Blogging!

Hello folks. I started this adventure of blogging on the 18th of January. As is usual for many things I do I was pessimistic about the longevity of my blogging. Though it is still early days I am happy to find myself still blogging diligently, though the quality of my posts are erratic, to say the least. Today I read more into RSS and ATOM feed and felt that I was the right time for me to take stock and pen down a lot of stuff that I have been meaning to write for a long time.

I heard about Blogger and blogging sometime in 2002. At that point I was still quite confused with all the stuff happening on the net and was slightly overawed. I must confess that I have a Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde character with respect to technology. I am both a big techno-phobic as well as a techno-fanatic. Anyways everything be as it may, I did not get involved.

This year I got a new Internet connection at home and started to surf the net at home rather than in the office. During one of these nocturnal sessions, I suddenly remembered about my curiosity regarding Blogs. The name, which popped out of my head, was of course Blogger; hence I searched for a Blogger.com and started blogging. The intention at that point was to work on my writing skills by writing something everyday and try to live by that discipline. Writing regularly was something that a lot of people had advised me to do and an article in Joel’s archive(Joel on Software - Painless Functional Specifications - Part 1: Why Bother?: search for weblog in his page) just helped me make the decision. As writing on paper marinating some kind of Diary was not my style I decided on a blogsite. This site would also help me fulfil another to-do item of having a website. Work on the blogsite would help me narrow down what I wanted out of my website! Again, irrespective of all logic and reasoning and gut feel etc. I started the blogsite and by doing so made blogging an integral part of my everyday life.

I am my Ego and over time I have found out that I will do almost anything to win a bet or to escape being ridiculed. In my younger days this ended up being self-defeating, as I would do nothing innovative or different. Nowadays I am much more secure and confident and am not ready to throw myself off a cliff. My Ego normally helps me nowadays to maintain what I have begun and try to stick with it till it is successful. I took the same approach with my blogsite. On the 3rd day itself I had broadcasted the presence of this site to anyone who came in contact with me. I even went to the limit of actually setting up my site on people’s computers so that they had to read it. His helped me immensely as now I had an audience and I had to keep writing or face the ignominy of failure and the ridicule of almost everyone I knew. Yes! It is official, your reading and hits are the fuel that drives me to provide constant and consistent content on this site. Hopefully this site will become better with time.

In addition to the obvious advantages that I gain by writing daily, viz. Formulation of a personal say and better-written communication, I was pleasantly surprised by certain side effects:
1. Many of my friends started blogs of their own. This was very useful as I had my gang with me as we stepped into the big blog world,
2. Made new friends in this new world, friends who shared the same passion with me with respect to blogging, and
3. Felt a part of an ever-growing community. This was not something that I had envisaged (though looking back it was pretty evident that it would be so) and hence was all the more sweeter.

As usual I fumble for words to close this blog. Just wanted to create a milestone for myself with this blog. A point where I could stand on the rooftops and confess, �Yes! I am a blogger�. So what are you folks waiting for? Take the plunge; you have nothing to fear but bad grammar!!!

Vroooooooooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!

The F1 circus starts all over again. Time for the passionate afternoons spent in front of the telly taking in the meow-meow races (If you concentrate while watching F1 you will realise that due to the Doppler effect one hears the sound of the cars as meeeeeeAAAAOoooooooon, sounds like a loud meow, doesn't it).

Anyway to kick off this joyous occasion I thought I would put up a poll for gauging who you think will be winning the Australian Grand Prix. So folks please feel free to vote in he poll set-up in the side panel. The poll is just below the archives section. It will be good practice for the coming elections:D

I am of course a Schumi fan and a fan of the scarlet car! What about you? But the new BMW does look kewl:D

cryptic crosswords anyone?

For people who love cryptic crosswords here is the free site you always wanted to go to: Free Crosswords Online!

Technical days are the best!!!

Today was a surprising day. Most of the time I try to keep my work away from this blog however this time it is something deeper than just work. We needed to work on this difficult piece of code and with pressures of deadlines ever present I put my hat into the ring and tried to help with my bit. In the process I touched a throbbing, wriggling, squirming, kickass code after a long long time. For almost a year I have been caught at the higher level(strictly in a management context) of things. This was the first time after eons that I had a day where I did not work on MSWord, MSProject or MSExcel and instead was knee-deep in code alongwith my experts. To say that the day was fun is an understatement. It was exhilirating. The sheer pleasure of reverse-engineering and adding comments which say " written by BK" was unbeatable. Added to all this pleasure was the fact that there were no client calls to diturb me. So for one day after a year I was happy, truly happy again. The withdrawal (from coding) is going to be that much more painful again:(.

Anyways enuff about me... lets see what our friends at Severely Confused Orangutans are doing by checking out these three articles : IBM ordered to provide SCO with code, documents - Computerworld & Document shows SCO prepped lawsuit against BofA - News - ZDNet & SCO Collides With Cars And Drivers (TechNews.com).