I had to do some shifting around with my hosting, so I thought I might as well make some long overdue changes too.
I got rid of the WordPressMU installation I was using. Of course with the upcoming 3.0 release of WordPress, that shouldn’t matter because they’re merging the codebases.
I merged the science and tech blogs that resided under a subdomain into this one. It meant I had to delete a couple of posts written by collaborators but that doesn’t matter since the whole collaboration experiment failed. I guess all of us were too busy to actually post here frequently.
The other big change I made was to move what used to be my anonymous personal blog that I’d been writing since 2003 into its own WordPress installation under a folder here. I had begun that blog on Blogger in August 2003 when I was still living in the US and back when Blogger didn’t have commenting! It was fun to go back and read some of my posts again, brought a few memories rushing back. I don’t plan to post there anymore, it’s now just an archive at http://absolutegeeky.com/oook
I’m still going to add a few more bells and whistles to this blog here and maybe I’d also post more often, I dunno. For now, the best place to find me usually is on Twitter or Facebook.
A significant proportion of my blog posts are of the “I’m back” variety. Well, maybe not on this blog… Not yet at least.
Anyway, it’s been a really really long time since I posted here and so much has changed in my life since then it’s crazy even trying to recap.
I did re-organize stuff and the posts that used to be under atheism.absolutegeeky.com have been added here. I might even just move to a single WordPress installation and roll all the posts into it. (I’m currently running WordPressMU)
So what prompted my return? Well, I recently looked into my hosting space because I was moving a friend’s site onto it and so logged into my blog. I found a zillion spam awaiting moderation and there was no “Delete All.” Sigh.
Anyway, that prompted me to make one more attempt to get this back on track. So collaborators or no on the Science and Tech blogs, I’m going to try and write here as regularly as I can.
I helped set up the website for an NGO called Citizens for Peace a month or so ago. I helped pick and customise the theme and also convinced them to use WordPress as their CMS!
Incidentally I also support their message and mission, so please go take a look at their website.
I’ve been an enthusiastic (and decent) quizzer for most of my college years in Bangalore. Ever since I moved to Bombay, I’ve not had much chance to take part in any quizzes until the Bombay Quiz Club came around.
They’re a group of quizzers that coalesced to do some informal quizzing every so often in Bombay. One thing led to another and they now have a mostly fixed schedule of meeting every two weeks for some intensive quizzing and recently they’ve even decided to formalise the organisation.
But even though they’re more than a year old, I never got around to attending a quiz until about a month ago. It was a lot of fun and the team I was in placed second with me answering a few questions. I attended the next quiz, two weeks later and once again the team I was in placed second, but this time only because the cricket geeks in my team hammered away at the round of 20 cricket questions rocketing up our team from 5th place to 2nd!
And then this week, this happened. So for a short period, I’m the “top quizzer” in Bombay! 😛 This won’t last, of course, unless I’m really lucky through the year and always end up in winning or placing teams.
Yesterday my colleague, Prayas came up to me and said that the latest edition of Business Today had an article about BlogCamp.in and that we were both featured in it.
Obviously, I rushed out and bought a copy of the magazine! 🙂 Unfortunately I can’t link to the story here as the online edition of the magazine is subscription only.
Prayas who had spoken about the need for Creative Commons licenses in India had got a pretty decent write up and a picture of him talking was the image for the story. All that got said about me was:
Ashwan (27), is a science professor from Mumbai who passionately follows science blogs around the globe.
But hey, I’m not complaining! It’s always cool to see your name in print as long as nothing bad is being said about you!
Then this morning, I opened my mailbox to see an email from Peter which had a link to a story by CNN-IBN about BlogCamp.in!
The short news clip had been uploaded to YouTube by some kind soul and I could finally see my glorious 2 seconds of fame that others had been telling me about for quite a few days!
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the clip in question. Share and Enjoy!
I mostly talked about some of my favourite science blogs and talked about the potential blogging holds for building bridges between scientists and others and even between scientists.
Obviously after the talk I was asked whether I had my own science blog and quite sheepishly I had to say no. But then I thought Why not?
And so here it is. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to maintain the momentum or whether I do know enough about science to be able to write a lot but I sure will try!
