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Dylan: You know the studios in the old days were all much better, and the equipment so much better, there's no question about it in my mind. You just walked into a studio, they were just big rooms, you just sang, you know, you just made records; and they sounded like the way they sounded there. That stopped happening in the late Sixties, for me anyway. I noticed the big change. You go into a studio now and they got rugs on the floor, settees and pinball machines and videos and sandwiches coming every ten minutes. It's a big expensive party and you're lucky if you come out with anything that sounds decent.
Bono: Yeah, records haven't got better, have they?
Dylan: No, you go in now, you got your producer, you got your engineer, you got your assistant engineer, usually your assistant producer, you got a guy carrying the tapes around. I mean, you know, there's a million people that go into recording just an acoustic song on your guitar. The boy turns the machines on and it's a great undertaking.
--- From an interview of Bob Dylan by Bono in 1984 (most likely in Dublin) accessible here
April 2015
This website is a not-so-good hack job. Drawing on services of another would have required conceptualization, planning, constant back-and-forth, and more importantly, making rapid incremental changes a challenge. When the purpose is to create an online repository of "personal files and documents" one likes to approach the process piece-meal as and when the mood and time permits.
Why not use available and useful ready solutions like social networking sites to host at least some portion of the same corpus of work? There are 3 serious reasons. One is about the open question of how much information is really collected for each user, how is it stored and how is it likely to be used on platforms as pervasive and intrusive as Facebook?
One can read all the privacy policies but at the end of the day if it is going to take that much legal prose to try to answer foundational ethical questions then one is well placed to ask: what is the real intent? We all have our different degrees of intuition about what the answer is likely to be. It depends on how strong yours is. Mine is strong enough to not enable me to cross this "hurdle of intentions" to overlook the disconcerting factors and rationalize to myself using such platforms to reap the benefits that others justifiably claim arise out of its usage.
Even if one crosses the ethical 'hurdle of intentions' one is confronted next with an aesthetic one. This one is analogous to being blinded by a number of bright lights at 2 am in the morning. It is the sheer effervescence and froth of information, images and sundry objects floating about on the screen all the time. Once you enter the whirlpool it is grating on one's nerves. Depending on your sensitivity you will choose to enter or not to enter. I choose to avoid the visual strain as far as possible.
Finally, even if one were to cross the ethical and aesthetic hurdles, the final one is of course about one's peace of mind. More simply, about not scattering your attention all over the place and conserving it and putting it to good use. The traditional way to do it was to find a quiet, secluded place (hopefully near the bank of a river in a forest under a comfortably large tree). That option is to be found only in artificially constructed farm-houses and luxury villas that few can afford and have the time to build.
For many professionals, who anyway have to make use of electronic devices throughout the day, the only way to find that space is to create a secluded one for ourself even as we are forced to engage in this electronically constructed reality: a window that you can shift-tab to and spend some quality time and shift-tab again to your email page.
What is the test of such a window? It is easier to explain by analogy. A true dialogue between a couple can happen only if that couple is divorced from all mental considerations of extraneous social relationships for that period of time, the 'windows' of the bed-room are over-looking a tree rather than the distracting glances of neighbours, noises from the street, etc. Else, is a true dialogue possible when one is aware that some-one is peeping in?
Today a presence on Facebook is leading to an evolving 'reverse voyeurism'. Every act of expression is to a greater or lesser measure influenced by knowledge of who we are connected to, and by implication, who is going to read and how are they going to react. If I say 'this', how will 'this' be perceived by those who I am connected with? The habitual arising of this kind of thought just before putting pen to paper is inevitable in a hyper-connected social platform. And in a suprising number of cases we find that people relish this reverse voyeurism.
It is very easy to lose the distinction between a platform meant for communication and marketing and one that serves a certain individual sub-conscious desire for having others stare constantly into one's bedroom. Thus the test of self-dialogue is an important and defining one that restrains one from placing thoughts that one values personally on such platforms.
