Sanity Insanity and Moi

I was there. It didn’t feel great.

I was scared, i was lost, i was wandering in the dark.

I hit the Writer’s Block.

Trust me its a damn scary place. Felt good when i reached there, mainly due to the fact that i was busy at work and i was in no way even getting time to pee. Forced into the dark the force grew weaker in me. Two days back i faced the bitter reality that i had hit the block, i shouldn’t have taken the left turn at the T-junction at the dead-end, for what joy?, i have no idea.

Goddess Wikipedia (a.k.a. Goddess Saraswathi in Hindu Mythology), describes Writer’s Block as :

Writer’s block is a phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to begin or continue writing, usually due to lack of inspiration or creativity.

Naah!!! Nothing of these caused my condition. I had inspiration(lots of it) and i had lots to write but i didn’t. Why? I needed a reason and today i have a reason to write. Breaking the door, like Rajani, i’m out with the reason i needed (I wish it was more like a girl that i walked out with).

20th Sept, 15th Oct and this one on the 30th of Oct, that was the frequency of my posts in the last 2 months.

Looking back i ponder what made me stop, was it the work or was it something more noir. Yes, work was one of the reasons, undeniably. 20+ hrs of working on a single day, my friends began referring me as IBM’s bitch. Getting adjusted to the new life was one definite factor. But when i search deep it was something more than that. One that pains me still, tried shrugging it off, but couldn’t, it still lingers in the darkest thoughts. It can be described as one that is scariest for a writer. I was never credited for something that i wrote. Even my closest friends didnt acknowledge the fact that it was me. Bang! i got a “500 Internal Server Error” when i was expecting a “200 OK” with “Connection: Keep-Alive”.

Any way its all behind me, and i at least think that i’m back.

BTW my lingo has now been reduced into the results of an aftermath of heavy AS2/AS3 testing, with heavy dosage of XML and Development team that doesnt consent to bugs.

Taken this opportunity, if u would like anyone who is coming across this post to share, what made them hit writer’s block and how they did eventually overcome it….

It Hurts … when you know a person for so long and yet she compares you, measures you ..

It Hurts … when things that you do goes unnoticed …

It Hurts … when she tells you, that you are not good enough …

It Feels Better — when i say FUCK YOU !!!

This day, 2 years back i started this blog.

Phew !! been quite a ride ..

Thanks for all the readers and followers. And my friends who get spam mails from me regarding any updates …

happy blogging

Here it is, after 2-3 sleepless nights and sleeping in office, i have the new look for my site.

From

which i called SIMv2.0, I have moved to SIMv3.0, which look like this

Thanks to Bob (http://www.blogohblog.com/) for his Limau Orange Theme, which i took as the base and then modified it extensively for this new theme.

Any way, hope you all like the new look and waiting for your feed backs and comments.

I’ll be really grateful if you can send me some of the errors that you notice, as it was done during sleep deprived nights ..

Happy Blogging 

This one is a general intro to blogging. Its the same one that i did at Wipro but with modifications.

I have the Calvin and Hobbes theme for this one.

This is the Blogging for Business slides. Its Dilbert themed

If normal blogging was too much for you and thought that Twitter solved it with Micro-blogging… AND if you thought that 140 characters was too long to type and Twitter was too much to handle. You are in big problem.

Friends might tell you that you are being lazy and you need to see a doc. Hell NO!! we have Adocu for one-word Nano-blogging. Now all you need is a word or rather words with no spaces in them.

Just one word, one word to tell the world what you are up to..

So far only text and numbers allowed. Spaces are a Strict NO!! You can alwaysbe innovative. Joining words without spaces is already happening there. The interface looks simple and you just can keep on going.

Adocu is still in beta and is lacking a good Puclic time line, friends updates, search etc. So when its finished by Jonathan (adocu.com/Jonathan), who is busy getting feedbacks at the blog (http://blog.adocu.com/) and fixing issues that are reported, its really going to rock.

Adocu is not a Twitter clone, rather its Twitter compressed …

Time to coin new terms like - Adocuers (populace in Adocu), Adocus (updates in Adocu), Adocing (the act of updating Adocu).

Thanks a lot Prateek for the tip. I feel sharing through SlideShare is much better

The day before the session, Christine calls me up and asks me, “So how do you intend to start the session?”. Then it hits me that, all this time i was preparing for each of the workshop, but didn’t even think of how to start of the whole discussion/workshop. Oops now i need to plan. gulp!

Ok, i felt i was going to crash and burn during the session - 1. I had no idea how i’m going to start off 2. The slides looked very very boring. The slides were a disaster, i was planning a workshop and they wanted slides if the whole thing was to be approved by the management. As a last minute step, turned to Calvin and Hobbes for help. Boy! they helped. Now my slides looked wacky and who ever saw it smiled. Let it be. So i spent the rest of yesterday’s evening taking screen shots of Twitter, Kwippy, Muziboo, Tempostand, Mutiny.in, All things Pakistan and individual blogs of 2s, Amit Agarwal, Adeeth’s and Mine. I would have loved to show all the blogs that i read, but the company firewall just blocked’em off.

On the D-Day, I was 30 min well before time and met up with Christine. The first of the participants turned up and didn’t even hope to have even 10 people. With all the work and things around, chances are that something like blogging could take a back seat for people. I was mistaken. There was close to 25 participants.

So here we go, as an intro got all the people who were there and had a blog to have their blog-ids written on the board. Only 8!!! Great!!! So more people wanted to get into blogging and as i learned they were confused at some point or the other with many things.

As we started off, i made the fact clear that it will be a discussion/workshop as opposed to a session. Pushed for some user interaction and it just took off from there, jokes, experiences and facts. A fun filled session where the beginners are now serious on starting a blog. To the question, Should Al Qaida blog? YES was the reply, as they all believed no one should be stopped from blogging.

Interestingly, every one converged on the point that, blogs provide a fact / news in its raw format rather than the media, which they though to be fabricated. We moved on to show the newbies how simple it was to set up a blog. Interestingly most of the people who blogged used Blogspot and haven’t even heard of LiveJournal or TypePad.

The discussions drifted from some serious discussions on What to be done on profanity?, What formed the basis of Moderating a Comment?, The Do’s and Dont’s of Blogging..etc to some fun stuffs that i shared with them. Interestingly people didnt know what RSS feeds are. So got someone to explain the whole RSS funda to them.

What is MicroBlogging and why do we do it?, was a tough one to make them understand. Finally i feel that when i showed them Twitter and the indian counterpart Kwippy. They then got the whole idea of micro-blogging.

Finally i had to tell them about Google Analytics and showed my own Analytics graph as an example of the worst thing that you can do - being lazy. The downward graph showed it all.
I was quite overwhelmed by the participation i had and people said it was wonderful. Felt good.

The presentation that i made can be found here - Blogging Workshop (PPT)

Finally the Bloggers made their presence felt through Blogathon. Some of them were featured in NDTV.

Here is the clip from Youtube.

For mySpace Session update see here-

So this is what is happening at BCB6

Technorati Tags - barcampbangalore6 and barcampbangalore