Random tangent (blog)
Ameel Khan's personal blog. This is a blog about life, technology, photography, typography, the internet, science, feminism, books, film, music, and whatever other random stuff I come across or happen to be interested in today.
The TWiT Netcast Network just launched a hugely inspirational new show called 'Roz Rows the Pacific'.
The show is about Roz Savage, a former management consultant and investment banker who, at the age of 34, "decided she'd had enough of her conventional London existence and wanted to do something special with her life" so she bought a rowboat and rowed solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Okay, so it wasn't quite as simple as that but you can read more about that journey of hers on her Wikipedia page or on her own website.
Now, though, Savage is rowing solo across the Pacific Ocean -- from the US to Australia -- and, if she succeeds, will become the first woman to have done so (she was the 5th to row across the Atlantic). She left San Francisco on 25 May, 2008 and hopes to arrive at Cairns some time in 2010. Yes, that's 2010.
During that journey, Leo Laporte will be talking to Roz three times a week on the RRP netcast so you can follow her progress there and, of course, on her website.
Funny thing: before she left, Laporte gave her an iPod full of books from Audbile.com. In the last episode of TWiT, he mentioned that it had taken her just three days to get through all of 'Bleak House' so I'm not sure how long that's going to last! :)
I wish Roz all the best and hope she has an awesome journey.
Last week's Munchcast was all about geek food. That is, the almighty cheeseburger. Now I love burgers -- making them, eating them, and trying out different kinds -- and that got me thinking: what is the best cheeseburger in Melbourne? Naturally, I turned to Google for the answer and, as it happens, a lot of people have a lot to say on this topic.
Global Sources of Information
For starters, according to the World's Greatest Hamburgers website, the 9th best burger in the world is from Kermond's (in Warnabool, which is just outside Melbourne) while the 14th best is from Andrew's Burgers (in Albert Park, which is a suburb of Melbourne).
Local Sources of Information
Meanwhile, back in 2005, The Age had a whole spread on the best burgers in Melbourne (both rural and urban) which is still probably pretty accurate. Then, in 2007, a number of blogs and bloggers weighed in on the debate:
Finally, a Quest...
However the most comprehensive, scientific, and up-to-date listing of top-quality burgers in Melbourne is on the Burger Quest website. Their reviews rate burgers on a star rating (1-5 stars) and six burger joints get top honours, though two of those have since closed.
So, it is now my quest to have at least one burger from each those places during my stay in Australia (i.e. the next 3-4 years). I've already had burgers from Burger Edge (6 stars) and Grill'd (5 stars), both of which were awesome, so I'm off to a good start. Now for all the rest...
I suspect I'm really, really, really going to enjoy this quest :)
Jeff Foust wrote a great article on the successful landing of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander in this week's The Space Review called A Second Chance at Mars:
The fact that NASA had dubbed the entry, descent, and landing phase of the mission, when the spacecraft slowed from 20,000 km/h to zero, “seven minutes of terror” was not exactly inspiring.
A lot was riding on this landing and NASA spent a considerable amount of time warning everyone how risky it was going to be but, as you know, it all turned out well in the end.
Yes, I am done with my MBA. I completed my official course requirements (i.e. got my final grades) on 9th May and then on 17th May I had my graduation ceremony. I uploaded some photos and wrote about the ceremony on my professional blog (so read that first) but here are a couple of more photographs.
This is the official photo of me getting my MBA degree from the University of Melbourne's Vice-Chancellor, Glynn Davis:
And here are Ayesha and Nadia in the freezing cold -- it was the coldest day in Melbourne so far and it rained continuously! -- just after the event:
Nuzhat was also there but she had to leave early. There are more photos of all of us on Ayesha and Nuz's cameras but I haven't gotten those from them yet.
So thus endeth my MBA. Now to find a job...
I wrote in my professional blog about an excellent site and video that I came across today. Called The Story of Stuff the site and video are about the concept of limits and the idea of sustainable consumption. The point is to raise awareness about these topics in a simple, approachable way and I highly recommend you go take a look.
In case you missed the first episode of Salam Cafe -- the new, very Aussie, very funny comedy panel and sketch show that debuted on SBS on Wednesday -- you can now watch it on the SBS website. I'm guessing all future episodes will be published there as well.
The show is about the funny side of being a Muslim in Australia -- which means there's plenty of Muslim and Aussie humour -- but is also about being a Muslim, particularly a young Muslim, in this day and age. Here's what The Age had to say about it.
So, set your reminders for 10pm on Wednesdays on SBS and have a good laugh.
Great article on the SciAm website about sleep debt, which is the difference between how much you slept and how much you should have slept.
The trick is that you can't make up for your lack of sleep during weeknights just by sleeping late on weekends, though that's very important too. For proper recovery sleep you need to be sleeping a little extra every day for a period of time till your natural sleep cycle is restored (i.e. your debt has been repaid).
