Walk Alone

I couldn’t resist.

You’re Cry, the Beloved Country!
by Alan Paton

Life is exceedingly difficult right now, especially when you put more miles between yourself and your hometown. But with all sorts of personal and profound convictions, you are able to keep a level head and still try to help folks, no matter how much they harm you. You walk through a land of natural beauty and daily horror. In the end, far too much is a matter of black and white.

Go take The Book Quiz. Details on Cry, the Beloved Country from Wikipedia.

No, not that sort of settling down. I’m talking about blogging. As more of my friends come online (Akshat’s the one to get a blog), I look at their blogs. I take them apart and try to find out what the thing is that makes a blog a good blog.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that my thoughts were not at all random. The categories, themselves, weakened the notion of me recording any thoughts randomly. Blame Blogger - it simplifies blogging to the extent that you don’t have to think coherently before you blog. WP makes me think; if only to decide where to slot the post. And I’ve found I prefer thinking before blogging.

Coming back to the issue, Random Thoughts has been discarded as not being a relevant title to my blog. The random part has been moved to a category name, which seems more befitting.

Previously, a week long hiatus (I’ll talk about it later) would have driven me off blogging for a month. Curiously, its not happened this time around. Maybe I’m doing things differently this time; don’t know which or how.

I’ve moved my site (again - I’m worse than a migratory bird) from bizhat to freelinuxhost. While it wiped out the gains of validating the pages (the ads mess up the page, damn sloppy ad-coders), the move has consolidated all my activities under one URL - rvbhute.freelinuxhost.com. Might help me later, if I decide to move the whole show again . sitecopy proved real useful in the move. The tiny application showed a lot of muscle.

I had included the WP folder (the /wordpress that you see in the URL) within sitecopy’s purview - this ensured that I was able to sync changes to WP files as easily as for the rest of the site. To complete the move, I was required to upload the files afresh to the server. This had me worried. Uploading WP using Filezilla had proved to be royal pain in the rear. 2.9 MB worth, no less. It was with a lot of misgivings that I fired up sitecopy.

No pain. It went about creating directories first and uploading files one by one patiently. Even the time required… was approximately half (or even less) of what Filezilla took. Absolutely superb. This was one part of sitecopy I hadn’t seen yet. Go figure.

I received an email from a friend.

I’m updating my address book. Please take a moment to update me with your latest contact info. Your information is stored in my personal address book and will not be shared with anyone else.

Powered by Plaxo (No, I’m not going to link to it); a service that aims to help you sync your contact books (read Outlook). Plus, it tracks and updates changes in contact details. Details here - [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

While the friend used a Netscape email ID which, frankly, I’ve not seen used much in correspondence with me, the email ID fed in to Plaxo’s servers on my behalf, is my main Yahoo! ID. One or more of the above links will tell you that Plaxo is tracking it by now.

I got an invite to Orkut - ignored. I got invites to Flickr and hi5 - ignored. Well, its not Flickr’s fault that I don’t have pics to share, but hi5 had it coming anyways.

Here’s the point - if you want to stay in touch with me, let me know through an email you have written, not generated by some script. I would be more than happy to take the time and effort to keep you updated about my contact details. Please spare my email IDs from such services. I don’t have 15-20 email IDs in reserve.

Thank you.