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I think I’ve been a little too caught up in my programming and reading as of late. What I’ve been up to:

• columbus tech scene
  • dabbling in some erlang
  • checking out coworking spaces w/ craig
• reading 7 habits of highly effective ppl
  • ( highly recommended for introspection and self improvement, my buddy chris recommended me this one )
• europe planning
  • practicing french w/ gaby (if you are interested in learning a language, google ‘coffee break podcast’)
• taking zoe to the park

I also ended up going to a volleyball game that Gaby organized yesterday. Had a blast and really love the sport. I need to find a way to get something regular going.

Other things on my mind, I feel that petty crime has been going up here in Ohio. I don’t know if it is just my perception or if this is true. With a bad economy, I sometimes worry what happens when the poorer half get desperate.

Some misc. interesting links that I picked up along my reading / cleaning out my rss feeds:

• the possibilities of the Universe
  • this reminds me of how small I used to feel after some astrophysics lectures in CEGEP
• on Education vs schooling
  • a write up from my brother’s blog on the education system
• Tips to think better from a savant
  • stole this from kevin, really interesting to see how this guy thinks
• Firefox > Facebook?
  • the future of the browser and online experience…
• Seth Godin: you can change everything

didn’t think montreal was that hot for tech – apparently i’m wrong. this article gives the run down but the main point: now is the time to be an entrepreneur in montreal.

so far california has been great, but i gotta say i’m looking forward to being back in a comfy bed in columbus.

these days i’ve been doing a lot of reading and learning, which is already great. i’ve decided to make a separate programming blog and keep this one personal. i ended up using blogger cause i just wanted to get something up quick and i hate dealing with server issues.

i’ve also started looking into my france trip w/ gaby which is going to take a lot more planning. i’m currently deciding if i should be taking a longer trip and enjoying this opportunity, or if i should be conserving funds. either way, this trip will be low budget and that’s probably just cause its crazy expensive there. maybe i’ll get lucky with a student sublet. ca fait un long temps que je pratique mon francais ecrive et en plus, mon espagnol es tous melange avec mon francais parle.

some other random interesting things, i just realized youtube shows movies. not always amazing ones but i watched super size me on it. right now i’m watching the future of food on hulu (dont think it works in canada) but i can now say i hate monsanto a lot. its quite scary actually – what nature originally provided for free is now being perverted into something that depends on products from a company. sounds like if you screw up enough, we just wont be able to grow food anymore – like ever… for the whole planet. luvly.

one think that speaks to california’s amazing hacker culture: i attended a super happy dev house yesterday, which is like a warehouse filled with hackers just hanging out and coding. very cool place. free food and drinks. you can meet tons of interesting ppl.

its been a relaxing couple days. drove down to santa cruz with kevin, beau and his gf michelle. the drive was fun: a windy road, driven pretty hard in a WRX STI. and the beach of course was great, mostly relaxing in the sun and some frizbee. the ocean here is fierce.


Today I spent a good couple of hours biking the golden gate bridge in San Fran. I think I biked pass the wild parrots of telegraph hill. It was great exercise so I feel good about that.

view from golden gate out to the pacific


SF from golden gate

fyi niraj, i got a compliment on that shirt.

the hacker house at palo alto has been pretty chill. people just coming through here and leaving, from all different places. so its a cool chance to meet interesting ppl. it was a bit hectic at times though – i mean i think there were like 9 or 10 guys and a girl living in a 5 bedroom place – oh and a dog.

20$ bill under the milk?

I don’t even know how this happened, and no one in the house thinks they did it… just ridiculous.

dropped in on the facebook offices. took a quick drive by of stanford – i should probably go back and do it for real.

tomorrow, its back to real work.

so i’ve been here since monday and what a change from peru. if learning spanish has been hastened by being immersed in the language, coming here is like being immersed in tech, geek and startup… its awesome on many accounts.

i’ve been learning a ton and not even trying – just being exposed to whats out there and what some of these people are doing is both humbling and inspiring. you just have this feeling that anything is possible.

i’ve been meeting a lot of ppl, mostly programmers and exchanging ideas and learning. alsom reading a lot of blogs and catching up on technologies. these are exciting times.

i think im getting fed up with mephisto (my blogging software) and will try to move to a wordpress blog probably. they’ve got some nice stuff those php fellows.

i think that’s all for now. i might update this later.

i honestly dont know why i like this so much; can’t be just because its cute.

so my brain is just firing off like crazy these days. lots of information input and thinking.

but first, i should say it feels great to be back in montreal. i think that itself has been responsibility for a good part of my energy. i can’t really describe it much more than saying home is home.

trying to knock out stuff as fast as it has been coming up.

