Amartya Sen and Tag cloud

Clearly, tag cloud and folksonomy are in vogue. Amartya Sen in his new book, "Violence and Identity" talks about multiple identities of an individual:

The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).

Wow! Thats a whole bunch of tags. Aren't they? Shashi Tharoor adds an interesting twist in this sunday magazine review of the book. He says that people who realize that they have multiple identities are a minority and not a whole lot of people are going to read this enlightening book. I am not 100% sure about that. But it sounds so true when the word 'context' is thrown in. Most people fail to realize their multiple identities when taken in by a momentary raze of a given context.

Are people using enough of tagging in the online world to use it as an evidence for or against Tharoor's twist? Thats an interesting question to think about. I should log my thoughts on that.

Democratizing or Inventing?

In an article titled 'Inventing Creativity', Ajit Daura thinks that Kaavya Viswanathan is more a victim of a remix culture than the perpetrator of a literary crime. Thats probably true because, at both conscious and subconcsious levels, younger generations at large do not hold any prejudices against remixing. For them it is pretty much 'okay' to remix and its definitely part of the creativity spectrum. This decade may even be called 'the dawn of the remixing age.'

Ajit concludes the essay with this...

...but in the market economy in which we live, Mozartian self-expression seems to be the least important value in a work of art. Is it any wonder that it is cut, copied, remixed and pasted to suit a common denominator of taste and sales?

There, I beg to differ. While it takes a Mozart to bring out a 'Marriage of Figaro', the remixing age and the new digital technologies that facilitate remixing allow many many more 'ordinary folks' to express freely and creatively (though its not authentic always). Remixing is more about democraziting creativity, not just serving to a common denominator.

Proposing using Apple

Apple is posting a time lapsed video of the visitor lines before its new fifth avenue store: http://www.apple.com/retail/fifthavenue/

Somebody used this delayed web cast to propose to his girl friend, Uschi Lang : http://images.apple.com/movies/us/apple/fifthavenue/timelapse0500.mov
Now, does that count as graffiti or vandalism? Will apple edit the video, if somebody shows a placard against Bush?

Land for Land?

"Drowned Out" is a documentary about Sardar Sarovar Project on River Narmada of India. It talks about some of the pros of dam which include bringing water to drought stricken villages of Western Gujarat and Rajasthan and one of the largest canal irrigation systems in the world. The cons are the submergence of large number of villages and unfair settlement for displaced people. (Environmental effects of the dam have not been discussed.). Unfair settlement seem to be the heart of the issue. Resettlers were offered good land on paper, but when it came to the efficiency of governments in executing, all the resettlers got were poor weeded lands that had abyssmal returns of crops.

Lets face it. India is a densely populated country. Land is scarce and fair resettlement in land takes extremely efficient and politically willed governments to show any useful results. Keeping the merits and demerits of dam apart for a moment, resettlement of people is a key issue in any mammoth developmental project. It becomes all the more complex, when land is scarce and majority of resettlers are illiterate.

The project's foundation stone was laid in 1961. Planners and builders had two generations of time. Yet, planning seemed to be minimal. Why does resettlement have to be Land for Land? Why not exchange land for vocational skills other than farming? Given a couple of generations of time, people would have smoothly made a transition from agriculture to other occupations. I am sure there would be some such skills that can be learnt in a short time as well. I am wondering if any work has been done in that direction.

Some Interesting Trends

Google Trends lists down the geographical locations where bulk of queries for a particular keyword come from. I tried for to find out the locations for some of these listed below....

• Software - Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai... (San Francisco at #8)
• Design - Mumbai, New York, San Francisco, Chicago...
• Usability - Bangalore, Chennai, Dublin, Austin, Seattle...
• User Experience - Helsinki, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Sydney, London...
• Java, J2EE, .Net, Siebel, QA, Oracle, SQL, ASP, VB, Datawarehousing, Biztalk, testing, CMM, Mainframes - Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune, Delhi in some order
• Ruby, Python, Ruby on Rails - San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, New York,
• Firefox - Munich (followed by 8 cities in Germany), San Francisco at #10
• Linux - Czech Republic, India, Russia, Norway, Poland, Hungary...
• Shahrukh - Pakistan, Morocco, India, Peru, Iran, UAE, Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany, UK
• Visa - Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Vancouver, Singapore, New York, San Francisco....
• GRE - Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Austin, Washington, New York, Chicago
• MBA - India, Pakistan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, United States...
• Islam - Jakarta, Bandung, Kaula Lumpur, Rabat, Cairo, Ankara.... (none of the so-called Breeding grounds in Top 10. Makes sense, because breeding involves certain amount of closed minded ness)
• Global Warming - Brisbane, Perth, Delhi, Vancouver, Portland, Minneapolis, Washington, New York, San Francisco (DC at #7)
• Prius - Pleasonton, Los Angeles, Irvine, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Portland...

iPod and India

I think iPod and iTunes (for that matter, ID3 tag format) are poorly designed for bollywood music for the following reasons...

1. Songs from Bollywood (and other industries like Tollywood, Kollywood...) have atleast two artists or more aptly atleast two 'playback singers'. ID3v2 and iPod work well when there is a single artist. Multiple artists fragment the song collection into larger number of artist categories. For example, there are numerous songs sung solo by Kishore Kumar as well as with Lata Mageshkar and Asha Bhosle together or separately. iPod classifies these songs under the following categories:

• 'Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar',
• 'Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhosle',
• 'Kishore Kumar'.
• or even 'Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar'

While the listener may always recall it as a Kishore Kumar number. Needless to say, best sold albums by AR Rahman have atleast four artists a song. One needs further ehtnographic research to determine how bollywood music is classified and thought about in listerners' hearts and minds.

2. Playback singers (artist in iTunes) are different from the composer by rule. More importantly, the name of the movie's superstar is prominent keyword in people's minds more than artist or composer. They are known popularly as Shahrukh's song, Rajnikanth's song, Amitabh's song, Chiranjeevi's song etc. iTunes or iPod doesnt even account for this factor which is inherent to bollywood music.

3. Some of the info fields in ID3v2 like Genre have no relevance for mainstream bollywood music. Its all the same: 'filmi music'.

