Hello!

Yes, I am back. The Uni year is finished, and in fact the entire degree is finished. My time is now much freer than it was – and I’m at a bit of a loss about what to do next. More study isn’t out of the question, but I have spoken to a couple of people and they’re advice was that I would probably struggle to stay focussed enough to get through a PhD. I have a very broad knowledge base, and my lecturer suggested that I would probably find it hard to become so limited and specialised as would be required for a PhD. I would have to do honours first anyway, but I easily have the marks to do that, if that’s what I decide to do. I don’t know. Things to think about!

In the meantime, I will focus on getting the website and shop properly set up and working. I have a whole bunch of photos that could be made ready for new products, I have recently loaded my entire photo collection into Darktable (my collection management and processing software). Apart from the somewhat bemused discovery that I have taken somewhere in the region of 40,000 photographs since I got my first digital camera in 2008, I can now quickly categorise and locate photographs. This increases the usability of the collection. While the vast majority of them are family snaps, there are bound to be some interesting photographs amongst the collection, which I will be able to feature here.

New Website layout

You have hopefully noticed the revamped website design. I think the new design is much more contemporary and better reflects the purpose of this as my gallery and blogs platform. I am working on revamping the shop – I think the merchandise side of it will stay on this website, but I also own the watersprite.au domain, and I’m looking to set it up as a dedicated shopfront. I am hoping to carry some third party merchandise/products on that platform, although I will probably have the Water Sprite catalog available there too. Stay tuned.

What won’t be so obvious (I hope) is that the whole set has moved to a new hosting platform. My previous hosting provider (which I purchase wholesale through my internet services operations) turned out to be less reliable than I had hoped, and their email platform was not fantastic either. If you are interested in purchasing a domain name or similar internet services, Water Sprite can oblige – I don’t completely endorse the hosting services I have available, however… If you’re after a basic website hosting static content it will probably be great, but for anything more serious (like my website) it was terribly under-powered. You should be able to access the internet services purchase and maintenance page through hosting.watersprite.com.au. It is all self-managed online, although I can help out if you really need – I charge $25/hour for anything you require me to do personally though.

End ramble

That’s enough rambling for this week. I’ll work on something a bit more structured and interesting for next week.

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