How does the fact that you listen to bands who are more introspective or have songs that are kind of depressing reflect on you? Does listening to Pink Floyd and loving "Time" mean that you wasted a lifetime and relate to it, or only that you really love the writing?

It's a question that was driven home a couple of years back, when a friend (who wasn't into much western music at all) asked me if all rock songs were depressing (This was after she'd heard "Comfortably Numb")

There was a small problem with the question - I find a lot of Pink Floyd absolutely uplifting. Maybe it is just due to memories of hostel afternoons playing "Coming Back to Life" or Another Brick in the Wall" full blast. Another problem: I see songwriting for quality, and don't particularly care if it is 'happy' or 'sad' or anywhere in between. Good music helps, of course.

Of course, if there's something in the songwriting you relate to, that hits home much harder. Yes, I thought "Time" was written with me (and a few million other people maybe) in mind when Waters sang -

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

However, irrespective of whether I relate with it or not, it is a great piece of writing.

Among contemporary artists, one songwriter whose stuff I really like is Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty. His sizzling solo number with Carlos Santana "Smooth" probably gave him way more visibility than you'd expect (and a couple of Grammys), but the group albums "Yourself or Someone Like You" and "Mad Season" are absolute rockers. ( haven't heard their third effort - "More Than You Think You Are") There is enough musical variety to hook you, and some amazing songwriting to keep you listening. One of my favorite songs, "Rest Stop" appears on Mad Season - it describes a breakup where the girlfriend throws the singer out of her car on the highway - "three miles from the rest stop".

She said - while you were sleeping
I was listening to the radio
And wondering what you're dreaming when
It came to mind that I didn't care
So I thought - hell if it's over
I had better end it quick
Or I could lose my nerve

And no, none of my girlfriends(!) ever threw me out on the road that way.

And: if you listen to Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson, it still reflects badly on you.

Monuments to Patriotism

While doing the usual tourist rounds, there are times when you are blase, and times when you are moved overwhelmingly. Depends on where you are and whom you are with. Being with a bunch of gregarious jocks making PJs every other minute means you are probably having too much fun to really pay attention. I am also wary of tourist guidebook hype, as buying into it even partially means that you may be underwhelmed. However, there are places that move you irrespective of that. Some of these moments are achingly simple - on a trip to Ground Zero (the WTC site in NYC) in the winter of 2003, I saw bouquets stuck into the chain link fencing surrounding the site. 2 1/2 years after the incident, it was a touching gesture of remembrance from some people for their loved ones.

There are other monuments that affect you with the sheer power of imagery. One of them is: The sculpture commemorating Gandhiji's Dandi March. This sculpture, located in Delhi feels alive, and is evocative of the fact that the Mahatma was able to make millions of Indians follow his path of non-violence to freedom. It is one of those things that invokes a sense of patriotism in my mind. (other things include hearing a military band playing the Indian national anthem, and watching A R Rahman's Vande Mataram video)

Photograph here


Another great monument in the US is the Vietnam War memorial. All it is , is a simple black marble wall with the names of every soldier who died in the War. The difference between this, and say, India Gate which too has the names of soldiers inscribed on it is the fact that this is accessible. You see people looking for former war buddies, parents and siblings. Tears are not uncommon, and there is a respectful silence if someone like that comes by.

However, my favorite of the War memorials in Washington DC is the Marine Corps Memorial across the Potomac in Arlington,VA. The memorial is based on the Pulitzer award winning photograph of the raising of the US flag in Iwo Jima in Japan. The sculpture itself is amazing and it is one of those that makes your heart swell with pride at the achievement of the soldiers. It is part of an important epoch in this century's history, and the sculpture sure does it justice.

There's a photograph here

Edit: Inline image links going bad on me. Added direct links to the images.

A place for my head

The first thing that impressed me about the US when I came here first was the highways. The roads were wide, well-maintained and very systematic. Exits were clearly marked and numbered with warnings coming from a couple of miles before so that you could move lanes safely. Not surprisingly, this country has built itself around the availability of easy access via road. (This leads to its own set of challenges and problems, but that's for a different time).