4. Neither CDDB nor Indian recording companies or any othermajor online Indian music websites have a consistent spelling for the artists. You get to see about six different spellings ...'AR Rahman', 'A.R. Rahman', 'AR. Rahman', 'AR Rehman', 'Rehman AR', 'AR. Rehman'....you get the picture.

5. In India, one gets to buy all the 6 tracks of an album for 99c (INR 44.5).

A bigger question is.....Isnt India a Tier-3-4 market at the bottom the pyramid? Immense commodification of music CDs and abysmally low prices of them at less than a dollar are the very proofs.

Isnt iPod and iTunes a Tier-1 product or one that encourges and thrives on Long Tail ?

35% stolen!

BBC reports that 35% of produced power is being stolen in Delhi resulting in an acute power shortage and long power cuts. So when governments cannot plan for increased installed capacity, cannot do good law enforcement in tackling stealing power....what do they do? They draft 'guidelines' for saving power. What do those guidelines sound like? "Government offices must switch off air-conditioners after 1830 and shopping malls across the city will have to shut at 1730." So people who pay for the power have to voluntarily shutdown at insane timings, so that people who steal can do it the royal way! And when leaders like Naidu reform power sector, whats he rewarded with? A terrible defeat at polls. Way to Go!

Rising Gas Price

Carpooling and driving less are the lowest hanging fruit in the battle against rising gas prices say experts. In the lieu, two major issues immigration and rising gas prices, its useful to note that carpooling is pretty much the way of life for many immigrants. Its an inherent cultural advantage to these people as its okay to rub shoulder to shoulder in the countries (Mexico, China, India...) where they come from.

Minority Report ?

Police predict crimes over Myspace. Minority Report doesnt seem too far. Does it?

IITians contest Tamil Nadu Elections

Here is a little TV interview with Santana Vasudevan Krishnan, an IITian contesting in the state polls this year:


"Getting inspired by Rang De Basanti is one thing...while doing it is another thing...", reads the newsreader. How sad the movie that's mentioned is Rang De Basanti and NOT Yuva. North Indians and North Indian media are often like CNN. They dont see the world beyond them.

But the news reader had all the perfect questions and Santana Vasudevan Krishnan didnt have any good answers.

"Why should people vote you when you dont have a film or political background? You might appeal to middle class, but they are usually not the people who vote. So whats the point of your contesting?"...so on and so forth ....asked the news reader. All perfect questions given the fact that majority of voters dont even know what IIT stands for, both metaphorically as well as literally.

"We are different", started Santana Vasudevan Krishnan. For a moment, all I could recall was the ULTI cliched film interviews and opening ceremonies on Gemini and Teja TV.

A simple litmus test: How many bollywood/tollywood/kollywood movies have a character from IIT? I am not talking about the 'hero', try to recall an IITian character atleast some where in the background. "English August" is all I can think of. What does it prove? IIT doesnt sell movies. Forget politics and votes.

The strongest weapon at the disposal of Santana Vasudevan Krishnan is Innovation, in my opinion. Innovation in terms of a totally different approach to marketing politics, usage of with loosely coupled social technology like cell phones and an ant colony of passive student volunteers....etc...etc...I am not talking about Chandrababu Naidu kind of of hi-fi babudom, but instead: innovation at grass roots level with the least usage of resources....appealing not just to the intellect and rational part of the voters.

Well, you might have understood that I dont have any of the answers or any precise approach guidelines. But I can say this with conviction, "Think Different" is what an IITian can do and what a traditional politician cannot do. And there lies the edge, not the usual super appealing brand image IIT. "Know the audience and act accordingly", it usually works.

Happy Bday to you and me

Happy Birthday to you, Pardha and 16,438,356 other people including me. (6 billion / 365, with a naive assumption that there is equal probability for all 365 days.)*

Birthdays like anti-depressants. You want to take the pill before you realize that you are getting older. While its a good thing to realize the eventual 'getting old' thing a.s.a.p., a solar year is too long a time period for any useful introspection. Shrinking time periods like academic year to semester to quarters, quarterly reporting of earnings instead of one annual event, billing hours instead of monthly pay cycles .... are all good evidences. Granularity of time seems to be the fashion and trend. Further, a year is like measuring weight in tonnes. Because, when you measure weight in tonnes, you really don't care about wastage of material in a few tens or hundreds of kgs. All you care about is the number: 25 tonnes.

That was all about birthdays from a self point of view. From an other person perspective, you want lesser granularity to age. You want to be in a certain demographic instead of the exact number, especially when the number starts taking a hike. People think "Well, I am 40-ish", when in reality the age of person is 49! But its going to be painful when I have to choose the 25-32 demographic the next time I fill out a survey or a form. :)

I wish I were a Piraha in matters of couting age. :)
(Pirahas cannot count beyond two and anything more than that would be "many".)

Finally, a Wikify!

About a couple of years back, I've sent one of my friends' at yahoo!, a little wish list for yahoo! mail. One of them included, a edit toolbar kind of shortcut which hyperlinks to its wikipedia entry.

Finally, I wrote the a greasemonkey to wikify: http://geocities.com/kaysov/wikify.user.js

You should see something like the snapshot (beside check spelling) when you open the compose window of gmail.

And here is a little how to on usage:

// USAGE:
// %ENTRY% -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENTRY
// %Indian_Ocean% -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean 

Best Linux LiveCD ever

Linux Live CDs have been my final resort for the past few days since the boot sectors of my hard disk got corrupted. I've tried of bunch of them including the following more popular ones: Ubuntu, MEPIS, Knoppix, SLAX and PCLinuxOS. So far, I found PCLinuxOS to be the BEST. Its got the widest range of plugins for firefox, its got realplayer, media player, stream tuners, Bit torrent, USBKey for persistent /home and Koffice. But its not without complaints. Some of mine include lack of a quick volume control, Firefox 1.0 instead of 1.5 and KOffice instead of Open Office. But never the less, PCLinuxOS has been outstanding so far!

Desi foods and air mileage

Vegetables like lean eggplant, curry leaf, bitter gourd, snake gourd, coconuts travel a distance of around 13,000+ miles to reach the dinner tables of Desis here in the US! And in the debate of globalization Vs. global warming, local foods can save a lot of fossil fuel while brining in significant revenue to Indian farmers. While we leave this debate to economists, can we naturalize some of the more local vegetables to Indian recipes?

