desi spidey and kim's journal

this just killed me - desi-eshtyle spiderman. who would've thunk it? peter parker morps into pavitr prabhakar complete with a lungi and without the toighty-tighty underwear. he's a bit of a mix - maharashtrian and pathan (check out the jodhpur-style shoes). makes you wonder, doesn't the 'costume' make it harder to swing around? what about wind resistance? isn't it harder to change into this? especially considering that phone booths aren't all that common in india. and where does he hide his costume while he's off doing his reporting thing? i supppose aunt may becomes meera maasi and love interest mary jane becomes mansi jhaveri. oh well, i grew up on the green lantern but times change.

i'll add a set of links somewhere for the blogs i follow but here's the funniest of them all - a blog purporting to be maintained by kim jong 2 (the south korean head-honcho). it's a complete riot with transcripts of chat sessions with bush.

so some guy tried to make some money off google because he knew how to automate http get statements? i should be in a different line of work, i've never been in the news.

when the workday slows down and you need your fix, head over to the onion. where else do you get to see stuff like this?


remember bainbridge island? here's how the rich people live ...

biking on bainbridge

here's an interesting fact. if you type as badly as i do and head over to http://www.bloger.com, when you try to leave the page you're prompted to set your homepage to http://www.munky.com. why, oh why, oh why would i want to do that? aarrrgh.

so it's getting close to time for another rant. a rant against spyware, browser hijacking, pop-ups and things of that ilk. but i'll save that for later.

i saw yojimbo by kurosawa over the weekend. it's your regular western but set in a village (which is all of four buildings) in china with two warring gangs. it even has the standard-issue coffin-maker who makes a killing out of the falling bodies. one of the best movies ever is ran. you could turn the subtitles off and still get the movie.

i turned up for ultimate league practice yesterday. i was exhausted before we got done with the warm-up. by the time we got to the drills i was panting so hard that people were tripping over my tongue that trailed all the way onto the turf. but i'm going to work at it. at least i know what a stack and a force are now.

a bunch of us saw fahrenheit 911 on sunday. first impressions - it was a very, very funny movie posing as a documentary, the facts are dealt with exhaustively and reasonably objectively (i'm surprised that moore managed to stay as objective in the movie as he has), the sequences are put together well enough and it doesn't scream 'omigod, omigod, omigod' which is more the moore style. the film downplayed the non-finding of wmd even though it touches upon the 'hunt for wmd'. definitely worth watching. the best line in the movie? - "who's your daddy".

i started reading baumgartner's bombay by anita desai. it's serious reading, i wish i could find something lighter, something alive and cheerful.

if you're into biking at all, bainbridge island is a must. head over to pier 52 on alaskan way (downtown seattle). the ferry to bainbridge takes about 35 minutes and it's a great ride. when you get off the ferry head over to the information center (just outside where the ferry docks) and pick up a bike map. my advice, pick the 'flat and easy' routes. it's still plenty hilly! it's best to drive a few miles out to the start of the trail, park your car and then get on the bike. there's lots to see along the way. make it a point to bike along rockaway beach, the view of seattle from there is just something out of a sci-fi novel - rolling hills with small houses on either side of a towering city with buildings that seems to rise out of nowhere ,flanked by two collosal stadiums. i'll post some pics here soon.


on a completely different track, here's an interesting read - '21 rules of thumb - how microsoft develops it's software'. that question is surely fodder for a million funny one-liners but it's still an interesting read.

eulogy for napster and lounging in greenlake

i like bouncing ideas off people. i mostly do it for the sound of my own voice, but occasionally - i listen. a friend of mine's been bouncing off quite a few of her beliefs about life, the universe and opinion-forming-principles off me and some of it is starting to stick. damn.


bob dylan at 1:00 am. i really need to get some new mp3's. oh! the days of napster.


did i really type that aloud? i wish i could take that back. but i can't ... so i'll admit it.


