I had successfully completed my registration on Money Today when I hit the Back button on the browser accidentally and here’s what resulted. Should I be worried ?

An IRC chat with a newly acquired friend resulted in the stunning disclosure that sometimes it is very easy to get distracted when one reads scrollbacks on IRC channels or even reads blogs. Distraction is a state of the mind that is common to everybody but what is important to learn over here is that the “tunnel vision”, “laser vision” (or whatever one calls it) is not something one is generally born with. That is acquired by degrees since one has to “work” at it. On a daily basis and each day keep track of how far down that road one has progressed. A fallout of far too many IRC channels, planets, blogs and what nots is that there is a large bit of information overload and not all of that information is of the “good-to-have” nature. Filtering out the noise and amplifying the signal takes time, effort and experience.

Everyday is a winding road
I get a little bit closer
Everyday is a faded sign
I get a little bit closer to feeling fine

A Linux Users’ Group or a LUG (or GLUG) is a community and for a community to thrive what is required is a steady stream of interest. What made iLUG-Cal moribund is that some of the senior members (which also includes yours truly) could never get enough amount of time to get the fresh folks going. Add to that the fact that there were the hiccups with the mailing list, the website, the domain name and you-name-it-we-had-it kind of worries it was not long before the demise of the LUG as we knew it was being talked about. And it was all true (in fact it still is all true – what you see now is just a small bit of the beginning or could be the last hurrah before the end). Individual brilliance can never make a LUG and without time and energy and most importantly events a LUG never flourishes. One hopes that this time around we can get to see some activity being spun around the LUG. For a change (or for better or for worse), I am not part of anything that’s the new LUG. An important reason for such a decision is that sometimes it is just better to thrust responsibility on to folks rather than wait for them to grow into a new role – we have waited long and hard and the only thing that we got as result was complacency. Given that I hardly am in Kolkata and add to that the fact that I don’t have too much time on my hands these days (fancy time management stuff implementation notwithstanding) it is better that a whole new gang of LUG-gers take over. There isn’t much to do to begin with but slowly hopefully there will be more things to do.

An important aspect that led to this decision is that the world I entered (or the FOSS scene) has changed considerably. Things are far more easier and work-out-of-the-box kind than ever before, there are newer slicker distributions. What this means is that a large part of the revival would require innovation in thoughts or what can be called design thinking. The old school paradigms are no longer relevant. And the new school innovations are fun to watch. Heady stuff like Mugshot etc are taking things to a newer level while events like the SoC allow a large cache of new members to come into the forefront. These would be fun times to watch from the sidelines.
I’ve been wondering if all the thing I’ve seen
Were ever real, were ever really happening

Of late I’ve not been feeling really fine – it is like the brain is overclocking at random times leading to dizziness. I’ve eliminated a few obvious causes – it is not my health (the exercises help), not my work (I still enjoy coming to office), not my reading habits (I still average around 3 books a week) but there’s this back of the head niggling worry about something that I cannot quite put a finger on. I’d take a few days off sometime early March to ponder but unfortunately did the cardinal sin of not logging off the internet. Mails can sometimes be a thought killer and I fell into the trap. Perhaps I do need to take sometime off…

This year would be the first time that I am not attending LinuxAsia, although given the theme of Interoperability – it would have been an interesting one to go to. In keeping with my tradition I did not attend foss.in and will also not attend Gnunify (this one would have been nice to attend) since I am in Kolkata during that period. The only one I would love to go to is Freedel. Let’s see when the organisers get that one going. Horizon organised by the Durgapur LUG is also being given a skip.
The past few years I have been doing the rounds of conferences and small meets and I see the same faces talking about the same thing and nothing much being done. Thus, in order to shrug off my cynicism, I am taking a self imposed break to do some stuff – file a few bugs, complete a few hack tasks I had set for myself and in general try level best not to fall out of the habit of coding. Over the past few months the sluggish and intermittent attempts to get back to coding has exposed how much out of practice I have become – and that’s frightening. Not all that I do would be available immediately, but I hope that with the plans that I have for Randomink, we can get some good things going.

Satish had his birthday on the 7th of July and here are some pictures