So why is GMail marking its own Google Alerts that come into my inbox as spam?
Branding a Bailout/Stimulus
It just struck me how important branding is and how well the Obama administration has used it in the brief weeks since Jan 20th. The $700 million “bailout” negotiated by the Bush controlled white house was given a negative connotation right from the beginning simply because the media and politicians very quickly called it a bailout. Of course, no one with self pride wants a bailout, and no one wants to give a bailout to to someone (in this instance, banks) who don’t deserve it.
On the otherhand, everyone does want to do something to “stimulate” the economy and hence a $825/$890/$(whatever it is right now) billion stimulus package seems to have much more general support than I remember the bailout package ever having. Sure, there is much more to these two packages, including their official names, but I just thought this was interesting.
What Google Services do you use?
Thinking about this on the drive in to work this morning, I was astounded by the number of Google Services, Tools or Software I use regularly. [For the purpose of this post, I define regularly as “several times a month”]. In no particular order, here they are:
- Google Search & its various avatars (Images, Mobile, Local, Package tracking, Area code, Flight Status, Movie Show timings, stock quotes, Music, etc)
- GMail
- Google Talk/GChat
- Google Reader
- You Tube
- Google Alerts
- Google Chrome
- Google Toolbar
- Google Finance
- Goog-411
- iGoogle
- Google Maps & Mobile Maps
- Google News
- Google Reader
- Google Docs
- Blogger (Passive user, i.e. reader of contect)
Some others that I use less frequently or have used in the past are:
- Google Checkout
- Google Product Search
- Google Earth
- Orkut
- Google Translate
- Picasa
- Knol
- Blogger
- Google Scholar
- Google Desktop
- Google Groups
- Google Calculator & Unit Conversion, Book Search, etc.
Phew, quite a list of prodcuts, right? I dont think I’ve forgotten any, but let me know if I have. And I dont pay for a single one…impressive!
Indian Unix Engineer almost Brings Fannie Mae to its Knees
Wired is reporting this story about an Indian Unix Engineer who almost brought Fannie Mae to its knees using a logic bomb script: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/fannie.html. Apparently, he was employed by a technology consulting firm but worked onsite at Fannie Mae. In this time of turmoil in the Indian technology oursourcing market, the last thing the country needs is more bad press about Indians on H1 visas causing trouble in the technology consulting field.
Intrepid Ibix
The Vaio laptop is finally working. The last few weeks saw the motherboard, optical drive, and internal power cable get replaced. It took 3 visits from a technician to get it all done. The second of the 2-year warranty on the laptop expires in a few months. I hope this is the end of the problems with it. Anyway, I purchased this way back in 2005 March, so it is coming up on 4 years. I dont think I used the Dell for 4 years even. Altough, to give credit to that machine, nothing ever went wrong with it – save the battery totally draining. It still boots in to WinXP, but the processor on that has become so slow that its not worth the trouble any more.
I just installed Intrepid Ibix (Ubuntu 8.10) on the Vaio. I installed it within XP first in order to get all the bugs worked out before I wiped the system. I intend to use it this way for a few weeks before wiping XP completely. Out of the box, everything worked splendidly, save the sound. I’ve normally has a lot of trouble getting the video card working on any machine I’ve tried to install various flavors of Linux on. This is the first time that process went without a glitch. Thankfully, Flash is now available for Ubuntu so I installed that and retrieved all the required updates. Things seemed to be going great until I popped open Hulu.com – at which time I realized I had no sound! Playing around with the setting of the mixer didn’t quite work. Also, it seemed like soundcard was installed and working properly, I just wasn’t outputting any sound. Ubuntuforums.org is a great resource, but I was having no luck. I finally came across this…such a simple solution, so complicated to figure out!
1. On the toolbar at the top of the Ubuntu screen, next to the time display, there is a speaker icon. Right-mouse click it, and choose “Open Volume Control”.
2. Go to “Edit” and then “Preferences”. This takes you to the Volume Control Preferences box. Here, tick all the boxes for all the track options provided (“Master”, “Master Mono”, etc., but especially “Headphone Jack Sense” and “External Amplifier”).
3. Now close that box, and go back to the Volume Control box.
4. Click on the “Playback” tab. Make sure none of the playback tracks (“Master”, “Master Mono”, “Headphone”, etc.) is muted. If any is muted, unmute it. Make sure none of the volume buttons are down bottom. Make sure they are up.
5. Go to the “Switches” tab. This is the essential bit I found that made it all work. Untick these two boxes: “External Amplifier” and “Headphone Jack Sense”. Now, you can close the Volume Control box.
What really impresses me is that WiFi worked great, out of the box. Even more impressive, the Fn keys (brightness, page up/down, home/end) work as well. I’ve not tested Fn-F7 (monitor out) but I’m sure that will work too. The one thing that I dont see so far is a drive for the Memory Stick reader. But I’ll figure that out soon, I’m sure.
