Terahertz

Where have I been?

Damn, no posts here in over a month. Did not mean for that to happen.

This is not to say I haven’t been blogging. Most of my writing has just been shifted to Canadian Atheist, where I’ve tried to consistently get at least a couple posts per week there. Of course it’s mostly on atheism/freethought/skepticism but there are still a lot of political opinions I have but time is always short, so they’ve fallen by the wayside.

It makes me tempted to advocate for splitting CA up a bit into more of a blog aggregator like Science Blogs where each author gets their own space to talk about anything they want and the front page simply highlights the different topics/authors. Then I could basically park this blog over there and say everything I want. However, ideas always seem to come with work in the volunteer sector, so unless I work on the implementation it may not happen. And maybe it is just better to keep these blogs separate for now.

In terms of politics, I’ve been quite busy launching Reason Vancouver, and after this past weekend where I attended a productive Olympic Dialogue (which I’ll try to write up later), I think may be the right thing at the right time for this city.

I also have to admit that after my initial scepticism of the “Big Listen” project, I’m really starting to like the direction the Alberta Party is headed and with the potential success evidenced by Naheed Nenshi’s win in Calgary, I think they’re really on to something. Although I may never come around to using the buzz phrase “post-partisan politics,” I do think they are on to something (which is another post I need to write up).

As for graduate studies, despite my committee meeting being thrice rescheduled, things are progressing well, and I was happy to receive the second place award (first for visuals) for student seminar talks this term (out of 10 talks) in my department, losing only to my fiancée. Perhaps if I really feel like I have too much time on my hands I’ll write that talk up with the slides so there can at least be a text-representation of it (I won’t just post the slides since they are almost meaningless without a dialogue to follow).

So don’t take this as a pledge that I’ll write more often here, since bloggers often make the false promise of “I’m going to post here more often” and then you don’t hear from them for another 6 months, but merely take this as a “I’m still alive, writing and busy, and if possible I may post some more here, but no promises.”

Fixed my personal site

I’ve rebuilt my personal website at http://ian.bushfield.ca since I’ve finally given up on Drupal and am now a WordPress-only junkie.

This blog will keep going as a place for me to rant about science/religion/politics while that blog will deal with my personal activities, including my goal to develop a business plan for a freethought cafe. I probably won’t cross-post anything, so if you follow both you won’t get overwhelmed.

Just out of the rankings

The results are in and Terahertz Atheist placed fourth in the Religion & Philosophy category of the 2009 Canadian Blog Awards. Not too shabby for my first showing in the competition, maybe next year I’ll have to bump my writing up a notch.

Thanks to everyone who supported me.