I went to San Francisco after a very long time this evening. I like to believe that I have not grown into a city sleek. (I believe it was Tolstoy who said that you can take a boy out of a village, but you can not take the village out of the boy). And I am really more at ease on a remote stretch of forest or mountain than on city streets. Cities give me the adrenaline rush, but too much of it is like living on caffeine. I then need to go sleep it off in a long trip somewhere far off to get my sanity back. But great cities are also, like caffeine or alcohal addictive. If you have been away from it for a long time and then suddently drink up, it all comes back with a vengeance.

And I have always been utterly charmed by San Francisco. When you live there, you get desensitized to its distinctive colours and smells. But last evening when I went there, I had the hightened senses of a kid. Even the mundane was magical. The majesty of the sky scrappers against the evening lights, the muni buses going past ponderously, the evening rush of commuters, the brief whiffs of perfume. It was all very prosaic, but somehow deeply satisfying.

I came back and tried to think of a great city photgrapher who saw cities through equally naive eyes. Not someone like Winogrand, whose obsession was the streets of New York city, nor a great like Ernst Haas, who saw everything through his own peculiar vision. (incidentally, I LOVE Hass' photographs). But someone who shoots straight, but who captured the spirit of the city, its everyday charms. Someone who has photographed San Francisco. I guess there are many out there. I guess I just dont know of them.

Google seems to have taken a strong stance against Pop-up Ads. It also links to a freeware application that would remove pop-up programs from your machine (ie if any has gotten in via Audio galaxy et al). Via Blogdex.

Also check out Top 11 Bootlegs of 2001. (ie if you haven't already!)

Raphael Just's photography (via Dooce).
His photographs made me stop. Even though I am not into that kind of remote, posed images, his photos are seductive in their own rights. Very well executed site too.

I usually dont give much credence to conspiracy theories. Most such theories tend to be idle speculation. Nevertheless, 'United Flight 93 Crash Theory Home Page' seems to bring out some interesting inconsistencies in the flight 93 story that we know so well. (via Rebeccablood). I think that even if that flight actually was shot down ( it seems highly unlikely that something this big can be kept secret), under the circumstances it was fully justified.

I am a sucker for good travel writing. I like reading about remote places, barren empty landscapes. I like lean chiselled prose. I love Chatwin's writing.

For a long time it seemed that good travel writing has found a home in the webzines. Now as one web publication after another closes its doors, there is a migration of people who pioneered travel content on the web back to print or to independent zines. Sustaining good related zines seems to be as difficult on the web as it is on print.

Good part is people are still trying to give good travel writing a home on the web. Jim Benning and Michael Yessis have developed this site called World Hum. I hope it becomes popular and remains interesting. Don George, the guy who created the 'Wonderlust' section of Salon has moved over to Lonely Planet. There is an interesting conversation between Benning and George 'Soul-Stretching Adventures Don't Sell Ads' available in the current issue of Online Journalism Review. George indicated that something similar to Wonderlust may be in the works in the online version of LonelyPlanet.

Rediscovered Carl Steadman last night. I knew of him earlier when suck.com was cool. I remember thinking WOW! after I had read his profile in Wired (it used to be available in Bangalore bookstores 2 months after publication and was obscenely expensive for a magazine). I remember wanting to come to the valley very badly and thinking its all gonna pass me by.

I had forgotten all about that excitement of working, of feeling that I am part of something new, great and revolutionary. Then last night I was reading 'When Automatic's Teller Ran Dry', and it brought back the forgotten and sullied dreams of yester years. And then I read Carl's 99secrets- a sad, beautiful, haunting nothing that is possible only on the web and it somehow, in a lopsided, weird way made me feel better about life.

I can't resist the temptation to post this Justice department cover-up. Hilarious! (via Mefi).

My take on Enron:

Scandal of course would be an understatement in describing Enron. While the corruption in Enron itself is bad enough, I have been more fascinated by Anderson's failure to raise the alarm. To my mind, the complicity of the accounting firm is symptomatic of a systems failure that was waiting to happen.

