| Uma's profilegubBinsPhotosBlogLists |  Tools  Help |
|
4/6/2008 Goodbye Spaces !I HAVE MOVED to Wordpress !
I finally migrated all my blogs (including comments and tags) from Spaces to Wordpress .
You would think that there would be a simple Import/Export buttons to do this. Nope ! Spaces is the only blogging site that cannot be imported into Wordpress.
So tonight, I decided to doggedly debug and fix the problem I was facing with my Python Script. And sadly, I began to consider abandoning my complicated Python Script!
Instead, I chose to only migrate just the blog posts (not my blogroll and other Lists) , thanks to a different approach from this amazing blog's implementation of a Python script. It just worked like a charm ! Yeah, scripting rules and now I get why the Pythonistas have that smirk :-0
And this exercise made me believe that the "the inner Dev" in me is still very much ALIVE :-)
PS: I have to manually import my Lists and other sundry stuff from here later.
So please visit me at my new home: http://umarag.wordpress.com
3/8/2008 Changes, changes, changes..I have been playing with a python script to import all my old blogs into my possible new blog home - away from spaces.
It has been a frustrating process - not to have a standard way of exporting and importing blogs across the competing land-o-blogscapes.
And I have to not just XML-ize just my blogs, but the lists , comments and trackbacks. I wonder what happened to microformats.org effort ?
Anyways...stay tuned..I may just show up as a brand new avatar, and may have to just bid adieu to my gubBins past ... 3/2/2008 One Evening, in the Garden of Life !How can this be possible ?
I found a blissful hour today to catch up on my literary pretensions. And since I maniacally read "all books by an author/poet" in one long crazy set of months - I decided to order books of poet Grace Paley, since I specifically fell in love with her one poem that appeared in The New Yorker sometime in December 2005.
But I never had a chance to check her anthologies/books out, beyond those short poems I read in the mag. So I decided to google her today...(yes, I didn't Live Search!)
Sigh...How can this be possible ?
And I was saddened to learn that Grace Paley passed away last August . Guess, I was stationed in a different part of the world, back in August and somehow missed the news. Would it have mattered ? Yes, I would have picked her books 8 months sooner... Sigh !
So I googled and I found this poem called "Here" and ...and on reading it...I went completely pale and ashen, and was completely shaken. I re-read it a couple times.
Here is the short poem that I have quoted below in "full" text-
Woah...Now get this...How can this be possible ?
I was pale, ashen and shell-shocked - for a reason ! I had never read this Paley poem ever before..... Yet, how was this possible ?
It surely got emotional . And I had to dig up my notebook - wherein I doodle/dawdle/dabble random amateur literary stuff ! And then I found it. I had inked these few lines in September of 2006 and I had titled it -
How can this be possible ?
I will let you, dear reader, to conclude your own .
But thanks to Paley's "Here" , especially these two little magnificent lines, I repeat,
the teary-eyed-writer-in-me dares to think - "Life is indeed full of possibilities".
Yes !
2/24/2008 Tis The Season Of..Oh wait..whatever happened to seasons ?
Last summer in India, my parents complained of the dwindling crows and almost extinct sparrows. They commented on the rather short mango-season and the good old quiet monsoons that drenched Southern India were no more gentle downpours but were now an angry torrent of flooding rain.
And I arrived back in Seattle last fall, to only witness my dear maple tree almost going directly from green to brown with her leaves. It was the first year I did not get to take a perfect autumn yellow shot of her, in almost a decade.
Those wild Daffodils were beginning to peek out already , one wintry January morning , in my yard , only to be brutally frozen by the next day's snowfall!
I go up to the ski-pass and everyone laments the Hobson's choice- either it is all packed up with ice or it is melting like crazy. Where did the powder season go ?
I just put down my Christmas tree in late January, and the stores were already gearing up with "Spring Easter Bunny Retailware" ! Do we need to really rush our seasons ?
Is it mid-winter break now ? Oh wait, everyone is already done planning with their calendar for spring break, and some are ahead of the curve, with finalizing their summer plans for the kids. Why are the stores stocking up on swim-wear now, considering the temperatures are still freezing outside ?
Why are we in such a hurry ? Why do we need to hoard and stock up for a season that may soon never come, thanks to our bad frankenstein habits in treating Mother Earth, and ourselves ?
Everday I am bombarded with research on how much we are sleeping less, how our kids are developing faster than they should, how a culture of instant gratification has shortened our ability to slow down and enjoy anything. How many hours do we rake-in for things that matter most to us ?
Are we really productive despite the technological advancements ? Is that frozen hi-sodium pre-made food really saving you time ? But ..but on a similar vein, in our world of all things "pre-processed" and "manufactured", living simply and naturally seems an extravagance, only a few can afford - as in the extra luxury "time tax" you have to pay to be simple and natural.
Oh, the only thing that defies the season and is eternally perennial is now the big bad "FLU". There is no more flu season, everyone seems to be afflicted by various strains throughout the year. Looks like those acytota basic life-forms have figured out something that the higher forms haven't ! Sigh!
And I type this as I slowly savor my spoonful of natural honey in my ginger-lime tea today, wistfully wondering where have all the bees gone ? Will honey soon be relegated to a distant tasteful memory from our sweet past , thanks to the Colony Collapse Disorder?
2/20/2008 Amor De DiabloThere are somethings you never grow out of.
Despite my green leanings and striving for environmental consciouness in everyday living, I have a confession to make.
And this epiphany occured this morning, as I hauled my vehicle to a collision auto place this morning. Please do not ask the reason what I was doing at a collision place. Thank You. But continuing my story, as I parked and walked towards the office, there stood a shining brilliant "Blue Devil" - a stunning handsome VT 6.0 that gleaned in the morning sun.
And suddenly I became giddy, completely wowed by this hunking blue eye-candy. It was a Lamborghini Diablo. I had never seen one so upclose and personal. It was a VT6.0, with its shiny wide wheels and those doors that would make any gal, like me just fly off the ground ! I looked around, before slyly touching the rear Carbon Fiber spoiler. Roarr..
I realized how much I still dig sexy cars - that is of the exotic, sporty, fast kind. There is something ooh..so la la about looking at a good hunk of metal that is so amazingly designed. And I am clueless about the inner-engineering of these machines. I do not know the poppet valves from camshafts, but there is some "inner design zen" that gets pleased, staring at the Perfectly Sculpted Body - Design of these machines !
