June 2010
1 post
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Better (Armenian) Typography in Web Design –...
My presentation regarding general typographic principals as they apply to web design, and specifically how to deal with the poor support for Armenian font types, which I gave at Barcamp Yerevan 2010.
Thanks to all of the organizers and all the other presenters.
Better Armenian Typography in Web Design
May 2010
6 posts
5 tags
Introducing The Oratsouyts Online, The Rhythm of...
Most people’s lives are governed by some sort of rhythm. This rhythm is usually determined by our school, our job, and by our family. Its a vital and integral part of our lives and gives structure and context to our experiences and relationships.
But as a Christian and a member of the Armenian Orthodox Church, my life is subject to another rhythm - the rhythm of our faith. Its a rhythm which...
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Improving Armenian Font Support On The Web
It can be a real pain dealing with Armenian fonts. Doubly so when dealing with Armenian fonts on the Internet. While all essentially
modern operating systems include at least one font that has the ability to render Unicode Armenian text, most of them are not what you
would consider visually appealing. In fact, I would consider most of them simply awful.
Visiting a website like a1plus, you’ll...
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The Translator We Needed
When I arrived in Armenia back in September there were two Internet resources for which I truly wished. The first was up-to-date and accessible information regarding locations in Armenia (i.e. resteraunts, services, etc…). The second was a tool to translate Armenian to English, and vice-versa.
My Wishes Were Granted
This first of these concerns was obviously colored by my being a newcomer who...
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Introducing The Grabar Cheatsheet
The hompage of the recently published Grabar Cheatsheet Say hello to the The Grabar Cheatsheet, a Classical Armenian study tool. Its a basically a reference tool which sums up commonly used grammatical forms in Grabar (the transliterated Armenian word for Classical Armenian), and should be useful for students, scholars, or clergy who study or use Classical Armenian.
Some Background
Armenian...
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Vote “Mitto” for Best Password Manager →
I have tons of passwords for tons of websites. So do most of my friends. For that reason my friend Arsen Ovanessoff had the idea to create a great tool to help people manage their passwords in a really productive and secure way. After a coupe years of collaboration, along with our head geek, Ted Schundler, we launched the Mitto Password Manager. We’re proud of our website. Its a solid tool...
April 2010
9 posts
3 tags
“We remain hopeful that common efforts to overcome the present challenges and the...”
– HH Karekin II, addressing the World Summit of Religious Leaders in Baku, Azerbaijan
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Google Maps In Armenia
Finally, Google Maps is offering driving and walking directions within Armenia. This is a convieniance that is certainly taken for granted in larger countries. In Armenia, up until recently either you knew where you were going or you had stop and ask a dozen people on the way. This may work for locals, but for the uninitiated and the tourist it was daunting reaching places that were even slightly...
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The Trustworthiness of Beards →
The Colonel Sanders approaching a state of questionable trustworthiness. I find this to be completely hilarious. As a professionally bearded man, its reassuring that many of my friends, associates and myself are considered to be amongst the most trustworthy. It is disconcerting though that some of my friends fall somewhat farther down the line. I’m looking at you John Harrison, or should I...
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This hymn is sung during the Ordination Rite of...
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Resurrection: Faith's Tipping Point
The Resurrection of Christ. Its a big deal, right? Of course it is. Despite this, I feel like Easter is an occasion that gets lost in the noise of Christian Culture. There is Christmas, and lent, and Palm Sunday, Easter, and many other major and minor feast days. Amongst these, Easter is just only day that comes and goes when more people then usual come to Church and get to have a big dinner. This...
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Alfred App →
Alfred is a new quick launching application that is in beta but gets more promising (and stable) with each release. If Quicksilver’s mercurial nature and LaunchBar’s price are not your speed, this is worth a look.
— minimalmac
I’ve been using Alfred for a couple weeks now, and its a wonderful application. I’d recommend it for anyone on a Mac.
