…And we’re back!

Yes, this blog is still alive.
And yes, I did get married. In fact, three days ago on 7th, it’s actually been TWO whole months since I tied the proverbial knot and started to share my otherwise bland life, with that one special person who adds joy and color to everything I do.
And it continues to amaze me with every passing day…

Firstly, I would like to thank you, the reader, every single person who kept coming back to The Square Circle months after it was, so to speak, down. And I’m sorry I didn’t keep up my promise of getting “back in the first week of March” (yes I did realize that thank you very much!) or even acknowledge comments. The thing is, I wanted to eagerly write a post just weeks into my marriage.
And then  the next one.
And another.

I don’t want to do the typical I-am-married-therefore-I-have-no-time thing every other guy I know does and blame my lack of blogability on my marriage or anything. I’ll admit it: I goofed up. I have no excuses.

Truth is, I have at least 6 unfinished drafts in my Open folder. I’ll get to them (and backlink them when I’m done) as soon as possible. In no particular order, they are approximately about:

~Wedding and on being married.
~My home town of Cuddalore.
~Why we love hot weather.
~Facebook.
~How to spot Indians in Frankfurt.
~Behind a bad video game.

…and other random topics of no particular interest.

I’ll get to them as soon as I can. I know its all been a long time in coming; but all I can do now is assure you:

The Square Circle is back in the game.
Play on.

How the internet can ruin your day

It just occurred to me that there’s a flip side to having practically unlimited high-speed internet access both at home and in the workplace.
And today, it just ruined my day.

It started out quite normal – a regular day doing what I normally do, and since it wasn’t very hectic this Thursday morning, I logged on to an online forum where I sometimes participate.
There were a few discussion threads and one of them seemed interesting enough to get into, and a few points exchanged back and forth. Good, constructive criticism. And then all of a sudden, a guy jumps in, accuses me of lying and everything, and before I know it, its a full-fledged war out there.

I had a few heated exchanges with him and finally decided to call it quits…when I realized how badly this really shook me up.
I didn’t enjoy my lunch today, and I really couldn’t concentrate on my work either.  He completely ruined my day, and pretty much most of my evening as well.

I came back from work still thinking about this, and it took me a couple of cake rusks and a load of funny pictures from Oddee to calm me down.
And as I still thought of new ways to get back at him, I realized:
Why am I even doing this?

For some faceless guy on the internet I don’t even know (he goes by the name of Dovey_Descends by the way) and of whom the only image I have is his profile pic?
Why should I care what he thinks?
Why did I let him ruin an otherwise perfect day?

I guess the answer lies in how much we love our online personas. And I for once learnt my lesson: nothing online is important enough to ruin your real life.
Dovey, if you’re reading this, you’re just a pathetic loser who gains from online wackamola. Go get a life!

And now if you’ll excuse me, soup’s on!
:)

I need a time-out

In case you haven’t noticed already, I haven’t been very actively blogging of late. Actually I haven’t been quite active doing anything creative lately.

I guess part of the reason for that has to do with stuff that’s been going around in my head for a while that kind of needs my attention. Some of this involves what a management guy would probably call “reorientation of short-term goals” and includes (though not limited to) a possible change of career, or geographical relocation, rethinking on continuing school, maybe taking up paid-writing more seriously, getting married, going bungee-jumping and so on, although not necessarily in that order.

And the other thing being the fact that I leave on a 2week vacation shortly and – in the true style of all my vacations – stay as far away from computers as I can while on vacation.

So I’m guessing this is probably the last post in a while, and thus effective right now, I take a break from blogging in pursuit of some, if not of all, of the above.


p.s.
In case you’re wondering, no I am NOT quitting my blog, and The Square Circle will continue to be online. Like I said, I’m on a break – not on retirement.

Base Bloggers

Without saying their names I’d like to mention that as of this morning, five people who I’ve known, personally or otherwise, decided to quit off the blogosphere and delete their blogs.

And I’m not sure if any of those people might be reading this post, but just in case you are, I’ve got just one thing to say to you guys:

You’ve let us down.

“Us” is every single person who ever visited your blog, read your posts and was considerate enough to leave a comment on it.
We did all that because we thought it mattered. We thought it was fascinating to glimpse into your lives and look at that special place where all things suddenly become equal – where you write all those interesting happenings in your life, your poems and creative proses, your dreams and those mad little thoughts, everything that you wanted to share with the world.

Until you decided to shut that door upon us forever.
And I say again: I am disappointed.

To all those ex-bloggers who’ve decided to quit and move on; I wish you all the best for your future pursuits, and I do hope that your life takes on a deeper meaning than it has now.

And on behalf of the community, I’d just like to say that while we will not grieve for you, we will surely miss you!

Peace.

The things I do…Offline

Looking back at this month, I realized I wrote just two posts the whole of this April …which is way below my average!
In fact, now that I think about it, I barely logged into my Facebook account twice all this month; I still have unanswered Email in my inbox and I haven’t even read up on all the blogs I regularly read (I know that’s lame, I’m really sorry you guys!).

So what did I do all of this month while I was away from blogs and social networking sites?

