Today I’m happy to introduce you to version thirteen of my website. I can’t believe it’s already been through thirteen (-ish) iterations, but here we are.

I see this new version more as a natural evolvement from the previous one. While Twelve served me quite well, it became more and more apparent that I use my personal blog more as a photo-blog than anything. Over time the tiny size of images in Twelve increasingly bothered me, and this is something Thirteen will definitely solve, as you might have noticed already.

With Thirteen I now fully embraced my purpose of this blog; to capture and share moments of life, the way I see it.

To some, the photos might look a little bit oversized. All photos are now 1024px wide, whether they’r portrait or landscape style photos. While this might look too big on smaller screens, I feel it allows you to view and understand what I saw in that moment I made that photo.

I’ll probably make some tweaks in the near future, but for now, it is my honor and privilege to welcome you to Thirteen; my old, new home.

After closing my Google+ account, Google asked me why I did so. Here is what I have written to them to answer their question.

A constant stream of totally-unknown-to-me 40+ year old Korean men keep following me for no apparent reason, short of the fact that I live in Korea I guess. With all the privacy-related options, the most irritating part of G+ to me was the requirement that all profiles are public, making it very easy for spammers, bored people and other kinds of pointless folk to add me, leaving me with a useless notification box that tramples on any kind of actual notification I might have to see and making it more of a bother to visit google.com with the “oh god, 10 more folks are hogging my stream” button I have to click on before it stops screaming red red RED CLICK ME DAMMIT.

$0.02: You had (and still have, nice choice of words with your “we’ll *try* to remove all your personal, viagra-to-our-ad-boner info”) all my personal info, why oh why did you have to force our profiles to be public. The reason Facebook works is because you are together with your friends, family, acquaintances and Mark (he needs friends), nobody else but those you are actually interested in. G+ started out as a great alternative (the Facebook without it being Facebook©), but soon ended in a shit-fest of people who thought they ran away from MyFaceTwitterBookSpace but ended up merely using G+ to “follow” total strangers and bitch about what things they didn’t like about G+.

$0.01 (My tip): If you want to create a social network; let it be social. Don’t launch and run away doing whatever it is you’re working on now. I’m telling you, with the way you’re launching services that could’ve been bloody brilliant (I’m looking at you, misunderstood and crappily explained Wave.. I miss you), you’re like a retard kid with ADHD. Dedicate yourself, focus, launch something and stick with it, for crying out loud.

Oh, look, a bird!

-Dave