Fat vacation and some “landmark” Moves…

I have big fat vacation coming up that starts from 3rd of December and goes all the way up to 12th of January. A hefty 40 days at hand. I am not planning to go back to visit Pakistan for some obvious and some not-so-obvious reasons. But majorly, I want to save some bucks. Hence, that rules out all plans to go backpacking across UK as well. I believe I’ve a lifetime ahead to tour places, I have to be a bit ambitious at the moment and least but not the last (yep, i know it’s reversed) I am not very very fond of traveling and sight-seeing. You may ask Why, but that’s another debatable topic for another time…

Somebody recently asked me what my ambition is, and I replied without a second thought "To retire by mid-30s". Now I didn’t know where that came from, but I like the thought of it. Let’s see.

Anyway, what do I do with that much time on my plate? For those out there who know me, they’ll be watching this space very carefully. Yep. I have got a lot of things that I have planned for this crazy off time and chances are I will still be striving for more time. I have got three gigantic ideas that I wish to see go live by January. They have all been gathering up since a while now, its just that I wasn’t being able to find some time to think about them. Well.. its about time now! I feel like I am in 2002-04 all over again when I used to be a bit ahead of the-then tech curve (or atleast up-to-date). It was then when I established this blog when only a few knew about what blogging actually is in Pakistan.

After almost 4 years of ignoring that I had a blog or taking it seriously, I am really back to it now. Along with all other social means Facebook, Twitter, etc. Please feel free to add / follow me if you will — who knows you’ll end up getting something out that is of some worth.

Okay lots and lots of people have asked me to move to WordPress. Umm. NO! The reason is simple I hand-coded this baby, and I am not going to abandon it no matter how crappy this "blogging system" is. It’s definitely no match for WordPress, but still. If we start abandoning our own stuff — well, to me its not right. However, I wouldn’t definitely recommend mine over wordpress or anyother blogging system to anybody for that matter. Plus, learn from Microsoft! They use their own stuff no matter how crappy…

Anyhow. I plan to start some serious development and re-visit PHP after about 8 months! I am setting up the development environment on my new laptop. Apache wasn’t even installed on it, can you believe it? I am going to brush dust off my MVC framework that I started developing back in 2004′s but have improved it a lot over time. It now has Ajax and all those bells and whistles in it. Last I worked on it was back in December 2007. Haven’t touched it since then. Anyway, I am going to set it up so that I can do some Rapid development on a couple of ideas that I got.

Hey, for a side thought, I was wondering about sharing my framework with all of you PHP enthusiasts. It has a lot to offer especially when it comes to high-scale websites with support for memcached, apache/reverse proxying using sticky sessions, distributed login mechanism (yep! go figure what it is, keeping Microsoft Passport .NET or Google’s central login in mind) and heavily uses mod_rewrite and mod_proxy. I will save the introduction for a later time. Just let me know who’s interested in having the baby framework, if any at all ….

So to sum up my  landmark moves:

• Big vacation
• Back to blogging (and social media stuff)
• Setting up Development environment to start working on new projects that I have in mind
• Thinking to share my framework with the developers’ community along with other things that I have developed over time

Me off.