Well, even though there wasn’t a shortage of stuff to write in my life, turns out there’s a lot more to be accomplished offline, than sitting in front of a computer.
Here’s a list of some of what happened.

a)
A good friend of mine (who recently decided to pursue his masters in management) decided to trust me with correcting, rewriting, proof-reading and otherwise ‘fixing’ his essays for his business school.
I love to write, but when someone trusts me with stuff like this, yes I feel honored, but also nervous. In the end though, it was a good experience…and made me re-think about continuing school again.


b)
I’ve also been invited to write for my company blog; and that feels good too, because it is mostly authored only by people who are almost as twice as old as I am!
Company policy however, dictates that I cannot mention it here, nor can I link up my blog URL to my post; but then I guess it is all the much better keeping my personal life separate from business.


c)
I’ve been travelling. A lot.
Of course (from my previous post) you probably already know about my little trip to Brussels.
The week after that, me and some guys from work – a colorful mix of Indian, Finnish and Argentinean colleagues – decided to take off on multiple mid-week road trips to Rudesheim, Wiesbaden and Heidelberg.
It was quite a awesome experience visiting all these places, and doing it in the middle of the work week only added to the fun!
Remind me to write a detailed post on this later.


d)
I’ve been working out.
Yes, don’t give me that look. Now that spring’s finally here, I’ve started this little routine of going out for a run everyday.
According to one guy I know though (who’s a fitness fanatic), it’s not enough to run unless you do it everyday for at least 45min at a stretch!
And even though I’m not at that level yet, I am working my way up.


e)
I’ve finally started my course on learning German.
And about time too! My “Bitte sprachen Sie Englisch?” was getting me nowhere.


f)
I finally managed to clear away all the junk from my balcony flower pots; and eyeing the lawn downstairs. I’m not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but I do have a bit of a green thumb. In case you’re wondering, gardening is not just for housewives or senior citizens…its really quite fun getting your hands in the dirt.


g)
I spent an afternoon at my neighbor’s place trying to fix their computer. Note, I said trying to fix it.
I don’t know how they got the weird idea that “those IT guys” should know everything about computers, silly people.


And to all the guys reading this whose blogs I haven’t read, I’m sorry…but there was a load of stuff that kept me away. But I will get to it soon.
And Jaffer if you’re reading this, there is life beyond twitter; hence proved :D (don’t hate me!)

Love you guys!

A New Beginning

Yes, we are finally back.
New blog, new template, on a fresh new domain. And boy am I excited.
So let’s get started right away.

Firstly, you’ll notice that this isn’t Random Thoughts anymore. To be honest, coming up with a new name and domain is the part that took the longest time because I was so comfortable with Random Thoughts.

But then I realized it wasn’t very original – there must be like a hundred sites out there with the exact same name; just try the words “random thoughts” (with the quotes) on Google, you’ll see what I mean. In fact, it took me over a week, after the design template was completed to finalize on the name to use.

Now why “The Square Circle”?
For the same reason Steve Jobs ended up with “Apple” – one week of domain hunting later I was so frustrated (did you know ALL the good domains are taken; most of which are just stupidly parked) that I started looking for something random, pretty much anything I could find and so, here we are.

Getting down to the technical side of things; my old blog (http://rahmannoor.blogspot.com/) still redirects to here. And I’m yet to import all my previous posts and setup my widgets, but I promise I’ll do this soon.

Coming to credits, this design is an adaptation of Blogy-illacrimo for BlogandWeb from DesignDisease, and I truly thank them for the wonderful template.
I say ‘adaptation’ because the original template had three columns which I didn’t like, so I changed it to just two and rewamped some of the original artwork.
There was also a whole mess of broken image links in the original template file which I had to find and upload to my own image-server; not to mention invalid xml and missing script references which I had to fix.


Btw, I’d prefer to think of this as “still in beta” (now don’t give me that look) because I tested this on a few browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and good old IE but I guess there are still a few glitches to it.

Oh, and in case this is the first time you’ve landed on this blog, here’s a snapshot of how my original blog looked like.
(I know, lame wasn’t it?)

Do let me know what you think, and how I can take this further. After all, in the end, it’s only the readers that count!
:D

Better Blogging. Now.

I have been blogging for quite a while now, and although today is not any specific day like “exactly-two-years-ago” or anything, it struck me how far it has come, and how much further I’d like to go.

Now, a long time ago I stumbled upon sites like BlogBloke with expert advises on blogging and the like, but somehow never really paid much attention to it.

When I logged in this afternoon however, it suddenly stuck me how lame the whole thing really looks.
I mean come on, a terrible looking design template, less-than-creative URL (that’s my name there), minimalist stats tracking and comment control, and no RSS…it really doesn’t get much dumber than this.


With this in mind, I’d like to take a deep breath, and announce that effective immediately I’m putting all my current blogging activities on hold and working full time over this holiday season on getting my blog back on track and in better shape.

I’m thinking maybe I’ll switch platforms, to something with better control (and a much nicer custom template!) or maybe even go pro on an owned domain; with my very own CMS and all the fireworks.

Whatever I do, I just wanted to let you guys know that I haven’t quit, so just in case you come back a month later and still find this post on top, you know I’m still working on it!

Scum of the cyberworld

I don’t usually get all personal and paranoid over some moron who’s lost his way in the world; but earlier this evening I (my blog to be exact) was attacked by a worthless, low-life scum who chose my blog to voice his pathetic opinion of the world.

Later when I was cleaning up the mess he left; it suddenly dawned on me as so how easy it is for anyone to get away with anything online!
You don’t need an identity, an address or even a name – just as long as you have a wee bit of skill and some creativity, the world is your canvas. Whether you want to create a masterpiece or mess up someone else’s using your graffiti is just a matter of choice.

And that’s a scary thought. But we’re not gonna take this lying down. Scum, you’ve just been tagged-out!