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Good Grief by Meghan O’Rourke →
A great piece about the diminishing role of mourning in the post-industrial world. It echos some of what I wrote about in The Sun Don’t Go Down.
Beautifully written, and carefully considered, its definitely worth a read.
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Why Easter Won't Stay Still
A couple times last week the question as to why the date of Easter was movable was brought up. My cousin asked in an email:
Why is calculation of Easter Sunday based on generic/basic astronomy? The first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox?
A few days later another friend remarked during dinner that she thought it was strange that the date for Easter was always...
March 2010
3 posts
5 tags
Revolution of the Mind
“Have I been blind?” I found myself asking this question to an empty room the other day. In fact, I’ve been asking myself this question a lot lately.
Before my joining the Kevorkian Seminary, I felt as though I had a solid grasp on a few things. Putting aside things digital in nature, my knowledge of the Christian Faith and the Armenian Church were right at the top of the list....
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February 2010
6 posts
3 tags
4 tags
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Buzzing
About a year and half ago, when Twitter was starting to become a household name, it was interesting to see how people were completely polarized in their opinion of the micro-messaging service. It was something that was either an impressive new form of communication to be reckoned with, or a silly toy that people with too much time on their hands and not enough real friends used. Having already...
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A Lazy Blogger I Am
Its been more then a couple months since I’ve contributed to my blog. I’ve been a bad bad blogger.
During this time countless important things have happened, and I’ve missed many valuable opportunities to shares my thoughts and experiences. In an attempt to rectify this, I’ve come up with a list of blogs that I plan on publishing over the next month. Some of this vital...
4 tags
November 2009
2 posts
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The Sun Don't Go Down
How often do you talk about death? Not often I imagine. It’s a topic that we naturally avoid, until we find ourselves face-to-face with it. If you’ve never been exposed to death, you usually avoid discussing it because it’s a foreign and dreadful thing. If you have experienced it, the consideration of it typically calls up unpleasant emotions.
In the seminary over the past couple weeks,...
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Seminary Life: Part 3 - Student Life
Currently there are about 150 students attending. Nearly all of them are from Armenia. There is only a handful from the Diaspora. There is one student from Syria, another from Iraq, and I’m told there is a student from Germany, though I haven’t met him yet. He’s doing a really good job of blending in. Students who come from Georgia or Karabakh are also called Diasporans, but kind...
October 2009
4 posts
2 tags
Seminary Life: Part 2 - Academics
This is the second part in a series of blogs which were written to give the reader an idea of what the Kevorkian Seminary is like… from my perspective at least.
The Academic life of the seminary, is very structured. Very very structured. Did I mention that its structured? This was surprisingly shocking to me at first, but in retrospect, its a seminary located on the grounds of an orthodox...
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Seminary Life: Part 1
Its been slightly more then a month since I began at the Gevorkian Theological Seminary at the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin. Since then, the process of settling in to my academic life has been, like most things in Armenia, less then predictable.
In this post and over the next couple in this series, I’d like to share with you how the Seminary is structured, what the student life is like,...
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Moved my blog to Tumblr
My previous blog system, chyrp, was causing me a headache. I set it up over a year ago, and while I really liked the concept, it was never stable enough to rely on.
I decided to move my blog to tumblr.com. It’s a hosted microblog, that you can use and customize for free, and even lets you use your own domain without having to pay extra. This made sense as well because of the fact that...
September 2009
3 posts
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“I am a child of the Diaspora. I was not born in the motherland. But the...”
– Karekin I of blessed memory
Settling In: The Armenian Way
If you look up the Armenian word for Settle you’ll find բնակություն հաստատել (pronounced Bnagootiun Hasdadel), which literally means to establish one’s abode. Of course, in the context of this blog, settle has the pretty much the same definition. So why introduce the Armenian word? Simply to impress you with my increasing Armenian vocabulary, and to illustrate that occasionally...
