Having moved all of my e-mail to Gmail, I am now ready for my next move-stuff-into-the-cloud project.
This time I’m moving all of my photos to either Flickr (where I already have a small presence) or Picasa (which I haven’t yet installed on my current laptop). I don’t know which I’ll end up going with but I’ll start by giving both a try and seeing how things go.
I’ll keep y’all posted on what I’m up to.
Jared Goralnick recently posted an excellent comparison between Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s Gmail on Lifehacker.
Having recently shifted all of my e-mail to Gmail you can image which side I’m lean towards…though in all fairness I chose Gmail because I wanted all of my e-mail to be in the cloud and not because I thought Outlook wasn’t for me.
I actually think Outlook is great. I don’t like it’s search capabilities all that much — though maybe that’s because we still use Outlook 2003 at work — but otherwise it’s got everything (and more) than I need.
That said, Gmail is awesome: I love everything about it and, now that Google is moving towards letting you bring some of its capabilities offline, I’m sure I’ll soon like it even more.
Raza Rumi recently wrote a good feature on one my LUMS BSc classmates Asim Butt on the ‘All Things Pakistan’ blog:
What distinguishes Asim Butt from his generation and perhaps the preceding generations of artists is the sheer originality of his vision and an iconoclasm that is neither trumpeted nor made visible until the subtext of his lines is closely studied.
More on Asim:
Engaget’s Darren Murphy reports that the design studio Art. Lebedev is opening a store (well, a sub-store to start with) in New York on 8 August! Awesome.
Speaking of stuff that’s related to Pakistan (see my previous post), I’m really looking forward to watching Mehreen Jabbar’s film ‘Ramchand Pakistani‘ which I’ve heard good things about.
Ramchand Pakistani is derived from a true story concerning the accidental crossing of the Pakistan-Indian border during a period (June 2002) of extreme, war-like tension between the two countries by two members of a Pakistani Hindu family belonging to the ‘untouchable’ (Dalit) caste, and the extraordinary consequences of this unintended action upon the lives of a woman, a man, and their son.
I don’t know when we’ll get to see it in Melbourne but I hope it’s sometime soon.
[Also see ‘Ramchand Pakistani’ on IMDb]
Laila Kazmi’s Jazbah.org — a site about “Pakistani women who have worked hard to achieve great goals and made significant, positive impacts in their societies” — has been around for a number of years but I’ve never gotten around to mentioning it on this blog. That’s mainly because, even though it’s a great resource, it’s not updated very often and most of the profiles on it are a few years old.
However I visited the site again recently thanks to the Muslimah Media Watch — I was commenting there on how it’s only blogs like MMW and PakPositive that ever seem to talk about all the good things going on in developing countries — and figured I should give it a mention. It’s a good site and the events and books sections seem to be active, which is cool. Make sure you take a look.
Good article in IndustryFinest.com on ‘The Top 20 Most Influential Rock Producers‘. Particularly since I’m a huge fan of Rick Rubin, Brian Eno, Butch Vig and Daniel Lanois.
So, is this goodbye to the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution? I guess only time will tell.
Don’t know what I’m taking about? Read on:
I presume you already know the awesome Internet meme in which you condense a movie into exactly five works (no more, no less). Well, over at Spill, Jared’s done that for the entire AFI’s Top 100 films list!
Awesome.
I don’t have the time or the energy to write more about this, though I really want to. Instead, all I’ll say is that you really must watch Brian Dunning’s ‘Here Be Dragons’ video. Here’s what it’s about:
‘Here Be Dragons’ is a free 40 minute video introduction to critical thinking. It is suitable for general audiences and is licensed for free distribution and public display.
Most people fully accept paranormal and pseudoscientific claims without critique as they are promoted by the mass media. ‘Here Be Dragons’ offers a toolbox for recognizing and understanding the dangers of pseudoscience, and appreciation for the reality-based benefits offered by real science.
‘Here Be Dragons’ is written and presented by Brian Dunning, host and producer of the Skeptoid podcast, author of ‘Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena‘, and Executive Producer of The Skeptologists.
It’s awesome. Enjoy.