The Reasoner

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My trip to the south went from being an almost potential disaster to being a successful meeting with Ronald on one end and a missed opportunity to meet Valerie on the other, and a few other things.

I will be posting some details about the events in the next few days, in addition to catching up to a lot of other things from the past also.

Site update:

In addition to being back here, I have implemented some changes around the site as you may have already noticed. I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress and unfortunately, a lot of things broke. I then decided to change the theme all together and find a new one. For the first time in changing history, The Reasoner has entered the version 1 phase in terms of design.

• New visual style
• Different coloring system
• Different, updated navigation
• Different pages have different, unique elements

This change can be considered a little bit of a major change compared to the last update, v 0.95. As of today, not moderating comments has turned out to be a good decision. Slowly, a few spam comments are getting through. At this time, I find the benefits that the readers and myself receive in terms of getting comments published quickly to outweigh the drawbacks of having a spam comment or two sneak in from time to time. The entire time I was away, about 20 or so spam comments go through, if memory serves me correctly.

The numbering system is a random system I chose in order to make it easier for both myself and you to keep track of changes. The latest change is v 1.0 . You may notice bugs or things that can be improved. Please let me know if you have any comments, questions or suggestions of any kind. You may notice the font style or size being weird, the coloring to be undesirable in some areas, the navigation confusing somewhere, the page looking weird or too wide in some areas, or something else. In any case, please let me know so I can try to improve things. :) Thank you.

If anyone wants the previous design back, please let me know and I will try to see if I can try to have the previous layout available as an option also.

I would like to thank everyone for this, specially 3 people:

1 : Vera

Without Vera, this new rollout would not be possible, literally. She spent a lot of time from pausing her busy life and studies to look at my site and offer several suggestions, comments, and to also point out several bugs. Vera’s original coloring choice was a different color, which I hope I can implement soon, or offer as a choice. :) Thanks Vera!

2 : Valerie

“Do it, just do it.” That’s Valerie. I had to do this because Valerie kept saying the same thing so I could start implementing and stop the plan-only mode. Thanks Valerie!

3 : Ronald

Ronald looked at the site and provided last minute input before the new look went live. Thanks Ronald!

If I forgot to mention you, please let me know and I will not only thank you, I will also update this list and include your name. Unless I am missing something, I kept in touch via e-mail with almost everyone. I will be getting back to comments within the next 48 hours.

The original posts and updates are included below. Thank you, and let us resume things now. :)

——First update to the post on September 19th, 2007—–

Hi again everyone.

I got back from my Los Angeles trip last Monday, and now it’s time to fly again. Things are hectic as usual, and emergency is slowly becoming my middle name, I think. I have to rush around like a squirrel, or hopefully a rabbit, to get things done before my next flight;I am flying to the southern states tonight, specifically Alabama.

About the hecticness, American Airlines first lost my luggage from my last flight, and when I managed to get it back, many of my things like clothes are missing, and some other people’s stuff is in my bag. I have to run around between two airports to try to sort things out before my next flight, which is very creepily with American Airlines also.

Some of the upcoming articles will include “Ten reasons to avoid American Airlines”, “How to lose almost $10k in 2 days because of immature friends”, and “The headaches bestowed on me by the tourism industry.”

I have gotten back to everyone’s emails by now, I hope. If you have not yet received a response from me, simply contact me and I will get back to you by Sunday evening. I will probably be meeting Valerie and Ronald. Let’s see how it goes. :)

Regards,

Bes

********* Original Post on September 13th, 2007, 10:49 pm PST ************

Traveling – September 13th, 2007 weekend

Hi everyone.

It’s time for emergency traveling again. From tomorrow morning, I will be traveling to Los Angeles. I will be traveling again next week [details on that next week]. I may have some prewritten articles to be published during the weekend. I will try to get back to all emails by Tuesday evening, September 17th. In the meantime, please feel free to contact me on my phone, specially if you are in Los Angeles or Orange County area and want to meet.

