Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

I found this gem hidden in a Paul Graham essay. He writes

I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.

A few years back I was a partner in a web development company called Silver Dragon Digital Creations. The reason I mention this is because we stopped running the business a while ago and I wanted to see if the domain was still registered to us. Can you believe that silverdragon.co.za now belongs to the Schapenberg Holiday Flatlet in Somerset West, Cape Town? I suppose that's what happens to internet start-ups when they die...

While I can't say I did too much in the company (I was too busy involved with student politics), we had a great team. We closed the company when I joined the corporate world and my partners Dylan and George went off to revolutionise the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics...

Dylan is currently at the University of Southern California doing his Phd. How he can survive in a state run by Arnold Swhatshisname is beyond me. I've known Dylan from high school. In fact, he was one of the first people I knew in high school - we had a standing challenge throughout our schooling careers "to see who could study the least and get the highest marks..."

George recently left the civilised world (Scotland) and moved to the US to do his Phd in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts. The crazy thing (to me) is that he turned down offers from both Yale and Carnegie Mellon. Why? Some jazz about academic puritism... While I totally get why he did what he did, I told him that if he went to Yale then I could have bragged that I had a friend at Yale - to which he replied "Well, you could tell them someone you know turned Yale down?"

How cool is this? l am posting this from a workshop at the Johannesburg Country Club from my Pocket PC connected to my mobile phone via bluetooth which is in turn connected to the Internet via GPRS.

Yes, no wires!

I've finally decided to set up a blog. So, why start blogging now? Well, I started something similar about 4 or 5 years ago while at university when I use to write a column (aptly called "The Reality Studio") for an internet startup called Get a Life. I thought I had something useful to say back then (being a student activist, blah blah) and have recently realised that as the world gets stranger and stranger I may still have a few useful ideas left in me.

Anyways, just for those of you who don't know what a blog is (and from chats to family and friends, not many do), it stands for web log (get it?) and is a sort of diary/journal that is arranged in chronological order. (I was first introduced to the idea when an old IRC friend put up a blog on his site a few years back. The cool thing about it was that even though I stopped IRCing years ago, I was still able to keep track of where he was off to and what he was up to.)