"i used to napster, but i didn't inhale".


so this aforementioned friend used to napster just as i did in grad school. she stopped because she can now afford to pay for music. i stopped because it'll be a drag to hire a lawyer when they slap a lawsuit on my behind. the bigger issue obviously is about paying for content. she believes that it's okay to pay $20 for a cd because the record label says so. the artist and the people behind the music deserve the money. fair enough, i agree with her on the second point. what i don't like is that nirvana's smells like teen spirit costs more now than it used to when Kurt was alive. so where does all that money go now? not to kurt for sure. it's sucked up by some chubby guy in a golden suit with a big flashy diamond on his pinky and an unlit cigar sticking out of his pouty lips underneath a receding forehead set off by beady eyes.
patents die out after twenty years. perhaps the amount you pay for music should taper off as an album gets older. when an industry hires chubby lawyers in black suits with tasteful rings and cigars (dominican, not cuban) sticking out of their pursed lips to sue thirteen-year olds it's close to hitting rock bottom. shame on you.

and please, please - don't introduce so many formats. it's stupid. figure out a smarter way to protect downloaded music. locking people in by restricting the devices they can play their music on, preventing them from making copies of their music ... wrong approach people. you have some smart minds working for you but they're probably controlled by mba wielding technology-control-management types. the dark side is filled with razor sharp minds with endless time on their hands trying to make you look stupid.
darth's clan will win. figure something else out.


i saw this ridiculously funny movie called the breakfast club over the weekend. highly recommended watching if you're not in the mood for mindless comedy. on that vein, lolita is a must see. kubrick's treatment is quite different from nabakov's yarn. and yeah, nabakov's being accused of pliagirism. shame on you ... dirty old man :).
if you're in the mood for some mental gymnastics the corrections by jonathan franzen is a good workout. somehow, his writing forces me to re-read most lines. the language is simple, the grammar is great but i can't grok it in the first go. go figure. huh?


the weekend was great. it's sunny out here most days now. yipee.

green lake park had tons of people in skimpy clothes working out, looking great and being generally un-naturally healthy. a few of us drove out there, found a convenient tree and plonked down in the shade. the closest i came to exercising was a running critique of the ultimate frizbee players in the vicinity. but we did detect a statistical anamoly - there was an inordinate number of shoebox dogs being taken for a stroll (shoebox dog = a dog that can fit in a shoebox). some of the women walking the dogs had platform shoes that were bigger than the dogs. really.

and then we headed out to alki beach to witness another statistical anamoly - women in really short, frilly skirts poised precariously on their hips. the skirts seemed to emit a dangerous predisposition towards leaping off hips, slipping across pavement and hailing a passing guy. before you mutter 'wishful thinking', i have witnesses. really.

an ode to google

so what's the deal with google? a lot actually. over the years i've looked at google from a number of different perspectives and i'll chalk some out here. i work in a related space so i've had some time to think about this.

a lot of people made money by building information portals in the last decade. to make money off a portal you need give people a reason to keep coming back. you either do this by providing content or by providing services. the companies that focus on content are making money, but not a whole lot. the average guy still prefers cable to internet explorer. there are reams of articles about how the internet revolutionized b2b, b2c, c2c etc. for the average internet user that means zilch - it just means you can buy stuff over the internet. the real value-add is the ability to find and share information. to find information you need an index and that's why search technology will be the hottest thing around for a long time.

google has great technology. they invested time and smart minds on algorithmic search and nothing else till they got it mostly right. a lot of players offered lexical search (basically looking for certain words in a document) that worked pretty well but got distracted with building sexier portals. google's technology which was initially roughly based on kleinberg's hubs and authorities idea combined with the ideas they described in their 'anatomy of a search engine' paper has definitely evolved, but the basic ideas are brilliant and still work. i had to review this paper for a graduate course in data mining. i had a funny slide on appendix a which was titled 'advertising and mixed motives' which decried advertising tied up with search engine results. i guess these guys are decrying all the way to the bank now :).

i'm still in awe of the number of technologies that google works on. the basic search is just the tip of the iceberg. they have invested time in a number of cool ideas that have huge potential - blogging, price-comparison, email, multi-lingual language support, image search ... it goes on.

in the midst of all of that they have the time to champion causes like the fight against deceptive software and maintain the google blog (which gives you a good feel for what the work-ethic is like...)

before you start thinking it - no, i don't work for google. far from it. but i respect the company and the direction they're taking. i respect the fact that all the heady hype and hoopla is written up by technologists who're peeking in from the outside at the outer layers of what they're working on. i respect the fact that they don't have vp's making statements about how cool their technology is. or how they're garnering market-share. or how they're trying to bump the stock price up by inane statements.


i need more caffeine. and yeah, that slartibartfast guy is a poser.

who needs bookmarks?

