Month: March 2002

I’ve been reading BBC’s Space Exploration Mission Timeline and i want to say a big thank you to all those that have contributed in someway to space exploration.

Just from the recorded events alone, we can see the pride man have when USA & USSR were having their space race. I’m glad that teething problem is over and we can be sure that we are living in an exciting generation.

Efficiency, as a general rule of thumb is good. Why carry out a task a certain way when you know that there is an easier way, a faster way, a more efficient way using fewer resources? Although we all know this and might readily agree to it, the majority of us don’t really practise it.

When walking, do we walk from point A to point B in as straight a line as possible or do we follow how the path meanders, allowing it to make us travel a little bit more everyday and taking up a little bit more of our time. When talking, do we add meaningless waffles and other unrelated issues before actually getting to the point? When listening, do we expect formalities and textbook like greetings before being willing to classify the speaker as polite and sensitive?

These issues although debatable, I think you can see where I am coming from. I think efficiency should be a way of life and not only mentioned during meetings or strategic-planning like discussions. Look at it this way, how can a business be more successful than the other? The more successful company is usually using relatively less resources and gaining a higher profit. So I believe in some weird way a person who does things more efficiently should be better as compared to a person who is less efficient.

God am I task oriented.

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.” ~ Philippians 4:8

Its amazing what we fill our minds with all the time.

I so wanna be at SXSW Interactive but i can’t. If you also wanna be there but you can’t, you could read about some of it at sxswblog.

Another happening event there would be Fray Cafe 2, listen about Jeffrey Zeldman’s (ALA) story
of his flute teacher and Heather Champ’s (mirrorproject) story of the best birthday present ever.

Hmm… after reading Zeldman’s “if the great movies had been websites“, it really started me thinking why the heck am I blogging? Casually I did toy with the question, but never really demanded an answer from myself.

In the beginning it was more like embracing content management technology and at that time, I did not know that there were scripts out there that did stuff like blogging. Did a simple PHP script to show the latest 10 records in a table in a mySQL database, then that problem of not being able to see previous entries crept up. Added a simple blog navigation that basically allowed the visitor to see the previous 10 entries and thats about how I went on for quite some time. During this time I was more fascinated about content management then actually recording down my mundane activities.

I actually found out I was blogging after one of my routine rounds on the net and apprently there was a whole community of people doing that as well. Then with the keyword “blog” I managed to find out about Blogger.com and Newspro. Blogger was a third party thingy, so I did not consider it, but Newspro just blew my mind, it had archiving stuff and the speed of the script just fascinated me. I used Newspro for quite a while then found out about Greymatter.

About this time, I encouraged Pearl to blog as well, but instead she went on to create her gallery of drawings and used Newspro as a way to post up pictures and to archive them. I then found out two of my close friends Desmond & Brenda is blogging as well. Cool… now my cloud (sixdegrees lingo) is getting bigger.

So everything before this was more like playing with scripts, then actually blogging, but along the way that changed and I started to treat my blog as a public diary which allowed friends to know whats going on in my life.

About mid 2001 Brenda told me to lookout for MovableType and when it came out, it smashed all blogging competition with style. MovableType did not have a “I’m better then you” kinda attitude, but more like a “this is but a response to the features the blogging community needs, an evolution of the blogging tool“. Not only did MovableType did well in its application structure, it had aesthetic appeal too.

Blogging became a hit, everyone talks about it and everyone does it, so the natural antithesis came about and big names started questioning about the content in blogs. I’m not saying that they are trying to be cool and dictate what should blogs contain, but that its an inquest into the natural death of content and to solve the subjectivity on the death of content in blogs.

So what is the synthesis? the question remains “what am I blogging for?” now I feel the question is a bit silly and ridiculous. Its like asking “what am I living for?”, “what am I thinking for?”, “what am I for?”, “why does this world exist?”, “how should I live my life?”, “what kind of content should there be in my life?”…

Is there really an answer?

*pause for dramatic effect*

Now… I’m still fascinated in content management and at the same time I also want to have a collection of my thoughts. hey… I think everyone is free to do what they want on their blogs, if it matters so much how others view your blog, then they are dictating how you should live your life. Well it’s your call and that’s what I like about it.