I was numbed by it's handsomeness, and I thought of my early days of Grad School in Detroit. I hung around folks who could name cars with their eyes closed, just listening to the hiss of the engines. I diligently went to the Auto Shows year after year. And I learnt the Detroit "hand signal" to let a driver know what a good looking car he/she drove, seriously ! Yes, ogling at cars was a serious past-time, that we grad students indulged, around Motown and it's wealthy suburbia !
And then I interned/worked at Chrysler. The Auburn Hills World HQ that housed a museum, was to me a candyland - a perfect place for a kid like me to get lost. And it was when I first started there, thanks to my colleagues, I got interested in Lambis, considering Chrysler had just sold off Lamborghini to some investor guy in Asia. (Now it is owned by Audi). And for the longest time, I used to pride in rattling off names of all models of Lambis - Countach, Murcielago, Miura, Diablo (and Gallardo).
It was good to have this brief reverie at the Collision place, this morning, until I got woken up with a "big fat bill" to fix up my old faithful !
PS: I had blogged briefly about Lambi Gallardo , two years ago, when it made a splash in Mission Impossible 3 .
2/2/2008 Fooled by Randomness ? The Hidden Role of Visualization...Have you read Taleb ? Do you like Art Garfunkel ? Have you tried Zen Visualization ? Do you believe in things happening by chance ? Do you make Lists for everything ? Do u love Math and Music ?
Uh..huh...you want to know what the heck...what is the connection ? Let me get to the point ...
Last summer, I made my Summer Reading List on my blog and had marked Nassim Nicholas Taleb down. I find Taleb's theories fascinating, despite the snobbery and all that Latin, and hi-brow references that just go way over my head. I picked up his "The Black Swan:The Impact of The Highly Improbable" book whilst at Bangalore, in addition to a few ones that were on my list. Due to the suddenly reduced airline weight restrictions, I ended up leaving back the tomes there, before I could get past Page One on even a single one of them.
About the same time in the summer, I met a Zen master, thanks to my mom ! Mom is alway devising clever ways of getting me to see things differently - as in a completely orthogonal viewpoint to my usual scientific and rational engineering approach ! Mom is liberal and progressive, and hardly religious esp. comparing her amongst the peers of her generation. She always let us kids form our own independent opinions, without pushing her religion or politics or beliefs! We always knew she voted differently than my dad - but it was never a topic of disagreement between them ! And I always teased about her funny kind of absolute blind faith - as in - "Believe ! Trust ! Faith ! Focus ! Visualize ! And things happen !" Period.
The Zen Master without preaching and pontificating, talked about the power of "Visualization" without secondary gain or results - Just "Visualize and Observe. Smile and Enjoy!", he said cryptically. Mom was convinced that the Zen Master had gotten "her" point across to me !
Being a Letterman fan - I love all kinds of Lists ! I think Life is really a big ListOfLists {...} :-) So for fun, I chose my summer reading "Blog book list" and my "get-back-to-listening-to-that-old-music-list" for my visualization exercise and see if things really start to connect up without me having to do any work other than visualization happen between my lists. And of course, I promptly forgot all about it in a couple days !
Sometime in December, I finally managed to get my music library all organized and dug out my favorite old CDs . And so I have been on a listening trip with Santana, Dire Straits, Floyd, Queen and Simon and Garfunkel, et al !
In fact, my last blog post was inspired by Simon and Garfunkel's lyrics of the song Bookends. And about my summer reading list, I couldn't finish them - since the books were now sitting in India, and I did want not to go buy them again. So I have been stuck with my usual mag reads, notably - "The New Yorker".
And just last weekend, I even had a FB status about me humming "Lie-La-Lie", a S&G tune !
So imagine my sudden "Visualization Awakening" surprise when I read this "The King of Reading" short piece by Nick Paumgarten , in the Jan 28, 2008 edition of The New Yorker , this morning!!
I know it doesn't seem extra-ordinary, considering everyone on the planet could be reading Taleb or listening to Garfunkel. But Garfunkel reading Taleb....Garfunkel having an online booklist...Taleb being the King of Randomness Theories...Me listening non-stop to Garfunkel the last couple months....
And the co-incidence of having done a fun zen visualization around my lists {book list, music list }; based on the advice from my {my mom, the ZenMaster }; and my interest in the duo that you would not normally connect up { Garfunkel, Taleb } , definitely made me think.....
Yes, mom you are right ! If I hadn't even had my lists nor visualized to opening up to seeing things consciously...I wouldn't have appreciated the article, as much as I did today ! When you start visualizing, it seems like the world around you is suddenly adapting to your that basic seed of thought that you planted, and all the stems sprouting from that idea suddenly seem to interconnect and make sense !
Or is it ? Maybe, it is all just random...
PostScript : Oh Mom...If you can convince dear sis to haul back those books for me, I truly would be one believer...he he !
12/23/2007 BookendsWith apologies to Simon and Garfunkel, I want to Bookend the year that was, for me:
A rather young friend of mine "S", remarked, "Mid-life Crisis Has Now Officially Gone Online!" . She was referring to her Facebook experience, after having endured the status feeds, pokes, hugs, tickles, and invitation to numerous apps on FaceBook,esp. from a Generation that graduated from an ".edu" more than two decades ago! She was amazed at the Gen-Minus{X,Y}-ers , who diligently updated their photos, posted pictures of their children, arranged books on their shelf, and wrote long-winded full-text English (not LOL !) messages on the walls ! My daily addiction of choice after coffee, is Facebook. I have to check into this social-platform-phenom at least once a day, notwithstanding a disclosure that I have pals who write apps for FB. I think Scrabulous is Fabulous. And Graffiti is Quite Alrightie. I do iLike, iRead and Shared Memories. I have air-dropped Balloonz and I have insulted friends with the Shakespearean Insult Generator. I recently did eco-friendly gifts with Xmas Stockings and I bought Shoes with moolah obtained by spamming my girlfriends. And No, I don't poke. And No, I am neither a "Gen-Minus-er" nor having a mid-life crisis. Thank you very much ! I am suddenly in touch with my childhood pals, my highschool/college mates, my office colleagues, my family, my long-lost neighborhood pals, my friend's cousin's neighbor, et al, just by showing up on FB. Although, I must admit, at times, I have wished for a separate "wall" between the concentric circle of friends- so my office colleagues are spared some of the personal conversations and vice-versa. And I much prefer FB over the older Orkut . Orkut's complete lack of a private "walled garden" made me stop being a regular, considering there were random Lurky Lius that violated your space. And making that connection has been the most remarkable highlight for me this past year: Re-connecting with people, and continuing to be able to stay in touch ! Being individualistic, and pursuing solitary goals and activities that leaves less time for others, I have now come to realize that we as a species, are still fundamentally "social beings" that need to reach out to one another, and our collective "Freudian Ego" exists in forming relationships with one another. [Yes, the obvious "facts of life" has been elusive for some of us, the whole time :-)] A little more serious introspection on social connections: As I journeyed thru the year with an attitude of fun and letting go, it has indeed been an eye-opening exercise to realize the power of choice - having to consciously chose and only be surrounded by loving friends, family and colleagues who you trust, care, believe and respect, and who in turn accept "you" for who "you truly are"- in your element. It has awakened a remarkable consciousness in me !
