This is my third winter in the Seattle, and it's snowed progressively more each year. We've pretty much been snowed in since Thursday, although we did find time to see Slumdog Millionaire on Saturday. Actually just got back from a walk to the local cafe, where the person who actually knows how to take pictures took a bunch with her new camera. In the meantime, make do with a bunch I took from the safety of doorways earlier this morning, cause it was rather pretty
Not sure you are familiar with Pragerpedia. It's a wikipedia-like site for David Prager ... too many geek inside jokes to go there.
Anyway, you can ask the pragerpedia anything and it comes back with the "correct" answer.
So, given the stunning accuracy of the pragerpedia, my secret job is out in the open
Today, on the train from Portland and Seattle (I was in Portland for OSCON), I sat next to an elderly English lady (must have been in her mid-70's). We spent a good chunk of the journey chatting. Turns out that she was in the area to spend a couple of weeks with someone she has been pen friends with for 20+ years. I've never had a pen friend, but I know others who have, and in a way, it's a somewhat slower, but a little more elegant way of having virtual friends, much the way we have today with Friendfeed, Twitter and the likes. I have been lucky to have met a lot of my one time virtual buddies and have actually gotten to know some of them over time.
The question I can't help asking myself is, how can we scale these relationships. Having a pen friend or two is easy to handle, but what about 300, or 5000 if you are Robert Scoble? The next step in these tools, which have been more than useful for me, will be the ability to help users prioritize, and filter.
“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”
1) Bold: I have read.
2) Underline: Books I love.
3) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Phillip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (The advantages of having a mom who studies literature)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (haven't read the whole thing yet)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple, Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Not quite sure how this list originated, but I did better than I thought
What was your first car?
An old 1985 (?) Honda Accord that I bought from a departing grad student (I was a second year grad student at Syracuse at the time). Paid $1500 for it and double of that to fix it during it's lifetime. So much for that
There are things to be proud of and things that make you feel giddy. Here are a couple of links that fall into those categories.
One of the features of my grandfathers house in Delhi where I spend a few years as a kid (well on the floor above) and a year when I was in college is a stainless steel olympic torch. Recently, the Delhi edition of the Indian Express talked to my dad about simpler times and you'll find out how the torch ended up there
On a more recent and personal note, one of the people, someone I call the original alpha geek is Jon Udell. A couple of weeks ago, he interviewed me for his podcast, which went live today.
Muxtape - How is this thing legal? I have no idea but it's kinda cool. Here's mine
Another is hypemachine. Haven't really tried it, but it seems to do a great job of tracking music blogs, etc. Let's see if it works for my tastes and interests.
Here's the latest. Haven't had the scrobbler on too much what with travel n all
All the desis on here will love this
http://www.badmash.tv/dishoom/
All you Americans ... you should watch this too. For context ... read this first
