Author: rakesh

There’s quite a bit of the world that I still haven’t seen:

I’ve visited only 22 countries, or about 9% of the world’s countries.

(UPDATED: How could I leave out France?)

That’s 31 out of 50 states that I’ve been to, though a few, like Ohio, are just states that I’ve passed through on the way to another state.  Create a map for yourself here.

We’re raising Ananya to be bilingual — to speak and understand both English and Hindi, but we haven’t had much of a strategy to date. The closest thing to a strategy has been something we’ve seen work with different friends we know: speak to your children in Hindi (or whatever non-English language you want them to learn) exclusively, or as close to that as possible, without worrying about their English skills. The idea is that they’ll pick-up English whenever they start school.

My Dad, Ananya’s dadaji, is probably the most conscientious about speaking to Ananya in Hindi, but the rest of us pretty regularly speak to her in Hindi as well. And Ananya’s done pretty well so far — she appears to have the same level of understanding of both Hindi and English and I’d day her vocabulary, which grows everyday, is split 50/50 between the two languages. Some things she knows both in Hindi and English and uses them interchangeably (examples: “water” and “paani”, “come on” and “aa ja”). And some things she just knows the English word for (“apple”, “cherry”, “orange”) or just knows the Hindi word for (“gardi” for car, “dhudh” for milk, “chaaval” for rice). An interesting thing that I’ve learned along the way is that children that grow up learning two languages at once (aka dual language acquistion) generally begin talking later than children learning only one language. Another something I’ve learned is that television can be a great language teaching tool. Actually the TV thing really shouldn’t come as a surprise to me since my eldest sister first learned English from Sesame Street.

Anyways, as Ananya’s about to turn two I’ve decided it might be a good idea to read up some more on language acquisition in children… So I’ve got two books on the way from amazon.com “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language” and “What’s Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life”. I’ll write reviews of them in the context of dual language acquisition once I’ve read ’em. And if there are any other books you recommend, send me their titles.

I get all of my voicemails, work and personal, on email. I use Gmail for all of my email. Firefox is really slow (for some reason) when it comes to processing attachments. And even if it were faster, it’d still be slow compared to not having to download an attachment or having the attachment immediately accessible.

So I really want this feature, that appears to only be for Google Talk right now, to work for any WAV file that comes through on an e-mail:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=45756&topic=1565&hl=en

I just got a Blackberry 7290 (an extra my brother-in-law had lying around) but couldn’t do anything with it because it was stuck on a password screen.  An my BIL couldn’t remember the password so I went a searchin’ for info on how to reset the thing and start over.  I searched on:

‘Blackberry 7290, hard reset’

‘Blackberry 7290, handheld is locked’

‘Blackberry 7290, reset button’ (note to anyone else trying to find this — the 7290 doesn’t have one!)
‘Blackberry 7290, password protected’

‘Blackberry 7290, reset password’

None of the resulting pages had the right answer for me.

The solution?  I decided to try and exceed the maximum password retries (in the case of my 7290, I had a max of 6 retries).  Once I did this, it nuked all the data on the Blackberry and let me set it up from scratch.  Perfect!

Something that’s sorely lacking on the mobile web (or maybe I just haven’t come across the right site yet…) is a good restaurant guide.  If you know one, let me know!

Google Video lets you link to any specific place within a video now — just append the timecode in this form (#1m34s) and it’ll jump you to that exact location.  I believe this feature will prove to be extremely popular and widely copied by other online video services.  This goes a long way to improve the linkability of online videos.

Fox also announces their fall 2006 premiere dates:

Monday, August 21
8:00-9:00 p.m. Prison Break
9:00-10:00 p.m. VANISHED

Wednesday, August 30
8:00-9:00 p.m. Bones
9:00-10:00 p.m. JUSTICE

Thursday, August 31
8:00-10:00 p.m. DUETS

Tuesday, September 5
8:00-9:00 p.m. STANDOFF
9:00-10:00 p.m. House

Thursday, September 7
8:00-8:30 p.m. ‘TIL DEATH
8:30-9:00 p.m. HAPPY HOUR
9:00-10:00 p.m. DUETS

Friday, September 8
8:00-9:00 p.m. Nanny 911
9:00-10:00 p.m. DUETS Results Show

Saturday, September 9
8:00-8:30 p.m. COPS
8:30-9:00 p.m. COPS
9:00-10:00 p.m. America’s Most Wanted

Sunday, September 10
8:00-8:30 p.m. The Simpsons
8:30-9:00 p.m. American Dad
9:00-9:30 p.m. Family Guy
9:30-10:00 p.m.The War At Home

Saturday, September 16
11:00 p.m.-Midnight MADtv
Midnight-12:30 a.m. TALK SHOW WITH SPIKE FERESTEN

Friday, October 6
9:00 p.m. Trading Spouses: Meet your New Mommy

Thursday, November 2
9:00 p.m. The O.C.

TV.com posts NBC’s schedule for their new fall TV lineup:

September 18
Deal or No Deal (special two-hour edition, 8-10 p.m.)
STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP (10-11 p.m.)

September 19
Law & Order: Criminal Intent (9-10 p.m.)
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (10-11 p.m.)

September 20
The Biggest Loser (8-10 p.m.)
KIDNAPPED (10-11 p.m.)

September 21
My Name Is Earl (8-8:30 p.m.)
The Office (8:30-9 p.m.)
Deal or No Deal (9-10 p.m.)
ER (10-11 p.m.)

September 22
Law & Order (10-11 p.m.)

September 25
HEROES (9-10 p.m.)

October 3
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (8-9 p.m.)

October 4
TWENTY GOOD YEARS (8-8:30 p.m. and 8:30-9 p.m.)

October 11
30 ROCK (8:30-9 p.m.)

October 20
Crossing Jordan (8-9 p.m.)
Las Vegas (9-10 p.m.)