And interestingly, I found inspiration from all over - mostly from my everyday set of people, and for the first time I paused to think and count on my blessings. First and foremost, my little R- my joie de vivre - who challenges, teaches me resilience and puts the big Fun back with heavy-set parenting responsibilities ! And then there's my ever-optimistic family, who challenge me to new-liberal-think ! No kidding, as I realize how conservative I am with my approach to all things in life- it is indeed nice to have a liberal family, for once [If anyone has seen that old sitcom Dharma and Greg on TV, I always related my liberal socialists/activists family to Dharma's - although it has to be heavily intrapolated to an Indian context ]! Continuing my personal inspiration list - An amazing fitness trainer who really should be a life-coach; a mentor who motivates and inspires; bosses who listen and respect me; a friend who will patiently listen to my banter week after week; a baby-sitter and her family that has become another home to R; a friend who will suddenly ring my door-bell on a Sunday, to spirit R away so I get some personal time out to myself; a friend [a future Nobel Peace laureate] who will ride 25 miles to bring me soul-food and herbal tea to soothe my aching fever; a friend who shares, cares,inspires, encourages, challenges and treats me and R as her own family despite the busy life; a pal who is a rock who is always making me laugh and probably cheerlead me into doing anything [Eg: convincing everyday dummies like me to believe that the finite state machine of life is like a Markov Chain, and has to do only with the present state!] ; another "gifted" pal who will always call and check on me and one who cooked up a surprise Thanksgiving meal so I didn't have to eat alone; yet another dearest talented friend who took an entire day out of an uber-busy life to help me with my perspectives as I struck out to make some big changes; and a long-distance good old friend who literally is my alter-ego that serves as my inner guiding compass... ....I am indeed blessed and humbled. Thank you for being there ! And not to mention the numerous friends who are just an phone call, an IM away, a blog away, a plane ride away. And to be working in a marvelous environment filled with colleagues who are rock-amazing and leaders in their field, gets my creative juices flowing. I truly have nothing to complain. Life is beautiful ! And I have so much to learn and give... Last but not least, there is something to be said about the positive magnetic aura, with being in the same room as these worthy thought-leaders. I met writer Vikram Chandra, author of the highly acclaimed Sacred Games, at a book reading in Seattle, earlier this year. It was awe-inspiring to chat up with him briefly and he gave me (a fan!) some down-to-earth encouragement about seriously pursuing my writing in the "narrative poetry" genre. And listening to the Nobel winner Dr. Yunus talk about his vision of Grameen was the best one hour of mind-boggling personal lecture I have ever been to , and one that left me stirred up to think beyond my daily mundane banalities. And Suze Orman charged at us femme to take care and plan/plot our financial futures, at her book reading! And bidding goodbye to Rick Dalzell, ex-CIO of amazon.com and my personal hero, at his retirement party this year -was telling of how one builds and leaves such a stellar legacy in the technology world. And like a giggly fan-girl, I admit this was the icing on the cake for me- I had a brief but interesting conversation with the amazing visionary Jeff Bezos briefly at that party. And to the "shy-inner-me", I was first aghast when the fan-girl in me leapt out, and mustered up enough courage to unabashedly tell him how I truly felt - "The world needs more CEOs like you, who are "The Institutional Yes" " ! ! Whew...and this considering I worked for amazon.com many moons ago, and during the Xmass-1999-Holiday season, like all amazonians - we were all on field duty outside our regular roles - and I had shown up at 5.00am to help Customer Service with emails - and Mr.Bezos happened to ride the elevator with me at that unearthly hour and asked me a few questions and thanked me for what I was doing....I just looked down and fumbled an inaudible thank you, totally stupefied ! But I got a chance to say my thank you right, only nine years later ! I guess, something has shifted in me...I am not that old-me that hid around in corners and shadows, in solitary pursuits. It feels good to voice and be real and conscious, no matter the place and circumstance. Oh BTW, I am not done and I am still working at it... Sounds scary..uh ? Am off to the beaches and rain-forest of the beautiful Costa Rica...so until next time, happy holidays and a happy new year ! 11/5/2007 Rick Dalzell Retires from Amazon.comRick Dalzell, the amazing CIO of amazon.com retired last week, after a fabulous 10 year stint with that Earth's Biggest Bookstore and seller of much more!
O'Reilly Radar's Jesse Robbins has a post and link to Jeff Bezo's Tribute on the amazon.com's Sporting Good page. (I admit, that I am doing a cheesy "pointer to reference" here, since the engineer in me forbids me to directly link to the actual easter egg on the amazon page . However, I did notice that SERP results on major search engines, are including the actual easter egg link itself!)
Rick has been a personal hero of mine, right from day-one. After finishing graduate school and a brief stint with Chrysler, I joined as a software development engineer for Wal-Mart Information Systems, back in 1995. Rick was the visionary VP who was responsible for Wal-Mart's famed Supply Chain/Logistics and Distribution Center Systems. When a family situation brought me to the Pacific North West area later in 1999, I ended up working for amazon.com , a company that is any engineer's dream nirvana of living, breathing, eating (Oy! Not to mention- beeping :-)) innovative code , and where you simply got things done.
And about three years ago, when I was mulling about a career change - going from being a slashdot dev to becoming a technical product manager, I was worried about dramatically changing roles mid-career and importantly, moving away from my first love of "writing code all the time". It was thanks to Rick's timely and sagely guidance that helped me make a decision, which eventually led me to take up my current job.
Rick was one of those rare personable exec-leaders who would always remember your name and chat you up in the hallways - no matter who u were. Beneath that folksy mid-western persona, was indeed a firm technology visionary who was intensely competitive and had immense faith and trust in his technical staff, right down to the engineers, coding deep down in the barracks. He knew how to inspire the masses in shipping great software, considering he was a rare bird that maintained the same even-keel whether he was talking to an engineer with a graduate CS degree or someone working hourly stocking items at the distribution center or expounding all that complicated technology in simple business speak to a product manager or say, even convincing a sleep-addled DBA via phone to do the right thing, in the middle of the night, when some critical bits need to be patched up.
