ctrl.altered.mind

If the title of this post was not enough as a hint, I got the following text as an email forward from dear family. Some of these present wise advice, and therefore, I shall share them with everyone chancing upon this blog.

(Text has been cleared of all obnoxious font typography, size, and color for your reading pleasure)

If a dog was the teacher you would learn stuff like:

When loved ones come home, always run to greet them.

Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joyride.

Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy.

When it’s in your best interest, practice obedience.

Let others know when they’ve invaded your territory.

Take naps.

Stretch before rising.

Run, romp, and play daily.

Thrive on attention and let people touch you.

Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.

On warm days, stop to lie on your back in the grass.

On hot days, drink lots of water and lie under a shady tree.

When you’re happy, dance around and wag your entire body.

No matter how often you’re scolded, don’t buy into the guilt thing and pout … run right back and make friends.

Delight in the simple joy of a long walk.

Eat with gusto and enthusiasm. Stop when you have had enough.

Be loyal. Never pretend to be something you’re not.

If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it.

When someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close by and nuzzle them gently.

For those not in the know, a meme is a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. The rest of you would be aware that memes can either trigger bloggers block or induce feverish and passionate mashing of input keys on a digital computing appliance. Known factors affecting response to stimulus include time of day, caffeine content, length (and width?) of pending tasks list(s) for the subject. Side effects to remain undisclosed until FDA approval.

If all that sounded like gibberish, you must be new to the internet. Check this link for a quick tutorial on the neo-cultural phenomenon that is a meme.

Alright, if you haven’t guessed by now - yes, I have been tagged for reciprocating to a meme. It doesn’t happen often, but when one does get flung my way, it usually is followed by a few moments of pause, which are followed by thoughts revolving around the theme, “how should one go about responding to this meme”. Well, fortunately this particular one appears to be not too complicated, so here goes -

First things first - I was tagged by the Bluelicious blogger.

Next, to lay out the rules -
- Link the person who tagged you.
- Mention the rules in your blog.
- Tell us about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours.
- Tag 6 following bloggers by linking them.
- Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.

Unspectacular Quirk #1:
I’m slightly compulsive when it comes to text formatting (in addition to spelling, but that has been covered before). Before sitting down to peruse a digital document, I must go through a set of re-formatting tasks to make the text more pleasing to my eye (caveat: the document has to be editable, of course.. if it isn’t, I am sure I won’t be giving it 100% attention). I have to right-justify paragraphs, insert whitespace as appropriate (or remove redundant line breaks), and switch fonts if necessary to a personal favorite. If I’m dealing with computer code, I will go through additional routines like replacing tabs with spaces (depends on the computer language and currently active text editor).

Unspectacular Quirk #2:
This one is fairly new, and I hope it does not become an impulsive habit. If I am at the computer when I come across a new interesting word or phrase (or personality), I tend to google it for etymological references and usage. I am likely to also check the wikipedia link for additional trivial knowledge accumulation.

Unspectacular Quirk #3:
In restaurants, I tend to choose corner booths by the window (even if the weather is dreary).

Unspectacular Quirk #4:
Speaking of quirks, I am intrigued by (and often even go looking for) easter eggs and unusual usages in computer programs and hardware. As far as microcode programming is concerned, I regularly realize usage quirks for C that I picked up as a graduate student, which conflict with the way the ARM compiler likes its code. I’ll spare the details in the general interests of this weblog.

Unspectacular Quirk #5:
In large parking lots, quite often I park my car at farther distances from the entrance. Surprisingly, I don’t consciously do this at work. Perhaps I should start tomorrow.

Unspectacular Quirk #6:
I am officially addicted to getting my world and offbeat news from Reddit. I have even found myself guilty of opening Reddit in a new browser tab, only to realize that I already had it open in an older one. More proof that I’m getting old.

There (phew). I can’t believe how unspectacular those quirks of mine are! If you’re still reading this pointless passage, you might as well go on to read the hopefully more captivating lists the following people-who-are-about-to-be-tagged are going to make. You can even call it a sociological experiment, if you want to sound important.

Mike
Murali
raison d’etre
Sean
Rohit
// placeholder*

* That’s five. Note to self - befriend more bloggers for the sole purpose of dissemination of vital cultural exchanges such as this one.