'Lynn E. Turner, former chief accountant for the SEC and now a professor at Colorado State University, calculates that in the past half-dozen years investors have lost close to $200 billion in earnings restatements and lost market capitalization following audit failures. And the pace seems to be accelerating. Between 1997 and 2000, the number of restatements doubled, from 116 to 233.'

(Business Week in 'Accounting in Crisis')

The same article goes on to say:

That accountants have become increasingly dependent on consulting is clear. In 1993, 31% of the industry's fees came from consulting. By 1999, that had jumped to 51%. In 2001, for example, PricewaterhouseCoopers earned only 40% of its worldwide fees from auditing, 29% coming from management consulting and most of the rest from tax and corporate finance work..... More telling, in a study of the first 563 companies to file financials after Feb. 5, 2001, the University of Illinois' Bailey found that on average, for every dollar of audit fees, clients paid their independent accountants $2.69 for nonaudit consulting. Puget Energy (PSD ), based in Bellevue, Wash., had the greatest imbalance, paying PricewaterhouseCoopers only $534,000 for its audit, but over $17 million in consulting fees. "That's 30 years of audit fees in one year for nonaudit," points out Bailey. Marriott International Inc. ...paid Andersen just over $1 million for its audit, but more than $30 million for information technology and other services.

I suspect organizations and people who are willing to be compromised would be compromised no matter what. And even if Anderson didn't make $27 million in consulting from Enron in 2000 (as opposed to $25 million in audit fees), the same thing might had happened. Since there is a regular procession of auditors who join their client companies, individual auditors may still be tempted to go out of their way to please clients. But without the temptation of consulting fees that encourages auditors to go out of their way to keep clients happy, organizational objectivity of auditing firms would probably not be as severely compromised. While the BW article also recommends limiting auditors move to client companies, I think that it is impractical. It is probably better to try to force a gap of 2-3 years before a consultant can move into a client company that he consulted for.

NYT in a front page story Jan 24th expressed reservation about Washington's ability and inclination in enforcing closer supervision of accounting firms. Arthur Levitt, the former SEC chairman battled very publicly and ultimately unsuccessfully in 2000 with the industry over his proposal to limit consulting by auditing firms.

Let us pray that the momentum of the Enron scandal ensures at least some much needed reforms.

While I am on the subject of consulting: I also feel that one of the reasons technology consulting companies are trusted so much less by their clients is because tech consulting is badly compromised by their alliance partnerships. There are very few consulting companies that doesnt pitch (subtly or directly) products in which they have a vested interest to their clients. It has now come to a stage where many good product company will not look to ally itself with a technology consulting company if it does not bring in business to the product company. In many case, it would need to commit sizeable revenue to the product company to be accepted as a partner. As a result, most consulting companies today are becoming more hustler than consultants. Most of the clients who went for the big-buck e-business roduct implementations in the last few years simply did not need to go into that kind of expenses to achieve what they needed. They allowed themselves to be steered them towards the big ticket items by the consultants. The chicken is now coming home to roost.

I was surfing through O'Reilly Network's Weblogs . Its a cool place, but it is mildly exasperating for people who are not familiar with the O'Reilly Network. You would thing that O'Reilly would know enough about information navigation to have some kind of a directory. There actually isnt any good directory or search engine for weblogs out there. But the number and size of Weblogs in O'Reilly is managable enough for them to be able to categorize them properly.

Anyway, Gordon Mohr's weblog has the scoop on what is happening on Kazaa - the P2P file sharing software. Gordon is the CTO of Bitzi - a similar company that apparently 'identifies, describes, and discovers files of all types'. Sounded a little like a Microsoft web services pitch to me, but the site looks interesting. Would spend some time exploring it this weekend. I also ran into ONLamp.com somewhere there. It seems to be a great resource for web development, using linux, apache, mysql, perl, php, python. I have been planning to look into php for some time. I heard that PHP Manual is the best online resource for it. But OnLamp seems to cover the other related technology areas too.

