Moments - 0

"Your girl is lovely Hubbell".

"I don't get it".

"And you never did".

I heart James McAvoy

Isn't it a pleasant surprise when someone cute is funny to boot? Ahhhh ... and that adorable Scottish accent ...

I heard it on The Wire - 0

Ahhhh ... The Wire ... I watch it every chance I get and am making some serious additions to my vocabulary because of it. So far, my favorites (and I'm only on Season 2) are -

• Most def
• Yo McNutty!
• Y'all need to get up in here in all this Chinese food yo!
  
• What up homes!
  
• 5-0, 5-0, 5-0
  

Looking for a cofounder

Since we can't all meet The Woz at our summer jobs, some sites to help you locate a potential co founder -

• Cofoundr - Allows you to see brief details about members before you sign up. Must have work or school address to sign up.
  
• Partnerup - The best developed of all 3 sites, will dig more into this one later.
  
• FounderLink - Still in development, no preview available, I had to sign up (private email allowed) just to see that there were 0 posts and 0 everything else.
  

And now I'm going to drive my parents up to Napa today (for their very first wine tasting!)

Grammar and The Wire

Ummmm... The Wire ???.... not so good for your grammar ...
Thank goodness I didn't get hooked on to it till I was completely done with GMAT sentence correction ;-)

Update: Miss Kima rocks!! (I just started watching so I'm beginning season 2 right now).

Startup ideas - 1

Universal texting - as in you can text landline phones.

• How would you display the message? (Convert text to voice mail on the answering machine?)
• Would this be easier with VoIP landlines?
  
• Is this even useful? (Should this be the first question I should have asked?)
  
• Well, its useful to text other appliances in your home (like turn on the heat or the oven or whatever). I even read about this appliance which is a refrigerator till you text it and then it turns on as an oven. From defrosting to dinner all by means of a text message...
  

Hey a geek can dream can't she?

Serenity prayer for agnostics

The Serenity Prayer for believers -

"God grant us the serenity
to accept the things we cannot change,
the courage to change the things we can,
and the wisdom to know the difference."


The Serenity Prayer for atheists and agnostics -

"We have (or will always strive to develop)
the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
the courage to change the things we can,
and the wisdom to know the difference."

Tech startups - advanced degrees, founder ages, etc

The EETimes reports on a new study by the Kauffman foundation about the founders of technology and engineering startups.

3 interesting takeaways -

• The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders was 39 when they started their companies.

• U.S.-born tech founders with MBAs established companies more quickly (in 13 years) than others. Tech founders with PhDs typically waited 21 years(!)

• U.S.-born tech founders holding CS and IT degrees founded companies sooner after graduating than engineering degree holders (14.3 years vs. 17.6 years).

Note that the study only included US born tech founders. I wonder how the numbers would vary for non-US born tech founders founding tech companies in the US.

Even more reason to get an MBA!

The world's first working memrister

Resistors, capacitors, inductors and now finally (more than 30 years after it was first deduced) -
HP produces the first working memrister.

Nanotech may soon be a thing of the past, picotechnology here we come!

Update: ArsTechnica has more.

Wireless HDTV

Sharp ships the first wireless HDTV (in Japan) using an Amimon chipset. US markets will see the technology later this year.

To read later(Amimom chipsets use the 5Gz band and are FCC certified): Amimon's whitepaper

New series - startup ideas

Disclaimer - This series is an attempt to capture some of the quote-unquote startup ideas buzzing around in my head. For all I know, there are already startups that do this very thing, do something similar but better, or have tried and failed to do the exact same thing. No due diligence has been done on any of these ideas.

User generated content is everywhere. How about a startup that integrates all kinds of user generated content and offers a seamless way to search for it and to buy it for reproduction/reuse?

The reproduction is not restricted to main stream media but to other user generated content like blogs, etc. The website would allow simple uploads, allow users to tag or categorize the content and offer a targeted search or feeds for certain tags for the end consumer of the content. Royalties would be seamlessly paid to the generator. (Side idea - is there a way to figure out that content has been reused elsewhere?)

ShutterPoint already does something similar but is restricted to stock photography. This is also similar to CNNs iReport but in this case the citizen journalist could actually get paid.

Startup-Z could integrate all sorts of content - images, video, audio (also a way to monetize blog posts for reprinting in mass media??)

New Year resolution - Simple ways to be green

Ah! The new year and all the resolutions it brings...

• Absolutely stop getting plastic bags from stores. Keep tote bags in car, even a portable one in your backpack. Get paper bags in a cinch.
  
• I've been doing this for a few months now ever since San Francisco outlawed plastic bags (though I don't live in the city, it just seemed like an excellent idea).
  
• On a side note, what is it with Indian grocery stores not carrying paper bags and offering only plastic to customers?
• Another side note, how can I stop using plastic bags when buying fruits and vegetables at the grocery store? You know, the clear plastic bags used to group things together to weigh them?
• If you eat lunch at work, keep silverware handy. Stop using (and throwing out) plastic spoons, knives and forks.
  
