( ! )

the part where I lose something...

2008-02-16T21:55:00.005-05:00

So I made it through 90% of my vacation without screwing anything up too much (other than visiting Sydney in the midst of its rainiest summer in recent history), but yesterday night I managed to lose my grey, Manhattan Portage messenger bag. Luckily there's nothing irreplacable in the bag, but it did contain my camera, contact lenses, glasses case, and some things I'd borrowed from friends... as well as being a beloved bag.

In the unlikely (but hopeful) event that you, the person who found my bag, had the incredible insight to Google [Akshay Patil] and found this blog post, please know that you can contact me at akshay(a)alum.mit.edu. Thanks.

a brief dispatch

2008-02-10T21:02:00.000-05:00

Heading off to the airport with Andrew C. soon to drive on down the Great Ocean Road for a few days. The weather here in Sydney has finally turned for the better -- reasonable stretches of sunniness punctuated by brief rain storms. I even went to the beach yesterday (boogie boarding is fun, currents were surprisingly strong).

I managed to knock off the two "must dos" of Sydney on Wednesday (the only gloriously sunny day we've had here) which were the Taronga Zoo and take a ferry to Manly Beach. I've now managed to not tour the Sydney Opera House twice now, thanks to tickets selling out and me showing up after they closed. Partially due to this, I've spent a fair amount of time wandering my way through most of downtown Sydney and getting a feel for how things are laid out.

Don't have anything much more to say at the moment... I've been keeping notes and maybe I'll write up some posts whilst we're driving (or maybe I'll actually look out the car window).

arrived

2008-02-04T02:00:00.000-05:00

Well, I landed in Australia just in time to watch the Patriots lose the Superbowl in a bar full of what I assume were American students spending a term abroad (read: young, kinda annoying, drinking Budweiser, and generally Giants fans).
The other two downers so far are (A) I'm apparently allergic to much of Sydney (apparently a rare condition, judging from the utter lack of allergy medicine in their drugstores) and (B) it's very rainy/foggy here right now. Apparently this is going to last most of this week (ugh) but it's better elsewhere in the country, which I shall be venturing out to next week.

Oh, regarding the flight from SFO to SYD. I indeed had a middle seat and 14 hours is just about as long as I remember it being (I awoke from my one successful nap to find we were still only half-way there). When I bought the tickets, I indicated I'm a vegeterian with the intention of avoiding those mystery meats they serve in air. Well, apparently United decided to lump vegetarians with vegans on my flight (despite them being very distinct entries in their form online) so was served nothing but rice and vegan cookies all flight... so much for optimizing that parameter.

Other updates/learned things:

You can get your visiting visa AFTER YOU LAND. How is this a "visa" and not just an enforced visitation tax? Just say: "Australia: A$20 admission; All major credit cards accepted" and stop trying to kid everyone.
The non-downtown bits of Sydney look suspiciously like major suburbia in CA. In the cab ride from the airport, I half expected to drive past a Trader Joe's or end up in front of my parent's house.
"Milk shakes" aren't what you think they are (thanks for the tip Bolin!). You'll be wanting a "Thickshake." I'll probably stop noting terminology differences soon, since I imagine there's a whole wealth of them that you probably don't care about.
Aussies (at least Sydneyites) put sweet chili sauce on pretty much everything... ranging from nachos to french fries in my limited sampling so far.
Having an American accent in Sydney feels much less foreign than I was expecting. Maybe that's the jetlag talking. Will have to reassess after I've done a bit more bumbling about.

on my way out back

2008-02-02T14:01:00.000-05:00

If it seems like I only blog when I travel, well, yeah. That's about accurate.

I'm in an utterly deserted United Airways terminal (does no one fly United and/or does no one fly on Saturday afternoons?) waiting for my flight to SFO where I'll switch planes and continue on my way to a two week vacation in Australia. Do I know what I'm doing in Australia while there? No. Should I probably have planned something by now? Yeah, probably, what whatcha gonna do about it? Vacations are about escaping responsibility and it turns out that just buying a ticket was almost too much to ask of me in the first place.

To prep myself for the trip, I'm working my way through Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country (generously lent to me by Ann V.) which has throughly sold me on two points:

Driving through Australia is a great way to commune with the vastness of this indescribably massive country.
Australia is full of many wondrous ways to die, one of which I will almost certainly experience first hand.

I mention the last one because Australia really just chalk full of things that will kill you and seeing as I can't go a few weeks in the U.S. without having the hell bit out of me by bugs, I really do feel like I'm risking my life going on this trip. Oh well, there'll be sun (it's rainy season) and surf (full of jellyfish) and I'll be thousands of miles away from work (we have an office in Sydney). Should be fun =).

Things learned today:

Do not mention you work for Google to your taxi driver. It turns out that he got a Masters in Computer Science from LIU (doesn't know how to code, but likes networking) and is wondering if you can help get him a job in the industry. He was otherwise very nice and got me to the airport in record time, but he did spend an awful amount of time turned backwards talking to me about his educational experiences and reiterating that he was in the U.S. legally and had a passport (in case I was wondering). He also knows a little bit of the HTML. The one thing the exchange really impressed upon me is how amazing it is that I too got a Masters in CS without doing a lick of programming. It was great at the time, but seems so wrong in hindsight.
The Chai latte @ Peet's Coffee is pretty terrible. Never get one.
You need a "visa" to go to Australia for pleasure. I didn't realize this (and never checked, so clearly I'm the idiot here) and no one mentioned it to me, until the woman at the ticket counter asked me if I had one. Thankfully they (United Airlines) can issue you one instantaneously (how is this a visa!?) and it cost me $25; if you do it through the sketchy-looking Australian Government website (http://www.eta.immi.gov.au/), it'll cost you AUS$20 ~= US$18.
NYC->SFO on a saturday afternoon might be low traffic, but apparently my SFO->SYD flight is booked up and I'm stuck with a middle seat (they refused to issue me a seat when I first bought the ticket. It was.... no comforting). Knock on wood this flight isn't going to be as painful as it sounds like it'll be.
You can indeed refill those little travel-sized shampoo bottles with contents from their normal-sized brethren. All it takes is a steady hand and an inordinate amount of patience. Do not try to do this right before you need to head to the airport though, especially if you too suffer from whatever disease causes you to loose all sense of time while doing the most unimportant and menial tasks.
Seriously, this chai latte is awful. Maybe it's because I don't drink these sorts of things often, but it's like burnt milk + artificial caramel flavoring. Ugh.

favorite small albums of '07

2007-12-24T12:58:00.000-05:00

Naturally there were a lot of solid albums this year, including a number of very good albums by band you've already heard of (Killers, Arcade Fire). And there are some albums I'm pretty sure I'll like, but haven't had a chance to listen to (Jesca Hoop, Radiohead, Kate Nash). These were the albums that caught be by surprise and I'm happy to say I'm not sick of any of them yet. Check 'em out.

Stars - In Our Bedroom After the War - As my last.fm profile will tell you, Stars have quickly become One Of My Favoritest Bands Ever. In Our Bedroom is maybe not their best album ever, but it's certainly their most cohesive.
The National - Boxer - There aren't any super stellar tracks, but for some reason, I can't stop listening to this album. I think, more than anything, I'm always in the mood for Boxer -- whenever I don't have anything else I feel like listening to, it's what I queue up.
José González - In Our Nature - Not as good as Veneer, but he still can't do wrong in my eyes.
Feist - The Reminder - Not as cohesive as you might like, but there are just so many stand-out tracks on this album, she could have filled it out with random noise and it would still be a great album.
The Weepies - Say I Am You - Ok, technically this came out in 2006, but it didn't cross my radar till early this year. This album is just so sweet, it's like a beautiful painting you could hang on your wall and never get sick of. You've probably heard their music in the JC Penny / Old Navy xmas ads now running.

saw it on the video

2007-11-20T21:58:00.000-05:00

A little while ago I got a (3rd gen) ipod nano. Apple's tagline is "A little video for everyone" and while the screen isn't huge, it's tolerable... so watch little videos I do.

Despite making me feel obnoxiously adult-like, I have to admit I'm addicted to NYT's video podcasts (available via subscription in iTunes). In particular, the world video segments are delightfully compelling 5-8 minute looks into issues that normally get edited down to 30 seconds on regular news broadcasts.

On the longer video front, I really enjoyed watching the Larry Lessig's latest lecture about his new topic of focus: Corruption. I've been a huge fan of Lessig ever since I watched his excellent Free Culture lecture at MIT for 6.805 - Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier. I had the privilege of eating lunch with him when he came and gave a talk @ Google last year... he's just as awesome in person as he is on your computer. Two other worthwhile @google videos worth watching are Jose Gonzalez (taciturn musician extraordinaire) and Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball).

I've found that comedy works best on the small screen... drama not so much. I made it through Season 3 of Peep Show but I haven't been able to tackle Hotel Chevalier. If you know of anything worth watching on a screen the size of a large postage stamp, let me know.

indian omnibus

2007-11-10T23:04:00.000-05:00

Well, it's my last day in India for this trip and I've still got notes on close to a bajillion things to write about. So, in the spirit of the Ask A Ninja Omnibus, hop on aboard as I bang through as much as I can before returning to my New York based, infrequently blogging ways.

