Tag Archives: blog

A New Voice on the Blogosphere

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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/.

Writing on a Train

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I neglected to post a blog entry today in the morning.  I felt too tired and uninspired to write anything of substance.  Also I could not relax until I knew I had left Toronto.

Now it is evening.  And I’m on a train, again going the farthest east on land I’ve been in Canada.  I’m going to Montreal again.  Slowly the English Breakfast tea is starting to kick in.  The air feels heavy and tired.  And I can write in peace.

It is amazing how quiet the train is.  Most of  the time I only hear the clatter of metal wheels on metal rail.  The swaying of the car is both comforting and awakening.  In Europe the trains don’t sway as much.  I guess the sway is one of the beauties of the Canadian track.  Everyone else used concrete ties and high-tech rails.  Not us Canadians, good old turn of the century-the 19th century that age of steam, iron and men driving nails with sledgehammers-wooden ties with metal piles.  But this doesn’t bother train, as I hurtle towards my destination.

Now the inspiration comes, slowly.  I will begin on my craft now.  So will be born my book, on board a Canadian VIA train bound for Montreal.

Still Regular But Not Always Public

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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

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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.

Moving House and Home…

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Please excuse the past few days of silence. But I’ll moving this blog/journal/collection of incohesive rants yet again.

The new home will be at my new brand new domain: https://dorianpula.ca/

Now at the moment of posting this message, the domain is not up.  CIRA, you fail again.  So for the next few days I’ll be working on putting up a new blog on that site, and copying over my content.  I’ll keep this blog up for posterity though.  However I will post new entries on the new site.  Also I might be silent for a few days while I transition over.

Facebook No More!

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UPDATE: Ok, so I lied. Getting off Facebook is much harder when you do have people you want to stay in touch with. I’m just going to make sure that all the info on Facebook relate only to the friendship side of things, and not to business or other parts of my life. Hence the blog feed no longer autoupdates on Facebook. But the same applies to LinkedIn.

Today I finally caught me myself off from Facebook. Not because I am anti-social. No, not at all. It is just that Facebook doesn’t work for me. Yes, it notified me of a few events. And I could follow what my friends do. But honestly… I’m not exactly interested in every pokey little detail about my friends either. I prefer to catch up on e-mail. Or read people’s blogs. And hence RSS and e-mail clients prove to work better for me.

Anyways, I’m too busy for Facebook. I stored too much information on it. Mea culpa. And I linked it to a blog. Mea culpa again. And Facebook won’t help getting you a date. I know, I tried.

Facebook is only part of the picture here. I am trying to exorcise the nitty-gritty, time wasting aspects of my life. I have far too much going on. And I’d prefer to spending 30 minutes on writing my novel or my games then on Facebook… …wondering why I’m bombarded by ads supposedly helping me out of my single life. Gimme a break. The social networking I need is on LinkedIn anyways.

Silent Running

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Please excuse the long silence. Recently I’ve had to concentrate on my offline life for the most part. Hence the lack of blog posts.

I’m still writing and plan on publishing one of my older “books”. The science fiction novel is inching along. More details about the potential publishing, once I find out more details.

On the gaming front, I working on justCheckers again. Check out the new home of the project: justcheckers.org. I still need to setup a good deal of stuff for the site. I am still thinking how the site should look and feel. At the moment I need to transition the current wiki on Sourceforge to the hosted site. Without revealing too much, I plan to use justCheckers as a model for a larger project. Watch this space for details in the future.

For the time being, I’ll be in silent running mode. Expect long delays in my blogging. The reasons for all this foreshadowing will become evident in the coming weeks.

Incremental Progress

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I owe a short update on what I’ve been up to:

The majority of my life still revolves around work. And also the necessary preparation and commuting to work. Still I manage to have some free time. Most of that time is on catching up with tasks and work I planned to do months ago.

I put off writing for a bit. Not stuck, but rather I find it easier to listen to podcasts and read e-books than actually write. If I’m not too stressed out, I’ll try to get some headway on Chapter 4.

Developing justCheckers a little bit at a time. I’m kind of ashamed to say that JSP programming without any particularly fancy framework is harder than it seems. The point of that exercise, is to use the least complex technology to get job done. It also means less dependencies and easier to read code. Still justCheckers will take some time to get going again. And SourceForge’s migration to a new datacentre isn’t making my life easier.

I’ve also got some other projects I’m working on. I’m going keep those under wraps for now. When I have something to show off, I’ll blog about it.

A Call to Action and Progress in Writing

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I’m disappointed folks. Where are all my comments on my excerpt? Did you even read it?!? Bah!!!

Well so far, one my coworkers mentioned the wordiness of the passage. I know. I’m guilty of wanting to jam pack my sentences. This makes them almost unreadable. I know. I know. I should use terse short brief simple sentences. But where’s the playfulness?

A few lucky privileged people can read the entire work so far on Google Docs. In fact I’ll probably let a maximum of five people to read my current work. I’d like to know your initial impressions.

I’ll admit it. Even that one short passage needs work. Ten rewrites later, it still needs work. But I’m holding off with major editing. I’m write a rough copy of the novel. Then I’ll edit the hell out of it.

Writing chapter 4 right now. Wish me luck.