Well, actually, I have several, but you’ve heard them all before. Suffice it to say that I haven’t been blogging lately, and I have resolved (and already failed, smarty-pants—ed.) to do it more this year. But better late than never, right?
First things first: happy new year! I’m only 7 days late on this, but better late yada yada.
Second, speaking of the new year, here are my new year’s resolutions. I guess the good thing about being late on this is that you get to hear how I’ve been doing on them so far. OK, OK, I can tell you that the prognosis on my resolutions so far is going to be uniformly “not so good,” but a girl can hope, right?
- Get out of the house more. – Not so good on this one, but! Better than last year, and I’ll take that.
- Watch more Netflix. – Doing well on this one so far. I’m down to the one-at-a-time plan, since my roommates have it too, but my second movie of the year shipped today.
- Enjoy more of the city, now that I actually live in it. – There are some subsections to this one, enumerating the places I definitely want to go, but I’ll spare you. This one is, again, not so good, but I’m optimistic.
- Last but not least—wait for it—blog more. – You know know how well I’ve been doing on this one.
What are your resolutions?
—and already got birthday wishes, but I figure more can’t hurt—but today is this blog’s 2nd birthday. Whoo!
Google has announced an overhaul of Blogger, with new features including:
- Dynamic pages – this means that Blogger no longer renders static HTML pages, and will mean, among other things, that changing templates will become a lot easier.
- Post categories
- Separate feeds for comments
Take the tour of the new features. This overhaul addresses many of my big problems with the service; if only they had done this a year ago! Well, I’d likely have migrated to hosting my own blog, anyway—the increased flexibility you get by hosting yourself is too important to me to do otherwise—though I might have stayed with the service a bit longer. The service is in invitation-only beta right now, but hopefully it’ll be rolled out to the public soon. (Via Slashdot)
a list of the 15 websites that changed the world. From the part on Blogger:
‘The funny thing was I actually hesitated before working on Blogger because I didn’t see the commercial applications,’ says [Pyra Labs founder Evan] Williams. ‘We had started a company and we needed to make money. We didn’t see how this little hobbyist activity was going to make anyone money.’
The little hobbyist activity was blogging, the art of keeping a weblog – of diarising, theorising, satirising, fictionalising your life and observations online. It had already taken off among the tech fraternity in the Nineties, but it required building and maintaining your own website; the luddites were excluded. Williams created a tool that made self-publishing online as user-friendly as word-processing. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this innovation. It didn’t just create a new form of creative expression, it turned the media upside down.
Content was once made by companies for passive consumption by people. After Blogger, people were the content. They wrote about and read about their friends, their opinions, their cats. (There was a lot about cats in the early blogs.) None had a huge audience but collectively they were massive. ‘Now you see TV networks saying: “We’ve gotta get on the web because that’s where the audience is,”‘ says Williams.
(Via Slashdot)
Oh, this is rich. I was this close to classifying this post under “Humor”, but it’s just too tragic to be funny:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has joined a burgeoning international community – by starting his own weblog.
The launch of www.ahmadinejad.ir was reported on state TV, which urged users to send in messages to the president.
Mr Ahmadinejad’s first posting, entitled autobiography, tells of his childhood, Iran’s Islamic revolution, and the country’s war with Iraq.
The blog includes a poll asking if users think the US and Israel are trying to trigger a new world war.
Yes. You read that right. Iran’s president, the head censor himself, has started his own blog. Wow. Just…wow. This guy has a truly magnificent disregard for irony or some seriously large balls. (Via Slashdot)
† Yes, this is another pop culture reference, for the at least two confused people I know are out there.
a trailblazer, but among my family and friends, and in the case of blogs, I am one. While I’m not precisely an early adopter of the technology, my blog is turning 2 at the end of August, and as everyone does on birthdays and anniversaries, I’ve been having a little mental retrospective about blogs and blogging and my experiences therewith (yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not a word). And because this is, after all, a blog, here’s some rambling on the subject.
