Archive: 2007

This post made me look around and realize how much I adore our bookshelves…

Sometime in 2005, we ran out of bookshelf space. Done. All gone. But there was a small problem – we still had about 30 boxes of books in storage and we had to get them out.

The boxes showed up, we doubled up every shelf in the house – so there are two layers of books on every single shelf – and yes, you can’t see the second layer at all. Even after all that, we still had close to a thousand books and no clue where to put them.

Then we discovered these really cool stand alone bookshelves. In fact, when fully stocked, you can’t even see that it is a bookshelf. It looks like a stack of books rising from the floor. We first got a couple and then, over time, acquired a few more.

Life savers. Space savers. And elegant. These now dot the house. I can’t recommend them more highly. But as much as I love them, R is on a book diet and is also armed with an eBook reader in the hope that we don’t have to buy more of these!

When I lived in California, I listened to music all the time when I was home. Moved to NY, married someone with overlapping but different tastes in music, combined our music collections and put it all on a shared server. In concept a great idea, but the damned thing never worked properly and connecting from my Mac was excruciating (old NAS boxes were very Mac unfriendly 2-3 years ago). And back then, our collection was too big to put on a single iPod.

Barely listening to music for over two years = less happiness.

But all that changed when my friend and tech savior George visited and came up with the idea of making a Mac Mini into our server. With a couple of external hard drives plugged in, all the music is shared and we can each listen to anything. Everything is online. One central, in-sync library. Perfect.

I have all my various versions of Offenbach’s Barcarolle/Belle Nuit on continuous repeat 🙂 Happiness.

Thank you, George! You rock!

A lot to be thankful for this year… At the top of my list:

– I’m thankful that despite it being a tough year health-wise on family, we’ve mostly recovered and are chugging along.

– I’m thankful for being able to stay in touch with special friends. I’ve been on an IM spike with a friend from eBay who I hadn’t really talked to in a while. Made me realize that there are handful of folks in my life that I hope I will stay in touch with for a long time – with these folks, even when we reconnect after a while, it feels like we just spoke yesterday.

The New York Times has an interesting article on making thankfulness a daily (or weekly) experience versus just a yearly one… And on that note, thanks to my imaginary and not-so-imaginary readers for making this a fun space to hang out!

Update: check the bottom of the post for an update. In a nutshell – glitch. They know about it and are working on it.

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I am trying to buy a friend on Facebook a gift. It’s his birthday.

So, I click on his profile and say “Send <name> a Gift”. I get to a screen which requires me to verify my password. Okay.

However, when I type in password, here’s what I get. Where, precisely, am I supposed to enter my email?

And yes, I did try to enter my email in the password box. But of course that didnt’ work…

Facebook – what’s up? Don’t want my dollar? I’ve read conflicting numbers that their gift revenue is anywhere between $2 and $20 million per year. I wonder how long this login issue has been going on…

Update: Nov 15th, 3PM – After IMing with Eileen (who works at Facebook), I tried a few things to get it to work. Finally figured it out – when you sign in to Facebook, if you check the “Keep me signed in” box, gifts don’t work. If you leave that box unchecked it works. Apparently they are working on it.

A few weeks ago, A&L turned one.

This picture is of them surrounded by all their party presents. This was them at seven months. And here was my post the day they were born.

They are so adorable.

Perfect. Family.

One of those festivals where I miss being in India. Getting up early, wearing your new clothes, and bursting the required crackers before the sun comes up.

Charlie and his partner Alex are taking a very open the kimono approach to their startup, Path 101.

I’ve always believed that if you have an idea, there is bound to be someone else who’s also had a similar idea. So execution is nine tenths of the battle¹. Given that, their approach makes a lot of sense. In addition to sharing what they learn (thereby helping other entrepreneurs), they also open themselves to feedback from many more people.

One of their more recent posts was on how they’d like to work with LinkedIn. I loved this post for a number of reasons. Ever since Charlie has come up with the idea for Path 101, he’s always expressed that he wants to leverage great products that are already out there and get his users onto other platforms as well. I agree completely. Many of the ideas he suggests will result in expanding the value of Path 101 while at the same time expanding the market and network of LinkedIn to a market it does not currently capture – college students and recent college grads. Read the post – some interesting ideas.

If you want to follow a startup from inception including details like their weekly meeting schedules, head on over to their blog.

_{Disclosure: I’m involved with Path 101 in advisory and other capacities.}

1. another reason why entrepreneurs should not bother with NDAs ↩

I don’t think I’ve quite seen this before – some guy takes a Tamil song and does a transliteration – the subtitles are not the meaning of the song, but how it sounds to him in English. OMG!! Too funny.

I speak Tamil, so not all of it sounds close, but still worth watching… Thanks to Manish for sending.

I missed the Democratic Debate on September 26th. So, I decided to catch up on it on the NY Times website. They have really done a great job.

The visuals are accompanied by a transcript on the right hand side. The visuals and the transcript are synced together – moving the video along automatically adjusts the transcript to the correct spot. Selecting a spot on the transcript moves the video to the right place. Broad sections are also provided so you can jump to them directly.

Perfect execution.

So far, the only option was to pay to unlock your phone. Now, the open source team has done it! The iPhone can be unlocked for free without paying anyone, without sending it anywhere… This version is still for the tech-savvy. A GUI version will be coming out shortly.

And yes, I know this blog has become just about this one topic. That shall soon be fixed. When, exactly? Soon!

While you hold your breath, read more here and here.