Kiran Jonnalagadda's Friends

Seconded...
It's a great feeling when you find the right track to go with the day. And today I have found the absolute perfect song...

...but sometimes no matter how carefully you plan your playlist, there is no right track for what awaits you.
--Definitely, Maybe.

Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Kahin to-Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na OST

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Toyota

I came across many Toyotas in Malaysia like this one sitting in someone's backyard. It's a nice dark blue in color, but I liked the B&W version more since it makes the setting rustic.

Curves adjustment and B&W conversion applied on the photo.

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come away with me ...........

i messed up the eye and covere it with hair.....

Current Mood: refreshed
Current Music: saathiya- hindi

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summer, alaunpark, dresden
more Dresden

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Bangalore Rocks!
  The terror turkey has come home to roost.  The myth of a secure Bangalore was long shattered when the blasts had occurred in IISC a few years ago.  However, those blasts today are hazy memory to most Bangaloreans.  

Today 6 low intensity blasts have taken place at multiple locations - Adugodi, Nayandahalli, Madivala among others.  Placement of bombs at widely scattered locations and the precision of timing indicates meticulous planning and extremely devious (BUT/& intelligent) minds.  The city is yet to groan to a grinding halt.  People surely have been thrown out of their comfortable rocking chair existence today.  The blasts establish the laxity in security and lack of concern regarding safety provisions within the city.  We still can not however make comments about intelligence network and its success or failure.  Any negative comment at this juncture would not only be hasty but also flippant.  

Will the Governments wake up?  Will also the common man wake up to the new reality?  That there is NOTHING called a safe place anymore.  Will we become REAL citizens from now? 

Bangalore, it's not just Mumbai (and Delhi and Hyderabad) that rocks.. Is it just the beginning or is it the beginning of an end?  

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Luz,Mylapore,Chennai
Here's the Luz part of Mylapore, Chennai:

Let's start with that landmark of "Luz Corner", the Ashta VinAyakar Kovil (temple), all lit up at night:






( walk around Luz with me )

And I passed the KarpagAmbAL Nagar home of this famous Carnatic musician Madurai Mani Ayyar , who had also been a close family friend:



In fact, I was very happy when many people who heard my concerts said that I could sing kalpanAswaram with some of the fluency of this gifted singer, whose music was melodious and did not resort to mathematical "kaNakku muttAyippu"s. I think I must have heard his concerts so often--my parents were one of the first I know to invest in a spool-tape record player-- that probably something of his style did percolate through! (Though I must say that in my opinion, he was not very clear in his diction of Carnatic lyrics....)

Current Mood: worried about my city
Current Music: none

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Blasts in Bangalore
According to early reports, at least one woman has been killed and 15 people injured in a series of blasts in Bangalore. Six blasts have been reported so far.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/6_blasts_rock_Bangalore_2_dead_20_wounded/articleshow/3279730.cms

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Blasts in bangalore
7 bomb blasts in Bangalore, reportedly. I'm ok. Shutting down office, getting people to leave. Take care, all.

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Andrea Fleischer

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by Andrea Fleischer

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My Current Tunes...
Songs I listened to recently that are on my current playlist:

Khudha Jaane - K.K & Shilpa Rao - Bachna Ae Haseeno

Bakhuda Tumhi Ho - Atif Aslam & Alka Yagnik - Kismat Konnection
- This one has the feel of 'Tum Se Hi' plus the magic of Atif Aslam's voice :P

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Bakhuda Tumhi Ho - Atif Aslam & Alka Yagnik - Kismat Konnection

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Rewiring

http://xkcd.com/454/

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by alois

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by Brandon Steed 5-4-2007 from Baton Rouge, LA

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Lake Owyhee

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by Krijnvan Noordwijk

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by Ernesto Muñiz

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Four images
The Gift



The Petal



Deteritus of a Wedding




Red and Green




Current Mood: cloudy
Current Music: nancy sinatra...

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bibliography of research on LJ
I'm trying to help LJ track down research that has been done on LiveJournal to date. Could you please help me? Pretty please?  I'm looking for three things:

1. citations of published, peer-reviewed articles that examine LJ;
2. PDFs of not-yet-published articles concerning LJ;
3. a list of scholars who study LJ-related issues (and their affiliation/contact info).

I'm interested in any and all research from all disciplinary/methodological traditions. I'm also very interested in research on non-English user populations. So, please don't restrain yourself to scholarship that's in English. If you know of research taking place in Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, etc., please send that my way.

It would be tremendously helpful if y'all could look at your Endnotes and share anything that you know. Feel free to leave comments here or email me at danah [at] danah [dot] org. Also, if you could send any and all PDFs my way, I'd be super duper uber stoked. (Getting PDFs via email is much easier than trying to track them down on the bloody locked sites that journals maintain.)  Please forward my request on to other scholars that you know who might not be a part of this community. And if you know of non-English research communities like this, could you please translate and forward my request?

