Personal Reflections – Page 19

My mom is terrific at a lot of things, but…

I would be misleading you if I said I’m ‘just’ a heavy sleeper. You might be the sort of person who can hear a fucking ninja creeping across the floor (to kill you) while asleep, but when I am sleeping I’m as good as knocked out after taking ten sleeping pills. If it wasn’t for my pulse, I would be pronounced dead every morning.

So waking up is a daily challenge for me. Over the years, I have developed many strategies. Such as setting 25 separate alarms on my cellphone all within the space of half an hour – all of them 1-2 minutes apart from each other – around the time I want to wake up. There have been times when I have successfully slept through this cacophony. The problem starts when I want to, say, take a short nap. I might tell my mom that I need to go somewhere and that I’m decide to take a short nap (I don’t do that often) and in case my alarm doesn’t work could she please wake me up on time.

My mom’s terrific at so many things, but one thing she’s failed miserably so far is to be able to wake me up. Ever. Her method works like thus…

Mom: Wake up. You just slept through your alarm and you said you need to go somewhere now.

Me: Mffmfphhhh?

Mom: Are you going to wake up now then?

Me: Mmmfffppphshh…

Mom: Good. Also, there’s this untidy pile of papers lying on your table. Is that supposed to be thrown away?

Me: Mmmpppppfffhhhh!

When I do wake up approximately two hours later (or until an angry friend calls me irritatedly on my cellphone, whichever is earlier) I find that I have massively overshot my nap time and that piece of paper in which I had figured out how to solve the BP oil spill has been thrown away. Mom comes back into my room when she hears my “AAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH!” scream that would put Hollywood sound libraries to shame.

Mom: What’s the matter?

Me: I overslept. AAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHH!

Mom: I did wake you up.

Me: I beg to differ, as you can see. Also, I can’t find that piece of paper where I had figured out a kick-ass solution to the BP oil spill problem. The one where I’d planned to use Chetan Bhagat to block the spewing oil vents.

Mom: I threw that away. You consented to it.

Me: AAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

The One Idiot — Chetan Bhagat is, like, the fucking Neo to all global environmental crisis problems. (This is the publicity poster for a future film starring Chetan Bhagat where he will end poverty in India while struggling with the 'ethos and pathos of OUR ENTIRE GENERATION'.)

I think at times when she really wants to throw some stuff of mine out she deliberately asks me that when I’m half asleep. After all, “Mmmmpppffhhh” is unequivocally ‘consent’. And now you also know why Nokia, Inc is my most trusted friend when I have to wake up at a specific time.

Still love my mom though. 🙂

A word about the new design

I have been meaning to change things around here for a while. What started off as a good design has gradually ended up as cluttered, slow, and with multiple ads shoved down its throat. Much of the slowness resulted from the fact that on pageload your browser would scamper off to fetch ads from multiple ad networks. After a point, I realized that all of this was diverging away from the real reason why I started blogging – to display content that I write and like.

So I evaluated the effectiveness of the various ad networks that I was using the result was unequivocal. Barring Google AdSense, every other ad network else is a pile of horsedung that can’t even scratch out a few dollars. Off with their head then. Google AdSense on the other hand is very effective and it pays the bills, so that stays.

When I started to look for a new design, I wanted one that pulled focus towards the content on the blog, rather than navigational elements that are extraneous to the design. This theme that I’m using now is called ‘Wu Wei‘, and it has been designed by Jeff Ngan – apparently according to Taoist principles. (Although, I’m fairly sure the book of Taoist design principles has nothing to say on the subject of AdSense. I had to wing it when integrating ads into my blog.)

Love this new theme!

Update: I forgot to add this. You might have also noticed that I have changed my filing system. The number of categories has been stripped down to a bare minimum. Specific topics that I used to speak about earlier are being tagged as such instead.

Update 2: Shucks, I keep forgetting stuff. Another change that I have made is that I’ve reduced the number of plugins used to just a few backend ones (for better database management, sitemap generation et al). So when you load the page, you don’t have to wait for sharing / PDF printing / podcasting / contact form etc plugins to process the page and then send it your browser. While there were people who were using sharing / PDF printing, if someone wants to really share a link they’ll go ahead and do so anyway. For the rest – and majority – of the readers, reducing plugin usage will significantly speed up pageload speeds. As it is the theme is lean on resources.

(I hope this I’ve covered everything and this is the last ‘update’ I need to make to this blog post.)