Greetingz all. There has been some buzz lately about the launch of a bloggers’ club in Mauritius. This initiative has been on-going for some time now, primarily through the Mauritius Blog Tracker, and also The Mauritius Blog Brethen, both of which had their moments of glory but the light soon dimmed out (not completely). Although the intentions were good, I think the basement was not strong enough (mostly due to the small number of mauritian bloggers) and the timing was not appropriate.

But in the Web arena, things change rapidly, and we now have an ever-growing community of bloggers in the country, coupled with the decreasing cost of broadband, we can confidently expect the number of Mauritian blogs to rise in the near-future.

For the time being, We will be focussing on the links among mauritian blogs, who is linking to who and come up with a graph of the Mauritian blogosphere. With time, we will analyse the morphing of that graph and understand its implication for the mauritian society.

As pre-requisite for this experiment, I will require an up-to-date list of all Mauritian Blogs.  I think Yashvin must be compiling such a list currently. But anyone of you already having a list can mail it to me on roushdat [AT] gmail [DOT] com preferably in the form of a datasheet with 2 columns: Name, URL

Check out Yashvin’s post to learn more about the on-going iniative

After successfully obtaining my BSc from the University of Mauritius (a university which i am proud of being an alumni), with the help of many of you, I managed to get myself a state-sponsored seat at the University of Southampton and I’m currently almost half-way the MSc degree in Web Technology and things are going really well

So I guess now is the time to focus on the next target, the PHD.

There are many reasons why people do PHDs…some think it will get them more money, others think that addind the Dr title in front of your name brings you pride…and most successful PHDs are those that do it because they love to be discovering/improving things.

Personally I will not say that I’m 100% of the last reason given above, let’s say 50%. The remaining 50% is divided among:

1. I DO NOT want to to work under a boss putting loads of pressure on me to complete a development task!
2. I want to be my own boss, manage my own time, and do things that I enjoy doing
3. I want a good life , not a dog’s life. (Waking up early in the morning everyday, go to work, work whole day, get back home late at night thinking about how to resolve a bug, sleep, repeat ->that’s not a life!)
4. The Dr. title is tempting as well huh ->It will look great for the president to be a doctor :p

So I am now hunting for opportunities available for the PHD. Still unsure about the specific fields, but I think I will be quite flexible about that. Have considered the area of Ubiquitous Security. Went to meet Dr. David Argles this afternoon to discuss about it. Seems the major obstacle will be to find a research group that has funding for international students and are willing to accept me onboard. That’s the unfortunate thing when you live in a small country, the government cannot afford to fund  many students for PHD and on top of that, since I have already benefited from a scholarship from the government of Mauritius, I am no longer eligible to apply again.

So as things  currently are, either I will get some research group here willing to fund me or I’ll be back to UoM doing the PHD at home

If you are from a company willing to sponsor my studies (the future president of earth’s studies), don’t hesitate to get in touch, my email adress is roushdat [AT] gmail [DOT] com