Peter's Thoughts

The proverbial Fork in the Road

As you may tell by the title of this post that there’s a proverbial “Fork in the Road” decision is coming soon that I should or need to make – well in 6 to 7 months time. The decision that I’m trying to make is to whether stay here in Alaska for 2 more years and finish University, or to move to back to the “lower 48″ next summer and could finish at another University that I have in mind. I don’t want to say which University that I’m thinking of applying to transfer to yet.

During this time I would need to consider some other factor whether or not I should stay or to leave Alaska. The reason for that statement is that there somethings that are somewhat “beyond my reach” but that’s not the phrase that I’m not looking for. The other phrase I might consider is “beyond my control.” There might be one or two other phrase’s that might be helpful or be used in this situation but can’t think of these phrase’s.

As I’ve just said that there are few other factors to be or should be considered and depending on what happens with these other outside factors/choices would help me make the decision whether or not to stay in Alaska.

Now here is the main reason for this “Fork in the Road” decision I should or need to make: I see an opportunity or an opportunity is presenting its self to me to leave the state of Alaska sometime during this next year possibly for a very long time. If I choose to stay here in Alaska to finish University I doubt that I’ll never leave this state for a long time, and miss a lot of opportunity to broaden my horizon’s in life. Like to travel the planet – see a later paragraph.

Anyway, looking at the situation that I’m currently in is making me think about what I want to do with my future. What I see is that I could stay for several more years and finish University and live here for the next 10 years or more, or I could move in 8 – 9 months and attend another University and “get on” with the rest of my life and have minimal contact with my family over the intervening years as time marches forward. Though there is possibly nothing wrong with either choice with what I want to do with the rest of my life.

If I stay here and finish University here in Alaska I would be done in approximately 2 years time starting in Fall 2008. If I do stay it looks like that I would be taking at least 5 classes per term – not that I mind taking that many classes at one time, though it would be difficult to manage my time among other things.

If I do move and attend another University in the “lower 48″ I would figure that it would take me, I think, at least 3 years or more to complete the required course work at the new University that I might attend.

Though I wasn’t planning to be taking classes this long (started in Fall 2002), now is Fall 2007. What I wanted to do was to transfer to another University 2 years ago and that didn’t happen at all. Basically it was poor of did proper planning on my part. I did take several classes over again which screwed things up for me academically in the long run.

Now the problem or the questions I need to ask my self are: What should I do about my education?, Should I stay in Alaska and finish University here?, Should I transfer to another University and finish my education there? Should I stay here and finish my education here then go to another University and get another degree? Should I take a break from University altogether for a year and travel?

One thing that I would like to do is to visit several countries and a few other state’s in the U.S. The places that I would like to visit to while on break from University are Ireland, the United Kingdom, Italy, maybe Spain, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Canada. Though not in this order and would or could take me several years to travel to each country listed here.

During the next 3 to 4 months would help me to determine whether or not on what happens if I’m choose to transfer to another University or to stay in Alaska for the next 5 to 10 years. Though I didn’t plan to stay in Alaska as long as I did – nearly 15 years of my life that I’ve been living here. The truth is that I’ve been wanting to leave Alaska for the last 5 years and the situation that I’m in prevented – well mostly prevented me from leaving and “getting on” with my life.

As I’ve said earlier in this post that there’s an opportunity for me to leave, now the problem is whether or not I should take this chance and take life by the balls and run with it.

I could go on with this post and talk more but it seems like that I’ve got the majority of it said here in this post and I would be just babaling on like a jack rabbit – if there’s ever such a thing to witness. I might post updates to this over time depending on what happens over the next several months.

Bye for now….

Peter

Blog Update

Just a quick update about this blog. You might have noticed the change of name to this blog after changing the time settings for post’s etc., my blog title went from this “Peter’s Thoughts” to “Peter\’s Thoughts” don’t know why the server (mysql and such) would that after having no problems with the way it was.

So I thought of using a different title, though I probably could do with out the url in the title but wanted to it to be descriptive with the new title. I may change it back to what it was after a while.

Peter

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Server Problems

I don’t know if anyone who’s been following this blog may or may not have noticed that I’ve been having problems with the mysql server as of late. What happened tonight is another reason I’ll be moving to another host hopefully by the end of the year.

Before moving this site and my other site I’ll be setting up another website with another host and get a “feel” about setting up a site at another hosting company, before moving this site.

