Rakesh Agrawal’s Blog

I’m a part-time Macintosh user. It’s a long story, but my wife and I actually got one of the original iMacs as a wedding gift. Yeah, I know, really nice wedding gift (shout out to John!). The best part is that we use it and love it… but I digress. Being involved full-time (and then some) in the “media center” software space and being an occasional Macintosh user, I was intrigued when Apple launched Front Row, a full-screen interface to photos, music, DVDs and videos on the Mac. But I haven’t seen Apple market this very much — no TV ads with mentions of Front Row, not a lot of play in Jobs’ keynotes, etc. I suspect it was the equivalent of someone’s 20% time at Apple and got the greenlight because people at Apple were intrigued by it, but who knows, maybe it was a requirementthat came from the top down.

Anyways, Apples seems to finally be giving Front Row some airtime in their marketing, as evidenced by this e-mail that I received last night:

(cross-posted from the SnapStream Blog)

I caught some TV last night, two quick highlights:

• Letterman’s Top 10 last night was “Top Ten Signs Osama Bin Laden Is In Love With You”… How did “You jihad me at hello” only make #4??
• Jon Stewart talked about the absurdity of the media’s attention to the meal and champagne eaten by the Jon Benet suspect on the flight that brought him back to the U.S. from Thailand.  I agree, completely absurd.  Then I was watching CNBC this morning and what do I see?  Again, some news anchor talking IN RIDICULOUS DETAIL about what the guy had for breakfast this morning.  Is there some new discipline within criminology that ties what people eat to crimes they may or may not have committed??

It looks like the folks over at Gist have launched a new mobile program guide service called UGuide… I’m downloading it now and looking forward to trying it out.  It’s a java midlet so it should work just fine on my Windows Mobile 5, Cingular 2125.  Does anyone out there have any experience with it?

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