Category: General

Steve’s company, Spur Digital, does most of the online marketing for the Houston Museum of Natural Science and he had highly recommended the Body Worlds 3 exhibit. So I’d been meaning to take Ananya and anyone else in the family interested to the exhibit. Turns out the exhibit is closing this weekend after being here in town for 6 months so I went online yesterday looking for tickets… sold out, sold out, sold out. Almost every timeslot for the exhibit was sold out, except for the night-time showings. What night-time showings?, you ask. Well, it turns out that when demand is high, the HMNS starts exhibiting 24×7 to fulfill as much of the demand as possible. So I wasn’t too excited about it, but I went ahead and bought two tickets for a showing this morning, Sunday, at 5:45 in the morning. I figured I’d get someone to go with me. Well, when morning rolled around, I was up and ready to go but couldn’t manage to get anyone to join me — not Shonali, not Ananya, not my Dad (my Mom actually told me she thought I was crazy… 🙂 ).

I went anyways and it was worth it. The exhibit was a strange and intriguing mixture of science and art. Some might dispute calling what was there ‘art’, but I’d certainly call it that even though it was positioned more as science. I mean, what else can you call it when you take the remains of two humans and a horse and create this:

Or when you take the remains of four humans and put them around a table, making it look like they are playing poker? I suspect that if the exhibit had been positioned as art, it would have upset a lot more people. As it was, I’m sure that at least some people came out of the exhibit offended.

Now the other part that was interesting… Going this morning, I was, in part, simply interested in who else would be attending an exhibit so early in the morning. I figured that I’d be among the few that had signed up for the crazy early morning viewing. I was wrong. The place was packed from wall to wall. There was a dense line of people that inched along through the exhibit. Anyone who thinks Houstonians are an inert bunch that don’t get out and take advantage of the great art, culture, and science that this city has to offer would have changed their minds this morning!

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

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!