Learning Differences

The Globalist is running a two part article (may require registration) on the schooling and learning differences in America Vs. China. It naturally made me answer the question, "So where does India stand?". Well, its in between but more towards China....and here is why based on some of the differences discussed in the article:

• Nationalized and Standardized tests: China uses them a lot. They think thats the only to ensure fairness and usually the exit from the dismal social fate in the country side. But standardized tests encourage the opinion that there is only one answer. India uses them a lot too. But the famous ones like IIT JEE do not grade the candidates based just on the final answers. They often credit the candidates with full marks when it is thought that the candidate had his/her thinking going right, but screwed up the calculation.
• Capacity for memorization: Chinese have a capacity that can be described shocking by western standards. Indians have a tremendous capacity as well. Much of the ancient Indian education system was based on strict oral teaching, where comprehension in the first listening and memory played all the role. British system just carried on the legacy. To this day, most state board students can pull along with a good deal of memorization. But national boards like CBSE and ICSE leave some room for creativity and individual voice.
• Tall nails get hammered: The article says that chinese society is massively conformist. While in India, its perfectly acceptable to voice out political opinions, however extreme they might be, its still conformist when it comes to yielding to older generations (and thats probably changing with new money).
• In-class participation: Not many state boards encourage this. But central boards and many prestiguous universities encourage some level of class room participation.
• and finally diligence: when it comes to diligence, Asians are all alike PERIOD.

I would love to see Indian education systems take a more center stance taking on some of the creative aspects of western systems and retaining indigenous diligence.

Rajkumar and his Fans

What happened to the admiration of the damn fans when Rajkumar was kidnapped? Why didnt they go swamp the jungles and free their iconic leader? Why is pelting and setting the buses on fire the only known form of exit to anger of fans in general? But why anger in the first place, when the actor dies of a heart attack? I fail to understand even the fringes of this insanity.

A solution to this can be a local group pretending to be an extremely devout fan chapter trying to do something constructive. I am pinning my hopes on competition amongst admirers that might bring out some constructivism.

Online Townhall

Online Townhall

Swades Special Disc

You know what would be a good special features disc with Swades' DVD pack?

A compilation of some real life expat contribution stories. Isnt that a absolutely terrific disc to buy? Taking this a little further, I think it would be a good idea to either start a forum that allows exchange of such expat contribution ideas OR link to such places which already do so. Yep! thats building a little eco-system around this inspiring movie. Some good legacy to leave behind, apart from the usual entry on imdb...

Innovative Protestors

Some Immigrant protesters found novel ways to make their point
Source:BBC News

What a Shame!

Top metropolitan areas of the world		Busiest metro systems in the world
Tokyo (Greater Tokyo Area) 35.2 million		Moscow Metro 3.2 billion
Mexico City (Greater Mexico City) 19 million		Tokyo Metro 2.7 billion
New York City, (New York metropotdtan area) 18.4 million		Seoul Subway 1.6 billion
Mumbai (Bombay), India 18.3 million		Mexico City Metro 1.3 billion
São Paulo, Brazil 18.3 million		New York City Subway 1.3 billion
Delhi, India 15.3 million		Paris Metro 1.2 billion
Kolkata (Calcutta), India 14.2 million		London Underground 976 million (2005)
Buenos Aires, Argentina 13.3 million		Osaka Municipal Subway 957 million
Jakarta, Indonesia 13.1 million		Hong Kong MTR 798 million
Shanghai, PRC 12.6 million		Saint Petersburg Metro 784 million

Source:
Wikipedia

What a shame! World's most populous countries India and China (excluding Hong Kong) don not have a metro system that rank among the ten. Imagine the cutback in pollution and fuel usage with better public transportation systems in these parts of the world!

Participatory Planning

A model of Shanghai in 2020 at the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall
Source: Business Week

What a wonderful way to engage public in city planning!

Lorenzo's Oil

This movie inspired by an incredible real life story opened with a Swahili warrior song:

"Life has meaning only in the struggle.
Triumph or defeat is in the hands of the gods.

So let us celebrate the struggle."

The Odones family has a child, Lorenzo, who is struggling from an extremely rare form that rapidly degenerates the brain and ultimately reduces the victim to a mass of flesh before he dies. The disease is poorly funded and thus has an abysmally few number of people working on its therapies. When the parents of the child try to find a doctor who can advise on their son's pathetic state, they find all the doctors to be equally groping in the dark. The Odones take the challenge upon themselves in trying to understand the basic bio-chemistry behind the fat-enzyme metabolism of the heartless-disease. And they succeed in finding a right mix of diet (a combination of a certain variant of Olive Oil and a certain other variant of Canola Oil) that controls the production of a certain saturated fat that leads to the degeneration of brain. The boy's parents have to fight a whole scientific establishment as well, in order to try out their self-discovered, controversial approach to the disease (A good illustration of cons of objectivity.)

The efforts boy's parents put in fighting the disease is breath-taking as well as extremely inspirational.

Set at around 2hr16min, this real life story is surely going to inspire you with its wonderful layman analogies on some miraculous bio-chemistry discoveries made by Lorenzo's parents.

Makes me want to sing the Swahili song again and again....

What about Legal Immigrants?

11 million illegal immigrants stand a chance to become citizens. While the 65.000 number limit on high-skilled, law abiding, tax paying H1-B guest workers remains unchanged. And thousands of students coming to this country for advanced degrees in Math and Science on an F-1 have to prove to the immigration official that he/she will return back to their home country after completion of their study. Is this whole immigration thing going beyond redemption?

The Second IF

I watched "Aithey" again. Unlike the usual stream of Telugu movies (for that matter Hindi as well) which have least concern for audience' intellect, this one respects you as an audience. It knows that humans multiprocess -- that they think while they watch. I was happy to see people who think thru things before they act, who "Stand-in for the values they believe in", and yet are extremely practical.

"Whats so special about that? Isnt it how people are supposed to act?" ?

Yeah, true. But thats not how Indian movies generally are. So there is every reason for me to feel happy that as an audience my intellect and integrity have been respected.

Buy everything...

