My machine crashed last Monday and all the attendant devastations ensued. I, contrary to the advise that I give clients, haven't beening backing up my stuff very often. So, for the past one week I have been running around like a headless chicken. I learnt more about the nuances of NT system crashes that I ever wanted to know in my life. To cut a long story short: I finally gave up on trying to repair my NT installation and upgraded to 2000, which I guess is a good thing. The bad part is, I lost almost all of my outlook data and contacts. It'll take me quite some time to put stuff back up again.

I am trying to migrate this site to CSS. The formatting has gone topsiturvy. And I have taken out the links to the archives out until I can get the site back in shape. Bear with me! I have got worse problems on my hands right now

Vinod Mehta is the Editor of Outlook magazine in India. He has a string of successful newspaper launches behind him and is one of the more sober writers in South Asia. 'Let Us Defy Uncle Sam' is a rather unlikely op-ed from him. If he is thirsting for first strike by India, things must be really on thin ice out there. He did admit that the Pakistani junta is crazy enough to threaten a nuclear first strike, but didn't address the issue. Neither are Indian politicians taking the noises being made by Pakistan very seriously. This story in Atlantic monthly is a frightening reminder that some people out there may have gone over the edge. What is scarier is that out esteemed leaders (no dearth of whackos on our side either) seem to have no clue.

The tragedy in South Asia is a tragedy of leadership. India has a relatively open society and more stable democratic institutions that have withstood the passage of time with much less damage. But something seems to have gone wrong with Pakistan. I don?t think everyone in Pakistan is an Islamic fanatic. I was rereading an old interview of Asma Jahangir. She appeared to be a lot more sane than most of our politicians. But unfortunately, she is not representative of the Pakistani polity. These comments by Michael Schaffer captures my unease:

"In 50 years of independence, Pakistan has come up with no new heroes. OK, there's a stadium that's been renamed after an officer who died in the disastrous mini-war with India a few years back, but if you look at the rupee bills, you see only one face: Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founder. And I can't think of anyone else who might make it. The only other icon that seems to resonate, ultimately, is the giant rock that finds itself in traffic circles around the country: a scale model of the mountain under which Pakistan carried out its test nuclear explosion.".

These guys have invested way too much of their emotional selves on the conflict with India.

Some random thoughts and links:

100 best online games is a good place to spend time over the weekend.

Some coffe links I have been exploring: This page is a great place for finding out more about your caffeine intake through everyday food and what it does to you. How Caffeine Works is a rather scary and depressing link for coffee lovers like me. INeedCoffee seems to be an interesting site about coffee cultures that I am currently exploring. I also want to get to this book eventually. (all coffee links via this metafilter thread).

This morning I read an interesting post about the pros and cons of living in USA for Indians. I don?t think money is easy in USA. A simplistic explanation is: most Indians who come to USA these days are software engineers who have a much higher pay than many other sections of the American society. (via Just A Little Something).

I am disgusted and disturbed that the murder video of Daniel Pearl video seems to be available in pornography sites. But I think it is wrong and ridiculous to try to suppress the appearance of the video on the net. Not only does anyone have zero chance of taking something off the net after it has been published, it is dangerous to let the state dictate to ISPs what one may or may not publish on the net (i.e. so long as it is not compromising national security).

Way back, fresh out of college in India, I was prone to misadventure. There was this time I was trying to hitch hike from my college town in Orissa to Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. At one point, I was traveling in the back of a truck. The other passengers were a teenage kid and his goats. It was evening. It started drizzling on the Orissa-AP border. Then there were thunderstorms. The goats started bleating. The kid and I started talking in a mixture of broken Hindi, English and Tamil.

"What do you do?"
"I have just completed my degree in Electrical Engineering".
"Lying is bad."
"I am not lying!!"
"Huh!"
There was silence for a few minutes before he tried again, "I make (Rs.) 700 a month"
"Hmmm"
"And you?"
"Umm, yet to start making any money." my voice drifted off.
"Huh!"
He didn't speak to me the rest of the way.

I was reminded of that conversation the other day, when I stepped inside the Weinstein Gallery in Geary Street to view these paintings. They have a terrific collection. I had a great conversation there about Li Jian Jun's works.

Snippets:
"So, are you thinking of buying?"
"Umm...we are kind of, well, toying with the idea"
"Ah, I completely understand. These are beautiful! Aren't they?"
"Yes. They are awesome!"
....
So what kind of painting are you thinking of ..?
Feeling vaguely guilty, "Well. We are not yet sure. It?s a lot of money to invest. We are still looking around."
Still later,
"If you want to look around, there is some great stuff upstairs. It goes up to $75,000"
Gulp.
I went upstairs. They had Dali's paintings on the second floor.

But surreal conversations aside, it?s an awesome gallery. The staff is very helpful - irrespective of your intention to buy; I am sure they can smell Dali buyers!

