End of a blogging month…start of a (mini-)summer break!

Here comes the closing post for July 2006, the month I feel I’m back to the regular blogging mode…well, sort of. This is my 10^th post for this month, which means one-third of the month I blog(ged)…that’s a good frequency for me! I don’t want to make this post just a statistics though – the 10^th post – without substance. Since this is the last day of July, I want to talk about a few things that have happened (been happening) to random jottings…, poudyal blog, and my online presence in general over the past few months, especially in July. Frequent visitors here might have noticed, random jottings… has undergone a massive facelift recently. And much more than spending time writing posts, I have been spending time designing this “face of the blog” and learning a thing or two about php scripts and coding along the way. For a web enthusiast like me, with no background whatsoever in programming languages and scripts, its a huge achievement.

Grumpy Old Man

And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
– Abraham Lincoln

“Dear Professor Poudyal, We are pleased to inform you that we have received your manuscript and that it has been sent out for review”, those were the opening words of an email that I received recently from a secretary of the editor of a reputed journal, where I had submitted a paper co-authored with my profs. (the real ones!). This was not the first time I had been mistaken for a professor or a senior research fellow. A couple of months ago, I had submitted an earlier version of the same paper for a conference and the acknowledgement email also started with “Dear Professor Poudyal”. A month or so before that, I had a mail in my pigeon-hole that was addressed to some “Dr. Poudyal”, which was ME apparently! In all these cases, I replied with an email explaining I was not a Prof. nor a Dr., but merely a PhD candidate, and that just in my first year!

an old man and a sprinkler

I was thinking of doing this for long, salvaging my old posts from my earlier blogs into an “Archive Hour” category. It always fascinates me to see changes in my own writing (style, content and what not) over time and this probably is one way of experiencing those changes…When I moved servers along with my move from Canada to the UK, I did prepare a backup of my old blog so that I could import those in my new blog. Somehow I managed to lose that backup in transit . So, instead of being able to rely on automation, I have to manually enter everything now (well, those posts that have a text backup!). I just don’t have time and patience to do that, which is why I decided to create this “archive hour” category (influenced by a BBC R4 programme by that name I must admit ). I’ll be posting few selected posts from my old blogs now and then under this category. The first one is a story of an old man and a badly set sprinkler. Enjoy!

when the money runs out…

“Nightblindness” – the song that I couldn’t remember yesterday, which includes the line “when the money runs out”. I thought I should post the full lyrics here….and David Gray is definitely one of the finest songwriters around!

NIGHTBLINDNESS – by David Gray

A million to one outsiders
Nightblindness can’t see your bright eyes
Or what the time is
Twenty five past eternity
Here listening to the sirens
Coming closer now further away

What we gonna do when the
money runs out
I wish that there was something left to say
How we gonna find the eyes to see
a brighter day

This might be boring, but hopefully I don’t count as a fool!

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
– Charles de Montesquieu

I do not intend to bore those I live with, let alone future generations, if indeed what I write here survives to the next generation! Nonetheless, I have been documenting bits and pieces of my life, and my thoughts in this blog. The idea being to share what little life experiences, and opinions I have on the stuffs that I care about to like-minded peoples. Well, “unlike-minded” peoples are also welcome here to read and comment on what I write, but I’m guessing those types won’t be too bothered to indulge in such activities!