There is a lot of press coverage about the man. So I will do the link-tribute to his time at amazon.com. Here are a few that I like-
Thank you for the wonderful ride, Rick. And enjoy the fishing !!
Disclaimer: I rarely talk about my work or my past work in this personal blog space of mine. I want to state that No NDA has been violated in this blog post. I have blogged only about my personal interactions with Rick,and they are my personal opinions, at best. I have NOT blogged about the technologies or scope of my work at any of my employers. And I have only linked to pages that is already public information. 10/29/2007 Trick or TreatIt's that time of the year - the annual mad sugar rush fest across the contintental US of A, that has become an innate part of the Halloween festivities.
Growing up in India, I had never heard of Halloween until I went to see the Spielberg's classic - ET. And after ET, I always imagined American kids had the most fun - partying wildly in their neighborhoods in cool costumes. And to the child in me, it seemed far more exciting to be going out as those sci-fi aliens than dressed as little Indian Gods- Radha or Krishna, during the festival of Navaratri.
And oh, we urban kids would never ever would want to be seen going around in costumes in the hip city, but only when around the bucolic settings of my maternal grandparents far-flunged rural residence. And in India, during the festivities -rural or urban, costume or not, as a child you were treated to some home-made hi-protein favors called "chundal" and home made sweets - that too, after you had exercised your vocals dutifully singing some classical Carnatic tunes. No candied treats anywhere in sight !
And this was the closest to what I thought Halloween was, until I got involved with the whole trick-or-treating ritual, thanks to R.
I admit, before R, I was one of those over-eager adults who would stock up on a ton of candies and liberally hand them over to every kid knocking on the door. I never really understood why the parents looked so harried and insisted on putting back some of the candies back into my bin. Once, at my dogged insistence of wanting to dole out more candies, a parent offered a Yoda-like advice - "If one of these critters, you have, realize that high fructose corn syrup is your worst enemy, you will. Yes, hmmm."
Ok now, as it, a parent I get ! I have to plot and scheme against the annual invasion of concentrated doses of HFCS. I read somewhere that 92% populace of kids (including R) do go for trick or treating for candies. This year, I wanted to know what the other 8% really did.
Don't get me wrong. I love the whole eerie spirit of Halloween. I love the costume bit - having gotten out my "kookiest best" to some really crazy fun costume themed parties over the years. I also like the bonhomie of this fest - that kids get out "walking" in packs, atleast one evening every year, to even figure out that there are actually other real people(humans!!) , just like themselves, living in their neighborhood of glorious suburbia, ha !
So I did... I mean, about trying to find what the other 8% did. While shopping at Whole Foods, a couple weeks ago, I found these Green Halloween signs. I was intrigued. I learnt that this smart Seattle mother named Cory Colwell-Lipson started this "Green Halloween" group-think. So far, I have been hooked with some of the ideas behind it.
I have talked to R about not handing out candies and instead giving out some of the eco-friendly tchotchkes to the visiting critters. Initially, R jumped into it enthusiastically, considering it seemed something out of the ordinary.
As days have passed since that first Green conversation, R is a bit skeptical and has made some negotiations - I know I cannot flip the switch overnight. R is keen on going on a trick or treating spree, with a couple friends, more to show off the costume. R has promised to pick only one candy per house, and has promised to give them all away...R really never cares for candies, but the mighty retailing media have all the kids under their "sugary" spell, and I now get that Yoda-ish dad's predicament.
I am hoping we can make a small first step towards a Green Halloween...this year, starting with our house.
Talking of Green and Halloween , I am suddenly inclined to see some old episodes of the Treehouse of Horror, this week. I truly believe, a lot of today's parenting homilies , atleast for me, happens via Homer and Clan. Believe it or not, Lisa the Vegetarian , really helped me tone down R's sadness against omnivores. Or, another time when we were talking serious stuff such as death -R brought up the subject of "being born again" and I eased it for her with my snowball analogy. I of course, was channeling Homer's sagely homily: "Lisa, you're a Buddhist, so you believe in reincarnation. Eventually, Snowball will be reborn as a higher lifeform... like a snowman!"
Happy Trick or Treating !
10/11/2007 So is the Andes..."So is the Andes"...replied Neruda when accused that his work was uneven !!
A friend #1 loves Neruda so much, that #1 made a pilgrimage to Chile early this summer and visited the Pablo's home and got us all priceless souvenirs, not withstanding a laptop laden with the most fabulous photographs of beautiful Che-lee.
One evening, over a bottle of Pisco, we were waxing eloquent Pablo's works. Friend #2, the cool-cucumber of the lot , didn't get what the ado was all about with those Nerudic works. #2 basically seemed to hold the belief that poetry was all bunkum . #2 proclaimed writing a verse like Neruda was no biggie. Anyone could just do it.
So an unspoken challenge was thrown into the air and all was soon forgotten...
Well, until I got this recent email from #1 proudly announcing #2's debut work....
I was delighted at #2's casual, yet very well composed piece-de-neruda... And bravo to #1 for paradoxically making #2 delve into the beauty of poetry :-) And of course, I had to critique it - Neruda style. I called it "Ode To #2" (With sincere apologies to the Pablo: I shamelessly ruined his Ode to a Woman Gardening )
Yes, I knew that your hands were 10/7/2007 Professor PauschLife has been "even-more-than-the-usual-busy" the past couple weeks. But still...I managed to take a personal time-out - almost an entire hour - about two weeks ago to watch this amazing academic deliver his last lecture.
The blogosphere has been raging about it for almost two weeks now. And yes, the journal covered it as well (duly brought to my attention, thanks to a pal who is a devout-WSJ reader ).
If in the span of your entire life, you are looking to bookmark that one read / hear + watch that is truly inspirational, then I highly recommend Dr. Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon speak on "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams".
