Ok, for Maria’s entertainment, I’m writing a blog post after 7 long months. One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much (in addition to not really being much of a blogger, and general laziness) is that I have blue.us now! Blue.us is an easy way to comment on things you find interesting on the web. It’s invite only right now, so drop me a line if you want an invite. They are launching publicly at the end of the month!
My brother’s tequila bar is now open! It’s right next to Pac Bell pack and it has a wide array of Jaliscan food and tequila! I was there a couple weeks ago for a friends and family night and it’s a pretty fun place. Check out this review.
Lauren and Kenny (my wonderful roommates that gave me the original vidster.net for my birthday last year) got me Karaoke Revolution this year! They think that Yourself Fitness is the best xbox game ever, but Karaoke Revolution is way better. The starting song selection is pretty great (lots of teenybopper songs and some good oldies) and you can download more songs from xbox live. The best part is that it rates your performance by taking your vocal input and comparing your pitch to the expected pitch. If you really suck, the crowd boos you off the stage. I’m so ready for Bush Garden!
The prague dance festival people posted pictures! (From the front that’s Vidya C, me, Priya, Roopa and Deepa) There are pictures of the other groups here.
This is really only of interest if you grew up learning bharatnatyam in the bay area. I got an email at work today about a random Kannada movie screening. I totally ignored the email at first, until someone pointed out that DeepaP is the female lead! DeepaP learned dance from my school before she got into bollywood and starting going by the stage name Deepali. Her movie is called Joke Falls and it’s playing in Kirkland tomorrow.
My brother received his seahorses this week, so I am now a proud aunt of three nephews and three nieces. Seahorses are pretty delicate creatures, but despite some minor emergencies, Sriram is taking good care of them. Soon they will start breeding and Sriram will have the seahorse empire he’s been dreaming of. Apparently the seahorses are still a little shy, but Sriram will send me pictures when they get acclimated. They don’t have names yet, but he is taking suggestions (like Kenny’s band)
I finally got around to the posting all the pictures of Shalini’s wedding and of Prague and Budapest. Most of my pictures of the wedding are of the mehndi night and the wedding morning setup. TK Uncle’s album has more shots of the actual wedding.
Shalini’s aunt made the huge peacock rangoli. She is the guiness record holder of the world’s largest rangoli!
My absolutely brilliant coworker Chris came up with a site that combines king county bus information with google maps. It’s call bus monster. The site allows you enter in an address and see realtime bus info for the area. You can even register to get an email or text message when your bus is nearing your stop. He also integrated it with the Department of Transportation webcams so you can easily get traffic updates for any location. It’s inspired by the site that combines craiglist and google maps.
You can stay up to date about the latest new features by reading the bus monster blog.
Since Amazon has to display the same image in many different sizes with subtle modifications for different promotions, they don’t actually store all the variations of the images. They have a standard picture and dynamically generate the image based on parameters passed in the url. Someone spent some time figuring out the different parameters and came up with interesting images.
I just stumbled upon the Tamil version of wikipedia. Now my grandmothers can read about Albert Einstein, Tony Blair and Christopher Columbus on the internet. Wikipedia now supports over 100 languages and many of them use different scripts.
The font strays a little from traditional Tamil. The characters that are used to change the vowel sound are all written after the associated consonant. (Try reading the “To” in Tony Blair to see what I mean) It also takes liberties with displaying letters that have the “oo” sound.