I have just been very busy at work for the past one week or so. Hence the prolonged silence. I hope to start weblogging regularly again from this week.

PDN's Photo Annual 2002 showcases the nominated photgraphers. It is a treasure trove of interesting photographs and photography websites. You ought to check it out while it is online.

I need to read the Session Notes from O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

Vanrens Bergen photographs old abandoned places in his spare time. The site has some terrific photographs of the places that he has explored. The photographs have a haunting quality to them. (via Iconomy).

Amtabh Ghosh's 'Countdown in South Asia' is one of the most lucid, thoughtful and anguished books that I have read on the nuclear situation in South Asia. Unfortunately the book is not easily available outside India. He has now made the notes and the interviews that he took for writing the book available on his website.

Tieing up loose ends:

It looks like I managed to move my weblog without any major trouble! I hope to modify the look and feel by the next weekend.

I was browsing through my referral logs and search reports this weekend. Every now and then some people come here via google searching for some rather outlandish stuff. I now feel compelled to declare that this weblog doesn?t have anything to do with 'naked girls in Santa Cruz'. For anyone looking for nude beaches in Santa Cruz, the best bet is probably to drive up highway 1 North of Santa Cruz and look for cars parked with nothing in sight. I believe there are a few south of Davenport.

On my January 21's post, I wrote of James Lick, the man who funded the building of Lick Observatory; "He apparently toyed with the idea of building the world's greatest pyramid in downtown San Francisco, but was persuaded to build the greatest telescope by U.of California." That is what the Lick observatory employee who acted as our tour guide told us. I recently read in the book 'San Francisco is your home' by Samuel Dickson that Lick originally wanted to build the observatory in what is now South of Market in San Francisco, but was persuaded instead to build it in Mount Hamilton. Pyramids make for a better story. But I didn't find any reference to it in Dickson's account. Its probably an apocryphal story.

Errata:

Admission to SFMOMA is free only on the first Tuesday of every month as opposed to every Tuesday as I originally wrote on my last Thursday?s post. (Thanks Archana, for pointing that out)

Yahoo has quietly been pushing Inktomi as the preferred search partner for their enterprise products. I think it's a matter of time before they dump Google as their search partner for the Yahoo portal. But google has already landed AOL. If they lose Yahoo now, it probably wont hurt as much.

While on the subject of search - I have started using Teoma as a complement to google. It seems to be a nice tool.

There is an exhibition of Edward Weston's photographs ('Last years in Carmel') going on in SFMOMA. Weston's photography changed tenor during those years in Carmel. Gone was the cold detached polish of his earlier works. His images of Point Lobos have a lot more pathos. His nudes of Charis; as their marriage was disintegrating around them, have a lot more intensity than the impersonal geometry of his previous works.

Edward Weston led a full and by the social standards of those days, an unconventional life. But by the early forties, it was taking the shape of a Greek tragedy. He contracted Parkinson's disease in 1944. Charis left him in 1945. In a haunting passage, Janet Malcolm described an incident from Maddow's "Edward Weston: fifty years".

Yet, we go back now and look at these expensively framed photographs in the immaculately maintained halls on San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and dont feel pity. We feel awe at how the immenseness of human achievements outlasts the everyday tragedies of human lives.

In case you are planning to go and it matters: there are no entry fees on on the first tuesday of every month in SFMOMA.

-Tracy Chiang, a photographer quoted in '25 and Under / Photographers'

I thought it was a very acute statement; though her photographs didn't resonate with me.

Now, talking about intolerable situations for men; I am having a terrible time putting together a new style sheet for my weblog. CSS doesn't seem to be as simple as it looked initially. I have a very good mind to stick to the templates! Hopefully I would be through with it by tomorrow and will have moved RandomNotes to my domain.

It of course didnt help matters that I spent most of yesterday kicking around Castle Rock State Park (off highway 35, near Saratoga). It has great vistas and nice rock formations; on a clear day, you can see as far as Monteray from certain places. It was all very nice. But now I have tons of office work to catch up up with too.

I am busy at least till saturday. Meanwhile, I recommend:

-Jennifer Balderama's post on discipline.
-This old article from Scientific American (via sylloge). It has been sitting in my 'To read' folder for a while.
-The 'World of Awe' (via mefi)
-Paul Graham's 'Taste for Makers' (via Kingshuk)
-Patrick Demarchelier's Photographs (Not work safe)

Have a good weekend.

Dan disagrees with my charectarization of his writing on my last sunday's post. I guess you think of people in the context in which you know them. Metafilter does have a strong tilt to the left. The fact that he is often considered part of 'The conservative cabal' in mefi, may had influenced my thinking. I would definitely not call him 'far right' in mainstream American political context. Also, since I hate it when anyone presumes to label me, it probably wasnt right for me to try to categorize his writings.