On the Soapbox

It is January 19. A year ago, I launched this 7th incarnation of my website. This new year will also be my website's 10th year; before 2007 is over, I shall be able to say that I've had a home on the web for a decade.

The first four versions of my website came and went within the first year. On my website's first birthday in 1998, I launched the fifth version. Things slowed dramatically after that; the sixth version of my website was launched years later in 2002, and it would be years after that before the current seventh version came into being. This is not too unlike the browser world, where release cycles that used to be measured in months have now morphed into ones measured in years. Or for that matter, much of the Internet itself. People often remark about how much and how fast the Internet is changing, but it seems to me that things have slowed dramatically, especially compared with the rate of change in the 90's. People and technology have found and settled into their grooves--their steady state equilibria, if you will--and the world of computing is developing a comfortable inertia. Anyway, it would be interesting to see how many years it would be before I do another redesign and technical overhaul of this website; personally, I wouldn't hold my breath.

I know I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy and I've had a cold this past week, so I just didn't feel like posting anything, even though I have a growing backlog of things kicking around in my head. Which is why I suppose it's nice that Google Labs released Google Notebook this past week, so I could jot those ideas down on something other than scraps of paper that easily get lost. Actually, I hadn't been doing that for a few months now; I had started using a similar server-based (so it's accessible from any of my systems) post-and-edit note system a couple of months ago, but my system was just a quick hack job that I did and so it was nowhere as good as Google's system.

Speaking of hacking up code, I really should get around to finishing writing version 0.3.0 of my blogging software, especially now that I'm getting more comment spam, which unfortunately means that I'm going to have to add some anti-spam mechanisms to my system. Oh joy.

Oh, and I finally got around to fixing the hinges on my laptop, which had been broken since 2004 (the hinges lost resistance so that screen had to be literally propped up from the back). The downside was that the replacement parts--just a pair of replacement hinges--that I ordered cost me a bloody £25 (the only supplier was located on the wrong side of the pond; and the weak dollar wasn't very helpful), but the upside was that this was my first time disassembling a laptop, and, as such, it was oodles of fun.

Finally, I just want to point to this nice post about net neutrality, which is different from what most people have written about the topic in that it points out the role of the all-you-can-eat cross-subsidization pricing scheme of Internet access these days. I think that this would be a great reason to force net neutrality because it would give the telecoms more pressure to switch to a more sane pricing scheme by preventing them from shifting costs to content suppliers to avoid fixing their bad pricing structure.

A friend took the Myers-Briggs personality test and was scored as an INTJ. I read the description for INTJ, and I thought to myself, "gee, that sounds almost exactly like me". I had taken one of these tests a long time ago, back in junior year of high school. As I recall, I was an INTP back then. Well, it has been quite a number of years and I have discovered more about myself since then, so I decided to take the test again (it only took seven minutes). Well, as it turns out, I'm still an INTP; darn, I really liked the INTJ description. What is interesting, however, is that the descriptions for both INTP and INTJ fit me quite well. For one, they talk about different things: the INTP description page talked about a tendency towards analysis and the INTJ page talked about perfectionism. These two description pages were not describing a common set of variables, and thus without the constraints of a sort of mutual exclusiveness, it can accomplish what I call the "fortune-cookie effect". Call me a skeptic, but most of these sorts of personality test results seem to cast a fairly wide net so that people will be more likely to say "oh right, that is me" even if the test results did not really mean that much.

Or it could be that this particular set of descriptions was poorly written. There are a gazillion pages out there with different descriptions of what an INTP is and what an INTJ is, and I didn't really feel like Googling and comparing...

