confused of calcutta

I’m always fascinated by the way people find unusual and unintended uses for the functionality provided by designers of technology.
A particular example I’ve been tracking for a while is the “Give me a missed call” approach I first saw practiced in India. It’s been around for quite a while now; if you want to delve [...]

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Lazing on a Sunday afternoon, after family time at church and at lunch. Watching the cricket. And realising that I still hold out hope for India managing to get something out of this game. As long as England are bowled out before tea, and as long as the target is around 400, I live in [...]

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Sean brought this to my attention, the blog-published story of Lorem Ipsum. Most of you have probably seen it as the standard filler text in sample templates from Microsoft PowerPoint. I’d seen it used in journalistic circles as filler for “to be completed” sections of dummied-up versions of magazines, but my sparse knowledge of it [...]

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Sean asked how on earth I came across Wholphin. [For those who are interested, a wholphin is the name given to the offspring of bottlenose dolphins and false killer whales, as in this story here.]
In addition, Wholphin is a DVD magazine of unseen films. And part of the McSweeney’s stable, including the books, McSweeney’s magazine [...]

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I was at the cricket today, with my son and some friends at Lord’s. Saw some fine attacking bowling (mainly by England) and some indifferent batting (mainly by India), leaving the match largely in England’s favour. A few early wickets tomorrow could change things, but I would expect this to be England’s game unless they [...]

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A quote from Simon and Rupert Winchester’s Calcutta: A Brief History
The burgeoning wealth and importance of Calcutta during the nineteenth century meant that gradually it began to move beyond its colonial roots for the first time, and started to become a city that blended the influences of both East and West. The Bengal Renaissance, as [...]

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If I wanted to know the most common human FAQs, I’d ask librarians, preachers and 911 operators.
So said Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, to the assembled masses of the Reference User and Services Association, American Library Association. You can find a copy of his full speech here. [Strangely enough, [...]

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….is the title of a bizarre short film from the Wholphin stable. Take a look at the clip sometime. It’s people playing cross-border volleyball across an international boundary fence. A different perspective, it lets you see just how ugly fences are.

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Have you really thought about how you listen to music on any given day? Do you tend to choose an artist, an album, a period? Or do you just press the shuffle button or its equivalent?
I’m currently using one of my favourite techniques:

Sort out my iTunes library into Time order
Scan through the library very quickly [...]

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It happens every now and then; my ten-books-at-a-time reading habit throws up a really good bunch, driven both by recommendation as well as randomness:

Absurdistan: Gary Shteyngart (recommended by the bookstore I visited in San Francisco a month ago)
The Ice Palace That Melted Away: Bill Stumpf (discovered as part of my interest in Max De Pree [...]

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