This has got to be the most uplifting video I have seen this week (or perhaps this year). The outro is especially outstanding.

With no one to count on. Yet.

Image from the ProseBeforeHos weblog

A fire broke into an older brick building housing the popular Maxwell’s American Cafe in Downtown Minneapolis on Wednesday, causing some serious damage with the flames causing the roof to partially collapse.

Firefighting efforts were compounded by sub-zero temperatures that day as the sprayed water instantly frosted the building and surrounding structures, casting a frosty and fascinating mantle over the landscape.

Flickr user Tony Webster has some fascinating images captured at the scene, such as this one (cannot post the image here as all rights are reserved by the photographer).

See the complete photoset here (29 pictures), or view as a slideshow.

Raj Thackeray has the achieved the (dubious) distinction of scoring a place in the In The News section on Google News. I can’t believe that such buffoonery is being tolerated by the people of Mumbai and Maharashtra.

A comic by Ted Rall appeared on Yahoo! this week, referring to a hypothetical Mike Huckabee in the garb of a Hindu fundamentalist. I thought it was pretty amusing.

The comic also sparked a bit of debate on reddit, but I hope most people realized that the cartoon aimed to point out the way fundamentalism of any kind virtually falls apart if taken literally. Unfortunately (in my humble opinion, of course), this wisdom is not demonstrated through the results of the Iowa caucus.

(Update) As this page just got linked, I thought I would explicitly add my perspective on the subject instead of leaving it (my opinion) open to interpretation. One has to understand that it has been targeted at the so called ‘ignorant’ American whose knowledge of Hinduism is probably derived from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It is easy to see the rhetoric in this cartoon, as the concepts outlined are pretty bizarre in a scientific context. It would easily make a person of any religion see the sarcasm, especially how misguided religious fundamentalists in the West (as with any other part of the world) are.

I’ve only been hit by one meme in the past, but that has not stopped me from wondering about things that matter the most to me when I happen to chance upon memes on the interwebs. It also makes me realize the lameness coefficient of my own blog (sigh). Oh well, now that I have an incoming meme, here are the ‘Top Ten Most Awesome Things That Happened On This Blog’* (in no particular order) -

I went through the task of setting up a UPnP home media server involving a Mac and a PS3

I was amused by the fact that the fastest personal computer to run Windows Vista is a Mac

I discovered xkcd and then chugged through the entire comics archive - and in the process discovered a talk at Google by Randall Munroe, and his ball pit couch

I wrote about recovering hidden disk space on the Mac

I publicly professed my infatuation with all things Audi

I got myself a sportsbike!**

I responded to my first meme

I discovered that Shift Happens

I made fun of Windows (especially Vista)

I wrote a tiny Mac application (based on Automator) that concatenates multiple pdf documents into a single file

Well, that got done quickly. At first I thought I was going to have a really hard time coming up with ten things to list here. Now for phase two of the meme - distribution. Tags go out to Mike, Murali, Rohit, and Sean.

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous new year! See you all in 2008.

* Your Mileage May Vary

** In terms of awesomeness, this one trumps the rest by an immeasurable margin

A long, long time ago, I tacked on some OpenID support to my blog by enabling the WPOpenID plugin (developed by Alan J Castonguay and Hans Granqvist) without testing it. After some gentle prodding from spl (who is probably the only visitor to my blog using OpenID :P), I have now finally had the chance to complete this project. OpenID support is now up and functional. Thanks Sean!

The plugin is designed to work with a standard wordpress installation, but kept failing for me because my site is restructured to live outside the conventional /wordpress directory structure. I had to update the permalinks translation at a few points within the plugin code, but it seems to be running fine now. I was able to test this by registering for a free OpenID account (with MyOpenID).

So what really is OpenID? It is essentially an easy-to-use form of online identity. Just like an email address, you can simply use a web address (or URL) that communicates your login information behind-the-scene to a blog or website that accepts OpenID, thus eliminating the need to create and maintain numerous user accounts for each of these sites. Click here to learn more about OpenID.

…especially with the current context of the US dollar falling to equal 93 cents Canadian, lowest since the Civil War.

“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”

- Richard Feynman