What is love?

Haddaway seems kinda appropriate at the moment … Ah well … I am being sad, dejected, introspective again – it’s all in those cycles I talk about. I often wonder what the word love means to people because it doesn’t seem to mean the same to everybody. When I say love, I mean an emotion which is wonderful and glorious, sometimes warm, sometimes exciting, sometimes tender. When I feel love for somebody, I want to do everything in my power to see them happy, to do whatever I can to make their life easier, to be there to offer a helping hand, to share their joys but also their sorrows. To me love is unselfish – putting your loved ones before yourself sometimes even at some personal inconvenience to yourself – just because you love them.

But I get the feeling that at lest to a part of the world, love seems to be just an excuse to have sex or to get to know somebody and to be with them and get them to do whatever you want them to do. It seems to be just take, take and take, no give. There is no concern for the other person, no eagerness to see them to, to talk to them or to just get a glimpse of them because your heart longs for the one you love. It seems to be all about what can they do for me rather than how can I make them happy or at the least, how can we be happy together? Why is it always me, me, me? Or am I just expecting too much in this day and age? Isn’t romantic love – the pure kind of love which just wants the best for your love there anymore? That can’t be the case since I know of people who do share that kind of love but maybe it’s not as prevalent as we are led to believe … Who knows indeed since I am just one person and you can never know how it looks from the other side …

Eddie over at BetaNews has been kind enough to announce the release of BlogMan and the visits to the site sky-rocketed yesterday :p So far however, I’ve heard from only two BlogMan users – one is Greg (who was originally a Blog users, switched to B2 and has now kindly consented to beta test BlogMan) and the other is Josh, who I heard from today. Josh wanted to know where he could post bug reports since there was no BlogMan thread on the forums. That of course brings me back to the subject of forums. I’ve looked at the PHPBBS (I think that’s what it was called) forum and it looks nice and impressive. Of course, I need somewhere to put it up and so probably won’t go with that since it needs both PHP and mySQL. Instead, I think I’ll probably try to find a free remote solution provided by somebody – I just haven’t had much time recently and so never got around to doing any of this. Maybe today since I really would like a nice organized forum that people can search easily.

Not much else in the way of new code or projects – I expect DeViLbOi to spring up at this point and go “PostMan! PostMan!” :p Actually, I don’t know if I mentioned this but PostMan is half-way coded. It works, it can retrieve e-mail and it can display e-mails. I don’t know if I completed the e-mail composition bit but the main reason that I am so reluctant to work on it is the fact that it is so darn slow :p It is slow in retrieving e-mail, actually slower than Eudora and I don’t know why that should be since I’m simply using an Indy POP3 component to do the mail retrieval. Then, it is also slow to display HTML e-mails since I am using my own display engine and not IE (so as to not be prey to VBScript based viruses). The HTML component I use can display HTML text but it will not display images on it’s own. I have to fetch the images individually and then pass them back to the HTML component. This seems to work since I can display HTML e-mail but if you select an HTML e-mail, you have to wait a couple of seconds for the images to be fetched and till then the whole UI stops responding.

I know that most of the above problems can be sorted out by optimizing stuff but in the mean time, I just don’t feel like using PostMan because it is so slow and anything I don’t use, I don’t develop with that much alacrity since there isn’t the incentive for me to do so :p For me all my software starts as personal projects and they take on their own life only if they are released to the public. And they are are released to the public only if I use them and find them useful – if not, they just die a natural death … you should see my hard disk, there are plenty of half-completed projects which never took off because I lost interest or they weren’t that useful after all :p