Once I get back, I have to then get ready for my next trip for next weekend. I will try to update this post with something more. Thank you everyone. :)

PS: Thanks to Valerie’s repeated persuasion, as a small test, I may be updating random, useless/useful things on Bes Z’s Twitter via my phone, which you can see on the sidebar of this very page also. That way, any interested people [hopefully they exist] can be aware of what’s going on. If you think it’s lame or something, let me know and I will probably remove it when I get back. :)

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This change can be considered a minor update compared to the last one, v 0.94 . This current update should hopefully have a significant impact in the long run. The numbering system is a random system I chose in order to make it easier for both myself and you to keep track of changes. The latest change is v 0.94 .

I hope this update makes it easier for you to comment, as your comment will be published right away once you submit it. This update does mean more work for me as I have to check the site more regularly to make sure no spam got through, though I think such an effort is worth it. If for any reason your comment disappears or does not get approved instantly, please contact me and I will find out what happened to your comment. Thanks for all your comments and support so far. Please let me know if I can do anything else to improve commenting or any other aspect of the site.

I am also going to try some new things on this site: one will be to go through the previous posts and find out the posts which have lose ends. Some ends can be tied, while some blog ends can be kept open. Some ends, like promises or expectations, need addressing. I will try to address them soon.

Thank you for reading this. :)

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There are four main changes in this site update: shorter site name, new logo, updated links, and related articles and tags.

1. Site name shorter and clearer

   The first change is the name of the site itself. I have reduced it from “The Reasoner dot Com” to “The Reasoner“; it is simpler that way and more appropriate. I thought about this change because of what I wrote before about doing things simply because others did it. Please let me know what you think.

2. New logo in progress

   You may already noticed an interesting change on the site: a new logo. It is very simple, and I like it. I will work on it more or have work done on it a bit in order to make it more interesting when it comes to colors, though it already looks great in my view. What do you think? Please feel free to let me know if you do not like it. It is a logo at this time and not more important than you, so if you do not like something about it, I would be more than happy to make the logo suffer in order to make you happy.

3. Related articles and tags

   The third small change you may have noticed for a while is the “Related articles” area and tags for every post. “Related articles” show you related articles, of course, that you may find interested and related in some manner to the current post you are reading. Tags are like keywords which you can click to find other posts that share the same tags/keywords, in order to find more posts revolving around those same keywords. Try it for this post; you should see the tag “updates” below this post and also a list of related articles that you may find interesting. Following is a picture to show you what such areas would look like:

   
4. Dead links removed

   I have been going around the different links I have on my site, and have removed several links because they do not work anymore. Such domain names either expired or got bought by spamming sites which now show a dozen pop-ups on those domain names. If I removed your link by accident, please let me know and I will put the link back up. If I have not yet linked to you, simply let me know and I will try my best to include it in the links section. :)

Possible future updates and upgrades

If you have any suggestions for future changes, or any suggestions or comments about anything on the site right now, please let me know. Following are five changes I am considering in the near future:

1. I may change some of the color systems around the site soon. “To what?” you ask; I do not know at this moment.
2. I would also like to incorporate some white space into the header above, though I like the tone of blue that is currently displayed on the top of this page.
3. I may revise the logo and the site coloring system a bit, though it should not be much different.
4. The right hand sidebar may go through a little bit simplification process also, removing things that may be too cluttering.
5. Last thing that I can think of is to incorporate Ronald’s Feed Styler plugin that can allow me to change the design/style of my RSS feeds.

This change can be considered a revision to the last one, v 0.9. The numbering system is a random system I chose in order to make it easier for both myself and you to keep track of changes. The latest change is v 0.94 . Once I have the above possible upgrades in place, I will consider the site updates to have reached v 1.

You can count on the content quality being improved daily!

Content on this site is something that I try to improve every day. Site updates happen from time to time when I want to take a break from working on content, as focusing your efforts on something all the time without taking a break will result in the freshness in your content disappearing.

