Rubin Starset

A long time coming.

I’ve been using LiveJournal for well over seven years now, even have one of the crazy life time accounts because I thought I’d be using the service for longer then that. I think it’s served as a wonderful, smart and simple journal service and I’ve been happy with it for most of the time. Though now my needs have slightly changed, or greatly, depending on how you look at it.

One important fresh requirement that’s come into my life over the past two years has been redundancy and retention. LiveJournal being sold to a company in Russia and then having part of its staff get the boot didn’t really make me feel like all my bull shit journal entries were safe and secure.

The focus of my journal has also altered from being a place to post little snippets of whatever I want, to being a bit more serious and very much photo orientated. I already have a small place to fuck around, and another spot on the net to dump my photography work. The need of having something that brings much of it together came up, a space on the internet where it pulls all of me from everywhere into one spot. About two years ago I rebuilt my site and attempted to do all this piping. It didn’t work out to well and I quickly gave up, leaving it to rot in the word wide ether.

Fortunately here I am tonight, after about two weeks worth of code hacking, with something complete that I’m finding extremely satisfying. My new site does many things…

• It contains my journal (or blog as some would call it) which features my top picks of photos.
• Meta data streams of information and updates from much of the activities I do on other parts of the growing social web 2.0 what not.
• A very clean looking photo gallery.
• Contact information if you don’t know me and would like to reach out and touch.
• A space to list off projects I’ve created and participated in (still need to finish this up).
• Some small blurb that will be titled “About Me”.
• DOES NOT support for Internet Explorer (suck it).
• Automated nightly backups.

I know you might not be as excited about this as I am (have been for the past week). The big question that remains is what does this mean for you, the friend of mine who’s been following my posts through LiveJournal?

• All posts on my site will be mirrored to LiveJournal, so you don’t have to subscribe to anything new.
• Commenting on my posts will be turned off, a link back to the same post on my site will be provided at the end of every post. Comments can be made on my site without registration, one can provide an email to get alerted when there’s a response back (just like LiveJournal!). If you do register you get the ability to provide a user icon.
• Some how during all this migration crap, I’ve gone through and duplicated almost every single one of my posts on LiveJournal, so if for some reason you feel like reading through every single one of them it’ll be slightly strange to see double.
• If you are someone who’s been reading my journal through an RSS reader, I would appreciate it if you resubscribed through my site’s new feed.
• If your preference is RSS, then by all means.

I’m fairly sure that I’ll keep my journal going for as long as it doesn’t require me to do anymore work maintaining this mirroring mechanism. Anyhow, take a look around if you already haven’t. I don’t mean to be tooting my own horn, but I think it looks very polished.

Been rather busy this past week or so with things, haven’t had a chance to poke everyone about this, very last minute. I’ll be participating in a road trip with Johannes from monochrom. Others coming along will be SFSlim, Binx, Avidd, and Yerdau. We leave Friday morning (less then 24 hours), and head up to Seattle for the next monochrom show in the tour.

After that we’ll go East towards Minneapolis on highway 90, stopping at various secret locations. I’ll be getting off at the Twin Cities, while the tour will continue onward to Chicago. I’ll be in Minneapolis from the 17th to the 26th (or some variation of that). It sounds like I need to get with a team for Puzzle Quest. I also foresee a roller derby game and possibly a bathtub full of gin in my future. Honestly don’t know what else I’ll be doing during that time.

At some point I’ll board a plane and end up in San Diego to visit an old friend for the weekend. There will be much partying, I hope, and also sight seeing of some sort. I end it all with a Virgin flight back into SF on the 30th.

Anyhow, if you’re in any of my stops or along the route, poke me and we’ll see if we can make something happen. I was hoping to take a quick trip up to Vancouver while in Seattle, but sadly it sounds like that wont happen.

In other news I’m furiously attempting to get WordPress running on my site. Trying to figure out a way to better balance out journal posts and photo posts.

Photos by Anna One.

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During my last visit to Minneapolis, I was introduced to this spot called the Kitty Cat Club. The building felt like it was setup as some sort of old factory, as much of the infrastructure for industrial devices were still part of the ceiling and walls.

The decor is a clash mix of a secret agent movie and a hunters lounge, and the lighting is simply amazing.

All and all I enjoyed the one night I spent there, and look forward to returning.