. On the other hand, I have been making steady, incremental changes to the blog layout with more changes to come. In terms of content, I have a lot of housing stuff that I havent had time to post and I have increased focus on games and a decreased on politics.

Another month has gone by. I've been quite busy with my summer internship so blog posts have slowed down. Claire continues to get bigger (but not big enough to sink a jump shot). The weather in Seattle has been fabulous. Life is good.

Not only is it July, it is half way through July... yikes!

Other than adding some new categories, I havent made any of the structural blog changes I intended to do back in June. Instead I took a few weeks off to relax with Angela and Claire, play some games, and in July I started my summer job. I've been trying to continue posting but its been too busy for much else. I dont know if you knew this or not but work is, ahh, a lot of work!

Last weekend I graduated from business school. *phew*

With school over, I get to spend time with my wife and new daughter. I am also considering my next career move and spending some time on this blog.

I hope to make some significant changes this month of June. I have a number of draft posts in the works and plan to add a new section on business school and business in general. Stay tuned.

Last week Angela and I each got a new toy. I got a new game PC and she got a baby girl. (Well, I guess I got two toys but who's counting?)

Expect blogging to be light for a while :)

Im finally churning through my huge pile of articles from the first quarter of this year. I hope it wont plug your RSS readers :)

I continue to burn the midnight oil (literally) tweaking this blog and have some results to show for it. In addition to the new layout, I have added some new sections.

There is now a "reading now" category called Stuff where I will showcase the books, music and games that I am playing with at the moment. The best Stuff will become Great Stuff. Look for the Stuff module on the right side of the main page.

I have also started The Numbers where I hope to showcase some of the research and statistics that make me think.

I hope to return to writing actual entries again soon. I have a two month backlog of articles on my desk :)

Instead of writing posts lately, I have been writing code. It took me forever and a day, but Purplevision now has a new home and a new look. I wasnt able to finish everything I wanted (far from it) so you should still consider this a construction zone but we are now open for business at this location.

Please update your bookmarks/newsreaders and keep sending the feedback.

I have been making minor changes to the format of my blog recently. Something of a lesson in frustration, I've been playing with the CSS to try to improve the readability (such as larger fonts) and find a format that works well and looks good to me.

Shortly I will also be moving the entire site to a new domain and upgrading to a new version of MoveableType. Stay tuned...

My HTPC self-destructed this past weekend so the lack of TV has freed up some time. I am unwinding now by tweaking with the layout of this site. If you have any feedback, please send it my way.

For making Purplevision #1.

A year ago, googling "keith vaitkus" showed some other Vaitkus' in Kazakhastan or something and googling "purplevision" brought up some weird companies in the Eurozone. (What kind of product do you mentally associate with purplevision? That's one seriously empty vessel.)

Thanks to your interest in this blog (I assume), the first kv result goes to this website and Purplevision is #4. Kinda cool. I now exist in Google :)

Say goodbye to 2005 and hello to 2006.

I had a bunch of articles to get through for the end of the year as well as some 2005 wrap-up and 2006 predictions. Sadly, I didnt get to it over the holidays so look for updates over the next few weeks.

Once again, it tis the season to be thankful for Michigan State basketball.

Best wishes to you this basketball season. Enjoy that Christmas/Chanukah/Holiday thing too.

Happy Turkey-Day to everyone. I hope everyone gets a chance to enjoy some time off, some good food, and some time with friends and family.

Stealth mode is over. For bad or good, I have started to let people know about this blog. There are still some old posts to move over but they are mostly essays so that will take a while. In the meantime, i will continue to add new content here every few days or so with large updates over the weekends.

For the past several months, I have been getting my feet wet with a blog on my home network. I have over 100 posts on that blog which I add to daily. Over the next few weeks I hope launch a public blog and migrate the good posts over to here. Expect to see format changes here as well as "new" posts that are actually several months old.