Why not my blessed cycle that I’ve been raving about, you wonder. Yeah, it makes me wonder too. But the sudden onset of a bad cold, a cough, a chest congestion that has caused my phlegm to come out almost solid-like isn’t really the best condition to be riding a bicycle in to work. Discretion is the better part of valour and all that junk.

Turns out, I’m now humming ‘All I want for this year is sleep’, to the tune of ‘All I want for Christmas is you’, and it isn’t even sounding funny. I have three grand ideas that I want to blog about, but in the classic case of (and this is a new one) my head and my heart v/s my body, the latter’s fatigue and NED seems to be overcoming the former’s zest for opinion expression.

In line with my current theme for 2009, and my wanting to sleep, I have decided that I want some psychedelic coloured pyjamas. I’m not a particularly big fan of sleep wear, having slept in old t-shirts and miscellaneous pyjamas all through, and shedding some of those during the hotter months.

But now, as I sit at the office at 3-30 AM on Sunday, the 4th of January 2009, working to get the GStreamer code integrated with my code for some audiobook to run on a hand-held device, all I can think of is polka-dotted pyjamas that I want to fall asleep in.

The pyjamas should be red. The dots should be blue, green, yellow, orange, pink and purple. (Any resemblance to the rainbow coloured flag is unintended, though I am all in support of those brothers and sisters who want to wave it unabashedly) I want even Govinda and Dennis Rodman to avert their eyes from said pyjamas and say ‘chi-chi’.

I think I couldn’t possibly write an arbitter post. So much for the first great weekend of this year. Have a great remaining 2009.

Being thrown out of class was something I was supremely thrilled with, because it provided me with a grown-up’s endorsement to go out, play in the school grounds, sit and watch slugs move and leave their slimy trails behind, help the aayah in school in ringing the bell, a few minutes earlier simply because I liked the sound of it. This was more enjoyable than attending class on some occasions, and the propensity towards missing out on classes only magnified further as the years progressed.

This particular train of thought veered towards what the future generations would think of us, the first generation of bloggers. I can only imagine my kid reading about my ‘Dorky Guffaw’ adventures, or about how strongly hippie I have allegedly been, and wonder whether his/her image of me many years hence will be the same as what I’ve portrayed now through my online content.

Our generation has been simultaneously privileged as well as encumbered in some ways due to the revolutionary changes having been brought upon us due to the internet. While communication channels have been made so easy, and long lost friends separated over space and time-zones can still stay in touch as if they were only in the next room, and information of all sorts is available to us within a few clicks, I am led to wonder whether we’re really better off compared to previous generations.

The internet has also brought about a significant invasion of our privacy, and a lot of time is spent on the internet instead of in getting a first life. The future generations might be even worse off than we are, or might ridicule us for our extreme involvement with the net. Nothing exemplifies it better than the constantly changing arbit facebook status messages.

For instance, my current facebook status is as follows: “Hari is astounded at how make-up can make the prettiest women look majorly scary.”

While I might think it is funny right now, or at least, somewhat vaguely relevant, this is just going to be arbit nonsense once I end up saying something else.

While those bloggers who have a defined intent which leads them to blog, and have something topical to write about will have their work appreciated over time, those who use their websites as a means of unleashing arbit (case in point being yours truly) might just as well be better off covering their tracks, lest our children get inspired to do crazy stuff and then conveniently state how their folks’ blogs provided them with the inspiration.

In any case, such an eventuality is quite a long way ahead, and we shall cross the bridge, if it shows up, when we come to it.

Drinking on a Sunday Evening: Most people tend to drink on Friday or Saturday evenings, once the working week has come to an end. Thereafter, uncontrolled alcohol consumption eventually results in hang-overs on Saturday / Sunday mornings and screws up most of the weekend.

However, I propose that people who want to drink to their hearts’ content should do so on Sunday evening. This is because one can conserve precious time on weekends, and since Monday mornings are shitty anyway, the presence or absence of a hang-over at work doesn’t really make a difference.

Plus, most watering holes are less crowded with riff-raff on sunday evenings, but that is a moot point, given that you can drink anytime and anywhere in Bangalore city.

It was the cheap Monkee who spoke about this again last night, and made me think about blagging about it.

The Alcohol Buddy Theory: An alcohol buddy is someone you hang out with in order to have a drink. The surest sign that a friend is an alcohol buddy is if you are unable to hang out with this person unless alcohol is involved in the equation.

If you can’t figure out who your alcohol buddies are, hang out with them even when alcohol is not part of your meet-up and see if you end up having a good time regardless. If that is not the case, then you’ve got an alcohol buddy on your hands.

If you’re a social drinker, and you want to kick the bottle, all you would have to do would be to stop hanging out with your alcohol buddies, and all your problems would be solved. Voila!

