Do You Like To Doogle?

Every wonder what an Irish search engine would look like? Here. I know Andy will appreciate this :).

More Evidence!

So I was on Sampada's blog right. Sampada's blog!!! Holy crap! That number won't leave me alone. Pun23, I curse thee!

Saved For Reference

Top 20 Geek Novels

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1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams 85% (102) - Done
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 79% (92) - Done
3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune -- Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov 52% (54) - Done
8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov 47% (47) - Done
9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein 33% (33)
16. The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick 34% (32)
17. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman 31% (29)
18. The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson 27% (27)
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23% (21)
20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham 21% (19)

All You Bases Are Now Belong To Us

Ok, I really needed to get that subject line out my system. Ever since I read the news that Google's launching a service called Google Base, its been doing the rounds in my head. Anyway, about Google base. Its a service where in you can upload stuff to Google and tag it so it becomes searchable via...you guessed it...Google. So its kind of like Yahoo! Briefcase but searchable. Why would you want to upload all your stuff to Google? I don't know, but looking at the examples of the site there's probably a few lazy people out there who can't even be bothered to put their information/data on a decent web site. So Google does it for them.

Does this mean the Internet will soon be inundated with useless junk? I think that one's happened already and as long as you use Google to search through the junk to get to the useful bits, the ad words machine keeps churning and old Goog is a happy corpy. I don't know how they're going to deal with helpful company employees who choose to upload their company documents to THE_BASE so that they become searchable. I can already see men in black business suits hovering overhead. Oh, and what about people who use the service to upload and tag software and mp3s (otherwise known as piracy)? Don't know. But ol' Goog'll fix it.

Aside from this, I am beginning to become a little paranoid of all the dirt Google has on me. Lets list the ways Google knows me shall we:
1. This blog, hosted on a Google server. Holds my thoughts, ramblings and other stuff I don't mind having in the public domain.
2. Gmail, which I really don't use at all. But if I did, and many of you do, they know me by my email. Somehow, since the Sony's rootkit fiasco, my trust in big corporations has gone down.
3. Google desktop search, which knows almost everything there is to know my hard drive and tracks all my internet usage (by sitting on top of winsock). Oh, you didn't know that? Read the EULA.
4. Google search, which tracks my usage using anonymous cookies. This includes Google local search, which now knows the post code of the London apartment I put up in while I'm there.
5. Google talk.

...and I wonder what else. So there, thats my State of the Google address for you. Not necessarily bad, just very paranoia inducing.

What Does It Take?

A Peculiar Day

For as long as he could remember, Hamid had always taken Roshanara road to get to his house from school. Today was no different. In fact, he had become so used to this walk home that if he were to think back to all the days he had done it, he’d be hard pressed to distinguish one day from another. Did that mean that all the hours of his life he had spent travelling on this road were lost forever? Had the innocuous walk taken away from him a part of his life? He did not know whether that was true or even why he was thinking these thoughts.

He found that if he let his mind ramble in the maze of pointless thought, it almost always served to relax him. Of course, this came with a price. Occasionally, people would come up to him when he was in a personal reverie and rudely interrupt him with social pleasantries. Did they even qualify as pleasantries he wondered? Especially when all they did was bring him back to a world that scarcely seemed to take notice of him. And what was so good about being part of society or the world at large anyway?

To avoid sudden interactions breaking into his private world, he had lately taken up to walking with his eyes to the ground. It was a bit like some of the girls in his school who had just sprouted the strangest protrusions on their chests. He didn’t think they looked down for the same reason that he did. He thought that like some of the boys in his class, the girls too enjoyed looking at their chest all the time. Unfortunately, he was at a loss when it came to this strange obsession. He had concluded that this was just one of those things that weren’t interesting enough to devote any time to. After all, how interesting could a body part really be? In the end, it was all just skin and bones.

He didn’t like to admit it, even to himself, but he did enjoy watching other boys watch some of the more bloated (was that even the proper word for this?) girls in the class. Somehow, it made him feel powerful that whereas he couldn’t care less, these boys could not help but surrender to their urge to stare. And for a moment, they simply forgot to take notice of the world around them. He thought that they might feel something like his thoughtful reveries at these times. Maybe it was their way of escaping the world. Maybe they just weren’t clever to get lost in their own thoughts.

Hamid’s habit of walking with his eyes to the ground had exposed him to a few new things. For one, he now could identify each of the varieties of flowers that grew in the flower beds by Roshanara road on his way from school to home. He had borrowed (more like stolen) his brother’s digital camera for a few days and photographed all the different flowers he saw. He had then matched the photos up with those on the Internet to find out what each one of them was called. The wide array of flowers he had found was astonishing. No less than 40 different kinds! Ever since then, he’d taken to counting and keeping track of the flowers to bide his time while walking home everyday. It was a sort of floral census. If the government ever decided to do some sort of count of the number of flowers in the country, he felt confident that he would be able to handle the role of the floral census officer for his little stretch of Roshanara road.

Today however, he saw a new kind of flower on the ground. This one wasn’t even growing in a flower bed. It had just sort of come out of a crack in the concrete pavement. He was so startled that he just stopped dead, almost causing a burly man behind him to trip over him. Fortunately, the man just grimaced at him and walked away. He saw the grimace out of the corner of his eye and didn’t even look up lest the man try to teach him a lesson in morality. Anyway, he was far too concerned with his new find to care what the big man thought of him.

What was surprising was that Hamid was sure that the flower hadn’t been there yesterday. Yes, he was quite sure. His floral census was faultless. Had somebody planted it there? But who would plant something in the crevice of a pavement where it was quite likely it would be trampled by some passer by? It couldn’t have grown there overnight, could it? He resolved in his head, there and then, to find out where this flower could have come from. After all, events like this didn’t happen every day. And he owed it to his duties as a floral census officer to keep accurate count of any flowers on this particular stretch.

Now he had a problem though. He couldn’t go home because he couldn’t risk the flower being trampled by somebody while he went home to get his brother’s camera. However, he didn’t want to pluck the flower either. What if it was the last one of its kind in the world? Come to think of it, what if it was the first one of its kind? So he just stood there, thinking about a possible course of action. He didn’t really have any friends, nobody who wouldn’t laugh at his foolish notion of trying to protect a flower that had sprouted up on the pavement. Besides, not too many kids from school used Roshanara road anyway. It ran by a cemetery and that scared some of the other kids off. Hamid didn’t get that. What was so scary about dead people anyway? If anything, the dead ought to be afraid of the living.

To bide the time while he waited for something to come to him, Hamid decided to tell himself stories. He had a fertile imagination, surely enough to keep himself entertained for a while.

New profile photo

Too lazy to post anything. So here's a spanking new profile photo.