BTW, I am trying to migrate my bookmarks from IE to Opera. If someone knows an easy way, please drop me a note.

Notes fromBlogger Pro demo. I wonder when?

Audio and text of Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech. It is one of the most powerful speeched that I have ever read. First time I heard it was on TV - I was a kid in high school in India. I still get goosebumps when I read it now.

The Mediaval Vocational Personality test (via Mefi) is the funniest that I have taken in some time. Regular readers have probably figured out that I love taking these tests! Anyway, I am the 'Benevolent Ruler' type. This is what it says about me:

"You are the idealistic social dreamer. Your overriding goal is to solve the people problems of your world. You are a social reformer who wants everyone to be happy in a world that you can visualize. You are exceptionally perceptive about the woes and needs of humankind. You often have the understanding and skill to readily conceive and implement the solutions to your perceptions. On the positive side, you are creatively persuasive, charismatic and ideologically concerned. On the negative side, you may be unrealistically sentimental, scattered and impulsive, as well as deviously manipulative. Interestingly, your preference is just as applicable in today's corporate kingdoms.".

So there!

We went to see the Lick Observatory in Mount Hamilton yesterday. Its a gorgeous drive off 680 south (exit at Alum Creek) that takes you all the way up to the top of Mount Hamilton. On a sunny, clear day one can see the San Jose valley down below. The road is winding, curvy and narrow with lots of blind corners and not without the occasional idiot who thinks he is driving in Nascar. The spectacular views reminded me of the the road leading to Mount Diablo. But Mt. Hamilton in winter is more barren and desolate. On the other side the observatory, the road leads down 130 to the emply quarter of California. We drove down it for a while. It is abolutely quiet and empty except for a a car or two wheezing past occasionally or cattle crossing the road. If you go, make sure that you take a full tank of gas - there is probably no gas station all the way to Livermore!

The observatory was built on the donations made by James Lick. Mr. Lick made his money from the California gold rush. He used to make Piano cabinets and invested the money that he made into buying up real estate in San Francisco when people started selling off everything to go look for gold in Northern California. The property appreciated considerably over time and he decided to build a monument to himself. He apparently toyed with the idea of building the world's greatest pyramid in downtown San Francisco, but was convinced instead to build the greatest telescope by U.of California. After he died he was buried at the base of the telescope.

Those days, Mule trains hauled the parts up the mountain. At the time of its completion, at 36 inch diameter it was the largest refractor telescope in the world. Even now, there is only one bigger refractor telescope (a 40-inch telescope in Illinois). But no one builds refractor types any longer. Lick observatory now houses a 120 inch reflector telescope which is used a lot more often. There is some images shot by one of the Lick observatory telescopes here.

The Geek hierarchy. Found it rather funny.

NPR has done a story: Born to Be Tone Deaf that says tone deafness can be genetic. It also has links if you want to explore the subject further. (via Mefi via Girlhacker)

I saw ?In the Bedroom? yesterday. I haven?t seen anything so moving in a very long time. It?s a quiet movie that holds a lot of intensity and grief and anger and passion. It was like watching a fragile piece of bone china breaking apart in slow motion. The acting was unexpectedly touching. Everything kind of came together - the haunting Maine backdrop, the low-key music, and the artless camera work - to leave a very vivid and real image.

I was scouring on the net for profiles and interviews of Todd Field, the director of ?In the Bedroom? ever since. The Guardian had the best story on Field here.In another story on on the same movie, Guardian says

Here are the reviews of ?In the Bedroom.

Idly surfing last night:
-NewScientist's Alcohal: The inside story tells you more about Alcohal than you would really like to know. But what I liked most was this story which talks about why red wine is good for the heart. Before this, I have never really read in any respectable journal that red wine is good for health.

-Write-up on Warbloggers: Well-written, but extremely partisan. But what can you expect from someone who is writing for Antiwar.com?

