San Francisco

A couple of things:

1) I'll be speaking at a conference in San Francisco next week. It's called Books in Browsers, organized by the Internet Archive, and is essentially a technical meeting for people currently working on the future of the book. Am subsidized by Brewster Kahle (founder of Alexa Internet and the IA), the NUS School of Computing, and the awesome people over at Hackerspace.sg.

I'll be talking about Pandamian, this little startup thing I'm doing. The underlying agenda for BiB is to consolidate efforts in the web-based publishing sphere. I suspect, too, that the IA is going to be pushing its standard for distributing book-catalog metadata: it's called OPDS, is open-source, and will be a fairly important first-step in standardizing the way books are consumed in the future.

In simple terms: what happens there is likely to change the future of reading, and so I'm rather excited to be a part of it.

2) Yes, I'm doing a startup; have been working on it for 6 months now. I'm still debating for/against writing about it on Mochaspot, because I've always kept work separate from this blog. But then again Pandamian is beginning to define my life. So we'll have to see.

3) And I'm swamped with schoolwork. Am a little worried about my math at the moment, will probably be bringing some assignments/homework to do on the plane along with me. Hope I'll survive the rest of the semester, there're only 4 weeks left!

PS: Thank God funding was possible! And I suppose I should talk a little about the journey, in a bit. But yes: I am thankful, and yes, I am in debt to so many kind people who made this possible. Thank you all.

PPS: Woohoo Paul, who's Yayasan Sarawak Champion!

MSN

I remember waiting for Friday nights, waiting for the sweet-spot, just after eight, and then I'd fire up my old Windows ME computer and log onto MSN. Because it seemed as if everyone in Kuching were online on Friday nights. And there'd be these huge group conversations, dozens and dozens of people all crammed into one window, and you had no idea who was talking to who, a mess of emoticons and teenagers and LOLs and OMFGs. It was terrible. You met new people that way. New girls, mostly. Terrible way to meet girls, or new people, or even strangers who saw your username and clicked add and went to your blog. But I loved it.

I remember sneaking online on the desktop computer, Windows XP now, blue and green light pooling into the darkness of my study room.And this was the new house - the current house - and like so many other times I found myself banned from going online. Because I had no self control. And so the times that I could go online I spent switching between MSN and talking to friends, and posting in the Undergroundsquare forums. I appeared offline in these secret periods.

I remember talking to friends late into the night. We had this theory that people were different on the Internet. Friends became odd variations of themselves in the container of a chat window. Maybe the personas were fake. Or maybe they were hidden facets of their personalities, rarely seen in real life. I had to wrap my head around that idea. And I subscribed to the second theory: it was exciting to think you were seeing bits of your friends that you've never been able to see before.

I remember 2am conversations and waiting, waiting for the right person to appear online. Because over time MSN became like that: wait offline, invisible, until the right person pops in, and then you emerge from the cellar of your contact list, eager to chat. MSN was morphing into this distracting thing. We were growing up. We learned to dump most of our crazy emotes. We began to be selective with who we talked to.

I've not logged into MSN for a full year now. Most of the time I'm really busy. Most of the time I can't remember half of the people in my contact list. (And I realize it's not called MSN anymore - it's Windows Live Messenger, or something similar - but my friends and I, we can't be bothered).

I sometimes wonder if there are kids out there, 15 years old with curfews and desktop computers, who dream of Friday nights so they can get online and chat. Because, to them, the whole of Kuching goes online to chat on Friday nights.

I wonder if that slice of Internet still exists. Because it would be sad if it didn't. They wouldn't have known what they've missed.