Over time, another thing that has blown me away to a much greater extent is the public library system. The availability of books even in relatively modest-sized town libraries is impressive. Even relatively new books are pretty easily available, and the systems in place are extremely convenient - online catalogs, hold notifications via email, extended borrowing privileges across libraries (i.e. inter-library loans within the same area), extended hours (the Redmond one runs all seven days - weekdays from 10-9 and shorter hours on weekends) all make reading books much cheaper as one doesn't have to buy every book one needs to read. As an added plus, many libraries have a good selection of audio books, music and movies as well.

Libraries also provide more facilities - reading rooms and magazines (of course) and importantly, well-qualified librarians can help with research - something school children will find useful - especially with the wealth of encyclopaedias available both in paper and online format. Most libraries provide internet access as well as meeting rooms for activities.

While denizens of Pune or Mumbai might think what the big deal is about, these are facilities smaller towns in India would kill for. There are local libraries, of course, but my experience in the local library at Baramati (even with dusty library cards and not online lookups) were nowhere as good as the ones here - especially in terms of the availability of really new books.

Enough rhapsodizing though. William Gibson beckons - Neuromancer is just getting interesting.

Mavericks all

An interesting look behind the scenes at the one tech company that's a noun, verb and indispensible for almost all Internet users today. The article talks about the much storied start of Google, and gives more details on how VC legends Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins almost didn't make it to the A-list of VCs investing in Google. Reason? Each wanted Google all to itself. They were made to 'share' by a pair of upstart graduate students at Stanford. Equally interesting is the set of conditions Page and Brin had for the CEO - that is, when they decided they had to have one from outside. It's no coincidence that Eric Schmidt is a PhD and earned his chops in serious technology (Sun and Novell).

All in all, Google has led its young life on its own terms so far. This about sums it up:

" The character they instilled in Google could be summed up in three phrases: Technology matters. We make our own rules. We’ll grow up when we’re damn good and ready. "

Now begins the second phase - as Google grows post-IPO with the heavies(Yahoo!, Microsoft) bringing their might into search , will it remain the media (and geek crowd) darling, or will, like Microsoft, it's power over the Internet cause it to grow to be feared and disliked? It's happened with Microsoft, and with Wal-Mart (it wasn't like they weren't doing 'evil' things earlier. It was just that they were being overlooked Everyone loves the underdog, don't they?)

And, there is at least one person who has the opinion that Google is the new Microsoft in the making.

Youve Got Mail!

The paper mail had been insipid lately. My subscriptions have moved over, but nothing new in the past few days. Mundane bank statements (I wish they'd just put them online, and not add to the dead trees) and regular utility bills.

Today, a most unusual item in the mailbox. A letter from, of all places, the state of New Jersey. It had the typical packing of a check (tear off two sides and the top portion etc.). I am not even expecting a refund on my state taxes, so what could it be? Turns out, it is a refund! Neato...woo hoo! The government isn't so bad after all. At least until I remember that interest rates on my floating rate student loan went up 25 points. Death, taxes and debt are inevitable.

Hack on

MIT is at it again. "I know, geeks" is what people will say and shrug it off. But this thingie seems really cool, although it is one of the more serious ones MIT's done.

If you want to look at some serious pranks, try MIT hacks. MIT has the reputation for pulling some of the most awesome pranks ever, and the most surprising thing is that they manage to find time for it in spite of their crazy schedules. What, they don't sleep, you say? Ah. Now it makes sense.

Update - two days after I wrote a draft of this post:

Another addition to the MIT repertoire. A few grad students went ahead and wrote code to automatically generate a technical paper. It was even accepted in a conference. I find this absolutely hilarious, considering how cool I thought it would be to get a paper published as a graduate student.

Additions to the Blogroll

Microsoft-followers and developers have their favorite blog to counter Slashdot's rabid zealots. It is Channel9, populated by MS developers and run by the good folks at the company. The nomenclature is interesting - Channel 9 is the audio channel on a flight on which you can hear the pilots communicating. So, Channel 9 on MSDN is presumably where you get the dirt on Microsoft's offerings from the guys at Microsoft itself. Also, I add Robert Scoble, Microsoft evangelist, who also says that the Apple Powerbook is cool.