If you are to buy everything advertized in an half-an-hour prime time slot on a channel like TBS, chances are that you'll end up with the following things:

• Three Cars ( 1 SUV, 1 Sedan and a sports car)
• Two deodarants
• Two Car insurance policies (One of them ought to be Geico)
• A bottle of Exotic beer and two light ones
  
• One Bottle of Vodka
• Eyelift / anti-ageing cream
• Make-up stuff + something that advertizes thicker lips / thicker lashes / larger hair volume
  
• Couple of ultra-fast internet connections
• Victoria Secret Lingerie + sometimes Male innerwear
• Tampon or its ilk
  
• A fast serving bank which advertizes convenience
• And some Microwavable food that compares itself to a nearest Bistro

A lot of them dont sound too good for the planet. Do they?

CNN gets cleaner interface

uh! CNN takes off the rolling ticker in the bottom and goes cleaner with the rest of stuff as well. I wonder if the already-clean-BBC would do something in response.

On Prophet's Cartoons

We can talk about a lot of things here: free speech, ends of free speech, fundamentalism, blasphemy, anti-semitism....

But I can think of only the following Sanskrit poem:

OM SAHANA VAVATU SAHANA BHUNAKTU
SAHA VIRYAM KARAWAVAHAI
TEJASVINAVADITAMASTU
MA VIDVISHAVAHAI

OM SHANTI SHANTI SHANTI OM


(Together may we be protected
Together may we be nourished
Together may we work with great energy
May our journey together be brilliant and effective
May there be no bad feelings between us
Peace, Peace, Peace)

Some mexican jobs.

Technology replaces some 'traditional' mexican jobs.

IE7 any better?

In comparison to firefox:

• Navigation toolbar is slicker. Stop, Refresh, and new tab have been made more contextual. (Clearly, a user experience team at work).
• New tab and Quick tabs work well. Not that firefox doesnt have these, but one needs to install a couple of extensions like foXpose to get this behavior.
• Search Providers? No simple way to add Wikipedia as a search provider.
  
• Thats the end of it. Bookmarks manager and Browser Settings just got carried over from 'pre-web' versions of earlier IEs. Isnt browser settings supposed to be a relatively geeky thing to go and fiddle with? Howcome IE7 hasn't got this part simplified?
• Find continues to suck. Does it take IE9 or something to fix such a simple thing?
  
• and on Firefox extensions...oh! there is just no point in getting started on that. Let's just say IE7 is lagging by a decade on that front.
  

Simplicity: Health Plans

Healthcare Industry desparately needs a 'Citi-Simplicity' version of a healthplan that doesnt ask elderly people to go thru the fine print to weigh in the pros and cons of different available plans in a decision matrix! Too many choices suck and thats an enormous business oppurtunity lurking in the fine print.

Its time for a daring company to come up with a plan that is bold and simple enough in terms of the strings attached. With increasing number of baby boomers, I think its also time to consider a DRAMATIC strip down of fine print and content on the websites. Keep It Simple and Superb.

Rang of Basanthi

Yeah, thats my poor French joke on Rang De Basanti. This is what went thru my mind as I was watching the movie:

• First you think, "okay this is an 'enemy' perspective at Bhagat Singh movie" (the general's dairies and all that)...
• then you think its about "an English girl making a movie with Indian cast",
• then you think "Oh! man its a 5 person version of Dil Chahta Hai",
• then you think "May be they do want to shoot a Bhagat Singh movie"
• then you think "Why Bhagat Singh for the nth time on Hindi Screen man?"
• then you think "Okay, this guy wants to deal with some issues of India too",
• then you think "Oh! NO Why does this guy want to talk about every issue India has?"
• then you think "The Bhagat Singh analogy is over stretching man"
• then you think "Thank God! Its atleast funny occasionally"
• then you think "They are going to get this Madhavan dude killed, man"
• then you think "Enough of Sepia man! Enough of the analogy crap! Dont start making a complete mess out of it"
• then you think "Oh! Well Congrats Mr. Mehra, you have officially stepped into the crap zone"
• then you think "Mr.Mehra has well passed the finish line in crap zone..entering bullshit zone"
• then you think "Now stop bullshitting me"
• then you think "There is something called Electricity to pull the AIR signal out of air"
• then you think "NDTV is doing a lot of product placement"
• then you think "You go on a plane and make a joke that you have a gun. You'll know how sane the commandos are"
• then you think "Enough of it man. This Amir dude gets shot and drags himself across India to reach the studio again"
• then you think "Ah! well, this Mehra wants somebody to wakeup. But why does he make a pretense of making a revenge story a national issue?"
• then you think "Ah! Now he makes a pretense of the movie being about MIGs"
• All in all, Dont try to summarize this movie too many times. You end up in the experience of watching a montage of short films with different themes but the same cast.

Can you play the magic flute?

How much of Mozart do you know? Take this little Quiz from BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4646778.stm

When am I going to do something about it?

When?

Those Tiny Great Moments

Why is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart a genius? NPR is running a week full of awesome collection of audio programs on greatness of some of Mozart's greatest compositions starting with Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. As the saying goes, the difference between a genius and an ordinary on one hand is huge, while on the other, its really tiny. What are those tiny moments of divinty that make Mozart a genius? Try these for an answer: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5164428

Hyderabad's new airport: Disaster in-making?

Hyderabad, one of the tech hubs in India, is getting a new airport. Here's a little video:


New projects are always great oppurtunities to try out new things and not to repeat known errors. This one seems to be missing on both. The airport doesnt seem to be trying out new mechanisms in energy conversation (It uses glass and metal ceilings in a region where average temp is 40C). There is no mention of access to public transportation. A country of 1 billion needs enormous focus on efficient and affordable public transportation to prevent an ecological disaster. How sad that the video talks at great lengths just on retail, food and beverage, retail, food and beverage (did i mention retail, food and beverage?) and nothing else.

In or Out?

I heard Y!'s Europe Managing Director on BBC say "Google's philosophy is to get the user out of the network, while we want to get the user inside the network". So which one's better? "Let them get to the place they think is the best" OR "oh! No. Let them stay inside." ?? "Lets help them go to the place that does the best job" OR "Lets build the best in everything" ??

EasyShare?

WTF do they mean when they say EasyShare? I cannot get in unless I have a userID and a passwd. I think companies should be made to be pay, say fine-per-use, when they say its Easy and dont really mean it.

A couple of Iranian Movies

Majid Majidi.

