While the newkai.com domain will be sticking around, I killed the over-eight-year-old “The New Kai” concept of this website. Not only was it horribly out of date content and design-wise, much of it was broken!

“The New Kai” concept was based on fifteen-to-eighteen-year-old me and simply had to be discarded of. I now work about fifty hours a week, spend six-plus hours in the gym, enjoy nightlife, and sleep most of the weekend to recuperate from the previous three. It was time for me to upgrade to a much simpler content management system.

Any of the worthy content from the old site will be carried over here eventually. You’ll already find a link to my two photo sites in the “pages” section of the main page.

Even maintaining a website in this age of Facebook is a struggle. See my post about this last year.

Here are images I dug up of newkai.com versions 1 & 2:

I’m finally freeing myself of frames on newkai.com. While they improved the site’s appearance back in the day, there’s no use for them in 2008. And last but not least, there’s no more 18-year-old me frozen all over the screen!

My weblog turns seven years old this year, and it all started with a scam email I received back in December 2000. More on that below, but first this:
A 107 year-old woman in Australia now has a blog. She has someone type it for her, but it is amazing nonetheless. Despite being 107, she goes swimming and drinks shandy (a beer/lemonade mix, or what in Austria [sic] is called Radler). Check it out: The Life of Riley.
I maintained something similar to a blog on my website from 1998 until 2000. When my account at Tripod disappeared in 2000, I lost all of those entries.
Xanga, now one of the most successful blogging sites, publicly launched in November 2000, and allegedly (and I believe it) launched a persona called Bianca Broussard. Bianca was supposedly a school teacher, and her blog featured daily stories about the “kids in her class.” What Bianca really was (again, unproven, but it speaks for itself), was a spam machine that sent out thousands of emails to members of Angelfire, Tripod, and GeoCites, free website hosts, the last of which I was a member of. The only variable of the emails was the name in the subject and salutation, which was simply the username on the host of the addressee. On December 29, 2000, I received the following email:

Subject: Hey “new_kai,” comment on your site: GeoCities/new_kai
Hi “new_kai” I was surfing GeoCities and checked out your site at GeoCities/new_kai. I have a good friend with a really similar site, and I passed your url along to her. Have you ever seen a weblog? I was noticing your writing style, and I think the weblog format might really work well for you. I just started one recently on my site, and I am actually thinking of dumping my homepage in favor of just having the weblog, since I’m enjoying it so much more than maintaining my homesite. Anyway, I really just wanted to say thanks for an interesting site! Bianca Visit me!
http://www.biancabroussard.com/home.asp

I started my weblog that evening, with the following post:

First Post Ever
Hey, this is pretty neat! First off, Bianca Broussard encouraged me to start one of these web log things after visiting my site. I like this. It is like easy to update. It is like a diary/journal type of thing. So, today I started this. I’ll see where it will go from here…

I kept it up, and the rest is history. It’s kind of funny that something good can come from spam emails. In 2003 I abandoned Xanga and manually began importing those entries into a new weblog based on my site. I never finished that, and to this day there are posts still missing… They’re safe though, and I’ll get to them one day.
It’s kind of strange that I went through the history of my weblog again… It must be already mentioned several times on my site. But this 107 year-old woman blogging got me to thinking what the future holds for my generation.
Before Facebook exploded over the last two years, I wasn’t in touch with most of the people I considered friends. Now I can more or less monitor their lives 24/7. Where is this going to lead? Is the situation going to be the same or perhaps even more insane in the future? Will I be 65 and on Facebook or a successor sites still monitoring my high school friends? If so, this represents an insane change from my parents’ generation, or even from those people only a couple years older than me, who have lost track of all but a handful or less of their friends from “back in the day.”
If I’m still around, I’ll be turning 107 in 2090… And I don’t even want to imagine what the world will be like then. Whatever it’ll be like though, I’ll hopefully still be documenting it from my point of view on some kind of electric communication network. And I’ll probably still find out if you are “no longer listed as in a relationship.”