Thank you for visiting my site and reading this post. I really appreciate your visit and your comments, and I appreciate all the interaction I have with you via e-mail, text and instant messages also. I have come this far because of your support, and I am hoping I can keep on going farther and farther in this blogging adventure with you. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment below or e-mail me. I like getting e-mails from you and I like replying to your e-mails also, so do not feel scared typing out that e-mail to me. Unless I forget, I answer all e-mails and comments, by the way. :)

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While driving, I saw and experienced a few things. Nothing was divine or spiritual, so I apologize if you were expecting something similar to those. I saw a few analogies to how to run and do different things while driving, which I will share in the next few week with you. A few things that prompted me to realize those things were truckers getting together to take a rest, cars going up and down a hill and staying in specific lanes most of the time and changing lanes sometimes, and having a car driven by a total stranger drive with me for a while just to pass time. I will explain these things as time passes.

I realized yesterday that waiting for over an hour and 50 minutes for Gaim to download over PeoplePC means I should start looking for ways to optimize the time I spend on different things. Even though I will be moving soon, I ordered Comcast to be installed in my current apartment. They allow for a monthly contract, so it will be easier for me to move to a more permanent house and have the internet service moved along with me. I found out that Comcast is one of the few broadband providers that cap your downloads. That means there is a limit on the number of megabytes you can download in a month. If you reach that limit, you may get suspended from using Comcast for upto a year. I will try to talk about that more later this week.

I am getting a steady flow of gmail invitation requests along with a few other emails that I will respond to soon. If I do not respond to your email within 48 hours, I probably overlooked your e-mail or did not get it. Either way, please use the contact form to contact me and let me know that you sent me an e-mail. I will try to look for it.

Thank you.

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What this means for you in terms of interacting with me and my site is that I might be responding to e-mails and approving comments within a span of about 12 hours instead of the usual average of 2. It is easy for me to write posts while I am offline though. After moving, I will have PeoplePC dial-up internet for a while. I will later get Comcast, which will probably get me speeds of up to 6 Mbps, even though my first choice is the new Verizon FIOS, with which I could get a constant and steady rate of 15 Mbps downloads. Since San Francisco does not have Verizon FIOS as far as I know, Comcast will do. Until I get any good broadband connection, my online adventures may be somewhat slow during the month of February.

If you live in Southern California and we have not had a chance to meet yet, I might be coming back here once in a while a day or so. May be we can hang out then. If you live in Northern California, let me know and we can get together some time. For me, it is always nice to meet online people in person, except for the time when an online person turned out to be an obsessed individual who immediately started making plans for us to be together forever and started following me everywhere and making interesting threats. Getting a restraining order can be a very interesting experience sometime.

Orange County has given me shelter for almost 10 years, with occasional prolonged disruptions of different sorts in between. From opportunities to making money to having fun to meeting good people to facing life to dealing with drama to taking care of childish people to getting stabbed to dealing with people from other states who disappoint you even when you dedicate everything to help them, Orange County has made a lot of things possible. I want to see if Northern California will produce more positive experiences compared to Orange County.

Thank you for supporting me via this site all these years time. Even though changing cities should not affect a site, I know my site could not have come this far without your constant interaction, support and feedback. Thank you.

I personally find the Bay Area beautiful and full of life. Now it is time to find out if I find it as attractive living there as I did visiting the area.

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The most obvious change is the new name of the site: The Reasoner dot Com . I ran a poll on this site from December 26th, 2006 till January 11th, 2007, asking all users to let me know whether or not they missed the layout with a penguin. 53 votes were cast, and the results show that most people were all right not seeing a penguin every time they came to this site. By a difference of only 3 votes, many people expressed their feelings that they wanted the now-missing penguin. 10 people thought I was crazy and had no idea what I was talking about, and thus they voted “What previous design?” Based on this, I decided to go ahead and remove the penguin from the site for now and make a few other changes throughout the site. I will bring the penguin back if I can somehow incorporate him [him, right?] into the layout and see if everyone is ok with him then.

I classify the changes into the following 4 areas:

1. New title

   For several years I used the name “The Penguin Chronicles” as the title for this site. As cute as that name was, it did not convey a feeling related to the content of the site. I like penguins, but I do not talk about penguins that much on this site. I decided that a new name was in order, and the domain name, The Reasoner dot Com, was a good replacement in my view. As time progresses, I will come up with a related tagline that better deals with the site content. The penguin lives on, but the logo is gone. “The Penguin Chronicles” title with the penguin logo was created around July 24th, 2005 and stayed around until January 18th, 2007. The penguin stayed with us as the mascot for 1 year, 5 months and 25 days [543 days total].

