akrish

So I’ve been reading The Economist a bit recently and they have a lot of international news. Unfortunately most of it isn’t good. Reading it this morning kinda got me depressed. Here’s what I read:

1. Brazil: Teenagers in Brazil, specifically Rio de Janeiro, are walking around with machine guns selling cocaine and marijuana in open-air markets. Policemen, officials and ordinary people are pretty much turning the other cheek. Pretty scary, but I guess the good news is that the mayor is supposedly trying to clean things up, but he hasn’t gotten very far. Read about it here.
2. The rest of the Americas: Venezuela has a reported murder rate of 48 in 100,000. That’s the second highest in the world, second only to El Salvador (another central american country). Pretty much I don’t want to go to South America. I don’t understand how people can live and be productive if they’re constantly fearing for their lives. Oh by the way, that’s just the reported rate, it doesn’t count most police-related deaths, prison deaths, and others. Read this article, it’s really scary.
3. India: The Ganges is ridiculously polluted, and so is a lot of India for that matter. So my question is… the Ganges is supposedly holy right? then why is it so polluted? Shouldn’t it be something that Indians are proud to take care of? Maybe I’m just being naive here but I really don’t get it. The problem is that, since the Ganges is holy, people continue to bathe and drink the water, and then they get sick. But again there’s some good news in that there are environmentalists that are working to clean it up, but so far they haven’t been very successful. Read about this here.
4. China: Olympic athletes are refusing to compete in endurance events because they’re worried that the pollution will affect their performance in the future. This just makes me really sad. Pretty soon people won’t want to go outside because there’s too much air pollution. Kind of reminds me of Wall-E…

And don’t even get my started on the middle east. That region is just a disaster.
And now to cheer you up…

So I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I had extravagant plans for this holiday break, but I’ve never really made clear what exactly I wanted to do. Saying that break is about half way done, I figured I’m not too late to actually do this. Plus I think it’ll actually inspire me to get to work because I haven’t exactly been as productive as I’d like. Really quickly, what I wanted to do was, build a good back-end for this company that I’m starting with a couple of friends, play a lot of guitar, run a lot, and of course spend time with my high school friends and my family. Of these, I think the things I’ve only actually feel accomplished in the guitar-playing and the socializing aspects. Of course I’m really happy about this and I’m more enthusiastic about music than I think I’ve ever been before, but I do want to get some of my work done.

My brother and I are always talking about how we can never get any work done when we’re at home and I probably should have realized this and not planned so much for the break, but for some reason I thought I’d be a lot more motivated than I actually am. It’s strange because last year I used to come home to finish my problem sets and get all of my serious work done (I had a harder to working in the dorms than at home) but this year it’s exactly the opposite. I find that I’m really productive when I’m at school but am exactly the opposite at home. Granted this state of affairs is better; I probably shouldn’t find it hard to work when I’m at school right?  Be that as it may, I’d like to get a little bit of my work done and it just isn’t happening; there are way to many distractions at home.

Actually I find that I don’t really have the motivation to do anything when I’m home. I pretty much sit around, play guitar, and watch tv (often at the same time). I also sleep a LOT (like 12 hours a day… seriously). I haven’t really been running because I’m waking up too late. I always seem to have plans for lunch or something, and I pretty much wake up just to make it to lunch so there isn’t time to run before that. Running later in the day is almost impossible and I don’t even try anymore. So this break is definitely a break. I’ve completely unwound from the stressed and pressures of finals and will soon begin to prepare myself for another intense semester (probably by sleeping and playing guitar. Go figure).

The one thing I have been doing a lot (that I’m really happy about) is practicing clarinet. I really want to get into wind ensemble next year and that’s really motivating me to prepare my audition. I’m definitely noticing improvement, and incidentally so is my mom who often listens to me practice. I’ve got a couple more weeks to perfect this Concerto I’m working on and I’m pretty confident that I’ll have a successful audition.

So I have two more weeks before school starts and I’m hopeful that I’ll get into a groove with running, working and music now that most of my friends have gone back to school and my parents are back to work.

As I’ve been perusing other blogger’s sites, I’ve picked up some general trends that blogs seem to follow. I’ve been working on adding some of these features to akrish, which is partially why I haven’t been writing that much recently. Very briefly, here they are:

Archives: This is my third month of blogging, and I have a decent amount of articles on the site. The archives allow me, and other readers to browse articles by month. I really see this as a way for users to find my most recent articles.

Tagging: A work in progress (it’s running decently on my local server). I’m trying to enable tagging of articles so that users can browse articles based on tags. It’ll let users find the stuff that they’re really interested in. Hopefully I’ll finish this up this weekend and deploy it on the production server.

Comments improvements: A lot of blogs allow users to link to their website in their comments, so I jumped on the boat and did the same thing. there’s a weird behavior if a user doesn’t include a URL that I need to get around to fixing, but for the most part it works.

I also want to implement a more general search engine on the site, but I probably won’t get around to it for awhile (now that school’s really started I’m very busy). Are these features useful? Do they work as you want them to? Do they contribute to the blog? Any criticisms? Thanks.

I’ve got a lot of ideas for articles that I want to write, and not enough time to write them all, so here’s a list of some of those ideas. Hopefully I’ll enough time to get around to all of them in the next couple of weeks.

1. Summer – a brief recap of my incredibly uneventful summer.

2. What I learned at Tellme – my first work-experience and what I took away from that (this will probably be a list). Naturally, I’ll only write this one when I finish my internship on Friday.

3. I’ve got another idea brewing that I’ll start working on soon. I can’t give away any other information because it’s a secret

4. Moving in and running a house – I’ll be moving off-campus this year, so I may end up writing about how my house-mates and I are coping with bills, chores, and everything else that comes with a house.

5. Running club – I intend to join the running club at school, so I’ll probably write something about joining, meeting everyone there, and the runs they go on.

There may also be some more album reviews and book reviews (if I find good albums and read books). The finance thread will probably be pretty stagnant for awhile saying I don’t know enough about the field and don’t have time to learn about it right now.

On top of all of this, I intend to make the design a little more intricate (maybe AJAXy, but definitely more dynamic). I don’t really like this new layout, but I’ll keep it for a bit, mostly because I don’t have the time or patience to make a new one.

After being online for about a month, Akrish.net is finally on Google’s search engine. It’s the first hit if you search for ‘akrish.net’, and it’s the second hit if you just type ‘akrish’. Hopefully this will result in a lot more traffic on the site. Thanks to everyone who linked to me (the only one I know of is Prashant) as that’s how Google’s crawlers got here in the first place. Also thanks to all the people who’ve been reading my entries and giving me feedback on them.