I like to observe ordinary strangers through their windows. Peering into some stranger’s window is not only extremely rude and intrusive, it is an uncannily fulfilling exercise.

When I glance into a stranger’s window and see a pretty girl curled up on a couch reading Elliots’s Middlemarch, I try to imagine what kind of a person she is and what her life is like. Is she a purist like Dorothea or an idealist like Tertius — or maybe she is both.

Or when I see an old man, deeply engrossed in his cigarette, I try to imagine what he is thinking about and how old he is and almost instantly — how long he has been smoking (for most smokers or ex-smokers, an old man holding a cigarette instantly evokes their long buried hope that one can continue smoking and live to be old)

A window offers the owner and an observer many insights. To an owner, it offers a view of the world outside and all the hues and depths it has to offer. To an observer, it offers the opportunity to judge — without fear of rebuke.

For an instant, the observer and the subject (through the window) are connected by some invisible karmic bond. The subject is, of course, unaware of this intrusion of privacy while the observer’s mind gleefully soaks in details –  constructs hypothetical structures around the subject. This “spell” is broken, if the observer loses perspective or if the subject realizes that he or she is being observed.

Such “intellectual” eavesdropping is generally different from “recreational” eavesdropping. However, that does not make it any less intrusive. Or rude.

I met an old friend yesterday — at an Indian grocery store in South Florida. He is one of those people who you know throughout your childhood and one day, without warning, suddenly transform into a grotesque personification of adulthood.

Anyway, after the initial surprise at meeting a friend thousands of miles from home, and the exchange of general questions and answers about our current life and purpose of stay in this foreign land, we decided to drive up to Starbucks for coffee. Knowing that this guy was a, errm, I guess there is no good way to say this — knowing that this guy was a tad rigid with money, I offered to buy coffee. Over coffee, he completely turned me off by singing absurd songs of praise for the American way of life and his perverted, off-the-mark, unfair comparisons between Bombay and Miami.

I admit that the streets here are wider and cleaner and the life here is comfortable, however, I believe it is disgusting when people land in America and immediately make inappropriate  and disparaging comments about the country that they lived in for most of their life — a country to which they have everything to owe, and left just a day ago.

I love South Florida, it is like a second home to me – with it’s warm people, wide roads, sunny beaches, small lakes every few miles, safe residential communities, abundant supermarkets and drive thru restaurants. But, I also love my city, Bombay — where the blood and sweat of 18 million people churns to drive the country’s economy and where mom cooks fish curry and rice every Sunday of the year.

Over the last couple of years I have made(for no apparent reasons), deliberate attempts to distance myself from Web 2.0, RSS, WordPress etc. I just had too much going on in my life — transition from student life to professional life, coping with lifestyle related health issues(hypertension, tachydermia etc), health related paranoia, a search for directions in personal and professional life, change of my geographical location and a mental struggle to quit smoking.

 I’m happy to reflect that I did stay on the positive side of most of these issues (and FYI, I did manage to quit smoking — I’ve been smoke-free for over one year now). However, all of these issues kept me away from something I devoted most of my serious student life to — recreational technology and the Internet. Not entirely, however — I did make feeble attempts to keep the fire burning through my much neglected blog at http://www.xanga.com/Too_Brown and I have been avidly reading a number of weblogs and technical forums. 

So, not surprisingly, I had a hard time setting up this website. Most of the issues were caused due to my haste. I initially signed up at blogger(also known as blogspot — a Google service) and signed up for toobrown.com from Google Apps. Google actually uses GoDaddy as the domain registrar. Very soon, I realized that blogger was not what I wanted. I wanted something I had a greater level of control over. Like the ability to SSH into my server and install applications. And use FTP.

 I signed up for these services at HostMonster. However, my domain was (and is) still hosted by GoDaddy. I managed to integrate these by changing the Nameserver DNS hosts over at GoDaddy to those served by HostMonster. However, the change is still propogating to all the DNS systems across the Internet. One peculiar issue I noticed is, while I can access my new HostMonster hosted blog through toobrown.com from here in Florida, an individual sitting in Utah or Arizona still hits my old pages hosted by GoDaddy. I did some research and apparently, it takes a while for all the DNS systems on the Internet to recognize the change.

 Finally, WordPress — I cant really say I had any real difficulties setting it up. I installed the latest version 2.3.1 with reasonable ease on my Linux server and also uploaded some layouts and common plugins. I’m really impressed by the manner in which WordPress has been designed. The design is clean and the implementation is near-flawless, to say the very least.