New Blog Website

TL/DR: Blog moving to https://strakul.com/blog

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For the past 14 years, I've been maintaining this blog, Strakul's Thoughts, hosted at blogger.com. As of today, I'm porting the content to a new instance. As I've become more familiar with development tools, I wanted to move away from the limited (but easy-to-use) offerings at Blogger and host my own custom site.

This blog is now running Jekyll with the Chirpy theme. I became familiar with Jekyll about half a year ago since it's being used for blog management at work. The appeal to me was content as markdown files which makes writing and editing posts easier and not needing to worry about HTML or all the other features—that's all handled by the Jekyll build.

There are tons of Jekyll themes out there. I was originally leaning towards Adam Blog 2.0, but opted finally for Chirpy. The Chirpy theme is simpler for text-heavy blogs like this one. I may continue to style it, such as changing some of the colors and such, but I'm happy with how it looks.

While Jekyll serves as the interface, I still needed to host it which is where I turned to GitHub Pages. This is now a version-controlled repo that builds and deploys the site. Furthermore, I integrated giscus to allow for comments. This does require a GitHub account to add comments, but it's an open-source, free solution for website interactions.

The largest change you may notice, however, is in the URL. I purchased the strakul.com domain and this blog is now accessible through https://strakul.com/blog. If you go to the top level strakul.com, you'll see my professional homepage, which has links to some of my socials including the blog. If you accidentally go to blog.strakul.com, you should be redirected to the new URL.

Moving forward, all posts will go to strakul.com/blog and will not be in this blogger site. This site will remain alive for preserving links, but all posts have been migrated over.

I'm excited for this change as it should give me more control and flexibility in how I manage this website should there be a need for changes in the future.

Data Science: My Blog with R

Over the past few weeks, I've been taking an online course on Data Science with the R programing language. It's my first time taking an online course and it's been quite fun. I wanted to learn more about data science in general and this course came recommended by a friend. I didn't know anything about R at the start, but I have many years of experience working with Python, IDL, IRAF, etc, so it was easy to pick up. One of the best ways I learn, however, is through practice. So I figured I would create my own personal project: some data analysis on my blog.

This blog post will focus on the statistics I gleaned from accessing the API for Blogger, which is a product of Google. If you are interested in more technical details, I'll point you to my Github repo where I share the code I used to get the results I present below. Rather than focus on visitors or visibility, I instead focus on production. That is, how often do I post? What is the typical length of my posts? What words do I tend to use? And so forth.

This is a relatively long post with some graphs and lots of discussion. Read on if you're interested in how this blog has evolved through time or if you want to learn how to do it yourself.

The Blog in Review: 2013

This completes the second year I have been running my blog. As before, I provide some overall statistics for how the blog ran last year and since it's start. The nature of the blog has changed throughout the year, though it still retains some of its original spirit.

Blogging for A Year

Last year, on January 2nd, I started this blog, something I've been meaning to do for quite a while.
I've since written 95 articles primarily about either astronomy or books. The divided nature of the blog has troubled me, but I'm not yet ready to split it into solely one or the other category. We'll see how things evolve in 2013.

Word cloud (wordle) of some of the most frequently used words this past year. Some html formatting may have slipped through.

In this post, I go over some of the basic statistics of my blog (as of Jan 2, 2013) and mention some of the more popular articles.

Poetry: Isildur's Bane

I have had no time to write or even think about my blog in the past few weeks thanks to lots of work deadlines and a bit of traveling. So, to fill up time, I present you with another old poem I wrote. This one recounts the story of Isildur, son of Elendir, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. It is not strictly canon in the Lord of the Rings universe, but that's alright: it's just meant for fun.

As before, I'm not a poet so forgive me if the meter, rhyme, or whatever is not quite right.

Poetry: The Fellowship

Back in high school I dabbled in some poetry some time before the first of the Lord of the Rings movies came out. I wrote four epic poems set in that world (with some liberties at time). I'll be posting them here when I find I haven't posted in a while. I am not a poet, so I don't think these are great, but perhaps you'll disagree?