is it just the books i'm reading or is it me? at last count i'm reading five books. i pick them up in almost no logical order. how sad is that? instead of a girl in every port i have a book in every room. at least i'm better off than people who need a fix of mind-numbingly-predictable-back-to-back episodes of friends.

wait... i'm one of those people.

well, at least i'm not abnormal. no, wait. read previous line.

so the stock market's picking up. my net worth went up by about 34 cents today. after taxes that should leave me just about enough for ... nothing.

i saw caddyshack today. it cracked me up. bill murray is a god. they could have made the gopher a little more realistic but i like the moves the little fella had. groovy (pronounced gruveee with an accent on the last e).
i need to book tickets for india sometime in the near future. i'm resolved to be more proactive about things. i'll spend some time thinking about that this week.

i also need a vacation. i've been heading into work this week waiting to leave. even the 34 cents didn't do much to increase my morale. i think my expectations have gone up. damn.

which leads me to another interesting thought. what's the difference between being really, truly happy and strapping yourself to some electrodes that convince you that you're happy (using three aaa batteries, two green wires and a diode - write me for detailed diagrams). sci-fi has dealt with this ad-nauseum.

here's another take on this - the social engineering variety. if i keep convincing myself that i'm worth nothing, i don't deserve much and that i don't need to have friends i can (eventually) be happy with much lesser. lowered expectations and achievements but much happier. truly.
so, as a start i'm lowering my expectations from quadrillionaire to billionaire.

so you gazzilionaires and gmail users - i don't envy you. i found my spigot.

friendless in seattle?

i'm getting dangerously close to cleaning up on friends.

sometimes, just sometimes, when i lounge on my futon in a artificially-generated-laugh-track-induced stupor i press pause on the dvd player and spend a minute looking at the patently ridiculous expressions on screen. i memorize their facial arrangements. after ten minutes i repeat the exercise. their bodies are in different places but their faces look the same. and from this i came up with a magnificient theory.


they make the 'friends' act that way to save on bandwidth.


come on, it's a perfectly obvious explanation for why their facial expressions seem to cycle every 33.452 seconds (the time between laughs).

when they send the video signals across the wire they send frame data about the background, the body movements and other action. they don't send data about the faces though - they just send data like "ross:3,monica:16,joey:1,chandler:2" where the number stands for a certain expression. for example chandler:2 is chandler with the 'duh-aha' expression.

for the next frame they send "joey:4,chandler:2,rachel:8".

they used to have to send more data for chandler but then he grew really fat and you can't tell between his facial expressions anymore. so he's stuck at 2 - the 'duh-aha' expression.


i started re-reading the douglas adams' second-best masterpiece over the weekend. yes, they're all masterpieces but dirk gently's holistic detective agency is the best. hence, the first in the hitchhiker's trilogy (although there are actually 5 of them?) takes second place. if you disagree you can take it up with my pet vogon. i found the entire set, used (of course - i'm cheap) at elliot bay. i can't believe they actually have 'pattern recognition' in the bargain book section now.

may they be struck by the curse of mildew. lots of it. especially in their prominently displayed copies of 'the da vinci code' which is a featured selection of the incomparable 'oprah book club'.
the oprah hangout is a pretty exclusive club. you need to wear a bookmark and a post-it to enter. dog-ears are discouraged but the drinks are free.

there's a friends trivia game?

i saw the 'friends triva' game at a wizards of the coast store last year and laughed aloud.

i laughed reallly hard repeatedly saying 'oh man, oh man, who would buy that?'.

it then turned out that someone who'd come along had actually played the game and went on to say that it was a lot of fun.

so then i was pointing at him, laughing loud and repeatedly saying 'oh man, oh man, who would play that?'.

and now it's happened to me. i have no cable and netflix is too slow. i've been living in a layer that's shielded from reality by an endless succession of episodes from friends.

i'm (gulp) more than halfway through them. soon it'll be over. there'll be no more self-involved-shallow-navel-gazing-narcissistic-peurile-twenty-somethings-who-need-to-get-a-life types keeping me laughing.

what am i going to do? oh what oh what oh what?

here's a thought - i could always get cable, tune in to cnn and watch self-involved-shallow-navel-gazing-narcissistic-peurile-fifty-somethings-who-need-to-get-a-life types talk about the 'situation' in iraq and how it's awful that the natives are fighting back and how they have the audacity to resist the invasion. why can't they just let the damned oil flow freely?

