पिरतीची कीरत dept.

पिरतीची कीरत समद्याहुनी लई न्यारी ।।

ही पिरत जडली रामाला, शीतेसाटी यडा परभू जाला ।
मग पुसं झाडापाखराला, कुनी दावा पिरत माझी प्यारी ।।

हीनं जनीला यडं क्येलं, हीनं नाम्याला घायळ क्येलं ।
हीनं तुक्याचं मन भारलं, सार्या सृष्टीत रमले नर-नारी ।।

अशी झळंबी कितीका बिजली, कितीकांची जीवजोत इजली ।
पर जीचावर मती हिची रिझली, त्यानं साधिल्या मुक्ती चारी ।।

पिरतीची कीरत समद्याहुनी लई न्यारी ।।

- कवी गिरीश.

one-armed-banker??? dept.

What will those Japanese think of next?

apple-on-a-roll dept.

A good game to play in the Bay Area these days is "count the iPods". Wherever there are pedestrians, count on atleast a few with those distinctive white wires sticking out of their shirts. The 'halo effect' of the iPod is now starting to reflect on Macintosh sales too, if this report is to be believed.

Apple is now the no.4 seller of personal computers in the US this quarter. (The ones ahead: Dell, HP and Gateway)

Their market share is now 4.5 percent, with a 33 percent rise in Mac shipments.

damn-lies dept.

newkiller-power dept.

Is this goodbye to three-hour blackouts?

i-want-my-iptv dept.

Damn. I need a bigger remote.

yankee-dawdles dept.

Those sluggish Yankees. India and China plan to steal a march on them again. Its bad to be in a position of being the only technology innovator in the world, with no way to deploy your own inventions for legacy reasons.

I wonder if this lesson applies to individual human life as well, hmmm?

somebody-gonna-get-a-hurt-realll-baad dept.

The Stand-Up comedy of Russell Peters.

retro dept.

RSS seems to be the new hot thing -- the shopping cart of the 2000s. Strange that multi-dimensional information structures like the web should be built, only to be abstracted out into single-dimensional linear feeds like RSS.

while-we're still-on-iraq dept.

The existential poetry of Donald Rumsfeld.

Ha ha. I have to post this, because its even more hilarious that 'Rumy''s verses. A post-modernist deconstruction of this book. Posted originally by this guy as a review on amazon.com.

A Unique New Voice in American Poetry, September 3, 2003

Reviewer: C. Colt "It Just Doesn't Matter" (San Francisco, CA United States)

"Pieces of Intelligence" is the landmark publication of verses written by the previously unpublished existentialist poet, D.H. Rumsfeld. While Rumsfeld is widely recognized and often quoted, his poetry has received surprisingly scant attention until now.

Rumsfeld first emerged on the scene during the turbulent Watergate years, however his poetry remained overshadowed by more flamboyant voices of the time such as those of J. Dean, G.G. Liddy, and D. Throat. Beginning in the late 70s, Rumsfeld entered the so called "wilderness phase" of his creative ruminations and was scarcely heard from. Turning up in a number of odd corporate and government locations, and once even in Baghdad as a guest of Saddam Hussein, much of Rumsfeld's poetry during this time remains classified.

Rumsfeld's period of artistic obscurity came to an abrupt end with the tragic events of September 11th, 2001. As a traumatized nation struggled to understand what had taken place, Rumsfeld addressed both its disorientation and its deep nostalgia for better times in his now landmark poem, "Glass Box" (December 6th, 2001).

You know, it's the old glass box at the-
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's-

And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But-

Some of you are probably too young to remember those-
Those glass boxes,
But-

But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

The beauty of this poem is that it remains both complex and accessible in a manner that appeals to practically every type of reader. The poem contains a clear sense of regression, with each stanza becoming progressively smaller until the final stanza "stabilizes" at the same number of lines as the preceding one. Similarly, while the first three stanzas end in incompletion with expressions such as "It's-", "But-", and "But-" the final one firmly anchors the poem with a nostalgic reference to childhood in a bygone era. At a time when the collective psyche of the nation's populace had become traumatized in an unprecedented fashion, "Glass Box" showed them that the answer to all of their problems lay in the past. The poet had found his voice.

While "Glass Box" may be Rumsfeld's signature poem, it is really his deconstruction of knowledge in the poem "Unknown" (February 12th, 2002) that demonstrates his skill and subtlety as an existential poet.

