Today, after roaming the earth for 21 years depending on someone else to cook my food for me, I made a giant leap: I cooked my own meal. Right from buying groceries to cleaning up the dishes afterward 
Here’s a picture of the modest beginning:
It looks a lot more delicious than it really was: just boiled vegetables with garlic bread – dressed with salt, pepper and a dollop of butter – rather bland for an Indian tongue. But, oh well, it’s a start 
I was going through Last.FM’s Best Music of 2008 charts when I came across Nine Inch Nails’ album Ghosts I-IV. What really caught my eye was not that it was 4th in the top albums chart, but that the music was licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commerical-Share Alike license!
In addition to the slew of albums available under similar licenses on Jamendo, it is heartening to see more mainstream music opting for this method of distribution – even Radiohead experimented with it not long ago.
The best way for us to fight the RIAA is by encouraging this type of music distribution, which directly pays the artist. Let’s not forget that associations like the RIAA are chiefly responsible for several draconian laws that plague our society today, and are also the primary driving force behind DRM technologies. Gone are the days where you need large amounts of money to produce and distribute your work of art. As I said earlier, the whole point of technology is to make things cheaper, faster and better for everyone involved, cutting out the middle-man wherever possible.
This holiday season, play your part by going and buying DRM-free music directly from the artist. It’s the least we can do to show that this open form of distribution actually works. My recommendations: Ghosts I-IV and The Raghu Dixit Project. Or sample music from Magnatune and then buy tracks that you like! Alternatively, pick out music from Jamendo and then donate to artists of your liking. A meal at your favorite fast-food restaraunt is all you have to sacrifice for the act
Just dicovered Typealyzer via Tejas. This post makes a nice successor to the previous one: Typealyzer analyzes a blog and tries to predict your Myers-Briggs type based on it. My result was ESTP (The Doer) as opposed to INTP (The Thinker) returned by other traditional personality tests (such as 41 Questions, covered in the previous post).
It’s interesting to note that while I’m an “introvert” in real-life, my blog posts are generally “extrovert” in nature. Though I wonder what an introvert blog looks like – most people maintain a blog because they want to express themselves, no? Also, I’m apparently more Sensing than iNtuitive in my writing, as opposed to real life. The other two characteristics: Thinking and Perception remain the same.
I’m usually not a big fan of personality tests, especially the online ones, but this one was scarily accurate. Or atleast, I’d like to think so
Going to club two recent events into one post.
First, Museumnacht 08! This annual event is the best way to cover at least some of Amsterdam’s many museums. Depending on your planning and speed, you can visit as many as 45 places covered under the plan. Travel on the trams, night-buses and the metro are covered on the ticket as well. The whole thing lasted from 7 p.m. on Nov 1 until 2 a.m. on Nov 2. For just 13 Euros, it was a steal 
Given that we didn’t know much about the museum scenario and are relatively new to Amsterdam, we still managed to cover 7 places in one night, an impressive feat IMO. We started off at the Filmhuis, and the theme of the night was Bollywood! They picked out the cheesiest scenes from the 80s to screen, posters of films from the 40s to the 90s and a dressing room for folks to try out traditional Indian costumes. Though it was enjoyable, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time rediscovering Bollywood in Amsterdam 
After a small walking mishap (Damnit iPhone, would it be so hard to include a compass on your maps so we know which direction we’re moving in?!), we found our way to the sound museum. Sounds fun, right? It was: plenty of interesting exhibits, some were even interactive. At this point, hunger caught on, and we got some “Wok to Walk” – that’s right – the stereotypical chinese food in a square box. Next up on the list was FOAM: The Photography Museum. This was the first one we had to stand in line for, but it was worth it, because inside there was a lot of free candy and some really nice photographs to look at. We decided to walk towards a tram station, but were attracted by the National Archives on the way. This place housed some really historic documents from the old dutch days, and couple of interactive exhibits.
