sair.am's blog

Approximately 5 years and 3 months back, I officially became a part of the wild-wild-web(www). I used to see and play games my uncle’s comp till my tenth class. I did not know any website other than Yahoo and few other sites on which he used to work on. I always liked the sound the modem used to make when we were connecting to the internet.

I still remember the day when I wrote my B.Arch exam in another university. I felt happy after writing the exam, since that was the ‘official’ last exam that I was supposed to write thinking wrt to my life towards Engineering. After the exam, Harith got me to an internet cafe where he checked his email and I later was shown how to create one of my own. I was officially on the web. I got myself an email account with Rediff.com [sairam_kunala_XX@] (it aint X, its a digit). I decided that should be my email id, since I told a friend earlier that he could mail me on that account after we parted from the college. Rediff.com was, possibly, the world’s slowest site ever that I accessed from the internet cafe. Probably because of its servers or the number of users trying to access the site (I never knew all the funda about vertical/horizontal scaling, websites/how email works or anything for that matter then). I only used to curse the internet at the cafe. Rediff never had any IM then, and none of my school friends were using rediff . So, I created a account on yahoo on my own. This time without the numbers and just plain “sairamkunala” because there was some other intelligent guy who wanted the username “sairam” on yahoo.

I joined IIIT in 2004 and during that time, Google’s GMAIL became the famous email provider because of the free 1GB space (that was announced on the 1st of April) to be provided to each user, and every one wanted a GMAIL account which actually required a referal from some one who had an account and in my case it was a senior in the college whom I never could ask. I was pretty happy after few weeks that Rediff too got the 1GB space thing.After a few months (end of 2004), I dont remember who, but he asked me if I wanted a gmail account and who would say no?, I got it. yay! . Gmail was famous and it was still on an invite only basis. Everyone started chatting on google talk and very few friends were using the old deprecated yahoo messenger which would take close to few hundred MBs in memory. I am pretty sure G N Aditya and  Revanth were two of the few who used to use YMessenger.

The IIIT digital library had most of the softwares that were approved&licensed for internal use within IIIT, but some of them had viruses . Why the viruses ?  An instituition having few hundreds of computers on the network , with mostly the BigBoss’s operating system which was the best breeding place for viruses. The place where even few anti viruses would already have been infected of viruses. And the best part of it is the DUMP and FYP folders where in any one could use DUMP folders and only the Final Year students can only use the FYP folder to store the presentations and backups of their Final Year Projects. I could explore all interesting softwares when I was in IIIT from the digital library which was later almooost replaced by DC++ for finding any data ranging for A as in for Academics/Animes through M as in Music to S as in Softwares . I was introduced to Animes in my mid third year. I started with the one called “Full Metal Alchemist” which was an 51 episode story, set in a fictional universe in which alchemy is one of the most advanced scientific techniques known to man, the story follows the brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric, who want to restore their bodies after a disastrous failed attempt to bring their mother back to life through alchemy [content reused from wiki ] and later started with Bleach, follows the adventures of Ichigo Kurosaki after he accidentally obtains the power of a shinigami—a Japanese death personification similar to the Grim Reaper—from Rukia Kuchiki. Gaining these abilities forces him to take on the duties of defending humans from evil spirits and guiding departed souls to the afterlife[content reused from wiki ]. Both of them were introduced to me by Prasanth K (who was also a friend in my eleventh class). The series of animes I watched and the manga I read increased going on from then. I could learn a bit of Japanese listening the Animes which were usually subbed(than dubbed). That’s the reason you could find an animes section both in my delicious site and my home page. The best manga that I read and which is a big hit is One Piece follows the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy, a 17-year-old boy, who gained supernatural abilities by eating a magical fruit, and his ragtag crew of heroic pirates, named the Straw Hats. Luffy’s greatest ambition is to obtain the world’s ultimate treasure, One Piece, and thereby become the next King of the Pirates[content reused from wiki ]. Its been more than 12 years since the release of the first volume of the story and its still so exciting.

In the span of the last 5 years I never ever cared about keeping myself organized with my online accounts on the web. According to my firefox’s list of stored passwords and other sources like the data in my notepad , I got close to 70 odd websites which I am trying to figure the best way to safely and securely store my personal data and also the few GBs of data I have with me on my personal computer and organizing the 40k odd emails, most of which were from college which I thought would be useful for some reason. With all this, I feel like it would have been better to keep myself organized with things like email and deleting email and the junk which are not worth keeping like a mail to a mailing list asking if someone had seen his empty bottle or his shoes which he left in some lab. I dont deny that they would bring back memories , but I feel like wasting unnecessarily using up space on the email server. I bet you wont be using the space with stuff that is work related on your email server that right now provides more than 7 Gigs of space for free , but denies to provide anything more than 100 MB of space for free to display/show your photos out to the world.

The question boils down to , which service is best for storing my data online and why ? How can one manage so many different passwords , information which all sites one has accounts on and data somewhere online safe(=encrypted). I have logged in my way of doing this storing the songs , movies, softwares, books or basically digital content which you bought online or home made content that is private.