Live The Night

25Jul11

Image by hubbleflow via Flickr

Have you ever thought what it is to ‘live’ the night? To be as functional as you’d rather be in the day? Do all those day chores in the night instead? When the night becomes the primary half of your daily life and the day, the time of rest. When you are expected to be fully productive and not while away the hours online lamenting about how horrible the day was? The worst thing about my mind is when it does seek a routine, it gets painfully bored too soon…and the routines, it finds too soon. Of course one cannot question the rotation of the earth as it sees the sun on different halves of it and hence the day and night. It sets the base of all routines. So what came over me?

Its very obvious that I stay awake often as late as the last of the sun rays have come out. What I do miss out from these hours is that I find myself to be doing nothing that one would be capable of in the day time. In short, to live the hours of darkness. To live the hours of waking. Not to have peace and quiet of the sleeping world to write blog posts nor to go out to get entertained or whatever, but to have my full attention demanded to all the daily chores and work/job. I wouldn’t want to be including the people working on a desk job at this hour who just like us nocturnals (who stay online and) pass the hours in the confines of closed boundaries/rooms. Being in a town, that calls it too early a night and shuts down, these kind of ideas do seem more imaginative and far fetched than life in the cities.

Regardless of how much work gets done in the day, the night remains the time to do more of what we would personally like, for our personal satisfaction. Where you are the boss, the employee and the client. Even if you consider the graveyard shift office goers, night for them would be the day time and thus the idea would translate. I guess I talk much like a person with serious problems with sleeping and waking at right times of the day.

Things I often feel like doing in the deserted night are to drive overnight. I have been on overnight journeys on buses. I wished to watch a movie in a hall, which I happened to have done recently when I had been in Mumbai. I’d wish to have like a proper meal like say lunch, not raiding a fridge or whatever, but actually preparing and cooking. Besides probably a lot of pseudo indoor stuff, like playing metal music on my home theater box at insanely loud volume. Meeting up with random people. Sharing life stories. The list goes on and on and keeps getting unrealistic.

I don’t want to disrespect the sun nor do I want to interfere in the routine of the scary nocturnal animals. Its just a thought and someday it will probably be realised.

Related articles

• Evolution of a Night Creature (missprint2.wordpress.com)
• Night Shift Workers in a Whole New Light (psychologytoday.com)

Filed under: rant   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: illogical, Night sky, Philosophy

i-rix 2011 Blogging Competition: Was it judged right?

10Mar11

I-rix 2011, the inter-collegiate tech fest, hosted by SPCC (Chowgule’s College) for first time was, as far as I see it, a fantastic first attempt in, what I know of as, a relatively short time. Thanks to @geekblues (blog) I got a spontaneous offer to judge the blog competition. I accepted it after much nakhrebaazi and geekblues has been real awesome to take care of all the details. Albeit regardless of my commitment to the task, being a blog fan, I did help with discussing and formulating the judging criteria. Perfect use case of Google Docs.

The blog setup (powered by WordPress 3, which supports multi-author blogs) was done by @vailancio, the apple fanboi who builds sites in matter of hours. These sites only run on the awesomest of browsers. Truth be told he shoves Android down his iPhone and writes hidden “I Hate You IE6 & Flash” messages in the websites he cares for. He helped speed up the presence of i-rix on the web a hell lot. WordPress is an ideal choice as its not niche n expensive product making it far more accessible to students (Education system pay heed). Each team leader was to create the primary account and the blog to go with it. The leader would then add the other team members.

As far as my work was concerned, I was checking the blogs (roughly 5, of which 2 were almost never updated) through most of day 1 and then day 2. The resulting blogs at end of day 2 were collectively hopeless, and read more like a stupid FB feed. What I intend to present here is my PoV on whereall things may have gone wrong since Infofest 2007 the first time I judged blogs on similar criteria.

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Tags: blog, feedback, reflection, wordpress

New Year Resolutions: Are you making any?

03Jan11

A new year has begun (as per the Christian calendar) and the overpriced HNY 2011 SMS’ have been exchanged. The other info that people seek from each other are their new year’s resolutions. Something that’s predictably a matter of much laughs and gags coz being serious about it is so being left out. Well, this year I choose to consider it slightly differently. New Year’s resolutions can be rewarding and beneficial to you if you take it up in the right spirit. What follows are a few ways of perceiving the daunting task of keeping your word to your self more manageable and exciting…ok motivational at least.

