the tip of the iceberg

my first blog post had exactly two readers on the day I posted it, if you allow me to count myself in the list.

three and a half years later, I have absolutely no clue how many people read the (usually) mindless drivel I write.

yeah, I do have hit counters and analytics and the like (although I rarely ever look at them), but I don't know how many of you just scroll past my posts without reading them (I have a terribly short attention span myself, so I know exactly what makes people do that!). the only clue I get is when i see comments from people when I can't figure how they got here.

so this is what I want you to do:

leave a comment here telling me how you got to this post. not how you initially found my blog, but just this post. things like feed readers, email subscriptions, buzz, google reader, facebook, friendfeed, twitter, a web search, technorati or any other site that hosts links to my blog/posts (I've lost track of those), my comments on someone's blog post, my blog landing up in your browser favorites...you get the drift.

let's see how many unique sources I get. i don't have much to offer in exchange, so I guess a linkback will have to suffice for now. maybe a beer, if you manage to collect it ;)

go on, make my day!

i can haz one black coffee?

for the past couple of weeks or so, i've been playing this game: asking @oneblackcoffee her phone number in as many funny ways possible. fun stuff. as long as she doesn't give in and give me her number, of course.

cut to thursday night.

i was asleep, and my phone woke me up with some sound.

unfortunately, i was so fast asleep that i couldn't tell what the sound was. so i held the phone up and squinted at it and tried to make sense of what was on the screen. new messages, new emails, new DMs.

i don't remember which of them i selected in my sleep induced haze.

but i remember seeing her number. it started with +91989...

i was so sleepy that i let the phone slip from my hand and fall onto the bed.

except that it missed or slipped off the bed and fell on the ground instead.

i was too sleepy to pick it up, figured i'd hear the alarm from wherever it was anyway.

woke up on friday morning, and eagerly checked my phone.

no new tweets. only new messages and emails, all recieved in the morning.

no DMs.

and no phone number.

i checked all the places i could: twitter on my comp, gmail's archives (i get a mail for every DM). nothing.

turns out i dreamed about getting her number.

but the phone falling off the bed part was real.

the modest, humble geek

i recently installed connectBot on my phone, and was trying to figure out how to type funny unix-y key combinations. when i found this nice comment on the connectBot project wiki, on a page where people were discussing all the keyboard shortcuts:



now that's a total *burn*, in the nicest way possible!

happy

I've always taken for granted that the aim of my life is to be happy. baring minor and major occasional acts of stupidity, everything I did was with that motive, ulterior or not.

I studied to be happy, I work to be happy, I travel to be happy, I met interesting people cos out makes me happy, I try to make the people around me to be happy because I'm happy when surrounded by happy people.

I eat because it makes me happy, I drink because it makes me happy, I listen to music because it makes me happy.

I pray because it makes me happy.

but I haven't thought about why I need to be happy.

maybe I don't need to.

maybe I don't need to be.

or maybe I just don't need to be happy.

3 am

you know what's the best thing about being awake at 3?

having friends you can call.

dissonance

people always agree with stuff i say. and if they don't actually agree, they try to state their contradictory point, and arrive at some sort of middle ground.

i don't remember the last time someone agreed to disagree with me. or go down insisting i was wrong.

other than my brother, of course.

the fight for my right to swype

when i brought my android phone half a year ago, one of the killer apps that i was dying to get my hands on was swype. when i tried using the crappy android default keyboard and the even crappier samsung keyboard, i decided that there was no alternative. i just had to get swype.

except for one catch: i couldn't.

swype is an OEM only product, and samsung wasn't one of the partner OEMs.

also, there was a limited beta going on, which was closed at that time.

i added myself to the announcement list.

no mail from them for a couple of months.

then one good day, i got the announcement. the beta is open again. i scrambled over to the site. signed up, created an account, waited patiently for the download link.

the link refused to download on my phone.

the page also did browser detection, so i couldn't open it on my pc either.

a month later, when i got wi-fi installed, i figured that might make the difference to my downloading problem.

except that it did not.

stranger than that, i got to know that a few of my friends were using swype painlessly on their phones. downloaded without a hitch.

tried everything they suggested. to no avail.

till yesterday afternoon.

here's what i did:

used a site to find my user agent string on my phone.

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1 update1; en-gb; GT-I5700 Build/ECLAIR) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

set firefox to use that user agent.

downloaded the swype installer and bluetooth'd it across to my phone.

ran the installer on my phone, and on the second try, downloaded and installed swype.

and 8 hours later, they announced that a new beta version (with a new installer) is out.

but hey, it's bliss.

times change

when i started blogging, i said a lot of nice things about a lot of nice people, knowing very well that they would never read them.

these days, i don't write nasty things about a lot of nasty people, cos I half expect them to read it.

promote niceness, discourage nastiness.

i make hypocrisy feel so noble.

my big daddy

while lying in bed after a long, tiring, and rather dry and sunny day, i heard the patter of raindrops, and a thought sprung to mind. and subsequently to twitter:

"and it's raining again! how awesome! love you god! *muaaah*"

and then a memory was refreshed. me as a kid. sitting in my dad's lap. me being everything a 3 year old kid could be expected to be, and my dad playing along affectionately, distracting me and then drawing my attention, making me giggle with laughter, and then cry with exasperation.

i closed my eyes and reached outward with my mind.

i still feel like that child.

and i know that even when i feel too old to be my dad's child, i can still be as childlike as I want to, in the lap of god.

my big daddy.