serendipity

7:19pm: Back to wordpress
Ok, my honeymoon with LJ was rather short - am back to WordPress on my website - http://www.pramod.ch/ - nothing to do with LJ as such, but I think its just because WordPress offers me the opportunity to waste time tinkering with WordPress on my site - which is difficult with LJ. So there it goes. I will soon add the plugin which will add all my WordPress entries to LJ - why? At the very least Rajith will not complain that I am not writing here :-)

6:46pm: LJ and SixApart joins hands
Perhaps I am a bit late - but just read that SixApart (the MT people) have bought LJ. So in a funny way, I am back to the MT world! I wonder if LJ will also follow MT as a fully commercial product soon!?

3:10pm: Back to livejournal...
I think it looks like I am coming back to livejournal after my trials and tribulations with Blogger, MovableType, and WordPress. MT and WP were great, I played around with them on my site....but - esp. with MT the comment spamming was hopeless! WP was much better I felt - user interface, ease of installation and the fact that I didnt have to rewrite the index file everytime manually and there was class to it! I even managed to handle the messy comment spams with some nice plugins - now part of the current version! And the fact that I could link it with livejournal was cool too - didnt use it though much!

But last month I decided to change my host and now I am a bit lost as to how to port all the posts. With LJ no just isses - so I am thinking of getting back to LJ. And then this cool tool iJournal by William Coldwell running on Mac OS X - I am tempted to get back to LJ. And this is my first post WP post here. I will integrat LJ to my site soon (leave a comment if you can help me with it :-)

:-)

1:58pm: Palakkad - first IT-enabled district in India
I was just reading that Palakkad, my home district will be the first IT enabled district in Kerala. The work it seems has been going on since May 2003 under the Modernising Government Programme. And the computer programmes were developed by National Informatics Centre.

The application suite is developed in three layers, with e-citizens at the top, Collectorate Internet in the middle, and functional applications at the bottom.

I am not sure how much internet enabled will be services. The idea seems to be to let agencies such as Friends, Akshaya Centres and Kudumbasree unito to become service delivery units - perhaps places with a internet enabled computer and someone with basic training to access the sites. I would hope that the sites will be made publically accessible for all of us and publicised using a central portal.

To be frank, the NIC portal, www.nic.in in itself is not really a best case for a good portal. Even the search functionality leaves a lot to be desired. On the face of it it looks like great development - but if not well executed - it will be a waste of time and resources and will soon end up being another bottle-neck. Hope it wouldn't!

View this post on my blog

4:01pm: Map of my home districts
Here is a map of Palakkad District, part of Kerala in southern India. My maternal village is called Kongad - located somewhere in the centre of the district.

I am still looking for a good map of Thrissur district.

View this post on my blog

2:06am: My first Livejournal entry
This is my first livejournal entry. rajith had been feeling rather bad for a long time for introducing me to livejournal and yet not see any entries from me! I think now its time for me to get started.

Why is this time? Well, simply because I just felt that I should get started. And what better time than when I feel like getting started!

Frankly I don't really know who am I addressing here, but I hope over a period of time I would be able to stabilise the kind of topics I would be writing. Perhaps something of interest to some or perhaps as a window to my thoughts and mind!

As you can see my mood is rather gloomy. As yet I don't want to get to that. But on the other hand it is 1.58 am on a Friday night (or should I call it Saturday morning, guess I will stick with the Friday night version, as I do plan to get some sleep as soon as I am through with this entry!) and I am sitting and tapping away on the keyboard.

There is a reason for that. I am now what Steve Jobs calls a "Switcher" and have been fiddling around with mac environment. Its fun and lots of thing to learn. (Now it's not really like a high tech thing, but the ease with which I made a music compilation with all my sister's favourite music and how I could just in few minutes upload 100s of images from my cam, organise it and upload it to my website is amazing!)

Well, I think that's it for now, it's rather late and my eyes are coming down rather heavily! Will drop by soon for more!