This Iranian director is extremely deft at the tugging the right chords of your heart. I happened to see two of his movies: Children of Heaven and The Color of Paradise.

Children of Heaven is about a young brother and sister living in a distant Tehran sub-urb. The boy accidentally looses his sister's shoes when he takes them to get it repaired. They decide to hide this fact from their father as he's financially broke at that time. They manage with the boy's single pair of shoes as both have different timings at school. The boy sees a flyer for a district-level under 10 running race. All his hopes are now pinned on the third prize: a pair of sneakers. I cannot believe that so much could be done around a pair of worn-out shoes! Heart-warming, unexpectingly funny, moving. In summary, Fantastic!


The Color of Paradise? A 9-year old blind boy wants to know the color of paradise thru his finger tips. A selfish father wants to get rid of this unfortunate child to better his prospects at a second marriage. But the boy has a loving granny who cares a lot. Once when the granny is away, the father sends away this boy to a professinal blind carpenter. And all that is left to see for the boy, thru his fingers is: different types of wood! At the end, the granny and the boy both see the color. They find that it is bright. An Intensely Emotional movie experience.

Both movies showcase rural and sub-urbian life of Iran which is very different from the usual axis of evil picture painted by Uncle Sam Propaganda machine.

Sense of Community is the key

One of my friends was participating in the CHI 2006 student contest on making ppl healthy. I kept pointing that sense of community is the key in helping ppl watch their diet & weight and technology should help them get that done instead of being overly intrusive. I was suggesting a version of Y! games where ppl wud be able to compete during their workouts. Here is an article on USA Today reporting new treadmills, stairmasters and gym equipment connecting to internet allowing people to compete with others. I am keen on seeing this succeed.

Mahima

A new album I discovered this week: Mahima by Debashish Bhattacharya and Bob Brozman. Fast paced music with Indian folk themes. You should like it. My personal favorites included: Tagore Street Blues and Jibaner Gan.

Who should get it?

Hey, lets say we have used up 90% of world fuel and 80% of rest of world's resources. Then there is a huge competition for the rest of the resources. Who should get these resources? Should it be the guy who can afford it thru money? or the one who cannot afford it? Sounds silly? Well, my argument is that the rich guy is rich, most probably because he has used up a significant chuck of those used-up resources, while the poor guy is yet to use any of them. The fundamental Q I think I am trying to ask is...Are the balance sheets really balanced?

China and resouces

Lester Brown is talking about the rise of China and and its impact on planet's sustainabilityt on NPR's Science Friday. Lester makes it sound so western-centric that as he says things like "China is threatening to consume all of world resources" (yeah right, west hardly consumes resources.), "This western model of economy is not going to work for China" (yeah but, what about the model working for the west and the rest of the world?).

Stone the Satan Inside

Its really disappointing to see people at Hajj rushin to stone the Satan, resulting in a catastrophic stampede killing 345. Isnt the biggest Satan inside? BTW, NPR has a great and politically-right interpretation of the tragedy.

Telling the truth

Victor Lomardi asks, "Central planning. Unnecessarily large teams. Official ideology. Poor moral. Are you working in a totalitarian company?"

I am tempted to answer, but I wont.

on JUST Western Europe and United States!

The guy reading news on the WBUR had the following comment on birdflu: "As bird flu breaks in Eastern Europe, there is a threat to Western Europe and United States." (or something to that effect). I can understand that the audience of that news bulletin is primarily United States. But that does not make me appreciate the incredible narrowness of interpretation of the news and the humongous self-centeredness of the western media.

An OST from Vanity Fair

I dont know how popular this one is...but here is one quintessential Rajasthani tune sung by Richa Sharma and Shankar Mahadevan. The words "Gori Re", sing in praise of a fair woman (gori) who has managed to get over all her obstacles and won every heart on her journey. The song appears in the movie ends as the character played by Reese Witherspoon climbs yet another step in the ladder. The two voices Richa and Shankar give the song a great depth.

Tolerance or Intolerance?

Here is a little dance drama in a south Indian classical dance style, narrating the story of Jesus from His birth to crucifixion. For a moment I was thrilled, but it was a little disheartening to see the dancer not wearing a bindi. I can understand that Indian Christians don't wear one, but bindi is the center of the whole universe of facial Aaharya (costume and make-up of the artist). I don't know if this enactment of Jesus' story should be called an act of tolerance OR if not wearing a bindi should be called intolerance.

Not so OCW-ish

Columbia has this supposedly great interactive medium called "Scientific Habits of Mind", but you got to be on Columbia's network to access it. How Sad! How not so OCW-ish!

Second Green Revolution?

The Ruling Congress Party and the Prime Minister Dr.Singh keep talking about a second green revolution to empower farmers and villages etc. Dont simple market rules of demand and supply
apply to food production? I mean isnt the world already producing an excess of food. Weren't the problems with distribution? If that is true, shouldn't developing nations help their farmers learn new skills and not be farmers anymore?

Lady Indian Busdriver

BBC reports this story about a lady bus driver in Rajasthan, India. Believe me, this one is a little different from the usual blonde driver joke.

Happy New Year, Taipei 101

Happy New Year, Taipei 101
Originally uploaded by Coolmitch.

my lifelong fascination

Toy Train
Originally uploaded by HELLO, my name is _____..

i love these trains...they always give me a good sense of the country they are in.

Gaming will start eating into films

May be they have already begun eating into movie markets' revenue by making people more addicted to game consoles and thus keeping them away from movies houses. On the other hand, some movie houses started churning out extra revenues by giving out movie-based games. The BBC reports that the games are now starting to unfold based on players reactions. So movie houses might as well make movies of length of just one hour, building the charaters enough and let players unfold the rest! Too many alternative endings??!!

Known Highlights of 2006

For all the green-activists out there, Olduvai theory predicts that World Oil production is to peak in 2006. So folks, start thinking green!

