I’m Still Alive, and I Have Books!

Back to Books - Old PosterYes it is true. The rumours of my disappearance in a freak alien invasion or my retirement into the mountains of Antarctica are greatly exaggerated. I am still alive, but this blog has been a bit dead for a while — more hibernating really. I thought it was only fair to say hello to my growing tribe of RSS and email subscribers (Greetings!), who I like to narcissistically imagine as hanging on to my every digital word.

As Vishal has so colourfully explained, we’ve been a bit busy with a small archaeological dig within the confines of our home. The layers were many, the sediments rich, and the finds extraordinary. To say I’m a bit of a bibliophile would be a gross understatement. While I’m sure there are many with a larger and more extensive stash of books than I have, I assure you the only reason for that is that I hold myself back for practical reasons. All those books need somewhere to be put, and sedimentary layers are not the best storage system. Once that minor organisational glitch is solved, you just try and stop me from accumulating the largest collection of completely insignificant tomes that I absolutely adore.

While all this reorganisation was in progress, my online activities languished greatly. Unfortunately, I can’t say my house and my books are now in order, but domestic archaeology is very hard work. For a lack of energy and time I had to stop, and the last few days have been spent introducing my visiting cousin to the wonders and horrors of the maddest “metropolis” on Earth: Dubai. The good part of that, besides the company, has been some decent photographs which I will make sure I share with all of you here some time soon.

In the meantime, fear not, brave readers. This delinquent shall be back soon to expand your minds, entertain your senses, menace society, and ruin your children in an infinite number of easy steps. Stay tuned, thank you for your patience, and wishing you a wonderful holiday season.

Samir

The Triple Benefit of Creative Procrastination

Just a few days ago I was telling you how procrastination is your greatest enemy, and now I have decided to reveal to you how procrastinating can sometimes be a good thing. Before you card-carrying members of the angry mob attack with pitchforks and torches, let me explain. It’s not that I am a fence-sitter or a turn-coat by nature, but unfortunately, this universe of ours is not black and white. It is instead a distinct shade of gray. All things are good in moderation, and procrastination is no exception.

At its heart, procrastination is a delaying tactic used by your very clever self to avoid doing something that you need to do. The reasons can be many — fear, a lack of confidence, a failing of courage, or good old laziness, are all equally common motivators for this habit. What this delaying tactic leads to is the passage of time, and in your modern, hurried existence, you automatically assume that any passage of time implies a waste of it. That is not always true. Time can have many effects on you and your life, and not all those effects involve painful botox injections or expensive cosmetic surgery. Some of those effects can be of immense benefit, and the wisdom that comes with time makes a moderate and creative sort of procrastination a very healthy thing for:

  1. Making the right decisions
  2. Doing things well
  3. Executing with purpose

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Carnivale! December 04 2007

Blog CarnivalA couple of weeks ago I submitted the first article in my series on personality in blogging titled The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships to a few blog carnivals. Since then the post has been included in some carnivals. I’d like to thank the bloggers for the link love and pay them back in kind, so here goes:

Thank you all!

Samir

Litemind Lists Project Favourites

Luciano Passuello over at Litemind recently put up the final list of entries in his Lists Group Writing Project. I had thrown in my hat into the ring with my entry about procrastination.

Now it’s voting time, and as I have done before on similar projects, I decided to look though all 66 entries and list those that stood out and those I would like to recommend to my readers:

