An Unquiet Mind of A Social Geek

Take a look at these numbers:

• This is my 267th post.
• There are 2962 authentic comments on this blog.
• My posts have 203 tags in 39 categories.
• Total views crossed 100K quite a while back.

These numbers usually don’t mean much to me. But I always use a trick while climbing a mountain. When I am exhausted and feel like I can’t go up any further, I turn and look the other way around. Seeing how much ground we’ve covered and how much height we’ve attained, is a re-energizing technique that works.

However, the need to look at these numbers now did not arise because I’m exhausted writing on this blog. Since I started An Unquiet Mind over two years back, I have written exclusively here. And now I’ve come to a fork in my path.

Discounting my professional writing at MakeUseOf.com, I have decided to start a separate personal blog exclusively focused on technology, specifically social networking and social media websites and technologies.

Since I began a writing career, I realized that being an early adopter of new technologies, I needed to participate in online communities of like-minded technology enthusiasts and industry influencers.

While Twitter has been one vehicle to achieve this, FriendFeed has been more empowering. To retain the intellectual flavor of An Unquiet Mind undiluted, I decided to post technology related content separately. Also, it did not make sense to direct the 90K+ MakeUseOf subscribers interested in cool websites, software, and internet tips to An Unquiet Mind!

Since I am known as the Social Geek in these tech circles, my technology blog is of A Social Geek. I chose Posterous rather than WordPress as a platform since it’s flexibility suits my needs better. Feel free to follow/subscribe to A Social Geek if you’re so inclined. Posts from there are also displayed in the sidebar here. Thus, my blogs reflects my two personae on Twitter – @SocialGeek maps to A Social Geek, @Palsule maps here.

At this milestone I also decided to experiment with a different theme, primarily for one reason: it gave me the push to do the necessary housekeeping of this blog that has been on the backburner for a while. I have reorganized my categories, which are now displayed at the top. Hovering your mouse over them reveals sub-categories too.

I think this will help An Unquiet Mind remain unquiet about things that matter. I think unquiet minds rule over matter, but never mind.

Image: Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and endings.

Roller Coaster Ride at Cedar Point

A few weeks back, when I realized that the world’s largest automaker was heading towards bankruptcy, I did a nostalgic photo-post of General Motors World Headquarters at the Renaissance Center and Detroit. This week, Six Flags, one of the world’s largest amusement park company in the world announced that it is filing for bankruptcy. It seems that in this economic downturn, people don’t want to spend their hard-earned money to get amused. So here is another nostalgic photo-post of a day at an amusement park that was loosely affiliated with Six Flags.

Cedar Point at Sandusky, Ohio currently holds the world record for the maximum number of roller coasters, one of which is the world’s second tallest and second fastest roller coaster. It has been voted The Best Amusement Park In The World for 11 consecutive years (yes, over Disneyworld in Florida). This is how the park looks from the air (not my photo):

It was a cloudy, rainy day that we went to Cedar Point. We were anxious, but the rides were fortunately open and running. Click on any of the pictures to get the higher resolution.

The cable car runs through the entire length of the park, since walking around the whole day can become quite tiring!

It was a bit difficult to get good outdoor photographs because the light was poor in rainy conditions.

The Top Thrill Dragster has been the most thrilling experience of my life. Paragliding at the foot of the Himalayas didn’t come anywhere close. 0 to 120 mph (193 kmph) in 4 seconds. A 90 degree climb up to 420 feet (~ 50 stories) and a 90 degree straight fall while spiraling 270 degrees. All over in just 17 seconds. I managed to capture a train climbing, at the top, and descending:

See more pictures of this demon here. The official page has more technical information as well as additional multimedia. And if you want to know how it actually feels like, I found this on YouTube:

Photo Tagging

Many blogger friends have tagged me for various memes while I was in hiatus. I will endeavor to take up those tags faithfully. One issue is that everyone I know in the blogosphere has already been tagged leaving me with no other option than to revert to a “Comment and Self-Tag” policy. Finding untagged bloggers will further delay my taking up the tag! So feel free to leave a comment and take up the tag if you wish.

Rolling has tagged me for the photo tag: post the sixth picture from the sixth folder in my pictures folder, and write about the history behind the photo. My sixth folder is my Personal folder, and here’s the sixth picture:

This is my mother. This photograph was taken around 1960 – almost half a century back.

Such artistic portrait photography was quite rare in that era in India, especially among the middle income population. A relative on my father’s side called Mr. Tambe was from the upper strata, and had his own private studio. He invited my mother for a few sessions immediately after my parents were married. The result: a set of beautiful monochrome photographs of my mother – several with large prints. Here’s another:

Incidentally, I was recently reminded of these photographs when looking at Priyank’s photo of his mom. There is one print which I have sketched in pencil and featured on my blog before if you’d like to take a look.

Thanks for the tag, Rolling!

Getting back from a hiatus

Dear readers, I’ve been offline for the past few days, savoring India’s performance in the 20-20 World Cup, while attempting to escape the insane noise pollution, traffic congestion, and air pollution as a result of the Ganesha Festival in Pune.

Please bear with me, while I get my bearings in cyberspace again, after an eventful sequence of days.

At the moment, I’m just glad that both the Ganesh Festival, and the cricket team’s victory parade, passed off peacefully. There were no terrorist strikes, despite both being good targets, as might be seen by the six bombs found in Mumbai.

PS: I’ve decided to do away with Technorati tags now that WordPress natively supports them. And I’m also doing away with those social bookmarking icons, since I don’t think anyone really uses them.