8/7/2007 » Tech, Humor

The iPhone is as much a letdown for this longtime Apple fan as the man hands of Seinfeld’s hot date. I was primed to love this shiny precious, to gently nudge its ovoid edges into my technological nest. I even switched mobile phone companies and, on the weekend of the iPhone’s release, trooped down to the Apple store to see my baby-to-be.

What I saw quenched my affection. The iPhone’s design is a triumph of flashiness over usability. At every point, the designers chose chrome over day-to-day use. I can understand why they did it: to create sexy demos and to justify the iPhone’s stratospheric price. But sheer lickability won’t sate your appetite.

The iPhone’s keyboard-free design is useless for high-speed typing. Forget about using your thumbs...

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5/18/2006 » Musings

Check Ultrabrown.com in ~4 days. Come, Watson, the game is afoot.

9/16/2005 » Tech

Check out my new blog editor, RocketPost. I’ve used it to publish this blog for the last year. A blog editor is like a word processor that publishes to your blog. If you’ve ever lost a post because your browser crashed, you should use one.

RocketPost uploads photos automatically and checks spelling. It also lets you link to old posts quickly, adds source cites to quotes, links to Google, Wikipedia and Flickr quickly, adds those big, fat pullout quotes and so on. I use it to post to our group blog and this one at the same time.

If you’re a friend, email me and I’ll hook you up with a free copy. Otherwise, it’s totally free if you use Blogger. It also works with Movable Type and WordPress, and TypePad is coming soon...

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9/16/2005 » Music

My Brooklyn ‘hood is on the water facing Manhattan. Aside from being musician central, Williamsburg is a half-blue collar, half-gentrifying neighborhood with four ethnicities: Polish-stan, Hasidic-stan, Latino-stan and Hipsterville (Diesel denim with red stitching, messenger bag in earth tones, fauxhawk bed-head and a big gay belt buckle). It’s also got a high PQ (poseur quotient.) I swear upon your grandma’s shriveled National Geographics that I’ve seen people sell pink trucker hats by the subway entrance with an airbrushed ‘Bitch’ on the front.

Sometimes you run into desis with pierced eyebrows and mutton-chop sideburns. You know those signs on Disneyland rides, ‘You must be this tall to ride?’ The L train has a sign, ‘You must be this hip to move here.’ I’m totally dragging down the curve as a stealth sinc duppie (single-income-no-colonialism desi-urban-professional). Tonight a thin brown girl in a black sack dress rode a big Huffy with wide handlebars down the sidewalk, the kind of bike you see in pre-WWII photos. We exchanged subtle, curious glances while trying not to let the other intrude on our indie brown singularity.

It’s a fun ‘hood — families dancing salsa in their dry cleaning shops, a charismatic revival church which plays Arlo Guthrie and saves souls in Spanish, nice Hasidic landlords in curls who refuse to shake women’s hands, hipsters exclaiming, ‘You’ve never heard of Death Cab for Cutie?’...

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9/16/2005 » Photos, Music, TV

 

5/31/2005 » Tech

A few months ago, some b-school applicants stumbled across a fascinating post on a BusinessWeek message board. The post explained how change the address in your Web browser while using a grad school application site to find out whether you were admitted:

The instructions told people to log onto their admissions Web page and find their identification numbers in source material that was available on the site. By plugging those numbers into another Web page address, they were directed to a page where their admissions decision would be found.

This security hole was a rookie mistake — all Web developers knows it’s bad programming to rely on easily-changed Web addresses. These instructions were the equivalent of being in the dean’s office and peeking at your admission file lying open right on top of her desk. As ethics issues go, this is thin gruel, akin to using your neighbor’s WiFi for a day or getting a parking ticket.

A few hundred applicants forwarded the instructions among themselves and followed them. For the pecadillo of visiting a Web site, the mainstream press and b-schools labeled them ‘hackers.’ Harvard summarily rejected them; surprisingly, so did MIT and Stanford, tech-friendly schools which should know better...

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4/30/2005 » Musings, Religion

When the teacher read out the Hindi-language alphabet in the modest two-room village school, Munni, 9, held her textbook in one hand and rocked her wailing 3-year-old brother with the other... even with the free meals, girls often drop out of school. They "have to help the family during the harvest season or look after the younger siblings," Ahmad said. "Girls also get married quite early. It is very difficult to retain them because education is not a priority." Munni's mother acknowledged as much. "She is our firstborn and we will marry her in about three years," she said. "She can study until then."

[A]s Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin's hymen 'like a ray of sunshine through a window--leaving it unbroken.'...

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4/26/2005 » Musings

Yesterday, while walking through Williamsburg (official neighborhood motto: ‘We’re Hipper than You’), I ran into a blonde wearing a flowy top, blue jeans and a reflective red teardrop bindi. She had an American accent.

In a rambunctious Meatpacking District bar, I met a woman whose parents were German. She was tall, brown-haired and fair and had grown up in India. She had a Delhi accent.

At a self-storage business, I met a manager who looked black. He had a courtly manner and a delightful accent, and his nametag said Seetram (Sitaram). He was surprised and pleased when I guessed Guyanese.

In college, the hardest partier in the entire coed dorm was a girl from a wealthy Bombay family. We’d always see pot smoke curling out the bottom of her door and hear inflated stories about her extracurriculars...

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4/2/2005 » Religion

In case there anyone still doubts whether the U.S. is a religious majoritarian nation, the current NYT home page devotes around 90% of its primary news coverage (marked in yellow) to more than 18 stories about the death of the pope.

The deathwatch itself was Schiavo-ish in its intensity. Did he speak a word at the window? Did he not speak a word at the window?

Just let the poor man go. Don’t create a cult of personality, don’t go all Mayan and fetishize him as a living representative of the sun god. The ecclesiastical handlers trying to smokescreen his frailty in his later years rivaled those of Dubya.

He was just an old man trying to do his best, rest his soul.

2/28/2005 » Art

Diaspora narcissist that I am, I just had to be at the first South Asian American art exhibit at a major museum that I’ve ever heard of.

And oh, the things I’ve seen. I saw a photo of a naked desi man smeared in Vaseline sprawled cockily across a green vinyl chair. I saw a self-portrait in cow dung with an LED in Hindi that spelled out ‘Bihari.’ I walked into an inflatable, 20-foot-tall man-organ through a red slit in front. I saw a hijra in a skin-tight salwar shaking his boobs to old songs and cheers. I saw a queer Rani of Jhansi, she of the Mutiny, played by Chitra Ganesh and lying dead in snow. I saw a six-yard sari made of Coca-Cola bottlecaps, silver with an orange border. I saw a wall of crimson medicine bottles called ‘Blame’: blame a minority, you’ll feel better in the morning.

I saw a book of memory by a Malayalee daughter, Annu Matthew, who must’ve loved her daddy like Anna loved hers...

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