A couple of other blogs to add to the list, just as shameless self-promotion - the Web Transports group that I work with, and IE . Watch out for IE7, expected out by the end of this year. That will be interesting. The browser wars will be back, I promise.

And to top it off, an Alhad pick, Larry Osterman. Pure geek. Writes about software, and stuff. Fun to read, very insightful on programming stuff.

News for me

In the age of RSS syndications and content personalized to you, it is easy to get greedy. One does. I've started following many websites, esp. blogs just on the feeds, and it's great. No annoying popups, no ads hurting your eyes, and plain text reading. However, one always looks for more. It would be great if one could have feeds on websites for each columnist. The Indian Express has a set of columnists writing about issues that interest me, and these are brilliant writers. The same goes for the NYT as well. It would be great to have feeds so that I could read articles only by these people, bypassing the rest of the information. Just a thought. You end up missing a few articles if you forget to go to the website often enough.

State of Fear, or clever marketing ploy?

Michael Crichton's book "State of Fear" has generated its share of controversy. I know there are people out there who believe global warming is a bunch of hokum, and the book plays into their hands. I haven' t read the book yet, but the armchair critic that I am, it makes for some compelling observations.

Firstly, the vast majority (almost all of them agree on climate change, in fact) of climate theorists cannot be in a vast conspiracy to keep their jobs. Researchers tend to get into it for the love of the hunt (for knowledge) and not for world domination or whatever he claims is going on there. Secondly, there is of course the whole credibility issue. I happened to chance upon an article by someone whom Crichton interviewed while 'research'ing his book, and I didn't like reading his account of it. Crichton seems too ready to selectively quote from literature and interviews to fit his point of view better. Another interesting article referenced here.

A good counterpoint is here, to give a balanced perspective on the issue.

After reading "Prey", I am slightly skeptical of Mr. Crichton. It raised enough of a hoo-ha over nanotech for no reason. Climate change, the Kyoto Protocol and such matters of importance shouldn't be left to bestselling authors to trivialize.

What's cool

What's cool on TV this week:

Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" ( rock song of 2004, IMO) selling Sony's PSP. The PSP looks like a winner to me right now. The new iPod in the making? It has all the marks of one. It has proprietary media formats (the UMD, and a Sony proprietary memory stick). That's a gamble that'll pay big bucks if it works. If it doesn't, bummer.

Graphic novel meets big screen in Sin City. The previews look very interesting, and the star cast (Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Brittany Murphy, Jessica Alba....) is as big as it can reasonably get.

Seattle on TV in new medical drama "Gray's Anatomy". Obligatory Space Needle shot and Seattle skyline shot. Intense medical graduate school drama. I see no dramas on engineers yet while medicine gets ER, Jordan's crossing and now this one.

When engineers work, lives don't hang in the balance. And admit it, math formulas don't have heart-in-mouth moments like a vial of intravenous fluids and grand mal seizures do. Which might be why Numb3rs isn't half as compelling as ER is.

Not cool this week:

India lose. Again.Breaks the heart when the team plays this way. And could people get off Ganguly's back? He's going through a bad patch. Sachin gets so much support when he's doing badly. Ganguly gets booed. Give him a break. He's not on a decline. He's just hit a trough and will bounce back. If he gets a chance, that is.

Last night in the Garden State. Onwards to the Evergreen State, where new challenges beckon, and a new life awaits. Can't say am unhappy leaving here and moving on. But more than that, I am looking forward to going to the North-West. It is the most breath-takingly beautiful area I've seen in the US. Evergreen means that it doesn't lose its beauty in winter, unlike here, where the trees have all gone dry. Some more observations here.

Things I'll miss? The vicinity of the Big Apple for sure. I never went there as often as I should have and a million things about the city have been left unexplored.Little Italy, Chinatown. Greenwich village. Didn't watch a single Broadway musical in my time here, and I haven't yet been to the Statue of Liberty (I did take the tour on the ferry and saw it from up close in the water).

Other things I'll miss - the famed Oak Tree Road locality in Edison/Iselin - a feast for Indian food lovers. Specialty Punjabi, South Indian, Chaat and (believe it or not) Gujarati food in a 2 mile radius. All this 15 minutes from my house.

