Rakesh Agrawal's Blog — Founder, Investor, Houstonian

I had the same thought as Paul Kedrosky when I read about the paid space increments you can buy for Picasa Web Albums. Why not offer the same thing for GMail? I’m a heavy Gmail user and I’m soon going to need more space (I’m at 80% now, 2.2GB space used). I’d be MORE than happy to pay $25 / year to get up to 6gb. Like Paul, I’m baffled at why they aren’t offering this. I spent some time trying to figure it out and it just doesn’t make sense to me. E-mail is an extremely important communication tool for me and Gmail not only fulfills my needs here, but it adds quite a bit of value over other options IMO. I guess for now I’m fine and hopefully when I get closer to not being fine, Google won’t force me into a position to start deleting stuff. After all, that would violate one of the basic tenets of Gmail: “Don’t throw anything away”

I happened to be up when I noticed that Google had launched Picasa Web Albums. I’m a long-time Picasa fan so I took it for a quick spin. So far I think it’s pretty slick, it’s possible I might actually use it in place of my Flickr account just because it’s so well integrated with Picasa and that’s the first place all of my digital photos go. But we’ll see, I’m also hooked pretty deep into Flickr. Some initial notes:

• I need to figure out how to limit sharing to family and friends.
• Uploading is PC-only — I don’t believe this version is available for Linux yet, even in beta. And it definitely doesn’t work on the Mac. I know because that’s what I was using when I first logged into Picasa Web Albums. 🙂
• I like the fact that albums can be downloaded (at least it seems that way) — my family in India always wants a local copy b/c net connections aren’t as plentiful there (at least not yet) and are left to do a bunch of right click and saves.
• Slideshows are nice, I prefer them to the flickr flash-slideshow, one-size-regardless-of-how-big-your-screen-is thing.
• Tagging hasn’t ever mattered that much to me, so I won’t miss Flickr’s tagging, but I know it means a lot to other people. I suspect this will be the topic of a lot of conversation in the blogosphere. That and the absence RSS subscriptions (another item that I don’t use much) (Correction, PWA has RSS subscriptions.)
• As I mentioned, the integration is really great — sure beats exporting from Picasa and then uploading using the Flickr upload tool (which is pretty unsophisticated and pretty not-integrated with flickr, unlike Picasa – Picasa Web Albums).

Fittingly, you can see my screenshot walkthrough of Picasa Web Albums as a, well, Picasa Web Album.

Or click on any of the thumbnails below…

The new Picasa client (Windows-only) with Web Album button

The built-in upload manager uploads your photos to Picasa Web Albums

Back at the Picasa Web Albums website…

All of my albums

Inside of one of my albums

Play a slideshow within your browser

When a choose a photo, it loads progressively

The same photo after the first pass at loading — subsequent photos are pre-fetched so browsing from one photo to the next is fast

Organize my photos (move/copy photos from one album to another)

Re-arrange my album

Share an album of mine through e-mail

“All of human unhappiness comes from one single thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room.” — Blaise Pascal (from The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham)

I’ve uploaded my first batch of photographs to flickr — see them among other photographs tagged with barcamphouston.

I’m headed to barcamp houston this morning. Look for a full report later on. Here’s a write-up of my experience at barcamp delhi in March.

Read the story

I have to admit that I’m a big fan of many (but not all) Google products. One product that I’m a fan of is Google SMS. I’ve turned quite a few people on to this since I started using it more than 9 months ago and I still have people coming back to me telling me about how useful it is to them. And in spite of now having access, through Cingular’s EDGE network, to mobile versions of Google’s local search, I still use Google SMS fairly often. So I was pleased to see my cell phone carrier, Cingular, promoting Google SMS to subscribers in a recent e-mail newsletter I received:

Is Google paying for this or is Cingular simply deriving extra text messaging revenue from this?

I had someone IM me today to congratulate me on my new job at Microsoft. Nope, I said, that’s the other Rakesh Agrawal. There’s also a third Rakesh Agrawal who studied journalism at Northwestern’s Medill that used to factor into search results on the net for ‘Rakesh Agrawal’, but I don’t see him around as much anymore. What happened to him?

I’m reading Yann Martel’s “The Life of Pi” and I just read a brilliant chapter on fear, chapter 56:

I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.