August 2009
2 posts
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Failure to Launch
I have a special talent for making short stories long. Therefore, I will begin this story much earlier then it needs to begin. Annie, my wife, and I went to Armenia together earlier this year in May. Our goal was to explore the possibility to moving there for a period of time so that I could continue my training for the priesthood. Upon returning to the United States we decided that this option...
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WatchAs I’m getting ready to move to Armenia, I’m increasingly feeling as though I need to get rid of all the baggage that I’ve been dragging around from place to place over the years. like most, I’ve got tons of clothes that I haven’t worn in years, nic-nacs of dubious sentimental value, many books which I haven’t looked at in years, and lastly, files and files of...
July 2009
3 posts
1 tag
Sharing is caring
I just had a chance to read up on all the awesome new social features that Google Reader has added, and I am very pleased. I am a very avid Google Reader user. I keep track of 244 news feeds, from which Reader tells me I have read (or glanced at) almost 2500 items over the past 30 days. It is by far my #1 source for news.
I’ve always shared the news I’ve found through reader. Friends...
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WatchEarlier this evening I went to IMIX Bookstore to see ManilaRyce perform his poetry as part of the monthly “Off the Books” Open Mic event. I was too late to catch his performance live, but I was able to find it when I got home via their ustream recording (His performance is at 14:30). He did a great job.
This was the second “Off the Books” that I attended, and each time...
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WatchOn June 21, I ran a workshop entitled “Parish Website Workshop.” The second session was very specific for the way that we are rolling out websites for our parishes (using Drupal), but the first session was very general, and I hope that its something other faith communities can utilize.
Presentation slides
These where the slides I used for the presentation.
May 2009
1 post
3 tags
WatchWe were fortunate enough to have photographers for our wedding, who agreed to give us all of the processed from our wedding in hi-res digital. Most photographers charge you for access to the original files, since they can make so much more on printing the photos for you.
Anyway, we received our photos in August, and I’ve been wanting to get them on flickr ever since. Aside from having the...
April 2009
1 post
2 tags
BLDGBLOG: How the Other Half Writes: In Defense of... →
Bravo! This is a must read for all my twitter hating friends. I love them, but like this author writes:
“Twitter is very obviously not the answer to everything, and it never should have been portrayed that way; but it also very obviously is not the death of humanism.”
This dialog about the value of twitter reminds me of the days when I used to despise MySpace. It was ugly, and...
March 2009
3 posts
2 tags
Abducted boys' trail is growing hot →
Thank God, it seems that after a very long time there is news regarding the investigation of our two Sunday School boys who were kidnapped by their non-custodial fathers last summer. It appears that they’ve found evidence that they were in Guatemala at some point in the last 9 months, and may in fact still be in Central or South America. That is an extremely vast area, so perhaps its...
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MaKeYOurOwN mkyoon :: Webkit, Chrome(2.0.169.1)의... →
So for some reason the new Chrome Beta is forcing websites to display legends. Very weird. I hope its a glitch they address soon. This link helped me out. Here is the code I used.
legend {
display: none;
position: absolute;
visibility: hidden;
}
February 2009
2 posts
2 tags
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Kim Kardashian - "In touch with my roots" →
I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to post this. A juxtaposition that I experienced in person, but it seems so much more surreal online.
How do you greet a Prime Minister, anyway?
January 2009
2 posts
3 tags
Silverstripe Textmate Bundle
We recently decided to go with Silverstripe as our CMS for the front end of the soon to be launched [mitto.com] site. I love Silverstripe. In the past we’ve had more of a love/hate relationship, but they’ve been stabilizing their code, and I’ve been understanding it better, so we’re coming to a happy medium. I’ve been using it for the development of our Western...
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September 2008
3 posts
3 tags
This is the audio from a workshop I recently led...
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Taking a Break from the News
I’ve decided that I’m not going to watch CNN, or listen to NPR for at least a week. I’m getting way, way to caught up in election news, and find myself becoming emotional and distraught over the candidates behavior. Now, I know this is stupid, and unhealthy. Its akin to my friends who become irrationally emotive over sports. I tell them that its not worth, your emotion is wasted,...