This funny thing happens to me over and over again. I think of something - an idea, a service that would be nice to have (usually software, because that's the way my brain is wired) - and within a week or a month, I hear of some company that's just started doing exactly that. Grr. One of these days I'm going to have an idea that nobody has had for a while and isn't going to have for a year. Enough time to actually make it fruitful. Not that I have the slightest idea about how to make any of my ideas a reality. But those are trivial details.
This is an idea that I was thinking about in the car while listening to a recently bought Live CD. Unlike Kristin or Andy, I don't have refined musical tastes. And my knowledge of the music "scene" is rather inadequate. Which means I'll listen to just about everything, I'll like some stuff, not like other stuff and really not know how to describe what I like and what I don't.
Okay. So the problem becomes one of how do I go find artists and music that I like? One way is sheer brute force search - try everything, classify and repeat. Seems rather stupid, especially if you hold an assumption (no validating data, hence its an assumption) that there will be a strong correlation among people who like, say Live, and some other band that I like as well. Point being - you can use this correlation index to greatly widen your sphere of music that you like without having to listen to all the bad stuff and weed it out. My badness filter should not be just Andy and Kristin (though they do an admirable job without knowing it) but really just about everyone whose musical tastes are somewhat similar to mine. This should be rather easy to do if you have a way of telling people what you like. And then having someone suggest stuff on ratings correlations. And of course you'd tune this per person - imagine a graph where a node is a n-tuple of at least { person, genre }. So I make one node starting with { rushabh, electronica } and I have some songs that I have heard, rated etc. In comes someone else, say { Paul, electronica } and rates stuff as well. There is a high correlation between our ratings - which would imply that I might like stuff that he has liked and I haven't heard. We link the two nodes and setup some weight. In comes another person, say { Jill, electronica } and we have a rapidly developing graph of my relation to everyone else using this particular node. And you can explore this relationship as much as you want - looking at the "electronica" genre, looking at some other element in a tuple etc. When it comes to doing fine-tuned adjustments - say I enjoyed Tranceport while Paul thought it sucked, well, we just adjust the link between Paul and me so that he doesn't influence me quite as much as Jill who loved Tranceport. Awesome.
[Edit] I'm not trying to be as presumptuous as I sound and claim that I am the only one or the first one, to get these "ideas". Just that I do as well. I'm one of the crowd
13 kids in PA are looking at getting felonies for bypassing computer security at their school [From Bruce Schneir's blog].
The punishment obviously warrants the crime. iChat is the most heinous of programs. If we could have productively used all the woman-hours spent on iChat, we probably would have had cars that ran on pure motive force and a fully-populated Mars. No Iraq war either. Its all iChat's fault. And any kid that bypasses computer security using a password that was taped to the back of the laptop is clearly asking for a long term in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Aight, I'll calm down. No, the kids are not really looking at going to prison. Yet, this kind of thing will go on their record. And it will ruin their life. Computer security is interesting - people make statements about what cannot be trespassed and then leave the protected resource wide open. Do you think the rates of bank robbery would go up if banks didn't have security cameras or sophisticated security systems and left their vault keys in the lock all the time? Which is exactly what this school did with its security.
A large part of the problem with computer usage is a generation gap between the teachers generation (mid-40+) and the kids. The kids are used to computers. Computers were around when they were born. They cannot imagine a world without google and mp3s. The parents / teachers on the other hand are still scared of these computer devices. Like what happens if I press the red button instead of the green button. Why won't my computer work? What is this internet thing? This is normal, but it also causes an unnecessary paranoia about kids and computers. Sure kids can be immature at times. Sure you'd like to keep kids from surfing porn at school. But there are easy ways to do that without limiting the kids potential. If these kids at 15 were smart enough to download tools and crack passwords, the teachers should have forced them to take a class in advanced crypto and figure out why those tools worked. What they could have done with the passwords to have made sure that the dictionary based attacks would not work. Should the kids have been punished? Absolutely. But within the domains of the school, not using the court system. In the school's defense, they did give the kids detention, took off their computer priviledges etc. Fine - if the kids are so troublesome, take away their computer completely. Or deny them wireless access. But going to the law is just below the belt. It is not fair to subject kids to an adult legal system. Its scary, its scarring. Leave the kids alone.
Man dies after nonstop gaming. And he was playing Starcraft. Crud.
