Just another blog!

Yeah, I know, clichéd saying, coined probably by ugly ducklings who wish that they could change to swans. No, I am not going to exalt this statement, but I am merely planning to express some of my views on the same. I had earlier written a post on us trying to find meaning in everything. I shall resume from where I left off, and try to show how the jumbled, twisted and convoluted skein of thought links these two posts. I resume at the interactions in my literature class. I have since completed that course, and moved on to another course which far surpasses the previous one in the qualities of the same. This course tries hard to hammer into the students some examples of good literature, which the students are required to accept as good literature. While I myself have no keen reasons to be a radical and debunk the canon, I think that it is unfair to actually point out what is good and what's not. Why, you ask. Very well, I shall tell. I go back to the highly clichéd title of this p...

This may be considered a meta-post. It's a post about the nuances of blogging. One change that you may see very soon is the addition of ads to this blog. This means that I shall receive money if you click on the advertisements. Why insert ads into a blog that was always meant to be a collection of frenzied, tangled and confused personal emotions related in a vacant or a pensive mood? Maybe it's because I hope that the advertisements shall be relevant to the content of my blog, and may help readers to enhance their experience. If I write about using an AVR micro-controller to make a line following robot, then maybe the ads should redirect you to sites where you may be able to buy the required materials to build a line following robot. But that's just the face I would like to show. Fact is that I may want to clutch at any straw that comes my way. If I can get paid while writing a blog just because readers find the advertisements on the blog to be useful, I shall not deny that...

I have been using the Dvorak keyboard layout for a little less than a year. This post is the recollection of my experiences as a Dvorak user in a world dominated by stubborn dogmatists inclined on worshipping the most inefficient keyboard layout users, manufacturers and perpetrators of the QWERTY keyboard layout. I too was a user of the QWERTY layout until a little less than a year ago. I could say that my typing speed was rather decent, reaching around 50 words a minute under optimal conditions. I had over four years of practice touch typing on the QWERTY layout, and felt rather proud of my typing skills, which I can modestly claim were better than most of my friends. However, I have always tried to be a maverick, and what better way to claim that I speak geek than to have a keyboard layout as esoteric as the Dvorak? I tried switching to the Dvorak, but the cost of switching was extremely high, and I barely managed to type at 5wpm. It sucked so much while typing code, that I gave up ...

My computer is ageing. Within days of buying the computer, the catch and hold mechanism of the card reader broke. Since I could not give my computer to the service centre for an extended period of time to replace the motherboard, I let it be. Then my computer entered adolescence. This was a stage marked by extreme instability, irrational temper, and uncontrollable heat. Getting my computer to behave the way I wanted was getting more and more difficult. These were the days when I had to battle with OS crashes and more, and spent a lot of time reformatting my hard drive. Then came the middle age. For six months, I had hardly any complaints to make about the machine that sits on my desk or on my lap. These days were characterized by a mutual understanding and respect. I never asked my computer to perform unearthly tasks, and my computer never expected me to wait for an hour before it booted up. Right now, my computer is ageing. My DVD drive has stopped working. Hard drive performa...

A post after a long time. I have hardly found enough time to blog, and this has caused the readership of my blog to suffer. So, I shall restrict myself to writing posts in a limited amount of time, which shall definitely cut down on their length. A moment to rejoice? Environmental concern has become a worldwide phenomenon. Even as undergraduate engineers, we are asked to study two half semester long courses in environmental sciences. While I do not object to environmental concerns, I do object to some of the hype surrounding the issue. One of the major concerns of the environment, at least in today's age is of global warming. The earth's atmospheric temperature has been showing a rising trend along with its seasonal cycles. Al Gore and all the others trading in carbon credits would have us believe that the sole reason for global warming is the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, and going green is all about reducing the carbon dioxide emissions. Hang on!...

I start this month with a lament... I get absolutely no feedback on my blog. It's really annoying. I write and write, but hardly any one ever comments on my posts, or even uses the quick feedback buttons. The reason I complain is not because I want to show that my blog is popular... no, in fact, I have a strange suspicion about the visits to my blog. The site stats show me that in the past, someone/something has reached by blog by searching for Mark Zuckerberg. Of course, I have a post about facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg does figure in that. Unfortunately, I don't think it would figure anywhere in to top three pages on google search. I don't think that any person would have the patience to look up more than 3 pages of the google search results. Which probably means that most of the hit counts on my blog are fake, and that there are actually some web-bots visiting random pages looking around for tiny little slips, like contact details and such. So, if you have inde...

It's really weird that the posts most difficult for me to write are the ones that have a deep personal touch: they are the ones that reflect my own views, or relate to some experience I have had. Maybe you would think that these posts are the easiest to write, and that they should flow out of my fingertips onto my keyboard, and from there onto the internet. But it is these posts that trouble me the most. I may write for lengths about DIY projects, or on why facebook sucks, or anything else; but when it comes to writing about something I really connect with, I have difficulty. As such, it is not difficult to explain this: Brecht's distancing works for me as an author as well as an observer, I write best when there is some distance between me and the object of my work. Here, again, I find myself drifting into the realm of the objective. But that is not the purpose of this post. So, I drag myself back to writing what I have put off for over a week. Recently, I met some wonderfu...