I'm all about intellectual curiosity. What are you curious about?
What if there was a Project Runway or even an American Chopper show for programming… what would be the (minimal set of) qualities to judge on?
After opening a strange envelope with a Sweden stamp on it, I was holding my first Google Adsense cheque.
Not only did I get money, but later in the day, Google (Mail) gave me career advice as well:
Heh.
A couple of weekends ago, most of the trekware gang met up for a weekend trek. This time we headed to Brahmagiri.
To reach Brahmagiri, take the bus to kuTTa (Madikeri district) but get down in Srimangala. Meet the forest officer (they come in at around 10 am) and it is better if you have called them up in advance and notified them. Enquire shops for guest house to freshen up and also for a jeep to take you to Iruppu Falls.
At Iruppu Falls, we met the forest guard who would accompany us during the trek.
The guest house that we stayed at was in the middle of a field where pepper and coffee was abundant. We plucked a pepper corn and ate it – it was deliciously spicy.
We then started the trek from Iruppu Falls and came across many interesting flora and fauna.
The good …
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.�
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
“A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults.�
— Charles Kingsley
Although it started with sports, it turned out to be a musical weekend.
Parikrma had a sports meet of the senior children among all its various schools – from Jayanagar to Sahakarnagar, and it was amazing to see all the boisterous children compete against each other, including gritting their teeth in the running races.
I may or may not have a hand in making the pom-poms for the children to use in one of the exercise-dances ;-)
A call from a friend got me rushing to Palace Grounds for the Bengalooru Habba. I got to see many good bands play – I particularly liked the Amit Heri band (especially “Mahaganapatim” from the Morning Raga movie) and the Ministry of Blues.
Then, came the maestro – Sivamani. It was going to be a percussion evening, and he got traditional “Kutti” drummers to join him in creating fusion music, and it was something that has to be simply experienced to explain. For a person who tried to learn drums, Sivamani is God. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for long, because I had promised to meet a few friends for dinner.
Sitting in a sofa in the 2nd row in the VVIP section rocks! Thanks to my friend Karthik for that :)
$150,000. That’s what’s in a name. That’s how much Microsoft paid for the name “Zune”:
According to Boslet, Placek cited several other reasons for zeroing in on “Zune”:
- It’s a short word, reflecting the gadget’s small size.
- It has a familiar sound. “‘From tune to zune’ was the expression some inside Lexicon used,” the Journal reports.
- The letter “U” has “a full sound” and “makes one think there is a lot packed into a little word– and product.”
So I searched for the Lexicon Branding company that came up with this name:
“The Lexicon Research Network of 60 Ph.D. linguists in 39 countries was tapped to provide insights into the latest brands in music and video entertainment and to give us suggestions as to words, word parts, sounds and metaphors that might be applied to a ‘next generation entertainment system” — from an SFGate article
It seemed strange to me that they get paid so much for just coming up with a name. But guess what other names they have come up with in the past:
Heh, so naming does matter… recently there was an internal call for suggestion of code names for the next version of Flex, and one of the names I had suggested was finally voted as the official code name! I guess you will hear this name in the press articles on Adobe Flex soon.
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