Time to Decide

Image via Wikipedia

You may be on-dot about sending out your new year wishes to all the world at exactly 00:00 of 1^st Jan as per your timezone, but there’s no hard and fast rule of coming up with resolutions at that very instant. In fact, as far as resolutions are concerned, only your commitment and time is required. You set the rules or you bend the rules. You decide how much progress makes you happy. When deciding what you would resolve to do in the span of one calendar year, take your time to list a bunch of ideas. Prioritize them. Shortlist them by reasoning and estimating how much time you could give each of those resolutions in a day, week, month, etc. These resolutions can’t be too time critical. You don’t choose clearing annual exams in April as New Year’s resolution. That’s something higher priority than your resolutions. The sooner you decide on your resolutions, the more long-term or complex they can be. As June gets over, you would think of smaller tasks or feats to achieve in the remaining time. No pressure on how soon or how big a resolution you are going to take up.

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Tags: New Year, New Year's resolution, Project management

Time Off Twitter

29Dec10

Image by terobin via Flickr

A blogger doesn’t stay put for long when it comes to writing about stuff on the internet, that he believes his imaginary friends (with verifiable IP addresses) read with great anticipation and followed by appreciation (Yes. no harm in dreaming). Twitter has been the damn quickest way to shoot off updates on anything under the sun and on my mind. So why the twitter break? Aaiye Jaante Hain.

Blogging had become quite irregular since I was done with regular college. I’d stuff to write but I was particular about length and consistency of style of content. So, let me explain why Twitter, which limits your posts to just 140 characters, became my main, high-density and primary channel of thought release. Twitter as a publishing tool on the social media platform had the following advantages:

1. Brevity : – For a blog that averages posts of above 600 words, a line of thought in 140 characters definitely looks like a waste of a potentially fully length blog article.Unless you use the P2 theme of wordpress for team microblogging. Exception to be considered. On the other hand, a post size restriction for a blogger means he can write out way too many twitter posts in a short while than a blog post.
2. Off-Topic is On Topic: It doesn’t matter what you post about, when you post it or from where you post it. Your own timeline defines your day, whether online or offline. It does not generically cover area(s) of interest that a blog usually is followed for. This is why you take time to choose topics you want to blog about. Yes, you can vary your topics, but they are related to you or your interests more closely.
3. Conversations: Many people would use Twitter as their feedreader alternative but for people seeking human interaction, tweet posts become threaded conversations. There is no separate ‘comments’ concept.
4. Time-Critical: Some info you catch up on or hope your followers catch up on, in time. Twitter has clients on almost every sort of platform. Official and/or unofficial. So do blogging platforms, but not tools that could alert readers on timely basis or help them get the gist of the article in under a minute. You wouldn’t write an article to inform that some event is about to begin in a few hours in your town or wherever you are heading to. You would write a tweet-length entry in your blog and hope people find your URL or happen by in time before the event is over. How would you increase your hopes? Yes, you tweet about it. Because people may not remember a 100 different URL’s but they remember twitter.com or atleast their tweeting app knows to get the needed info on time.

Filed under: rant   |  2 Comments
Tags: blog, introspect, Social Networking, twitter

Homoeopathy Exhibition: Still dunno why

11Dec10

Image via Wikipedia

So 6 yrs since I learnt of the Health exhibition in Shiroda’s Homœopathy college, I decided to get a first impression of the college and the exhibition. I’m thinking the all-around mood was damp. Or maybe my timing was worse (lunch break).

I’ve never been to a health exhibition of any kind of medicine, so I’ve no prior experience to compare with, However I’ve seen science exhibitions. Really good ones like Infocom (Kolkata, Jan ’10). I’d atleast hoped to see some practical projects. All I remember is good colorful thermocol caricatures with such a strong overdose of biological terms. Serves me right for speaking all tech-gibberish to people who just needed their computers to ‘work’ and for never attending bio classes since XIth. The presentation was amateurish sure, but I’m thinking the exhibition’d be a hit if other medical/homoeopathy college students alone were invited.

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Tags: exhibition, Health, Homeopathy