I’ve had the orange look since December 2001. There were many things I liked about it. I liked the uplifting orange. I liked the flexibility of the three-column design. I liked the fact that I got to see my nephews every time I visited my web page. I liked that I was able to display a lot of information on the same page and still feel like it wasn’t overly cluttered. Unlike my previous design, I didn’t get tired of it instantly. But it’s been over two years. Much has changed in my life since the orange design came about.

I found myself thinking more and more about a design change in the last few months. I wanted to be able to put up pictures of beautiful California and the different states we visited this summer. I wanted to encourage myself to take more pictures. I wanted the design to be simpler. I wanted to remove the thousand links I had somehow accumulated on the left column. The down side of this design means you may have to click through two pages to get to some of the content but I think that’s worth the simplicity.

All the other pages are still in the old design and will be updated little by little in the coming month. Let me know what you think of the new look.

It’s like this.

Since September, I’ve been struggling to keep writing. Not because I don’t want to, but because most of the topics I used to find interesting don’t seem to be anymore, at least not to me. I’m sure things will eventually work themselves out and I will find the time and energy to ponder random things once again, but till then I apologize for the lack of consistent updates, especially in my side sections like tidbits, learned things, and aiptek pictures.

I spend many nights sitting at my laptop trying to will myself into writing, but I can’t. I don’t even want to sit at home anymore. I want to go out, be with people. Somehow remind myself that life is going on, in its charming, annoying, delightful, fun and sad ways. I want to talk until I’m blue in the face, I want to listen until I’m falling asleep. I want to laugh and hug.

At the times I don’t crave human attention, I long for the opposite. I take a good book and curl up or turn the TV up all the way, enough to block my thoughts. Part of me wants the days to pass and another part wishes she could stop time. There are moments I want to hang on to badly.

As if to reassure me, my laptop broke yesterday. I was trying to take out one of the books it’s stacked on and I dropped it, causing the A/C adapter to split in half, inside the machine. I spent all of yesterday running from uptown to downtown, trying to replace the part, only to find out that it’s not possible. I have to order it directly from Toshiba. At night, when I finally collapsed on the couch, I ordered the part and decided to relax. It’s amazing how stressed a tiny glitch can make me at times. Yet when the world falls apart around me, I manage not to freak out.

So I might not write very often lately. If you like my site, take this as an opportunity to explore the archives. I’ve got a lot of words on this site and I guarantee they’d keep you busy for quite some time. I will be writing again real soon, I’m sure. Knowing me, I’ll even update tomorrow, after having said all this. But it’s important to say it anyhow. This way, when I look back years later, I can remember why.

Just a little down time.

I want to temporarily stop thinking so much and start living more.

Previously? Tidbits of Conversation.

I’ve now been writing this log for over eight months.

To many, that’s not a really long time and to some it’s awfully long. Personally, I’m quite amazed that I’ve been writing consistently for that long. Amazing that I can find something to write about every single day. Maybe that can account for the entries you’ve read that seem to lack in substance. (I’m not going to do my usual self-deprication act here, since I assume you wouldn’t be coming here unless you enjoyed my writings on some level and if you’re a first time reader, well tough crap if you don’t like what you see.)

I’ve also often thought about why I write. I went through many phases and mood changes, especially in the beginning. I started with blogger, so I anxiously awaited for my page to show up in their directory and then I kept checking my hits everyday. I asked my friend Adam, who’s hosting my site, to setup my referrer logs so I could check who was coming from where. I discovered weblog rings and joined a few so I could get more hits. I needed the hits!

And then a while passed and I started reading more and more people’s pages and seeing what they did and tried to figure out what appealed to me most so I could shape my own site. I redesigned a few times, but I am no designer and I realized that most concepts I had in my head weren’t really feasible in my ability range. And then I went through the self-denial phase where I was like, ‘who cares if anyone reads my page, it’s for me anyhow.’ Which I totally believe to be an untruth. If you want to write and don’t care for others to read, it makes no sense to make a web page for your writing. Barnes and Noble and other establishments would be happy to sell you diaries that require no HTML skills.

For days I pondered why I felt the need to have a site and to write, especially since no one read it anyhow. And, of course, that wasn’t the truth. While I might be far from the most popular sites, I had a few consistent readers. Some people even liked to me from their sites. And then a few people started emailing me their thoughts related to some of the posts I made and we started conversing, initially about those issues and then in general. That’s when it hit me.

I’ve always written diaries, so the question of why I wrote wasn’t interesting. The reason I like writing on the web, however, is because it’s like having a multi-way conversation. Not only do I get to put my thoughts out there, but people write back to me and challenge my thoughts and stretch my mind, or they agree with me and make me feel less alone. Both of which I find extremely rewarding.

I don’t really like reading logs that point to many news items. News items are interesting and good information but between the newspapers, metafilter, slashdot and a few similar sites, I can get all the news and links I need and then some. I like the personal side of the pages. I like to see how people think, what kind of lives others have, what struggles they go through. When something great happens to the owner of a page I read regularly, I feel just as happy as if it had happened to someone I know in real life. And when something bad happens, I tend to react just as strongly.

I don’t exactly know who reads my log anymore, and I’ve sort of let go of my obsession with it. Of course I like that people read it and I hope more and more people do, but if they don’t, well it’s really hard to obsess over something I can’t control. I’ve also learned that not every page appeals to everyone. Some of the pages others love, don’t give me the satisfaction that I get from my favorites. And thankfully, we all have the freedom do surf wherever we want.

What I do still wish for, however, is for my readers to make contact. I feel like my thoughts are a good start for me, but when someone else tells me his or her side, it makes me think harder and if there were three of us, the conversation would get even more interesting, and so on. So since I don’t really link to much of anything, except in my tidbits, I wonder why people don’t tell me what they think more regularly.

Oh, well. This is just to give you my thoughts on logging for this long and also to tell you that if you have something to say and even if you don’t, please say it. If you don’t like to say it publicly here, you can always email me.

And if you don’t? Well that’s okay, too, I still hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoy writing it.

Ps: Yes, I know eight months is an odd time to be writing a reflective entry, but I felt like it and who says I have to wait anyhow?

Previously? Evil!.

Bye Bye More Than Words. Since no one seemed interested in the lyrics and neither was I, I decided to stop doing them. Lemme know if you think otherwise.

Thoughts
Last night, I got spam about voting in the upcoming presidential election. Obviously, these spam people didn’t do their homework correctly. What’s point of sending that email to a foreigner?

On the way home last night, what I’d done wrong with my bio page hit me and I fixed it. It loads much quicker now. Apologies for being so stupid before.

I’ve changed my page so that the links don’t open up new pages. If you want the link to be in a new page, right-click and choose “Open in New Window”. Thank You.

Looks like last night’s reading was tons of fun. Even more reason to be bummed. Oh well. I meant to tell you that as Jake and I went home, the guy sitting next to us in the subway was reading Neal’s book and had the latest issue of McSweeney’s on his lap. Obviously, he hadn’t been able to get in either. Brooklyn being Dave’s current hometown, we shouldn’t have been surprised that the event was so packed. I guess it’s good for them. Next time we’ll have to remember to get there early.

Oh well.

So I decided I wanted to try a poll. Go ahead, tell me what you think, you know you want to.