Dr.Pausch stirred me awake from my zombied existence of living in an eternal livelocked state. That is definitely no metaphor, a semaphore maybe :-)
Godspeed Dr.Pausch!! 9/23/2007 Powter's Pop Parable
"Sometimes the system goes on the blink Ah..Sunday morning. I wake up and just decide today will be exclusive "Mommy-R-1:1" day. Out goes my planned weekend chores -laundry, bills and I bail out of other scheduled activities. Except cooking of course, that I hurry through. It has been quite a hectic and frenetic month since returning back from India. A fascinating new role at work which requires me to learn a ton - "squeeze in all 101 fundamental courses of an undergrad engineering degree in Communications into say three months"; start of the new school year for R with new extra-curricular schedules, lots of school homework, crazy commute times; and a tyrannical info-glut of monstrous paperwork that needed to be done, on the personal front - that had eaten away my weekday nights. So we started the day with R wanting to practise some new classical vocal lessons. And I am surprised R has moved onto complex lessons, with varying speeds and is able to keep up with the "talas" <beats>. Then we talk about school and what R did last week. R is eager to tell me the storyline of an Indian movie that R had gotten to go, and says - "You can watch the songs, on YouTube ,on the computer ?" And I stuttered... "Watch, You-What ?" completely taken aback that my baby suddenly has grown up. I do go to "Live Search" and type the name of the movie, since R wants me to see a song in particular. R looks at the SERP results and announces -"You won't find it here. You will find it on Google". I give a spiel about why mommy wants to use Live Search, but R is adamant and is not at all happy with my clickpath. So we go to google and R spots the "YouTube" thumbnails in the SERP. I guess R was just looking for exactly that result set. R had somehow observed that when you searched on movie-names on google, and by looking at thumbnail images (not the text results) in the SERP, R could exactly pick the song to click on. Live Search did not return thumbnail images!! By now, although proud of R's ingenuity, I am completely aghast and my brain is already racing to figure ways to get the computers off the grid at home -and considering R NEVER gets much computer time at all and that too, NEVER EVER alone!! R senses that I am not warming up to the cheesy Indian song, and tries to calm me by mentioning that at school they are allowed to use the computer, but not allowed to watch "YouTube". Thank Heavens ! And then R brings out the school bag - and out comes a big strip of paper with a 1 followed by a 100 zeros and says - "This is the number-googol that I wrote at school and I do know that googolplex is larger than that...closer to infinity. So I know all about google !!" Now I don't want to know more, considering R uttered "google" before uttering "amma"....when R was a baby...and I have since then been peeved at the sneaky pervasiveness of the "Do No Evil" company in my household. Yeah, it is personal :-0 Now, I am positively miffed at myself for somehow having missed all this "new-found-knowledge" having taken root with R. And then R also announces that folks at India are smarter - since they watch YouTube music for free on the computer, while we pay to listen/watch music on CDs/DVDs ! So now I know where R learnt about this YouTube business - from the summer trip at India . I try to pull the plug on the computer and say "Today's not a Good Day for playing on the computer!" Immediately, R goes -"Is that a Bad Day, as in 'Bad Day to watch Indian Stuff' ? And I think that means I can get to watch my favorite "**Children's**" show, right ?" And I relent ...and absent-mindedly end up typing the name of the show on YouTube , instead of going to the actual show's website link. The music starts and R squeals with delight - "Mom, isn't that song from the Car Radio ?". Yes, indeed. It is Daniel Powter singing "Bad Day". Someone had uploaded a video of the "Children show's cast-members" to the tune of Mr.Powter's cute ballad. Not exactly what we were looking for! By now, all rationale left my side -esp with the co-incidence of R saying "Bad Day" and this whole "YouTube" thing. R is now distracted with the music playing and goes off to work on an unfinished puzzle. And I ended up watching the handsome dreamy-eyed Mr.Powter sing his ballad on the YouTube video. I really loved the clean-cut video with the cute couple in it , and it reminded me of my favorite song from my early teen years -"Take On Me" by A-Ha in the 80s. Cheesy Pop...Not ! For some reason, the Bad Day lyrics touched me today, even though I had heard it many times before. Maybe, because I was being harsh on myself for being an absentee-parent. Or Maybe, ahem..it was Mr.Powter's cute "Touque", after all...since I have a thing for those NorthWesterny knit-caps and probably own about a dozen of 'em in different colors ! It wasn't A Bad Day, having caught up on all things with R and at home... But now....I can't get that tune out of my head....it is stuck... ..
.... yeah.... 8/8/2007 Zzz...Zleepless in Zurich Allegra - that is Romansh for Hello !!
Romansh is one of the four national languages of Switzerland. Thanks to my history and geography lessons gleaned from those Asterix comics, I would have prefered calling it Helvetica (has a "romansque"quality to it ) and thought of them Swiss to be one among Those Indomitable Gauls.
All I hear is "zzzz" sounds buzzing around me when folkz speak in Zurich....But no "Zzz"s for me due to zevere jetlag and trying to do zome homework as part of my new zjob...and the only indulgenze - playing my daily doze of Z daily Z-Scrablicious on FB. 'Nuff Zs.
I arrived in town with two big suitcases that were packed only for my final "Spice Route" destination. Any true blooded East-Indian going home will understand what I mean - they were filled with COSTCO size gifts, "Made for USA- but Made In China" shirts and sweaters, random tchotchkes such as a catapult-like-toy-from-Target-for-my-dad (please do not ask!) , a digital photo frame with memory sticks so I can put an end to the question "why I don't print pics and mail them" anymore ; Nuts-pistachios and almonds; Bright salwars for me to wear back home (altho they will be way-out-of-fashion in India) , Beano for an aunt, Aspirin for an uncle, Sugar-free munchies from Walgreens; latest style purses (that I have never carried one myself), scarves-that reminisce folks back home that they are on a Gondola trip at Venice , boxes of Saffron - Marco Polo would be proud, except my silk-route is the other way- I haul things from the West back East :-) Oh! the only savvy thing I did was NOT to buy chocolates from the USA and saved that for Zurich!!!
But still - hear this - I lacked basic stuff on arrival at Zurich - no spare clothes and no toothbrush, and stuck with my Cosmo Kramer hair ! Perdunai !
British Airways lost my "hand baggage" that I needed the most. Yep, the BA folks made me check-in the "hand baggage" in the last minute at Seattle, saying that BA has weird policies - u are allowed to carry 2 pieces on certain legs (SEA-LHR), but not on all routes (LHR-ZRH) !! So anyone understand the logic behind this ? If u start out your journey with two pieces of carry-on (a pullman and a laptop bag) , what do you do mid-way into your journey that now u are suddenly told to only carry one piece and not the other (pay extra or dump it!) ? Some brilliant logistician consultant for BA who has never flied across the pond must have come up with this one.