I’ll be posting updates to this blog at some point during the next 4 weeks or so 2 months. Just need to see how thing’s go during this time.

Peter

Update: I think it would be at least another 2 months before moving from my current hosting/register provider, just haven’t saved enough money to do this. Hopefully, I’ll be switching hosting providers by summer beings. I’ll post something here in a few months time.

Taking pictures

Last night I tried to take pictures with my digital camera turned out to be a big mistake. The picture of what I wanted to take was a star or a planet that had an orange tint to it, and it was located in the southeast part of the sky. Though there was a slight overcast of clouds but still could see the brighter of the stars in the night sky that could be seen through the clouds last night. It turned out that I didn’t have the right set up for a camera to take pictures at night.

Anyways, the pictures that I did take of this one star (or it might have been planet don’t know though) didn’t come out right and I generally try not to post a sub par photograph on Flickr.

One thing that I would like to get is a high end SLR camera but not really a digital SLR. Having both would be nice but at this point I much rather have a film-based SLR. Though its just a matter of saving money to get a brand new film based SLR – if there even made by different OEM’s to choose from. I would like to have more than 2 choices when it comes to choosing a new camera, don’t know why, but its the way I like it or want it that way for some reason.

Peter

Star watching

One thing that I like to do over recent days is to look at the stars above my home outside of Fairbanks and when I do, I like to un-focus my eyesight just a little bit just see the night sky moving a just little bit. Don’t know why I like or want to do that with my eyes while looking at the night sky.

I’ve always had a passing fancy with the stars just about my whole life. I had a telescope for a while when I was growing up but some how it got lost on the move to Alaska. I would love to get a new telescope that could hook up to my computer and view the night sky that and along through the eye peace itself on a telescope itself.

One thing that I would like to do if I got a new telescope is to take pictures through the it, well at least closer pictures of planets and of stars that are viewable/visible from where I live in Fairbanks. Where I currently live is or could be considered a rural part of Fairbanks but yet close enough to town to see about one third of the city along with North Pole, Alaska and a little bit further than that city.

One thing I really like about Fairbanks and Alaska in general is that the night sky can be seen by driving out of the various big cities and have a clear view of the sky when its not overcast with clouds at night or when there is no full moon out at night.

Bye for now…

Peter

site problems

For those who follow this blog I’m currently having a problem with the feeds and other things too with the host I have in some fashion. I won’t name names but currently I ‘m trying to get things corrected with the host.

Updates (hopefully) will come over the next several weeks or months.

Peter

Update: Things have been fixed for now, but going to see how things go for a while.

Google Reader and Bloglines

I’ve been using Bloglines for a couple of years and use to it in regrades to its interface and the way it works. Though with Google Reader I’ve been using it for a much shorter time and have had 2 feeds in it. Tonight I imported the feeds that I have in Bloglines into Google Reader, which was an easy thing to do. Let me say that its going to take some time on using the service from Google and the way it marks the items in the feed as read items.

Though I’ve tried the Bloglines Beta a couple of times but not enough to comment on it. Though its an improvement of the current version of Bloglines. Though I may switch over to Google Reader for a bit of time to see how it goes.

bye for now.

Peter

a test post

This is a test post that I’m seeing if my feeds are working. If they are then could someone post a comment on this post. I’ll be making this post private at some point in the next week.

Peter

Blog Update

Well I’ve update the back-end software for this blog and this is the first time I’ve had any visible trouble/problems with the upgrade process. Before I did any upgrading I backup the db and the files that I had. Though I had trouble uploading to the wrong place, got everything working – generally again.

Then I had trouble with the sidebar for the theme that I was using when I upgraded, tried to revert to the default sidebar and that didn’t work. Then I tried the default theme that came with the wordpress install and the css wasn’t even work, so then I tried the classic theme and that works.

While I had this trouble all I thought and dreading is the fact that I might have downgrade to the version that I’ve been using. Which I didn’t want to do. This also showed me that I need to change hosting company and register for my site. The hosting company and domain register are one in the same but I won’t name the company here.

Anyway, I don’t know if I would be doing anything anytime soon. The last time I did promise something major I didn’t deliver on that promise, which sucks big time.

I think the main problem now is that I’m starting to have (very) early trouble with my hosting company, but my problem is that I don’t know which hosting and such to transfer to or how to do what I need to – if you could understand what I just said. One thing that I should do is to go through the plugins and themes that I’m not using anymore or if at all. Well that could be said for the rest of the site.

bye for now…