Carthik Sharma

Thanks to the awesome FAlbum (for Flickr Album, I suppose) plugin, I now have all my flickr photos on display here, at this site. Look at the top nav bar, or if you are reading this elsewhere, visit my photos page to see some pics.

I used to have a self-run Gallery at 2fargon.com, but I let the domain expire, and exported all the pics from Gallery to Flickr using this exporter. It took a longish time, but now I have the 2K+ pics at Flickr. They’re all private now, so you can’t see them. I will work on the albums, one by one, add descriptions, trim the collection where it needs trimming and then enable the albums for the public.

Thanks for the FAlbum plugin, the gallery-to-flickr exporter, and thanks again Matt, for the Flickr “pro” membership.

Every now and then I come to the basic problem of organizing my music collection, which has grown to quite an unmanageable size. Improper ID3 tags make the situation even worse.

The more music you have, the less you listen to music you want to listen to.

Without proper tags, or information to organize the collection, all of it ends up in a soup, and when I want to listen to a particular song, or, worse, check if I have one or more of a particular kind of sing, and listen to them, I end up spending a few minutes flailing about, and then giving up, and listening to the same old favourites – time and again! The problems of having a disorganized collections include the possibility of having a very disgruntled girlfriend. “You know what, your music collection sucks, you have all this junk, and not one song I want to listen to!!”.

So, people, is there any tool that will give me a genre if I give it the Artist/Album/Track Name information?

I already have started using Musicbrainz to tag the untagged mp3s, which is a phenomenal task, given that I have over 5000 untagged songs, but I will get there someday. For now, I need a method to classify songs based on genre. The [[List of music genres]] at wikipedia gives me the jitters. I would love to have a web-based tool that will tell me what genre a song belongs to. I’ll take its word, and never contest it, I promise!

The second issue is that of setting up a tree-like directory structure for the files. Things like compilation-cds, classical music cds, and worst of all – Hindi film soundtracks muck things up very very badly. So any suggestions on a structure for organizing files into directories based on mp3 tags that works are welcome too.

I’m trying to have a conversation here, so let’s talk.

Looking for the solution to edit the dates on all photos in a set on Flickr?
You can do that, and much, much more with the Flickr Batch Operations Enhancer Greasemonkey script.

So get firefox, install greasemonkey, and get the Enhancer script. It is a life saver, as far as I am concerned, since some of the photos I have on Flickr haven’t got the date the photo was taken set quite right.

..no day should go by without writing at least a line…

Increasingly true of my life, and I expect this to be so for a long time to come. Writing a scientific article is very different from writing a work of art, which I have never attempted in earnest, but it is writing, nevertheless.

I found this article on how to write better, which puts some things down very well. Let me save it for posterity. May the author forgive me for reproducing the entire text here, but i have seen too many websites with long URLs fade into obscurity, and 404s.

“The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses”
Walter Benjamin

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea — but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

DSC00442

Hostel doors at my alma mater, REC Warangal used to be inviting for graffiti artists. I know, it may seem repelling that people actually vandalized state property, but it wasn’t a social evil at RECW, everybody did it, and the authorities hardly noticed. The doors used to get painted over every 2-3 years. This photo and the others in the set were taken by my friend Sasi when he visited RECW about a year or so after we all graduated. On display are the things I wrote on the door.

Notice the cord tied to the door-handle. The other end was tied to the door-handle on the other side of the door. The purpose being to keep the door shut, without having to latch the door. The cord, or rope would effectively jam the door shut

These photos were in a mail which was a part of the mails I recovered lately. I had forgotten about these photos. They bring back a strong wave of memory. Le Sigh!