Some known highlights of 2006:

in Politics:

* Anticipated retirement of Alan Greenspan
* Change of Guard expected in Brazil, Italy, Israel, Palestine, Canada, Fiji, Peru, Ukraine, Uganda

in Film:

* in March: Basic Instinct 2, Ice Age 2
* in May: The Da Vinci Code, MI 3
* in June: Pixar's Cars, Superman Returns
* in July: Pirates of Caribbean: Dead men's Chest

in other Media:

* BBC World Service to end radio broadcasting in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian and Thai.
* TV shows Ending this year: Will and Grace, The 70's show
* Will be able to register .eu domain name for European Union.

in Music:

* in May: AR Rahman's stage musical: The Lord of the Rings
* 2006, The Mozart Year, 250th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

in Sports:

* XX Winter Olympic Games: Feb 2006 in Italy
* Commonwealth Games: Mar 2006 in Melbourne, Australia
* Soccer World Cup: June - July 2006 in Germany (UTC + 2 with Day Light Saving)
* 15th Asian Games: Doha, Qatar in Dec 2006 (UTC+3)

World News Quiz 2005

Part 1

(D0nt ask for my score though)

Green Costs of Christmas in UK

• 200,000 trees are felled to supply 1.7bn Christmas cards sent in the UK
• 40,000 trees are used to make 8,000 tonnes of wrapping paper used for presents
• Nearly 6m Christmas trees end up in landfill sites every January
• The UK throws out 3m tonnes of extra waste over Christmas

(Source: BBC)

whew! What abt the giant guzzler, the United States? 2m trees for cards, 60m christmas trees and 30m tonnes of extra waste? Probably much higher!

Not so pretty Google Doodle

First Google doodle that does not end very pretty looking, though the idea is still good: http://www.google.com/doodle10.html

Praying

Praying. Meenakshi temple
Originally uploaded by Claude Renault.

"Iha Samsaare Bahu Dustaare
Kripayaa Paare Paahi Murare"

(This eternal cycle of rebirth is hard to cross over. Save me from it, Oh merciful Lord !)

My Carbonated Xmas Tree

My Own Little Xmas Tree
Originally uploaded by kaysov.

Women Admissions

Here are a couple of graphs showing the percentage of girls admitted in 1996 and 2004 to BITS Pilani (peak years between '96 and '04 have also been marked):

Discipline	In 1996	In 2004	Peak	in Year
BE Chemical	29.17	42.37	51.61	2000
BE Civil	28.13	34.62	42.86	2003
BE EE	21.43	28.13	34.55	1999
BE Mech	6.15	26.58	28.4	2003
B.Pharm	23.33	46.15	51.35	2003
M.M.S.	50	67.5	67.5	2004
BE CompSci	30.19	41.94	49.47	2001
BE Instru	31.25	47.46	49.18	2002
MSc Bio	33.33	69.05	75	2003
MSc Chem	17.24	42.5	47.5	2003
MSc Economics	9.68	37.5	42.5	2003
MSc Math	25.71	37.78	51.11	2003
MSc Physics	13.51	35.56	35.56	2004
MSc Tech ET	0	44.44	62.5	2001
Msc Tech IS	26.67	58	64.29	1998

Data from this Source

Left is Right?

Left
Originally uploaded by aqui-ali.

Overweights > Underweights

I am not stating the obvious. BBC reports that for the first time in human history, number of overweights rival the number of underweights. Thats so saddenning.

Bygone Days?

[r]
Originally uploaded by Babsi Jones.

NYC - Central Park Rink

NYC - Central Park Rink
Originally uploaded by RUKnight.

Where's the Kong?

Change to speed gear

Those laces are innovation. A simple and a great idea. Can be laced to any shoe. Available in different colors for the right styling for your shoe.

San Francisco

San Francisco
Originally uploaded by !Habit Forming.

Still iconic with out the Golden Gate.

Dear Santa...from Harley

Dear Santa...from Harley
Originally uploaded by Cynr.

Santa, Grant these wishes dear...

Netflix+

How about a wishlist for Netflix+? Netflix reviews your wishlist and then buys them once it decides the items in the list are non-porn (whatever its policies are) etc....

Googlers and del.icio.us

Given the fact that Google doesnt have a formidable equivalent tool for delicious (atleast publicly), I am inclined to believe that many Googlers must have been using delicious for tagging. Now that Yahoo! has bought the company, isnt it easy for yahoo! to keep a tab on the worlds and trajectories of these googlers? Isnt this a bigger issue for Web 2.0 in general, where players have the potential ability to lock up peoples data? Its easier to Do Evil once things fall into corporate hands (as corporations have lower moral and ethical standards. Yeah, thats one thing where sum is always less than the constiuents).

Anyways, Google is falling behind in this MyWeb area and thats one thing that sometimes makes me think of using the yahoo! toolbar.

Ajax and the Back button

Its snowing here and my shoes are proving to be slippery. So I decide to buy a pair of shoes from columbia.com. Their whole catalogue is thru a javascript menu that nests upto four levels ( What We Make >> Men's Items >> Outdoor Casual Footwear >> Outdoor and trail). I carefully choose 'Outdoor and trail', I am taken to a new page with those shoes. Now, I think "May be I'll find something in 'Trek and Travel'....Guess what? I'm stuck. Theoretically, I've made my way thru three levels of the catalogue tree. But when I hit back, I am taken back to the homepage. (why? because technically, i moved by just one page). From the 'Outdoor and trail' page, is there an alternate way i can browse thru the catalogue? NO. I've to take the "What We Make" menu on the top and start all over again.

So, moral of the story? Isnt Back button more to do with how you design the overall interaction? Isnt it about providing a means to get back, when you expect somebody is gonna need it?

Crediblity and Ads

Some times, its so hard to understand why do credible organizations like Discovery, CNN (Credible?, I know), The Hindu, even NY Times...allow a mess of ad-banners and popup windows! BBC, ofcourse, is the cleanest in terms of advertisements. Isnt 'keeping the site clean of advertisements and pop-ups' a factor of quality and credibility?

Bank of America and Laundry

I was thinking about Bank of America's new 'Keep the Change' scheme. Isnt that change precious for laundry? Isnt the amassing quarters for laundry usually thru Starbucks and its ilk?

Heavy Snow at Fishers

Heavy Snow at Fishers
Originally uploaded by kaysov.

Good to see snow all over...

