In Search of the Perfect Blog Post

Radio telescopes searching the sky

What is the second most disabling problem bloggers face after not knowing what to write?

To paraphrase a million different wise individuals throughout the ages: it’s not what you say but how you say it. And that is exactly my problem, because while others are struggling with doubts and complete melt downs over what to write next, my “block” is wanting to get every entry to be “just right”. Yes ladies and gentlemen, I am talking about that forever elusive goal of human civilisation: the perfect blog post!
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Tyrannis Populi: Who are “the people” anyway and who says they’re always right?

Confused pointing figures on a road signThe rule of the masses, what we like to affectionately call “democracy”, has been on my mind a lot lately, especially since I commented on Darren Rowse’s post about a new service called Linebuzz. Democracy is all about the effects of, and the interaction within, vast communities of people. You can’t really understand the effect that large groups of people have on the world, until you understand what affects these large groups of people. Since the advent of mass media, vast swathes of the population have been touched by world events and important turning points in world history and human endeavour. It is said most people who were alive and sober in the 60’s have a clear memory of what they were doing when they first heard the news of Neil Armstrong taking his one small step on the powdery lunar surface. So, I think it very appropriate to start this post with a simple question: what were you doing during the great Digg user riot of 2007?
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Coming soon to my open source print workflow

Print newsletter produced with open source softwareA few days ago I finally received some copies of a quarterly print newsletter I work on with Vishal. I’ve been working on this regularly for over two years now. For most of that time I worked on it with Anjali. In fact we came up with it together from scratch when a local engineering contracting company in Dubai wanted a complete makeover of their in-house newsletter. During that time I had very little to do with design and production, which was handled by Anjali using the standard Photoshop + Illustrator + InDesign setup. At the end of last year she moved home-base so I took over the mantle of getting this done every three months with Vishal’s help. The first major stumbling block was that I didn’t currently own Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign, and I hadn’t owned or used them in a long time. Since the last few years had been almost completely devoid of large scale print projects for me, I had never felt the need. I had moved on to open source software.
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Top 5 tricks for taking professional looking photos with your digital camera

It’s great when technology in a field advances to a state where the field suddenly opens up to the masses in a way that was never possible before. You could say things like YouTube have done that for the world of video, but long before that development, photography was brought into the mainstream in a whole new way with the popularisation of the digital cameras. Sure the film camera was very popular before then, but there was the developing and the waiting, all of which went out the window with digital. Now you didn’t need to think too much before taking a photo because you weren’t wasting precious film. And that is the crux of the matter. You know what the best thing is about digital photography? Anyone can now take photographs. You know the worst thing about digital photography? Anyone can now take photographs.
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How entertaining is your 3D software?

I saw Spiderman 3 two days ago and just didn’t feel like writing about it. Sure, I could have gone into the post-mortem of every little piece in it that worked and didn’t work, but I realised that none of that would go far enough into explaining why I found it disappointing. In a seemingly un-connected event, today I came across a mention of this Slashdot piece about Blender on Blendernation [later I also saw a related thread on Blenderartists]. Lo and behold there was a large number of people doing post-mortems of every little piece of both Blender and the Slashdot piece, that either worked or didn’t work for them. Just as I was about to dismiss the whole thing and put it off to sour grapes on one hand and over zealous teenagers on the other, I realised there was a connection I was missing. While everyone was tearing everything apart and analysing every word, sentence and minor feature, we were all forgetting to ask the most important question: How entertaining is your 3D software?
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Samirbharadwaj.com is live

For the past few months, this blog has resided on the private confines of my ancient laptop during my trip to India, and later on my desktop at home. I was getting all the old blog posts working, and most importantly getting all the functionality of this new site working to my satisfaction.

When I started this resurrection in January, the plan was to get this site up and running with a ready-made blog template, and then gradually work on the final and finished custom layout. Then I thought back to the last time I had had a similar plan, and I realised that that version of my site had been online for years without me ever getting to that much planned “new look”. Not wanting for this version to suffer a similar fate, I decided that this time I would wait till I finished the site to my satisfaction (almost) before I released it online. Then I set off on the layout work.

It would have taken its time anyway, but it was certainly not meant to take months. Other things grabbed my attention along the way. There was freelance work to be done, and other distractions that kept me away from this, but I never stopped sketching and making notes about all the strange and wonderful elements and features I wanted to implement. And now after a lot of work, trial-and-error and serendipitous chances it is finally ready, or at least ready enough to make public. However, I don’t think a site like this is ever done. It is more of an ongoing evolution.

The main focus of this new site is the blog and the idea of a constantly updated stream of content. The old site was really a temporary static measure that continued untouched for too long, and I have kept that part of it untouched on the Works page. That page has not been updated not for a lack of new material to include. Quite the contrary. There is so much new and old work that I would want to include in any comprehensive treatment of my work, that the simple straight-forward portfolio page simply doesn’t suffice any more. That will require a re-thinking, a new flexible system, and possibly a whole new site to meet my long term needs. That and other ideas I will work on as time goes by and you can remain updated on my progress by keeping track of this blog.

So welcome, look around, please leave your comments and enjoy your stay on this little corner of the Wild Wild Web.
Now the real work begins.

The Road to Fujairah

Panoramic desert scene in Sharjah, complete with camel

I’ve been to Fujairah many times, for both work and pleasure. And I’ve been somewhere along the various roads that lead to Fujairah even more times than I can count or remember. Most people only know of one highway that leads up towards this northern Emirate, but I am familiar with several because we never stick to the beaten path. We are always on the lookout for a new twist in the tale or a new fork in the road.
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