Information spreads like Plague on the web - Blogs' contribution

I was reading about the Memespread project on Wired. Meme is a unit of information that passes from one person to another person as defined in the Memespread project Analysis. The objective of this project was to determine the route a piece of information takes to be transmitted and the duration it takes for it to get popular. It is indeed a interesting thing to have used blogs to test this phenomenon. Regular bloggers will observe that any popular piece of phenomenon - be it a cool software or a game or a mpeg doesn't take more than 30 days to gain popularity! The ones that strike me instantly are the Penguin game (yeti and penguin), the big line in front of the new Apple store at Tokyo.
Some of the most popular blogs are listed here.

In other news, I'm really exhausted with the all-day meetings. It is taxing to listen to someone for 8 hours. It is a meeting after meeting and finally when it comes to doing real work, I'm burnt out! Right now I'm really looking forward to the long weekend.

Appearances can be deceptive. I looked at someone today and wondered why would someone so authoritative present himself not-so-elegantly. All it took was just a 10 min conversation with him to change my perception and more importantly be very impressed! What would have taken me atleast an hour or more to figure out took him a mere 5 mins and he presented it so beautifully and made it so simple.

Introspection

Dad left this evening. I was very sad until I spoke to Mom now and she cheered me up! I feel so much better now. Retrospecting the events over this past 1 month, the questions I was asked has got me into thinking.

"Is everything so easy for you now?"
"Don't you care about anything anymore?"
"Is this take-everything-lightly attitude right?"
"Have you lost respect for others feelings?"
"Isn't this I-know-it-better attitude a sign of arrogance?"

I don't have answers for any of these questions. Upon introspection I know one thing for sure - I have changed and changed drastically in the past 2 years. It has got nothing to do with coming here. The biggest influencing factor for the change in my perception of everything and how I do what I do is 1 person. His characteristics are beginning to show in my character. I'm surprised at how much they have affected me until Dad pointed them out to me and though I was initially upset about all this criticism everyday, thinking more about it I don't think we was wrong. The careless attitude stems from doing things and staying by myself.

Things for me to remember and follow:

1. Don't forget your roots. You got here because of his efforts. You saw the world thr his eyes until a few years back so don't show off that you are old enough to show him the world. Doesn't hurt to keep his ego boosted and continue seeing the world thr his eyes if that makes him happy!

2. Criticism from parents is for one's own good..they will NEVER say anything that will hurt the kids. Remember they have an edge - they are more 'experienced'.

3. Don't take them for granted. Their patience wears off too as they are aging. They have been patient all these years, now its your turn. Save that smile you put up thr the day for all the strangers to the people who matter the most! It will make them happy.
Their expectations from you are very little. Live up to those and don't disappoint. Its the least they are asking for.

4.How you perceive things might have changed with years. Thats what is given the fancy term - "Generation Gap". Try explaining and don't belittle them.

RSS and Atom

I've spent a lot more time than I should have reading about RSS and Atom. I've been trying to find a online RSS aggregator that would show 1 newly added post within the last 24 hours for a list of blogs that I read everyday. Though there are a few good online RSS aggregators that also support Atom such as Bloglines, they do not allow linking from one's blog. Feedster does provide this feature but it doesn't seem to work. The fetaure is called feedpaper that lists the recent posts from one's list.

While reading about RSS/Atom, I did discover a few good sites for maintaning links to other weblogs (commonly called blogrolling). Check out Blogrolling and Del.icio.us.

Parsing the RSS feed either with Java/PERL is actually not a difficult task if I had my own server. In the absence of which I'm looking for a site that parses the relevant information and displays it and also facilitates linking to it from my blog.

A few good links:
Specs and understanding what it is:
RSS
Atom
RSS Feed Reader /News Aggregator Directory

Random Thoughts

I'm really impressed with the transition that Blogger has gone through. The user interface for editing/managing posts and creating a blog has got a huge facelift that it has no resemblance to its earlier version. Good work!

I was surprised to see what a Gmail account is worth. Read this article. Blogger invites active bloggers to sign up and that's how I got mine. I created mine about a month back and had forgotten about it until I read the controversy surrounding privacy invasion and how ads relevant to the keywords in one's mail are displayed in Gmail. There's something about Google that keeps it in the limelight constantly. Check this one on search for the term "Jew" and Google's explanation of the same.

Today was another tough day. The nightmarish pattern for Thursday's continues...Dad left today for a brief trip to the West Coast. I don't know how I will react when he leaves on Tuesday from here. It will be sad and it is further sad that I'm not so open as I would like to be. I wish I could just tell him that having him here was fun and it will be disheartening to see him leave. I should start conversing better with real people than with computers.

Am I overworked?

I guess I'm overworked - at work and at home! I feel tired all the time and can't concentrate on anything lately. The traveling has also got on to me. This weekend would be such a great relief.

This last weekend at Niagara Falls was good. V commented that it is like Haridwar ( a pilgrimage center for Hindus in Northern India) for Indians in U.S. We started counting the Indian/Other Nationality Ratio sitting on a porch by the American Falls facing the Goat Island. For every 1 other Nationality person, there were 7 Indians. The only reason I could think of was the promotion of the Falls in the earlier Indian Films. Most of the Hindi/Regional films made in the 60's/70's (when shooting outside India captivated audiences), featured the Niagara Falls. Probably the next generation would frequent it as much as this generation does. This was my first visit and V's second. We took Dad there. He was satisfied to have seen it. Like every Indian, his image of America was the same too. If you've seen the Statue of Liberty,N.Y.C., Niagara Falls, White House, Lincoln Memorial, Disneyland - L.A, Mount Rushmore (it actually goes by "the mountain with the faces of the presidents"), you've seen it all.

