Confusion

Well, for those of you who still read this blog (statcounter says there were two visits yesterday and 13 in this week, so guess not everyone has given up on me) might be wondering how I went from three posts a week to one in three months, the simple answer is that I just couldn't think of anything to write.

I mean, in the beginning, when I first made my blog (not this one, this is the third one. Or maybe the fourth, I forget) I blogged about all the cool stuff that was happening to me at BITS. You know, stuff like meeting religious zealouts, my first interaction with the (in)famous Sajiv Chandran, experiences with drunk friends and so on. Later, in my second year, I blogged about disappointment, dashed expectations and heartbreak. Most of my posts were metaphoric, thereby ensuring that nobody other than those I was really close to would be able to fathom the depth of the posts. And considering that the people falling in that category numbered three of four, well, you get the picture.

The central driving factor behind all of my posts was, as Ramya pointed out to me, intensity. The stuff that I blogged about was stuff I intensely felt something about, be the essence of the feelings joy or sorrow. What changed over the summer holidays was that I lost most of whatever intensity I had. And no, it wasn't because something disasterous happened to me in the hols.

Another small reason for my not blogging was that my vocabulary and command over the English language seem to have diminished, no doubt due to the brojen combination of English, Hindi and Tamil that most BITSians converse in. Which is a very bad thing, considering that I will have to appear for GRE these hols.

Anyways, moving on... I guess what I'm trying to say here, is that I'd stopped blogging for all the wrong reasons. You don't have to blog to let the world know how much you're hurting, or to make the whole world laugh with you and get their appreciation. You blog because you want to. Because you've just found or done something cool that you want to shout out for the whole world (or atleast your subscribers) to hear. And maybe, in the process, to get a small bit of satisfaction from knowing that there are people who take time out of their busy lives to find out what is going on in yours.

So, what is going on in my life right now is...


And no, I haven't gotten a job at Apple. not even an internship (though not for lack of trying. Basically, I got Leopard working on my PC (and I know that's illegal, thank you for asking) and I have to say, while all the flak and criticism that Apple is getting for their stubborn policy of having one and only one way of doing anything might be well and justified, Mac OS X is still one magnificent piece of art. You know how all Apple fanboys will tell you that everything "Just Works"? Well, there's right. Everything does just work. Even on my PC, on which Mac OS X is not supposed to run, so I'm sure you can imagine how well it would work on Macintosh computers.

And surprizingly, all of this is on a Unix backend. That's right, the glittery GUI of Mac OS X runs on the same system as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and the other BSD's. And everything works, at the first try. I've been using it for over two weeks now, and I haven't had to open the console even once (although I did open it, but that's because I love the commandline). Compare this with linux, where chances are high that you'll have to open up the trusty console and tinker around with the system within an hour of installing the system, whether it be to get your lan card working, or to get some sound to pour out of your speakers.

And Linux (Ubuntu 8.04), even with a custom-compiled kernel, takes atleast a minute to boot and a little less than a minute to shut down, while Leopard, running on my hardware with a generic intel kernel, boots in 15 seconds and shuts down in 5.

Now why can't Linux be more like this?