By Graham K. Rogers

I took a vacation to allow me some time to think. I am only halfway through and have managed to clear some cobwebs. I have made some decisions about the eXtensions website, one of which concerns an attempt at streamlining.

When the Bangkok Post, Database folded a couple of years back and the weekly eXtensions column was dumped, I opened the AMITIAE site. This had some small success, until the Bangkok flooding: payment mixups, coupled with a failure at the site host - they had no backup, for heavens's sake - left me with little choice but to revert to eXtensions where the hosting service (VisualWeb) has never let me down.

One of the carry-overs from AMITIAE was the thrice-weekly Cassandra, which itself started life as a text for the eXtensions podcast: text and sound to help those learning English. Each week, I collect news stories that interest me and produce a commentary based round these, with the occasional spin-off article, such as when one story develops a life of its own, such as the recent "Apple, iOS 7 and Uncritical Reporting" and not long before that, "Fallout from Financial Analysts".

There is no point in reinventing the wheel and plenty of other writers do a far better job than me, such as The Macalope, Daniel Eran Dilger on Roughly Drafted, John Gruber on Daring Fireball and Jim Dalrymple on The Loop.

Three times a week takes up a lot of time and I have many other things I would like to invest my time in, such as more reviews (when decent subjects arrive), photography and a couple of books that have been on the back burner for a while. The long Cassandra reviews are no more. Instead, when something comes along that I want to comment on, I will put out a briefer report. That will (I hope) keep me fresher and the reports more vibrant, as well as loosening up some of my time.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.