Carthik Sharma

I post the following not to display the results of the mini-quiz, but to put the correct map of India out there. There are maps, and most of the maps of India in the US show parts of Kashmir as belonging to China and/or Pakistan, which is just wrong.

When we gained independence, all of Kashmir was a part of India – and it remains so. Agression, and declaring illegally occupied territory as one’s own just plain sucks. Recently when there was the earthquake, a lot of new agencies referred to Muzaffarabad as belonging to Pakistan. Wrong! At best it is Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir. Even when the reporters try to refer to the occupation, they call it Pakistan-Administered-Kashmir, which is totally senseless. The media in the US is so pro-Pakistan, it is amazing – considering Pakistan supports terrorists just as much as any other nations, perhaps more than any other nation. I don’t hate the country, I have no problems with it – but I have a problem with misrepresentation of facts.

So folks, call it disputed, or call it a part of India (since it was that way before the dispute) but never call it Pakistan’s.

Brought to you by pratibha75, quizling and teemus.
Which states in India have you been to?

I must say I am tickled. They claim it will increase one’s typing speed. I don’t know about that, but just the look of it is so appealing. The price, however, is not.

Kids On Science. Priceless, read the whole list to find more gems like…

“Many dead animals in the past changed to fossils, while others preferred to be oil.”

“To most people, solutions mean finding the answers. But to chemists, solutions are things that are still all mixed up.”

“A monsoon is a French gentleman.”

“Talc is found on rocks and on babies.”

Read all of them.

Thanks, White Noise

For being the world’s third largest religion (after Christianity and Islam, of course), the Internet has very little to offer by means of Hinduism resources. The number 1 result on Google gives me popup ads and to me, most of the stuff there is passé. Is there a blog about Hinduism? No, sir. Nothing that is interesting, or absorbing.

Gotta fix that.

Frustrated by
1. sitting in front of the Laptop,
2. Reading pdf after pdf,
3. frustration at not being able to browse (self-imposed restriction) …

the dissipated author of this note will now try to go home early (It is 3:46 PM now) and try to recline on the couch with a book.

Let us hope reading science fiction, or mythology, will up the spirits enough for another stint of work later in the day.

I finally set up Gregarius, a feed reader to be able to read what my favourite websites have to say, without having to visit the sites themselves. Yes, I always visit the websites I am interested in. I like reading articles in their native settings. The decision to use a feed reader is because I am running out of time these days, and can’t pull long nights like I used to. A couple of months ago, I decided that the Ph.D. program has to move into overdrive, and so I kept the Ph.D. at “top-priority” and moved everything else a couple of notches down the priority list. But now we are digressing.

Let’s stay on the topic of reading feeds. If you look at my feed reader, you will notice that I have not subscribed to Engadget, or Metafilter, or any of other ubiquitous blogs that you find on everyone (and their dog’s) list of feeds. The reason for this is that I use my friends as a filter. So if something posted at one of those we-cover-it-all sites is noteworthy enough, I will get to know about it in the course of my daily surfing. If I don’t come across an article, then it probably wasn’t worth my time anyways.

Now here’s how you can help me. If you read this article, please take a moment to suggest a maximum of three weblogs that you actually look forward to reading everyday. There is no other criteria. Whatever is a part of your daily online reading is all I ask. It could even be the blog of that one friend that you miss most, or find the funniest.

My must-reads are:

• Photomatt – Don’t ask me why!
• Planet Ubuntu

I’d not be honest if I named any more blogs. But these two blogs are read everyday, without fail!

So please name some good ones for me!

So will your convictions and principles stand in the face of a few million dollars? Apparently there are some who do stand up to the millions. Read the story, it is inspiring, to say the least.

“People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music,” Densmore said. “I’ve had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music, other people say they know someone who didn’t commit suicide because of this music…. On stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That’s not for rent.”

From Ex-Door Lighting their Ire

John Densmore was the drummer in the band “The Doors”. One the few bands I have a t-shirt of, in fact. Doors’ songs have meant different things to me, at different times, but they have always meant something. It is good to see someone treating music as something besides a profit-making venture. I mean this was music that woke me up, taught me stuff, and kept me motivated. All that will definitely be eroded if I hear it as the backdrop for, say, a Geico ad, or something.

Thank you for the music, John.

I ended up at the misheard lyrics page for U2’s Mysterious Ways.

U2’s, “Mysterious Ways ”
Misheard Lyrics:
Shamu, the mysterious whale
Original Lyrics:
She moves in mysterious ways.
Shamu is the killer whale at Sea World.

Made me smile! I am sure the rest of the website is a split too, but I have work to tend to.

I used to dream about the day when Linux had better media management/playing software than Windows, or Macs. That day is here.

I hate iTunes on Macs. Kludgy, and reminiscent of a recalcitrant adolescent. I never could figure out how to play just a set of songs from a particular directory in the hard drive in iTunes. It creates a library and then shoots itself in the foot – a mess! Don’t teach me a new paradigm – allow me to listen to my music, whichever way I want to get at the music and play it, dammit!

I hate the MediaPlayer on Windows too, too many shiny things in there, and it looks suspicious – sort of like a coupon book trying to sell culture to you when you are online. I dislike teen-pop, so MediaPlayer, ould you please just play exactly those songs that I want you to, and hide your ugliness so it doesn’t get in the way? Using mediaplayer to queue songs and play music is for me a very irksome task – one which subtracts from the pleasure that follows.

In any case, I will leave it to the User Interface experts to convert my subjective dislikes to technical terms and to reason on which components caused me to feel the way I did. Basically, I am not one to “adapt” to the computer and make my behavior, wants and needs fit what the computer is capable of (and Windows users like to think they own the computer, hah!), but want the computer, which I bought, and, though this is easy to forget, is a dumb inanimate machine, to do what I want it to.

Amarok came as a pleasant surprise – given my presentiment that anything that “imports” songs and creates libraries is a sure loser. Part of the hesitation was also due to fact that it is a KDE app, and I use the Gnome desktop environment, but I decided to try it out anyways. Good thing I did, ’cause I love it, except for the fact that it demands a lot of the old desktop at home.

Thanks to the recent visit to India, I now have 150+ GB of songs – songs I mostly have not heard before, that I really want to. Amarok simplifies a lot of things. Using ID3 tags, it sorts songs by artist/album/genre etc, in a tree-like fashion, and lets me decide what comes first, and the structure of the tree. I can browse songs on my computer by directory (I can’t do without this), by genre, artists, albums, ratings etc too. I can drag and drop songs, albums — pretty much anything that is in one pane to the playlist to queue the songs up. Amarok uses Musicbrainz to automatically fill in the ID3 tags. It fetches me album covers and lyrics for songs, and the best part is – it suggest songs similar to the currently playing song – that are present in my existing collection! This is a godsend when you have a lot of new songs to explore. Say you like one song, and want to find more of the same, Amarok comes with an option that appends similar songs to the end of your current playlist. It also has the ability to let audioscrobbler (now last.fm) know of the songs you are playing. Check out my last.fm profile page if you want to see what it looks like. last.fm provides recommendations for songs too.

There are oh-so-many more el-neato features, I don’t want to bore you with them – but this is for sure – this music player is here to stay on my desktop. It is, after all, the first one that has stood up to each one of the challenges Carthik threw at it: “Can you do this?” says Carthik, “Of course, dear sir!” says Amarok. Reminds me of a very efficient and genial butler, who got in the business early, and is still pretty young, and who likes to wear bright-colored ties. In fact, if future versions deviate too much from where it is now, I will stay at this spot in time, and not upgrade. It couldn’t be better, I say.

Should make a few of these for myself.

lol!