We interrupt the current stream of travel vignettes in order to celebrate a truly momentous occasion: the 10th birthday of my online journal. It is no testament to either perseverance or superior writing that the blog, started as the written record of our expatriate experiences, has survived our subsequent repatriation,…
If you clicked to the website in the last couple of days, you probably noticed that things have changed a bit. Ok, not a bit – a lot! Part of the reason for this was that the last time I re-decorated had been over 7 years ago – an updated…
So I made it to my vanity goal – this is my 1000th post. It took me six and a half years, a pace of roughly 3 posts every week. Surprisingly, this is very close to the pace I initially established at the beginning of this endeavor, but obviously well…
My regular readers – however few of you are out there – likely could notice that I started a new series of posts in the last month, “My favorite sights of…”. Unpredictable person that I am, I now decided to pen a brief introduction to the series after posting a…
With a bit of spare time on my hands, I decided to change the way embedded pictures are enlarged to a more contemporary and elegant method. Feel free to click on any image within any post, and please do let me know if you come across any buggy behavior. Thanks!
Trying to think – not for the first time, mind you – what I would use Twitter for. I don’t care to share the tidbits of my life as they happen. Maybe, I did care a bit more during the years in England, but even then, I do not see…
I have spent the last hour or so recovering my blog from backups after it was hacked by some f***ers who had replaced my WordPress installation with a single sound-hotlinked page in Arabic. On a plus side, I am pretty diligent with backups, so I was able to restore all…
We’ve been back on the home soil for two years now. I felt a tiny bit of re-branding of the site was due. The word “[back]” was no longer appropriate as the modifier of our local status. So, welcome to “Burlaki on the Hudson”, all!
I’ve been thinking for the longest time that the only reason I have to keep this website going is that my expat musings from the years of living in England can be of use to friends and strangers alike. Only yesterday a couple of friends relocating to England for work…
What do you know? The patient still has a pulse. Despite the fact that I have been, sometimes willfully other times inadvertently, shirking my blogging duties for most of the last couple of months, Google Analytics tells me that there continues to be a fairly steady flow of visitors to…
The trajectory of my blogging activity went from unenthusiastic to senile. In the last few weeks, there’s been a spike in electronic communications with my high-school friends. We go through these periods once in a while, when we realize that the last time we had any meaningful exchange was months…
I’ve had this idea for a recurring blogging feature/angle ever since I knew that we were repatriating and my “expat observations” would be soon drying up. Which means, I’ve been considering it for roughly 18 months now. The concept was fairly simple: An essay about each place that I’ve become…
Apparently, if you type “London Bridge” into Google Images search, the very first picture of nine millions that come up is that of London’s Tower Bridge from my fairly old public service announcement, marking it as not the London Bridge. As a result, that particular post has been receiving a…
Heh! The whole thing took me less than half a day to turn around, and a couple of hours were idly spent on waiting for DNS changes to propagate. I have one strange artifact in the Travelog, which I will have to look into at some later time. I also…
… but there will likely be an intermittent downtime at burlaki.com in the next couple of weeks. The reason for that is that I am moving the domain to a cheaper hosting platform. When I started the website about four years ago, I was not expecting that the main blog…
I’ve long been stupefied by the fact that one of the most common search terms that leads people to my website is “medical sign”. Type that into a Google search and you will not find a link to B[b]otH anywhere near the top (I gave up checking after ten pages).…
The third annual largely-meaningless exercise of combining the first sentences posted herein each month of the year. As on previous occasions, not much coherency achieved. A couple of usual traveling undertones, clear relocation markers, a couple of obvious holiday notes… Interestingly, most of these sentences clearly suggested the topic of…
Checked my Analytics stats for the first time in G-d-knows-how-many-weeks and realized how wholesome and boring the searches that lead people to my website are. Fully two-thirds of all the searches can be fairly coherently attributed to specific subjects of my posts (over a quarter of all searches are to…
In the past, a 6-day interval between posts on this blog would invariably mean that I was on a trip to some fun and rewarding destination. At present, not so much. I still don’t have a writing angle that I want to be exploring in depth, and I’m increasingly lukewarm…
This sign at a nearby supermarket parking lot kinda symbolizes the speed of my movements this weekend. Aside from seeing friends and watching football on the telly, I devoted the large part of the last two days to cleaning up some loose ends in the Travelog (the most…