Chinese food -- Indian people generally only eat Indian food. The only exceptions to this are Western multi-national food chains (e.g. Domino's) and Chinese food. Just as the U.S. has its own brand of Chinese food (think "orange chicken"), so does India. Chinese food here is generally sauce heavy, spicy, and not fried. It's so distinctive, in fact, that it is available internationally and has its own Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Chinese_cuisine
Landmark navigation -- No one calls streets by their official names and street signs are rare at best so everyone here relies on landmark navigation to get around. It's utterly confusing as someone who doesn't live here and makes it close to impossible to get anywhere you've never been to before (unless conveniently located next to someplace you have been to and remember). I thought I'd be all independent and learn where things are in Mumbai this trip, but I quickly gave up when I realized all the dirty streets looked the same.
Clothing -- My cousins took me to a store that sells casual dress shirts and started pulling out shirt after shirt for me to try, each a different and unusual color -- colors I rarely on people and certainly have never worn. Apprehensively I told them I'd try them on, but I was pretty sure they wouldn't go with my skin tone. Then, lo and behold, ever one of the ridiculous colors matched my complexion just fine. I was amazed until I remembered I'm in India... everyone here has my skin color and they've had thousands of years to figure out which fabric colors go well with it. On the other hand, in a country full of such exceptionally skinny people, the fit of the shirts was surprisingly loose. In all the clothing stores we went to, I consistently ended up getting the smallest size available -- I'm not smaller than the average Indian, but common practice here is to wear collared shirts baggy (and tucked in)... go figure.
Historical upkeep -- India does a depressingly poor job maintaining its cultural landmarks. When I visited Raj Ghat (Gandhi's memorial in Delhi) a few years ago, the lawns were dying, the fountains dry, and the pathways dirty. The best maintained sites are almost always World Heritage Sites (maintenance funded by UNESCO) or Buddhist sites (maintenance funded by the Japanese). The notable exception to this is a series of palaces maintained by the Taj Hotels company. This means that whenever you see a large, beautiful, well-maintained, historic building, it's almost always hotel.
Local trains -- Mumbai doesn't have a subway system (what they call "subway" we would call "pedestrian underpass") but it does of a simple system of above ground local trains. Riding the trains is considered quite scary but my experiences on this trip weren't so bad (I only went off-peak and always with someone more experienced). The train system is incredibly efficient, punctual, and dirty. It's the backbone of the dabbawallas who operate with "six sigma" precision. There are first class cars (10x more expensive), women-only cars, and general cars. The general cars are by far the most crowded and have people hanging out of the doorways (oh right, there are no doors) at all times.
Cricket -- I never realized this, but cricket is way more popular than soccer in India. I don't think I've seen a single pick-up game of soccer here, but I've seen countless groups of all ages playing cricket. According to my cousins, Indian television show cricket and soccer matches but no other sporting events (not even the Olympics).
Mustaches -- Something like 60% of Indian men have mustaches. I don't get it. Not beards, mustaches. Doesn't matter what your social status or occupation is, you probably have a mustache. The one exception is Bollywood actors who, for some reason, are generally clean-shaven.
Driving -- Driving is perhaps the most singly scary thing you can do in India. I'd always understood that lane markers were optional in Mumbai, but when we went to Bhopal, I quickly learned that the center divider is just a suggestion too. No one wears a seat belt and everyone has their side-view mirrors tucked in (otherwise the mirror would get nicked off). Horns are so integral for announcing where you are and what you intend to do that you'd probably be better off driving blind than deaf in this country.
My ignorance -- I don't speak Hindi or Marathi (just English and Java) so everyone (including my relatives) assumes I must know next to nothing about India and the Hinduism. My knowledge of Indian history is certainly lacking, but it gets very frustrating when people start describing to you, in simple terms, a dish that you've had since childhood. Especially annoying when people assume I know little about Hindu mythology. It's true that as a non-practicer, my familiarity with practical/daily details of Hinduism (why you do something x number of times, to always do y before z) is sketchy, but I've found that my knowledge of Hindu mythology is actually broader than most Indian people's. This is, in no small part, due to the fact that my sister and I were voracious readers when we were young and were fed piles upon piles of Amar Chitra Katha comics. At this point, I'm fairly sure my sister and I know more about Hindu mythology than both my parents and perhaps even more than my Grandfather and many of my cousins (incl. the ones living in India). Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to stop people from trying to explain to me who Ganesh is...

Alright; I have more to write about but this is the last stop... everyone off.

don't eat that...

2007-11-10T08:53:00.000-05:00

As you might imagine, one of the best parts of visiting India is the Indian food. The one complication is that, as a foreigner, I can't eat a lot of it -- it makes me sick. It's not a problem of prejudice or strong distaste, it's a matter of microbes. "Don't drink the water" is as appropriate a warning in India as it is south of the border and the Maharajah's revenge is every bit as vicious as Montezuma's. Of course you can always build up an immunity if you want to... but by my dad's estimate it'd probably take you about three weeks to do so and it's been a long time since I've had a trip to India last longer than a month.

I learned first hand about these microbes the hard way when I came to India in 2002. My cousins run a fresh fruit juice stand in Mumbai and were positively insistent that I sample their offerings. Seeing as they were family and knew I wasn't from 'round these parts, my mother and I figured it was probably O.K. to try. Despite using filtered water when washing the fruit, some regular water presumably made its way into the mix and by the next day, I was running a fever as well as other.... physical discomforts. To make matters worse, this happened a day or two before my 32+ hour trip back to Boston... I think I spent most of my flight in line for or on the toilet.

Needless to say, many meals here are prefaced by a quick discussion as to which dishes are "safe." There are two major rules of thumb: anything uncooked containing water or sold uncovered off the street is off-limits. Water must be boiled or filtered (Aquaguard being the trusted brand name in filtering) before consumption and only up-scale restaurants bother to process all of the water used in the cooking process.

Of course the best food comes from the most questionable of origins. My friends and I are big fans of a type of Indian fast food known as kati rolls -- if someone we know doesn't like kati rolls, we tease them saying they "wouldn't last a day on the mean streets of Calcutta." The truth is, we probably wouldn't either. Proper street-side kati roll wallas use uncooked chutneys in their creations, so when I went out for some "authentic" kati rolls in Mumbai I had to settle for a more sanitary version from a proper food stand -- chutney on the side.
The unsatisfying verdict? I like the ones in NYC better... but without the sauce, it's not a fair fight.

in and on mumbai and bhopal

2007-11-09T07:51:00.000-05:00

For as long as I can remember, my grandparents have lived in a part of Mumbai known as Santacruz West. Since we always stay with my grandparents when visiting, this area has come to define "India" for me and my sister -- through out numerous trips in our childhood, Santacruz West was the only part of India we were really exposed to.

In the local parlance, Santacruz West is a "suburb." It's considered a suburb since it is not part of downtown Mumbai and is mostly residential. In the U.S., the word "suburb" conjures up the mental image of low population density sprawl; large houses with clean, manicured lawns... nothing at all like Santacruz West.

Santacruz West is a crowded area choked with pollution. There is little green but lots of filthy cement. People don't use the sidewalks because they're pitted with large holes, exposing open storm drains below. You don't need to own a car because the streets are teaming with three-wheel rickshaws and taxis. The humid air traps the vehicle exhaust which eventually settles on city in a uniform layer of brown dust. Many people here to both chew paan and spit, resulting in splashes of dark red "paint" all over the place. It's almost intolerably hot for most of the year and much of the area floods during the monsoon season.

Given all this, it might be easy to imagine why my sister and I have spent most of our lives thinking poorly of India -- a country full of filth, wretched poor, and relatives we didn't recognize who chatted for hours in languages we couldn't understand. Finally, a few years ago, I put my foot down and told my mother that I'd only go to India on the condition that we traveled as tourists, not seldom seen family. Fewer relatives and more sight seeing. I was tired of hearing how beautiful and mystical India was from non-Indians when all my personal experience led me to believe otherwise. In the trips after this change in focus, I've finally seen many of India's most treasured gems, ranging from the Taj Mahal to the Ajanta Caves and Kailash Temple.

Most recently, my parents, grandparents, and I spent a few days in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh in central India. Infamous in contemporary culture as the site of one of the world's worst industrial accidents in 1984, Bhopal is conveniently close to a number of historical sites and is also the home of my mom's cousin, currently serving as head of the state's police force.

Despite being a major city, Bhopal is still small enough to give a glimpse of why some people enjoy going to India. The population hasn't outgrown the latest round of city development ("New Bhopal" versus "Old Bhopal") so the streets aren't constantly clogged with traffic or littered with beggars. Bicycles are still a popular mode of transportation even though the roads are terrifying (I spent a lot of time being the only person in all of India wearing a seat belt and we were involved in a hit-and-run within hours of arriving). Just wandering through the city, you can't help but feel like the old men in Bhopal have lives full of poetic hardship etched into their faces.

Don't get me wrong -- Bhopal is still crowded, confusing, and polluted, but much less so than Mumbai (c.f. NYC). My view of the city may also be tinted by the fact that visiting family of the State Chief of Police are apparently to be treated like local VIPs. We stayed at the "Police Mess" and were given a lake side marble suite that cost us ~$10 / day (yes, this is ridiculously cheap, even in India), which included a bathroom the size of most studios in Manhattan as well as a 20-something guy who sat outside our rooms during the day to make sure we had everything we needed (and watch over our stuff when we were out). While on a day excursion to Udayagiri and Sanchi, the local police provided an escort as well as a lunch they had prepared for us... including the only cup of proper masala chai I've had so far this time in India (de facto chai doesn't include masala spices).

Pampering aside, Bhopal was an enjoyable trip, highlighted by visits to the Bhojeshwar temple and Bhimbetka paintings (photos forthcoming). Most importantly, it reminded me how much more I get out of India when I'm not just in Mumbai and not just spending time with relatives (not that I don't love you relatives! Hi Chimu and Baru!).

Anyways, now that I'm back in Mumbai, I'll hopefully pump out a few more light-hearted observational posts before I head back to the States. Mumbai might be destroying itself riding the rickety roller-coaster of industrialization, but it does have easy Internet access.

bucket bathing

2007-11-01T00:15:00.000-04:00

Oh, hi there. You just caught me finishing a bucket bath... "what's that!?" you ask? Bucket baths are how you bathe when your lodgings lack bath tubs or shower heads. Basically you fill a big bucket with water then use a smaller bucket to pour the water over yourself while trying to lather/rinse/rub at the same time. I've been working on my technique these last few days but I still have a number of problems with the process.

It's hard to get the temperature of the bucket water just right -- at any given time you can only add hot water or cold water to the bucket, so it's a delayed feedback system with a fixed deadline (the bucket edge). After a few days practice I'm now able to get a satisfactory temperature, but doing so requires diligence and sustained monitoring of bucket temperature.

