Main | summary of the past week of Kevin's life »
January 27, 2005
a short introductory message
If you find the text too small to read on your computer screen, you might consider looking at the View menu on your browser for an option to make the text larger.
Brief refresher: Kevin is on a Fulbright grant in Moscow from mid-January to mid-August 2005, learning about Russian libraries, traditional and digital, and perfecting his Russian language skills.
Sorry it's taken me so long to set up this blog—I've been promising it for a while now. I've been resisting blogging for a long time since, well, you know, I don't think that what I have to say is worth sharing with many people, and I'm not sure how I feel about making those thoughts more permanent than sound waves. Most of all, I tailor what I say to my audience, so it's hard to tell things in the same way to everyone.
So I've decided that if there was ever a time to give it a try, this trip to Russia is it. My goal is to keep everyone informed of what's going on here and distribute pictures from my digital camera more easily than by just using email, generally my favorite medium of communication.
I suppose that this experiment could lead, at one extreme, to me becoming a steady blogger even after returning to Ann Arbor, or at the other extreme I might be so disinclined toward blogging that I give up doing it even before leaving Russia. I realize those aren't really extreme cases, but I guess I'm just not an extreme kind of guy.
The name of the blog is a malapropism of "Old Church Slavonic" as perceived, I believe, by more than one person when listening to me speak excitedly about taking a course by that name at the University of Maryland. I'll entertain alternative suggestions for a title. I'll also accept site design advice. Right now I'm just using the default Movable Type templates.
This URL should be fairly stable. Since I've drug my feet on starting a blog for this long, there's no way I'm ready to do anything so drastic as register a domain name for a personal website. Therefore it's likely to stay here for a while.
I decided to use my name because I have no plans to say personal or controversial things that I wouldn't want associated with my name. No email address is given because if you found this site, you probably know how to reach me. If you don't know me, then I think you're a bit voyeuristic and should spend your time doing something else besides reading strangers' blogs.
While I think Creative Commons licenses are wonderful, I'm not ready to use them for this Work. 'Cause I might change my mind about something I say. So all that's here will be locked up practically forever under copyright. Just like Mickey Mouse.
All times are Moscow time, which is almost always eight hours ahead of Eastern Time.
Feel free to make comments and leave questions. Hopefully blog spamming won't force me to disable commenting.
Soon I'll change the sort order of entries to descending so you won't have to scroll to the bottom to search for new content.
Posted by kshawkin at January 27, 2005 07:00 PM