i know, i know. you think i have the shallow view that iraq was all about the oil.

you're wrong. i see the bigger picture. it's not as simple as 'walk in there and take the oil'. it's more like 'walk in there, get rid of the guys in power, get rid of most of the people who don't toe the line, bomb and destroy everything, hand out contracts to rebuild everything, and then, only then - take the oil'.

it's a shame when a well-thought-out strategy like that gets all messed up by insurgents blowing up oil fields.


btw, have you seen my spigot? i left it by the comma.

me:- "who's god". ramona:- "piss off"

and it's monday.

again.

it's been this way for the last few years. and before that. we need a change in this whole days-of-the-week thing, it's getting monotonous.

i'd like to buy an island. and on my island i'll have some new rules. i'll start with the 'no mondays' rule.


there's a guy at work with a sign on his door that says 'there are two secrets to being successful at business. the first is to never tell everyone you know.' it's funny - in a geeky sort of way (which is of course the best kind). but i've devised a way to piss him off and make him take that sign off his door. i'll stop by his office every day and ask him about the second secret. i'll keep doing it until he starts throwing things at me when i walk in the door. i'll then scrawl the second secret under the first - 'keep bugging people until you get what you want'.
that ought to enhance my reputation as a guy who gets things done.


i sometimes mess with ramona when i get bored. ramona's this ai bot on ray kurzweil's site. she does really well on the 'who is ___' kind of questions. try 'who is god' for kicks. if you haven't already, check out the rest of the articles on that site. some of the essays on machine intelligence are pretty cool.


about two years ago i got started writing a story about an intelligent lifeform in the internet. the basic premise was that the brain was a set of interconnected neurons all running parts of the same program, or rather, by their interconnections and firing *were* the program itself. in other words - consciousness.

the story starts out inside the mind of the protagonoist. just your regular guy in india. all of his thoughts, memories, emotions, feelings in real time. but that's where it got interesting. the guy doesn't really exist. all of that is generated by a program running on distributed nodes across the internet - a machine generated consciousness. i was all excited about exploring the whole concept of consciousness. would it be murder to turn all those machines off and bring them back on? if you think of the system as a state machine in a self-contained system then as long as previous state is retained the system can be brought back up at any point with no change. but it it then the same 'version' of the consciousness or was something altered?

most of this is still in my head - i didn't get around to completing the story. i'm tepidly determined to complete the story before classes start up again in september. it took a little steam out of me when i saw the same concept in the form of Jane, the evolved computer intelligence from Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

psst... need a box of pe*is enlargers?

i stared at my inbox for a full minute willing new mail. no luck.

it's friday and people who have a life are out doing other things. i think I'll go off and check my yahoo mail.

yahoo mail is so dependable. i keep getting mail about penis enlargers and breast enhancers. inevitably, both mails are from the same guy.
someone really needs to explain to matt.davison@emedicineathome.com that the market for people who're interested in both products is very, very small. if it really was a big market then you'd see more of this around.

so you walk into costco and ask them where they keep the ear buds. this friendly sales woman leads you between the bales of diapers and hands you a box of 9999 ear buds (that's the smallest size they carry). you thank her and start to walk away and she asks you if you'd like to buy a dozen penis enlargers. if you stop to show any interest whatsoever, she'll start the cross-selling pitch. a half hour later you're struggling to open the boot of your car which is hard when you're balancing a huge box of penis enlargers and a bigger box of breast enhancers (they were on sale).
cross-selling to cross-dressers? now there's a niche market they don't teach you about at wharton.

so i think I'll give this a shot

i'm here. finally. who would've thunk it? blogopia.

i'll have witty things to blog every time i'm near typing distance of a browser. i'll tell funny stories and make insightful observations about everyday things but from a completely wacky perspective which will make people go - 'oh wow, this guy is wacky. truly.'.
yes, this blog is going to rock. so cool.

people will talk about this blog over coffee. and like in 'pattern recognition' by william gibson i'll spawn a geek following by posting traces of a thought, glimmers of an idea. see what i did there? i let it drop that i've read the book. i'll do things like that to make this a cool blog. somewhere later i'll allude to my erudite movie watching habits.

see, i did it again and you didn't even notice. i was born to do this.

i must admit that i'm feeling a bit of performance anxiety. what if i can't be witty on demand? i know, i can always inhale a helium balloon. i'm a party animal. roar, roaar.

i need caffeine.