BlogSat

...that were pretty ok, but could have been so much better. Caught the late show of Salaam-e-Ishq yesterday. Watching the movie in the company I saw it with made for a completely different experience. Now in general I tend to prefer the "don't really talk to me; I'm trying to lose myself in the story" approach to watching the movies. The approach doesn't hold when the movie is particularly cringe-worthy and this one of them. There were enough scenes where I needed company to share a "Oh god, what've they done now?" moment with. Best comment of the movie came from this gentleman during this song "The British built Trafalgar square to mark their conquering of India, and now we've closed the place to dance on top of it." As for the movie itself, I really liked it. All the stories kinda worked, despite the fact that I kept sliding in my seat to look away from the screen so many times. I thought everyone in the movie actually did really we...

Deep meaningful thoughts about life in posts soon, but new chibus post here. I also added a cute script to the site from Snap , that shows you the site you would jump to.

I can't really explain this, but the Maze Game is a great reflex tester. Now after,(and only after!), you've completed the game. Check out the following things on Youtube . I suddenly a believer in user-generated content.:)

The movie was good, but Borat is really enjoyed best in small doses. I think he was much more effective on the TV show than in the movie. Will definitely catch Bruno if and when that gets made. His acceptance speech (below) is priceless. Enjoy it while it lasts on YouTube.

Two of my favorite new TV shows are back on the air tonight in the middle of their first season. Studio 60 started kinda slow, but then really grew on me. For a while, I thought the show was trying to bite of more than a show about TV had the right to try to bite off, but the show has grown on me. Aaron Sorkin 's preachy stuff works, as does the plot, the romantic bits and really all the characters. I avoided Heroes for a while, moderately certain that it was a poor copy of Lost. Ended up doing a marathon watch of the first 11 episodes over the first week of school and I was blown away. The story is more complex, more vivid, more imaginative and much larger in scope than Lost (which I'm a little worried may have jumped the shark ). I hope they can keep the pace and quality going.

Looks like a favourite pastime just got an upgrade. I'm still not sure what the different colored lines are supposed to do though... And I'm a little concerned that Yahoo decided that the most relevant ads for the site right now are for drugs that treat respectively bedwetting, arthritis, diabetes and insomnia. Yup, they really need that Panama thingy .:)

I was suddenly reminded today why blogging about personal stuff frustrated me so much. The best writing, in fact any effective writing needs honesty. Everything else adds to it, but if that fundamental sincerity isn't there; if you don't really believe or convince yourself of what you're writing, you're not going to be able to convince others either. Now personal blogs are generally about two things: what you did and what you think (about people around you). I can't do the former because I don't really remember any details about anything that I do; well that's not true; I sometimes do, but I don't really think it's very interesting. What's much more interesting to me is what I think about those events and what I feel. Now, blogging about those things might actually be good for me (force me to clarify my own thoughts) and even fun (I tend to see the humor in everything and my inner critic has as well-developed sarcastic streak.) How...

...is the title of another excellent book that I never got around to reading, but has absolutely nothing to do with this post. The "case method" is an integral part of b-school education. You either love it, hate it or tolerate it, but you definitely can't escape it. The idea is by looking at business problem (typically described in narrative form with supporting data and exhibits at the end, and normally supplied by these guys ) and discussing/analyzing it, you learn a particular topic. If the professor uses it well and I've put the time into thinking about the problem, I think it's a powerful way to learn the topic, as well as how the knowledge is relevant in a real-world setting. Another argument in support of the case method is that since the universe of business problems ,especially when you boil it down to the basics, is fairly small you will learn to see patterns and be able to arrive at the solution. Now while I've seen similar patterns in the cases I...

The post below just turned out to be a bit of rant on jargon, but originally it was this post on the Long Tail blog that caught my attention. This line is a trend that I see more and more in others as well as in my own behavior of late:"The future of media is to stop boring us with news that doesn't relate to our lives." Yikes, me no likey this idea of the future. Increasingly I choose the news and the entertainment I consume; to be more specific I can choose to a much higher level of granularity what to use and what to reject. I don't watch TV or flip the newspaper pages cover to cover, I select shows to watch on my PC and just click on those links (or sections) that I know I'm already interested in. While most of us agree this is generally a good thing, it does end up meaning there is a higher probability of being too narrow in focus, or if you're a believer user-ranked content (e.g. Digg ), what you believe a particular crowd thinks is generally important...

Chris Anderson's article (which was short enough for me to read), and the book that followed (which wasn't), have popularized the idea that niches in consumer product categories (e.g. rare books, non-blockbuster movies online) that can actually be significant enough markets to be profitable, especially when you have the scale to exploit them. The idea is especially relevant with the increased use of the Internet by consumers. It's one of those simply, but powerful ideas that I really liked when I first heard about it. While I still like the idea, the words "long tail" are beginning to annoy me a little bit and I just don't know why! It gets back to the whole jargon thing. I think the "long tail" has gone the way of other overused MBA-ish phrases such as "adding value", "competitive advantage" etc. etc. The problem is I don't disapprove of jargon, and I recognize that sometimes the use of jargon is actually the quickest way t...

This post is about BlackAdder . Does the weak pun make more sense now? No? Sorry bout that.:) It stars Rowan Atkinson, and is ridiculously funny. I remember seeing about half an episode about ten years and not really enjoying it much, but after so much positive buzz about it lately and given how much I'm prone to procrastinating of late, I ended up watching 4 episodes of Season 2, and it looks like I've found another way to be happily unproductive. I have Season 3 and 4 all lined up. It's just a really funny British sitcom (and those guys are so much more comfortable being politically incorrect) and Atkinson is hilarious as Lord Blackadder and the entire cast (Stephen Fry, Miranda Richardson etc.). I just saw the first appearance of Hugh Laurie on the show. He has a more significant role after this. It's refreshing seeing him in something other than House . His acceptance speech at the Golden Globes was so much more British sarcasm/wit than the more usual American funn...

So how do I follow up my bold resolution to blog regularly? By slacking off for a couple of days of course.:) I have to say I'll start with an easy post though: I'll just write a bit about a site that I'm using right now as I type this up: Musicovery It's a lot of fun, and...well it has to be experienced rather than explained. The basic idea is so simple, and so well executed you can't help being impressed. My wishlist for the site now is a search feature (probably not coming for a while because of copyright issues.) They recently added the "skip" and "pause" feature I really wanted for a while. The site now competes with Netvibes for the honor of being my favorite French Web 2.o site. Yeah, I'm sure someone cares about that... Oh, two articles in ChiBus last week: The first one from the BFL I attended in December, the second I'm not quite sure what the hell its about, but there was a point there when I started.

Besides the fact that everyone does it, why blog? My life is pretty boring; not to me, but when I last googled myself, I really didn't feel like clicking on most of the links. My life is not unordinary. I could try to write about it in a fashion to make it seem less so, but what would the point of that be? This isn't the first time I've blogged. I've done it twice or thrice before, but anonymously. Why anonymously? Well, it's hard to tell what perfectly innocent opinion of mine (which I'll probably reconsider by the end of the week anyway), might offend someone that I don't really want to offend...right now. Also, I'm told the sarcastic sense of humor doesn't go over well sometimes. But I really do like the idea of writing regularly; the idea of sharing stuff we know with other people and I am intrigued by the idea that communication could...well more about that in another post. But blogging also forces me to clarify what my thoughts, push myself to ...