Happy Diwali 2025!
Diwali has always held a special place for me in the calendar, mostly as it was the one festival our family did every year in full force. It was always easy to describe to my non-Hindu friends as being ‘Christmas for Hindus’, but I think I appreciate it more now as being a bit of a punctuation on the year. Diwali is always assoicated with ensuring you have a clean house where everything is put away nicely, and while that has been more successful for me in some years than others, it does give a bit of focus to ensuring I clean up the place. Something which is very easy to get away from you, the bigger your scope gets.
I do find it interesting that Diwali has the association with cleaning which is analogous to a spring clean, only… the time of year in India, it would be an autumnal clean. Could we put that down to different preferences, that the ancient Hindus knew that things got away from you over the summer, but come winter, you really wanted to ensure things were clean and tidy before you tucked yourself away nice and warm inside your house? Food for thought!
This year we’d been planning on having family over, perhaps even friends, but we dialled it back and even then ended up cancelling as I fell sick at the last minute. I’d hazard a guess it was due to going out and catching up with some folks over drinks, something I haven’t done in a long time (the drinks part!). I enjoyed that outing very much, but I suspect I’ll need to keep a cap on the drinks next time because I really don’t want to go through it again the way I had on Friday and Saturday, when a cold & flu tablet was pretty much the only thing that kept me going.
Earlier in the week I went to the city to catch up with some folks, have a haircut and sus out the job market, priorities roughly in that order. I’m being a little slow at getting the ball rolling on applying for jobs, and news like the increasing unemployment rate certainly doesn’t help. However there was a good, realisitic chat with a recruiter who told me to expect 6 months on the sideline, which I can handle, and to be realisitic about my goals and timelines. I know I don’t want to rush into the next thing going, but I will need to knuckle down at some point - unfortunately the proverbial gravy train I’ve been on for the last 6 months where I was just parenting and being paid fully to do so won’t continue forever, however much I’d wish it, and I need to figure out how to make some money again. (What I wouldn’t give for a UBI system to kick in).
Oh, back on site stuff: I cleaned house last week, weeding out bad links going pretty much all the way back to the first few posts on here (or associated thereof!). That was interesting to me to see how much I’d ended up having stuff pointing into dead links, whether unresolvable or at a spam domain; I wonder if I was complicit there in providing legitimacy to those sites through linking it in. So as much as I’m contributing to the web of broken links by moving here, I am equally going my part to clean up. Also the trip back through the archives was a great walk down memory lane; I could see how I evolved here, trying different things - in the early (pre-2010) days, it was very autobiographical, very conversational, as I had frequent visitors to my side who would read and comment & respond. I remember that distinctly driving my adoption of Wordpress as a host because it was built around those interactive features. And then over time I was clearly influenced by folks like Kottke and Gruber, with their link blogs and limited commentary, and I suspect then Twitter took over and incentive to post here was lost along the way. And then the last 6 years of the blog being fallow has left a lot of navel gazing.
Anyway, all that to say, if you have any feedback, reach out and let me know. Who knows if anyone will end up following me from my previous site, but this is my go at it.