Welcome! Come in, I love having visitors. Hungry? Need anything to drink? Pardon the mess, I just moved in myself and I’ve been too busy to properly unpack and set up. Give it a few weeks, and you’ll think I’ve been here forever.

My old site was created to let my family and friends keep track of where I was in the world without my having to e-mail people directly. Since I’m not traveling as much as I used to, my writing is simultaneously going in three different directions:

• Research: My time with the EASy group was an utterly fascinating experience, and I’d like to think it has helped me determine the kind of work I want to do in the future. But whenever I try to describe what I studied, I am immediately asked about whether the robots I build will ever take over the world (they won’t). The first dozen or so times were cute, but now I feel like I’m just not explaining it well enough. So this site will become a dumping ground for any fascinating links and research I come across that help show what exactly I do, as well as demonstrations of a few papers I’m going to try and replicate.
• Development: I noticed while job-hunting recently that, for a web developer, I don’t actually have a lot of work that I can show off online. Many of the projects I’ve worked on are down for renovation or otherwise unavailable. And frankly, even if I did have access to the actual code I wrote, I wouldn’t feel comfortable making it open to anyone other than the company that paid me to write it. So this site will also be a place to highlight the tips and tricks I’ve picked up in my years of web development and programming, and all code will be made available for other developers to ridicule see.
• Life: I’ve been told that I’m not a typical computer nerd, and in my eyes that’s a very very good thing. I cook, I play capoeira, I’m socially and environmentally conscious, I love cinema, I bike, and I have strong opinions on topics I know nothing about, although I suppose everyone does. The last thing this site will do is let me get all the random thoughts in my head out into the open, where I hope the Internet will pick them apart like vultures so that I can rebuild them better and stronger, just like Steve Austin in that show I haven’t seen.

So why not just do that on the old site, you ask? Because I have a serious issue with “stuff” in my life. Whether it’s physical possessions, receipts, ongoing projects, daily reminders, or whatever, stuff tends to pile up faster than I have the ability to deal with it. I’ve been gradually developing the two skills I need in order to prevent this from happening; the ability to deal with stuff faster, and the ability to avoid new stuff, or at least to decide where it goes before it turns into the generic “what do I do with this” kind of stuff. While everyone has a different approach to this, one of my favourite techniques is rebooting. Instead of trying to fix a big pile of stuff, simply make a new empty pile, make brutal and harsh decisions about really needs to go from the old pile to the new, and trash the rest. Chances are, if you’ve had something sitting in that old pile waiting for your attention for a month, you’ll never get around to it anyways. And once you have a nice clean space to work in, you suddenly find yourself motivated to keep it that way.

Hence, the new site. Instead of re-designing and re-editing my old website, I’m starting from scratch and bringing in the posts from other locations that I want to be here. That includes both my old Japan travel journals and the stuff I’ve posted on Facebook lately. Wordpress was good enough to bring in all my old posts, complete with the original posting dates. Unfortunately, it wasn’t good enough to bring over all of the embedded images in those posts, nor fix the links to sites that have broken since the time of writing. I’ll be touching up all of the old posts and bringing them into the new Web 2.0 format soon, so if you want to read them in the meantime, now you know why they look so screwed up.

That explains the new design, or lack of. But why did I get a new domain name when I already had a perfectly good one? Frankly, because I didn’t think it was a good one. When I was posting about living in Japan, I wanted a domain that reflected that, so a play on my name using the Japanese alphabet actually made sense. Now that I’m writing about whatever happens to be in my head when I put finger to keyboard, I wanted something a bit more general and personal. Not gonna lie, I spent a lot of time trying to think of a catchy new name; I was even reading blog marketing tips, for some reason. But nothing seemed to stick, and in retrospect, of course it didn’t, because I’m not trying to market my site and become a (barf) professional blogger. And I was resistant to using my own name for a while, mostly because of my slight paranoia regarding the potential for things I say online coming back to me in real life.

As you can see from the URL bar, I got over it. I figure that, even if I never mention my name in my writings, I’d inadvertently give up enough details for a motivated individual to put the pieces together anyways. I’ve Googled my own name (you know you’ve done it too) and there’s nothing out there that I feel the need to hide; it’s mostly just public profiles and technical posts related to my previous jobs and research. Hell, most of the hits are for a misspelling of a Latvian hockey player. It’s easy to remember for anyone who already knows me, and because my name isn’t exactly common, it hadn’t been taken yet. And once this site is properly up and running, the only thing all my writings will have in common is the fact that I wrote them. So davezoltok.com it is.

Now, sorry to kick you out the door, but I have to get this place cleaned up, and it’s likely to look worse before it gets better. Stop by anytime, coffee’s always on.

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