Just bought tickets to the Jens Lekman show in Cambridge at the Middle East. Should be great. Jonathan Richman tickets go on sale tomorrow for the March show. Hoping on that fast.
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1 week until we leave for Australia and then New Zealand. We’re excited as hell. 14 inches of snow tonight might slow things down in terms of other things, but rest assured: we’ll be ready to roll next Sunday. The 14 hour flight from San Francisco to Sydney is nothing to look forward to, but we’ll manage by slumming it in coach.
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1. I got my hands on the forthcoming Magnetic Fields record entitled Distortion.
2. I love it.
3. I’m trying to buy tickets to their Somerville show, but hate being pimped on ebay.
4. I was a pimp in a former life.
5. I’m being punished in this life as a result. If you care to change that, let me know.
6. I pre-ordered the album on Amazon. You’re welcome.
7. I’m telling all my friends about it. Again. You’re welcome.
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I use Dreamhost quite a bit for a variety of domain hosting. I recently tried using it for DNS services for a custom domain name that I was using for a tumblr tumblog.
It didn’t work so well. (the Dreamhost DNS part that is)
The idea itself is simple: You create a CNAME DNS record pointing to the Tumblr IP address. And then they handle it internally when requests come in.
The problem with Dreamhost is that it creates a number of CNAME records for domains that they are managing as part of your account.
Dreamhost allows you to create multiple CNAME records as expected, but doesn’t consistently work. For some unknown reason, my CNAME record that pointed to tumblr’s IP address would occassionally resolve to what appeared to be an HTTP directory listing enabled site. I mean, WTF?
In any case, I forgot that DynDNS was the best solution. I pointed my rajzilla.com’s nameservers to DynDNS (rather than through Dreamhost) and then created a CNAME record there that points to Tumblr and now it consistently works.
You have to use the DynDNS custom domain service in order for this to work, but these guys have been super through the ~8 years that I have used their paid service. And it’s cheap as hell.
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The current unrest in Pakistan won’t end gracefully. Nor will it end soon. People are calling for the restoration of democracy as if there was one functioning before. Their history doesn’t exactly portray one of a harmonious, mountainous nation thriving by the will of the people. Frankly, democracy isn’t what we should be concerned with at the moment. It’s the power vacuum about to be created with radicals waiting in the wings that the world should focus on.
Further, Pakistan’s friends and foes alike will need to intervene when Musharraf loses power. There’s an assumption in the previous statement: I don’t think he’ll make it through this unscathed. His time as come — and his opponents will use this current weakness as an opportunity to seize power and convert Pakistan into our greatest nightmare: extremists with nuclear weapons.
Even with a relatively stable regime, the Pakistanis managed to proliferate nuclear weapons to every known offender worldwide who possessed a little cash. Iran and North Korea only have their nuclear capabilities because of these fellows who are now regarded as national heroes. Iran in particular looks like a walk in the park compared to the situation in Pakistan. So Ahmadinejad questions the Jewish holocaust — who cares at the moment when there might be another one but on a much larger scale?
There’s no easy answer to the current situation. Propping up Musharraf’s regime with billions of US dollars has not proven useful. US troops on the ground won’t work as a force to keep things from completely disintegrating — the Pakistani people would revolt in a violent way. A puppet government also would prove ineffective as it has so many times in the past.
Our main mission, however covert it might be, should be to secure the nuclear weapons — or just destroy them before it gets into the wrong hands. India might be forced to react to this before the US has a chance. We’re not next door to Pakistan and don’t have the urgency that India has. And I wouldn’t blame her either.
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I started a tumblelog at tumblr.com. It’s at rajzilla.com.
My aggregated life has an RSS feed.
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In Atlanta, I listened to music on my desktop machine frequently since I was working from home primarily. Now that we have an office in Boston, I tend to listen to music on my iPod during the subway rides and at the office.
The net result? Not as many Last.fm updates to my listening habits. Sure, you can update Last.fm from your iPod now with the latest versions of their software, but you have to enable automatic synching —– and that sucks. I like to synch manually since I listen to tons of music while I work and have tons stored on disk.
Anyway, Boston has changed a few things. This is just one of them.
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The record comes out in a couple weeks — it’s top 10 material for sure.
There are some incredible tracks on this record. These are my favorites:
1. $20 — certainly more serious, but the Indian references make me laugh a little — you almost have to speak a Dravidic language to get some of the references.
2. Bird Flu — more incredible similarities to South Indian popular music — makes me want to do, what would amount to, awkward looking ass shaking on the subway.
3. Bamboo Banger — not sure what she’s saying, but this is a catchy-ass song
4. Boyz — the South Indian music similarities are more subtle, but this is a good track regardless
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I have been revisiting my love for Chuck D, Flava Flav, and Terminator X — collectively known as Public Enemy. I remember driving my parents station wagon (sans built-in tape deck) around in 9th grade with a portable boombox blasting PE’s “Rebel Without a Pause” from “It Take a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.” The record sounds as fresh, dance-y, and rebellious today as it did then. It’s hard to keep from busting out a few robot dance moves on the subway followed by an MC Hammer old skool run-in-place.