Perhaps the greatest mystery in my mind about bucket bathing is how I'm supposed to wash my arms. I generally pour with one hand and rub with the other, but on the arms I can either pour with no rubbing or try to awkwardly pour onto the arm holding the bucket while rubbing the arm down gently so I don't splash water everywhere. It's very inefficient; I think I use 1/4 of the bucket water on just my arm & shoulder regions.

Finally, bucket bathing requires me to stand naked in the middle of a bathroom and pour water on myself. Standing in a running shower is mentally acceptable, but standing around naked without water constantly running over me is strangely unsettling. It's clearly a silly cultural thing, but I'm having trouble adjusting.

While we're on the matter of washroom cleansing, let me just answer the one question I know you've all been asking yourselves: No, they don't use toilet paper in India. They instead use, you guessed it, buckets of water. No, no, you don't sit in the bucket; you pour the water down your backside.
I'm fine with about 3/4ths of this method -- feel free to read an extended critique of toilet bucket system in my new book entitled OK, My Butt is Clean and Dripping Wet... Now What?.

getting here

2007-10-30T06:59:00.000-04:00

Getting to India was surprisingly straightforward. I caught a direct flight from JFK to Mumbai which was ~14 hours (which, for the record, is about how long it takes to get to Korea if you go the other direction) and meant no worrying about missed connections. The flight was totally full (11 stand-bys didn’t make it) and Delta had to pull the “we’re overbooked and need a volunteer to give up their seat" game. I ended up sitting next to what I hope was a newly married couple – an Indian man and a white woman who looked like Alf Mushpie from Bloom County, except that she was overly reverential to her husband (e.g. unwrapping his food and feeding him) for the entire flight. This weirded me out and I was in the window seat so it was all napping, New Yorker, and seat-back video entertainment for me.

Baggage claim reminded me how atypical an Indian tourist I am. Neither a returning native, nor a dedicated tourist, I was the owner of the sole bag on the conveyor belt not stuffed to the point of bursting. I probably could have survived with a single carry on if I'd wanted to, but I'd been warned that I would need room for bringing things back. Failing to fall in a typical classification felt a bit weird and led to some short lived introspection, but at least it made it easy to pick out my one gaunt bag from the other black suitcases labeled "PATIL."

Mumbai's airport has undergone major renovations recently and the finished product is much cleaner and tourist friendly than the the old airport, which was beige, green, and brown and patrolled by soldiers who assumed you spoke Hindi and were casually armed with assault rifles. Customs were unexpectedly easy -- in the past I've entered India with my mom who always has 2 bags full of gifts and pockets full of gold (to be made into jewellery), but this time I was alone and carrying nothing but clothes and some books. There was also some guy arguing with the x-ray machine operator (something about how tax payer's are either harrassed too much or too little, I wasn't quite sure) so I don't think he even looked at my stuff. Between exiting the plane and finding my parents outside, the only words I exchanged with anyone were "Thank you" to the passport control guy.

As I made my way out the airport, I started to wonder if some how India had transformed since my last visit three years ago. Maybe Mumbai, like its airport, was now cleaner, friendlier, and less scary. Then I walked outside and realized India hadn't changed... it was just how I remembered it: hot, humid, utterly confusing and overflowing with people.

indian arrival

2007-10-29T14:47:00.000-04:00

It’s 7am and I’ve been mostly awake for the last few hours, thanks to nine and a half hours of jet lag compounded by 14 hours of fitful sleep on the plane. My family is gradually waking up – my father and my grandparents are already busying themselves, readying for the day – in the various parts of my grandfather’s apartment where the eight of us are staying for the next few days. On the way over I was bit by the desire to write, so here I am tapping away on my old Dell Latitude laptop, a tech hand-me-down recently brought over by my parents, just like I used to when I pounded out weekly columns in college.
As bodies and bodies of better-written work can testify, traveling often entails learning more about yourself and where you come from than it does about where you’re going. No matter how many trips I’ve made, this is how I feel every time I visit India. Seeing as I no longer have my own newspaper column, I’ll be posting my thoughts (the interesting, intriguing, and the insipid) here over the next two weeks.

mid-october weather

2007-10-15T18:48:00.001-04:00

Feeling cold in Northern CA? Come on over to NYC for some more pleasant weather.

me + microsoft's new search

2007-09-27T11:40:00.000-04:00

Microsoft launched a major update to "Live Search" so, being the vain techie I am, I did a little vanity search to see their results:

The first result for my name is for a term paper I wrote my senior year of undergrad, which is appears to be more important than my undergrad personal website. Also apparently you can find me on eBay, which certainly good news for those of you who've been dying to get your hands on me.

Taking a look at Google's results:

First result is this blog, second is my undergrad website, third is my master's thesis. No ads. Sadly neither search engine has picked up on my current homepage, so there's still work to be done for both... Akshay Patil, Akshay, Patil -- there, that should do it.

(To round out the coverage: Yahoo thinks my last name is a misspelling of "Patel" & Ask.com gets my undergrad website as result 1, but has a spam blog as result 3)

now in 2D

2007-06-27T23:43:00.000-04:00

My mom isn't a fan of the photo I posted earlier, so hopefully she'll like this one better. It's what I would look like if I were a Simpsons character (designed on the Simpsons Movie website). The eyes are a bit big, but then again, it's a cartoon character.

in 95% better shape than previously suspected

2007-06-25T12:58:00.000-04:00

I ran 10 miles with Kushal yesterday. I'm pretty sure that's significantly further than I've ever run before and both Kushal and I were impressed with how well I held up ("annoyingly in shape" were Kushal's words =).
Much to my surprise I woke up this morning feeling perfectly fine with the exception of my knees, which are killing me. I've regretted living on the 5th floor of a walk-up for the last day, let me tell you.

origins

2007-06-17T18:48:00.000-04:00

Enough people still ask that it seems necessary to write another post explaining the title of this blog. My father and grandfather are both big fans of a Danish mathematician named Piet Hein who wrote a series of short, light poems called Grooks in the '50s and '60s. (!) is an allusion to the Grook:

AN ODE TO MODESTY

Talking of successful rackets
modesty deserves a mention.
Exclamation marks in brackets
never fail to draw attention.

updates

2007-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

I get flak for not updating this blog often enough, so here I am... updating. I tend to over-expose myself to the internet through less direct means these days: flickr, facebook, twitter, etc. See q00p.net for all your ak-stalking needs.

Anyways, I'm sitting in the Long Beach Airport headed back to New York after a short romp through CA for Man Diego (photos), Work, and Mother's Day. I've been traveling a bit these days, including trips to Holland/Spain and Boston (Go Sox!), but I think I'll have a good month or two of staying put in New York City after this, which should be nice.

Outside of traveling, I've been helping friends work on a continuing side project of mine called PartyChat, going to concerts (Honeycut, Snow Patrol, Priscilla Ahn, etc...), exploring Manhattan, watching TV, eating cupcakes... the usual stuff. My point-and-shoot camera is busted, so I haven't been taking as many photos as I'd like to...
I don't think there's anything more riveting to say about my life. I'd like to get back to writing long-winded rambly reflections on subjects of no value, like I used to, so watch this space or unsubscribe from this feed, depending on your feelings on the matter.

Hrm, guess that'll have to satisfy people's hunger for the moment since it looks like my plane's about to start boarding. More updates later, maybe.
P.S. Included photo is courtesy of my new company-issued MacBook Pro -- I took the photo something like 2 minutes after I got it. I still love shiny new technology.

help me.... stalk you.

2007-03-04T17:20:00.000-05:00

I recently updated my "homepage" to pull in recent items from the hodgepodge of websites I use. There was some interest from others as to how I did it, so here's the skinny.

Google Reader lets you share RSS feeds using "clips" (javascript you paste into your page's html source). If you specify "Color scheme: None" then the output of the clip is formatted like everything else on your page. I just created clips for each website I use that exports an RSS feed and let Google Page Creator do the rest.

Mihai then gave some additional tips: you can specify a feed clip without actually subscribing to it and you can hide the little "Read more" link at the bottom of each feed. To hide the "Read more" link, include the following style definition somewhere above the clip:

<style>
.reader-publisher-module .f {display: none}
</style>

This instructs webbrowsers to ignore the section of the page that has the link. To specify a feed without subscribing to it, change the clip to look like:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/publisher.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript/feed/http://akpatil.blogspot.com/atom.xml?n=2&callback=GRC_p%28%7Bc%3A%27-%27%2Ct%3A%27%27%2Cs%3A%27false%27%7D%29%3Bnew%20GRC"></script>

And you're set.

i want to cry.

2006-12-10T10:37:00.001-05:00

This has to be one of the saddest customer service conversations I've ever listened to: Vcents (transcript). Warning: those of you who are sensitive to inconceivably stubborn stupidity may be offended.

more bar

2006-10-13T18:46:00.000-04:00

As previously menioned, I went to BarCampNYC2 a few weeks ago. It turns out Fred Stutzman wrote a blog post about the talk/discussion I hosted entitled "Monetizing Social Networks." This is pretty cool -- not just because I read Fred's blog, but because I actually first heard of BarCamp through an earlier post of his.

Anyways, it turns out his post about the session was "dugg," (digg article here) which is a testament to the whiz-bang job he did summarizing and analyzing the discussion, as well as to the amount of interest there is in the tech community on this subject. Now I don't have to feel like a tech-nerd-poser when I'm sportin' my free BarCampNYC2 t-shirt.

it's been a while

2006-10-07T11:45:00.000-04:00

but this is so totally me.

i thought there was a bar involved...

2006-10-04T19:14:00.000-04:00

So I went to BarCampNYC2 this weekend, which is less exciting than it sounds (camp!? bar!? sweet!), but still a good time. In a nutshell, BarCamp is a bunch of (somewhat) geeks getting together and talking about (somewhat) geeky things in (and this is where the false advertising comes in) somewhere other than a bar*. Discussion topics ranged from Pervasive Games (hosted by Dens) to "Hacking the Long Tail" to "Xquery Redux" (whatever that means). I led a little discussion on monetizing social networks which was fun -- a number of people there were actually running their own websites and were grappling with that very problem and had lots of good insight to offer.

