Sudarshan Gaikaiwari

It’s a place where some hicks still proudly fly a flag from a war they lost in order to keep their slaves.

Wil Shipley

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I think nationalism is a disease and it’s a disease that has really hurt the world.

Nicholas Negroponte

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go check

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Posting here is going to be even more infrequent. Check valleygeek.org to see what I am upto.

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In Steve Job’s keynote yesterday there was a mention of Jim Allchin’s desire to buy a Mac. Today the context in which Allchin made that statement has been revealed. In his email Allchin keeps reiterating “scenario, simple, fast’. Any software developer should take these words to heart. The order of these three words is also significant. The most important thing for any software is it’s usage scenario.Usage scenario help in making the right tradeoffs while designing software. But for the few lucky people who write device drivers and are constrained by the operating system interface on one end and the device interface on the other, all other software developer need to pay a lot of attention to the design of the interface that their software presents. As far as the user is concerned the interface is the software. She does not care how extensible, modular the software is. Nor is she bothered if it uses the latest technology or is Web 2.0 compliant ;-). All the users want is to achieve their goals with the minimum effort.

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from the Union Square Ventures blog on Founders and Management. What is a business?

it’s a collection of people who have been organized in attempt to profit from offering a product or service to the marketplace.

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A quote by Alan Kay

People who are really serious about software you should make their own hardware

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I am reading a fascinating book, “The Bug” by Jesse Ullman, these days. It contains a description of programming with which I completely agree

Programming starts out like it’s going to be architecture – all black lines on white paper, theoretical and abstract and spatial and up-in-the-head. Then, right around the time you have to get something fucking working, it has this nasty tendency to turn into plumbing.

…

It’s more like you’re hired as a plumber to work in an old house full of ancient, leaky pipes laid out by some long-gone plumbers who were even weirder than you are. Most of the time you spend scratching your head and thinking: Why the fuck did they do that?

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I have been intending to write this post for a while. Kept putting it of as it might seem to corny but …

A few months ago I read this blog post by Joshua Allen. I have seen many unhappy relationship and could not but think that it boiled down to low self esteem among the people involved. Since some of you might be too lazy to read the comments on that post here is what Allen thinks as high self esteem

Let’s roughly define “high self-esteem” as, someone who is optimistic and positive about his/her own ability to have a positive influence on the world; who has internal locus of control versus external (that is, doesn’t blame others or ‘luck” for failure, and doesn’t take failure personally but sees it as learning). And finally, someone who sees that this attitude reflects the intrinsic worth of all people.

Among all the couples that I have seen only Tieming and Bo Ding seem to have a great relationship and I guess it is because of how good they feel about themselves and how they make others around them also feel good.

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“Love is a Bitch” is a great movie by Alejandro González Iñárritu. I have seen his 21 grams and I am looking forward to Babel. I really like the way he makes his movies. I guess he is one of the few people more cynical than I am and his potrayl of human nature closely matches my beleifs about it. Technically the movie is just brilliant, the cinematography and the soundtrack are about as good as it gets. I really liked “La visa es un carnaval” and the beats were really apt for the scenes they were used in. The movie talks about the struggles we endure in our quest for love. It links up three different stories showing this struggle in its different phases and somehow manages to have a coherent structure. The story of Octavio deals with his love for his brother Romario’s wife. Daniel’s story deals with his love for a top model who will soon be tragically disfigured in an accident. The story of EL Chivo, a vagrant hitman, talks about his love for his daughter whom he left when she was 2 years old to become a guerilla. In all the cases the quest for love is futile and tragic.

I like movies like Amoresperros that cross the borders of language and culture and make such bold statements about universal themes such as love.

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