sudo reboot

Of late, I feel people have waned away from blogging thanks to more contemporary social networks some of whom insist on limiting you with 140 characters. While microblogging has been successful, I myself have been very erratic in using it as I have been with every other service. (Talk to me of ever being an early adopter and not being a constant user.) That has been the case with Twitter, Identi.ca, Google+, Buzz, Quora. The only social network that I frequent quite regularly is Facebook, perhaps because of the fact that I’ve resorted to being a consumer of news and not someone who can produce something interesting. While it pays off to learn about my friends’ lives, it certainly is a huge task to keep track of what every acquaintance is up to. The reason I’ve stuck so long with Facebook is that I took some efforts to trim down on whom I follow and whom I not, through the Lists feature and that has been working like a charm. So why did I stop using each of those services? That’ll diverge from the motive of this post and that’s for the future.

I’ve always had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind about my blog going derelict. I have made painstaking efforts in the past to keep it up and running when I switched boats from blogger to WordPress to a custom hosted blog and finally to tumblr. Ever since I stayed with tumblr, I never actually blogged very frequently and maybe that’s why I didn’t make an effort to move it to another blogging service. tumblr was serving me pretty well till recently when I began to realise that WordPress is going great guns in the space of blogging and has grown leaps and bounds. In fact all blogging platforms have grown a lot thanks to people embracing more open standards with HTML5 and the like.

So, if you are reading this post, you are beginning to wonder what this post is all about. Well, let me break your bubble. Nothing! Actually it maybe nothing for the reader, but it’s certainly a milestone in the realization of my self. It’s a reboot of my blog through WordPress, perhaps the last of my reboots before I crash into oblivion. I originally intended to blog because I wanted to know whether my rants and ramblings resonate with the Internet. But, then I thought of blogging only about something interesting. A cool algorithm or a piece of code that I wrote or perhaps a cool song that I heard or some phenomenon that I observed. I expected something to tickle my fantasies so that I can put all my laziness behind me and actually write a blog about it. But that never materialized. Not to mention the many entries that are still sleeping in my Drafts folder. That’s because the algorithm/code just sat in my directories, the song was just shared on Facebook to fetch a couple of likes, the phenomenon was occasionally retweeted so that the handful of followers that I have can have a peek if it indeed showed up on their feeds. And as I think about why these happened, I can only point back to lethargy. I don’t want to bring in the topic of priorities getting reshuffled. Though it might seem like a valid argument in favor, it begs the question of why blogging isn’t a priority.

Since last year, I’ve been maintaining what I call as my sysdump. It’s a series of log entries that I write everyday about what happened during that day. It’s a diary, only that it’s written through the day in one perennially open vim session. I’m someone who speaks quite often to myself, a trait I habituated because of being the only child to my parents. I had no siblings to play with and I loved (and still love) talking to myself about all sorts of random crap. These sysdumps were envisioned to be these ramblings preserved as bits in memory chips. Well that is what this reboot is about and that was indeed was my original intention – a filtered, uncluttered version of my sysdumps.

I’d like to close this entry with this beautiful line from House of Cards. Yes, I’ve started watching it and am repentant on why I didn’t start earlier. An amazing series and amazing acting by Kevin Spacey. He’s certainly one excellent actor and I’ve always loved him since American Beauty. Although I didn’t like the movie much and still don’t think it deserved an Academy Award, Kevin’s acting is brilliant! You should watch it if you haven’t. Anyway, here’s the quote.

Humility is their form of pride. It is their strength. It is their weakness and if you can humble yourself before them they will do anything you ask.

What an observation this is! How many times has humility been used to reverse the tide? Something that’s so frequently done and is seemingly genuine, yet the character of Frank Underwood has an excellent take on it. It reminds us of how this can be realized, not falling for it at the same time.

As I type this, the United States is moving to DST in 2014. That means the days will be longer and the Sun will be out for one more hour. And summer is just around the corner and I have quite a lot of activities lined up. I proclaim this to be the Summer of Myself.

> sudo reboot
Password: