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.
Category Archives: Blogging
Looking Forward, Looking Back
I’ve blogging for a while now. This particular site and setup doesn’t suggest that I’ve been blogging since 2005. Of course nowadays, I blog more often than I did then. But the fact remains. I noticed this because when I imported my old Blogger blog to WordPress, I did a messy job of importing my posts. Most of the tags and categories were messed up. So every so often I go into my mass of uncategorized posts, tagging, spellchecking and updating as I go along.
Looking back, I blogged about my life in the context of a university student. My struggles and triumphs as I dealt with university, computing, stress, writing, love and growing up. Some things changed since those times, some remained the same. I still enjoy blogging for all the same reasons as before. Back then I would post when inspired. Today I have to inspire and compell myself to keep posting daily entries, that are interesting, compelling, clear and worth reading. Still it has been a worthwhile journey, one that I plan to continue well into the foreseeable future.
Looking forward, I am trying to bring my blogging into the next level. Aestetically, I have set up the theme for the site in a manner that I like. To top of the site, I created and added a favicon yesterday. Also I continue with my re-organization of old posts. I have some 110 post to clean up. So about 65% of the posts are done. Just a few more to go.
Things That Work, Things That Don’t
As usual I like to experiment on various hacks to improve myself and enrich my life. Actually recently I have been actively trying to distract my mind from other issues. Along the way I like to record what worked and what didn’t.
Blogging on a touchscreen cellphone works as a compromise of convenience. Writing on a physical keyboard works better. I don’t end up pressing wrong letters and rewriting words. But carrying an IT strains my pocket more. And carrying a phone is far more useful. Besides the IT is still in an unusable state at the moment. Hmm… Another call looks like in order.
Microblogging works less well. It acts more like a distraction, than a useful form of communication such as an instant messenger or social network site. Besides just like Marika I prefer to blog in the long format.
Ok… I’m drawing a blank on what to write next. Oh right, keeping todos on my site works better than on the builtin PIM on the 5800. TaskFreak works really well. All I need is a syncing client for the todo list on my cell. Maybe I should write one as my first Qt project. Hmm…
Additionally, I am striving to incorporate regular exercise into my life. It helps to clear my mind and to keep me fit. In the winter, I used to play indoor volleyball. Nowadays I’ve switched over to taekwondo and soon, soccer. Exercise really does work, so long as it is packaged in the fun form of a sport.
Image Tinkering
I planned to do some writing this weekend. However that fell through. Instead I looked my blog and my profiles on various sites. I noticed that I projected a different image then I wanted to. I wanted to look like a young working professional who enjoys his work, loves to work on his various hobbies and still be rather fun. And I wanted to look like someone of my age. I mean I like the fact that I look younger than I really am. But some of my profiles don’t carry the same look and feel I wanted. So I started tinkering my image, both online and offline.
One of the first things that will change is the blog’s appearance. I thought of a title that would capture the sense of what I want to project. In the past I called my blog on Blogger: Mlaren Dreams (a mlaren being a fictional hovercraft racing vehicle, inspired by FZero) and The Open Source Gamer. Once I moved to a self-hosted WordPress installation, the name changed to Transmissions from High-Earth Orbit (a nod to my philosophy of looking at life from the perspective of someone in orbit above the Earth). Then about the time I met Caroline and S., I renamed it to The Art of Being Dorian. That last name made the blog more personal but it still felt too self-centred for my liking. Yesterday I kicked around a number of different ideas for names. Today I changed the name of my blog.
So I present to you the new title: A Hacker’s Journal in the Cloud: Dorian Journals His Attempts at Hacking, Writing, Gaming and Living. The name aludes to my hacking of computers and reality. Hacking as in exploring and playfully using knowledge to my benefit. The cloud beind the Internet cloud where this blog resides. The rest of the title is self-explanatory. And yes the title nods to the 19th century style of short titles and long elaborate subtitles.
My next goal is foist a new theme for the blog. I wouldn’t mind creating a theme myself. But if someone already made something I like I’ll use that instead.
I Can See You
I’m playing around with Google Analytics. So I added a bit of tracking scripting arcane magic to this blog. Now lets see who visits and how… I’m only doing this because I’m not getting many comments people. 
I know it is essentially spying on you. But I’m curious. And curiosity killed the cat. This one is used to belong to Schrödinger and is thoroughly dead. Or is it?
Now with 100% More Subscription Goodness
Thats right, following my blog just got easier. Check out the brand new Subscribe to this Blog! page. And also note that you receive e-mail notifications about new posts. To top things off, you can now register yourself as a subscriber on the blog. Nifty, eh?
A New Voice on the Blogosphere
One of my friends from my professional writing class, Marika took up blogging. Yay! It is nice to see another familiar face on the blogosphere. Anyways, check out her blog. I have always found her writing style as fun, thoughts provoking and aesthetically pleasing And yes, her philosophical posts beat out mine in the cohesive, interesting and well-thought out sections. Also her audience responds in her comment section more often than mine does. *nudge* *nudge*
Marika’s It’s On My Desk blog can be found at: http://itsonmydesk.blogspot.com/.
A Change of Pace and Style
In the past I wrote almost exclusively about technology and gaming. The occasional happy accident in time management and organization popped up. In the past few weeks, I decided that such a scope of articles is limiting.
There is only so much one can write on such subjects, before one feels tempted to use other people’s ideas as one’s own. Also one feels tempted to speak on subjects that can get one in a lot of trouble. I’ve resisted such temptations. However I realized that I could not both resist these temptations and blog on a regular basis. At least not without expanding the scope of articles.
So nowadays, I plan on blogging all things that interest me. I’ll avoid the political, the personal and the confidential for all the obvious reasons. Everything else is fair game. This means some of my more technical readers will see a larger span between articles on computing. I apologize for that. But my life does not revolve around technology alone. Everyone else, please enjoy my inane commentaries, crazy thoughts and more artistic stories. 
Still Regular But Not Always Public
As I blogged about before the control of information has become the difficult topic in the 21st century. Once information becomes public it becomes next to impossible to restrict its flow. Restrictions and privacy used to be something implicit and natural. In today’s networked world it must be a life policy. One of the things I decided that this blog will be excellent for is to document my thoughts. Up till now, I have documented mostly only knowledge I wanted to make public. Unfortunately, I suppressed my own private writings or made them uncomfortable to access to even myself. Only problem is that personal confidential information bubbled out or was hinted at, and most likely to people that I probably shouldn’t of told. Now I trust these people enough to not air my private discussions with them. But I can never be sure how far I can put out my trust.
WordPress has this fantastic option to keep certain posts private. And I plan to exploit this to document more sensitive thoughts. I am aware that any hosted app is still vulnerable, so material of an extremely confidential nature will not go up. But then again, I don’t ever write such material on anything other than the surface of my neurons. So henceforth I still plan on blogging regularly. Just not all the posts will be for public consumption. You’ve been forewarned.
Blogging Update
As you may have noticed, I am back to blogging on a regular schedule. In fact this past week, I got a full five workdays all covered. And was no easy task. Now I’ll be the first to admit that not all of my blogs are actually written on a daily basis. Rather I am liking WordPress’ option of scheduling blogs. So now I get to make a buffer of the blogs I’d to publish, and I can keep up with regular blogging even if I am not. That said, if some interesting timely news breaks, I try to make sure I get it out right away.
Still even with the options of scheduling blogs, the amount of writing takes its toll. Currently I am on hiatus from my novel. But that is simply because my life is always busy in general. I hope to keep this regularity up. And I plan also on more regular updates to my writing and my other projects.
Also I’ve played around with the theme and static content of this blog. I think I like the current setup and I’ll keep it around for a while.