Weird stuff, useful stuff, and really, really cool stuff. Camping gear, science kits, heck even a jeopardy/quiz buzzer kit. Have to come back to this site someday. I am afraid if I buy stuff now, I’ll buy way too much. The prices sound real low and reasonable too. I’m already loving it, though I wish I was a kid, and I had an uncle who loved this store.
Seetharaman Narayanan – Photoshop
November 15th, 2006 § 7
If you have stared at the name Seetharaman Narayanan as the Adobe Photoshop credits roll by when Photoshop starts up, and wondered who this guy could be, you are not alone. I found this interview with the guy at Ironic Sans. By the way, you pronounce the name as “Sita-Raman Naaraa-yanan”. The last “n” in the name has a nasal, twangy sound, probably impossible for many westerners to reproduce. I wish I had a microphone so I could record the sound for you. I am glad I read the interview, quite serendipitously (I don’t even remember how I got to that page, or why). It turns out that there are quite a few pages on the web where he’s mentioned – even a couple of fan clubs.
The reasons for the name getting stuck in your head might be because the name is so long, and “exotic”. For me, however, I used to wonder how an Indian, from the same community as me (South Indian, probably (90%) Tamil, and (75%)Iyer/Iyengar), got into the credits of Photoshop.
My father(Appa)’s name is, after all, V. Narayan. Before he changed his name to what it is now, his name was V. Lakshminarayana Sarma. The “V” stands for Vydianath, which is also my grandfather’s given name.
So Mr. Seetharaman Narayanan studied at the Regional Engineering College, Trichy. I note this with pride, since I studied at another REC – the Regional Engineering College, Warangal. He’s called “Seetha” – which, though a handy name, also happens to be a feminine name – that of Lord Rama’s consort. My dad’s old name would be shortened to “Lakshmi” (yeah, just like the Lakshmi Singh you hear on NPR’s news). Maybe that is one of the reasons he chose to rename himself. I don’t want to get started on naming procedures in our community – that would make for an interesting post all by itself, and so I will save it for the future.
The Sun Online – Sport: ‘Terrorist gets a wicket’
August 8th, 2006 § 0
The Sun Online – Sport: ‘Terrorist gets a wicket’
AUSSIE legend Dean Jones has been sacked as a TV commentator after he branded a Muslim player ‘the terrorist’. Continuing polarization of the world?
puremeteor: Best Out-Of-Office Auto-Replies
August 7th, 2006 § 1
puremeteor: Best Out-Of-Office Auto-Replies – “7. I’ve run away to join a different circus.”
I can always make you smile
July 30th, 2006 § 7
Found this one on Go! Flavien who somehow found what I wrote earlier. I’m still amazed at the the chances of someone finding something I wrote and I accidentally finding out that someone found what I wrote interesting. I mean, there are, what – 100 million blogs out there? 1/100,000,000 * 1/100,000,000 = Wow! Okay, that was a very naive mathematical model, but still.
Jhumpa Lahiri does Malgudi Days
July 30th, 2006 § 5
Narayan Days is Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri’s review of Malgudi Days, that R.K.Narayan work that we Indian’s have come to love. The review introduces you (if you are unfamiliar) to Malgudi, and if you have read the book, reading the review will bring back fond memories.
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of R.K. Narayan’s birth, here is one way I propose that you read his Malgudi Days: one story per day for 32 consecutive days, by the end of which you will have experienced Malgudi Days as a Malgudi month, more or less. Each day’s reading, with only a few exceptions, will take about ten minutes. The vast majority of the stories are less than ten pages long; several are under five; and only one is more than 20. “What a fine idea,” you are perhaps thinking. “Ten minutes a day: I can manage that.” And if you are the type of virtuous person who is satisfied after just one piece of chocolate from a chocolate box, never tempted, until the following day, by a second, then perhaps you will be able to savor Malgudi Days in this restrained fashion.
Strange Sculptures
July 30th, 2006 § 0
Strange public sculptures from around the world – some of them are not strange, them being works of famous artists.
Conceptualists and Experimentalists – Two Types of Genius
July 22nd, 2006 § 1
My new roommate, who shares my first name, subscribes to the Wired magazine. Nice magazine, really. I never thought I’d use visually stunning to describe a magazine, but it is that, and much more. There were very few articles that I skipped, and every one of the articles I read was interesting and thought provoking.
As an example, there was this article titled, “What kind of genius are you?“. So it appears that there are two kinds, the Conceptualists, and the Experimentalists. The early- and late-bloomers. The author, an economist, has made it his life’s work to study the phenomenon across diverse fields, like painting, literature, film-making and music. The results are clear — there are the Picassos and Mozarts, who do their best work early in their lives, and then there are the Cézannes and Beethovens, who take time to hone their technique, and bring out the best in themselves.
Long after they are dead, these things seem to matter very little, but I can see how the late bloomers must have been frustrated through much of their early lives, watching other, less-talented individuals surpass them in acclaim, and the later-life depression of the early-peakers — never able to rise again to their early productivity later in their lives.
Kiran writes about the recent Indian website ban fiasco
July 22nd, 2006 § 1
The long dawn of Indian internet activism — jace.seacrow.com
The long dawn of Indian internet activism
And so a week has passed. We kicked up a ruckus, got mainstream media to back our case, appealed on television, made various government babus look like idiots, rattled their departments, extracted their precious document, made it public, set them off on a blame game, and finally, got the ISPs to restore access to our blogs.
Have you ever seen a long, detailed, well written article, with every single phrase in the article being a link to some informative article somewhere? Read the above article. It is the first such I have come across, and speaks of the recent Indian Govt ban on some blogs and websites. Information and opinion should be free for democracy to prevail.
Amazing, I wonder how long it took for him to put this article together, and how many tabs he had open when we wrote it.