It'll take me a little while to aggregate and organize this, but I'll return back with a complete bibliography that should be useful for all of us.  Any and all help and citations are really appreciated.  So I preemptively thank you.


Note: For those who don't know me, my name is danah boyd.  I'm a PhD candidate at UC-Berkeley in the School of Information and I'm an ethnographer who studies how American teenagers use social network sites for sociable purposes.  I'm also on LiveJournal's Advisory Board.  I strongly believe that decisions about LiveJournal should be based on a clear understanding of peoples and practices as well as technology and business.  Since LJ is not aware of all of the research in this space, I've volunteered to help them track it down. 

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Aki Alliance: Kendra Woodward: Page 42

Start at the beginning - Start at the beginning of the chapter

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Loved this poem on the LJ of asakiyume
http://asakiyume.livejournal.com/209918.html

Current Mood: better
Current Music: none

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Houses and computers

People don't seem to get that computers are complicated. Insanely complicated. More complicated than any otehr machine they have ever used. Think TVs and VCRs are complicated? Simple, very simple. Think cars are complicated? Not as much as a desktop computer.

A co-worker used to work construction, but now does computer stuff. (Yeah, "stuff". Most people reading this would understand if I said what he does, but I'm not going to. It's work stuff.) So today I'm going to compare the complexity of building a house (a subject I know little about) with the complexity of a computer (something I know a lot more about, but by no means do I know everything.)

A house. What've you got? Walls, floors, roofs, studs, joists, beams, electrical, plumbing, *planning* the thing in the form of an architectural ... er, plan? Permits, zoning, and so on. Figuring out what's wanted, designing the thing. A garage? 1 or 2 car? Or are we talking condos/apartments/townhouses? (Servers, versus desktops.)

What color? Well, that's fairly superficial. A big job, but still can be done after the whole thing is finished and lived in for a few years. That's like asking to change the color scheme of a web site -- can be a pain, but doesn't usually involve a rebuild.

Oh, you wanted brick with aluminium siding? Not the concrete/wood with wood siding we've done, that you hinted at? And when we said "okay, we'll do concrete with wood" you said "yeah whatever I don't know much about those house things", and then you signed off on it? So you want us to change the basic structure of the thing, expect it to be done in 2 days while your in-laws are visiting, and expect it to be free/cheap because we "know about that house stuff"?

That's like asking for your PHP site to be designed in MySQL (real computer people are cringing now) when, in the beginning, you didn't care what we did as long as we did it in a week and it had "social networking, videos, email, and a forum blog". We threw together something slick in Wordpress, you liked it, but now you realise what you really wanted was a forum with a document sharing area. Tough noogies. And the weeks of meetings that you spent deciding on the exact shade of blue in the footer (or, the exact pattern of the crown molding)? Worthless.

Now say you want the kitchen at the other end of the house. Sure, we can do that. Oh, the laundry room too? So you want us to reroute the plumbing and the electricals (the 3-phase supply for the dryer), again in 2 days and cheap? Suuuure. That's the same as when you ask us if the site can have fine-grained permissions bolted on later. And it should support frames (What the hell? You're not qualified to decide that. That's like you asking for the house to be built with 1 room on the 1st floor, 2 on the 2nd, 3 on the third, and so on. It's stupid. It might work in some special case, but generally it's stupid.)

Now, about the materials and construction. Do you realise that the video card in your desktop has more components than your entire house? How many in your house? Let's count every sheet of wood, every 2x4, every pipe and fixture. Let's not, actually. Take a pipe. What does it take to build one? Does every inch of it have to be designed individually? No, you probably roll some steel, thread the ends, and voila, your basic pipe (again, my knowledge of manufacturing fails me). The video card? Yeah, okay, so you can take some standard components and fit them together. I'll give you that. I know it's not true, but fine, whatever.

Now, when you have a leak. Most times you can see it -- there's water on the floor, or whatever. Or your faucet doesn't. A memory leak? What do you get? Random crashes. The application hangs. If you're lucky, it'll be consistent. Otherwise, someone has to go in with a memory debugger or leak tester (in the case of the water pipe -- it's an acoustic device, I think). And believe me, the debugger is a lot harder to operate.

Take tools. When the carpenter re-uses his (or her. I'm not going there.) hammer on various projects, do you scream copyright violation, intellectual property violation, and so on? Does the plumber have to sign a non-disclosure agreement? Can your electrician use the experience gained on his next project? Sigh.