Why not a platform like a blog? Because what is to be expressed cannot really be force-fitted strictly into the format of a blog. Why not one of the readily available website builder tools with a set of templates to choose from? After some trial and error, I realized ultimately that I was trying to strip the available templates down to size and have only a plain white screen with black text on it. Actually, what I wanted was the look and feel of Paul Graham's site---a site I used to regularly visit when I was in the habit of labelling myself as a software engineer.
The remaining thing to do was to go back to a quote from Ken Thompson that I have found to be of immense practical utility whenever I had certain ideas that somehow had to be 'programmed' in a certain form (programming, making power point presentations) using a certain tool. That is: when in doubt, use brute force. The way I have applied this dictum is to basically choose tools that have limited but powerful options. The options if needed can accomplish very many tasks. Where such tools are not available, then to use a very small set of options in the available tools and try to do most of the tasks with those options instead of trying to learn and master more sophisticated features for one-off tasks. Of course, if you operate on unix or a variant of it, actioning the above is so much easier.
To quote, "Even though the UNIX system introduces a number of innovative programs and techniques, no single program or idea makes it work well. Instead, what makes it effective is an approach to programming, a philosophy of using the computer. Although that philosophy can't be written down in a single sentence, at its heart is the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves. Many UNIX programs do quite trivial tasks in isolation, but, combined with other programs, become general and useful tools."---Introduction, The Unix Programming Environment, Brian W. Kerninghan & Rob Pike.
I had read at some place that Ken Thompson used to use the editor ed for a long time to do his programming. I checked the editor out and I found it significantly improved my speed of writing. It was an editor with the most minimal desired set of features. Not one more and not one less. Being simple text based editor also made sure the visual clutter was out. I found it especially useful when dealing with emails. One of the irritating things about web-based emails or email programs is that the one thing they are supposed to aid most efficiently they do not: the speed with which you can read emails, classify them and respond to them. Hence I shifted to a text-based email reader (mutt) in 2014 and have stuck with it since.
In short, it is important to get something up. And to do that very few things beat Thompson's dictum. Accordingly, this website is typed in ed using bash, sed and AWK along with a few other text processing facilities on a GNU/Linux operating system (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS). All image files are created using LibreDraw. There were a number of documents that were originally written in a word document. They were all converted first to txt format (using LibreWord) and edited heavily using ed.
It was surprising to see the rapidity and ease with which a website could be built up with these tools. To simplify things even further, I restricted usage of html tags to very few and essential ones. This also meant that I used HTML 4.0 as opposed to HTML 5.0. I had some faint recollection of version 4.0 and had no intention of learning 5.0. The aim was to create a local environment on my machine by which I could write and immediately upload the written stuff on the website without too much hassle.
As an aside, I also recognize that, in my professional career, when I was starting on my own, the choice to use a GNU/Linux solution simplified all start-up costs. That decision has proved pivotal. Accordingly, I do contribute on a regular basis to Free Software Foundation , to the e-mail service Tutanota, and to The Document Foundation, curators of the Libreoffice product suite. I pay out of a conscious desire to support a software that does not impose itself on me and does not force me to follow any commercial or usage norms. The difference from paying because it is a popular choice (which effectively reduces to the same as no choice for most people) is remarkably and refreshingly stark.
In the era of Apple marketing blitz and cult-like appreciation for Steve Jobs, it is equally (if not more) important to take a few sober moments to remember (and be grateful for) the ethos that drove the original team at Bell Labs from the stable of which came C, Unix and many wonderful things. Appreciation is also due to FSF, affiliated and other like-minded groups.
It is in our nature to forget that those who come later always stand on the shoulders of several giants. It is an evidence of the credulity of our minds and of the fact of being overtly enamoured with 'visible form over substance' that we fail to 'see', or at the very least be aware of, the giants, even if the work of these giants is what touches us every day.
In line with the spirit that nurtured a certain part of the Bell Labs environment in the 60's and 70's: in case you want the back-end source of this website email me at kushagra dot communication at the rate tutanota dot com. Will be happy to share a .tar or .zip archive. Mine is an ugly hack job. But even ugly hack jobs have a purpose: they can allow you to quickly boot-strap.
Initial draft proof-read and corrected with help from Bibhas Mondal. The errors, if any, may be on account of subsequent modifications and are all attributable to the author.
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