In the spirit of geeks getting together to talk about geeky things, the entire (un-)conference was documented on a variety of web 2.0 sites, all tagged with "barcampnyc2". In particular, you can see everyone's photos on flickr, watch videos of some of the talks on Google Video, or read what other people had to say via Technorati.

* BarCamp gets its name from FooCamp. "Foo" & "Bar" are the traditional names given to throw-away variables when programming.
Photo is of the free shirt given to attendants. We do love them tech swag.

I always knew math was involved

2006-09-15T11:30:00.000-04:00

Which Is All About the Unknowns

Female tourist: I don't get it. This isn't a square, it's like... triangular.
Male tourist: No, no, they just call it that because... well... it's like... a square... a square of people. I don't know, it has something to do with algebra.

--Times Square

Overheard by: Luke

via Overheard in New York, Sep 14, 2006

2006-09-04T16:40:00.000-04:00

the pink panther, resux

2006-09-03T11:12:00.000-04:00

I'm on a Greyhound bus on my way to Wooster, MA and they're playing Steve Martin's The Pink Panther. Man it sucks. If the video store has any any Sellers version (except maybe Trail of the Pink Panther, which was made with a dead Sellers), or even the Benigni follow up, pick up one of those instead. Please. I can't play my music loud enough to make Martin's Inspector Clouseau tolerable.

(FWIW, Revenge of the Pink Panther has one of two movie scenes that has made me laugh so hard that I couldn't breathe)

2006-08-16T22:30:00.000-04:00

Even though it's technically "reality television," Morgan Spurlock's 30 days on FX is amazing, compelling television.

back to beta

2006-08-14T13:52:00.000-04:00

I never could tell anyone what exactly I was working on at blogger.com, but now a year's worth of work is finally coming to fruition and beta.blogger.com has just launched (details) with this being the first public post ever made on the new system!

Excuse me while I go celebrate =)

blog this: TIME Magazine -- Numbers -- Aug. 7, 2006

2006-08-11T00:14:00.000-04:00

TIME Magazine Archive Article -- Numbers -- Aug. 7, 2006:

36% Percentage of Americans surveyed last year who said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003

50% Percentage of Americans surveyed this year who say that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003

blog this: Henry Jenkins on the future of TV

2006-07-25T14:24:00.000-04:00

I think Henry Jenkins makes a good point about the evolution of TV (and why it's easy to mis-imagine the future)

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Catching Up: The Future of Television: "We picked up the July 17 issue of Newsweek, belatedly, and read an interesting article discussing what current network media consumption. The opening paragraphs, though, really annoyed me:

A guy--let's call him Brad--longed for the company of his wife, so he took his iPod to bed. Confiding in an NBC researcher, Brad tells how he inserted his earplugs, nestled down beside his bride and got lost in an episode of 'The Office' or another of his favorite TV shows downloaded from the iTunes store. His wife, meanwhile, was riveted by her favorite show playing on the bedroom TV. Yet another intimacy-challenged couple dialed up the heat on their relationship during the college basketball playoffs, say researchers for Verizon, the cellular-service giant. No fan of hoops, the wife snuggled up to her basketball-craving husband on the living-room couch, unfolded her cell phone and watched video clips streaming from Verizon's VCast service while he tuned in the game on CBS. 'She thought it would be a good way to spend time together,' says Ryan Hughes, Verizon's chief media programmer.

There's a kind of outrage here that people might be sitting side by side in bed and consuming different media content. Now, substitute books or magazines for television content and see if you feel this same level of shock and awe. I think we'd think it a little odd if the couple always coordinated the books they took to bed with them. As my wife points out, in the old days, the wife would have been banished from the room while her husband watched the big game, so, yes, there is some element of togetherness, snuggling down physically together, even if you are in different mental spaces. In any case, other research on television suggests that while homes may have multiple televisions, only one set is on during prime time in most households because we still prefer to watch television content socially rather than individually and the shows that do best are those that give us content we can talk about with others."

remixed cover

2006-07-18T10:55:00.000-04:00

I really like DJ Z-Trip's remix of Run Run Run's cover of Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You". Check it out at So Much Silence.

emotional eye candy

2006-06-25T22:16:00.000-04:00

Penny Arcade got me revisiting the we feel fine project which, in turn, led me to the awesome website of co-creator Jonathan Harris. Now I'm just itching to get artistic again -- perhaps I should start by putting my old "eyes" piece back online, for those of you who still remember it....

2006-06-25T21:36:00.000-04:00

crazy

2006-06-14T09:58:00.000-04:00

Many of you have probably heard the new Gnarls Barkley song "Crazy," but also worth checking out is Ray Lamontagne's cover which can currently be found here

watch a talk

2006-05-30T22:30:00.000-04:00

I've been lucky to see a number of interesting talks and I figured I might as well point out a few they you can be lucky enough to see too:

How to survive a Robot Uprising -- hearing him talk was actually funnier than reading the book.

DNA and the Brain -- A talk about autism by James Watson of Watson & Crick.

An Inconvenient Truth -- Al Gore's talk about global warming (you'll have to go to a theater to see this one)

Does all this linking to Google video make me a company shill?

emusic traps me again

2006-05-23T23:46:00.000-04:00

I was all set to cancel my eMusic account because I felt I had grabbed all of the music they had that I wanted. But there in my "your new arrivals" they had 3 albums I wanted. So now, (The Tourniquet, Get Behind Me Satan, and White Blood Cells later), I can't help but continue my subscription and hope that the quality new music keeps rolling in.

(And they now have the entire Stereophonics catalogue! That's at least another 3 months worth of downloads.)

yahoogle

2006-05-17T12:36:00.000-04:00

An interesting blog post on the evolution of Yahoo & Google's front pages - Maeda's SIMPLICITY: Yahoogle!

al gore on snl

2006-05-14T14:37:00.000-04:00

Last night's skit with Al Gore on SNL was, I must say, quite awesome. Thanks to Adam for the pointer.

colbert mocks bush

2006-04-30T12:03:00.000-04:00

Last night, Stephen Colbert gave a speech mocking President Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner, which Bush attended. The video (~~a 3 parter on YouTube~~ on Google Video) is pretty long, but quite funny. It's getting some "blogosphere" buzz... will it go viral like Jon Stewart's "Crossfire" appearance?

deal expectations

2006-04-04T00:45:00.000-04:00

NBC has a game show called Deal Or No Deal in which the contestant picks one of 26 suitcases containing amounts of money ranging from $.01 to $1,000,000. After picking the suitcase, the contestant slowly eliminates the other suitcases, revealing their amounts. The contestant is periodically offered a "deal" to trade in their suitcase for some amount of money.
If you've eliminated a lot of the high paying suitcases, you get offered a low deal. If you've eliminated all but the most valuable suitcases, you get offered a pretty sweet deal. If you decline all the deals to the very end, you get the amount of money in the mystery suitcase.

It seems like a clear case of probabilistic expectation, so I was curious if the "deal" offers were just the expected value of the contestant's suitcase; I don't watch the show often and I don't normally carry a calculator with me, but I was watching last night and had my laptop with me, so I decided to quickly calculate some odds.

When we tuned in, the current contestant was down to 3 suitcases: $.01; $400k; and $750k. Ignoring the one cent suitcase, that's 1/3 * 400k + 1/3 * 750k or an expected value of $383k. Her deal? $375k. Pretty close. (She took the deal; her suitcase was worth $400k, so she only lost out on $25k. Chump change =).

One contestant later, they were down to 8 suitcases with one worth $750k. The offer given to the contestant was $21k. Now $750k / 8 is almost $100k, so the deal value was clearly below expectation. The contestant eliminated two more (low value) suitcases, and her deal got bumped up to $63k. One more low value suitcase down and her deal went up to $96k (her suitcase now had expected value $150k). She took that deal.
They then walked through what would have happened had she had continued the game. She kept eliminating suitcases until there were 2 suitcases (the one she'd picked and one last mystery case) and they said her offer would have been $400k. $25k above expectation.

So it looks like the game has an increasing expectation multiplier that actually hits >1. I guess if I'm ever on the show, I'll work my way down to 2 suitcases and then take the deal -- proving once and for all that mathematicians make piss poor gameshow contestants. Now if only they'd bring back Let's Make a Deal...

google current feed

2006-03-20T21:53:00.000-05:00

I'm a fan of current_'s Google Current segments, so I tried to set up an RSS feed with enclosures so that I could use a video podcast program (like iTunes or Democracy) to download them, but Google video requires a "secure url" parameter for downloads, seeming to imply Google doesn't want people doing stuff like that. The best I can do is use the video feed API to create a feed of links to new videos.

Import this RSS feed into your favorite aggregator (like Bloglines or Google reader) and it'll update with links to new Google Current segments in Google video.

the future of online music is.... sometime tomorrow? we'll have to get back to you on that.

2006-03-12T19:18:00.000-05:00

Before I begin, let me say a few things

(a) I don't like DRM. I realize that for now we often have few choices, but I really do hope the public comes to at some point and demands that media distributors stop treating us (the customers) like we're a bunch of crooks
(b) I think music CDs should cost $12 or less. Maybe it's because that's how much the cost back when I first started buying CDs, but I find it hard to believe that inflation is the reason why the average CD is something like $15.
(c) I worked for Amazon.com as an intern in the summer of 2003 and have a number of friends who work there. Amazon feels very strongly about "passing the savings on to the customer," but recently I've become rather disenchanted about their average customer experience.

Alright, on to the actual whining.

Earlier today I decided I was going to buy Supernature by Goldfrapp and Back to Bedlam by James Blunt. Now, I'm excited about these two albums, but it's not like I'm buying my favoritest albums ever, so I'm looking for the best deal possible and while I'd prefer to have a physical do-as-I-please copy, I'm not above saving some money and putting up with some lower quality DRM nonsense (how bout them principles, eh?).