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I had the great pleasure of hanging out with some TechStars entrepreneurs last week in Boulder while I was out there. I watched them practice their pitches to a closed group of people. Then I had beers with a handful of smart (and funny) dudes who are building some really neat applications.
Thereâs something to be learned by hanging out with these guys. I try to cull tidbits of inspiration from anyone I meet and young entrepreneurs are no exception. Most of them appear to be in their early twenties and seem fearless. And theyâre not afraid to iterate and move on ââ thatâs sometimes the hardest part of it all.
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One of my favorite things to do at an international airport is to read the departure and arrival boards. It must be the wanderer and traveler in me that longs for far off destinations in search of unusual episodes and thought provoking experiences. Being in perpetual transit has been part of my personality from childhood I suppose.
Anyway, if you’re half-interested, you can get to the following places from Delhi in one hop in the next couple of hours. (Most international flights to Europe leave India
a couple hours later than these)
1. Abu Dhabi
2. Kuala Lumpur
3. Singapore
4. Tokyo
5. Chicago
6. Newark
8. Doha
9. Bangkok
10. Hong Kong
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I was doing some work late one evening with the lights turned down low in the room and I happened to glance outside of the window and fixated upon a strange, dark object. It was a bat —- at the same height as the floor I was on! I quickly grabbed my camera and sprang into action.
It eventually flew away. I suppose it was annoyed with the flash from my camera, but it was a little crazy to see one so close up.
Then the next morning, in the same exact set of trees, I see a wild parrot staring back at me much like the bat was. I have only seen the bat once, but the parrots can be seen regularly.
I often find myself trying to explain things about India — to myself even. Similar metaphors associated with bats and parrots can be found amongst many other contrasting aspects of life here. India seems a little like a mashup —– different parts fused together or placed side-by-side.
But one of the most obvious disparities is between India’s rich and poor. And it’s a gulf that only seems to be getting worse — at least in the short term. But my fear is that India’s extremely poor will get left behind in the current technology boom. But that’s what happens in democratic societies with free markets —– things aren’t necessarily fair. And they’re certainly not balanced.
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One could opine and muse all day long about the problems in India, particularly when it comes to infrastructure. Let’s face it — India’s infrastructure is a mess. One cannot even classify it as being in disrepair —– because that implies that it worked properly once upon a time. But the problems are and will get better over time. But still, each time I visit India, it’s apparent how chaotic things are here because of it.
“Load shedding” happens frequently. It’s a way of forcing people off the electrical grid when it needs to, well, shed some load. A very small, lightweight storm came through Pune a few days ago. We lost power at the house for a brief period. I lost Blackberry data service for the rest of the evening. It was the sort of storm that would be a blip on the radar in the States in terms of fear of power loss. But small storms can amount to large disruptions here because of the infrastructure.
But, just before the storm was starting to set in, I was wandering around on foot (getting a break from my startup) and realized that democracies are chaotic by definition. Competing interests, capital markets, free flow of information and ideas all have a mysterious way of being chaotic yet somehow manage to work out in seemingly the most challenging situations.
As people continue to describe India as the “counter-weight” to China, I am reminded that infrastructure in Shanghai is brilliant, but at the cost of slave labor, censorship and basic freedoms. Give me poor, ailing infrastructure any day along with the ability to speak my mind, read from the free press, and travel freely —– compared to living under a merciless regime with well paved roads.
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I spent a couple of days at BarCampBangalore3 last weekend on the lovely campus of the highly reputed Indian Institute of Management (IIM). I spoke about BigSwerve, my startup, and the Semantic Web in reference to such. People get it and the reaction was great —– and I think they’re starting to understand the Semantic Web as well. There wasn’t much time to really try to explain what the Semantic Web was all about, so I stuck to simple examples of being able to make inferences over data to explain one large difference between the “uppercase” SemWeb and its “lowercase” comrads consisting of things like microformats.
BCB3 was fun — and it was one of the more thought provoking technology gatherings since it incorporated more than just a pure tech focused discussion. There was a lively discussion about India’s future as a provider in a services economy or one in a product economy. I get the feeling that many folks believe a product based approach is more prestigious than that of a service or outsourcer economy.
I interjected, from a somewhat outsider perspective, that the source of innovation is typically close in physical proximity to the source of the need. In other words, the western world typically innovates for the western world itself. And mobile phone are way more ubiquitous compared to personal computer use in India, especially in homes. Until such a time when Indians can innovate for India, it will continue to predominantly be a services based economy.
And it’s not a bad place to be either in my opinion —– some people during the discussion raised the age old argument that all the profits from companies like Nokia get returned to Finland, the respective shareholders, and people outside of India. But they quickly forget the valuable benefits brought on with employment in the local economy and the tremendous wealth being recirculated by such.
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I’m back in India for six weeks as we try to push to reach the next level of our beta release. We’re going to open it up to a wider audience in the coming weeks.
I’m also going to be at BarCampBangalore3 this coming weekend being held on India’s prestigious IIM campus to discuss some thoughts on the Semantic web and how we fit into it.
On another note, I chose to take the direct, non-stop flight to India from the States rather than making the connection in Europe as I previously had in the past. The trip can be painful, but it’s the best way to minimize fatigue. And the prices — at the moment at least — are less than the cost of making the connection in Europe. 15 hours on a plane can be rough though.
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