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Because the musicality of this poem tends to fool many readers, they often miss out on its uncompromising logic. One useful trick to avoid the dreamy cadence produced by the "oh" sound in all the "knowns" is to separate them from the rest of the poem an a substantive manner:

Know known knowns
know know

Know known unknowns
not know

Unknown unknowns
don't know don't know.

Even by extracting and parsing the most emblematic term of this verse, we must labor to keep up with poet's logic. The beauty of this poem, as with many of Rumsfeld's more subtle ones is that, indeed, by the time he is done we wonder what it is we actually know.

While I have quoted two of Rumsfeld's more academic poems in this review, readers will be pleased to learn that he is a poet of tremendous variety, which makes his work infinitely readable. Among other genres, "Pieces of Intelligence" also features Rumsfeld's haiku, hiphop and free verse.

Whether you're a sophisticated student of poetry or just a person who enjoys some really cool verse, I highly recommend purchasing the first publication of D. H. Rumsfeld's poetry. I hope that in future we see more of Rumsfeld's verse including his lost earlier poems from the 70s and 80s.

stuff-happens dept.

The play's the thing. Interesting play by David Hare.

electronic-life dept.

As I write this, I am sitting with my laptop next to a vacuum cleaner power socket at Gate 12, Terminal 3 of JFK International Airport in New York. My iPod Mini is plugged and charging itself for the implending, mind-numbing twelve-hour flight to Paris. Internet Connectivity is through TMobile's pay-as-you-go WiFi service at JFK (I had subscribed at SFO Airport, and my account works seamlessly at JFK). Am I a geek or what...

map-quest dept.

Thanks again to Jeet for this diversion...

How much of India have I covered?

A long way to go yet...This definitely makes me parochial.

Brought to you by pratibha75, quizling and teemus.

h2g2 dept.

A bit of H2G2 trivia -- an answer to a question that has puzzled me greatly ... No! Not that answer, and not that question either ... it is this -- what is so funny about the name 'Ford Prefect'?

In the first book, Douglas Adams mentions that Ford chooses this name because he feels its nicely inconspicuous. Now after having read this far, knowing Adams' style, one begins to think there must have been some lingering irony behind that origin of his name.

A clue was revealed to me when I stumbled upon a wikipedia entry for H2G2 -- more specifically, the French translation, in which the names of the characters have been changed around. So, Ford Prefect becomes Ford Escort.

Apparently, Ford Prefect was the name of a Ford Car specifically marketed in the UK as a low-cost car in the 50s/60s that became quite popular. And Adams mentioned in an interview that the reason 'Ford' chose his name was because he simply miscalculated the dominant life-form.

Get it?

mystic-redemption dept.

In Mystic River, Tim Robbins plays a man abducted by child molestors as a kid, who spends his adult life finding and beating up child molestors. In that movie, he is seemingly dispatched into Boston's Mystic River by a vengeance-seeking Sean Penn.

In Steven Spielberg's War Of The Worlds, however, we learn that he somehow made it out of the river, moved to the countryside, and found out that his abductors were actually Aliens from outer-space, planning a mass extermination of humanity. Now he waits, talking to his shotgun in a rickety old basement of a rickety old house, biding his time. Until of course, his old tormentors arrive to finish the job.

Then he runs into a guy who calls himself "Ray Ferry", who is actually Mitch McDeere, hiding under an alias -- he brought down The Firm, remember? Mitch is trying hard to pretend he is not a Yuppy, working at the docks, trying hard to look like a slacker, stretching out his perfect abs to simulate a beer belly that isn't there. He's gone underground, taken his older brother's first name (and also his persona, I might add ... but naah, Ray McDeere was way too cooler), and managed to lose his wife to a guy who's not afraid to show his yuppiness (also I don't think Abby really forgave him for that beachside romp in the Bahamas, and of course, for the fact that he got to cheat with a Penelope-Cruz lookalike hottie and she got to cheat with Gene Hackman. Although women are turned on by wealth and power, well, he's still Gene Hackman.)

Abby -- she's actually Eowyn in disguise, conferred immortality after an accident in the grasslands of the Riddermark with a Noldorin Elf and some spare Longbottom Leaf from Pippin's secret stash -- has now moved to Boston.

Meanwhile, all these strange goings on, with people hiding themselves under aliases, talking to their shotguns, Aliens digging themselves into the earth, only to come out of it, first zapping human beings with a death ray, then thinking it would be a good thing to drink their blood and spray the tri-state area with their intestines instead, all of these strange things have been foreshadowed by Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding. He was just fed up of fixing boats in Zihuatanejo is my guess. Besides, when one does too much voice-over work, one does get 'institutionalized'.

ash-nazg-durbatulúk dept.

