Evening Telegram

Indians’ selective sensitivity

nikhil — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:16:38 +0000

Ah, it’s campaign season again, which means it’s time for me to hear how I should join the Brown People Bandwagon™ and support the President—like Shefali Duggal Razdan, Deven Parekh, Sunil Sabharwal and Kavita Tankha, all named by the Hindustan Times* as typically oblivious fundraisers for the President’s re-election campaign.

Maybe I should climb aboard that bandwagon. I mean, clearly leading Indian-Americans seem to have no problem with the administration’s inability to understand innovation without their branding, let alone the Vice President’s Michael Scott-like racial observations. (Good thing he’s not George Allen or we’d have to care!)

* n.b.—I still have a grudge against the HT, who very casually linked a holy figure in my faith to an ideology that has helped kill hundreds of millions world wide. So yeah, f*ck the HT while we’re at it.

hahaSamsungsuck—oh, maybe not.

nikhil — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 04:22:55 +0000

John Gruber thinks it’s hilarious that Samsung is scrambling to find a device that can work all day on a single battery charge. HAR HAR That would be FUCKING HILARIOUS if my regular iPhone 3GS would work as expected with iOS 5.

Yeah, pretty sure that wasn’t in the fancy Tim Cook guidelines for not fucking up.

edit Heh, forgot the link. Yay inebriated posts.

selective memory in tech politics

nikhil — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:39:36 +0000

WordPress.org recently posted on why the abomination known as SOPA (House)/PIPA (Senate) needs to be stopped. Good arguments all around; the law has virtually no upside and a whole lot of draconian downside. But I found this bit interesting:

Laws are not like lines of PHP; they are not easily reverted if someone wakes up and realizes there is a better way to do things. We should not be so quick to codify something this far-reaching.

What, like massive restrictions on the financial industry that make it harder for tech startups to get funding? Or a hastily-written, multi-trillion dollar health care entitlement scheme? No? Never mind, then, carry on myopically.

motherf*cking judo

nikhil — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:34:42 +0000

The James Bond theme has words.

via Chairman Gruber

with real zucotti park smell

nikhil — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 01:47:43 +0000

The Occupy Wall Street Riot Brigade Lego set.

that creepy PBS logo

nikhil — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:13:25 +0000

And how it was developed.

via SO MUCH PILEUP

your bags behind the scenes

nikhil — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:09:59 +0000

Delta stuck a camera in one of its bags to give us a look at what your bag sees on its journey. Hey, it looks better than coach.

via swissmiss

Stephen Colbert breaks character

nikhil — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 05:13:54 +0000

via kottke.

Beeri: a beer-pouring interface for Siri

nikhil — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 02:32:49 +0000

Beeri from redpepper on Vimeo.

LSU and the civil war

nikhil — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 05:40:50 +0000

Turns out the LSU Tigers were not named for the large cat.

The Tigers were just a small subset of the 12,000 Louisiana soldiers in Virginia in 1861. Most were decent, God-fearing men who served their state honorably. But there were enough criminals and drunkards mixed in to give the entire state’s contribution a bad reputation. The good were lumped together with the bad, and because Wheat’s Tiger Battalion was the most infamous, all became known as the Louisiana Tigers.
…
The Tigers’ name lives on today. Contrary to popular belief, the Louisiana State University Tigers are not named for a ferocious feline but for Louisiana’s most famous Civil War soldiers. In the early 1900s, Dr. Charles E. Coates of Louisiana State University was trying to decide on a name for the football team. When he was told that the Louisiana Tigers were the toughest set of men who ever lived, he chose them as his mascot.

The whole article is worth a read. Their story needs to be a movie.