Things I did do here? The Times Square on New Year's Day (I saw the ball drop from two blocks away). The top of the Empire State Building. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. And stuff.

5 hours. 3 time zones. A new world awaits.

Modi-fied Policy?

Disclosure: I hate the guts of the man.

However, this article makes a good point about the fact that the US is being hypocritical and using a different set of policies by denying him a visa while people with equivalent or worse misdemeanors to their name come and go as they please. In fact, Larry Pressler makes a similar point in the NYT when he states that the US foreign policy has it all wrong- it is courting religious dictators (of the benevolent and malevolent kind) and not giving a religion-neutral('secular 'is so cliched) elected democracy with one-sixth of the world's population the respect it deserves. (I can almost see the twin jellyfish in Shark Tale going "Respect!").

I disagree with the article partially though. It doesn't state up-front that Modi is guilty. (The judicial enquiry is one thing - the rhetoric of the man itself tells us enough). And there is another problem. Just because most guilty people go scot-free and that the US visa issuing system is being selective in its enforcement of rules, doesn't mean anything. If he was in breach of a US rule or law, he better shut his trap and get a life. There are other diaspora to please. The pot can call the kettle black. Especially when the pot is the one issuing the visa, and the kettle is interested in the pot's dollars in FDI.

Apparently, the Indian radio station (1680 AM in Central New Jersey for those who are interested) in the area was fielding calls on the issue. Most calls were in support of Mr. Modi. When one man called up in support of the denial, his call was cut short. "We lost him" was all they had to say. How convenient.

Scratch n' loop

Hip-hop and rap, unlike other genres of popular music, are quite heavily dependent on a producer's skill. While a good (my emphasis on good, not the Spears and Simpsons of the world) pop-rock singer/group can generally get by with instruments without any electronics, (except the instruments themselves), hip-hop with its use of samples and loops of sounds from various sources lends itself to the skill of a completely different beast - one who is comfortable with computers and complex equipment with a bewildering range of knobs and weird lights. I'd go so far as to say that the genre doesn't exist without the producer.

However, that's not entirely true. Hip-hop started out on the streets, and it is the crass commercialization of today that has reduced it to merely being commercially successful with lyrical gems like "It's getting hot in herre, so take off all your clothes".Bleh.

Eminem and Jay-Z are notable exceptions (I really like a lot of Eminem's work, and I haven't heard the Grammy-award winner Kanye West), and there are great singles out occasionally that get your attention, but the rap genre is a great dance-floor (and album sale) mover with nothing much to say. Rock may be dead, but I still take some of today's rock bands over rap.

QOTD

Quote of the Day (or month or year):

" Most of the time you are neither as good nor as bad as people write and say you are"

- Rahul Dravid

Warning...fragile mind

A wonderful article at Cricinfo about one of Australia's most exciting batsmen at the time, Michael Slater.

The mind is notoriously fragile. Slater isn't the first genius to be bedeviled by an illness of the mind, and he certainly won't be the last. Genius seems to breed this, almost as if a great mind cannot bear the burden it places on itself (or the burden of expectations of others). What people (whether geniuses or not) need is genuine care and understanding. It is not easy for the normal person to understand completely the goings-on in an ill mind, but making fun is definitely not the way out.

What surprised me more was the fact that Slater's Australian team-mates had such an unsympathetic attitude towards him. Maybe it was just that they were uncomfortable with Slater's behavior, but you'd expect more from team-mates.

Indian society has traditionally taken a much dimmer view of mental illnesses, and a trip to the shrink, not that uncommon in western society is almost unheard of in India( maybe people do go, but we never hear of it). We need some of those blinders to come off.

Go West!

'tis time. This long hiatus is attributed to my trip out west (north-west, actually) to the famed land of Redmond, WA where the world's largest software company resides. An interesting time - a few observations:

Washington state is beautiful. Forget the rain, and the general cloudy-gloominess that seems to infest the air. The mountains that graze the skyline and the evergreens lend the area a character that is entirely its own.

Microsoft is big. Quite like a Tata Steel would have defined the ecosystem of a place like Tatanagar in Jamshedpur, the company defines an ecosystem for the area it surrounds, albeit on a smaller scale.

