The rest of this post is purely hypothetical.

I am going to invent a new language. Every sentence in this language will be composed of a sequence of numbers, and each number — or word — will be a cultural refer­ence, a refer­ence to a quota­tion, event, activity or just about anything that took place in the history of our world at some point in space and time. Each sentence in this language will carry an immense amount of infor­ma­tion within a few, short, simple words.

Eventu­ally, advances in technology will make knowl­edge ubiqui­tous, thereby condensing sentences into something as simple as a repre­sen­ta­tion of a sequence of vectors in space-time.

I call this language “Pointerse”.

Finally.

I now have a new blog called technoYak. Does that name sound vaguely familiar…?

For a long time now, I have wanted to maintain a separate blog for all things technical, especially the ideas I work with profes­sion­ally, such as software and system design. This was motivated by a slight unease whenever I wanted to post an inter­esting idea to this blog — but couldn’t because I figured it wouldn’t make sense to the lowest common denom­i­nator of the audience. A new blog with a much more narrow focus seemed to be the right answer. That and a pinch of “seriousness”.

So why haven’t I done this before? To tell you the truth, I’ve been stuck in this vicious circle of inaction. Here’s how the thought-process works:

1. I just had this great idea! I think I should blog it.
2. Oooh! You know what, it would be great if I could have a nice serious blog about these ideas that I can talk about with authority, instead of mixing it up with all this random stuff that is unrelated.
3. Yeah, and it would be even cooler if I could do this on my own blogging platform (the one I’ve been meaning to release version 0.1 of for the last three years). Let’s do that first!
4. There’s this whole bunch of features I want to put into this code. It would be nice to have some kind of note-taking software to keep track of all of this stuff. Let me check if there’s awesome new software in the Gentoo repos­i­tory for note-taking.
5. Nope, I guess not. I wish I could use something like OneNote on GNU/Linux…or perhaps I should invest in a really large white­board for my apart­ment? Will I find that online at Amazon.com?
6. [*] Maybe that’s not what I need. Maybe — just maybe — what I really need is a new laptop to do all this new cool stuff. *drool* Yes, that’s it…if I had a new laptop, all of these annoy­ances would go away.
7. Sigh. Let’s put this discus­sion on hold while I take care of all this work stuff. *several weeks pass*
8. I just had this great idea! I think I should blog it.

* If you’re strug­gling to find the logical leap to Step 6, I’m afraid I can’t help you there.

Today, I found out that City Market (the general store on Bellevue Avenue in Capitol Hill) closes at two o’clock in the morning and re-opens at six. I also discov­ered that the Starbucks on Summit Ave and E Olive Way actually closes at eleven o’clock in the night — not midnight as suggested by their official website.

I guess I should be thankful for the 24-hour-open Subway store down Denny Mountain.

When you come to think of it, time doesn’t flow very smoothly — it gushes out in fits and spurts like a leaking pipe that you try to keep under control even as you call the plumber with your free hand. It’s been a while — a long while — since my last post. Heck, it was so annoying to see the same front-page everyday that I stopped visiting my own website beyond a point.

I guess I have excuses. Many things have changed since November last year, and yet, life is the same as before. Most changes in life are like re-arrangements of pieces on a chess board. You move some here, you move some there, but overall things remain in balance except for the occasional loss of a piece. It’s only towards the end of the game that things become exciting, but ironi­cally, that’s the time when you have the least control over the board. Life is God playing chess with you; I suppose He likes to win.

The New Year came and went with a small burst of hope (purely my imagi­na­tion, I am sure) that ebbed quickly and receded into oblivion. But February was a month of many changes, with January franti­cally getting ready for it. I have seldom seen a month packed with so many punches, but the punches were super­fi­cial, almost playful to an extent. There was a wedding to navigate through, a vacation to deal with, castles to look at, a workplace to be moved, an apart­ment to get out of , an apart­ment to move into and impos­sible things to be taken care of at impos­sible schedules.

But the truth is, life isn’t a game of chess — you shouldn’t stop to think after every move, you just power through, no matter what. Never stop, never give up, just keep going. Just keep going, that’s all…

I feel a sudden irrational urge to design and code a new website again.

The goal is to have a something “new” launched on the 1^st of November. Quoting J R R Tolkien, “It’s a job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish.” So let’s begin.

And thinking about it, there’s a method to motiva­tion and a wee bit of madness to every creation. I’m sure you have no idea what I’m talking about, but trust me on this one.

That’s alright, Comcast — I trashed your August 14^th email after barely a glance. No apology necessary.

You wouldn’t believe how many chess games I’ve begun but not played to comple­tion. Part of the problem stems from the fact that I only play (or rather, start playing) human-versus-computer games. Humans playing chess (not world champions, of course) add some kind of ‘flavor’ or person­ality to their game, and not all moves are completely logical. Computer chess players, on the other hand, tend to…win, with cold preci­sion. Now I could tweak the diffi­culty level of the game, effec­tively asking the computer to make occasional mistakes, but how could someone play an honor­able game, knowing that the opponent was not giving a hundred percent?

Now that my 25^th-week resolu­tion is to play chess more seriously, I guess I should hunt for humans to joust with me. Any takers?

I’ve always liked the idea of using a desktop client to post to my blog. (Somehow, Google never managed to sell me on the browser-as-an-OS idea.)

Now that I have a laptop with Windows 7 on it, I’ve decided to give Windows Live Writer a test-drive. Here goes nothing.

Pick up ten random blogs on the Internet and at least one of them is sure to have an apolo­getic note from the author explaining why there have been fewer than usual updates recently.

Gather some statis­tics and add a punch­line, and I’m sure this will be a great xkcd strip.…