Just another blog!

A few days ago, I changed my tagline on my Google profile to "I don't like people". This tagline has helped many people ridicule my comments with Your tagline says it all and has got a good many people who know me and care about me extremely worried. Hence this blog. The inspiration for this line came about from a Dilbert animation, wherein Dogbert says this at the start of the animation. Somehow, this line resonated very well with me. Why, you may ask. Good question, but the answer may not be to your liking. Actually, as I write this post, I wonder whether I should just hit the delete button, as it is extremely difficult to put in a coherent and cogent answer on a post which is available publicly. People, I find can be just as mean as they can be magnanimous, with more people tending towards the mean side. Consider the Milgram Experiment or the Stanford Prison Trials. However, I don't need psychological experiments to prove my case. Even in everyday affairs, we see ...

This post is about a philosophy, nothing more. I had tweeted the title months ago. I thought that I'd better write a post too. Apart from Windows, my antivirus and Microsoft Flight Simulator X; you'd be hard-pressed to find any proprietary software on my computer. I like to use FOSS everywhere. Call me a geek, my reasons for using FOSS are simple. I just cannot pay for all the proprietary software I'd require. Consider that Adobe Photoshop costs close to $ 1000, Lightroom costs $ 100, Photomatix costs the same, MS office costs around $ 500. I cannot pay so much. But this does not mean that I compromise on quality. As I've recognized in my various experiments with FOSS, free does not mean poor quality. Why is FOSS so successful? Simply because it is open, in that everyone who uses it can modify it to suit their needs. Let's consider an example. Say you are interested in a word-processing software (assuming you are one of the many idiots who do not use LaTeX. You do...

I'm compelled to begin each post with a meta. That way, my blog posts seem less like essays or dissertations, and more like diary entries, or web logs. So here goes... I started this blog a little over a year ago. The main purpose of this blog was to experiment with styles of writing, and find an effective outlet for all the subjects I wish to rant about; saving my classmates the agony of having to listen to them. As I wrote this blog, I've experimented with so many styles, and have received comments claiming that my work is a shameless copy greatly inspired by so-and-so author/work. Fact is that I simply chanced upon that style. I read, so obviously, my work shall reflect the styles of those I admire, but I've worked out so many styles without even knowing that they exist, only to be informed of them later. Recently, I've been struck with the seeming absence of whispers as an element of a story. The more I've thought of the subject, the more I've been convince...

The internet has changed the way we access information, no doubt about it. In school, I had to rely on the library, on encyclopaedias that I possessed for information. It was a long and arduous task, looking up indices, and hoping that the keywords within would lead me to what I sought. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I got internet access around the same time my demand for information increased. It was not necessary to store too many of those heavy books any more, I could just access the internet for any information I needed. However, slow internet speeds still forced me to rely, for most of the time, on an encyclopaedia that I had on a CD-ROM. The amount of information on that single CD-ROM amazed me at the time. The encyclopaedia had over 70,000 pages, video, music and much more. The internet, however, contained much more information than I could have ever stored in my house. While my copies of encyclopaedias grew out-dated, forcing me to buy newer copies, Wikipedia came up, and I ha...