the rant

Taking a break to assimilate

1998 was the year I got online. Before that I had only heard about the internet from my school, some friends and from a lot of books.

There were lots of books which I had read back then, which had links to articles, websites, code-listings and downloads.

The Internet like the computer that was bought for my brother to do his music, was a luxury. There were places that charged 80 Rupees for an hour back then. When the rates came down to an affordable 60 an hour, I hit the web like crazy

Email and search was dominated by Yahoo and the new Hotmail. I had a Rediff id as well. Even though yahoo was the de facto search engine, I preferred Rediff for its faster cleaner and yet similarly accurate results. The Yahoo chat rooms using Java online and later the instant messenger was an awesome place to be.

It was hard to believe that I was talking to someone halfway across the world. The feeling was pure awesomeness and coming back from simple ramblings about how the weather was in Canada or how you said hello in Spanish was like a huge wave crashing down on you for 13 year old me. Consoling my new friends during their breakups or learning the alphabet in German was almost a household thing for me; and a bit exclusive because not many around me were doing it and hence, more exciting.

One of the embarrassing situations in my online life happened while I discovered IRC. I’ve had a program on my computer called Microsoft Comic Chat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat), since I had no internet at home, it never worked for me. So one day, while I was wondering what to do online, I remembered about the little app and tried to find out if it was installed and luckily it was!! The program ran, and after some setting up it connected to some chat room and there I was standing in a room saying hello, Speech bubble et al. After trying to find out if anyone was around, someone popped up and said ‘lol, you are in the comic mode, switch to the other one’ and I did and saw a room full of noise and activity.

The same person who came to my rescue told me that no one really used the program I was using and asked me to look up mIRC… and I did.

There was a long two and a half year period of my life when I kept running to cafes with floppy disks and later on CD’s. By that time I had moved on to my experiments with DirectX and attempts at creating an HTML code editor with syntax highlighting and code hints. During one of my chats with a German friend, who was making a website and a forum ground up with logins and everything; He told me that this new thing called the personal home page or PHP tools was going to be really awesome in the future. By the looks of what he was doing, it seemed awesome!! I had by then given up on server side programming after trying a bit of perl; and the only other option was to learn Java, to which I clearly said no (giving up was mainly due to a lack of proper [read easy] information available and the lack of knowledge to assimilate what was there and sadly enough, no one to tell me where to look for the right stuff) java looked awesome with all its widgets. But the amount of preparation needed to do anything drove impatient me over to something more sinister and sinful called visual basic.

The later year and a half was a really productive. I finally had a computer but with limited internet (limited by my parents since the phone bill ran up a fortune the month before)

I had access to a whole range of information ranging from complete source code to huge projects. All around were people helping others with just the right information. The internet back then was not or seemed not to be as saturated as the internet today. All I did everyday was come back from school Eat/Watch toons, study and code till late next morning with very little internet if any. Without any distraction I got a lot of really cool work done.

It wasn’t until later next year that I had realized that I had stopped referring to all the technical books I had bought for myself. Another tragic fact that keeps haunting me even today is that I’ve become a download junkie. I’ve downloaded tens and hundreds of books and haven’t looked at more than a rough fifty till date. A lot of information was gathered and for some reasons it ended with that.

Back to the future… compared to many others I have at least 4 to 6 hours every day to spare (if I don’t count the hours I don’t sleep) that, for the last few months I’ve been using to think, write and read. This is due to the fact that the only place I use a computer and the internet for the past 6 months is at work.

As my friends doing philosophy say, ‘let me problematize this situation’ and maybe give you a solution too.

Don’t let the tools and information overwhelm you, Take time out to think, assimilate all that you have gained so far and plan out for your moves ahead. Trust me, it helps :)