from the horizon

30th January 2009

2008 was a great year. It had its ups and downs which I won’t go into here, but I overall, it was great. Unfortunately having a great time hasn’t been conducive to blogging about it, therefore while my year was a roller coaster, my blog has stagnated.

But a series of events has recently provided me with the opportunity to address this stagnation So in the biggest comeback ever launched from an AC Seated Coach on the Koyna Express between Mumbai and Pune (did I mention that I’m writing this from a train in India?) From The Horizon is back. This does require me covering a large amount of material is a short amount of time, for which I have decided to employ a certain classic cinematic technique (recommended by my friend Scott – thank you Sir!). So sit tight, make yourself comfortable, and queue the 80s rock soundtrack…

(Apologies for certain creative freedoms I have taken with the dates in order to preserve the correct sequence of things)

One of the perks of keeping a blog is the people I meet along the way. I’ve established a number of contacts through my rambling on here, some of whom I’ve actually had the chance to meeting in real life. I had one such opportunity on Monday night when I finally met up with Jakob, who’d contacted me through my blog to get some more information before coming to do some work here. The interesting thing is that his housemate, who came along too, turned out to be Asri, someone I’d already actually caught up having met through our mutual Banda Aceh Blogs.

I’m wondering if there’s actually a bigger community of Bloggers out there in Banda Aceh – maybe it’s time to organize a bit of a bigger meeting…

It has always been my intention to make my own design for the presentation of my blog. It’s only taken me more than a year, but I’ve finally gotten around to making my own “blog theme”.
This involved me hacking round some CSS and PHP (I say hacking, because I went in without know much about either of the languages!). I also learnt how to use GIMP – a very user unfriendly graphics editor (Hurray for Open Source!).
In my attempt to create a prettier looking blog, I found out about anti-aliasing and have some interesting analogies along the lines of my Quantization spiel. Might write about that one later!

Go to a few different pages to check out the different banner pictures. A gold star for the person who can guess where they are all from (there’s 6 different countries so far!).

Feedback and comments are welcome (it would be nice to know that someone appreciates my blog beautification efforts), please let me know if anything isn’t working or doesn’t look right. (I’m following my philosophy of participatory testing – which means that you test it for me )

I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated – sorry, I’ve been super busy (how unusual), but I assure you it’s been worth the wait. Over the next couple of weeks I promise you an assortment of (some post-dated) delights – photos, stories, conference papers, videos, musings and monkeys (don’t forget the monkeys).

In an attempt to keep me regular, I’m starting a high bran diet, and also a regular “Idea of the Week” post. These ideas will probably range around Technology, Developing Countries and generally what we can do to make the world a better place. I’m going to have to cut back on my perfectionist streak, which tends to make posting take several hours at least, so apologies if these posts are a little rough around the edges!
As always you comments are welcome
(except for Gareth – you’re just a pain )

Anyway, without further ado (or with further ado, what ever suits you best)…

Well, it’s something which I’ve been meaning to do for a while now, and I can’t think of a better way to spend my time here, so I’m finally setting up my own blog.

You’ll still be able to view my old TravelBlog at http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Cogito/. Eventually I hope to copy all of my posts from that blog over to here. I will also be postdating some entries as I struggle to get my blog up to date with everything which has been happening.
I’ve changed over to this new blog for a couple of reasons, but primarily because I want to have more flexibility with my blog, and expand it to cover more things other than just my travel adventures. I will be working on the blog over the next couple of week, adding posts and features, so keep an eye out!