Journey
I have a new found fascination for Journey. I’ve only recently discovered the extent of the popularity of the songs recorded by this band. Until the beginning of 2008, I didn’t quite know who they were. This disturbs me, because I thought I was fairly well educated in the classic rock bands of the 70s and 80s. I’ve been listening to their music incessently on YouTube – not the greatest quality, but it sufficient. I also really want to revitalize my MP3 collections, but that is hours and hours of work. I’ve been wanting to revitalize that for years now. Some day, some day…
Penang
#3 in the list of my Philadelphia “Must-Visits” (Yes, I’ve been eating out a lot), is Penang. It can be found on 10th and Arch. It is a Malaysian restaurant in the Chinatown area of Philadelphia that I first visited back in 2002. For a vegetarian, opening the menu there can be disheartening until one learns that almost everything on can be made in a “veggie, no meat” option. Upon being seated, you are given a pot of hot herbal tea and small, oriental porcelean cups. Upon closer inspection, a lot of the menu has Indian and Thai influence. Try the Roti Telur and Roti Kanai for apetizers, but make sure to tell them no meat. Main courses can be chosen from a variety of fried and drunken noodles, or rice dishes that are delightfully flavored and suit the Indian palate. It is great escape from the normal mild and almost flavorless American food found everywhere else. I think my absolute favorite part of the meal is the end – when they bring out sliced oranges or “mosambi” that clears the mouth of all the other taste of the night and leaves one with a wonderfully clean, slightly sweet flavor.
MadMex
MadMex is my second nomination for a Philadelphia “Must-Visit”. It’s official address is 3401 Walnut Street, but it can actually be found at 35th and Movarian, a tiny street that is not really a street between Sansom and Walnut. It is in the University City area and is generally crowded with college kids. Its got great specials, including half-off food at various times during the week. A large selection of beer and great margaritas are always available. And to top it off, the food is excellent. I’ve been there several dozen times in the last 7 years I’ve spent in Philadelphia. I’ve been there for a few memorable birthdays and other occasions where things have got — somewhat out of hand. When I’m looking for great Mexican food, MadMex is my top choice.
Mint
I changed banks for this website – www.mint.com. I think everybody should use it.
I’ve always been rather careful about how much money I have and how much I’ve spent. I would usually check my bank and credit accounts every few days and I knew my networth within a few hundered dollars at any given moment. I got my need for close money management from my mum, I suppose. As a kid, I used to watch her write down her expenses in a notebook that she kept in her cuppboard. Her’s was nothing fancy, just a list of how much was spent and what the expense was on. When I moved to the US in September 2001, and was for the first time responsible for my own money, I started to do the same. Every dollar I spent was documented in a little diary. It slowly evolved into calculating my weekly expenditures and bank balance, but for nearly two years it was all hand-written. I experimented with various Excel spreadsheets with complicated forumals in cells, but that never quite satisfied what I was looking for. I was suggested Quicken and MS Money, but then never quite appealed to me (I think amount of manual work required for software that was supposed to automate something, irked me.) Some years ago, I stopped keeping track of money manually and resorted to checking bank and credit card accounts almost daily. When I was a student and didn’t have much income, or resources, this was easy enough. As I moved out into the professional world, this became somewhat harder with regular income and tons of expenses. Adding to this was the complication of several credit accounts. Nonetheless, at any given moment, I could reasonably estimate what I had in which account.
To someone like me, Mint is a boon. I’m sorely dissapointed that it is a US-only tool at this time. For now, I’m here and I’m enjoying it.
Jesus Camp
Jesus Camp: I watched this documentry last night. I’m writing these thoughts without reading any other reviews of the movie, save the snippets that come up on the Netflix website and the movie’s Wikipedia site that I pulled up to find the director’s name, etc. I’d seen trailers for the movie some years ago, but was unable to find more details about it at that time. I’m glad I got the chance to watch it.
The movie provides an overview of a “bible-camp” that Evangelical Christians in Missouri attend. The camp is focussed on childern in the 7-12 year range. The movie itself focusses on 3 or 4 kids and their journey from being introduced to the camp, attending it, and their impressions and actions after it. The movie alternates between scenes of the childern at camp and other places and an admittedly Christian radio talk show host who can not fathom the creation of the next generation of Jesus’s army. Significantly more time is spent on the children than on the radio talk show host and there is no other negetive commentry on the former. It is a surprisingly balanced view on the the reasons why parents send their kids to such camps and the reason people run such camps. However, the filming of the movie (angles, length of shots, etc) itself does cast a somewhat negative light on the premise of the documentary.
As an observer and viewer, some things in the movie frighten me and other things impress me. Firstly, I’m concerned by the age of the children being indoctrinated. Getting them this young means they really never get the chance to learn any other point of view. Secondly, having such firm beliefs implanted from such a young age probably makes one more likely to be an extremist later in life. I have no proof of this, but don’t middle-eastern extremists get started similarly. Thirdly, the rationale of the parents camp authorities for why they run this camp is “because they’re doing it too”. Finally, the “trance” the children seem to be in at various times through out the film frighten me. They are shown to be in tears for what they claim are reasons that even I can not comprehend. What impresses about the kids is their cohereance and ability to string together well thought out sentences about why they’re doing the things they are doing. Now I dont know if they’ve just been so thoroughly brainwashed that this is all they know, or they’re really capable of thought that I think is atypical of children of that age.
Overall, a recommended watch.
Krishna Srinivasan 