What has gone before

After an absence of nearly 15 months, I’ve decided to revive this blog space to document my life as I am living it. Before moving forward with that, I guess I owe it to the readers of my previous attempt at blogging some explanations.

1. Why the long hiatus?

Life and work items clashed with my blogging plans. It got to a point that blogging had became a chore instead of being fun. It was not as therapeutic as it was when I first started blogging. Skipping blog entries became easier to justify instead of sticking to the daily entry regime. I could see what was happening at the time but I felt like I was not in control of everything that was happening around me.

2. Why restart now?

For one, I have more time now that I’m not managing any urgent projects at work. Part of the reason I stopped before was so I could focus my resource to manage a global project that was dropped in my lap when the previous project manager jumped ship. Now that that project is over, I’m finding more free time everyday to start documenting my life again.

I’ve also had a broadband connection installed at my house for a while now that would definitely help with uploading my postings. I had to deal with the crawling and unreliable dial-up lines for the longest time with my previous blogging attempts. I’m sure that my current bandwidth would make the whole process much easier.

I guess lastly, I could say that I want to reach out to other people again with my stories. Blogging has been a source of enjoyment in that it has introduced me to a whole new circle of friends that I would not have encountered before had I not started blogging. I’ve been reading about their stories and their life in every new posting that it’s just fair that I do the same with mine.


3. What happened to your remaining “Explorace” season 1 write-ups?

Mark this down as a failed experiment. I did watch all the episodes of season 1 up to the finale and even made contact with some of the contestants in hopes of getting interviews from them for the site. I had all entries planned out and it was to be the definitive write-up for this local TV show on the web. Sadly, I could not follow through with all the plans I laid out.

Writing the weekly recaps was quite the challenge since I was writing them as I watched them on TV instead of from tape. More often than not, I found myself jotting notes of things as they happen on TV instead of actually watching the show. As a result, I found that instead of looking forward to an enjoyable time watching the show, it became so much a chore because I was always worried that I would miss something important for the weekly recap. In the end, I felt that I was not giving the effort it’s due and the entries were reflecting that.

On the plus side, the whole experience did give me a whole new appreciation for people who would write weekly recaps of TV shows like the wonderful people of TWOP :) BTW ... I did not watch any episodes of Explorace season 2 so I have no idea what's happening there.

4. What changes have you done to the site?
For the time being, most of the changes are cosmetic in nature. Blogger.com have really improved the available selection of blog customization tools since I was last there 15 months ago. It makes creating a half-way decent blog page very much easier that it was back then.

The archives of my previous postings are listed in a drop down menu to the right of this entry which allows readers to pull pervious postings by the month they were written. Readers could also click on the mail icon under each entry to email the posting to either themselves or their friends if the so desire. Everyone is free to share my postings around but I do ask that they do so responsibly and not quote anything out of context.

I’ve restarted the comments page for the new postings but in doing so have not save the old comments from my old guestbook. Partly this is because I’ve decide to use the comments options offered by Blogger.com instead of my old guestbook provider. I did however retain my old visit count counter but have not decided yet if I want to reset the count to start from scratch.

I’m guessing that this is enough for now although there are other things that I could easily add to the site from Blogger.com instead. For one, I could now easily add a tag board although I have to really consider if that is something that I want to host on this blog. I’ve seen too many tag boards hijacked for their own purposes by irresponsible readers. Why deal with that when comments tag are easier to moderate.

4. What should we expect in future postings?

I think that I will not be committing myself to produce daily entries as I did before. I’ve learnt my lesson from my previous attempt for putting such rigid schedule and expectations on myself. Instead I plan to have semi-regular entries as and when something moves me to write about it. Some days when I have more to say may result in multiple short entries in a day while on some days I just feel like skipping an entry. Regardless, I’ll keep linking the entries into the monthly archives so you can review them at your own leisure.

As for the content, I’m guessing that it would be pretty much the same thing as what I had before. More of things that are happing in my life, things that I’m currently passionate about, things that I’m reading/watching/listening etc. The details could be banal to some but everyone is entitled to their own opinions, I only ask that they respect the opinions of others as well. If we have to disagree on something , lets just disagree to agree on the points instead of making it into a personal attack.

‘Nuff said for now.