2. Rate every article
   You now have the power to rate each article to show how much you like it. You can rate any post on this site anywhere from a 1 to a 5, with 1 being the lowest rating and 5 being the highest rating. Your ratings and comments let me know how and what to improve. To rate an article, simply move your mouse over the star you wish to rate and click it. This will instantly rate the article and reflect the current ratings. Go ahead; try it on this or any other post. :)
3. Improved navigation

   The other changes on the site include a simpler navigation system on the top and on the side of the page. I had simplified the navigation before and have decided to consolidate several links into one location further so as to make the site easier to understand. There are now more ways to find out other comments, commentors and posts on this site via the different sections on the side of the page. Also, I have removed the advertising that was being displayed on the side bar. I am trying to limit any advertising on this site in order to make everything as simple and relevant as possible.

4. Updated sections and a new stats page

   A few pages have been updated to make them easier to read. The following pages have been improved for easier reading:

   • Links page. Links are now organized with more description. If your link is listed here and you want a different description, please email me.
   • About page. The about page needs constant changes, and I have included more details on advertising compared to before. You can now see more details about my disclosure on the advertising used on this site.
   • Copyright page. This has been updated to show what can be done with this site.

   I wanted to make more stats about this site available to you, so I came up with a small new section of the site called “Latest activity” that shows the user interaction on this site. On that page you can see the total number of comments, the last 10 comments, the most commented posts and the latest commented posts. If you would like to see something added or removed from this section, please email me.

This change can be considered a bigger change than the last one, v 0.81. The numbering system is a random system I chose in order to make it easier for both myself and you to keep track of changes. The latest change is v 0.9 . Once I have a new tagline and a logo ready, I will add a few more changes and call it v 1.0 .

As with all the changes, if there is something you would like to see or if you feel something should be removed, please email me to let me know.

Thank you for reading this post; I really appreciate it. :)

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The sharing option is simple; at the end of each post, including this one, you’ll notice a “Share this” link which you can click to see different ways to share a post with different online services and with your friends. This change is simply a minor improvement over the last change, v 0.80.

Please let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations like adding, changing or removing something. In the meantime, I’ll keep taking your suggestions and keep integrating them into the site. Thank you. :)

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This new layout is part of a visual coding scheme, which comes in the form of a theme called K2. Valerie referred me to K2 long time ago, and yesterday she told me to convert to k2 since it makes it easier to maintain the both the look and the coding of the site itself. The site is now running k2. The layout you’re looking at is something that needs some customization. I’ll be traveling this thanksgiving for my operation. If I can finish the changes before that, great. Otherwise, I’ll try to have a different layout up and running by the 3rd week of December. The previous design is something I want to lay down in the archives. We’ll see if that happens.

You’ll see some cool enhancements to the site like “live” commenting and searching. That means the comments and the search queries will be displayed right away without the need to reload or leave the page. Go ahead and try it. You can also see a cleaner interface and an improved font system compared to before, along with a simpler way to access the archives, leave comments, register and navigate through the site. The new navigation system near the top is something I’m going to play with and probably use as the main navigation menu, moving the most basic and most requested links from the sidebar on the right to the top menu area of the page. No amount of improvement is effective without good writing. I’ll whip up some great posts for you all in the next few weeks, if I’m able to survive through the cutting and stitching.

The previous layout and design served its purpose from July 23rd, 2005, till 2 days ago, November 20th, 2006. That’s a total running time of 1 year and 120 days [combined total of 485 days]. Au-revoir previous layout, and good bye those cool colors. Hopefully some elements from the previous layout will be implemented into the future layout that I’m working on. The Penguin was something that I wouldn’t want to give up completely, since Sumin was so eager to have it be a nice addition to the site since the beginning.

In the meantime, if you have any suggestions, questions or comments about anything on the site, please let me know. There are many links that are being repeated unnecessarily and I want to remove them. There are many things that can be combined together into a single page also. I’m open to any ideas received for the site and will be glad to implement them into the site. Thank you for visiting my site and for reading this; I really appreciate it.

Below is a snapshot of the previous layout for your reference:

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