The Art of Being Dorian

Life, nature or  the universe has a perverse sense of humour.  The next day after I posted my last blog post, optimistic of the future and looking forward to approaching life in a slower pace… well everything happens at once.  And it seems like someone decided to fall asleep on the ‘drama’ button in my life.  So now things are exciting, moving quickly and require immediate and decisive action.  I am not amused, by this turn of events.

Since this seems like a prevailing theme and trend recently, I’ve had to make decisions to simplify my life.  I have to minimize the distractions and maximize the impact my action have on my surroundings.  If that does not happen, I will simply get swept away and get carried off by the next big wave.

Today I realized I need to take my tasks and projects head on.  That means do the most relevant, NOW.  It also means putting up a single list of to-dos and sticking to them.  And I have to simplify life and remove distractions.  One such distraction is maintaining my blog.  I love blog, I love writing and publish my thoughts.  But I do not like having to administer it.  Hence I migrated to WordPress a long time ago.

And also why I am turning off comments on my articles.  I am sorry to my readers, but the majority of you don’t comment on my blogs.  I don’t mind that.  Most of my articles and journals are not something one can or need to comment on.  And the majority of comments that get queued up are spam.  Even with Akismet running in the background, I get too much crap.  These days I have precious little time to blog or do anything outside of the urgent.  And I definitely do not have time to read 200+ comments all trying to commit various forms of link spam.  I want to use my precious time for blogging and updating my sites.  So no more open comments on my blog.  Some articles I will open for comments, but most will not.  Sorry but it is just something I need to do.

Any writer who keeps on promising to write more regularily but doesn’t is a scoundrel and a rascal. I leave it as an exercise to the reader about what that makes me.

So I tried microblogging, like all the cool Web 2.0 kids do. Unfortunately for me I can’t blog about many things for a multitude: legal, personal, client confidentiality. What gets left are random bits and the boring and mundane. Even the little experiment of Day X of 2010, was a fun way of writing good soundbites but honestly I ran out of creative and witty quotes. I prefer long form writing. And only at random time when my muse whispers something interesting in my ear. I know very artsy of me.

Short story long: I’m back to just plain old blogging, on no day in particular and not particularly long. Enjoy.

I’m preparing for what I hope will be a new phase in my life.  And one of the things I need for this change is a revised online presence.  I’ve experimented with various ideas and concepts.  And I want to try and implement them in my life.

One of the first to feel the changes, will be my blogging.  I deleted my old Blogspot blog.  All the content exists on this website anyways.   Also I’m planning to make this blog more into a portfolio, than just a blog straight up.  The blog obviously will be accessible, just not on the front page.  Also I’m thinking of doing some ExtJS magic and build a new AJAXy theme.  So if the site breaks, you know what I’ve been up to.

On another note, I’m getting back to developing justCheckers into reality.  And on the side playing around with the newly revived Pyzzle game engine.

So do you like it?  The theme on the website that is.  I decided to go with a variant of light greys, royal blue-purple and amber highlights.  It does have a spartan, minimalistic feel but I like it.  I considered rebuilding the theme as an ExtJS or jQuery UI powered on.  But honestly, this works and IMHO looks pretty good.  For a theme that doesn’t use any images.  I plan on tinkering with this theme as time goes on, but I think I like this theme as a base.  As promised, I will go through this theme, clean things up and release it out in the open once I’m done.

Whats next on my list?  Well a good chunk of work, and some partying this weekend to celebrate the coming of the end of the year. 

The future is white?

Bob, the future has been white since the 60′s.

- Autotainment, Big Ideas

The future has been white for a long time, thanks to the likes of Stanley Kubrick and the folks at Apple.  Thats why the theme I’m crafting for this website, is called “Clean Future”.  I took the “Open Sourcerer” theme by Alan Lord, and modifying it until it suits my tastes.  I’m still debating whether it will look like a glass UI or hand-drawn doodles.  Maybe I’ll go all out and create a full AJAX powered UI.  We’ll see.  I’m sure it will remain white and light grey.  And I’ll take it as far as I feel it makes sense to do so.  So if anyone has any suggestions feel free to leave them in the comments below.  I’ll make the modified theme available once I finish working on it.

I apologize again for the silence earlier this week.  I meant to post a few posts earlier on, but I did not get around to it.

Also you may have noticed that I’m updating this blog.  In fact in general I am updating and cleaning up my “Web” presence in a big way.  Hence I’m working on refreshing the look and feel of this blog.  I’m plan on modifying the current theme into something I built myself.  And I’ll building out my portfolio, something I should of done ages ago.  Hence I’ll try to keep updating this blog frequently, but I might be a bit too busy for daily updates.  Also the e-mail subscriptions ARE going way, please switch to using RSS feeds.

I’ve found myself recently writing considerable amounts in my diary.  I’ve had many a thought, that I felt compelled to write down.  But such thoughts were fairly private in nature, so I will discuss or hint about them here.  One of thought that I would like to share, is my temporary withdrawl from daily blogging.  I’m trying to concentrate on writing my novel, A Collection of Shards.  And I’m concentrating on reviving the comatose justCheckers project.  Post daily updates to my blog just add more overhead to my day.  And I’ve so precious little time and so many tasks to complete…  So I’m going to take a break, and update this blog when I feel like it.

I think I just hit a new milestone in my organizational efforts.  I just finished tagging and categorizing the last of my blog posts.  A long effort but finally done.  I almost want to take a moment to step back and admire my handiwork.  But unfortunately, today I’ll be heading off to party hosted by the Huddarts.  So I don’t have time to stop and celebrate, at least not until tonight.

In addition I finished balancing my accounts and ledgers this morning.  This could not of been possible, if I had not yesterday filed away most of my papers.  The expanding file idea seems like a stroke of genius now.  I can easily find everything, takes up less space and I feel organized.  I managed to compress space and create time.  And this all thanks to a bit of time, money and effort.  My next goal will involve clearing out the junk and clutter I’ve collected over the years.  With some effort, time and perhaps a bit of money I’ll finally be able to live neatly in the small room that I own.

Still this week my schedule suffered from my efforts.  I have walked around sleep deprived.  I put off tasks that need to finish.  But at least I can safely say my long term goals and projects seem closer to realization.

OK, moment of reflection over.  I need to plan for tonight.  And I need to acquire breakfast.  Also I need to get to those defered tasks.  Maybe I can find time to move my projects forward too.

I am continually amazed by the ease of working with WordPress.  Not only do the themes and plugins just work, so does everything else.  I upgraded my WordPress install to the latest and greatest 2.8 .  Simple, clean and issue-less upgrade.  This is how technology should work.  Get out of the way and perform the tasks the user needs to do.  And perform the tasks quickly, efficiently and perfectly everytime all the time.

In addition to that, I can proudly say that less than 20% of the older blog entries remain “Uncategorized”.  I plan on tagging, categorizing and editing the remaining entries.  With any luck, I have this blog configured perfectly before my upcoming birthday.  Hurrah!

I’ll be taking a brief hiatus again from daily updates to this blog.  I need to concentrate more of my time on writing my novel.