The birth of a blog

Its a Sunday -- a time to sleep, relax, reflect, enrich my knowledge (oh yeah!), and enjoy mom's cooking.

But I get up at 8am and have this urge to visit "the life of an econ junkie" - maybe the author of the blog planted a sublimal suggestion when I was IM'ing him a couple of days back?

OK so I go read his blog and think - "Hey, if this guy can have a blog - I can do better. I can have a blog that will be read by millions of people!". I was helped along in my thought process by the fact that Andy Abramson credits being featured on CNN International to his VO-IP blog.

I could be famous too, let me create my blog!!!

So off I go to BlogSpot.com and started off with the first of the 3 easy steps.

Creating an account was simple enough, I just need to select a username, password, display name and agree to the terms. I've done this tons of times, no big deal.

Then came naming my blog. The Internet has made linguistic jugglers out of all of us. I quickly realized that I could not get san.blogspot.com, santosh.blogspot.com or other nice sensible variations. "Sorry, this blog address is not available".

"Google to the rescue", I thought to myself. So off I went to google.com and typed "name generator". Well well well, tons of sites. I guess I am not alone.

"Drogo Brandybuck" is my Hobbit name, according to this site. But drogo.blogspot.com was not available, someone had the same idea that I had. And drogobrandybuck.blogspot.com was too long.

This site told me that "messiah", "lord" and "poonen" are all related to the keyword "santosh".

And this site gave an interesting expansion for my name - "Synthetic Artificial Neohuman Trained for Observation and Scientific Harm". But I couldn't use such a long name for a blog that I wanted read by millions.

So I finally settled for Nuranto as suggested by The Middle-earth Name Generator. It was short, mysterious and still available on BlogSpot. So off I went back to the registration page and completed step 2 in a jiffy.

The final step wanted me to select a design, which I did quickly (I liked the colors and the layout of this template a lot).

There it was - my very own blog! Now to fill it up with something. So I started writing this - my first blog ever.

So now I have my very own blogging style - long, complicated (often single sentence) paragraphs full of links, my thoughts on thoughts (enclosed inside parenthesis), hyphens, commas and other assorted punctuations. And don't forget the footnotes.


FOOTNOTES:
(yes, this makes it look like an academic paper but I really want to impress you)

(1) I referred google.com gazillion times while I wrote this post - from finding sites, to researching facts, to getting definitions and checking the spelling of words (which I wanted to use to make that favorable impression on you). This is sufficient proof that Google has now become more indispensible than toothpaste (atleast to me).

(2) Note to Google: Please buy g.com, it will make life easier for all of us.

(3) Note to BlogSpot.com: Link to good name generators (or create one yourself) from step 2, follow the example of Network Solutions and other domain name registration sites.

(4) Note to you: You can expect to see random ramblings, notes to myself, insights into me, cool links to websites, suggestions for books/music/movies, my thoughts on technology, info on my work and other odds and ends here. I may post infrequently, it all depends on my mood. I am in a very "creative" mood right now, by the way.