So I was left wearing the same set of clothes for 48hrs...and then I decided to make the best use of the zsituation- ZShopping at Zurich- I drank a big pot of Nescafe coffee to keep that jetlag at bay, walked for an hour and then went zshopping bright and early at 9.00AM (Oh, this the country that keepz "time"!) before I showed up at work. Zurich, I guess is any girlz paradize of retail dreamz....
Although someone at Seattle, who had lived at Zurich earlier had recommended me to check out the premier shopping district - Bahnhofstrasse.... My hotel was close to Sihl City which has a big indoor mall+eateries+cineplex+retailers such as Swatch, Zara, H&M, Esprit...And thanks to grocery chains - Micros and Coop where I picked up some Bare-Escentuals for a gal. Although I am not a mall rat nor a shopaholic, I was thankful for the roof over my head since it has been pouring cats and dogs since I arrived. I haven't seen a ray of sunshine yet.
I have a room with a view at my hotel - The ugly metal of the A3 motorway bridge atop the Sihl River. Ugh! First, I thought it was water running off from the torrential rains...but the ferocity of the flow confirmed it was the tributary of the Limmat river, that separates the city into left and right banks.
I spent an entire day holed up at work... with some folks from my team who had flown in from Redmond and those industrious Swiss folks of an erstwhile startup. Lots of learning to do.
Here's few sightings and impressions of an "Auslander" (despite the "intense downpour" and being holed up at work and not having gone out and seen the real Zurich!)-
Since I don't have much time beyond my work schedule to get around town, I am hoping to alteast go catch the famous Chagall Windows at Fraumunster. I guess, I have a thing for Windows -esp in photography and the arts !!
A pli tard...
8/5/2007 A Midsummer Night's Reads - 2007A few friends asked if I stopped reading....as in "Where is your Summer-2007 Reading List" ?
Yes dear pals..I have been reading, going to author book-readings, breathing, reading, writing a little, and then some more reading. But I just didn't get a chance to post my list to my blog until now.
Setting no goals was a goal this year. Isn't that statement inherently a Russell's Paradox ? Mmm....Set Theory messed me up enough that I still break a sweat and have nightmares about being ill-prepared for those dreadful Discrete Math exams.
So here is my list of reads: My Summer 07 Reads
For the first time, I am reading more of the lighter reads (Nora Ephron ) and self-help reads (Pema Chodron). I have also been reading some standard business-school stuff (Tayeb, Hal Varian, et al). And true to my geeky CS roots and relating to my work, I am perusing some Speech Recognition textbooks. I guess, there is no heavy lit on the map. Maybe in some ways, I have been sub-consciously focusing on working the brawns over the brains ! (If you read my last post about me and the gym, u know what I mean :-))
Anyways, I am off on a business trip to Zurich next week. And then I head to Bangalore, India for a short vacation and hope to catch up on my reading list. And oh, R and me have grand delusions of hanging around all those "compulsive" bookstores that u can check in, but never leave, whilst at Bangalore.
Enjoy the remaining dog days of summer !
7/17/2007 Resign as General Manager of the Universe---Stop striving for perfection-thus spake Naomi Judd, that I decided to make it my blog title !
'Tis has been a good summer of good health and bliss for me. Knock on wood...Did I just say that ?
Yes, I have been blogging less, because I am spending the time walking or working out or doing yoga...or...or...lurking on Facebook, when I am not @work. And Oh! I am excited to start a new job/role in a very cool and fascinating space, of course within the same company.
Ok, a girl's gotta have one vice atleast. So Facebook's got me, for now. But I have to talk about some virtues here...
A couple weeks ago, my awesome trainer (and an amazing person!) suddenly threatened me with "Time for the half-annual health checkup and measurements"!
It was the week of non-stop grueling interviews and living on leathery pizza. The questions ranged from coming up with efficient hash algorithms for sorting large scale data in flat files, designing a data architecture that would clearly bound and represent a country/state (graph theory - nodes/edges, anyone?) , remembering back my fundamentals- data structures from undergraduate days- eliminate duplicates in an unsorted list of numbers, etc (circular arrays, egad!) There were some fun puzzle and design questions as well- design a speech based search engine; design a spigot for your fitness club.
Ah..back to fitness...So I was expecting to flub out the BMI Test...And guess what -I had a perfect score of 22--Let me say that "Twenty Two" !! Yay ! This actually puts me almost in the elite company of Kate Winslet, Venus Williams,etc who have a perfect score according to this diet blog.
Seriously, the magic was finding my "amazing trainer" who motivates me , challenges me, coaxes me, and believes in me.
I guess this past year has been a year of self-awakening of all sorts. I started lifting some weights again. My trainer incorporated a regimen of yoga and stretches that focused on my core areas. I walk atleast three times a week. I stopped eating out much. I never ate junk food, but I started a conscious diet of organic healthy home prepared food, since I loved to cook anyways. I am never a fan of any particular dieting craze. I actually eat well and often. As always, I take my supplements and focus on my proteins/omega-3 since I mostly live on a vegetarian diet, loaded with seasonal fruits. I do have coffee and I never touch those fake sugars (only the real "organic/unbleached" scoops for me). And the fact is I weigh the same, but lost some inches and put on muscle weight.
I try and meditate. I relax....this was the hardest since I had to first learn to let go of difficult things, or attain perfection in anything. I just chill and hang out with only a small close-knit of amazing pals, and some who are just a phone-call/an IM/ a plane ride away. I go to the movies, I watch random TV, I look up at the sky. I started to take Indian Carnatic Classical music lessons to re-learn playing the Veena. And I read a lot of self-help Buddhist books esp. Shambala publications. (I must admit that a few years ago, the rational me would have mocked at these titles. But now, the words speak to me !)
I feel good. I feel it in my bones. I could not have done with those few amazing pals, for I am blessed with friends who inspire and believe and motivate me. Thank you, and you all know who you are. And my parents and family who are always rooting for me, and have this crazy notion that the best is yet to happen. That is one family of unfazed optimists.
And the biggest joie de vivre and apple of my eye, is my little R who makes me want to get up and be a better person everyday. R has taught me resilience, patience, taking things in stride and having a sunny outlook in life. However tired we might be, we read a bedtime story, and R made the rule that we say good-night only after laughing at some real silly jokes and performing variations of a silly pillow dance that R invented.. I love you R!
6/10/2007 A New Yorker State of Mind'Tis "a song of a review".
That is, a "whole magazine review" of the May 29, 2007 edition of The New Yorker .