  • Six Savvy Reasons Why You Should Travel Light by Sheila Beal
    I happen to be a whole-hearted believer in travelling light, and Sheila builds a very clean and convincing case for it filled with many practical insights.
  • List Of Why Blogs Are A Female Gender by Domtan
    In a single blow, Domtan produces a list that is at once deep, depraved, and utterly hilarious!
  • Best 101 Lists by Pearl
    This is a list of 40-something lists of 101 things. One even leads to a list of 1001 lists, and I’m sure many of the others also have links as part of their 101 listing. Pearl deserves a round of applause for just giving me a happy information-overload high as I try to contemplate the geometrical exponential explosion of it all!
  • 100 Resources To Improve Your Career, Relationships And Money by Lawrence Cheok
    A monster list of useful links. Good work Lawrence!
  • 100 Sites I Seek Inspiration From by Iain Hamp
    Like all grab bag-deals, this list of 100 inspirational websites is bound to have its fair share of duds that just don’t do anything for some of us, but the rest is pure gold and Iain deserves a pat on the back for putting this together.
  • 40 ways to make your mind your playground by Fier
    This article is the result of three hours well spent by Fier. It is a listing of fun games and intellectual challenges, all designed to enhance your mind in some way. There’s something here for everyone, everyone who likes using their mental equipment on occasion, that is.
  • Ten things I didn’t know until last week by Blaiq
    Blaiq proves once again that you can never know too many pieces of interesting trivia. Educational.
  • 8 Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople by Daniel Sitter
    Simple and useful are by buzzwords when judging any content praise-worthy. This post by Daniel is both.
  • 21 Punching Tips On Social Media Marketing and Social Media Optimization by Etienne Teo
    A great collection of links on the topic of social media that together form a very comprehensive tome on the subject. Excellent stuff by Etienne, and close to my heart because my old post on taking photos and even my Litemind entry on overcoming procrastination have greatly benefited from social media traffic.
  • 10 Ways to Survive the Writers’ Strike by Cynthia Boris
    Cynthia obviously loves her subject matter, and it shows. I love geeks … and I use the word in the most complementary way, of course.
  • 15 Tips to Prevent Repetitive Strain Injury and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome by CSS
    A simple and straight-forward post of tips on a truly useful subject, with enough appropriate links for further reading. Perfect.
  • 12 WordPress Editors you can choose by Karthik
    I’m a big fan of comprehensive resource posts. They take a great deal of effort and research to put together, but the end result, if done well, is always worth the trouble. This roundup of editors for WordPress blogs from Karthik is a prime example.

Enjoy these wonderful entries, and I wish all the participants the best of luck with the competition.

Samir

7 Tricks You Need to Fight Procrastination

All the ideas and brainstorming in the world can’t help you if you don’t take action and do something about them. In any process of creation your greatest enemy is always procrastination. If you ever wish to be someone who actually achieves something, rather than one of the many who had all the best ideas, your greatest skill will need to be fighting your own procrastinating mind.

It’s a tough battle, but somebody has got to do it. Since it’s your mind that’s creating all the trouble, you’re volunteered for this skirmish whether you like it or not. Procrastination, writers block, all sorts of other creative blocks, and just plain laziness, they all happen so regularly because, face it, you’re brilliant. You’re so brilliant, that your brain comes up with these perfect and logical excuses for not doing things all the time and you just can’t argue with brilliant and flawless logic.

Be thankful that the world and human life, doesn’t actually function on logic. No sir it doesn’t. Look at a newspaper, any newspaper, and you will see hundreds of examples of brute force winning out over logic, so would it be so wrong to channel some of this barbaric brute force in a positive manner for once and use it to fight all that flawless logic that’s holding you back from world domination? I think not. So here are some fights you need to pick to get going and do wonders:

  1. Fight mental inertia
  2. Fight the fear of large tasks
  3. Fight the clock
  4. Fight the infinite research syndrome
  5. Fight distractions
  6. Fight the finishing fluster
  7. Fight fatigue

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Free Online Survey Tools for WordPress

Free online survey toolsAlways being up to a million different things is one of the perils of being me. An unfortunate side-effect is that some things tend to be neglected for a while, like this blog. One of the reasons is that I’ve been trying to research the availability and implementation of free online survey tools for WordPress.

A friend of mine wants to setup a complex survey on her WordPress blog. The idea is to ask some questions on a topic, study the reader response, gather some statistics and arrive at some conclusions — your bog standard survey stuff, really. The challenge and boon of doing an online survey is that a more complex system can be setup to get more out of the process. Ideally, the software tools should be able to gather data, compile statistics, provide some immediate feedback to the participant, and possibly interface with a mailing list or auto-response sequence to allow further contact with the reader. With these lofty goals in mind I set off on my own survey of the available tools.

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Jab We Met – movie review

Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor in Jab We Met

Jab We Met (When We Met – Jab is pronounced like ‘cub’ rather than ‘cab’), starring Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor, is the second film directed by Imtiaz Ali. I was looking forward to this one because I fell in love with the director’s first film, Socha Na Tha, and I was expecting more of the same.

I’ve only ever written about one other Hindi movie in the entire history of this blog, and that write-up wasn’t the most flattering. If you went by that you could be excused for thinking that I wasn’t a fan of Hindi cinema. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am, in fact an ardent fan of Hindi films, but it just so happens that this year has not been a great year. There haven’t been many Hindi movies which I would wholeheartedly recommend since this blog opened shop, and I just wasn’t interested in whining about the rest of them. Now at last we have Jab We Met, and at last there is something I can gush about. That should have been enough to give up the plot of where this is going. I absolutely loved Jab We Met. After a long time, I was happy to see a simple, straight-forward romantic Hindi film done with class, which manages to be both engaging and endearing.

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