"Homecoming is Ever Present"

I found some great world music on NPR today. Rachid Taha is a leading Rai musician. He's a second generation Algerian immigrant to France and is now one of the most sought after artisits in France. He's nominated by the BBC for the World Music Awards too. I liked Ya Rayah and Mamachi tracks in particular. Ya Rayah is a widely popular Algerian song that vaguely means "the feeling of homecoming is always present among first generation immigrants." Wonder how this song is perceived after the recent French riots. There is a more recent track called 'Tekitoi', that sounds like a Bollywood remix. You should give a try. (All tracks available on iTunes Music Store)

I got one other track called "My Comfort Remains" by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook. I think I am falling in love with Sufi music.

All white with snow

All white with snow
Originally uploaded by kaysov.

Its very bright with the reflecting light.

National Cheese Emporium

Sometime back, when I was trying out yahoo video search, I found this classic little piece of animation called "National Cheese Emporium". I thought it was short, yet brilliant. Only today, I learn that it was a Monty Python sketch ! I should have recognized Sir John Cleese's voice in the animation.

12 F does this

12 F does this
Originally uploaded by kaysov.

Its was 12F today here in Fishers

NYTimes Photo essay on India's Golden Quadrilateral

This photo essay points out some glaring differences between North and South in terms of speed and quality of the road work, which I find a little alarming and disturbing. As North falls behind South in virtually all progressive aspects of society, the South is vulnerable to phenomenon like huge exodus to its urban areas. (Just like Eastern China Vs. Inland China). South in no way is equipped with enough infrastructure to cope up with it.

Luckily, "Yeh Madrasi tho bekaar ke cheez hai" attitude of average-North Indian may act in favor of South.

When I think about it again, I realize that I am talking about things which are already occuring. Well educated large North Indian populations exist in Bangalore and Hyderabad. I think I am fearing something like "Thousands of Jobless desparate Biharis littering Delhi".

Thats like being in Gaza strip or something!

The poor little stickman didn't stand a chance..
Originally uploaded by itspaulkelly.

The chances of survival seem to be 1 in a million!

Design and Pickle Bottles

Thinking about design in the Indian context, I find pickle bottles extremely clumsy to use. As a south Indian, I eat food with my right fingers. I think of pickle in the midst of eating. So, I have to go unscrew the lid of the bottle with the left hand, find a clean and dry spoon, take care of the dripping oil on those trips between the plate and the bottle, and then finally close the lid and then take care of the dripping greasy spoon. The pickle being real greasy does not fall freely from the spoon. So I have to keep yanking the spoon till the pickle gets off. The whole thing just sucks. It could get worse: you had disposed the greasy spoon and you decide to go for a second round of serving!

I was thinking of something like an icecream scoop and a good bowl for the whole setup.

A documentary on Maya Lin

The first two minutes of the documentary pass by And it invariably strikes to me..."Oh! My God, What an emotional roller coaster is the chronological order taking the visitors thru !! Thats the heart of the design. Nothing else matters as much." Ofcourse, Maya Lin later explains the significance of the chronological order. She goes on building on this very notion of capturing time in all her works. First in the Civil Rights, then the Womens Memorial at Yale And the Eclisped Time at Penn Station.

57000 Names stretched on a timeline (wall) of a decade long! The numbers and the stretch of time add up creating an immensely overwhelming emotion moving the visitors to the core. A simply Brilliant Simple Idea !

Walk in the Rain

Sometime back in 2000, PC Quest has given 1 min excerpts of hugely successful tracks from the label : Music Today . I had the mp3s, but no ID3 tag info. So, I started naming them to my imagination. I called one of them "Mayur Ka Naach" (the dance of a peacock). Yesterday, I found that iTunes 5.0 is selling that track. Its called "Walking in the Rain", a Pandit Shivkumar Sharma composition for the album "The Elements: Water".

I thought, "Well, I was pretty close!"

Consistency and pulldown menus go away in a new Office version

Couple of genuinely interesting things happening this time.

Microsoft is moving away from pull down menus and toolbars in their next release of Office called Office 12. So no more "I have seen it. But cant find where it is" stuff.

The pull down menu technique was introduced into the office when there were about 150 features. But over the years and several releases as the commands and features grew to 1500, they had to use additional techniques like preferences/checkboxes to present all that stuff. The consequences? Some of them are deeply hidden...and it takes a lot of time to get to them. They realized that the technique no longer works.

In a strange way, the root of the problem has been "consistency". Yeah, consistency with the legacy of the predecessors in the product line. With office 12, they have finally decided to break off from the lineage w.r.t consistency. They began to think what they would do if they had began all over again. (Yeah, I too think Consistency is overrated and Change is good.)

They have reorganized all of the menus into 'galleries' now. The galleries look very task oriented and they actually guide you thru the lifecycle of creation/maintenance of the artifact. Everything is shown upfront in the galleries. No pulldown menus. No hidden features. Did this come at a price of loss of functionality? No. I am guessing they have built lot of contextual intelligence into it.

No annoying clip. There is thing little thing called floaty that comes up when you right-click and gets you most frequently used commands on the selected text. (Behaves little more intelligently than the current right click).

They have also departed from the alt key board shortcuts into something called Overlays. When you press the Fn key or something, you are shown the keyboard shortcuts on the items themselves. (With galleries you have nothing hidden.)

"You tell it what to do and its going to do that." , thats the motto. I think finally, its going to be a fair deal.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/sep05/09-13OfficeUI.mspx for some screenshots

There is a great video on the whole thing: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114720

Why are those Classics?

Why are movies like Gundamma Katha (The Story of Gundamma) and Maya Bazar classics? Both of these movies were adaptations of hugely successive stage plays. When something is a successive stage play, the contents turn out to be nothing less or nothing more, but just what is necessary. Going in multiple iterations helps anywhere, not just in building software. Or may be film making is not very different from building software, both work towards a common goal: appeasing the audience and making money.

98 BITSians on Map

I did this plot of BITSians-'98 on Google maps this Friday night. Tell me if you think something makes it better.

Ones with Very Long Wait

Two movies indicate a "Very Long Wait" on my Netflix Queue*. K. Vishwanath's Sirivennela and the "Pirates of the Silicon Valley", a dramatized war between Microsoft and Apple. The former has a niche American-Telugu audience (and presumably, Netflix has just one copy of the movie), while the latter probably has atleast a quarter million slashdot geeks waiting for it!

*There are about 110 movies in the Queue, as of Sep 08. Kungfu Hustle had a 'long wait' until its release recently.