Words of wisdom

Aldous Huxley said, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." Ironically he also used the term "man" and not "person/woman". More often than not in the past few months, I have proved right time and again. If only people listen atleast once the first time! This has happened in 3 instances and the third instance took me by surprise as to how one could feel so strongly about one way and then turn around by 180 deg.

It is not a woman's world yet. The attitude of a coworker towards me has changed so drastically (in a postive manner which is good) in the past few days. Reason - he apparently finally believes that the suggestions he thought I was blabbering for the past x months was not insane after all! When a man offers those same opinions and still bettr if he is older, it makes such a huge difference.

Weekend is here

V came last evening. We just lazed around..thanks to the thunderstorms. Tonight we leave for Niagara and it should be a lot of fun. Lots to finish at work before fun begins!

The interface to edit/manage posts on Blogger has changed. It is very user friendly now. I just hope the lil ad that comes on top of the page goes away too! Typepad is my favorite however.

A break from work and travel was not so much fun!

There is so much to write that I don't know where to begin from. I would have blogged more frequently if I weren't on my feet all the time for the past few days.

There has been a lot of travel. Went to NYC and DC this weekend.

NYC :
New York City was good. The layout of the streets is logical - the vertical ones are called Avenues and the horizontal ones are called "Streets". Once I had that figured out and the layout in general of where Bronx (North), Brooklyn (South), Queens (East), Manhattan (West), East river and Hudson River was, it was much easier. The transit system in every city is different that it takes time to figure it out. After seeing the Metro system at NYC, I'm all for CTA. CTA is amazing. Ofcourse the magnitude in terms of size and the numbers that travel by NY metro and CTA cannot be compared. We stayed at Jersey City which is much less crazier than NYC. After lunch at Jersey City we took off to Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel which took a whooping 2 hours to cross. The cousins who drove us said it was exceptionally high traffic that afternoon. Our first stop was at the World Trade Center. I have only seen pictures of the World Trade Center. It really must have been shocking to see those giant buildings that occupied so much space sometime to have fallen the way they did. The names of the thousands that disappeared in the attack are inscribed there. Standing there, nothing seems to justify that act of terrorism.

Out next stop was at Wall Street which is not so far from Ground zero. Being a Saturday afternoon, Wall street was really quiet. after taking a couple of pictures there, we headed to the Empire state Building. The Emipre state building built during the Great Depression took just a lil over 13 months to build. The observatory is situated on the 86th floor. Unlike Sears Tower at Chicago, the observatory is not in a enclosed area atop the Empire State building. One can step outside and feel the air and look at the mazing view down..it really feels like you are at the top of the world. However that evening it was very cold. It was 8:00 p.m. by the time we came down from the ESB. Our next adventure was to find a Indian Place to eat. This was exciting. Considering the fact that good eating places were probably just 4 blocks away (which we didn't know at the time) from where we were (5th avenue and 33rd Street), we kept going down on Park Avenue until we hit 1st Street. It was then that I told Lex is parallel to Park avenue and we traced all the way back. We went round and round for 4 times until we got 30th street and Lex. The only good part was that the place we chose to eat at was really nice. The cousin who drove us was very patient despite driving in the crazy NYC traffic for 6 hours at a stretch.

After a good dinner, we stopped at Times Square and then headed back to the hotel. The next morning, we took the ferry to see the legendary Statue of Liberty. It is nothing like seeing in the pictures. For some strange reason, I had always pictured it in grey color. Seeing it in green and standing tall was a breathtaking view.

Sunday evening we drove to D.C. D.C is so much in contrast to NYC. NYC stands tall with all the high rises. Whereas D.C reminds one of Roman architecture with those huge, not more than 10 storey tall federal buildings.

..to be continued...

It is a beautiful day here. Today is Dad's Birthday. Happy Birthday!

The day started at a bad note..Thursdays scare me. I've been going around the town so much that I need rest badly. I'm in acute pain now and feel like snapping at everyone but of late I've been very quiet at home/work!

In other news, Vinay left yesterday and there is a vacuum after he leaves everytime. Today is the last episode of Friends :(

Correction: Harper says, "The Rockies are just 30-40 miles from Denver though they seem far". so I stand corrected on my earlier post. Since he is from Colorado, I'll go with him :)

I haven't had time to update my blog in a week. It has been really busy at work and at home. Dinner at T's place last Wednesday was good - his kids are great and every time I go to someone's place who has lil kids it makes me wonder how tough it is to keep the house in order and really scares me. Dad came last Thursday which is very good and kinda strange since I can't recollect ever having him around while I grew up. I saw him for a mere 8 hours last summer in over 2 years.

The best part of these last few days was the weekend at Portland. It is such a beautiful place. I was so sad to leave on Sunday. There was such a drastic change in weather from mid-west to west. It snowed in Denver, Colorado and it was over 80 deg in Portland. The Rockies were snow-clad on Friday and on my return, the snow was all gone and the temperatures had soared back to the 70s in Colorado. Colorado is so flat and dry. There are these huge circular patches of fields all over. The landscape from Colorado to Oregon is amazing. It starts with flat( in the true sense) and dry, followed by the Rockies soaring high just a few hundred miles out of Denver and then there's Mt. Hood in Oregon and then the greenery of Portland. Portland was breathtaking from the air. It is so green that makes one want to stay there all the time. The weekend was so peaceful - THE place for one to stay after retirement!

In other news, it is a month of travel - this weekend I'm off to NY, D.C.
Countdown update - roughly 4 more months to go!