Here is the first of them.

Short Story: The Plane and the Calculator

This is a scheduled post. I've been traveling a bit these past few weeks and one of the things I know to do is to power down all electronic devices for takeoff and landing. Regardless, a Kindle, which barely uses any power at all, shouldn't interfere in any way or form with aircraft operations. The worry perhaps is about radio or wifi devices, but those settings can be disabled so why the constant fear? I've heard some people saying it's necessary and others saying the opposite. Still, it's annoying to be reading a book on your e-reader and have to turn it off. Score another one for "dead-tree" books.

While thinking about this, and unable to sleep, I wrote this very short story about what would happen if someone disregards those rules. Clearly, this is all tongue-in-cheek as I doubt the severity of the situation or that a calculator, of all electronic devices, could cause it. Note, though that calculators are among the devices that can't be used during takeoff and landing.

It should be noted that I am not an author, so I make no claims as to whether the story is good or not.

The Plane and the Calculator

by Vir Strakul

The plane shook and plummeted another 50 feet.

"The controls aren't responding!" cried James, the copilot.

"There's some kind of electrical disturbance," replied the pilot.

***

Simon was just your average high school teacher, flying out to meet with his sister in Hawaii.

It was a last minute trip, given the sudden accident, so he had brought along some of his work to do on the plane ride.

This time it was grading homework. Boring.

The problem was he didn't think things through when he gave out the assignment. He should have said "What are the absolute magnitudes of these 5 stars?", rather than having thie students pick their own stars. He guessed it was more engaging this way, but it meant he had to work through the numbers himself.

Just a little bit of logarithms and some arithmetic, but still, most people (himself included) cant do logarithms in their head. Hence the need for a calculator.

He was using an old calculator just barely useful for this work. It was solar powered, so as long as he had light he was good to go. His phone had a better calculator, but they were taxiing at the moment and he knew you had to...

"Sir! You need to turn that off."

"Turn what off?"

"Your phone. It needs to be off"

"This is a calculator, not a phone. It doesn't even have an off button"

"Oh, well you should stow it away and stop using it"

Simon sighed. 

He put it away, but immediately took it out once the stewardless left.

Seriously? They think a cheap calculator like this is going to be a problem?

***

The weather was clear, with low winds and visibility out to 20 miles. A perfect day for a routine flight from the Los Angeles International Airport.

Captain Rob had done this a million times. Well, maybe not a million times, but certainly often enough.

"Hey, there's this cool book I read the other day. You might like it, James."

"Yeah? What's it called?" replied James, as Rob led the plane on the runway.

"Redshirts. Remind me to lend it to you sometime"

A few minutes of communicating with the tower, extend flaps, increase throttle, rotate, and with that they were in the air. Another perfect liftoff.

"What was the name of the book again? Redskirts?" asked James as the plane gained altitude.

"Nah man, Redshirts, like the Star Trek guys."

"Oh, that sounds.... HOLY SHIT, what are you doing!!" cried James, as the plane suddenly tilted violently to the left.

"I'm not doing anything, something's wrong with the controls!"

The altimeter and velocity indicators were flying wild. Controls weren't responding, even the radio cut off. 

The plane dropped.

***

Babies started crying. I mean, they always cry on airplanes, but this time they started crying earlier. They weren't the only ones with their nerves on edge, though.

"Remain in your seats with your seatbelts fastened!" the stewardess screamed.

Simon seriously doubted anyone could walk with a plane tilting like this. He could barely work on the grading as it was.

His calculator slipped from his desk and fell to the aisle. Oh, I was supposed to put the tray table up, wasn't I, thought Simon.

He was about to pick up his calculator, but the stewardess noticed.

"Sir! I told you that had to be turned off! It interferes with the instruments!"

"It's only a calculator!"

The stewardess, in a fit of annoyance or perhaps fear, smashed the calculator with her heel.

The display died down and immediately the plane leveled off and startng gaining altitude again.

"Umm, oops," said Simon, as several of the other passengers turned to glare at him.

Who would have thought?