Supa Dupa Fly

I was just revelling in the joy of Pandora, and felt like posting something in praise of it. So here's a few hip hop songs I've discovered in the past few months :

Missy Elliot - The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly) - I frickin' love Missy Elliot.
Wyclef Jean ft. Missy Elliot - Party to Damascus - Nice fusion
The Roots ft. Jill Scott - You Got Me (Live) - Sung by the original songwriter, quite a bit better than Erykah Badu.
Mos Def - Ms. Fat Booty - A tribute to the booyah! Need to find out what the hell an "idaho potato" is :)
Talib Kweli - Get By - Pretty slick production, methinks.

And now, back to Pandora ...

Firefox goes Places

Have just downloaded and installed the new Firefox 3 Beta 4 and found myself reading the Release notes rather in awe of what we have in store for us. Understandably, Firefox is a surfer's wet dream. It has great features and add-ons which make it so user-friendly it's ridiculous. Have just been blown away by the new bookmarking setup in this version: Places.

It is a great way of bookmarking pages, minus all the pains of bookmarking. So bookmarking, the way I do it, is have a bunch of folders on the Bookmarks toolbar folder (called "Important", "Blogs", "Comics", "Reading", etc) , each of which contains a list of links to related sites. Now the problem with this is two-fold: If the number of such folders gets out of hand, the Bookmark toolbar is too long, and now has a little arrow on the right telling me there is some stuff out there. So now you have a folder called "S" for "Stuff". It contains everything from Youtube videos of kids playing rad. guitar, to news about a local book fair next week. ie. kinda stuffed.

The other major problem is having too many links in the "reading" folder : everything from a BBC article on shell-fish to a random blogger's take on Calvin N Hobbes. Not so good if I need to scroll through 15 sites before getting to the one I want to read.

In short: the problem would be solved if I just had a way of searching my bookmarks from the location bar. ie. the new Places "Tags"! All you do is, when you bookmark a website, just give it a tag, like "blog, shark, miniature". Now if you type any of those 3 words, the bookmarked website will show up under the location bar! Love this!

More importantly, the list is sorted in decreasing order of "frecency" (frequency+recency). Just found all of this, and am extremely impressed. Now I don't have to worry about limiting the number of websites I bookmark ever!

Firefox 3 Beta 4 review : Mozilla Links

New in Beta 4 is adaptive learning: Firefox will keep an eye of what you type and what you select. After a few repetitions Firefox will understand what you’re trying to do and provide better suggestions. This should address the case where frecency (a combined frequency and recency index) didn’t provide the best results.

Free, as in Beer

Now Rann the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free—
The herds are shut in byre and hut
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!
Night-Song in the Jungle

Oh yeah! Just found The Jungle Book as a free ebook. Love the fact that these authors have been dead so long that even their estates are sick and tired of leeching the little pennies from every book lover on the planet. Go dead people!

On a not-so-legal note, I also found the new Artemis Fowl Graphic Novel as a torrent file. Am waiting for it to download so I can continue to procrastinate and avoid work through the rest of the weekend. Excited!

Facade

Just found myself re-reading some old Sandman comics - something I find myself returning to every now and again to feel that euphoric I-am-seeing-real-art feeling. The comics always border between extremely good fantasy and extremely disturbing horror and it's often hard to distinguish one from the other.

This specific comic, called "Facade", talks about the faces people wear when they go out into society, the tragedy of seeing someone's true face, and finally that of mortality (a recurring theme in these comics, in the guise of a cute goth girl representing Death). The following excerpt (minus the image, unfortunately) is one of those times you stop to wonder what the author was thinking when he wrote this, but then you stop wondering because you don't want to know the answer :

I hate making faces. They give me dreams.

I have only two kinds of dreams : the bad and the terrible.

Bad dreams I can cope with. They're just nightmares, and they end eventually.
I wake up.

The terrible dreams are the good dreams.

In my terrible dreams, everything's fine. I'm still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened.

Sometimes I'm married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything's wonderful and normal and fine.

And then I wake up. And I'm still me.

And I'm still here.

And that is truly terrible.


PS: The use of bold lettering is originally part of the comic, and although it seems superfluous, a second reading makes you realise that it actually gives the passage that extra dimension. Neil Gaiman is a genius, he really is.

Angels and Demons

Just came across this beautiful picture of a naked woman tying her arms around a statue of Satan while being possessed by the darkness at her feet. Somehow wonderfully captures the moment of the loss of innocence without saying too much. Got the image off of this website, where some folks at Cornell University have compiled a whole bunch of images of the Fantastic in Literature, with a view to educate.

Have found myself lately getting more into horror fiction as well - H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe mostly, and some random short stories from magazines with titles like Tales of the Weird. So this is right up that alley.

Night food

So it is 2AM, and I was reading this awesome book called "A Game of Thrones" by George R R Martin, whom I was introduced to just this week. Rather ordinary sword-and-sorcery fantasy, but it has me rather enthralled. It is very much in the vein of Mercedes Lackey, whom I like a lot, so I am pretty happy.

Anyways, as usual, got hungry and ate some cereal. While eating, I did a random google search (love doing that, btw) for "night food", and it turned up the following link. Surprisingly good song by some random Calypso group back in the 50's with extremely suggestive lyrics for that time. Apparently, it caused quite an uproar in Jamaica back then. But recently, the singer passed on to the happy place in the sky, and so NPR had it as their "Song of the Day".

Thought I should share ...

NPR Music: 'Night Food' and the Corrupter of a Nation

"The room is dark / She said, 'Come and eat / This night food is very warm and sweet' / I said, 'Lady, there's no knife and fork / And how can I eat food in the dark?' / She said, 'This food needs no knife and fork / How can a human be so dark? / The food is right here in the bed / Come here, man, make me scratch your head

The Conqueror

Given Douglas Adams' fascination with Genghis Khan (refer first few pages of Hitchhiker), it isn't surprising that he wrote a nice little short story on the true history of Ol' Genghis and his pals. Here it is.

DNA/The Private Life of Genghis Khan

A casual observer would not have noticed anything remarkable about the man who rode at their centre, muffled in a heavy cloak, tense, hunched forward on his horse as if weighed down by a heavy burden, because a casual observer would have been dead.

Pandora's Podcast

I think it is a universally accepted fact that Pandora is the most awesome website around. Just found this interview of Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, by an AOL Podcast station. Although some of it is redundant information for anyone who has used the website (the interview is old - back when Pandora was not really all that popular yet), there are some interesting discussions towards the end - particularly one where you hear Tim tip-toeing around the question of whether Big Bad Record Companies are trying to push him around to "recommend" their own artists :)

Soul of Wit

She : "So where is my comb?"
He : "It is on yon counter top, O fair maiden!"
She: Since when have I been a maiden, O brave .. er .. warrior?"
He : "Well, it doesn't exactly have the same poetic ring to it if I said O fair one who hath once been a maiden. It's kinda like taking the soul of wit and gently beating it to death with a dictionary."