A quick (free) ride on the tram later, we wound up at the Rembrandt House, which is a modern reconstruction of the famous 17th century painter’s home. There was a queue for this too, but again, was definitely worth it. There were paintings from a few other modern artists in addition to some of Rembrandt’s works (couldn’t tell if they were original or not). We heard there would be some live Jazz music around this time (it was 11:30 PM by now), so we started wandering around looking for it until we wound up at this really cool Portuguese Synagogue. It was entirely candle-lit, and was very pleasing to the eye. A nice place to sit down and relax after all the walking-around. Last place we visited was the Jewish Historical Museum, which was possibly the best place we visited all day, because we spent a little more than an hour here. There were multiple floors within this place covering all topics ranging from the foundation of the state of Israel to the stories of Jews in the Netherlands during WWII. An excellent collection of paintings, photographs, books, videos, documents, you name it.
We could have visited one more place, it was still just 1 a.m., but we were all extremely tired (I had just returned from Volos the same day), so we decided to just walk towards centraal for the nightbus – all the trams had stopped because it was late. Overall, a fairly satisfying trip: Amsterdam is a city so much more than its general perception, I am loving it!
Next up: the iPhone tech talk. Apple had advertised a series of talks on iPhone development around the world, and there was to be one at “Amsterdam”. But it turns out that the actual venue was at the Technical University in Delft, which is about an hour away from here. I was just happy to be invited, so a friend and I took the trains (which rock in the Netherlands, BTW). After a little wandering around, we managed to find the place. The event was “confidential” so apparently we’re not allowed to blog about it, so I’ll just say that it was rather interesting. Coming from a FOSS background however, I must say that writing applications for the iPhone is not the most lucrative option. In any case, as a Grad student there was no way I was going to give up the opportunity for free food and a free T-Shirt 
Thanks Apple!
I’ve been doing a lot of traveling in the past few weeks, starting with the really exciting “Northside Weekend” at the Dutch towns of Tolbert and Groningen. Copious amounts of embarrassing pictures were generated on Facebook: I wouldn’t expect any less from a group of 60 students hanging out over the weekend
Allowing for just enough time to recover, I had to write my final exam for the Parallel Programming course. Having courses compressed into such short time periods can be both and good and bad, I guess I will decide for myself when the results come in!
I left almost immediately after the exam to catch a flight to Barcelona, for EU MozCamp 2008. There was a Labs Session at the Facultat d’informàtica de Barcelona the next day, part of Dan and Aza’s Europe tour. I managed to reach just before the session ended, thanks to me getting lost and then someone pointing me to a different place in the opposite direction. thunder, aza and myself then traversed the excellent Metro system in the city, to catch up with cbeard for lunch. I had my first experience with Tapas, and it wasn’t bad at all – the fact that thunder knows spanish helped a lot. mconnor joined us shortly after. A fabulous dinner later, we were all set for the first day of MozCamp
Most Mozilla events are all about meeting new people and catching up with people you knew already. I made the most of it, it was nice to see faces back from Mountain View, and some new ones. Aza was scheduled for a Labs keynote on the first day, which was pretty good. Unfortunately, he seemed to have contracted food poisoning, or maybe just general exhaustion and insomnia from the whole Labs Europe tour; so they postponed the session on Ubiquity to the next day. David Ascher‘s talk was fantastic with some really cool demos, Thunderbird 3 is going to be prodigious! We had a session on Weave that evening, which also went off reasonably well, though the audience seemed more focused on the legal and privacy aspects of the project. Not a bad thing, just not interesting to me – I’d rather think and talk about technical challenges
I had the wonderful opportunity to have dinner with Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. I also met up with Suneel who had just recently joined Mozilla at Mountain View, and we all had a great time! mconnor had to stay awake a little later than the rest of us, to prepare for his talk the next day.
Highlights of Day 2 were mconnor’s talk, 2010 goals discussion and the session on Ubiquity. I also had a brief discussion with Dan on some of my plans for Weave 0.3, it’s going to be awesome! Labs team did a little sightseeing that night, and then caught up with John Lilly, accompanied by his wife, for dinner. A perfect end to an excellent weekend.
Thanks Mozilla Europe, and Barcelona!
