The customary Hello World!

I started blogging some 18 months ago. There are things about technology in general and computers in particular that I’d love to write about, but given the general nature of posts in the other blog, I decided to keep material of technical nature away from it. There were attempts, half-attempts, failed attempts at starting a technical blog; none materialized into a blog URL I could attest my name to.

My friend Anand – who incidentally was the one who initiated me to Blogging, was kind to extend me an offer to blog with him jointly. I made all but two posts and got entrenched in quagmire of things at work that kept me off from it. My sincerest apologies Anand!

While spending 8 days of vacation where I tried diligently avoiding computers, it became clear to me that I still fundamentally love computers (distance makes hearts grow fonder ;-)) – and more importantly I love sharing all the exciting things that I discover or do (with them, on them, to them ;-)). So here it is - another entry to the technical blogsphere. I hope, especially if you’ve read so far, that you’ll find the stuff I post in future, worth your time!

Now to address a question, which I prognosticate will be certainly asked of me tomorrow – why Blogger. Don’t you work for MS – and so aren’t you supposed to show your allegiance by using spaces.msn.com? Aren’t you being perfidious!?

space.msn.com are great – especially in the light of the fact that they are in v. 1.0. But I find them limiting in the regard that they don’t allow me to edit their HTML templates. I am a DHTML geek at heart and it hurts me to not tweak the defaults. The boxes you see on this blog (on your right), are built using inline jscript generated by an ASP.NET page, residing on anther server, which is querying amzon web-services and is fetching meta-data of my books and CDs in real-time – that kind of stuff just wouldn’t have been possible. Then there is an even more fundamental issue of aesthetics – I just can’t get myself to like either msn’s default font or any of the bundled image-background templates. That should settle it. It is not a downright repudiation of spaces.msn.com, but a conscious choice based on a set of reasons.