confused of calcutta

I told you I enjoyed reading Dreaming in Code, Scott Rosenberg’s recent book; I told you I was going to start reading his blog, Wordyard.
I kept my word. And I’m still enjoying it. To give you a for-instance, here’s a quote from a piece Scott wrote on MySpace and success:
Here we have the state of [...]

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I’ve been catching up with my reading, and came across an intriguing post by Kathy Sierra. Headlined What Comes After Usability, it poses some very interesting questions. I quote from her post:
Unlike waterfalls (which run in one direction and don’t back up), spirals can produce software much more likely to match what users want. Spirals [...]

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Have you ever seen Adelson’s Illusion?
The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey.
I won’t spoil it for you by giving you the proof here. Instead, why don’t you go visit the original site and see for yourself? There are a number of really worthwhile illusions there. I first saw it maybe [...]

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There’s a lovely little story going around, about a band called 7 seconds of love.
They’re very today, they even have a myspace site;
They’re very yesterday, they play ska;
They’re very tomorrow, they’re unsigned.
Somehow a 2005 hit of theirs got copied lock stock and barrel. Seriously plagiarised. Not just the tune, but the characters and costumes in [...]

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I’ve always been intrigued by what people actually do in services firms; I’ve worked in them all my life, and I have yet to figure it out completely. Why? Because every time I look, the daily “outputs” of individuals mystify me, yet everyone appears really busy. Weird.
I used to understand how things worked, but lost [...]

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Cory pointed me towards this article in the New York Times, headlined Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music. [An aside: The retarded hippie in me just cannot comprehend the use of the word "contemplate" in a context where "navel" and "lint" are absent...]
Where was I? Oh yes, the New York Times article. Here are a [...]

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How often do you visit Wikipedia? If you’re like me, you probably go there three or four times a day. In which case you’ve probably noticed the “thermometer bar” at the top of the page for the last month or so.
The Wikimedia Foundation ran its recent month-long fundraiser from 16 December 2006 to 15 [...]

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You may have figured out that I was born and raised in Calcutta. Lived there from 1957 to 1980. For much of that time, the roads there were less than perfect. So much so we used to joke that, when confronted with a particularly poor road, the smart way to drive was to stay in [...]

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Sean’s having trouble finding vendors that try to Keep the Customer Satisfied; in fact he seems to be doing better at finding Deputy Sheriffs, according to his recent post.
Deputy Sheriff said to me
Tell me what you come here for, boy.
You better get your bags and flee.
You’re in trouble boy,
And now you’re heading into more. [...]

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I’ve spent some time reading a recent study titled Economic Impact of Open Source Software on Innovation and the Competitiveness of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Sector in the EU. Don’t worry, you won’t think the title is too long when you see the document, all 287 pages of it. And no, I haven’t [...]

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