sandipb.net

Granted, it is about 37 minutes long. But it is one of the finest that I have ever heard. It is also one of the rarest, in the sense that a political candidate, running for the president of USA, no less, could ever dare to make. It is also rare to find even non-politicians confront the issue of race so effectively on the face. It is also one of the best references for those learning about public speech.

I must have been living under a rock all these days. I just discovered Librarything yesterday. Librarything.com is your online bookshelf. It lets you enter just the ISBN of books , and will pull in all the rest of the meta info - even thumbnail cover images. If you have a bar code scanner, you can scan your hundred+ book collection in no time at all. For Indian prints, I use the US ISBN number of the original written in the inside pages next to the print information, and tagging the book “indian-edition”.

So he decided that this was perhaps not such a wise move. There is a video presentation explaining why. The summary is that the representative he is fighting against is pretty strong, and for a first hand politician, the margin of defeat is going to be enormous. And “losing big” is not the best way to start such a campaign. Nice quote I read today which summarizes the frustrations of newbies in the FOSS world - I would RTFM if there was an FM to FR.

Resurrection of lug-delhi planet. I intend to put in different planets based on my interests. I am calling it a planetary system :-P Hopefully others would find it successful. In other news, I have been trying out Twitter for the past few days. It is turning out to be quite addictive. Aren’t we often stuck at times, with nothing to do for hours, with just your mobile to give you company?

Flickr’s camera stats is an enormously humbling resource for me. It would be the most powerful message for newbie photography enthusiasts - creativity rules technology any day, so stop thinking too much about your camera. The kind of amazing photos taken using basic point-and-shoot cameras by talented photographers from around the world, keeps me firmly rooted to the ground while I lug my bulky Rebel Xti wherever I go.

I just saw the update on Lessig’s blog - he is actually considering running for Congress this year! You can find more at http://lessig08.org/. Lessig’s announcement last year of the shift of his efforts over the next decade had significantly changed the way I look at myself. I had been involved in LUGs and FOSS advocacy for almost eight years by then. But I suddenly realized (and perhaps there are quite a few people out there who always felt that way about me) that I am nothing more than an armchair activist.

Dummyhead recording I was recently introduced to the world of binaural recordings, and was blown away with the dramatic experience. What is special about binaural sound is that you are totally immersed into the sound. No, the sound isn’t around you like in 5.1 channel surround sound. Rather, the sound is almost within your head, as if your ears were there, and the sound is moving all around you … so realistic that every one I introduced to this magic, spent the first few minutes in disbelief.

This has got to be the funniest stuff I have read. I have seen some bad translations, but this confidently beats everything I have seen. Read May I take your order?

Wasp attacking the roach This is probably one of the the most chilling of wildlife stories I have ever read. And the video in the article was as scary. The wasp, which lives in tropical regions of Africa, India and the Pacific Islands, relies on cockroaches for its grisly life cycle. But unlike many venomous predators, which paralyse their victims before eating them or dragging them back to their lair, the wasp’s sting leaves the cockroach able to walk, but unable to initiate its own movement.

Really nice quote in an article of the current issue of Time. I had never looked at the differences in this way before. The actual comparison here is done between Islamic societies and the west, but you can mostly replace “Islamic” with “Eastern” over here. “That’s the big difference between us,” he shrugged. “You Westerners make love in public and pray in private. We Muslims do exactly the reverse.”