Hmm..err...Well...Happy birthday!

I don't get these realizations too often, in fact, I get them so infrequently that I never know what to do with them when I do. In a state of almost complete boredom, my options at my local guardians' place were either watching Akhtar massacre the Indian bowling, reading about how elements in a normed algebra lying in the open unit disc are invertible, or just surfing the web. I think I chose to do what most people I know would have chosen to do. Now it is almost a compulsive thing that whenever I'm wasting time on the internet, I feel obligated to visit my blog, not in the least because I feel I'm one of five people on the planet who do so! (If you want to know who the others are, read the comments to any of the previous posts.) The situation wasn't quite so bad when I started out blogging. Every day my blog would receive around ten to fifteen comments. Some were people promoting their own blogs, others were selling lingerie for women, some were even selling women with little lingerie and some were patrons of things even more breathtaking. In between admiring their comments full of innuendoes and feeling ashamed at having such comments on my blog, I used to wonder how people engaged in such esoteric and no doubt pleasurable pursuits found time, or the inclination, to read through the fairly boring text that they most probably didn't even connect with!

Then courtesy a "net-savvy" friend, and there could be many who I owe my thanks to, I learnt of two interesting features the blog-hosts offered. One was that as the "owner" of this blog, I had the right to delete messages I didn't want on my blog. An even more potent tool was that I could turn on "word verification", something that prevents the automated posting of messages and comments. I was happy to be able to rid myself of those not-exactly-offensive messages, but in its aftermath, I realized how unpopular my blog actually was!

Alongside blogging I was also pursuing formal education. I'd finished my bachelors and I didn't quite think myself workplace worthy. Besides, my blog still fetched a pagerank of 0 on the google tools. I decided that I needed to devote time to it and increase its popularity. So I started networking with some popular bloggers I had the privilege of sharing the table with in the St. Stephens' mess. But illiteracy had a way of showing through the best faked facades, and my troubles started when people added me to their "blogroll" and asked me to do the same. While I nodded nonchalantly, I was thinking in my head all the time, " I know what a blog is, but what the hell is a blogroll?"

Wikipedia came to my rescue. "A blogroll," it said ," is a collection of links to other weblogs. When present, blogrolls are often found on the front page sidebar of most weblogs." That was a good start. If I could just confirm if a weblog was the same as a blog, I was almost done.

Finding out that a weblog was the same as a blog was only half the battle. I still needed to figure out how to add people to my blogroll. "It's easy, " said one of my friends, "just edit the html code." So I tried editing the html code. "!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" it said. But where was the blogroll? I scrolled down further. There was "description { margin:0 5px 5px; padding:0 20px20px; border:1px solid #222; border-width:0 1px 1px; font:78%/1.4em "TrebuchetMS",Trebuchet,Arial,Verdana,Sans-serif; text-transform:uppercase; letter-spacing:.2em; color:#777; }. Further down there was still more Greek and still no blogroll. I was at the point of giving up when a friend, now in Norway, came to the rescue.

I was now ready to make it big in the blogworld. I had my own blog with a template designed by Douglas Bowman, and a blogroll created by Gautam Chandna and in the master stroke of seeking Chandna's help, I had even found my first regular reader! As luck would have it and as most billionaires would tell you as part of their life stories, I was in the right place at the right time. Chandna was looking for content to put on his website and he began borrowing from this blog! Independent of the masses who read posts on his website, the traffic on my site increased from a measly one to a whopping five! So much for multiplying fivefold in less than a year.

So this is approximately my first birthday in the blogworld. I'm never good with dates, but the archives link on the blog tells me that my first ever word in the blogworld was said in January 2005! That is almost when I think I signed up on blogspot.

So here am I wishing myself a very happy birthday. And now back to Banach Algebras.