Blog About Technology

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A few steps forward, a few steps back...

Now that I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel, I have to go backwards and try to tie up some loose ends I have left with some of the earlier exercises. The first is a little blog about technology (in 150 words or less)...

नो वहत वौल्ड यू लिके मी तो राइट अबाउट ? थिस इस कुइते अमजिंग, इसन'टी आईटी ? इ वोंदर हाउ मानी ओथेर पीपुल हवे प्लायेद विथ थिस...

That was a nice little exercise, don't you agree? It was a simple task made possible by tools available on this very page. But is it technology (टेक्नोलॉजी)?

Why on earth it has a Devanagari (Hindi) script and not Chinese, Japanese, Russian or Hebrew for that matter? Is that a sign of things to come? The above is a transliteration rather than a translation of a couple of sentences I just wrote, using Hindi phonetics. A transliteration back into English?

Now what else would you like me to write about? This is quite amazing, isn't it? I wonder how many other people have played with this...

And now to the point of this exercise, a word or two on technology: I have played around with other Hindi alphabet programs and found the one here to be much better. For starters, it is phonetic in that it will transliterate a word as it sounds rather than how it is written, taking the whole word rather than each individual letter.

My technology wishlist? At least in relation to my newly found टेक्नोलॉजी, I have been thinking wouldn't it be great to take a written work and just run it through a simple program to have it translated. A bit idealistic, obviously, but it'd be terrific, don't you think?

जाय श्री राधे!

You Tube, You Beaut!

There's so much to choose on You Tube, as I remember one the first 2.0 tutorials was posted there. So how to choose from the thousands of videos? What's the first thing that comes into your mind? Admittedly, I had to look around before finding this first good clip...

Holi festival in the sacred land of Braj (Vraja) in Uttar Pradesh, India. For some people these images may be familiar, particularly if you've been to the NGV recently to see one of the current exhibitions showing there, Krishna: Love and Devotion.

N.B. There's no sound in this clip, it's just a slideshow of photos.

And on a completely different note...

Here's a trailer for the latest David Lynch film, Inland Empire. I saw it at the cinema last week and in my opinion it's Lynch's most bizarre film to date (and that's saying something). Often Lynch's work needs a second or even third viewing to understand, but I'm not sure when I'll sit down again for the 3 hour marathon.

Discovering Web 2.0 Tools

There are plenty of applications/tools to choose from (200+), so how to make up one's mind?

I'm not sure how or why, but I did end up looking at one interesting literary site, a musical one and another that is environmentally conscious. I probably ended up having a look at these because these are different aspects of my life. Notably on that point, there were no listings that are spiritual at all. Is that asking too much or is it just a reflection on where everyone's interest lies?

onesentence.org was enjoyable for the humour and succintness, telling a story in the space of, you guessed it, one sentence.
pandora.com seemed like a good music site, but was its use was restricted outside the U.S. Hence, I found mystrands.com a better option, though because of restrictions on our work computers, I couldn't listen to anything (damn!)
Lastly, begreennow.com wasn't necessarily outstanding, as there are so many of these types of sites around nowadays, but it is instructive and interactive and obviously more conscious in many ways than quite a number of the tools that were given awards.

Zoho et al.

Zoho was a little bit of fun, I created a mock donation form and laughed many times. For the sake of PCness, I've posted it privately. That I was able to chuckle was a change, or at least a little relief, for this week has already been a very trying one (I'm sure a number of my colleagues would agree), and it's only Wednesday. Thank God I've got a few days off before Chrissy!

Maybe I'll need to come back to it though and spend some more time working out Deluge. That looks like pretty fancy stuff there... I found it much more straightforward, especially as someone else has done all the hard work already. If only they'd consulted me first, then I wouldn't need to customise.

Talking About Image Generation

Very quickly went to a couple of image generation sites and generated some images:



Ten points to whoever can tell me what card this is from the Tarot deck