My Newest Net Home

Most people who have surfed the Web for a length of time feel the need for a Net Home, a place which becomes their current main destination for entertainment/distraction/amusement/discussion/argument, along the lines of the bar celebrated in the following song from Cheers:

******
Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.

Wouldn't you like to get away?

Sometimes you want to go

Where everybody knows your name,
and they're always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.
*******

Net Homes are where surfers spend the bulk of their free time (and some of their non-free time), letting trash remain unemptied, grass remain uncut, and driveways remain mired in snow. [Thanks Malathy ]

I am a new blogger here. IndusLadies is about to become my most recent Net Home.

I have had several different Net Homes in the past. One of the earliest was Usenet's soc.culture.tamil, in the dark ages of circa 1990.[What is Usenet you ask? You are too young . Usenet was the Web's predecessor.] I still remember several of the people I have interacted with there. I even managed to meet a few of them in person, one of them several times.

While that was my main Net Home, I would stray from time to time. My children once needed a digital piano for their music education.And rec.music.piano became my second Net Home [a chinna veedu ast it were ] While I initially went there for information, I stayed there for more than information. There were strong and interesting personalities, people who became your friend some times, and your foe at other times, for instance if you decided to buy a Yamaha instead of his recommendation of

Another time, we decided to go on a cruise. I wanted to collect a lot of information, including whether Indian food will be available. [A lot of my forty years in the US has been driven by considerations of the availability of Indian Food ] The corresponding "rec." whose name I cannot remember now, became my second Net Home. I used to think that going on a cruise was something that people did once in their lives. There were people there whose main hobby was to go on cruises. Not that they were rich. They would come back from a cruise, and then scrimp and save for the next one, meanwhile vicariously living their dream via the newsgroup.

This is already getting too long. I need to get ready for work. ["I owe, I owe; off to work I go.]

I hope that people will be happy that I came here, at least some of the time, if not always.

 

A belated thanks Suresh, for your welcome comment.

At this time, having written 15 pieces under it, I want to provide some general introduction to my blog. [Here is the terminology I use: my while set of articles is a blog. Each instance is a blog entry. I believe that this is how IL uses the terms. Thus, for instance, there are about 331 blogs, meaning 331 different people have one blog each. Under each blog, there will be multiple entries.]

At some future time, I plan to organize my blog better. In general, my writings will fall under one of the following areas:

A. Autobiographical recollections from my life. (I fully reserve the right to embellish as I choose. In other words, there is no guarantee that this was what happened.)

B. Attempts to push a particular point of view, a certain approach to analyzing people's actions, utterances, and thoughts.

C. Jokes and other light stuff.

I have already posted entries under each of these categories. The "Autobiographical recollections from my life" category needs no further introduction. However, even here, my writings will be colored by my interest in the "certain approach to analyzing people's actions, utterances, and thoughts". This is how I I view life and this is a part and parcel of me.

The rest of this introduction will focus on this certain approach. I didn't discover it. (I am not smart enough to discover it. I am not being artificially humble. I am just stating a fact. I am smart enough to appreciate its value.) I am intentionally not stating its name or its general subject area for some specific reasons. As I have written before, if I can get one person to accept this point of view, I will be delighted. This seemingly modest goal is possibly unreachable.

If you have questions, please ask. I appreciate people's responses, especially the ones based on attempts to understand. By no means, I am assuming that a large number of people will be interested. This is as major as Darwin's theory of evolution, which is still being fought in parts of the world.

Why I am going to the trouble of writing this blog? As in the case of others, I am interested in expressing myself and in making friends. (Writing is something of a passion for me.) However, unlike others, I also have a point of view to push. Understanding this point of view is the most important thing I have done in my life.

It is possible that pushing my point of view may conflict with making friends. This is something I have to live with. I am not willing to compromise one for the sake of other, at least not yet.

I started a Website for promoting this mysterious point of view I am alluding to. However, without anybody reading it, I find it hard going. I also find Web site maintenance rather annoying. I can't even find my Website [I have a link on another computer which I don't use anymore.]

I will leave this with this light thought. When I asked IL for a blog space, I had in mind long articles each taking at least a couple of weeks to write. That's why I didn't agree to IL"s request that I promise to write at least one entry a week. It turns out that my prediction was way off. I enjoy writing short entries and can turn them out in about 1/2 hour or less.