At first, I started because I found myself sending more and more links to neat articles or websites I found while surfing to my friends, and I noticed that the volume was very shortly going to pass the annoyance threshold (some might argue that the threshold was long past, but we’ll ignore them for the moment). So, having recently started reading some blogs, and often having a lot to say but no one to say it to (say, at 3 AM), I thought I’d start a blog.
The rest is more or less history, but I’ve learned a few things along the way:
- The blog has caused me to become a lot more articulate than I was; reading myself in print usually caused me, after I stopped laughing, to start thinking about how I said what I said a lot more, and to more intelligently formulate my opinions before I went spouting them to all and sundry.
- The whole blog-catharsis thing is severely underrated. I feel so much better after ranting here that even I’m surprised. And sometimes, getting it in print makes it look so ridiculous that I wonder why I was even angry in the first place. Either way, it’s been beneficial to my mental health, which is always a good thing.
- This kind of goes along with my first point, but I think that blogging has made me smarter. I have pretty strong opinions on, well, just about everything, and writing about them on as wide a forum as the internet has really made me think more critically about what I’m saying and why I’m saying it. Also, I started thinking more about how people could argue with me on various topics I blog about, which in turn makes me hone my reasoning and, usually, discard frivolous or unsubstantiated ideas in favor of more logical ones. It’s made me think.
But I digress. To get back to the original topic—trailblazing—I have, I like to flatter myself, instigated the gradual build-up of a nice little group of friends and family who also blog, who are interested in reading and commenting on others’ blogs, and whom I am getting to know better not just by reading the minutiae of their daily lives, but how they choose to communicate them to the world. I love it!
All of them appear in my blogroll in the sidebar, but here are the sites of my little online family:
- Prachee – my sister.
- Matt – roommate and good friend.
- Jieun – roommate and good friend.
- Lori – good friend who is so busy I never get to talk to her, who is almost as opinionated as me, and who I am glad is finally blogging.
- Ila – my crazy friend whom it seems I talked to five minutes ago even though it’s been months or even years. As of this writing, hours, but still, you get the picture.
- Dev – Ila’s brother, my friend, and faithful and regular blog commenter (which rocks!).
OK, you caught me. I didn’t really instigate any of these people to start their blogs, but I’m going to take credit for it anyway.
but the reason (and I always have a good one) that I haven’t been online—reading or writing—at all of late is because I am in the midst of some voluntary life upheaval. The biggest factor in the upheaval is that I’m leaving my current job to start work at a small software consultancy owned by some friends of mine. As a result, I’ve been busy making arrangements for the change, looking for a new place to live, and in general taking care of all the details that need attention at times like these. My free time, what there is of it, tends to be spent sleeping. 
So, while I know that all these promises to be back soon and blogging are getting to sound like a broken record, I really mean that I will be back soon and blogging, once the furor settles down a little bit, which it ought to after the end of this week, which is the last at my soon-to-be-former job.
I miss blogging. I miss writing, the shaping of words to follow my whim, the attempts to amuse, complain, wax poetic. So as soon as I get a spare minute, I will be back.
I hope to start soon on my story rewrite (I know, it’s been months) and post that as well; I’ve got some great ideas.
As you may have concluded from my being completely incommunicado (or inburrito, as my friend Eric likes to call it) for a little over two weeks now, I have been swamped, simply swamped, with things not-internet of late: my real work, some freelance web development, and the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival.
I am near the end of my swamped-ness, and am starting to get some more free time to surf, to think, to waste. So you will start, very soon I hope, seeing a bit more of me here, which I know you are all very happy about.
Teasers on what’s to come: SFIAAFF rants and raves, piñatas, writing. Hasta la vista. Baby.
Blogging has been light for the past few days and will continue to be so for at least a week following this post; I’ve got a lot going on both at and outside of work, and websurfing time has been cut down drastically in recent days. I’ll see you when I see you.