So I go fire up the ol' web browser and head on over to Amazon. Sure it's not instant karma, but they'll have a low price, right? Well, Back to Bedlam is $14 (a dollar off if you buy the "clean" version, but that's a tirade best left for later). Supernature is $14, with a special edition DVD version for $15 ($1 for a random extra junk seems more than reasonable).

My original thinking had been that I would pay $12-13 for a physical CD, but any more than that, and I'll just buy the damn things for the flat $10 on iTunes. $14 > $13, so looks like iTunes will be lining their pockets with a few more of my dollars.

Haha. Did you see that? Silly Akshay thinks that just because iTunes says full albums are $9.99, that they'll actually be $9.99. How naive. No, it actually turns out that the James Blunt and Goldfrapp albums cost $11.99 and $12.99 , respectively.
In particular, the James Blunt album includes a "Bonus" video that I don't want but can't buy the album without; oh boy! I can buy and album that's supposed to cost $10 plus a video that costs $2 for the low low low price of $12! Thank god for iTunes and how it lets me buy my media a la carte! Bleh.

So what did I do? I put on my shoes and walked my butt over to Best Buy where I bought the two albums on sale for $$10 and $$12 (+ $1.84 tax). No waiting for Super Saver Shipping, no DRM crap. The normal Best Buy prices are $13 and $14, so even if they hadn't been on sale, buying them on Amazon would have saved me about a buck (after taxes).

So for all our wonderful internet and technology, the best deal for this customer was to walk a few blocks over to his local record store to buy what he wanted. What does it mean? It means we still have a ways to go before the future of online music shopping is here... or maybe it'll just never come. While the world waits, I guess I'll stick to buying physical CDs and what limited stuff I can get off of emusic.

s/see/boo/

2006-03-09T22:38:00.000-05:00

I saw this comic in emilie's aim profile a few months ago and today I had the strong urge to dig it back up. I probably won't win many coolness points by admitting that this is absolutely hilarious... but it so is.

all grown up

2006-03-02T21:42:00.000-05:00

Well, I guess I graduated almost 2 years ago, but it's amazing to see people I knew in school having a noticible impact on the world around me.

At work, everyone loves playing Guitar Hero -- a game for the PS2 that Ethan Fenn ('04) helped develop. I remember that when I asked what he was working on, he said "it's a kind of music game." Man, it's a lot cooler than he made it sound.
iPod Hi-Fi. Home Stereo. Reinvented -- it's Apple's version of the Bose base, and what WeyWey Lin ('06) worked on last summer during her internship (I actually got to be the first person to tell her it had finally launched)
I always knew he would shake things up, but it was still crazy to see an article by Keith Winstein ('04) on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
At a party two weeks ago, I met a girl who mentioned that she was going to a concert this week. The performing artist? Vudoo Soul. Or, if you knew him in school, Chris Vu ('04). It was great to see and hear him again; especially with friends who only knew him as that voice they loved.

Makes me want to go out and do something. All in good time, I hope....

new music (via kcrw)

2006-02-23T14:50:00.000-05:00

My iPod died a week ago, so I've been heavily leaning on my favorite online radio station, KCRW, to keep me musical company at work (Morning Becomes Eclectic in particular). In addition to playing great, new stuff, they also keep their entire playlist online so you're never left wondering what that song you just heard was.

Below is some of the stuff (not all of it is new) that I'm now addicted to thanks to KCRW:

Goldfrapp - Fly Me Away

Jose Gonzalez - Crosses and Heartbeats

Magnet - Duracelia and Hold On

Massive Attack - Protection (click "Protection" in the bottom menu, then "Music Player". They have a really cool website)

Mozez - Feel Free

well i'll be damned

2006-02-18T09:29:00.000-05:00

There's a strange feeling you get when you discover that a joke you love has a second meaning that's always been there, unbeknownst to you.

Case in point, I've always thought Family Guy's cover of Elton John's "Rocketman" is absolutely hilarious, but I just discovered yesterday that it's actually a parody of an eerie, 1978 William Shatner cover. Now I feel all weird inside.

a look at blogging

2006-02-15T18:19:00.000-05:00

not dead... yet.

Anyways, I ran across this article about blogging in New York Magazine and thought it was quite the interesting read. So here I am... blogging about it. yeah.

you like that? how everything came full circle? I thought you might.

a year of searching

2005-12-22T23:29:00.000-05:00

Google recently made available a way to see what your most popular searches of the year were. My results offer quite a bit of insight into my personality... mainly that I'm a vain, self-absorbed, mash-up/podcast listening, photo sharer who lives in zip code 10128.

Top searches

1.	akshay
2.	gmail
3.	akshay patil
4.	weather 10128
5.	sixx mixx
6.	flickr
7.	patil
8.	wikipedia
9.	coverville
10.	yatta

I had no overlap with the (English-speaking) world's most popular 10, but did have a "top gainer" in my top 10 ("wikipedia").

geekdom come to fruition

2005-12-04T17:59:00.000-05:00

So as some of you know, I've recently been working on a little side project outside of work which I've taken to calling "party chat." It's this group-chat like bot for Google Talk which (for the most part) acts the way I always sorta thought low-traffic group-chats should act.

Anyways, thanks to lots and lots of help from Michael Bolin, I've finally "launched" PartyChat as the inaugural post to my new geek-oriented blog Techwalla. Please take a look, make a poke, and let me know what you think (as well as any bugs you find). It currently isn't that solidly implemented, but it should be able to handle a few hundred users. If you want to know what chats I'm in, just send me an IM, and I'll let you know =).

my conversation with jon stewart

2005-10-18T20:08:00.000-04:00

I went to the filming of today's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart with some other Googlers. On a whim, I suggested we all wear Google gear to the studio in hopes of getting some attention and maybe a mention on the show.
We didn't get an on-air mention, but our four black, Google t-shirts immediately grabbed Jon's attention when he came out chat with the crowd before the show. After asking us if we really did work for Google, he started quizzing me about how Google works.

Jon: So tell me this, you know that "I'm Feeling Lucky" button Google has on the front page? How does that work?
Me: It reads your mind.
Jon: No really, how does it do it?
Me: You want the real answer? It's just the first search result.
Jon: But how does it know what I want? You push the button and it just magically takes you to porn.
Me: But you were looking for porn, right?
Jon: Well, yeah [crowd laughs] What? Isn't that what the Internet is for? Porn and Shopping.

Unsatisfied with my answer, he announced that it's probably a bunch of gerbils inside his computer creating the search results. He must already be well versed in our patented PigeonRank technology.

BlogOD

2005-10-02T16:22:00.000-04:00

Well, as you might guess, after a day (or week) of working on Blogger, I lack the energy to come home and do blogging of my own. So as low traffic as this blog has been in the past, it'll probably get even slower for the next few months. Life is interesting and I do my best to take advantage of the city. Work is good and stuff. Yeah.

Alright, back to watching the Sox in HD on my 50" TV. Ah the good life.

good ol' mcgruder

2005-09-12T22:27:00.000-04:00

Good ol' Aaron McGruder

Jon Stewart and Christopher Hitchens on the nature of national dissent over the Iraqi War

2005-09-03T17:10:00.000-04:00

Many of you have probably heard or read about Jon Stewart's August 25th interview of Christopher Hitchens on Comedy Central's The Daily Show. Video clips of the interview can be found on the CommonBits website (courtesy of Crooks and Liars) and on The Daily Show's official website.

In the interview, Stewart does a wonderful job articulating many Americans' frustration with how the current administration has dealt with the war in Iraq. A transcript of the most important part of the interview was done by Wonkette and has been widely circulated around the internet. Being a former college newspaper editor who once evoked campus outrage when being too precise in the transcription of an interview, I decided to fix up Wonkette's text using the recording of the show I have on my DVR. What follows is my best transcription of Jon Stewart and Christopher Hitchen's exchange:

Jon Stewart: The people who say we shouldn't fight in Iraq aren't saying it's our fault. That is the conflation that is the most disturbing to me --

Christopher Hitchens: Don't you hear people saying we've made them nastier?

Stewart: I hear people say a lot of stupid [bleep]. But what I'm saying is, there is --

Hitchens: You promised me you'd never say that.

Stewart: There is reasonable dissent in this country about the way this war has been conducted, that has nothing to do with people believing we should cut and run from the terrorists, or we should show weakness in the face of terrorism, or that we believe that we have in some way brought this upon ourselves. They believe that this war is being conducted without transparency, without credibility, and without competence --

Hitchens: Well I'm sorry, sunshine, I just watched you ridicule the President for saying he wouldn't give a --

Stewart: No, you misunderstood why --

Hitchens: a timetable. You said [unintelligible] --

Stewart: That's not why I ridiculed the Pres. . . What I ridiculed the President was, He refuses to answer questions from adults as though we were adults and falls back upon platitudes and phrases and talking points that does a disservice to the goals that he himself shares with the very people he needs to convince.

[Audience erupts in applause]

Hitchens: [barely audible] You want me to believe that you're dying to be his side...

[Continued applause]

Hitchens: [gestures to the audience] There you go! You did it again! . . . C'mon c'mon [gesturing to Stewart to display Hitchens' book] . . . get it done and delivered.

[Audience still applauding, eventually dies down]

Hitchens: You want me to believe that, really, you're secretly on his side -- you just wish he was more persuasive. You want me to believe that.

Stewart: I secretly need him to be on my side. He's too important and powerful a man not to be.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - August 25th, 2005

finding it

2005-08-31T17:53:00.000-04:00

realized today that blogspot blogs are their own domain and can use the "site:" parameter to do an internal search. a little html source code hacking later and voila, my own personal blog search.

if that means nothing to you, look in the right hand column and check out the little "Search ( ! )" box.

dodge that ball

2005-08-21T13:45:00.000-04:00

In May, Google acquired/hired dodgeball.com, a SMS-based social networking tool. Since NYC is precisely the kind of place where the ability to find out what bars/clubs friends are at and how to meet up with them is important, I've been using dodgeball for a while now since moving into the city. But, as you shall now hear, dodgeball is thankfully available in a number of major cities.