Facebook is great and all… It allows me keep in touch with people on a daily basis. But what’s the cost of this all-in-one internet portal? Creativity. I’m not talking about not sending a birthday or holiday card to your friend because a “wall post” will do, I’m talking about how Facebook is killing off personal websites.
First there were the photo albums, then notes, then shares. Now virtually all your internet activities can be done via Facebook. And it has taken its toll.
On a personal level, there are sites of mine such as AIS2002.COM, which has 1715 replies to 139 Topics. All but maybe 100 of those posts were posted before 2006, when Facebook began to seriously take over people’s internet activities.
Facebook’s group technology has serious flaws however. Most groups are only highly visited when new, causing thousands to be created daily, often on the exact same premise as countless others. Individual discussion topics can’t be “shared,” only entire groups can. And customization of the groups is largely restricted to “sponsored groups.”
Facebook has an import option for notes that allows you to continue writing things on your blog and have them appear as imported notes on Facebook. That’s kind of the best of both worlds.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this, other than that I’m going to bring the personal website back! And I’m ironically doing that by starting a Facebook group…

Just as in the past, newkai.com is going to cover this Winter Break in Vienna, from December 29 to January 16. Here are some of the highlights:

• In addition to hundreds of photos throughout my time in Vienna, there will be video coverage of New Year’s Eve and possibly other nights as well.
• Like this past summer, photos on newkai.com will be in a sharp, minimally compressed 800×600 size on newkai.com. While photos will also be uploaded to Facebook, on newkai.com you can view them larger and in much better quality.
• Also introduced last summer is the new photo gallery, which is extremely orange user friendly, and has a ton of options. If you are interested in uploading your photos of this break to the newkai.com Photo Gallery, simply let me know and I’ll set up an account for you.
• New: Photos can be downloaded as a single zip file for each evening. This has been highly requested, as it makes it much easier to add all of my photos to your computer, for printing, sharing, screensavers, etc.

The first media will begin appearing on December 30. Enjoy!

I finished up a nice film of photos from the last couple years with a nice soundtrack. If you’ve been in any of my photos in the last three years, chances are you’re in this film. So check it out!
Vienna Winter Break Promo Film

I switched to using Coppermine Photo Gallery today. It makes my life easier, looks better, has more features, etc.
Photos before August 31, 2006 (old gallery)
Photos starting August 25, 2006 (new gallery)

Facebook added a “Notes” feature today that functions just like a weblog. Other friends networks have done this as well, but they often aren’t used much because it would require the user to switch weblog hosts. Facebook fortunately has an import feature that allows users to continue posting on their usual blog. Entries are then automatically imported into the Facebook “Notes” feature. Furthermore, entries can be tagged on Facebook just like photos.
The advantage this has for me is that more people will undoubtedly read my entries. First there’s a “Friends’ Notes” feature, which shows all recent posts of a users friends. Second, my friends will be interested if they are attached to a post through tagging, which shows up, just like photo tagging, in the top left corner of a user’s profile.
More people reading my post might also inspire me to post more…

I finally figured out why my PowerBook’s CD drive was jammed… I had screwed a too-long screw when I had reassembled it, which blocked the drive!
Since that problem is solved now, I was able to import and upload the pictures Oliver took during the Rolling Stones concert here in Vienna in July. Many of them came out pretty amazing. Check them out!
Rolling Stones in Vienna 2006

Unique Visitors: 6905 (2nd Place)
Number of Visits: 12972 (2nd Place)
Pages: 48785 (2nd Place)
Hits: 123363 (6th Place)
Bandwidth: 2.38 GB (4th Place)
Top Photo: DSC00211.JPG from “Night of March 31” (22 Views, Pictured)
Top Countries: United States, Australia, Austria, Great Britain, Japan
Yeah… I’m just a little late with this…
April was not a record-breaking month for newkai.com, but it came in second in three of the five categories.
There was a new top photo, pictured above.
The most visited sections of my website were AIS2002.COM, followed by my weblog, photos, KaiCams, and videos… Same order as last month.
Google’s index of my website increased significantly, from 733 to 1280 pages… Craziness. Currently the most searched-for phrase that leads Googlers to my site is depressing lyrics, followed by Long Beach short bus lyrics and IB Sucks.

Today I came across some photo disks from 1994. My dad used to send his undeveloped film out to Seattle Photo Works, and they’d send back the developed photos and these disks with photos on them in some strange format that thankfully GraphicConverter for Mac can read. I found three disks in total, two of which just have scenery or tourism attractions in Ottawa, Canada, respectively. But one has two photos from the first Vienna trip my family ever took (the real Vienna Trip I!). Additionally there were a couple of my spring concert as a 4th grader in the African Road Elementary Orchestra. Most of the photos are of my family’s pool being built. All these photos were taken in May 1994.
4th Grade: Pool Construction & Vienna