The company knows its employees are important and takes care of them. It is easy to see that geeks started the company and run it to the greatest extent. The only suits who are part of it are those who talk to the clients.

It is a company I've always grudgingly respected. The 'respected' part got a big fillip after meeting people there. Smart and committed. Willing to accept that they need to work harder to put out better products.

This is possibly the last I'll be talking about that on this blog. No work chatter here.

City woes

Dilip D'Souza is a fine writer. I don't always agree with what he says, but he is rarely uninteresting. In the past few months, he has written extensively on the slum demolitions in Mumbai, ostensibly to beautify the city and make it the new Shanghai.

Why Mumbai would want to be like a pretty-looking city in a repressive communist regime is beyond me. However, this post is one of his best so far. In addition to detailing what has been wrong in the urban planning in the past, it details some really nice ideas of what is important in the future for the development of the city. A point lost on our dear civil servants. Looking at the way New York City is evolving, and where Mumbai has stood over the past n years with respect to a lot of things, the potential for Mumbai to be better is breathtaking. If only someone were to do something about it.

A Google Approach to Email

The funny thing about great products (be it hardware or software) is that you never really get to appreciate them until you start using them more and more. It is power users who appreciate the finer points of software, rather than the regular Joe, for whom most of the functions will be similar in competing products.

Take GMail for instance. I shifted a lot of my mailing lists to it to start using and testing it(My family emails are still off it). As I started using it, I didn't like the paradigm of labels, since I make use of folders for record-keeping. I am also of a delete-dispose mentality, and I delete emails I don't feel the need to keep.

However, as time passes by, I find Gmail more and more useful. The conversation threading feature is of course a killer. As is the auto-fill for email addresses. I've gotten used to labels over folders, and funnily, it is even more useful. For instance, I have a category of emails, say X. Now, the category is important, but has grown big, and what is also important to me are emails from people of company Y. All of the emails from Y may/may not be in category X, and are all from different people within company Y. Of course, searching makes things easy, but if you categorize the emails with labels, you achieve an amazing amount of flexibility. Folders are hierarchical, labels are semantic, and the difference in ease-of-use is phenomenal.

Another such application is Firefox. While tabbed browsing is an obvious advantage, the search box with built-in Google search (I've added IMDB and CDDB to the list myself) adds ease of use that is visible only on repeated and highly intensive use. That I believe is great UI design. Achieving it is so hard, that when things work the way you'd instinctively want them to, it is almost magical.

As Arthur C. Clarke said - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Snow is white. Blinding white. It is #0xFFFFFF. All the colors of the rainbow, put together and powdered into crystals, all of them unique. It rains down on a whim, rendering the area around it completely white and reflective. Going out on a day like this, with snow around and bright sunlight, means that you are wearing warm clothing and sunglasses. I, raised in the land of gulabi thandi - literally " the cold that makes your cheeks rosy" and mellow winter mornings (with the sun only making a friendly guest appearance), find it extremely ironic.

Winter days, drifting away, but, oh, those winter nights*. Sodium vapor streetlamps and yellow bulbs on doorways reflecting off snow make for the eeriest sight ever. The light is ghostly and surreal. Half-light with the promise of adventure. Adventure that should be manifested in the snowball fights of the carefree kids from the colony. Only, I don't see any. It isn't even a weekday. The tyranny of homework. Has anyone ever escaped it?

*shamelessly paraphrasing Grease

Time for a change

I've read some interesting books in the last few months, including Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, two of Lawrence Lessig's books on technology and law (Free Culture and The Future of Ideas) and a graphic novel (The Road to Perdition, the one on which the movie was based).

A genre of books left undiscovered so far is the modern science fiction genre better known as cyberpunk. While a couple of books I've heard a lot about (Neuromancer, Snow Patrol) weren't easily available in the library, Cryptonomicon was. The jacket decription looked interesting enough, so down the rabbit hole we go.

Note: Technically, Neal Stephenson is postcyberpunk. And talking of rabbit holes, Alice in Wonderland is a trip unlike any I've ever had. I'd love to know what Lewis Carroll was smoking when he wrote that book.