I'm in the bay area for a few days and I was supposed to meet up with my sister at a bar in San Francisco last night. Unfortunately, she gave me directions on how to get there while I was in a groggy-post-nap condition and, hearing her wrong, I some how convinced myself that the bar was on third street. It wasn't. My sister, being my sister, is absolutely terrible about answering her cell phone so there I am, groggy, in San Francisco (which I am not familiar with at all) with no idea of where I'm supposed to go.

Then, in a moment of brilliance, I opened up an SMS compose message to sf(a)dodgeball.com and queried it with the name of the bar, "21st amendment?" 10 seconds later I received back dodgeball's glorious response "Sounds like you're looking for the 21st Amendment @ 563 Second Street (btw. Bryant and Brannan)..." And all was good (so was their jerk chicken).

blogger hack

2005-08-19T22:21:00.000-04:00

So you super observant readers might notice this, but the ( ! )'s main page has changed subtly. Now under each post, you can not only see how many people have commented, but who has commented.
It's a neat little feature I found out about here. There are lots of other "hacks" you can add to your blog that I might try playing with in the future too.

never buy a mattress from Sleepy's

2005-08-15T23:24:00.002-04:00

I bought a mattress from Sleepy's Mattress whatevers on the beginning of July. I thought all was good, they were willing to deliver it soon, were giving me a good price, and so on. When the sales rep went to go ring it up, she had trouble getting the discounts to work out properly, so she was $20 above the price we had agreed on. She fuddled around with the computer for 10-15 minutes until finally convincing me to pay the total bill and have her write a note on the receipt promising me a phone call and my $20 back.

A week later. My mattress had arrived fine, but no call from the sales woman. I went back to the store, but a different sales rep was there. He called the store the woman was working on to confirm the refund. She gets on the phone and tells me that she tried to call me the day of my purchase to tell me that her manager had not approved our "deal" but that there must have been something wrong with the number I gave her because she was not able to get through, which is crap, seeing as she gave my # to the delivery guys who had no trouble getting a hold of me. After bitching at her and talking to other sales rep, I was able to get the process of refunding restarted, with a promised call in a few days.

Two weeks later, no call, no refund. I go to the store once again and talk to yet another rep. who appears to be higher up in the chain. She tells me they've had problems what my original rep in the future and apologizes. She then does mumbojumbo with my card and says that they'll be refunding me $60, again sorry for the inconvenience. That was 3 weeks ago and I still haven't seen any money put back into my account.

So, what do we learn? Never buy from Sleepy's. Never ever ever. I hope someone who was thinking of buying from them reads this post and changes their mind. At the very least, I'll never buy from them again.

best served chilled

2005-08-09T23:35:00.000-04:00

So my suitemates and I live in a new apartment in a complex which only opened recently. Amoung other things, this means the apartment gadgets are still new.... which is why we only recently realized we've been refrigerating our fridge's instruction manual for the last month.

Full disclosure

2005-07-31T16:27:00.000-04:00

For readers of ye olde blog who aren't up-to-date with the more meanigful aspects of my life, a quick update on the parts of the world which I revolve around and, on occaision, revolve around me.

I've moved to the upper Upper East Side of NYC and begun working full-time for a relatively young company named Google, Inc. As their headquarters are in Mountain View, I'm working in their remote office in midtown Manhattan.

Amusingly enough, Google has made me part of the Blogger team. That's right, I now spend my time making this site better and cooler. I'm really enjoying my first few weeks at work and I look forward to (positively) impacting company and... the world. At least the internety parts of it.

surreality

2005-07-28T10:33:00.000-04:00

it's funny because it's true

Internet round-up

2005-06-23T01:50:00.000-04:00

I've been home for a little over 3 weeks and just now has the boredom finally reached "maybe I'll post to the blog" levels. Well, that's not totally true... I did make that last post about penguins, but who could resist posting about penguins?

Anyways, I mainly distract myself by surfing the internet. Periodically I'm surprised by how many people know nothing about all the interesting software/websites out there on the internet. Really, this isn't very surprising since the only reason I know all these cool net things is because (a) I'm a geek (b) I have a fast internet connection (c) I'm generally quite bored. Anyways, here's a round-up of interesting stuff that I think is cool... some of it is common stuff, some of it is a bit obscure.

Firefox + Adblock (+ filter) is good stuff. I know I've posted about this in the past, so I won't say more.
Tracks up the Tree - is a podcast focusing on indie music. You don't need iTunes/an-ipod/macosx whatever to listen. You just need a computer and an internet connection to listen. The hosts (Funtime Ben and Josiah) didn't strike me as terribly funny when I first started listening (I used to listen primarily for the music) but their last few shows have been quite hilarious.
del.icio.us/popular - in big words, del.icio.us is a "social bookmarking community" or something like that. Practically speaking, it's somewhere you can bookmark cool/interesting websites, adding little tags to describe what the site is about (my bookmarks can be found here). The /popular page lists those websites which have received a lot of attention recently -- thus acting as a collection of cool new websites for the exploring. Particularly if you're bored, like I often am. Yeah... I check /popular about twice a day....
skype - you can talk (voice talk, not typing talk) to other people for free through your computer. This isn't the crappy, circa 2001, shouting into a cheap headset internet telephony... it's really easy to use (especially on laptops, which almost always have a built in microphone, even the old ones) and is like using a normal speaker phone... except that it's *free*... even talking to people on the other side of the world.
Google Maps - somehow, some people never found out about Google's venture into online cartography. Well, if that someone is you, then get your fingers clicking. Note, you can drag the map. no waiting to reload, just move the map as needed. Apparently you can do smooth zooming in IE too, but really, it's not worth using a crappy browser.
answers.com - is like m-w.com or dictionary.com, but much cooler, better looking, useful, and informative.
CommunityBits - snippets of politics related media (like the Daily Show). It's rss friendly, so easy to keep track of through a podcast subscriber or through an rss aggregator like
Bloglines - It's not for reading blogs (though you can use it to do that). It's about being intelligent when surfing the web and not having to read the same thing twice. News sites, webcomics, blogs, media sources, what have you -- find out when there's something new and never have to sort through stuff you've already seen. Trust me, it'll change the way you use the internet.
Live Music Archive - recordings of live concerts by groups/musicians like Howie Day, Jason Mraz, the Grateful Dead, Tenacious D, Jack Johnson, and (one of my favorites) Glen Phillips. All for free. You used to need a winamp plug-in to play the music, but now-a-days a lot of it is available in .mp3 so just go ahead and listen.
flickr- I don't actually use flickr... yet. A lot of other people do, however, and it's really one of the best online photo sharing websites I've ever seen. So use it and when you have pictures to share with me, I'll appreciate it.
TinyURL - Too many links but not enough space in your AIM profile? Have a long url that would be a pain to send anybody? TinyURL will totally rock your socks around the block. It makes long urls really short so you can send them with ease. AND TinyURL comes in a handy bookmarklet form. Just take (TinyURL!) <-- that link and drag it to your bookmark toolbar. Then, whenever you're surfing the net and you want to send someone a link to the page you're at, click the "TinyURL!" in your bookmark toolbar and it'll automatically make a tinyURL for you. It's like magic! Except not. But it's still cool.
How to (painlessly) phase out of MIT e-mail - Aimed at MIT alums (or soon to be alums) but it really can work for anyone in college. Your school e-mail will expire eventually and, presumably, you'll start using online e-mail services like Gmail instead. This handy little website (written by me... because I was bored) shows you how to set up your current e-mail preferences so that when that day comes, you'll be able to make the school->web transition with remarkable ease.

Alright, that's enough listing for me. Time to sleep. Hope y'all found something useful in the list.

Apple - Trailers - March Of The Penguins

2005-05-31T00:07:00.000-04:00

This has to be one of the cutest things ever: Apple - Trailers - March Of The Penguins (courtesy of nanphan).

more arrested development

2005-05-16T13:55:00.000-04:00

As reported by an article on the TV Squad website, the best-written show on television, Arrested Development, will be back for a second season. The only way this could get any better is if they start distributing it online too.

The MPAA/RIAA Guide to Leveraging New & Promising Technology: just kill it

2005-05-12T22:08:00.000-04:00

Today the MPAA targeted and shut down 6 major websites which specialized specifically in trading television programs via bittorrent (cnet story).

I, personally, was a regular user of the first site listed in the MPAA press release, shunTV. While I can't speak for the other websites which were targeted, shunTV had a very specific and strictly enforced "no HBO shows and no DVD rips" policy. As a result, almost all shows posted to the site were captures of television shows freely availible on broadcast television. Thanks to shunTV, my tv viewing habits grew by approximately 700%, I started buying television show DVDs that I would have never purchased otherwise, and I started writing a column for the MIT school newspaper about all things television related.

What is particularly frustrating is that, as far as I can tell, there isn't a very strong legal standing for the MPAA's actions. Movies? Music? You know, the MPAA and RIAA came off as bullies, but it truly was within their prerogative to take legal action -- both are content which users pay for that is often behind a content protection technology. Broadcast television, on the other hand is transmitted over what is considered the "national resource" that is the television broadcast spectrum and is, by definition, NOT enclosed in any sort of content protection. IN FACT, the federal courts just recently ruled that the FCC (taking action requested by the MPAA) did not have the authority to even INTRODUCE such restrictive technology. In this case, the MPAA is just plain-ol-big-enough that it can flex its muscle and shut down these sites which can't take the risk (shunTV didn't charge money or run ads, so I seriously doubt it was trying to make a profit, let alone a signficant take-on-the-MPAA like profit) or bear the cost of questioning their authority.

All of this two weeks after the return of a television show which was resurrected, more than two years after its cancellation, thanks to staggeringly high DVD sales fueled ALMOST ENTIRELY by extensive online trading by young adults.

Such stupidity

look ma, a blog

2005-05-08T15:14:00.000-04:00

I went to a talk Friday about algorithmic analysis of social networks. The talker collected data from the livejournal community and so, as an aside, asked a room full of ~40-50 members of MIT CSAIL how many of us had a blog. About 4 of us raised our hands. Is it me, or does that strike you as rather low? I still remember how at the beginning of last summer I had to explain to one of my coworkers what a blog even was. I thought these things were commonplace by now.