• Instead of using paper cups for coffee and water at work, keep a favorite cup and glass at work.
  
• I'm surprised at the sheer amount of paper cups I see in the trash at work everyday. If you spend 8 hours someplace everyday, what's the big deal with keeping a cup and a glass there?
• Stop buying bottled water.
  
• Recycle, recycle, recycle. Don't be lazy about it.
  
• Grocery stores have recycling bins for plastic bags.
  
• If you live in or around Sunnyvale, check out the local SMART station. Its amazing all the stuff you can recycle just by dropping it off there.

A little green can go a long way! Now all I need is for someone to make a hybrid convertible ...

Madam President - 1

We've all voted for and elected absolutely awful men into power. So who cares if you don't completely agree with Hillary's politics or think she's not the best quote-unquote person for the job?

Let's just have a terrible woman President, but a woman President all the same.

Madam President -0

Bumper sticker 1 - "Hillary for President"
Bumper sticker 2 - "Bill for First Gentleman"

Jessica on the Colbert Report

One of my uber-favorite bloggers from Feministing, Jessica who has a book out recently was on the Colbert report last night.

Video here. Backstage pictures here.

I've been a regular Feministing reader for about a year now. Jessica on the blog appears (to me) awesomely articulate, very serious at times and completely self-possessed and poised. Jessica on TV came off as delightfully geeky and had a completely disarming grin. Very, very likeable.

What remained the same (on the blog and on TV) was the passion for feminism and women's issues and the drive to convey the same passion to other young women.

Kudos Jessica! I can't wait for Amazon to deliver "Full Frontal Feminism" so I can read it.

Pre-primary debates

I spent almost 20 minutes trying to Google up a broadcast schedule for the pre-primary Democratic and Republican debates. So to save myself some time later,

• List of debates and forums for both parties
  
• List of DNC sanctioned debates
  
• June 3 transcript of the Democratic debate
• Non-official list of Republican debates

Extra, extra, EEEPC - Read all about it!

Intel and Asus announced the EasyPC (or the EEEPC as it is being called) at Computex. With a dollar price tag of $199 and $299, it comes loaded with Linux but bundled with XP drivers as well.

What do the 3 Es stand for?

• Easy to learn
  
• Easy to play
  
• Easy to work

Aimed at a completely different market segment - worldwide and specifically at senior citizens and families with young children, the EEEPC is a product worth watching.

You can also read about it at the Chinese Engadget and Digit-Life.

Blogs I recently discovered - 0

Blogrolls are out, but del.icio.us, bloglines and digg make sure I never run out of new blogs to read.
So here's kicking off a new series where I'll post links to blogs I have recently discovered and grown to like. In completely random order here are a few new blogs that I have been perusing lately -

• ZenHabits - Mostly focussed on GTD and productivity in general, also has some cool quality-of-life posts. You could literally spend hours reading through this super-prolific blog.
  
• AlgoBlog - Not a lot of content yet but a very interesting premise. A blog devoted to discussing algorithms.
• The Happiness Project - Watch the process as a blog turns into a book, again an interesting premise where the blogger tries out and collates information on practical approaches to achieving happiness.
  
• Scott Young - Again a recent find, mostly about productivity and quality-of-life kind of stuff. The funny thing is that the blogger is still in his teens but wise beyond his years (perhaps he was born on February 29th?)
  
• The Mad Momma - Mother of two, lives in India, journalist blogger with a unique perspective on motherhood, her writing makes things come alive.
  

Making life a little easier, one innovation at a time

I don't remember which blog I read this at, but the blogger is currently travelling in Japan and has posted pictures of innovative Japanese products and ideas in Flickr.

Profiting in New York

New York Magazine analyzes how various small businesses (yoga studio, pizza parlor, copy shop) turn a profit operating in New York. Very interesting piece which highlights the interdependence of all things economic at the local level.

Placeholder theories or Everything is more complex than you think it is

Scott Young talks about willpower as a placeholder theory. Placeholder theories are simplistic explanations that people use to explain complicated systems or phenomena that we don't really understand. In effect, they are simplistic placeholders for more complicated explanations which either don't exist currently or that exist but are simply too complex to be grasped . The one major characteristic of a placeholder theory is that it can be intuitively grasped.

As Scott so aptly puts it - "it is useful to assume that everything you think you know now is a gross simplification. Your goal is to continually refine and seek better metaphors and examples to explain the world. ".

He continues with a classic definiton of the confirmation bias - "Once you have a theory, even a grossly simplified and inaccurate one of how the world works, it becomes increasingly more difficult to change your mind. You seek evidence and examples that confirm your hypothesis and discredit the contrary evidence."

Any other placeholder theories come to mind? Errrr ... God for one.

You can find a list of the confirmation bias and other cognitive biases here.