unlimited

It's been about a year (and 4 days) since I started this. Coincidentally, this is also the 100th post. I should've gotten it out earlier but I was lazy =b.

Well, this blog has been around for a year, but the first I heard of blogging was long ago, in 2001. First entry was on 7th December, 2001. I made a simple page in ugly html =), but I never did bother to put it online. It was too much trouble to keep editing the pages... no blogging software, back then. Here's an entry for the 15th of December, 2001.

"I have just finished watching two David Copperfield (real name David Kotkin, I think) shows back to back, and it started me thinking - how does he do all that? All that levitating and illusions and other tricks, I mean. Wouldn't knowing detract from it all? Yet I feel that I am past joy already, to a place where I believe that I know too much too soon, making me more of an aloof spectator to this world, puttering under the guise of a normal human being to observe the machinations of this world. I have this unerring longing to understand, to know how everything works. Curiosity killed the cat, so the saying goes. But I'm no cat. All I want to do is understand. To know. To be omniwise, omniintelligent. Or at least as close as I can get. But, I guess that only applys to whatever I am interested in. This kind of longing is, more or less, the lazy, lie-back-in-your-chair-and-wait-kind."

I gave up the html and switched to various notepad replacement programs, eventually. It evolved into a sort of journal, one I've kept almost without fail until today. It's less refined than this, of course. More on whatever I feel like writing.

I wonder how this blog will be in 5 years. Still around? Same address? How will it look? What kind of tone will it have? Which naturally leads to the question, where will I be in 5 years? Hopefully, not staring at a screen too much.

Anyhow, I've changed the banner again. My 1 hour banners, because that's the average time I spend on them (usually with a crash in the middle, too). I'm still not entirely satisfied, but it'll have to do. Need something to mark the occasion =).

Now, off tangent, there's an interesting discussion on why God allows atrocities. I think it's less acerbic than a lot of debates on the topic, the people respect each other, and they do try to answer the question with not so much of the 'maybe God just doesn't exist' kind of statements. The part where they raise Plantinga's solution is especially interesting.

"[It] proposes that perhaps all persons suffer from transworld depravity, that perhaps the actual world, though not the best possible world, is the best one that God could bring about, if he is to respect the free choices of the creatures therein."

It's in the second half of the page, and there are lots of links to various resources too. Incidentally, the wiki on it is good too (it's also linked to on the site). I can't believe I've never heard of it before.

Lastly, if you've noticed the new 'Recent Sites' sidebar, you'll see that the link to the discussion is there too. I kinda like that addition, because I occasionally stumble on interesting things, but I wonder whether all this extra stuff will eventually make the page load significantly longer.