Back to trouble-shooting, which was supposed to be the point of this article. Something goes wrong with your house (computer). Do you call the police (helpdesk) and yell "help it doesn't work"? For that matter, do they say "try re-inserting the key (rebooting)"? Okay, so they say "what's the problem"? and you say "I can't use my GE (Microsoft)", meaning your fridge (word processor). Okay, why? In cvase of the fridge, it could be any number of things, from a stuck door to leaks in the freon. In case of your computer, it could be anything, from the keyboard down to the RAM. In both cases it could be user error or power failure. It could be a corrupt file or mold in the vents. Point is, in case of your applicance there are much fewer points of failure.

If it's a web site or web application I've built, the points of failure are much more. I can replace the RAM, but any number of lines of code could be bad in the web app -- and I have to find out where the errors are. I can't replace the whole app, can I?

I seem to have lost my point somewhere.

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PET 2008 rump session talk
I gave a quick rump session talk about my ideas for MAID and just uploaded a set of slides.

I think it's time to get this ball rolling. Is anyone interested in working on this project?

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m
her

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object
light switch, under incandescent light.
of objects

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Mylapore Tank
After a month has passed, I find that the pain is still not easing pereceptibly, but life goes on....I think, though, that I will post a few scenes from the city that my brother lived in, and loved (though his first love was Kolkata, too!) for 3 decades....

Mylapore is one of the oldest parts of Chennai, and the heart of Mylapore consists of two areas: "Luz", which is the old Portugese name, and the "Tank", that is, the pond that belongs to the beautiful old temple of kApAleeshwara (god of the skull, Shiva) and His consort, Karpagavalli. The temple and the tank form part of the folklore of the city, and the area is a vibrantly alive space even today.

The gOpuram of the temple can be seen all around for a little distance,thanks to the open area at the temple pond.



( a tour around the kApAleeshwarar tank in Mylapore )

Here, finally, are two views of Mylapore Tank, one with the Tirumayilai Metro station in the background:




and another with a famous saree shop showing....




I have been lucky to have a base in this beautiful area of Chennai for so many years now....

There will be another post on Luz; the Portugese name is borne by an area that abuts the Tank area, and is a bustling trade-and-residential neighbourhood.

Current Mood: dull
Current Music: songs from "shAbAsh meenA" (sivaji ganesan)

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Insecurities
Insecurities are among our worst evils. They always find bad ways to come out. Despite appearing harmlessly small, they are dangerously powerful in defining our actions and sometimes even our character.

The things that we feel inadequate about affect us daily. And rarely do they come out at face value -

• "You're confident and charming and people want to be around you a lot" - vs. - "the only reason that people fall over you is because you flirt with them."



• "I love that you are so good at this, I am quite insecure about my own abilities" - vs. - "Oh, you're not that good anyway" - or - "He's only good because he has some advantage that I don't have."



• "I'm glad that you've found a way that works for you, I am not yet sure about my way and I'm insecure about it" - vs. - "your way is wrong" - or - "My way is the only right way and your practicing your way is undermining the right way."



• "I'm not secure that I deserve this achievement" - vs. - "other bastards are saying that I don't deserve this achievement" or "I deserve this achievement, I'm so great."



• "I'm proud of myself for achieving this" - vs. - "Look at all the idiots who have not achieved this - they're fools. I'm so awesome."



• "I've missed your company, let's get together" - vs. - "It was her fault that we haven't met. She's the one who never calls, I'm not going to call her first."



• "I love you, but I am insecure that you love me" - vs. - "I will be mean to you because you have no chance to meet my expectations for you and I'm already hurt by your not loving me back."

Sometimes we come across as "holier-than-thou" about the things we are inscure about and other times we come across as either demanding or self piteous. Sometimes we project negativity and meanness, or we put down people or their achievements. It finds its ugly outlet. Inadequacies have multiple layers of cause and effect on a person and all our relationships.

The way we respond to someone who prods us (whether they do so as a result of their insecurities or not) is also based on our insecurities also. If we are secure, another person's prodding will not affect us much. If they are mean or onerary, we will feel sorry for that person (at worst) and not care (at best). If we are insecure about those issues, we tend to react sharply - either feeling badly (at best), or wanting to hurt the person "back" (at worst), or feeling negativity that may not even be connected to the incident but comes out in unconnected ways (the very worst).

Current Mood: What the hell am I doing awake ?

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In Ottawa, no luggage
I got into Ottawa yesterday. Flew Westjet from Toronto to Ottawa. Waited till all the bags had come through. Mine didn't. The guy at the baggage desk checked the bag tag, and said that there were no notes about it in the system, but that it might show up in one of the other flights coming through. He called me back later last night to say that all flights from Toronto had come in, and my bag wasn't on any of them. He said that someone would call me in the morning to give me the latest status.

