October 29, 2002

OK, before I go into angst-ridden soul searching mode <g>, let me just say that I’ve uploaded the new build of Blog with the PlusMemo nag dialog removed. As I mentioned earlier, there is no change in version number and so you simply have to download the same old file. Now on to the soul-searching :p

I have always believed in doing what I think is right but what do you do when you have a conflict between two things which are both right in their own way? I believe implicitly in keeping my promises – not just to the extent of the letter of the promise but the spirit of the promise as well. I also believe in doing what my heart tells me is right. Then on the other hand, I also believe in not hurting anybody either through my actions or through inaction. What the heck do you do when all of these different principles collide against each other? I really don’t know in this instance and perhaps the one person who can help me sort it all out will not talk to me. I sometimes think it’s rather prissy of me to worry about every little action but then again, I can’t help feeling responsible for everything I do – maybe it’s from too much reading but I am always aware that each and every one of my actions can have far reaching effects like ripples on a pond due to a stone being thrown in. Terry Pratchett is very fond of a saying which goes something along the lines of a butterfly’s wings causing a storm somewhere else and I believe explicitly in that – everything we do can have very far reaching effects and I always try to consider everything when I do something. Of course, you can’t refuse to act because your actions might have far reaching effects either because that’s cowardice … at least, that’s what I think :p

Something else that occurred to me while coming back from work today was that in this day and age of the Internet where every one of us has so many friends that we’ve never met, that we need a dead-man’s switch of some sorts :p Why did I think this? Well, I was doing seventy on the road on the motorbike and in Sri Lanka, that’s courting death :p But it felt good to ride fast with the wind in my face but while riding, I had this though that if I were to die right then due to an accident, nobody on the Net would even know that I’d died (OK, fine .. I was specifically thinking of Jen there but I later thought of others I know of on the Net too :p) My parents know nothing of my Net friends and they’d not even consider letting anybody from the Net know if I were to die. But how would you reliably construct such a program that would let others know if you were to die? I was going through several alternatives but nothing is really foolproof but this entry is getting really morbid by this point and so I will stop :p

I’ve been considering a few additions to Blog as well as a completely new program which will merge Blog and a few of my other apps – though I would probably not do it since I hate bloated apps which have a lot of functionality that most of your users don’t need. So I’d rather stick with several different program than one huge app but I’d still like to discuss this idea here. Plus, Duane wanted to know about Postman … guess all of that will appear in tomorrow’s entry 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 5:44 pm  |  5 Comments