RogiLife.Com

I’m back around after a hectic-yet-nifty two months, and I bring with me to the Algarve (and normal life) some long-awaited springtime.

To prove it, I have uploaded a few pics snapped earlier today to my also-recently-neglected Portugal Life photoblog:

1. Algarve spring carpet.

2. Hillside ruin.

3. Olive tree in Algarve spring.

Yes, those titles are pretty dire, but such is life when you only have a limited amount of keyword choices to keep the search engines onside.

I’m about to take a bit of a break from my regular type of photography, kick back and relax a little, and photograph a lot of the Algarve for a book project of my own. In theory this should mean that the Portugal Life photoblog will see a lot more added to it, though the images that do get added to that are unlikely to be directly from the book, for obvious reasons.

I have plenty of other things going on too, both photography-related and otherwise, so I am likely to be around both virtually here on the blog and physically here in the Algarve for much of this year.

A quote for today, the first of January 2010.

“Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.”

– Mark Twain. 1863.

New Year’s Resolutions? Not for me.

The video of the day for me today is Peter Gabriel’s ‘Come Talk To Me’.

It’s also going to be pretty much the theme tune of my life for this week, I suspect, but that’s a different story.

Play it loud. It’s the only way.

Today marks the eighth anniversary of this weblog, and some might say that the first ever post here set the tone as to how interesting most of the following thousands of posts would be. :)

I could write a book on the different adventures this place has had, from the first days of Blogger.com (“What is a Weblog?”) to GreyMatter to MovableType to pMachine to ExpressionEngine to WordPress, and there were probably yet more scripts in between.

There have been at least three different domain names, and I really cannot remember all of the different servers used, the ISP’s contracted, the different countries and locations that I have typed the posts in – or sometimes even the condition that I was in as I posted them. This blog has been with me through some interesting times, and to coin a phrase David Bowie once used when talking of his wilder days; “You don’t know half the story”.

Some of you reading this have been around right back from the very beginning, and thanks a bunch for that. Thanks also to all of the writers of all the thousands and thousands of comments over the years. Most of those comments have not been transferred between servers and scripts, but I still have them all archived.

Yet more thanks goes out to all of you who have taken the time to write the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of personal emails to me over the years. Whether sharing expertise, pointing out things I might be interested in, recipes, technical help, music, movie and book recommendations, or simply just shooting the breeze, every email was good to get and good to read.

It has been a real blast meeting so many interesting people via this place.

A hat tip fom me to all of you.

You know when instinct shouts that something is seriously not right?

Thirty minutes ago my instinct really screamed at me and, sure enough, things really were not right as the scorpion shown above was heading extremely rapidly towards my left foot – which was at the time completely unprotected against attack.

Seriously dangerous? I have no idea, but it is quite clearly a scorpion and that was enough for me to decide to apply a little ‘maximum prejudice’ to it.