Drone » toobrown

nesting

toobrown — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 07:45:55 +0000

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.

Change

toobrown — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 06:01:31 +0000

When you reflect on your past, very often, you realize that numerous small, seemingly insignificant events and consequential changes have modified the portrait of your personal reality. Most of these reflections, reveal changes which are small in scale and easily ignored. Some reflections however, shed light on parts of your life which have undergone radical transformation and the result of such unconscious transformation has changed the course of your life.

At such times, you realize that you are no longer the same person you were in some recent memory. If you are sensitive, your mind may react with shock to such conclusion. And you may, if the transformation in question has negative repercussions, start making conscious efforts to reverse the transformation.

Such denial is healthy to a certain extent. Beyond a particular threshold (defined conveniently, by the nature of the situation), such denial can lead to emotional injury. It is important to be wary of such denial and make only controlled and externally aided efforts to negate the change. The most effective external aid is the support of family and friends and such support should be solicited aggressively.

However, a large percentage of the times, the transformation in question is positive and it is important to treat the realization of such transformation with the respect it deserves. Often, celebrating such transformation is important to obtain closure. Closure is the single most important factor in the acceptance of personal change.

Tum Chalo toh Hindustan Chale

toobrown — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 22:31:51 +0000

e the change you want to see in the world.” ~ Gandhi

ramblings of an artistic soul

toobrown — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 04:03:11 +0000

What do you say to a fellow who has vowed to destroy his brotherhood? Such violent thoughts. Such vile plans! O the foul aura of his being! O the ungodly spite in his prose! Such a monster ought not to be invested upon. No, never! Such insanity should be cast into the darkest, most evil corners of the underworld.

Why do we permit such evil to exist? Why don’t we just ask the Divine Being to strike such evil down? Why would such monstrosity be allowed to breathe the same air we breathe, live in the same world as we. You and I.

In the increasingly evil, self consumed world that we live in, sometimes, we feel the negative energy drag us down, consume our happiness, destroy our hope, devour our love and infest in us a hardened self sustained source of hatred and materialistic madness.

For a moment, just reflect upon the evil that has plagued our world since the beginning of this new century. We need to wake up to reality. The world is a mess, right now. And we seem to have submitted to the grim stage of evil and destruction it presents today.

Men and women, my fellow citizens of the world, pray for a vocation! A call from the Divine Being Himself. So He may wake us from the deep slumber of ignorance. Escape from the prison of self content and comfort — because these just inspire rest.

Sharpen your blades, O brethren. Let us form an army and restore our world!

Viva Revolution!

first attempt at a “dear diary type entry”

toobrown — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 07:07:27 +0000

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.