Thoughts from the other side…

I rarely write anything about politics or my view of the world, but Arvind’s post “Africa: why it’s fucked up and what you can do” appealed too much to the armchair economist in me to keep quiet. Particularly interesting is this quote:

The main problem with Africa is petty dictators. Don’t take my word for it — [...]

Reason #253 that Facebook rocks:

You can keep track of other crappy social networks using their corresponding facebook apps:

+1 for Extensible Platforms and the Social [...]

Today, while shopping at Costco, I had the option of picking between Tellicherry pepper and Malabar Pepper.

Both grown in the “tropics of India’s Southwestern coast” no less…

Tom Friedman is probably turning in his grave bed now and mumbling something about the world [...]

3rd time’s a charm I guess. I finally realized that the best place to watch the Blue Angels show is from the I-90 bridge when it’s closed. Not Genesee Park, not some random location in Mercer Island, but right there on the bridge. I took my parents to the show today inspite of the fact that [...]

Last week, the Wife & I took our annual summer vacation and headed down south to escape Seattle’s liquid sunshine. We spent a day at Orlando’s Sea World (where Shamu sprayed salt water all over my camera – but that’s another story) and then drove down to Port Canaveral to board Royal Caribbean‘s Sovereign of the Seas for [...]

Two related articles about the lack of respect for copyrights in Asia that caught my eye today:

via Slashdot:

“Apparently Japanese TV and bloggers have just discovered Disney’s theme park in China, where young children can be part of the Magic Kingdom and interact with their favorite characters (like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the Seven Dwarfs). The [...]

I’ve been using Google Reader as my blog reader/RSS Aggregator for the past few months. This, after trying out Bloglines, Outlook, NewsGator, RSS Bandit, Live.com and countless other desktop, online and mobile RSS readers over the past few years. So, what makes Google reader better than the lot:

1. It’s faaaast. No more waiting for 200 items and [...]

Middle of March? Check.

Switch to daylight savings time? Check.

The NCAA in full swing? Check.

Springtime in the Great Northwest? Umm.. not really…

It’s a week away from the official start of spring and the weather’s still grey and dull. VikS & I skied last weekend at Alpental is some rather lousy conditions. It was foggy when we [...]

I’ve been lazy with the blog again and it’s only because I’ve been too busy at and outside of work Some interesting tidbits from my life over the past few weeks:

I wrote a little app called the Seattle Rain-O-Meter a couple of weekends back. The app gives you the probability of rain in Seattle on any given day based [...]

Soo… PowerShell seriously rocks! I just downloaded the 1.0 release for Vista today and was playing around with it. Here’re my top 2 features in the couple of hours that I’ve been playing with it…

Cool feature #1: You have the entire .net framework at your disposal from the command line. So, you can instantiate any .net [...]