New additions

If you were lucky enough to come by in the last couple of days, you may have noticed a brief appearance of Uniqlo’s fantastic Uniqlock on this page. It’s available as a Flash badge (2 sizes), and a screensaver, but you can test-drive the magic on their main page itself. Simply, it’s a neatly designed Flash clock, with music by the Fantastic Plastic Machine, that plays short clips of fresh-faced Japanese dancing girls every 5 seconds. They do a quirky mix of hand puppetry, ballet, and Jazz dance routines, and it’s simply mesmerizing. At work the other day, a couple of us just watched the damned clock for 10 minutes straight.

But the Uniqlock is gone now, because it was an unwieldy size for a webpage such as this. (RSS readers, do come by now and then!)

It’s a Web 2.0 age (Web 2,0 for the French), and this creaky old design with its non-standard, non-semantic web HTML – 382 validation errors and counting – just doesn’t have what it takes to keep the young kids entertained anymore. Why, just last night I learnt of the existence of tumblelogs! Have you heard of them? I sure as hell hadn’t! Suddenly, I understood how the great unwashed computer-illiterate masses feel, and it was the most unpleasant second of my life.

And so, in the grand tradition we have here of overcompensation by kneejerk reaction towards uncharted waters, I give you:
1) Larger, lovelier type.
2) blast!

Powered by the very nice tumblr system (Kevin Rose and Merlin Mann use it), this new channel/brand/flavor of my sangsara.net service/gift/blessing will deliver all short-form posts from here on out.

It’s simple:
Links, conversations, photos, tweets, YouTube videos, and short grunts – blast!
Long meandering posts, essays, reviews, complaints and grievances – blog.

Bonus: I’ve also added a handy link for visitors on mobile devices. It’s powered by Skweezer and trims all the fat off the blog page. Find it at m.sangsara.net.