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4/6/2008 Goodbye Spaces !I HAVE MOVED to Wordpress !
I finally migrated all my blogs (including comments and tags) from Spaces to Wordpress .
You would think that there would be a simple Import/Export buttons to do this. Nope ! Spaces is the only blogging site that cannot be imported into Wordpress.
So tonight, I decided to doggedly debug and fix the problem I was facing with my Python Script. And sadly, I began to consider abandoning my complicated Python Script!
Instead, I chose to only migrate just the blog posts (not my blogroll and other Lists) , thanks to a different approach from this amazing blog's implementation of a Python script. It just worked like a charm ! Yeah, scripting rules and now I get why the Pythonistas have that smirk :-0
And this exercise made me believe that the "the inner Dev" in me is still very much ALIVE :-)
PS: I have to manually import my Lists and other sundry stuff from here later.
So please visit me at my new home: http://umarag.wordpress.com
3/8/2008 Changes, changes, changes..I have been playing with a python script to import all my old blogs into my possible new blog home - away from spaces.
It has been a frustrating process - not to have a standard way of exporting and importing blogs across the competing land-o-blogscapes.
And I have to not just XML-ize just my blogs, but the lists , comments and trackbacks. I wonder what happened to microformats.org effort ?
Anyways...stay tuned..I may just show up as a brand new avatar, and may have to just bid adieu to my gubBins past ... 3/2/2008 One Evening, in the Garden of Life !How can this be possible ?
I found a blissful hour today to catch up on my literary pretensions. And since I maniacally read "all books by an author/poet" in one long crazy set of months - I decided to order books of poet Grace Paley, since I specifically fell in love with her one poem that appeared in The New Yorker sometime in December 2005.
But I never had a chance to check her anthologies/books out, beyond those short poems I read in the mag. So I decided to google her today...(yes, I didn't Live Search!)
Sigh...How can this be possible ?
And I was saddened to learn that Grace Paley passed away last August . Guess, I was stationed in a different part of the world, back in August and somehow missed the news. Would it have mattered ? Yes, I would have picked her books 8 months sooner... Sigh !
So I googled and I found this poem called "Here" and ...and on reading it...I went completely pale and ashen, and was completely shaken. I re-read it a couple times.
Here is the short poem that I have quoted below in "full" text-
Woah...Now get this...How can this be possible ?
I was pale, ashen and shell-shocked - for a reason ! I had never read this Paley poem ever before..... Yet, how was this possible ?
It surely got emotional with involuntary tear-drops starting to flood my thoughts. I ran around the house, like a banshee looking for my notebook - wherein I doodle/dawdle/dabble random amateur literary stuff !
And then I found it. I had inked these few lines in September of 2006 and I had titled it -
How can this be possible ?
I will let you, dear reader, to conclude your own .
But thanks to Paley's "Here" , especially these two little magnificent lines, I repeat,
the teary-eyed-writer-in-me dares to think - "Life is indeed full of possibilities".
Yes !
2/24/2008 Tis The Season Of..Oh wait..whatever happened to seasons ?
Last summer in India, my parents complained of the dwindling crows and almost extinct sparrows. They commented on the rather short mango-season and the good old quiet monsoons that drenched Southern India were no more gentle downpours but were now an angry torrent of flooding rain.
And I arrived back in Seattle last fall, to only witness my dear maple tree almost going directly from green to brown with her leaves. It was the first year I did not get to take a perfect autumn yellow shot of her, in almost a decade.
Those wild Daffodils were beginning to peek out already , one wintry January morning , in my yard , only to be brutally frozen by the next day's snowfall!
I go up to the ski-pass and everyone laments the Hobson's choice- either it is all packed up with ice or it is melting like crazy. Where did the powder season go ?
I just put down my Christmas tree in late January, and the stores were already gearing up with "Spring Easter Bunny Retailware" ! Do we need to really rush our seasons ?
Is it mid-winter break now ? Oh wait, everyone is already done planning with their calendar for spring break, and some are ahead of the curve, with finalizing their summer plans for the kids. Why are the stores stocking up on swim-wear now, considering the temperatures are still freezing outside ?
Why are we in such a hurry ? Why do we need to hoard and stock up for a season that may soon never come, thanks to our bad frankenstein habits in treating Mother Earth, and ourselves ?
Everday I am bombarded with research on how much we are sleeping less, how our kids are developing faster than they should, how a culture of instant gratification has shortened our ability to slow down and enjoy anything. How many hours do we rake-in for things that matter most to us ?
Are we really productive despite the technological advancements ? Is that frozen hi-sodium pre-made food really saving you time ? But ..but on a similar vein, in our world of all things "pre-processed" and "manufactured", living simply and naturally seems an extravagance, only a few can afford - as in the extra luxury "time tax" you have to pay to be simple and natural.
Oh, the only thing that defies the season and is eternally perennial is now the big bad "FLU". There is no more flu season, everyone seems to be afflicted by various strains throughout the year. Looks like those acytota basic life-forms have figured out something that the higher forms haven't ! Sigh!
And I type this as I slowly savor my spoonful of natural honey in my ginger-lime tea today, wistfully wondering where have all the bees gone ? Will honey soon be relegated to a distant tasteful memory from our sweet past , thanks to the Colony Collapse Disorder?
2/20/2008 Amor De DiabloThere are somethings you never grow out of.
Despite my green leanings and striving for environmental consciouness in everyday living, I have a confession to make.
And this epiphany occured this morning, as I hauled my vehicle to a collision auto place this morning. Please do not ask the reason what I was doing at a collision place. Thank You. But continuing my story, as I parked and walked towards the office, there stood a shining brilliant "Blue Devil" - a stunning handsome VT 6.0 that gleaned in the morning sun.
And suddenly I became giddy, completely wowed by this hunking blue eye-candy. It was a Lamborghini Diablo. I had never seen one so upclose and personal. It was a VT6.0, with its shiny wide wheels and those doors that would make any gal, like me just fly off the ground ! I looked around, before slyly touching the rear Carbon Fiber spoiler. Roarr..
I realized how much I still dig sexy cars - that is of the exotic, sporty, fast kind. There is something ooh..so la la about looking at a good hunk of metal that is so amazingly designed. And I am clueless about the inner-engineering of these machines. I do not know the poppet valves from camshafts, but there is some "inner design zen" that gets pleased, staring at the Perfectly Sculpted Body - Design of these machines !
I was numbed by it's handsomeness, and I thought of my early days of Grad School in Detroit. I hung around folks who could name cars with their eyes closed, just listening to the hiss of the engines. I diligently went to the Auto Shows year after year. And I learnt the Detroit "hand signal" to let a driver know what a good looking car he/she drove, seriously ! Yes, ogling at cars was a serious past-time, that we grad students indulged, around Motown and it's wealthy suburbia !
And then I interned/worked at Chrysler. The Auburn Hills World HQ that housed a museum, was to me a candyland - a perfect place for a kid like me to get lost. And it was when I first started there, thanks to my colleagues, I got interested in Lambis, considering Chrysler had just sold off Lamborghini to some investor guy in Asia. (Now it is owned by Audi). And for the longest time, I used to pride in rattling off names of all models of Lambis - Countach, Murcielago, Miura, Diablo (and Gallardo).
It was good to have this brief reverie at the Collision place, this morning, until I got woken up with a "big fat bill" to fix up my old faithful !
PS: I had blogged briefly about Lambi Gallardo , two years ago, when it made a splash in Mission Impossible 3 .
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Lingua Chaos Multiplexed
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