And sincere apologies to song-writer Billy Joel for mangling his original, altho mine may be sung to the tune of "Moving Out" :-)
FAB QUOTES from just this one issue
"There are two parts to every person. There's the brittle part that everybody sees. And then there's the part that would rather lie on the floor with the dog. The private part" - Cindy Adams
"Now he belongs to the ages" Or was it "Now he belongs to the angels" - Ed Stanton at Lincoln's death
"Dear Appy, How commited are you? Signed, Lost Data." -Gordon Bell's fantastic review about his own earlier article on software applications.
"Tintin addicts are a mixed bunch.
-Last week, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson announced a three picture deal to bring Tintin to the big screen.
-I once heard Hugh Grant declare on a radio program that if he could take only one book to a desert island it would be "King Ottokar's Sceptre"....
- General de Gaulle declared that Tintin was his only international rival !!"
-Critic Anthony Lane commenting on the Tintin Century
"For love I make characters in my play"- Tennesse Williams
5/29/2007 SpringCleaning:Cultural Learnings from OldClothes for Make Benefit of Glorious State of WomandomThis narrative is being omniscientially told in a proper story format.
Another long weekend came and went by.
Three pals. Many Grand Plans. Zero Ability To Skip Town.
#2 wanted to head off to the Grecian Climes of Athens (The Real One, not one of those pit-stop towns in the Mid-West)
#3 wanted to go on a one-day-road-trip-in-the-convertible to photograph the rolling wheat fields of Palouse, Washington
(Writer's Special Edit:
The last plan(#3) was a wee-bit more practical, since visiting SFO (#1, #2)..Ahem...that is right..."SFO as in San Francisco" was definitely a kill-joy trip for a long weekend!!
To be precise, to go visit the embassies of Nicaragua and Greece at SFO, for a potentially distant future trip, was how the weekend plans turning out to be !)
And #1 is always having grand foreign travel visions. To quote a favorite Pico Iyerian term, #1 wants to "Fall Off The Map".
A minor caveat that must be mentioned though: #1's Passport has never made it back home in a while. Since at any given time, it lives under some happy "diplomatic immunity" traveling around, courtesy of one embassy or another, while it is waiting for a visa to be stamped.
And #2 wrote this apt, simple, elegant pithy observation about #1. See the picture way below, at the end of this blog post.
Well...the weather Gods sealed the weekend plans : Cold Front. Rain. Overcast Sky. More Cold Front. More Rain. Overcast Sky..... So the road-trip promptly got the "Gray Overhang", and the pals decided to hang around town.
And hung "around town" they did !!!!Holed up for almost an entire day, inside a suburban home, for some major spring cleaning of closets.
Or call it "cleansing", since #3 needed help with bidding goodbye to more than a decade worth of accumulated memories. Or NOT.
No points for guessing why #3 was desperate to skip town, and run away from it all. #3 was in an anti-social mood, having missed a goodbye dinner and a previously planned "weekend spiritual retreat".
Sadly, #3 was untying the final tangled knots with the formal breakup of her marriage in the past week.
While #1 and #2 took it up as a mission of cleaning #3's closet , #3 tried to bail and procrastinate by taking off on random errands outside the home.
#1 and #2 persisted . And they zealously began the cleansing, ignoring #3's tactics.
They started with the tiny tot stuff - toys, clothes and books: They put a ton into the "GoodWill" sacks. The remaining books and toys were neatly cataloged and categorized. The clothes were folded and stowed away in a drawer. It seemed like the clothes had not seen a neat crease-line , in the recent past, and seemed to be going through the blues as well.
You think of Petabytes - do u only envision Search Engines ? Think again ? Check your home, if you have little critters ...esp, of the human kind that live with you. You will find "Vundabytes" of crayons that need to be spidered out - crawled out of the deep spaces, indexed back with the original set , hashed out..oops.. trashed out, map-reduced, etc. No easy salt being passed from any "BigTable" here.
And then came the "Big Dipper" accompanied with wallops of tears. Raiding the unused, unvisited closet in one of those spare rooms, carried the most emotional baggage.
That closet carried the tale of more than a decade. It was stowed with clothes ranging from size 0 to size "n", where n is a sufficiently large number that any living being who has that extra "X" chromosome, is genetically programmed to just not divulge. A woman may tell her age, but never ever her clothing size.
Out went the notables: "The-Pink-Dress"(3) , "Ralph-Lauren-ThreePiece-Pant-Suit"(3), "Brown-Burberry-Plaid-Shirt"(1), "A-bubbaish-sleeveless-suit-with-shorts"(5), "XXXXL-Red-Sweater"(0), "A-Heavy-Down-Jacket"(30). Also, out went a bunch of clothes with tags still hanging. All these clothes hadn't been worn in more than 9 years, and the (n) indicates the number of times totally worn, before that.
Then went the oversized "tenty" clothes that #3 had pitched and camped herself "in" for years - hiding inside - not wanting the world to find out her inner trials and tribulations of a marital relationship that had gone South many zillion moons ago.
And so the cleansing happened. #1 and #2 hauled monster trash bags to the local GoodWill store right away, lest #3 decided to hang onto "a past that wasn't".
Footnote (aka FeetNotes): #3 managed to have the courage to clean out the shoes, by herself. There were 4 pairs that were victims of an old fashion era, that had to go. Period. There were 3 pairs that could be worn indoors only- Oprah has those incredibly high-perch heels befittingly called "sitting shoes"- But these indoor shoes were flats that had so much bling and ethnic craftsmanship, that it would leave a walking trail of shiny baubles that even Cinderella might not be proud of. And then there were 5 pairs that were in need of some minor repair.
It finally dawned on #3 that "life was too short" to be cobbling back things together !! So #3 valiantly dumped the unwanted shoes. Hurrah !!!
Pick your favorite "Moral of The Story":
a) Never hoard. Throw Away. Never hoard. Throw Away. Never hoard.
b) You can Travel Abroad only if you have a Passport on-hand. That is, it is "absolutely in your physical possession" for the travel.
c) Live Simple. Live for Today. Live Simple.
d) Life will never go according to plan(or no plan). But traveling definitely requires one.
Corollary to the above: Travel Abroad requires "A Minimum Plan"- 7 days ahead + enough money not to raid your 401k funds.
e) Say No To Gifts - Unless they are of the edible variety that u can make them disappear fast - instantly, on the spot.
Addendum: If the Gifts are Books, you can accept them, as long as you ensure these two things:
One: The giver does not deface the book with any personal inkings
Two: The giver is kind enough to bestow you a gift-receipt -so u can quickly read and return. (Tut ! Tut)
See Ma, No Memories To Deal With Later !!
