Reality and reliability …

Maybe it’s because I’ve been running on less sleep than usual but reality has begun to wear pretty thin for me recently :p Trish, in discussing a different post I’d made earlier, made the comment that the difference between reality and dreaming was that reality seemed to be "heavier". While this made perfect sense at that point, now even reality has begun to seem very light and insubstantial. Certain things which happened over the week seem to be just figments of my imagination and I keep wondering if they happened at all or if I simply imagined them? If I didn’t have concrete evidence to the fact it did indeed happen, I’d be even questioning my sanity at this moment … actually, that’s not true, I’ve always questioned my sanity – but then again, I have always questioned the sanity of the rest of the world too :p

I know this is familiar grounds – me debating reality and whether we can believe what we sense as being our environment or events taking place around us. One of my theories is that this whole world and everything that happens to me might all be in my head – hence the name for the site -. Some of the things that happens to me might actually vindicate this theory since some of it seems to be pure wish fulfillment but then again, since some of the things I most ardently wish for seem to come almost to hand and then always be snatched away might seem to indicate that I might actually be somebody else’s figment of imagination and that they might be having fun at my expense by bringing my dreams close to fulfillment and then snatching it away again – like king Tantalus of Greek myth who was fated for eternity to be in a pool of crystal clear water and have delicious grapes growing right over his head but have both the water and the grapes recede out of reach whenever he reached for either. Yes, it’s just me being self-pitying … things aren’t that bad :p

All of us have problems of one kind or another to deal with. It’s just that at times our problems seem so huge that they completely obscure the fact that others have problems too. This is mostly due to the fact that our troubles are so close to us whereas other people’s troubles seem so far away. However, sometimes if we pay any attention to another person just once in our lives, we might discover that compared to their problems, ours are nothing at all. As long as we remember this and remain strong, nothing can overcome us – whatever life, ourselves or the gods throw at us … or so I sometimes think … but then again, that’s when I’m not feeling the threads of reality to be so tenuous that I think I might drift away in just a moment :p

Things have been rather chaotic, hectic and a bit confused as you might find from some of my entries on SM and I’ve sort of fallen out of the habit of making my daily entries here – especially given that I didn’t have much in the way of tech stuff to talk about. I haven’t really felt like coding and so have been taking it easy, dabbling in video, audio and most recently Flash. I’ve always felt ambivalent about Flash since while it did look nifty, I just couldn’t seem to accept as part of “pure” web design. So, while I’d think of using Flash, in the end I’d steer clear of it. However, a friend needed to work with Flash recently and so I got involved and in the process I actually came to do a bit of work with Flash, though it was not Macromedia’s product that I used but rather Swish. It’s a neat product and pretty easy to use and while I don’t think I’d still be tempted to use Flash since my taste in web design runs towards the KISS principle, I can at least pretend to myself that I know something about Flash now :p

I’ve also been contemplating getting back into coding but wasn’t sure what project to take up – I know that Blog 8.0 needs to be worked on but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to get back to Blog immediately and so was actually contemplating the often mentioned PostMan, which is actually an e-mail client. The greatest problem that I’d had with PostMan had been the slow HTML rendering but now I thought I had a solution which might overcome that problem. But I was debating whether to try that or get back into Blog and so did neither till one of the Blog users, Lena, decided the matter by reporting a problem with archive table of contents templates. I started looking into the problem and discovered that there was a bug in the code that needed to be fixed. I fixed that but since I was already on a roll, I decided to fix a few more issues.

A couple of bug fixes later, I had a release that I was beginning to name Blog 7.11 when I received an e-mail from Collin where he mentioned that it would be pretty nifty if Blog could support the new Windows Media Player 9.0 option to display it’s playlist in blogs. I had seen the blogging add-in for Media Player 9.0 mentioned on the MS site but had not given much attention till now but now I went over there and downloaded Media Player 9.0 and the blogging add-in. However, I got no chance to look into it any further since I was distracted by other stuff but if it looks as if it’s a simple thing to implement, I’ll probably add that feature to Blog 7.11 before I release it 🙂