Tagsonomy for iTunes

I have a decent collection of M.S. Subbulakshmi. The collection is dominated by two genres: Carnatic and Devotional. The other genres include: soundtracks, bhajans, light classical, Hymns (like Vishnu Sahasranama, Venkateswara Suprabhatham). Bhajans and Hymns fall are partly Devotional genre too. Some of the tracks are more listenable during early morning hours, some contemplative, some very festive (Hindu festive, ofcourse) in nature...

You see where I am getting at? Tags for songs, apart from the genre.

Genre is too rigid a classification and playlists are too cumbersome to achieve all of these listening patterns! I am hoping iTunes 6.0 will have it.

Some lessons from IM Pei's works

I was watching a documentary on the works of IM Pei, yesterday. I thought I would put down some of the things I took from it.

• Form follows function, except when things are pushed to the extreme. In his case, the HK's Bank of China tower's form followed structure (and not function). The structure enabled him distribute the loads to the four corners, tall ones needed to be counter the effects of things like strong winds.
• Design for people's needs. So there is no instant gratification from design work. It needs people to actually go around the buildings and live in them to get to know if the design really works.
• It takes things like hardcore persuasion and persistence to make things like the pyramid at Louvre happen.

$2,275 to change the destiny of Indian Roads

As $2,275 or the 1 lac car from Tata Motors is getting ready, my worst apprehensions about Indian road traffic and the emission levels are all set to be true. In a country where car has been a status symbol, 1 lac is no big deal to move into that status. More cars -> more traffic -> more gas -> more parking -> more pollution...more God knows of what!! Gas will probably shootup from Rs.45 a litre to Rs.60+ a litre. Most of the shopping districts, entertainment centers, business districts do not accomodate parking lots, forcing the car owners to park them on the roads creating huge road blocks for the moving traffic. Its too huge a problem to be postponed even by a single day OR to be thought about in a single dimension. Wish I had a part to play in solving these huge problems.

PS: $2,275 has the potential to spread the same problems to most of the developing countries making them more unmanageable!

A bad idea: Spell Check for IM

While I was exploring Google's new IM, it re-struck to me why spell check is such a bad idea for IM. Most popular case against a spell checker can be that its a very informal mode of communication and hence you dont have to be pedantically right.

I think that a bigger point against spell check is that: Given a context, we are extremely good at auto-correcting. IM, being a conversatory mode of communication, defines and keeps re-defining context clearly. Also, we humans are good at re-iterating mutual feelings thru conversations, thanks to paraphernilia like :) , lol , ha ha, :( , :D , :P ....

Ironically, there are hundereds of spell check plug-ins readily available for every IM client.

PS: Here's a poem that passes thru a spell check. It makes good sense to humans too. But its a total nonsense to an English teacher.

Eye halve a spelling chequer,
It came with my pea sea,
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rarely ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I'm shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect in it's weigh,
My chequer tolled me sew.

Arnold in India

When Terminator 3 got dubbed into Telugu, Arnold Schwarzenegger was translated as Anna Swarnasekhar. Yeah, "Anna Swarnasekhar natinchina Terminator 3". (Arnold stars in Terminator 3). Wondering what he might be called in Tamil Nadu? Anna Saravananan? (An extra -an to make it a little more tongue twisting.)

Different and Unlikely

Indian movies use two words a lot, when they write down the synopsis of a movie.

One: Different. "This movie is so different from the rest of the stuff." Remember (A')' = A ? Yeah, thats the case with Indian movies.

Two: Unlikely. "The girl realizes that love happens with the most unlikely guy in the most unlikely circumstances ." I have started questioning the very meaning of unlikely after all those unlikely usages of the word.

Why is Amitabh such a mainstream actor even now?

I think thats mainly because its only he who provides writers to write a story/script that does not entirely revolve around cliched love stories and still managesto make money at the box office. What do you say?

Water Tragedy

It takes about $1.7 billion a year to provide fresh driniking water to everybody on the globe. And about $9.3 billion for sanitation. The irony is that there is an annual spending of $46 billion on bottled water!!

The Rising

A bunch of kings revolting against Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse and then another bunch of soldiers revolting for a thing as silly as animal fat. Now, how interesting can that be for a movie?

Answers?

"Computers are useless. They only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso

Yeah, the greatness lies in asking the right questions.

India going more Nuclear

Dubya and Singh have talked about giving more nuclear technology to meet increasing demands of power in India. It sounds good in the first hearing. But how good is it? Well, India is definitely gonna dig out far fewer amounts of coal and thus emit much lesser greenhouse gases. But then you have the problems of disposing the nuclear waste. On a bigger picture, I think the more you have, the more you tend to consume it. People hop in to buy more gadgets and 'utilities' with the availability of power. But more buying means more depletion and more pollution.

Vijay Vaitheeswaran of The Economist says that Centralized Power Generation is a bad idea and it should be decentralized by giving it away to markets. You'll be much more frugal when you have to generate your power in the backyard using sun, wind or whatever.

London 2012 and boom come the attacks!

What if someother city had won the 2012 Olympics? Did the terrorists plan to blow stuff in the winner city OR was London the only target?

The best words came from Tony Blair. He said...Our resolve to live the way we live is stronger than their resolve to shake it...or something on those lines.

One of the best reports on the whole attacks are from Wikipedia, apart from the BBC. Smartmobs, afterall!

10 years of growth and still a toddler.

Amazon.com is celebrating 10 years of its existence. Here is their first homepage. Today's homepage is hell a lot better! Amazon.com has been consistently improving its user experience and converting them into customers quite successfully. They have been constantly realigning their technology to suit their business goals of allowing more sellers and buyers. Netflix is another great example I can think of that create a good experience.

The web has matured by leaps and bounds on the user experience front. Yet it is still a toddler. A lot more can be done to help businesses and design. We'll see much better experiences and designs in the coming years.

Why is life worth living?

As Woody Allen puts it, in the movie Manhattan:

Why is life worth living? It’s a very good question. Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Like what? For me, I would say, what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing … and Willie Mays … the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony … Louis Armstrong’s recording of Potato Head Blues … Swedish movies, naturally … Sentimental Education by Flaubert … Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra … those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne … the crabs at Sam Wo’s … uh … Tracy’s face …