Author: rakesh

A popular blog on Indian pop culture, Sepia Mutiny, is hosting a meetup here in Houston in a couple of weeks.

Paul links to a report from TNS that lists the top 10 counties with millionaire residents. Harris county (which contains Houston) ranks #6:

Also interesting is that we have 16% of the Texas’s millionaire residences and that we’re above the only Bay Area county to show up on the list (Santa Clara County at #8, with about 25% fewer millionaires than Harris County). Now this could simply be about how county lines are drawn — Harris County is the third largest county in the contiguous 48 states.

Zack and Jason have some fun networking their homes together:

There comes a time in a homeowners life that he realizes the importance of being able to play full high-definition content from his neighbor’s house 5 doors down… wirelessly.

Link

I’m not just saying this because I’m a new Wii owner or because Sony’s PS3 sales numbers are terrible, but seriously, could it get any worse for Sony?

I had to print 17 mailing labels just now and I thought, man, this should be easy to do. Typically, I use UPS for shipping stuff but it’s not important that these packages get to people quickly and I thought USPS might be cheaper, so I decided to try to do this through USPS.com. My experience:

– first I uploaded by file… USPS’s help system (powered by RightNow I believe) did a pretty good job to guiding me to some information about importing my addresses and about batch printing labels. Good, I’m happy that I was able to find the info I was looking for.

– I uploaded my file of 17 names and it somehow stuck the people’s titles in the “full name” field instead of their full names. So I purged the addressbook, edited the CSV I was trying to import to create the full name field myself (rather than having USPS’s import function create it — that appeared to be the problem point to me), and then re-imported. OK, it worked this time.

– Now I go to create a label. I have to choose what country these labels are for — all but 1 are here in the U.S. so no problem, I choose U.S.

– My return address is pre-populated from my account information — that’s good.

– I have to choose one address from my addressbook. Doing this involves my address book appearing in a pop-up and then choose one address. OK, fine.

– I fill out my package weight and then I choose an option to extend this label creation into a “batch job”. No big deal.

– I start to add other addresses from my addressbook and it turns out that there’s a 10 label limit on a batch process. Lame! But no big deal, I say. I add 10 labels to that round of batch labels.

– I go to check out and it informs me that one of the 10 labels has an invalid address. It doesn’t tell me which one. Argh. I delete a couple of labels and miraculously it works and I’m able to checkout with 5 of my 17 labels.

– Evidently, the folks who built USPS.com ignored Firefox compatibility because when I go to print I get nothing. Firefox downloads a file (“com.usps.cns.web.pdf.LabelGenerationServlet”) which I guess is a PDF. Lucky guess because when I add a .pdf extension to the file, I’m able to open it in Acrobat and print. Great. Now I actually have 5 of the 17 labels printed and ready to go.

– It’s painful because it involves a bunch of trial and error, but I finally figure out which address was the “trouble” address. I try to fix it, but it seems I stumble on a bug: when you have a label added to your cart and you try to edit the shipping address, any changes you make stick… except the zip code field. After I try to re-edit the address three times, I figure this out, delete that address, edit it in the address book and then create a label for it.

– Then there’s the one shipment to Canada. I have to create that label separately. Creating it doesn’t go too badly. There are some extra forms to fill out. The forms are slow, reloading on every click, form validation step, etc. I’m also a bit annoyed at this point that USPS.com has wasted so much of my time.

So here I am, more than an hour later with 17 labels printed knowing that what I went through was way more painful than it should have been and that, ultimately, I probably could have done this faster by handwriting the 17 labels.

I bought one of these for Ananya (my daughter, 2.5 years old) about a month ago but she didn’t get into it much. Then I bought a pair of them for my niece and nephew (3.5 and 5 years old) and they loved ’em. My sister, their mom, told me that the two of them played with them for 2 hours in the garage with the lights off and that she was planning on buying a few of them for the children of friends of hers… and at $9 per head lamp, she was really impressed with the price.

I’ve been following the facts surrounding the Virginia Tech tragedy and this morning I read two articles that I thought were interesting. NewTeeVee looks at the VT killings in the context of a culture addicted to fame. While I don’t agree with where the article ends up (the article concludes with these instructions for next time: “Guns are dangerous. Be nice to loners. Wait for the next tragedy. Cover it.”), I like the perspective it takes. And then there’s this article on a refrain that’s emerged from people talking about the killings on Facebook: reach out to loners.

Start here and click through these twenty photographs that won this year’s Pulitzer’s Prize for feature photography.

Maybe Lost hasn’t jumped the shark after all… things haven’t been as bad since the Hurley-asteroid episode. But I haven’t made up my mind if I’m still watching because I really like the show or because I just want some answers.

Anyways, for the Lost fans out there who are also fans of SNL and Andy Samberg, you can’t miss this video:

I’ve received two online photo albums today from different friends of mine and both used Picasa Web Albums. I hadn’t told either of them about Picasa (though I’ve told lots of other folks about Picasa!)

While there hasn’t been a lot of coverage of it, my guess is that Picasa Web Albums is slowly becoming a gorilla in the online photo sharing space because of the quality of the Picasa client and because of it’s tight integration with Picasa Web Albums. I don’t have any basis for this claim other than 1) I keep coming across more people using Picasa and 2) I’m involved in product development and I think I can recognize a ‘hit’ product when I see one.

Quiet ‘hits’ — as in successful products and companies that aren’t spotlight-seeking and maybe aren’t even that ‘sexy’ — are often the most interesting ones.

Update: In the comments, Brent asked me how Picasa compares to Flickr. My response:

Flickr may be better for some things (larger critical mass of users, better for bloggers IMO, flickr used by a lot of “influentials”, there’s a social network built-in), but for the sequence of 1) take photographs, 2) import them into computer and 3) share them with my family and friends, the Picasa experience kills the Flickr experience. From Picasa’s camera import capabilities, to the ease with which photos can be corrected, selected and, otherwise, prepped to be shared, to the two click upload process (which takes care of resizing your photographs and more subtle issues like correctly handling albums that get uploaded in multiple parts) to Picasaweb’s actual interface for viewing photographs. Maybe it’s unfair to compare Picasa and Flickr when it comes to the camera->computer upload and the computer->web upload steps, because Flickr doesn’t really contend in those areas at all (somewhat in the computer-web upload area, but their little uploader client is almost a non-contender). But even if you compare the web interfaces themselves, Picasaweb’s interface, I think, puts flickr’s to shame. It uses keyboard shortcuts so when I’m in album or slideshow mode, I can zip through photographs quickly. It seems to pre-cache the next few images so it feels faster than flickr. And best of all, they dynamically resize the image so regardless of the size of my monitor, the image fills most of the page — this is a big one!