1. Going to Peru for 3 weeks in March
2. Researching camcorders to buy
3. Going to San Francisco for 3 weeks in April

still no reading of books… =(

reduce russian and american nukes by 80%?

interesting looking movie: Outsourced

UC Berkley Game Theory Class with Applications to Starcraft

I was looking back at Randy Pausch’s time management lecture, it is still good to review one more time – but I know the one hour is a bit long and wanted to write summary notes. Luckily, I found this link with all the summary done. It has a bunch of good little points – the kind you already know but need to be reminded of.

Btw, just random tidbit fact, Randy Pausch used emacs – the proof is here.

I forgot to mention that two days ago I went back to the free meditation class on nithya dhyaan and had a pretty good class. since the previous weekly course was canceled due to the severe weather here in columbus, that course had to pack twice the info. in the end, i felt pretty good and was apparently successful in ‘unclutching’ or letting go of my thoughts. there are some interesting concepts in the first class that i also wanted to bring up, maybe i did in a previous entry but i dont remember.

i dont think this is the first time i bumped up against this concept, but it’s interesting how in this class they model a person as body (of course), mind and self. now at first, it was a little awkward and didn’t fit. but the instructor went on to point out some examples. i don’t want get this wrong but i think it was along the lines of your mind is responsible for your thoughts and it develops its own patterns about thoughts. but most importantly, your mind is not your self.

now this is interesting for a couple reasons and it makes sense to me independently of any meditation or ‘new age’ stuff. some common examples have to do with expressions like “be honest with yourself”, or “lying to yourself”. if you stop and think about that, it is a really weird idea that you can be not honest with yourself because that implies there is another self not being honest with your self. i actually ran into this experience many years ago when i caught myself lying to myself about video games. at the time, i thought it was surprising and ever since then learned to keep an eye on myself. probably one of the most useful experiences i’ve ever had.

anyway, going back to their model for body, mind and self reminded me of all of this because the other self was the mind (don’t know how obvious that is to point out). so, sometimes our self has to keep an eye on our mind. interesting and useful.

p.s. i almost put a corny title like ‘mind your mind’, but i thought i’d spare you all.

I blogged about how email is becoming a standard for identity on the web and I think i’ve seen more trends that agree. in short, when you want a password reset for another account, they use your email. anyway, here are two quick security tips for gmail users:

1) if you click the settings link on the top right, then scroll to the bottom, you’ll see this:

Https roughly means use a secure, encrypted connection. so it’s always good to use it.

2) this one requires a little more manual involvement. at the bottom of your inbox page, you’ll see this:

If you click on the details link, you can see a popup with a table of all the account activity by time and IP address (which for simplicity, is just a number that identifies a computer). At the bottom of the pop, it’ll tell you the IP address of the computer you are using. So if there are other IP address on this table, you might want to click on “sign out all other sessions”, and then change your password, if you think someone has access to your account.

I have two IP addresses in my table, but i just verified the other is my itouch. this is also useful if you aren’t sure if you left yourself logged in on someone elses computer.

does this look broken to you?

just incase this picture doesn’t capture the exposed metal wire and broken covering, that’s what happened.

so naturally, still being under warranty and having paid 300$ for my extended coverage, I goto the local apple store and show them the wire. get this – I have to book an appointment… with an Apple Genius.

When you have questions or need hands-on technical support for your Mac, iPod, Apple TV, or iPhone, you can get friendly, expert advice at the Genius Bar in any Apple Retail Store.

Thanks, Apple. Expert advice? Really? I need to waste more time so I can talk to your geniuses, so they can explain to me that my broken power cord is broken.

I tried to take the issue up with the customer service agent who wanted me to book the appointment.

“Oh are they going to fix the cable?”
“Oh no, they can’t fix that. They’ll look at it and check if the part is under warranty. Then they’ll just give you a new one.”
(stupified face)