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 got there, started raining halfway through – with snow and hail at the higher elevations and a gust that brought the windchill
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:
This being Seattle and all, it’s not unlikely that there might be some rain during the day. Just how likely it is can be hard to say, but thanks to Umesh Unnikrishnan and the Seattle Rain-o-meter [site] all the work has been taken out of your guesswork for you! Simply select a month and date and you’ll be given the odds of rain that particular day, along with a couple of predictive stats.
So, check it out: http://umeshunni.com/rainometer.aspx
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 class and call methods on it with no compiler or anything.
Cool feature #2: It natively understands xml. Which means that you can get an xml blob and play around with it at the command line.
Combine the two together and what do you get?
A shell script that prints out the latest woot.com sale item and price:
PS C:Usersumeshu> ([xml] (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(“http://www.woot.com/Blog/Rss.aspx”)).rss.channel.item[0].title
Philips GoGear 2GB MP3 Player w/ FM Tuner – $49.99
Or how about the latest headlines from Slashdot:
PS C:Usersumeshu> ([xml] (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(“http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot”)).RDF.Item| select title
Brain Scanner Can Read People’s Intentions
Is Interoperable DRM Really Less Secure?
MIT’s Millimeter Turbine to be Ready This Year
Microsoft Not Dropping Hotmail Name
Mice Cured of Autism
Cisco to Open Source CTA
Windows Expert Jumps Ship
University Professor Chastised For Using Tor
FAA To Free Aircraft Hobbled By IP Laws
Apple’s Windows Apps Not Ready For Vista
Yahoo Pipes
Canonical and Linspire Make a Deal
Indonesia Stops Sharing Avian Virus Samples
Did Gates Fib About H1-B Salaries?
To Media Companies, BitTorrent Implies Guilt
Neat, huh 🙂 More to follow in the weeks ahead I suppose…
PS: Holy @!%*&, it’s been over two months since I last blogged! There’s been too much happening in life and work over the past few months that’s kept me busy, but I hope to blog more frequently in the New Year.
Today, we had the first snowfall of the season. Sadly, it started right after sunset, so I couldn’t get any photos of the landscape around our house covered in white. So, here’s the best I could get – a photo of the strip mall next to our house.
Snow falling as I walked out the garage to get a photo of the neighbors kids playing in the snow…
Hopefully, the snow sticks around till the morning so that I can get some photos on the way to work. I don’t think I have too much to worry about, though – given that it’s only the end of November and we’ve had snow already, I think we’re in for a white winter 🙂
PS: Jas writes in from Vancouver, BC about it snowing there: http://jasvir.com/2006/11/some-white-stuff-fell-from-sky.html
I took three days off this week and joined Vikram and his brother on a trip to Vancouver and Whistler in BC, Canada. Ullas was here too and joined us on the trip. I’d blog in detail about the trip, but Ullas has written up the salient points in his blog. Some trivia about the trip:
The trip itself was a lot of fun – Whistler was waay above my expectations and I will from now on look down upon every other ski resort, including Snoqualmie, with contempt for not living up to the bar that Whistler has set. We didn’t do as much skiing as would have liked – we started at 1 and were done by around 4.
A few pics in my flickr set.
Woohoo – something to be proud of… an Inbox with zero unread messages in it… for the first time in nearly three years!
Well, I kind of cheated, by moving all my mail from my Inbox to an archive folder the day after we shipped! The best part about starting with a clean Inbox is that I can now strive to be at zero email bounce at the end of each day or atleast each week.
It’s bad enough that our privacy is constantly threatened by surveillance cameras, spyware, data leaks, call centers and even Netflix… but 30 boxes’[1] new Buddy Cards take linking together the marks you leave on the web to a new level.
I was reading some blogs earlier[2] and chanced on a blog entry on Dodgeball‘s Google integration that decided to comment on.
All I did was to enter my Name, Email address and URL into the comment entry field and it, through some funky integration, gets my userphoto from flickr and added it to my comment. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when I hover over the ‘avatar’, I get a link to my (sparsely used) MySpace profile as well as my recent uploads to flickr!
Luckily, Buddy Cards seem to have a reasonable privacy policy that lets you control what shows up and allows you to opt out :
Buddy Cards are a service enabled by the blog owner and are subject to that blog’s privacy policy.
Blogs that make use of Buddy Cards generate a profile for each user that posts a comment on the blog.
Members 30 Boxes may edit and maintain what content appears on their Buddy Card.
For non-members, 30 Boxes searches the web for public information about the person making the comment. Information tied to the email address that the individual has chosen to make public on other sites (such as photo albums and blog posts) is used to create a Buddy Card.
Buddy Cards do not expose a user’s email address
but I’m shocked that this is an opt-out service as opposed to an opt-in one.
Private by default, anyone?
PS:
[1] Wasn’t 30 boxes supposed to be hot new web 2.0 calendaring app? Oh yeah, that was before Google Calendar!
[2] Still using bloglines, Google Reader’s still too slow for me. I don’t mind sacrificing Ajaxy coolness for speed.
(not the Real Estate bubble, silly… the Web 2.0 bubble)
You know you’re in the middle of a bubble when:
1. Companies which lose millions of dollars a month are bought out for billions of dollars.
2. Conferences about the bubble start handing out free iPod nanos.
I was checking out Google Transit the other day, to see if it’s any better than SoundTransit’s Trip planner in finding me a bus home.
On the bright side, it gives you a nice view of the actual distance and duration of the trip. It’s bus selection seems to be pretty lousy, though, with it picking the 271 over the faster 554 in the trip I tried.
What cracked me up is that it seems to completely ignore the fact that I’m not Moses and can’t part Lake Sammamish to walk home.
Come to think of it, if I could walk across Lake Sammamish, I wouldn’t need a bus at all, now would I?
One of the reasons I like taking and looking at photos is because they capture people’s thoughts, emotions and memories and preserve them for eternity. Every year, when I visit my parents in India, I like to browse through the old photo albums in the almira and gaze at photos of my great grandmother who I’ve never met, my grandparents, two of whom exist only in my memories now, baby photos of my cousins, photos of my uncles when they had hair and so on…
The funny thing about Orkut, which everyone and their dog in India seems to be on these days, is that I meet a lot of my middle and highschool friends there. Since I graduated from highschool before most of us had email (or orkut/facebook etc. existed), I had lost contact with most of them over the years and it’s been great digging them up from someone’s friend’s list. This has of course swelled my friend’s list though not as badly as this guy’s:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brv-TIb70b0.
So, recently I found my 2nd grade classmate Shikha on orkut, then blogspot and finally flickr. So, imagine my surprise when I was browsing through her photos to find a couple of old photos of me!
For your viewing pleasure:
and
No points for guessing which one is me! Geez.