Smile

It seems to be ages since there was a cheerful post on this page.

We’ve changed the theme here for the sake of it. Rubric was nice and elegant, and I really love the pen next to the title, but we got extremely, extremely bored of the same look. So here’s a new theme. It’s called The Journalist. It’s not rubric, but this was the one I hated the least.

Anyway, the title is yet another Queen reference – Smile was the name of the first incarnation of Queen. And I’ve said this a zillion times before and will say it again, Queen Rules.

Speaking to my cousins who are in their late teens, I realize I’ve become some sort of relic in their eyes.

I adore Carnatic music. It’s been ages since I listened to any music which is not older than me – Jethro Tull, Queen, Beatles, Bee Gees, Asha Bhonsle, Kishore Kumar, AC/DC, The Doors, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong – it turns out, either stopped performing before I was born (due to death, sometimes due to old age), or had their best times back then… I’m also hopelessly out of touch with the latest music, and despise the new filmstars. And my favourite radio station here is USC’s western classical channel – which music to them apparently sounds like Tom-and-Jerry music. Oh, and I don’t like the newer versions of Tom and Jerry. I also can’t see the point of Facebook. I watch Desperate Housewives like I’m an addict. I can’t follow SMS lingo. I am a spelling Nazi. And, the worst crime of ‘em all, I don’t like pizza now (I’ve grown sick of too much pizza. Yes, that happens).  *Sigh* So much for hip-olderCousin-ness. I think my mother’s older cousins are way hipper than me in my cousins’ eyes.

Thankfully geekness counts for something with some of my cousins who ask for help with game development in Python. So far it’s been basic Python STL stuff, but I guess when they discover that the only libraries I use are PyBrain and SciPy, and that I have no clue about game development libraries for Python, it’s going to be a long fall from grace – from the higher echelons of geeky-coolness down to “This is my akka, she’s a nerd”-ness. Especially since they are fast outpacing me in the domain of being able to pull out e-versions of the latest and the greatest in literature from seemingly nowhere. Hmm… maybe I should buy an iPad to get back to being cool.

I’ve been rather addicted to 30 Rock of late. There’s something so unapologetically irreverent and cheerful about it.

Leechblock keeps me off Google Reader, Youtube and a dozen other sites for most of my day, thank god for that. So what do I do? Find new sites to be addicted to. Thankfully these ones don’t have me in a vice-like grip yet.
Topping the list is Fizy.com. It’s thankfully not blocked in the USA anymore. You can look for music online, and make playlists which you can save. You can also share permalinks to songs on Twitter, Facebook, and a few other places. The only sad part is that it isn’t good for phonetic search. So ‘Pyar’ and ‘Pyaar’ are considered two different words.
However, Guruji.com/music totally rocks in that department. Tragically, they are having their offices raided and things just because the websites they search through sometimes host mp3s illegally. They are one Indian web startup I really have grown to love, and they had better not be coming down; it’s going to scare off more entrepreneurs. Totally not what the country needs.

And check out avaxhome.ws if you want ebooks. Rather a good repository. I’m now so used to it that the other day, I was at the student center, when I saw a woman whip out a book with some really curious title that reeked of conspiracy and thrill, and as if out of instinct, I pulled that book out of the website. Of course, I promptly deleted it from my hard drive and made a note to tell the librarian about the book so that I can legally borrow it .

And do you want $8000? Check out Yahoo’s Learning To Rank Challenge: http://learningtorankchallenge.yahoo.com/. There’s still a month left. It is a rather fun contest, it turns out.

One of my favourite bloggers has taken the plunge into writing books now. So many of them doing this now…. I’m struck by an idea. Will it be a good idea to aggregate blogposts into a book? Topicwise? Current-ness of the writing is not an issue, assume that posts will be picked in such a way that even if you read them ten years later, they’d still read current. So tell me. Is this an idea that’ll work? Has it been done before? Let me know in the comments section.Thanks.

And… smile! It makes everyone wonder what you are upto.