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marathi jevan!

With my acquisition of a pressure cooker and its sundry auxilliary elements, I am finally able to cook a proper Marathi meal, almost like aai used to make. And still does. After the jump, my modest attempt at foodblogging.
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the nationals' new ballpark

New Nats Park: panorama INew Nats Park: panorama II

links for 2008-04-28

  • xkcd: zealous autoconfig
    If the wifi client could just intimidate my router into cooperating without kidnapping actual humans, I would be all for it. I would not be opposed to router-kneecapping, either.
    (tags: humor tech)

links for 2008-04-27

links for 2008-04-24

perhaps the best bollywood cover ever

Classic Bollywood liked to copy American songs with reckless abandon. (Today, they just copy pathetic Casio keyboard beats and rap in “muscle” shirts.) Indeed, I probably heard “Mere Jaisi Hasseena” (Armaan, 1981—so hot) before I heard the song it covered (“When You’re In Love With a Beautiful Woman”, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, 1978).

But this is definitely one of my favorite Bollywood covers: “Tumse Hai Dil Ko”, from Janwaar (1965):

(And that’s only half the actual song. I don’t expect anything less than 6m from Bollywood, and neither should you.)

links for 2008-04-23

  • 23 Apr 2008
  • 9:21am EST
  • Economics, Politics
  • This post contains political opinions. Reader discretion is advised.

shackle the free market, resort to food aid

The EU is now being forced to send even larger shipments of food aid to developing countries:

Making the announcement in the European Parliament, the commission’s development chief, Louis Michel, said: “The rise in basic food prices is a worldwide humanitarian disaster in the making. Ongoing humanitarian food programmes are under enormous pressure with less food available for people already on the brink of starvation.”

Jeremiah notes, bitterly, “European agricultural protectionism of course plays no role in this. It is
the (not actually) free market’s fault.” Nor does the Green+farm lobby pushing ethanol in those nations. Even more perverse is that the developing nations still have strict controls on imports (it takes an average parcel over 3 months to go through customs in the Central African Republic) that make normal market shipments of food difficult and failed legal regimes that discourage capital investments in their own arable land.

Both sides have locked their doors to trade and are shocked that they now have to crawl out their windows.

addendum Sherrod Brown pens an ignorant and petulant op-ed in the WSJ trying to defend trade barriers, operating under the myth that trade is a zero-sum game. Funny that he never mentions the merits of not-starving-poor-countries or of the capital investments those evil foreigners make in American industry.

dr. 'fraidofunlocking

Or “How I Stopped Worrying and Unlocked My iPhone”.

Last month, my once-trusty Razr v3c, running on Verizon’s once-trusty network, stopped being so trusty. I was not gainfully employed at the time, so I figured that if I needed to make a call from my own apartment, I’d just press my face against the window–the only position from which I could prevent a dropped call.

Then, in mid-March, three events occurred nearly simultaneously:

  1. Finding that I suddenly had NO SERVICE WHATSOEVER in my own home, I hurled my phone across the room in frustration. Oddly enough, once I snapped the pieces back together, the phone still worked. But the reception was about the same.
  2. I became fed up with my OLPC.
  3. I received word that I was gainfully employed once more.

At that point, I decided to make a radical shift in the way I used the telephone. I switched to T-Mobile (which has, as far as I can tell, a pretty good east coast network) and finally caved in and bought an iPhone. Then I hacked it to make it work on T-Mobile’s network–which brought the additional benefit of being able to run third-party software. After the jump, a summary of why and how I jailbroke my iPhone, as well as a few notes of interest.
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links for 2008-04-22

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