Almost four years ago, on a whim after reading too many /usr/games/fortune's, I bought a volume of The Lord of The Rings. It was a time in my life where I had developed a sort of mental block and had problems reading books (among other things, like spotting holes in the ground two steps ahead of me). I had spent almost a year before that without reading a single new book (this of course, includes my textbooks in engineering college), and had serious concentration problems. I would try to focus on things, but my mind would wander and I would begin to mentally digress.

Well this book eventually brought me great enjoyment and reassurance, and I feel I should acknowledge that. It was a welcome friend to me in a time of confusion and desperation. I had mixed feelings when reading the trilogy -- mostly because I was trying to force myself to read arduous, complex writing like Dostoeyevsky's Crime And Punishment and books of the same ilk. Rings seemed to be sinfully enjoyable compared to those other ones (the measure of a great book is -- it goes well with snack food of any kind), and for some time after I'd finished it, I was sort of lost because there wasn't anything else to read. So I hobbled out to the bookstore and back again, and bought The Hobbit instead.

More recently, over the last few months, I went through the entire Lord Of The Rings Extended DVDs -- through the documentaries, and also watched all the movies with commentaries turned on ( Cast, Director and screen writers, Weta Digital Special Effects Crew -- you name it. Don't ask me how I found the time).

And now, joy of joys, I have begun reading The Silmarillion. I have never read anything quite so beautiful, and so complete and as imaginative. Its like reading a "Best of" collection of human mythology. There are online reviews of The Silmarillion which say that it reads like a catalogue of events, but please don't believe them.

To paraphrase the central idea: the world is created out of a symphony by "The One" -- Eru or Iluvatar -- who creates a number of guardian spirits to watch over it, and then he creates Men, who are blessed with a will of their own and are driven by a quest for the infinite, and who above all have been bequeathed the one gift which the other spirits lack -- death, or freedom from the circles of the world.

How can you not like J.R.R.Tolkien?

color-me-bad dept.

Thanks to Jeet for this link. A rivetting, veritable explosion of color.

i-ain't-never-gonna-need-this-but-anyway dept.

An idea that some guy who calls himself numbski had for preventing the slashdot effect.

More interesting is an analysis of this idea by some other guy called morethanapapercert in the comments thread for the above journal posting. He coins an interesting term (don't know if he coins it or if it has always been in circulation) -- the golden minute rule -- which is a sort of thundering herd variant for the web.

The reason I read numbski's journal is his interesting suggestion on how to make OS X -- the Intel version -- run on non-Apple Intel hardware when it comes out (Apple is rumored to be thinking of putting a dongle-like ID chip on the motherboard to prevent installations on anything but Apple hardware).

In short, his idea is -- Install Darwin/x86 to get the base BSD subsystem; then copy over the other system binaries from an already installed OS-X Intel Machine. Hmmm...A very weird idea that isn't so cool because it doesn't involve any binary hacks. And needs an Apple machine, which we were trying to avoid in the first place (though why anyone would want to do this is beyond me -- hey call me biased, I don't mind).

But earns its fifteen minutes of attention.

dog's-bark dept.

Bangkok Street Dogs finally have their day.

wimax-mullahs-dept.

The problem with having led a peripatetic life in your childhood, is the occasional desire to take a peek at places and people you've left behind. It is a strange feeling to see words and names and phrases that were once part of your daily lingo now pop out of the page like vaguely familiar ghosts.

So every few months, I find myself parked on some obscure web-site such as The Bangkok Post. Back when I was a budding computer geek in the Land of Smiles, I would devour every square inch of the Wednesday supplement called Post Database. My dad did not mind either, in fact, he'd courier me a whole stack of Post Database prints when I moved into the computationally deficient heartland of India some years later to further my education.

Compared to the efforts I seem to have put in, I seem to have retained comparatively very little knowledge. I have a theory (read excuse) to explain that too, but that is another story.

To cut a long story short, this story grabbed my attention this time 'round, and finds its way into this blog.

I hope someone up there in the chain of command of the Indian Telecom Ministry has this at the back of their minds. Much of the terrestrial lines that Indian telecos have laid will be redundant once WiMax networks start popping up. Though god knows how these network specifications will deal with the inherent security issues that wireless has.