--THE END--
5/10/2007 Selamat Tinggal ...It has been a profoundly sad ten days.
A dear friend of mine Shanta Rayan passed away on April 30th, 2007, Monday, leaving behind her hubby and two young children here in Seattle, Washington.
Shanta was a friend who would come in, when you just thought the whole world had gone out. Her deep iron-willed inner strength, rational and practical objectivity to all things in life, along with an amazing sense of rib-tickling humor, was deeply complemented by her genuine compassion and kindness for others. She was the friend everyone laughed with, she was the one everyone unburdened their inner turmoil. She was "the" friend who always found time to call and leave you a message every week or so, despite the hecticness of her own life .
There never was a dinner table that did not lighten up with Shanta's funny stories - be it tales of her camping at the deserts of Egypt , after a six hour camel-back ride or her carefree days as a grad student's wife at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She traveled the world over - she learnt to speak pig-Hindi and lived in Pune for a couple months last summer, since she had never lived in India. She trekked around Europe, camped near the grizzly bears of Northern Canada, hung out at plantations in war-torn Sri Lanka (her land of origin) or just went to chill at the beaches of Australia. She inspired us to travel to her home country Malaysia- which we did in 2005. And to this day - R wants to permanently live in Langkawi, the beautiful islands off Malaysia.
She loved to cross-stitch, go for long walks, run marathons, cook "sambal", and was "Martha Stewart" in my circle of girlfriends who kept her house so beautiful, which could have popped right out of an issue of "Good Housekeeping". And all this, when she was not working at the school as a librarian, and being a full-time mom raising two remarkable children and being one half of the most adored couple.
Tis' hard to say Selamat Tinggal.... 4/28/2007 One Hundred Years Of R K Narayan (This posting is available as a cross-post at my blogspot blog)
I am baaack ! That was close to almost more than one hundred days of NOT blogging !!
Thanks to the frenzied hecticness with the software product I work on. Oh yeah.. I do work at a real job that hmm...actually earns me my bread and butter , more my "rice and curd" - thayir sadam, as any old faithful South Indian would say !!! Gaasp, Wikipedia has an entry for the humble "thayir sadam" !!
Talking of South India, has anyone gotten lost at Malgudi ?
Yes, that fictional town that hosted not only characters of R K Narayan, but for me, it became the special hometown where my own paternal uncles, aunts and volley of cousins ended up growing up in my vivid imagination as well, that too alongside Swami and friends. This imagination was fueled thanks to the family raconteurs - Appa(dad) and Athai(aunt) - who regaled the family kids with stories of their carefree childhood spent in pre-independence Bangalore, about the same time I was discovering R K Narayan.
Truly, listening to their childhood tale of pulling of a brave mini-neighborhood kiddie heist of stealing a "monster jackfruit" from a grove that was well-guarded, and their subsequent tribulations with hiding the "very odorful" jackfruit in the trunk of an abandoned car, away from the watchful eye of stern adults both at home and school, until it ripened - was definitely a family story of Malgudian proportions.
And if you think I am a bit lulu with extra-polating Malgudi to my family's ancestry, you should read my friend Sujatha's (blogpourri) recent post on visiting Mysore , the gentle city that was R K Narayan's home for most of his life. Her post has no direct reference to Malgudi nor RKN...but you will get a feel for that RKNian Malgudi of definitely being somewhere in South India. Read her well-written blog post and observe the Malgudian cast - characters like the gardener, her tree-laden grandparents' home, the South Indian aromas of coffee shops and flour mills, a movie theater called "Ganesh Talkies", a point of interest called "Ballal Circle" and the school she attended could just have been Swami's Albert Mission school.
That is the beauty of R K Narayan's timeless writing. His Malgudi, his story lines, his characters -somehow become personal pages from any South Indian's familial story. My kid R who grows up afar from that world, can still be enthralled by RKN's works or even Mark Twain. R is completely transfixed and transported by the antics of Swami and Tom Sawyer.
Malgudi-O-Palooza:
Being a rabid R K Narayan fan, it's been at the back of my mind (since I read N Ram's tribute to RKN in "The Hindu" about this being the centennial year of his birth) to really do something to celebrate the grand master's story telling. Actually, N Ram specifically in the article, mentions how the very private RKN would be aghast at all the brouhaha over his centennial year.
But I being a "rule breaker" decided to ignore N Ram's advice, and do something called "Malgudi-O-Palooza".
So dear reader , do your part for "Malgudi-O-Palooza" . Do any/all of the below, before October 2007.
1. Spread the word of R K Narayan in your local communities (esp, if you are living abroad)
2. Get creative. Get outrageous. Do something that spreads the word of RKN
3. Oh...in these worthy times of web2.0 and tagging, I am kicking off a "Malgudi-O-Palooza" blog tag.
So here I go first- "tagging" folks I know who are voracious readers , and who would be willing to play :-) !! a) Kamla at Kamla Bhatt Show b) Sujatha at Blogpourri c) Vikas at Loosely Joined... d) Priya at The NITK Numbskulls Page e) Anand at Anand Hariharan V NOTE: If you want to comment, please go to my cross-posting at my blogspot site. Sorry for the trouble !!
4/16/2007 Photree - My Photo Blog on Trees A quick post:
On a whim, I just started another blog -a photo blog on trees.
Check it out at http:\\photree.blogspot.com
Why did I choose blogspot? You decide on one...
A) Live Spaces and The Walled Garden: It drives me crazy that on this blog, that my dear readers are forced to send me comments via email, since they cannot post directly to the blog unless they have a Windows Live ID account. And I cannot moderate comments since I get the likes of some random Romanian origin spam-o-commenters.
B) Work that CyberSquat Muscle: Well I have held some blogomains (blog + domains) for a while on popular blog sites; but I figured it is time to actually put some of them to use, to "TreeSit" ... check what's out there, beyond Spaces
C) Photo Blogs: In my limited knowledge, there are just no good Photo Blog sites. And Live Spaces has a separate section for photos and all that directory structure/storage for albums confuse the heck out of me, since you cannot hide albums or other images that appear on your regular blog
D) All of the above
Caveat Emptor: I am neither a photographer nor an expert on trees. I have a very ordinary digi camera. I just shoot, click and now post :-)
Ah...but I love trees...a tree-hugger ? No, I am definitely not a "Julia Butterfly" , but definitely a wannabe tree-blogger.
See ya there !
|
|
|