Moon toilet/the cobbler is in Taiwan right now providing humrous cultural commentary she's allowed to make because she's the right ethnicity. Anyways, apparently National Geographic there had a show about viruses which devolved into a sexually charged indian music video. This leaves me utterly speechless... I'm flabbergasted and so confused as to (a) how someone could ever come up with this (b) what it was doing on Taiwanese television.

More comics which will disappear evntually.

i hate the flag policy

2005-05-06T22:37:00.000-04:00

This makes me very happy

can you even do that with a cheeseburger?

2005-04-12T17:46:00.000-04:00

more colorful commentary can be found here. If you don't understand what's going on, perhaps you don't know what "i'd hit it" generally implies.

The New York Times > Fashion & Style > The Man Date

2005-04-12T17:29:00.000-04:00

The New York Times > Fashion & Style > The Man Date: "Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date; eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man date; going for a jog is not. Attending the movie 'Friday Night Lights' is a man date, but going to see the Jets play is definitely not."

It's an interesting thought -- though the author left "getting drinks" off the list of non-man-dates despite it being a common guy thing and (i think, at least) a viable date possibility. I'd never really thought of it before, but most of my lunch appointments during the week are with women (not all though -- Whitehead Inst. salmon on Friday's with Javy is a regular). Intriguing that the article author had to make up a name for the activity.

Lastly, am I hallucinating or does the by-line state her middle initial is "8"?

more comic

2005-04-07T13:50:00.000-04:00

The problem with blogging about comics is that they generally disappear after about a month, so the image files I link to will probably not be in this post after a few weeks. Oh well.

It looks like Aaron McGruder of "Boondocks" fame is back at trying to get himself censored again. It's hilarious stuff.

no comic swap

2005-04-01T12:17:00.000-05:00

It used to be an April Fool's tradition that on April 1st, comic strip artists would swap comics for the day (e.g. Jim Davis would draw "FoxTrot" and Bill Amend would draw "Garfield"). Doesn't look like anyone did that this year, which is sad -- it was cool to see artists trying their hand at someone else's character.

The only hack I'm aware of is this one (as documented by @ philly.com): "Three of the strips, Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley, Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis, and FoxTrot by Bill Amend, are virtually identical. They feature a story about a Ouija board that is supposed to spell out messages from the great beyond, but is used by one character to write out insults to another. Satchel in Fuzzy, Paige in Fox and Pig in Pearls get the taunts, and all reply with the punch-line, 'I imagined the afterlife to be a more peaceful place.'"

the strips:

does anyone else know of other hacks?

more mashing

2005-03-20T19:21:00.000-05:00

Still listening to mashups. Here are some more songs I'm listening to.

Screaming Pro in Hell by Team9 (Beck vs. Michael & Janet Jackson vs. AC/DC)
DJ Love Affair by Loo & Placido. (The Notwist - One with the Freaks, Curtis Mayfield - Astunded, Indeep - Last Night A DJ Saved My Life, Daft Punk - Harder Faster Stronger Better)
Astounded Saliva by solcofn (Curtis Mayfield vs RJD2)
Sexual High by Go Home Productions (Marvin Gaye / Radiohead)
Sweet Home Country Grammar by DJ Mei-Lwun (Lynyrd Skynyrd vs. Nelly)

enjoy.

pod world

2005-02-23T16:56:00.000-05:00

After getting my new ipod about 3 weeks ago, I decided to check out podcasting (of recent mention in the NYTimes). While I still think there's a pretty high signal/noise ratio out there amongst podcasters, there are a few goodies like Coverville, The Laporte Report, and (my favorite) On the Media. "On the Media" is actually an NPR show, i.e. a real bona-fide radio program; it's just waaay more convenient to listen to it on my iPod than trying to catch on the radio.

Anyways, you don't need an iPod to listen to these things, just a computer and a podcast aggregator. I used to listen to the radio 24/7 when I was in high school but now only listen for the 30 seconds it takes to get me out of bed in the morning. While I love the music I have, it's nice to have some new music(or intelligent/interesting fodder for thought) to freshen things up.

Partly due to listening to Adam Curry's The Daily Source Code, I've started listening to a lot of mashups recently. Some of them are quite good and I'm especially fond of Beatles mashups because they add flavor to quality music that's almost gone bland after static repitition. Anyway, a few favs are: "No One Takes Your Freedom" by DJ Earworm, "Numb/Encore" by Linkin Park + Jay-Z, and "Boulevard of Broken Songs" by Party Ben. Check 'em out and see if you get addicted too.

The New York Times > National > Jailing of Reporters in C.I.A. Leak Case Is Upheld by Judges

2005-02-16T14:22:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > National > Jailing of Reporters in C.I.A. Leak Case Is Upheld by Judges: "Two reporters who have refused to name their sources to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer should be jailed for contempt, a unanimous three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington ruled yesterday.

The panel held that the reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, may have witnessed a federal crime - the disclosure by government officials of the officer's identity. The First Amendment, the panel ruled, does not give reporters the right to refuse to cooperate with grand juries investigating such crimes."

It's a good question, should reporter's be able to receive information that is illegal for anyone to disclose? What pisses me off is that Robert Novak, the guy who published the identity of a secret agent, is not the one being jailed. That makes no sense to me.

baby eaters

2005-02-12T10:40:00.000-05:00

as posted on the recently killed
lokitorrent.com

Good god, when was the last time you saw a company consciously launching a campaign of terror? I don't use bittorrent to download illegal music but tactics like these inspire me to commit egregious acts of violence against the heads of the MPAA (and RIAA).

Perhaps they should use this as inspiration for future campaigns?

the way we speak

2005-02-11T14:35:00.000-05:00

I've always been very sensitive about the way people speak. I often identify voices not by their tone or pitch, but the way they pronounce words and their inflection. If only I could consciously reproduce these subtleties, I would be great at doing impersonations.

Anyways, over the last few months, I've noticed that I speak like a theoretical computer scientist, or, at the very least, an MIT theory of CS person. In everyday conversation I talk normally, but when I start explaining something, or stating an opinion, I start introducing pauses, emphasis, and sentence inflections in a way that people in my lab do. I've always been slightly conscious of this, but as I sit here in the Theory of Cryptography Conference, I'm acutely aware of how distinct a way the people here have of explaining things. There are some variations of this "Theory accent" and I'm quite sure that the MIT version of the accent has been heavily influenced by the Italian accent of Silvio Micali.

This, I think, is due to the facts that Silvio a) has the strongest accent in the department and b) is easily the most interesting person to listen to for any period of time. Regardless of the cause, however, it's rather surreeal to be talking to someone about something utterly non-geek-related and realize I'm speaking with a mild Italian inflection (not pronunciation, mind you, inflection).

For example: In normal English, when you pose a rhetorical question, you do it much in the same way you would pose a normal question: your voice rolls up and down as you ask the question, with natural peaks at both the key word in the question (i.e. who/what/etc.) and the sentence end. With an MIT TOC accent, however, your voice naturally ramps up during the entire question, raising in urgency until you reach the end of your rhetoric question. Then you have a pause, where it is clear that no one should interject an answer, then you give your answer with strong emphasis.

I guess it's natural for people who spend a lot of time talking each other to speak in a similar way (e.g. siblings), but it's just so strange to think of that happening to you in someplace like the crypto group at MIT....

the end is nigh

2005-02-09T22:55:00.000-05:00

Just a few minutes ago, I saw a girl running on a treadmill and talking on her cellphone at the same time. And I'm not talking "earbud crazy person wire"-talking on the phone -- she was full on holding the phone to her right ear as she ran at an awkward angle to compensate for the fact that she was only swinging around her left arm.

Crazy. Maybe she was talking to her personal trainer? I don't know.

do the evolution

2005-02-02T21:56:00.000-05:00

Now that I've stopped updating my news-related blog, i feel the need to post striking facts in this blog. Apparently not only are youth ignorant about the 1st amendment, but only recently did half of this sountry start believing in evolution. I remember my Biology AP teacher, a devout Christian, started the evolution unit with the disclaimer "I don't believe this, but it's covered on the AP so I'm going to teach you this." But it's still amazing...

The New York Times > Science > Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes: "In a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement 'human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.'

And this was good news to the foundation. It was the first time one of its regular surveys showed a majority of Americans had accepted the idea. According to the foundation report, polls consistently show that a plurality of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago, and about two-thirds believe that this belief should be taught along with evolution in public schools."

well now

2005-01-27T11:41:00.000-05:00

For regular readers who remember my previous web celeb post, it would seem that Google updated its webcrawl and has rediscovered my website. My (in)famous yatta page is once again at the top of the heap and, more excitingly, is no longer listed when searching with the family name. Instead, my personal homepage pops up as hit #9 under that search, making me, somehow, the highest ranked Patil in my extended family. Probably because I'm the only one that cares. Anyways, good to know that people looking up my uncle's bio won't be bombarded with diapered Japanese men anymore.

it's art, stupid

2005-01-24T23:24:00.000-05:00

I've been mulling about a digital art idea for a while and while I don't have the patience to create the full realization of the final vision, I did have the time (and patience) to make a pretty good approximation which is a few "coolness" points lower, but probably better looking.

It's a bit out of step with previous projects (like my collages and "eyes" page) but as someone pointed out today, it's the natural inverse of my "faces" piece. I took the text of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" (courtesy of Project Gutenberg) and superimposed some of the book's original illustrations on top -- creating an image out of the words.