(via Blogdex)

Dan Gilmour's remarks on Google and how its going to obviate the needs of domain name did not seem very impressive to me. That was why I was surprised at the inordinate amount of publicity that those remarks received. Finally, here are some remarks in the 16.1.02's post (its a British site!)of plasticbag.org that explores the logical inconsistencies of that argument.

I went there via Kottke. I think kottke's is one of the best placeholders for weblogs out there. In the absence of a really good portal for weblogs, the best way that one can explore new weblogs is through referrals. Since he gets a lot of press, I suspect people are always sending links to him. I dont mean to say that those he highlights are the best out there. But going through his links is a good way to get to find some of the very good ones. I think lightningfield.com provides the same serice for - what I can only call - photologs.

Pong!
Another video game. Not a good idea to open it in office (via GMSV).

I ran into this quiz today that apparently determines your political orientation (via Mefi). Very interesting. Turns out that I am a left libertarian (left-right -0.50, Authoritarian/Libertarian: -3.79). I always thought of myself a centrist! Since I am a borderline leftist (only 0.5!) I guess I can call myself a centrist? Anyway, they have interesting questions, gave me pause for thought. Great Reading List too.

Another interesting quiz, Which drink are you? is inching its way up blogdex. I love watching how some interesting new content slowly makes its way up the collective consciousness of the weblog community and suddenly its here, there everywhere. I think blogdex is a greater cultural barometer of the North American Internet cognoscenti (that's a loaded word to use, sounds rather arrogant and is probably not very accurate. but I am groping for a word) than anything else out there.

fyuze : An interesting concept for a weblog portal. There isn't a lot of content yet, but it will be a cool tool to use if a lot of people sign up and add sites.

I have been reading Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. I have been hearing about it for some time, just couldn't lay my hands on it earlier. Its an interesting read. The only problem is I have to return it next week and the next few days are shaping up to be very busy. I also found an interesting site called Project Gutenberg- (via Mefi). It has been around for quite some time. You can download most of the classics from that site (all pre-1923 due to copyright restrictions). I dont think I want to read entire books online. But its accessible and one cal always read them slowly.

Check out Yann Arthus-Bertrand's ariel photography Awesome stuff.

In case you are using ICQ or Windows XP:
AOL reported a bug in its pre-2001b versions of ICQ and urged users to upgrade.
Technical problems have stopped some users from downloading a patch for what appears to be serious vulnerability in XP. If you are using XP, you should probably download it as soon as it becomes available. (via GMSV).

Ok, here is some fun stuff. I am sure you may have already seen some of these (The clock!). But this is for posterity's sake! If you still haven't seen these, check them out. (If you are in office, make sure u have earphones on):

-An arcade game
-Counter-Rotating Spirals Illusion.We used to do similar stuff as kids in school.
-Deng deng dong
-The by now famous clock
(All thru Mefi.)

Also, there is a new photolog at knurdle.com Pretty neat (via Photographica). New images in Thom Anderson's photography site. I like his stuff.

As a kid growing up India, we had a far gentler picture of Afganistan in our minds. As a child, I read Tagore's short story 'Kabuliwala'. Its an heartrending story of an Afghan streetvendor who saw reflection of his daughter growing up in far off Kabul in a Bengali child who befriended him in Calcutta. When slightly older, I read Syed Mujtaba Ali's 'Dese Bideshe' - an account of his stay as a teacher in Afganistan. It painted a picture of the hospitality and large heartedness of the Afghan people. Ali had to get out in a hurry when a palace coup started in Kabul. But that didn't detract from his love of Afganistan. As I grew older, I heard about the ravages that the Soviets were wrecking there, I saw the photogaphs that captured the desolate beauty of the barren deserts of Afganistan. But the the image that stayed in my mind was painted in words by Bruce Chatwin in his introduction to Byron's 'Road to Oxiana' (the last passage. It was later reproduced in 'What Am I doing here'). It was very evocative. I wanted to travel in Afganistan.

