Look Ma, new car !!

Got myself a Volkswagen convertible in my favorite shade of blue (the color of this blog!). Thank you VTA for a year of good service, but I need a little more of the Californian sun to shine on me... 

For some more of this beauty, point ur browser to these photos I took somewhere near the beautiful Shoreline trail.

Bloody show-off !

Last Sunday I was at a concert. You'd think I'm writing about yet another concert. But this one was special indeed. Not 'cos it was one special band. But 'cos it was many. 8 hours of music. 12 in the afternoon to 10 in the night. Some big names. Some I was hearing for the first time. Almost all of it, awesome.   

- Devendra Banhart

- Beck

- Norah Jones with The Little Willies

- Mumford & Sons

- Carlos Santana

- Eddie Vedder

- Foo Fighters

- Tony Bennett

- Dave Matthews

- Arcade Fire

- Neil Young

I wish I could show you some nice pictures from that day, but alas, they didn't let me take my camera inside. RS did a nice write-up and a video of one of the songs.

And of course, there is absolutely no reason I'm posting this on the day Metallica is performing in India for the first time. And I'm not going to be there. :-P

Look who's doing the Blues !

I'll see him play live at a Blues festival this weekend. There's a bunch of other good people too. One of them being Buckethead. This is the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in SanFran !

Awesome pictures shall follow.

Blog-Instant

One of the reasons I started blogging was because I started working in the corporate world! The necessary, the mundane, the 'such-is-life's of life hit me. I needed a place to get away from it all. And I started writing, and enjoyed it. The irony, however, lies in the fact that it is life, work and other related 'such-is-life's that keep me from blogging for days. 

Why Work and Life you ask ?

Well Life....it turns pale sometimes. You really can't do much about that. And I don't like the negativity to flow onto here. 

Why Work ? Is that a trick question !?!?

I promised to myself in the last post before this that I would post more often. And I haven't managed to write anything in days. Bummer ! 

So here it goes, new style I adapt. No long posts. Short bulleted-lists of thoughts on my mind. One liners on stuff that make me smile, things that make me ponder, stuff that make me frown. Maybe even 140 characters per thought..... What the heck, Twitter, I'm your slave... :-)

Till of course, the thoughts turn into day-dreams and I have a _long_ post. \m/

So here you go, 

- My group photo-blog, Reason-11, has been getting some love off late. 

- I've been reading about Tin Pan Alley.

- I want you to play this in another tab while you read this. Well, Google, when do I get to play background music for my readers ??

- The hiring in the Valley, I read, is like good ol' 1999. Hmmn !

- I've got a bike, You can ride it if you like!

- Adobe releasing a HTML-5 authoring tool while Apple and its fanboi's cry "Flash is going to kill the world, Flash is going to kill the world", is very cool. 

- August is the month things turn beautiful. 

- I recently visited the Stanford Campus with a fancy-ass camera. Here are the steals. 

- Here are a few more from the city I live in, Mountain View and of course, nearby 'Frisco. 

- Which also reminds me, Tied-House in downtown Mountain View. Home-made beer. Good shit.

- Finally, I went for a Robben Ford blues evening. Indescribably beautiful guitar solos.

Three Dot Five

The first blog-post I wrote was in Jan of 08. And since then I have piled up two hundred and twenty posts. Which comes down to around a post every 5 or 6 days. Not super impressive, considering I had started off with the goal of one a day ! But what the hell. Aren't most things in life all about high expectations, mild failures and celebrations nevertheless ?

< Trumpets and drum-roll !!! >  So here's celebrating Birthday-3.5 with something new and special. A very own domain name... \m/.... Yes, I moved my blog from sagspace.blogspot.com to blog.sagnikdhar.com. And of course, I moved my personal website from its older link to www.sagnikdhar.com.  < /Trumpets and drum-roll !!! >

Cheers to a long awaited wish fulfilled and to the self-promise of more frequent posts! And for anyone who cares, I've updated my Pandora channels list on the right sidebar. The top 6 are the most recently baked.... :-).

Badge up !

Google digs data. In every sense of the verb. Take Google news. The world generates stories everyday, or should I say every hour. Of every kind. Products like Google News and others, run tons of analysis software on these articles. They have records of which news tags receive the highest views and which news article is being spoken about the most online. Everything. And they have this data, almost on a per-person granularity. Many know this, many don't. But everyone enjoys it when Google News dishes you articles which always seem to kindle your interest. Wait, I can almost hear the nerds (in black-rimmed glasses) say, 'Ya ya, we get it, they have an awesome recommendation system ! What else ?'.

Now this is not what I found interesting. They've taken these numbers from a 'back-end analysis engine' and made it cool. 'How ?', you'd ask. Everytime you read articles about a particular topic (say Cricket), you earn points for it. These points accumulate and becomes a Cricket-badge on your account. You could have as many badges as you want. And the more you read about cricket, your badge turns from Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally Ultimate. Its almost like a medal of honour for the knowledge gained about a particular topic. And as I sense the privacy-purists turning red, let me mention, all your Badges are private to you. No one gets to know about your Platinum knowledge of Lady Gaga. But of course, you can explicitly make public one of your badges. And maybe even spark some interesting conversations with fellow amigos. 

Needless to say, your news feed was always customized according to the reading history. Tags are used for that and I'm sure you see how Google already had all of the infrastructure for this. Nothing new in that. Almost every other news service uses tags. But this new feature called Badges, without almost any technical additions, engages many more users. It plays with their minds and makes an everyday mundane activity more fun. I've always felt there was this strong psychological aspect to software. 

Finally, they also let you create a Badge (instead of Google News giving you one) on any topic to get news feed on that topic. To make things fun, when you start using Badges, they offer to create you an 'Apple' badge.... :-P

And for such things, Google is awesome. Unlike some other things, which sadly is chipping off the awesomeness. 

  

Happy 4th ye all !