Hello again!

Hello again!

It’s been close to two years now since I last posted on my blog. Naturally, a lot has changed.

First of all, more than 11 years after I first registered with WordPress, I have decided to move on. This decision had been made quite some time ago, as I became increasingly fascinated with Markdown, and parallelly with R. My first leap into the world of RMarkdown was creating my CV, whereas more recently I use it to make most of my slide decks as well.

Migrating an entire blog, albeit with very few posts, wound up being quite the task—if you’re at all familiar with anything R, lRning curves are steep! Long story short, it took me a while to learn how website-building using RMarkdown works, and to migrate all my blog posts here while also adding more elements to turn the erstwhile blog into a website.

My stubbornness hasn’t helped, of course. I wanted to resolve all issues and make this website look perfect before consummating it with posts and publicity. However, passing birthdays have nudged me to the point where I have now decided to proceed even with the unresolved issues. One good thing is that any reader can suggest edits or make corrections (for even stuff like typos), because the source code for the entire website is open and accessible on GitHub. I’m actually pleased with how it has turned out, and excited to make use of the data manipulation capabilities of R as well as the typesetting/formatting prowess of Markdown/LaTeX.

Now, on to personal changes. Since the last time I posted, I earned my Master’s degree in Ecology; I scrambled around Czech Republic and a couple other countries on a mad bird-and-travel rush in my last month in Europe, after having been unable to travel for the majority of two years; I went rock-climbing for the first time; said farewells to some beautiful souls; started my first job; moved back to my “home city”; had reunions with some beautiful souls, and found several new ones; got myself a few bucket list items; experienced a few bucket list places, geographies and landscapes; spent an entire 30-hour+ train journey working, and made my first first-author manuscript submission from inside said train; gave an entrance exam in memory of school days; fell even further in love with the written word; made many many travel and birding stories.

Although I’m still as lost as I was in the larger scheme of things, it feels as if the entropy has been channelled into a handful of disjunct but proximate paths. And I’ve grabbed my popcorn, and lurched into a comfortable yet resolute recline, and I’m here to enjoy the ride.

Until next time.