The stories that are emerging from Afganistan are very different from the Afganistan that I imagined as a child. There is pederasty and its social acceptance , there was systematic state sponsored torture , there is images coming out of the misery of children. The other day, someone posted a link about the the massacre on the retreat from Kabul, Afghanistan (1842,the Anglo-Afghan war) in Mefi. The poem in the beginning of it captured the horror:

"When you're wounded and left,
On Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out,
To cut up your remains,
Just roll on your rifle,
And blow out your brains,
And go to your Gawd,
Like a soldier."

-Rudyard Kipling

The picture that I get now is of a people that have always been cruel, a people that are now so accepting of the excesses of feudalism, that no one would even try to change things anymore. In that sense it is similar to what is happening in Bihar (India). Only Bihar seems civilized by comparison. So much for remontic notions.

But I still want to travel in the Hindu kush mountains......

Mission San Jose de Gauadalupe is an unexpected pleasure in gleaming white adobe in the Mission district (Fremont). Originally built in 1797, it was restored in 1986. It has a quiet chapel with high wooden beams, old-looking chandaliers, interesting paintings, knick knacks and a great alter. There is a small graveyard in the backyard with old, old obelisks that smell of history. You can see the greens of Fremont hills on the background. Quiet, small and pretty in a kinda sad way. I loved the museum too. They narrate the spanish history of Alta (Upper) California rather well with the very few artifacts. For a change it was a sunny afternoon in East Bay and we decided to take advantage of it. The chapel was worth it.

I like the Mission Blvd. There are unexpected treasures like the Chapel lurking just around the corner. Last evening we went to the Bistro - a small coffeeshop tucked inside Hayward off Mission (near a bunch of antique shops. Can't remember the cross street) where they were playing some great blues.There was a kid playing the mouth organ. He was simply awesome. There was no cover charge either.

Sometimes I think the tech meltdown - the corollary of which has been the downsized lifestyle for people like me - has been a blessing in disguise. It is very tough for me right now. But it has forced to introspect, to become financially responsible and to seek pleasure in the small things in life. I know it sounds like a bloody cliche`. But think about it. If I continued to make as much money as I were making at the same time last year, we would have been spending my weekends in San Francisco. I would not have discovered all these interesting little tidbits of places in East Bay!

...But who am I kidding? I wanna move to San Francisco.

Absolute Powerpoint has been making small waves on the Net for some time.It was originally published in New Yorker. I finally managed to find this copy. Great read. (Via Lightningfield).

This is the neatest resume`/portfolio concept that I have seen in a long time. Very cool. Check out the bar on top.

I have been tinkering with the template. So the site is in a bit of a mess right now. The archives had disappered last night. This afternoon they miraculously reappeared. Blogger has been wobbly of late and could have been showing attitude. The comment box doesnt look too happy either. Anyway, I have been planning on adding some stuff on this page. But the last few days have been hectic and the rest of the week isnt expected to be any better. May be over the weekend .......

I have also been spending more time than could be good for me in Mefi (I have always had a problem with prioritization. The interesting always won over the important). Lately, I have gotten better. But that could have more to do with the cashflow than with actual intent!

Final Meal Requests of the death row inmates in Texas.
I was feeling slightly guilty when I was surfing through this page. This too is pandering to our baser emotions in the same way as browsing through reports of an electrocution . But that didnt stop me from checking it out :(. ( Via another weblog. Can't recall the name right now.).

Happy new year!

This must had been the laziest year end for me in recent memory. We read, slept, took long walks, generally lazed about. Took a day trip to 'Napa valley'.It drizzled all day that day. But rain made Napa prettier. We had a candle lit picnic in V Sattui's celler where it had put up picnic tables because of the rain. Later, we drove up to Santa Rosa thru Springfield Blvd. The moss on the trees were deep green.We drove through the clouds - the only 2 cars on the road almost all the way down.
Also Finished 'From here to Eternity'. -the first book in James Jones' war trilogy that includes 'A thin red line' and 'The Whistle'. I was not familiar with Jones' writing and read it without any expectations. Very moving.
Catching up on functional reading. Hope to stay off fiction for the next 3 months.Need to work my ass off.