Evolutionary Meme

I got the idea of doing an evolutionary meme from Nita’s blog. Not really the types to do memes or talk about my personal life on a blog, but I found this one to be quite interesting. The rule is simple: The blog author has to write about his/her blog and how it has changed in the past. So, this post will be quite long and you may want to stop reading now.

After I looked through my archives, it turns out that I started blogging in July 2006. For a week or two, I was at Blogger. I remember spending at least two to three sleepless nights learning HTML in order to do jazzy stuff at my blog. If you are aware, Blogger doesn’t let you password protect your blog. A year back, it didn’t even give you the option of making your blog private. I think they’ve introduced that option now. Anyway, left with little choice, I did some coding and made my blog a private one. I remember adding Harry Potter theme music to it, which is funny, considering the fact that I was the only one who ever read its contents or heard the tune. I wrote very few posts because Blogger was too slow and took too long to get updated, even though mine was a new blog with hardly any content.

I found the whole thing to be a big hassle and started finding another blogging platform that would relieve my HTML-related stress. So, I shifted to WordPress and have never regretted it. The different widgets were a delight in that they gave me more time to focus on my writing instead of writing HTML codes. Some of my earlier posts are quite “personal” in that they provide a rare glimpse of my day-to-day thought process. This post is a perfect example. It talks about everything I’m passionate about, including movies, swimming, eating and HARRY POTTER.

I have been bitten by the Harry Potter bug yet again. I’m reading the Half-Blood Prince for the third time. Cant wait for the last book to come out I feel that the book should be released sometime in 2007(Else Ill absolutely die). The 5th movie based on the book “The Order of Phoenix” will be released in July 2007 also. I read somewhere that JK Rowling wouldn’t want her book release to clash with the movie. I don’t know what this piece of news means. But I do hope that the book is released in the first half of 2007.

This was back in August 2006…almost a year before the release of the final book; still, I was thinking about the seventh book. I guess old habits die hard.

I was enticed into shifting totally to wordpress because of their new “Privacy” feature. So I can choose whatevr Privacy settings I need. I think Blogger really needs to buck up and do something about its privacy settings before more bloggers start leaving its site.

This was when I had started blogging only to keep an account of my daily thought process. I still do that, but on another private blog. Time and Again has been a public blog since September 2006. That is why the URL of this blog is “havetoremember.wordpress.com”. I had started blogging because I just “had to remember” what I’d done 10-15 years back. I cling on to my past. I remember explaining the meaning of my URL earlier too, but this is for the benefit of those who didn’t know about it.

It’s funny that I even have a post on the Growth of Linux Servers in India, dated 9/29/06, because I started learning how to work on ubuntu only recently, after some encouragement from Swen. September was a month marked by all kinds of random posts (Shahid- Kareena romance, Shah Rukh Khan, CFA Level-I, and Mallika Sherawat! ) I think I did this purely to get a steady flow of readers. I have never really been the Bollywood type of person. I wrote posts on topics people wanted to read, even if I found them to be uninteresting. This was the time I made some of my earliest blog friends- Ish, Justin, and the Ph.D guys at the Sparks Team Blog. Ish is a very active blogger who aspires to have probably a million blog hits one day and is currently preparing for his 12th grade exams. He has a very cool style of writing. You’ve got to check him out, if you already haven’t. Justin has almost retired, I think. His friend Adam hangs around WordPress sometimes though. Tismar Khan (a.k.a Parmanu) is one of the Ph.D guys and he blogs about a lot of stuff- mostly rocket science (got his Ph.D in Aeronautics ), history and politics.

sk exists only for his love for Microsoft. I’ve had an amazing number of arguments with him, which have been very entertaining. If you take a look at his posts, there are many instances where he has just fallen short of abusing me. Heh. It was only after communicating with him that I really started even thinking about Microsoft and technology. Before that, I didn’t really give a shit. Since he liked Microsoft, I absolutely HAD to dislike it. Ish has also described me as a Microsoft hater on his blog. Anyway, this is how the technology and Microsoft phase in my blog life started. I also did one of my first and last reviews on a Microsoft product during this period. So, October was marked with a lot of technology stuff- Microsoft, Google, Firefox, Internet Explorer…you name it, you’ve got it! Oh, and don’t forget to read some Microsoft Jokes.

I enjoy reading many other blogs and most of them are in my Blogroll. There are some other blogs that are in my Google Reader or Tag Surfer. If I find myself reading their blogs regularly, then I add them to my Blogroll too, for what it’s worth.

I didn’t really blog much November onwards because I was busy studying for my CFA exam. But whenever there was an update on the Harry Potter front, I made sure that I found time and blogged about it. It wasn’t until my exam got over in June that I resumed blogging again. I was relatively free during Summer and had lots of time on my hand to re-read Harry Potter stuff, catch up on movies, some novels and blog about them.

I’m sure all my regular readers remember my Harry Potter phase…especially during the Book Release. The book had been leaked over the internet and needless to say, even though I had pre-ordered mine on Amazon, I spent about 15 hours reading the whole thing from scanned images on a laptop screen. I blogged about my initial reaction (Beware: The post is filled with profanities. Click at your own risk!) extensively and got LOTS of hits. And when I say lots, I mean 94, 369 hits in a single week. You should check out sk’s post on Halo-3, which is a spoof on my Harry Potter post. I find this imitation to be quite flattering, actually.

August 2007 onwards, there hasn’t really been any spectacular incident on my blog. The same usual stuff…movies, books, technology, maybe a post or two on India. That’s about it

I have never been able to stick to a particular theme in this blog because I’m pretty random and I blog about anything that catches my eye. It’s seldom that I write a post like this one. So, if you are one of the very few who are still reading this post, then I would like to thank you for taking out some time and visiting my blog and perhaps commenting!

Also, if you liked the idea of writing an evolutionary meme, then consider yourself tagged.