Yes, WTF are undoubtably there. However, I found out that most of them end up searching for ‘Ewmew Food’ and are redirected to this post, which has turned out to be the post most visited on my site so far, in its 22 odd days of existence.

Now why the Argentines are searching for ‘ewmew food’ in droves is something I am curious to know more about. Incidentally, searching for the said text string in the google Argentina home page will throw up the aforelinked post as the first hit.

However, someone landed up on my blog by merely searching for ‘Hari’, and I was quite surprised at how high my site must have been to show up while merely searching for my first name.

On putting a swift google search, I did try searching for what rank my site had, but I wasn’t able to locate it within the first hundred hits. Thereafter, I was too lazy to hunt for what was literally akin to a needle in a haystack and so I gave up conveniently.

However, what caught my attention was the third hit, which you should also check out. A website (who’s full name I have expanded in the title of this post) that, without a shade of doubt, gives one more wtf moments than one could possibly imagine, more so if your first name is the same as mine.

Despite using my twitter account regularly now, I doubt that I put up anything of significance, much like how I unleash on my website as well.

Nevertheless, the integration of my website + twitter + my mobile phone has resulted in some cool things happening.

• The twitter widget on the right column of my website updates tweets from my profile regularly
• The twitter tools plugin provided by wordpress sends out a tweet onto my twitter profile whenever I put a new post
• Integrating twitter with my mobile courtesy of vakow ensures that I don’t have to be connected to the internet to have at least some part of my website updated on a continuous basis

Twittering is microblogging, for those that don’t want to unleash long posts. However, even for those painfully verbose characters like yours truly, the site really is some good shiite.

For those still blinking at the ostensible spelling error – it is plugging my blog. If you don’t know what plug is, kindly refer urban dictionary.

After having engaged in significant drum beating via facebook on its status message, on orkut by finally enabling my updates to be visible for junta and courtesy of twitter and the usual gtalk status message build up, which has resulted in quite a few junta visiting this site, I was having a discussion with SKimpy about other innovative and unconventional ways to blug one’s plog, and we came up with the auto-rickshaw idea.

It would be quite awesome to get some bumper stickers printed, with the blog URL and have it pasted on the backs of auto-rickshaws, so that footage can be provided in the weirdest and coolest way possible. I have seen autos with stuff like ‘Hai! Want to Friendship me?’ and ‘Love leads to death’ and other such nonsense.

I am not sure how much auto drivers would charge for such advertising, but before I go ahead and print stickers, I sure would like to find out. If you have a plog that needs blugging and want me to help by getting stickers printed, drop me a line, and I’ll see what I can do after I’ve done the background research work.

Any further ideas apart from the conventional ones to engage in shameless publicity are most welcome as well. Please don’t tell me I need to write well to make this happen, I’ve been trying for ages to do so and I have now finally abandoned that approach, in a ‘grapes are sour’ type situation.

Edit: Urban dictionary defines blugging as bad blogging. An unfortunate coincidence, I’d say.

However, what KP said once fine evening when I had met up with him still resonates in my head – ‘when you don’t do it for the money, you tend to do your best job’, and this is probably why I consider this site as my labour of love.

Churumuri article on the excessive media hype surrounding the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Churumuri article on how India should follow Israel’s footsteps in its steps to counter terrorism.

Churumuri article on the 2006 FIFA world cup, when I was north of where all the action took place circa July 2006.

(As a disclaimer, the post titles are given by KP, while I supplied the content which he has, in some cases edited to make it better.)

Having seen quite a few blogs morph into fully-fledged websites, I’ve been wondering for quite some time as to whether I should discard the arbit google pages front end I have had for my website and follow the path of those who’ve got their own server space and hosted their content online.

At this point in time, I have complete NED* to do so, but I am sure that this will change before the year is through.

*No Enthu Da – a concept Skimpy discovered, and is as infectious as any. Wednesday NED currently plagues me.

I play the bass guitar for a band named ‘Arth’. Our lyrics are in Hindi, and one can classify our music under the rock genre.

On the first day of the beginning of the second half of 2008, we’ve uploaded three mp3s of our as part of an initial demo we’ve recorded. The instruments were recorded at home, the drums were programmed and the vocals were recorded at G3 studios in Chennai.

This is the link to the band blog from where you can download the mp3s – http://arthband.blogspot.com.

The songs are under creative commons license – free to distribute and download, but please ask us if you want to modify it.

I’d really be appreciative if you were to listen to the songs and spread the word about our demo either through word of mouth (and by that I mean gtalk, heh!) or by putting up something on your blog / LJ that would link to the aforementioned band blog. The more publicity, the merrier.

We’re also on Facebook on the artist’s pages, do join up there as well.

If you like the music, tell the others. If you think it sucks, tell us!

Cheerio!