At around noon today, I got a call telling me that my bag was last seen checking out the Eiffel tower à Paris. How it got there, they had no idea, because Westjet doesn't fly anywhere out of Canada.

Most likely some other airline picked up my bag and took it along with them.

Well, I'm a seasoned lost baggage traveller, so I know to carry spare underwear in my hand baggage, and the conference provided me with two T-shirts, so I'm okay for now. Westjet says that my bag should be here sometime tonight, so waiting for it.

The conference has been good so far. We went on a boat cruise last night down the Rideau. Earlier in the evening, I met with the Ottawa CouchSurfing community for Ice Tea at Bubblicity. They are just so much fun and so welcoming that I didn't feel out of place at all. This evening say_yes04 and I met with the group again at a Somali restaurant called Sambuza at Gladstone Ave. Followed that up with drinks at Friday's with a bunch of conference attendees, and then got back to the hotel.

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On May 1, 1947 Evelyn McHale leapt to her death from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Photographer Robert Wiles took a photo of McHale a few minutes after her death.

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Pasture by Waldemar Zimmerling

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Nelly Toe in Ghana by NanaKofiAcquah on Flickr

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Market in Laos 1998 by Peter Whittlesey

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Dakota Fanning c. 2002

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People and Scenes, Ragihalli
Here's the great group with whom I made the trip on Sunday:

Asha, Geetanjali, Avinash:




Subir, Sid, Anush:



Asha had just returned from a memorable trip to Leh and Ladakh; Geetanjali and Subir (one of the most hospitable couples I have met!They are always enthusiastic when I foist a new group of people on them on a Sunday morning) had decided not to bring their lovely daughter Avantika along; and Avinash and Anush were busy finding picturesque scenes through the cameras.....

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The Ramakrishna Ashram logo and symbols, and the pink-washed wall, make a nice picture:



That's it folks, until the next trip I make....

Current Mood: sad
Current Music: none

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Silhouettes

Yesterday I went out on a long evening stroll with friends through the Southern Ridges Walk. The walk connects 3 parks and the visitor never has to hit any traffic or roads all through. We were also treated to a simple and beautiful sunset along the way. I had the company of my friend Yunzhen (another Canon photographer) while we took a few photos along the way. Silhouettes at sunset are so easy to take and the results are satisfying.

Curves adjustment applied on the photos.

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The weary traveler returns
England
Isle Of Wight
Portsmouth
London
Bath
Stonehenge (Twice)
Ipswich
Liverpool
Manchester
Birmingham
York
Lake District
Stratford-Upon-Avon
Oxford
Cambridge
Windsor
North Wales
Wrexham
Scotland
Edinburugh
Glasgow
Inverness
Fort William
Mallaig
Ireland
Belfast
Derry
Enniskillen
Sligo
Donegal

You bet, I've traveled.

Current Mood: tired

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A most unfortunate meme post.

We’re having a horrible day at office. Horrible. And there’s not much we can do except laugh about it. So that’s what we’re doing instead of working. Anyways, here is a meme.

pratibha75 is tagged, of course.
 

 

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1. What is the very first song you remember?
2. What is the very last song you heard?
3. Name one song whose lyrics are close to your heart.
4. What are some of your favorite lyrics? (either from song you name above or otherwise)
5. Name one song whose video you like.
6. Name one song which paints a picture in your mind.
7. Name one song you dislike intensely.

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 My answers:

What is the very first song you remember?
Vande Mataram, playing every morning on radio. I didn't know it was called Vande Mataram, though :-)

What is the very last song you heard?
Song from Hu Tu Tu on TV.

Name one song whose lyrics are close to your heart.
The Shins/ Girl on the wing.

What are some of your favorite lyrics? (either from song you name above or otherwise)
"Shake it, Sh Shake it, Shake it like a polaroid picture." :-|

Name one song whose video you like.
I don't like music videos.

Name one song which paints a picture in your mind.
Bob Dylan/ Shelter from the Storm.

Name one song you dislike intensely.
Madonna's version of American Pie.

Current Mood: bored

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PET 2008
Mike and I spent an evening in Amsterdam, slept all day and then drove with Alex to Leuven for PET. I'm giving an invited talk on Friday, I'll probably also give a rump session or two.

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dnalounge update

DNA Lounge update, wherein mostly photos are presented.

Current Music: Portishead -- Machine Gun

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What Would You Wish For?
Her: What is the one thing you want most in the world?
Me: What?
Her: Lets say a genie pops up in front of you and is ready to grant you a wish what would you wish for?
Me: What is all this about?
Her: Ok, forget the genie... Lets just say that can wish for one thing right now, what would you wish for?


Current Mood: full
Current Music: Bakhuda Tumhi Ho - Atif Aslam & Alka Yagnik - Kismat Konnection

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