•1. Long Time No See
Well, well, well, it was a long one. I haven’t been running a full-fledged personal site since 2006… and a lot of things have changed since then. No empty promises, we’re together on this bumpy ride — I don’t plan to blog rigorously, but I wish to fill this site with all the projects, interesting tidbits, and curious things I have to share.
I guess not everyone seeing this actually knows who I am — and well, this is not a question I could answer. I find it deliciously hard to label my activities in any kind of singular way; in this blog, I’ll be using categorization based on the set of categories easiest for my use — Open Directory Project‘s wonderfully taxonomied set of categories.
Thus, by this approach, my interests and activities lie as follows:
- Arts — I started writing early (please refer to •2. The Story of My Writing for details), and unfortunately, that’s my only instance of real art auteurship. I shoot some photos (though, I wouldn’t call this art), and I’m an avid connoisseur for music and movies (footer contains links to my Last.fm and Criticker profiles which cover data for my musical and cinematographical taste quite thoroughly).
- Business — I am employed as a Internet marketing director for a major e-commerce operation, and thus consider myself to be qualified to share from time to time my opinions on achieving a financially successful Internet enterprise.
- Computers — I have done a fair share of (web) development in 2006-2009 (mostly Ruby, mostly Ruby on Rails), still available for consulting. I also do web usability, conversion rate optimisation, blah blah. Also, noncommercially, I’m fairly interested in functional programming and curious computing equipment applications.
- Games — I do not play much (when I do, it’s mostly Flash casuals on the computer); yet, I’ve been quite entrenched in the Debating community while in school, tabletop RPG community while in university and have a certain knack for fantasy worlds.
- Health — I wouldn’t call myself healthy, in fact, I’m somewhat overweight (though, working on it) — yet, I have quite an interest in healthy nutrition, mostly as a specific case of the knapsack problem in meal and diet planning. I support Atkins diet as the best way to lose weight, and United States Department of Agriculture’s food pyramid as the best approach to healthy eating.
- Home — What is this, I don’t even… in all seriousness, I’m not handy at home, I have no DIY spirit, and frankly I doubt very much this category will ever be used.
- Kids — From late 2005 till 2009 I worked on the premises of Ukrainian Ombudsman as the children’s rights representative. It was a wonderful experience, I have many stories to tell, and I have my own vision of children problems for society to solve.
- News — I don’t watch or read any.
- Recreation — I have developed quite a taste for some of the weirder humor you may find around.
- Reference — Reference tools such as Wikipedia, which I contributed to anonymously and semi-anonymously since 2005 (see •3. Wikipedia and Me) or Wolfram|Alpha shape the way I work or learn; they are a subject of my great fascination and a great share of my spare-time research projects.
- Regional — I am deeply into comparative economic geography / geographic economics, and have quite a deal of research outtakes in this. I hope I’ll get sooner than later to digitizing them and putting them here.
- Science — This is a tough one. Out of the lot of sciences I’ve been more or less into in my child years (see •4. Your Child, a Scientist), I’m still carrying some level of interest into all of them, yet only environmental science (see •5. I am an Environmental Scientist, not a Environmentalist!), which I major in, and economics, which I study in my free time as a social Science-To-Rule-Them-All, produce actual research results. I promise, I promise (*puppy eyes*) I’m going to share them here.
- Shopping — Maybe, just maybe, a gadget or a fashion item review will creep in from time to time here.
- Society — I hold fascinations, to a different degrees, in economics (surprise surprise!), statistical genealogy, ethnic studies, geohistory, linguistics and politics. I guess it will be a busy topic here at this site.
- Sports — I’m barely a sporty kind of person, yet some of my wild ideas have something to do with sportsmanship-like activities. You have no clue? Well, I guess before I post something about that (that is, if I do) you better not.
- World — I am the world. You are the world. We are the world.
Stay tuned.