What a decade!

 

The noughties are almost gone for ever. But what a decade it's been. It began on 1st January 2000 which was supposed to be the day of the Millennium Bug which in turn was believed to cause the end of the world, a nuclear catastrophe or, at the very least, a malfunction of electronic devices.
As we now know, there was no Armageddon and apart from some cases of computers showing the wrong date or machines ceasing to work correctly, nothing else happened.
A big scare that turned out nothing more than this.

Over the next ten years we have seen a huge progress in computers, mobile phones, digital cameras, TV equipment and so on. I remember my first mobile I bought in the early 2000s and I must say by today's standards it would only make you smile. It was called Alcatel One Tough Easy DB :)
No one in 2000 could predict all the things that would happen in the course of the next ten years. And quite a lot has happened in the first decade of the 21st century:

• Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube dominated the internet
• mobile phones, MP3 players and digital cameras became commonplace
• Windows Me (2000), XP (2001), Vista (2007) and 7 (2009) were released
• terrorist attacks in New York (2001), Washington (2001), Bali (2002)Madrid (2004), London (2005) and a countless number of other places
• heatwave swept across Europe (2003)
• earthquakes (2008), (2009), hurricanes (2005), cyclones (2008) and tsunamis (2004)
• mad cow disease (2003), SARS (2003), avian flu (2007) and swine flu (2009)
• climate change
• Olympic Games in Sydney (2000), Athens (2004) and Beijing (2008)
• enlargement of the EU (2004), (2007)
• introduction of the euro banknotes and coins (2002) and eurozone enlargement to Slovenia(2007), Cyprus and Malta (2008) and Slovakia (2009)
• appointment of the first president of the EU (2009)
• wars in Afghanistan (2001) and in Iraq (2003) began
• pope JP2 died (2005)
• credit crunch (2007) and recession (2009)
• and many, many more

The world truly is a different place compared to what it was just ten years ago.

For me too the noughties have been a busy period; in the last ten years I have:

• attended High School and finished it
• passed my Matura
• moved away from home
• gone to university
• had two relationships
• lived in Toruń, Gloucestershire and Glasgow
• stopped believing in God
• got my first flat
• voted in elections for the first time
• bought my first laptop, digital camera, mobile phone, MP3 player
• opened a bank account
• started smoking
• flown for the first time
• started learning English
• hitchhiked
• come of age
• been sued
• got my first job
• started losing hair (unverified and hope not true!)
• visited many beautiful places
• met lots of people and made some friends
• got ten years older

 

More here: A portrait of the decade by the BBC

New blog

About time too!

After many, many hours spent on moving the content of my old blog and setting up this one, I can finally say that I’ve managed to break free from spaces live and am not going back there.

You can admire the fruits of my doings:

• the nice and neat new address (zarazek.eu) which can now be used without typing www.
• the lovely banner featuring fragments of my photos which, I hope, is recognisable for its Scottish flavour,
• the arduously copied and pasted comments from the old blog (there was no way of moving them with the notes)
• and the video clips which somehow appeared as pieces of code at first and which I had to redo manually

I had to move the old blog first to wordpress and then to blogspot. There was no way of exporting in directly onto blogspot and it really got on my nerves before I figured out how to do all this.

zarazek.spaces.live com, in its almost two year long life had 8537 hits (I was probably responsible for a half of them but still :P) It was visited by people from:

Europe

 

South America

 

 

North America

 

South East Asia

 

Yeh, yeh, I know it doesn’t look impressive but because of the specifications of the dreaded Spaces Live, not every visit was recorded on the map. This was among the many reasons why I didn’t want to stay there any longer.

Polish hunk and money

 

Nice Polish ‘model’:

 

And what some wikijacker (I thought I’d invented this word but apparently it already existed) thinks of the Polish złoty:

Zarazek goes .eu

and wants break free from Spaces Live

Whilst doing my usual aimless browsing on the internet, I stumbled across an advert which said  you could get a .eu domain for a year without paying a penny. I thought it was a brilliant offer and, without thinking much, I decided to go for it. So, from then on you can access my blog by typing a much shorter and easier to remember address www.zarazek.eu.

The www. part is important as my poor skills didn’t allow me resolve the problem of having to have two parts of the address. If someone knows how I can change it to work even if only zarazek.eu is typed, please let me know.

Isn’t it strange that when I was registering and chose the UK as my address the website said I had to be in the EU and it wouldn’t let me continue with the registration? I had to change the address to Poland.

I’ve spent the whole evening trying to figure out how to move my blog onto a different service and it seems like Microsoft do their best not to let this happen.