The resulting files are rather large, about ~30MB, since a) the font can only get so small and stay readable b) they're .tiff (uncompressed) files c) I'm hoping to be able to print it out at somepoint, so I figured 3' x 4.5' ish was a good sounding size. If you have the bandwidth and monitor size to check out the final files, please do and give any feedback you might have. I'm not sure how much change I can make* but I'm always looking to improve things. (* the fastest computer I have is a 1.2 Ghz P3 with 512MB RAM, so Photoshop takes something like 15 minutes just to change the font size of the text. I made these two images while snowed in on Sunday)

Below I'm posting thumbnails which link to the full-sized files as well as a "zoomed in" view to better show the text/image detail (for non-bandwidth blessed). Give some feedback!

pink panther

2005-01-24T22:30:00.000-05:00

Steve Martin is starring in a new addition to one of my favorite movie series, The Pink Panther. If you watch the trailer, it really makes you appreciate how hard of a character Insp. Clouseau is to pull off and how much better Peter Sellers was than Steve Martin ever will be. It's funny how many people these days don't even know who Peter Sellers was or hadn't heard of "The Pink Panther" until the Steve Martin film went into production. And that's *after* being the focus of a reasonably well advertised and double-Golden Globe winning biopic. Just goes to show, I guess.

you don't care, but google does

2005-01-11T10:55:00.000-05:00

and posting on wings that work is pointless since google currently doesn't index it.

Running Firefox 1.0 on Mandrake 10.1

getting creative

2005-01-10T14:32:00.000-05:00

some more amusing brevity:

Thanks to a story in Wired, I've become aware of the amusing Gates quote about redefining intellectual property and the resulting "creative communists/commonists" fad centering around the creative commons movement. I've always been a fan of creative commons -- another cool thing they're doing is hosting the "the fine art of sampling" contest which has already revealed to me that I have absolutely no patience for music sampling... it's fun to do in my head, but a pain to actually try and do on a computer.

Anyways, "Giant Robot Printing" is selling "Creative Commies" t-shirts which are quite nice and very reasonably priced ($8-10 after s&h). Gonna order me one in a little bit. Sadly no money from the shirt goes to support CC, so if you're feeling a bit more generous, check out your donating options. Of course, if you're in a giving spirit, be sure to remember recent victims as well as multitude of always deserving.

delayed discharge

2005-01-04T01:59:00.000-05:00

More unrelated thoughts presented in itemized list format

I was watching "60 Minutes" with the extended family and there was a story on Google. During the story, Leslie Stahl does a little demo of "Google SMS". The Fam was quite delighted -- they immediately began experimenting with their own cell phones and squealing in delight when they received their results. Anyways, the few family members (including myself) who are, for lack of a better term, "computer oriented," were shocked by everyone's ignorance -- google sms is old news as far as we're concerned. Now my family isn't exactly stupid (if level of education is an accurate measure), so our incredulity just goes to show how specialization blinds us to the outside world and fosters arrogance about the importance of our own field. Case in point, later that weekend I guessed that humans have 26 pairs of chromosomes. Damn, I'm getting stupider. Anyways, check out Google Labs and this previous post if you're smart enough to not spend >40% of your life in front of a computer.

Just watched two interesting movies: The Gods Must Be Crazy and Tadpole. Both were not what was expected and require a bit (maybe a lot) of tongue biting ("oh! come on!"), but were certainly worth watching; especially after a few weeks of watching nothing but generic Hollywood movies.

For some reason, our router at home (Southern California) refused to connect to the MIT domain (18.*) so I was unable to see http://web.mit.edu/, check my e-mail, access my web-locker, etc. It turned out to be the perfect incentive to give Tor a real test-drive. Tor is a web-anonymizer that allows you use the internet with (reasonable) anonymity -- in doing so, it accesses the internet through a variety of other computers which comes in handy when surfing the internet from behind an unintentional, or deliberate, firewall. To the point, it allowed me to bypass my web-restriction problem with moderate ease. Hot stuff.
Tor recently received backing from the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is just another reason (in a long list of reasons) why the EFF kicks ass.

Wired Magazine has a beautiful story on the history, impacts, and implications of everyone's new favorite p2p program, BitTorrent.

well put.

scenes from a waiting room

2004-12-19T20:40:00.000-05:00

For those of you who wonder how anyone could ever mispronounce my name, let me just say that during my last visit to the doctor, the nurse retrieved me from the waiting room under the sadly uncommon "ush-kaya" ('ush' as in 'slush').

In other little-to-do-at-home fronts, there's been a lot of interesting news recently, esp. for bittorrent users, as partially chronicalled in my list of interesting news stories. For the most part, MPAA is not only suing sites but launching electronic attacks on them as well. All of this while p2p networks from the napster-era try to market themselves to content providers as the new, legal, distribution channel.

Also, I've been playing about with ObjectDock in an attempt to get over my OSX envy (final conclusion: bit buggy and sucks up power on laptops, but certainly very very cool).

On a more cultural note, I've recently become a big fan of Ann Telnaes's political cartoons. Check her stuff out if you're bored and cynical.

web celeb

2004-12-14T13:23:00.000-05:00

I was going to make a facetious comment about me being a "web celeb" due to yatta, but when I went to go link the Google results page, I discovered my site is no longer the number one hit. In fact, it doesn't actually appear in the results at all anymore. A quick check to my counter showed that starting Dec. 9th, the site daily hits halved in number (600 to 300)... a moderate Google effect, I guess.

Anyways, the unindexing of the site is probably a good thing; now when you Google for the family name, dancing japanese men in their underwear are no longer hit #5. On the downside, my actual website, wings that work seems to have been unindexed as well....

ass in ascii

2004-12-05T13:37:00.000-05:00

it's been inquired if the title of this blog is meant to signify an ass in ascii. no.

it's a statement about confined expression. i like the aesthetics of an exclamation in parens just to begin with... it's also is a mild allusion to a Piet Hein grook:

AN ODE TO MODESTY

Talking of successful rackets
modesty deserves a mention.
Exclamation marks in brackets
never fail to draw attention.

I seem to have a bad habit of creating titles requiring explanation -- the hallmark of a bad writer, but now you know.

my yahoo

2004-11-23T17:56:00.000-05:00

my.yahoo.com updated recently -- including rss feed aggregation. Worth scoping out, but still not as hot as bloglines. On the other hand, yahoo can display lots of other types of information, like ticket fares and their calendar. So it's still spicing things up.

state of the union

2004-11-23T17:30:00.000-05:00

I had some time to reflect and watch some non-primetime television this weekend. Some strange and pessimistic musings resulted:

Britney Spears is releasing a "greatest hits" CD/DVD entitled "My Prerogative". Greatest Hits. This is a performer in her young 20s (no, I don't know how old she is, and I'm happy that I don't) who puts words like "prerogative" in album titles. How does she have a greatest hits album already? I'm left flabbergasted.
My favorite gelato place in the country used to charge $2.25 for two scoops, no charge for the cone. That was August of 2003. Now it charges $2.75 for two scoops, $0.25 for the cone.
The number one movie in the US this weekend features a plot line focusing around a character named "Benjamin Franklin Gates". How serious a lack of creativity do you suffer from that you go about naming a character that? Let alone your main character. Runner up, Sponge-Bob. They should just re-release "Kangaroo Jack" and ban everyone who shows up to theaters from ever buying a movie ticket again.

Not to mention, I forgot poland.

10 x 10

2004-11-18T15:41:00.000-05:00

another cool way of digesting the news -- 10x10. Very graphical and does news-correlating so you don't read the same story in 4 different manifestations. Heard about it from my man rich. Screen shot courtesy of Josh Rubin's "Cool Hunting"

feeding my information addiction

2004-11-14T20:09:00.000-05:00

I've recently become hooked on using Bloglines.com. It feeds my information addiction like no other website.

The story:
I surf the web more than I should. I read The New York Times online, sometimes browse BBC World to get some outside takes on international news, read some online comics, and try to check out blogs for a few friends. Squinting at pages to figure out what's new, or spending time loading up a blog only to find out your friend hasn't updated recently is annoying.
Well, it turns out that all of these things put out RSS feeds. RSS = online format that makes it easy for computers to understand website content. You can then use an RSS aggregator to watch all these RSS feeds for updates. This way, You just open up one window and immediately see the state of all websites you care about.
So, anyways, bloglines does that for me. There are other nice aggregators out there, but what's nice about this one is that it keeps track of what i've seen across all computers, so when I open up my page on another computer, it still only shows me the stories I haven't seen. You can see all the sites I keep track of here. (Note, that if this was your account, it wouldn't show you all stories, just the stories that have been added/updated since you last logged in.... don't be scared by the information overload. Embrace it)

crazy like a fox

2004-11-11T16:17:00.000-05:00

Firefox 1.0 launched February 9th. I'm a great fan of the web browser and use it (along with thunderbird) all the time.

One exceedingly useful feature of Firefox is the ability to add extensions to the program. My all-time-favorite is AdBlock which squashes website advertisements. For some reason, the default download doesn't include a list of filters, so I'm publshing my filters list here. enjoy!

my hero

2004-11-11T16:09:00.000-05:00

A website saved my laptop's life today. If, when booting, you get the error:

"Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"

then How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting will have you tear-ing up in gratitude.

visualizing our nation's political landscape

2004-11-09T21:02:00.000-05:00

This is nothing new, but it's certainly still interesting.
Since election day, there have been a number of attempts to rationalize and visualize the policial landscape of our country. I've been pointed to a number of useful visualizations which are worth noting:

this map loses the "red/blue state" menality and shows just exactly how each part of the country voted, to the highest resolution possible. It was created by Robert J. Vanderbei using information publically availible through USA Today and the US Census's Tiger Database. Click on the image for more details as well as variants on the map.

Another interesting technique is to weigh the political map by population density. There have been two different approaches which have caught my eye:

The first is this cartogram approach which actually distorts the map to make area match population. This graphic was made by Suresh Venkatasubramanian.

The second is the "dotty" approach by the New York Times. They don't have a screen shot imeediately availible, but you can view their visualization via this plug-in

a first whisper into a noisy net

2004-11-09T20:50:00.000-05:00

Inspired by the ever informative, useful, and surprisingly well read web-log of my friend Jesse Ruderman, I've decided to overcome my long distaste for the "xanga" and take a stab at blogging in what has certainly become a very crowded and noisy net. Hopefully this blog "revolution" of sorts has not peaked and there is still room on the self-publication bandwagon for one more quiet voice of self-proclaimed reason.