I think that I have been somewhat sheltered from the world these past few years. I used hungrily consume news and keep up with the world in high school, but I stopped doing that at HMC, partly because of time and also partly because the place oozed apathy. Also during these years, I had completely missed out on the rise of the blog, despite my usual desire* to keep myself atop the crest of technology. It wasn't that I didn't have a blog; since 1998, my website has always featured a blog-like section where I would post my latest ramblings on a somewhat regular basis (though it was somewhat different structurally from the canonical blog of today). No, it was because I simply did not believe in it. Over half a decade ago, people were rushing to get Blogger accounts, "blog" was starting to turn into the latest new buzzword/hype, and places like LiveJournal were brimming with people posting daily details of their personal life (it took me a while to finally disassociate blogging from LJ-esque diaries). All this left a me with a sour bias, which is why I never even referred to my now-defunct second-generation blog (which was an awkward mix of a heavily sanitized diary plus some dull commentary) on my old website as a "blog" and why I never paid much heed to the growth of the "blogosphere", both as a word and as the thing itself. Ultimately, I was oblivious to the blog...

...until now. And boy, is the blogosphere addictive or what? There are many precious nuggets that I read every day, such as this little excerpt (source) that I read today about what it means to be a moderate:

Perhaps the best definition of a moderate is someone who does not derive all of their political opinions from one or two first principles and stick to them no matter where that may lead them. Those first principles may be relatively crude ("the moral environment that prevailed in the 1950s should be held onto") or fairly sophisticated ("we must maximize the power of the weak over the strong"), but regardless of their origin, they tend to make people into extremely rigid voters. People who see themselves as trading off a whole bunch of values, will have political opinions that are in general less extreme. They will also be more tolerant of other peoples' viewpoints, because they tend to assume that other people are simply weighting different values differently--rather than concluding that the difference of opinion must be caused by some terrible moral failing on the part of others.

I now have about 20 feeds (and quickly growing) in my RSS aggregator. But perhaps most importantly for me, blogging has allowed me to reemerge from the sheltered bubble of HMC's apathy and reconnect with my old self. I enjoy reading a variety of perspectives and insights on the affairs of the world, and my blog has become a delightful outlet for a lot of my own thoughts. Instead of letting the thoughts that occupy my mind during mundane tasks like showering, brushing, and eating evaporate or get lost on the countless pieces of scrap paper that litter my archives (yes, I do think about free markets in the shower; call me a freak), I can now preserve and express them here. I know I don't have much of an audience here, but that doesn't matter because this is mostly for me, and if I get an audience, that would just be a nice bonus. :)

I thoroughly love this, and I only wish that I had started this blog years ago and that I had paid more attention to the rich blogosphere. Of course, that is not to say that the blogosphere is entirely good; most of the blogs are not that interesting or well-written (that probably includes mine), and most of them are not very thoughtful or carry too much bias of dogma (see the above excerpt on moderation or my own rant about lack of moderation), but there are enough gems out there that all this is much more satisfying than watching yet another movie or the other mundane things that I could do to fill my free time.

Anyway, that's enough of me gabbing on about this topic. I've been blogging and reading blogs for nearly a month now, and I've learned a lot. For one, I have learned that my features wish-list for the blogging system that I use has grown a bit lot. Remember what I said** about kBlog 0.1.0 being nearly feature-complete? Never let a non-blogger decide what features would be nice. I'm currently in the middle of a major overhaul (most of it is stuff that visitors won't notice) of kBlog (version 0.3.0), so that will occupy my free time for a few days, and I'll probably end up doing a couple more versions to add new features after that before finally going for 1.0. I've considered moving to one of the mainstream blogging software packages, but the hassle of installing, configuring, and migrating to something like Wordpress is simply not worth it (and I hate reading manuals), especially since the hassle of hacking up Perl to add some pet features to kBlog would probably about the same, and, most importantly, I'm too comfortable with the control and flexibility of using an in-house system, and for a control freak like me, that means something. ;)

* I started browsing the WWW back in the days of Netscape 1. I used VoIP for the first time in the 90's when AIM added voice to one of its betas. I got a Hotmail account back when it was the Gmail of its era, before it was bought by Microsoft. I first encountered Google back when it was a little-known beta with a very, very crappy-looking logo. I've installed Mozilla-based browsers since Mozilla 0.6, and used Firefox long before it was named Firefox. So I would at least like to think that I keep up with technology. ;)

** That reminds me, I never did get around to posting the kBlog source code. Oh well. I'll post the source when 0.3.0 is finished.