I have to cut back on my Warcraft - Mark you better calm down yourself :-)
So I just got back from the Bay Area after visiting Kavita, Ted, Nirav, Andy, Kev, Mike, C&T, Milap, Sanket - the gang, in short. It was one big, huge blast. The excuse this time (last time it was Garba) was Kristof and Ayca's wedding reception - which was a lot of fun and I got to meet more old friends.
The weekend started off Friday night when Kavita and Jason picked me up from the airport along with Jason's cool-as-beans housemate Jimmy. Off we went to the City - this is around mignight, so you can see where this is headed - for some beer and other forms of alcohol consumption - where we were joined by Nirav. We got kicked out of the place - Mount Royale Cafe, for those in the Bay Area, highly recommended - around 2 am. This left us rather hungry, or "snacky" as Kavita put it and off we went to a pizza place in the mission that was open late. Nothing quite so satisfying at 3am as a greasy, full-of-gooey-goodness slice of pizza. Veggie, of course. Off at 3.30, got lost in the City (naturally, SF doesn't let you out quite that easily and without a decent effort at least) until Kavita really clamped down upon us and told us to get on the freeway and get out - we were in an interesting debate about whether we were headed East or West on mission, but Kavita ruined our fun :(
After a much needed 45000 winks, up again at 11 ish. The K-Dawg (Kevin, not Kristin, we have a couple of k-dawgs around) picked me up and off we went to Hobbees for "breakfast" (at 1pm) followed by hang-out at C&T's totally awesome phat pad complete with a swimming pool and a (not yet) hot tub. They're still "moving in" but once its done - boyoboy. Party Central, San Jose. Then came the first (out of two) Most Significant Event of this trip:
I played with their puppy.
If any of you know me, this is like super-duper-majorly significant. I am terrified of dogs (and I quite hate them) but not Zoey. She's cute. And pretty awesome. I'm not quite as comfy and down with her as Andy or Mike, but there was potential there. I could feel it. We may just bond on the next Bay Area trip.
After chilling at C&T's for a while, I was off to Kristof and Ayca's reception - which was great. It was really good to see them and good to see other friends from school and of course Malay and Bina, who're ever funny and considering Alice isn't around, rag on me nonstop. We saw a slideshow of Kristof and Ayca's turkish wedding - and I want to go to southern Turkey. Wowsa. Beautiful beyond words.
Off drinking that night with Malay and Bina and Kavita and Jason. We hit Blue Chalk first, thinking it'd be a nice, quiet loungy place. Was I wrong on that one. Turns out its morphed into this club thing with really loud, bad music, lots of scantily clad women and *gasp* a cover charge. That would have been my scene at some other point in time, in some other life, but not that night. We went in regardless, had some horrible cheap beer and left.
Next morning, breakfast at 9 (meaning 9.40 in Indian Time, which sorta left Ted and Ashley rather mad (sorry, sorry!) especially since the place didn't open till 10 - OOPS). Anyways. St. Michael's Alley was fantastic as ever, convinced Malay and Bina that it was totally an A-List place (ie the list of restaurants that must be visited on any trip to the Bay Area) and general goodness abounded. Then we went to the park where we just chilled on the grass for a long time - and the second Most Significant Event happened:
I played with Tanmay (Priyank and Juhee's little, extremely cute son).
Now don't get me wrong - I didn't hate kids or anything - but I hadn't quite played with them in the sense just picked them up and let them pull my hair and stuff. Quite an experience - but a really awesome one.
Then I got to meet my old friends Milap and Sanket and their wives Siddhi and Megha (resp.) whom I've never met. They are totally cool, totally fun. I'm looking forward to hanging out with them this winter (since they've all promised to go snowboarding / skiing).
A last dinner with Ted, Ashley (there were suggestions of TAshley and Tedly floating around, but I will not rat on my friends and say who came up with those), Andy, Nirav, Kavita and Jason and off to the airport. What a blast, what an action-packed weekend. Wooohooo!
Jeremy Clarkson, of the Top Gear fame, writes just as well as he talks. Writes better actually. While I didn't care much for the program itself (mostly because I couldn't care less about the TV aside from my Halo2 addiction), I was in splits while reading his writing.
For increased mirth value, read his review of the Porsche Cayenne and the Nissan 350Z and the VW Passat. Yeah, that's a lot of car related reading, especially if you're not planning to buy one, but trust me - its worth the half hour you'll spend at it.