Dead leaves all year round....

Nope. It's not autumn. At least, not in this part of the world, where we effectively have summer all year round.

With leaves falling down all year round, you could say I've an endless task of raking leaves off the ground.

Besides being a visual mess, the fallen leaves are also somewhat of a fire hazard, especially during the dry season that we're currently experiencing in Malaysia.

What's the best way to get rid of the fallen dead leaves? I've ruled out setting them on fire, easy as it may seem. Open burning just isn't an eco-friendly way to get the job done.

My old college-mate, Joon, suggested I resort to composting. Hmm, sounds good, though my first thoughts are it would take next to forever for dead leaves to decompose. Opposed to, say, stuff that drops from cows. Going to if some research to see how to compost effectively. Anyone out there with experience to share do drop me some pointers, please....

Breaking free from blogging boundaries.

Does every post on a blog need a title and a photo?

Sometimes, it's hard to come up with a post which fulfills the "template" of a typical blog post. At least, that's what traditionalists of blogging would tend to expect. Ironically, looking at social media platforms like Google Plus and Twitter, and to lesser extent Facebook, in order to streamline the look and feel, users are forced to conform to the requirements of that particular platform.

Take Twitter for instance. Sure it's come a long way now, but it's still the 140 maximum character micro-blogging platform. No technical reason why you can't post more than 140 characters, but unless Twitter makes a change, you simply just can't.

Likewise for Google Plus, each post looks very much the same, which is good in a way as the focal point is now on the content of the post rather than the looks, but after some time, everything looks very much the same and standardized (in an Apple kind of way, which for some may be a good thing). No blogging titles, no tags, and no index - good luck finding something you posts on pineapple tarts two years ago....

Facebook is certainly not for blogging, something which I've pointed out before, and certainly, in spite of numerous changes to the user interface, things haven't changed in this respect.

Of course, having a high degree of freedom when it comes to designing the looks of you blog does demand a great deal of responsibility and "taste", to avoid spawning some psychedelic creation (like what you often see in Myspace).

Blogging here knowing fully well that the contents are open to the the denizens of the World Wide Web is good - as it keeps me consciously checking that I don't post something that shouldn't go online. Something that the "privacy" of social networking tend to lull us into a false sense of security.

I've come a long way since my first blog on the now abandoned Multiply (the social network that was everything that Facebook is today and more, but sadly no more for reasons that I can't really understand). That alone poured a swimming pool full of cold water on my motivation for blogging. But fortunately, my decision to cross-post to Blogger, the "clone" is the sole survivor today....

Well, don't have to stick to the SEO rules, since this blog isn't monetized. Just a place for me to keep on writing - and to look back fondly on perhaps someday in the future when I'm well into my grandpa days....