A lousy day for this guy

Those clothes must really chafe

With the advent of the Internet, a good portion of humanity leads two separate lives. One, in the offline world where you are like the mild mannered reporter who is cut off from everyone else and doesn’t have access to the collective knowledge  of humanity. And one in the real world where you wear colorful underwear on the outside, are connected to everyone everywhere and have access to the collective knowledge of humanity while at the same time being about as smart as your average pumpkin.

Everyone knows what happens to you when you die in the offline world. But what happens to your identity on the Internet? What if you had no siblings who could inform your four thousand two hundred and twenty one friends on Facebook that you had died? What if you were and only child and you only had parents who used the Web only as a transport layer to access their emails? Would Facebook still be sending you emails to your old email address telling you what your friends got up to? Shouldn’t someone update your current status to “Dead”?

Facebook - You're Dead

And let’s not even talk about the forums and blogs we hang out on.

Bloke 1 : Dude, what happened to jomanlk? I haven’t seen any of his well written, thoughtful and altogether praiseworthy posts in awhile.

Bloke 2: I don’t know, I haven’t seen him around either. If this was the offline world I’d have thought he died. But we all know that people don’t die on the internet.

Bloke 1: Word. Here, take a look at my cat – http://i.imgur.com/7yOSV.jpg

(This conversation contains only blokes because we all know that there are no girls on the Internet. Only 40 year old men pretending to be girls)

Maybe it’s for the best that your online presence lives on while you die. Usernames and profiles could be valuable family heirlooms. I mean think of it, a Facebook url like http://www.facebook.com/john.n.pereira is worth way more and less stupid than something like http://www.facebook.com/john.da.dawg.2023. The same goes for Email IDs, usernames and domain names. Not to mention reputation earning profiles like Ebay, Amazon, RentACoder profiles. A high value profile on one of those services could be worth a lot of money.

Dying father: And to my eldest son, I bequeath www.pereira.com and all its sub domains and email addresses.

Eldest son: Booyah!

Others: coughsonofabitch!cough

Dying father: And to my programmer daughter, I bequeath my grandfathers RentACoder account with 99.8% acceptance rating and 2143 completed jobs.

Anyway, you get the drift.

All these Web 2.0 people need to come up with ideas on how to address this issue. It’s an important issue. It’s not as if it’s even a rare or borderline issue, people die all the time. And their dying only partially! Their souls might not even be going to the rest they deserve because Google is still indexing all the tweets an app made on behalf of you, therefore trapping your online identity in their capacious servers.

Yes, it’s a chilling thought. Everlasting half-aliveness in some database server or webserver. And for company you’ll have all those Internet memes (we all know they don’t die, they just go away for awhile, waiting to trap some innocent internet newb) of yesteryear playing on a loop, rick rolling the crap out of you. It’s enough to make me shudder.

The more astute of you browsers might have noted the half done look of the site. That’s because it is half done. I haven’t blogged in over 4 months and I thought I might as well get some design work in before I start again.

Ergo, the site is under construction and is immune from criticism. The more foolhardy of you may feel brave enough to browse but do not send me whingey comments about something or other not working or not being readable. Don’t blame me if something falls on you or mice eat your eyes. Shit happens.

If your life is a meaningless husk without my words, go here : http://twitter.com/jomanlk

Danke.

So, before regular broadcasts begin I bring you a teaser trailer in the form of a picture I took at Sigiria (went there on an office trip recently)

The North Star in My Pants.

Thanks to Juggy for inspiring it.

More pics and amusing commentary soon…..

Step 2 is to become an Associate Software Engineer.

In other news, I am now an Associate Software Engineers (surprise, surprise). Which explains my prolonged absence in all forms of the Internet. I got promoted and I got assigned to an urgent project, which means I have less ‘john is doing stuff come again later’ time.

This post is just to inform any of you regular readers who still visit my blog (in case there are any in the first place) about my status. Regular blogging activity does not seem likely to resume at this juncture. Hopefully I’ll be able to work out something new.

On the plus side, I actually get paid to do what I was doing for free in the first place. Developing I mean. In case you get any other ideas.

P.S. – And those of you who tagged me for “10 things that make you happy” will have to wait a bit longer to find out what gets my freak on.

P.S.S. – Work on my new site has paused for the moment. You can get a sneak peak here – http://www.incrediblebulk.info

I’ve temporarily halted blogging till events at work and SLIIT regain normalcy. Which should take a couple of more weeks methinks.

In case you missed it, the first paragraph was a joke while the second paragraph was not. In case that got you confused, this is NOT a paradox. It is not paradoxical in any sense of the word.

At any rate I don’t want this blog to go defunct so I will be posting random stuff that I might come across. This week I will be doing a discussion on why watching plants grow is boring work. So I’ll begin by posting this link to this awesome game/simulation/creative bit of programming that I came across.

This is the home page – http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/crayon

You can find the download link there as well (Size – 5 MB). I recommend that all of you download it and check it out. I’m sure anyone of any age can enjoy it – IT IS NOT TECHNICAL IN THE LEAST. It’s quite an entertaining and interesting project. It was apparently done in less than 5 days. That’s less time than what it would take my mom to get me to cut the grass. This is actually the prototype of the project that eventually won the $25k cash prize for the best independent game of the year. Pretty cool stuff.

And that is the primary reason why watching plants grow is boring. As soon I get a few more minutes of idle time I’ll post more facts to back up my theory.

Short but sweet non?

Oh, what the hell! Have a Happy New Year too!  This one’s on me.