Being a sleep aficionado myself, I can safely say that I already knew that. And having worked in startups for most of my life -- i.e. being someone who swings from periods of no work to periods of intense work which, as you would expect, messes with your sleep cycle -- there are a few other bits of sleep pattern wisdom that I could add. But I'll save those for another blog post since there's lots to say.
I have three primary e-mail accounts: Melbourne Business School, Yahoo! Mail Plus, and insanityWORKS.org. I also have three secondary ones: The University of Melbourne, Gmail, and Hotmail. I forward UniMelb to MBS, Gmail to Yahoo!, and I check Hotmail via a browser periodically. I POP mail from my primary accounts to my laptop and I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail client. That is:
When I'm away from my laptop, however, I usually only check my primary accounts. To do that, I use the MBS webmail interface, Yahoo!'s excellent webmail interface, and I POP my insanityWORKS mail into Yahoo!. That is:
This system has worked well for the last seven years because I've always had one primary computer to work on (which, for the last four years, has been my laptop). Now things are starting to change and I'm tempted to (a) move all my e-mail online and (b) move to one primary e-mail account (Gmail) and five secondary ones (all the rest). That is:
Here's why...
Three Major Changes
First, I've become a lot more mobile and I increasingly want access to all my old e-mails (and some of my data) regardless of where I am and which computer I'm working on. This wouldn't be a problem if I was to carry my laptop (and, therefore, all my e-mail and data) with me everywhere I went, but that's not something I want to do all the time. Also, in the future I want to use my phone to access my e-mail and I simply can't do that with my current setup.
Second, cloud computing has come a long way over the last couple of years and Yahoo!, which is by far my preferred e-mail provider, lacks a number of cloud computing features that I really want. For example, Google Reader is much better than Yahoo!'s RSS reader and Microsoft's SkyDrive is much better than Yahoo! Briefcase. I also prefer Google's Calendar to Yahoo!'s, I really like Gmail's labelling mechanism, and Microsoft's Live Mesh sounds very exciting as well. In other words, I want to start using cloud computing-like services and Yahoo! alone isn't giving them to me.
Third, we live in an increasingly connected world. My current system of downloading all my e-mail to my laptop works well because it assumes that I'll be doing a lot of e-mailing (and, in general, computing) offline and from one computer. Increasingly, that is not the case. Instead, I now use communication tools like Facebook and Twitter for which you need to be constantly online, I don't limit my e-mail usage to just my laptop, and I even access the 'net and my e-mail through my mobile phone (though I don't do much of that right now because it's really expensive on my current phone plan!).
Two Implications
This means two things. First, I am seriously considering moving all my e-mail to the 'cloud'. I want this for seamless and synchronized e-mail access across multiple computers and devices. And since I am frequently online (or at least in mobile phone signal range) not being able to access my e-mail because I don't have an Internet (or mobile phone) connection is no longer an issue.
For this to work, though, I will need an IMAP-based e-mail solution and not a POP-based one. IMAP will not only let me sync my e-mail across multiple computers and devices, it will let me work offline (before re-syncing) as well.
Second, because of that IMAP requirement, I am seriously considering making Gmail my sole primary e-mail account. In fact, I'll start to POP e-mail from all my other accounts into this one as well (see diagram above).
Why? Not only is Gmail the only one that offers IMAP (which is why it should be my only e-mail interface), it's free and it gives me tonnes of storage, great calendar integration, and excellent e-mail search capabilities. It is also reliable, universally accessible, and, once I switch, I won't have to take regular backups of my e-mail folders any more.
I could, of course, use other (paid) IMAP services, but I think I'd be better off using Gmail for all the additional benefits I get from it.
One Decision
So I have a big decision to make. Do I move all 2.1GB of e-mail archives off my laptop, out of my direct control, and into the cloud? Some people have done that and are happy with it. Others didn't have such a great time. Until I try it myself, I don't know how things will turn out for me. What might be useful, though, is if I was to do a bit of e-mail housekeeping before uploading everything to Gmail. Doing that would be a pain up-front, but it would make life a lot easier going forward.
Actually, maybe the bigger issue is this: should I commit myself to using only Gmail (via IMAP) from this point on? I guess another way to think of this is to ask myself whether this is better than the status quo. That is: should I commit myself to using only my laptop (with occasional backups) to store all my e-mail? Or, to get the best of both worlds, does it make more sense to store my e-mail both on Gmail and to maintain a local copy of all that e-mail in Thunderbird as well? The answer, in theory, is pretty obvious. Naturally, it's much harder to go ahead and actually implement the solution.
I think I'll start off with a baby step: I'll activate IMAP on my Gmail account and will start using that with Thunderbird. I'll even try uploading copies of some of my old e-mails into Gmail to see how it goes. If that goes well, I'll spend the next few weeks moving all my folders over one-by-one. Before I know it, I'll be good to go. Let's just hope things go as smoothly as I've just made them sound!
Or is it a debacle only when, say, Microsoft does it but a minor PR issue when Apple does it? Whatever.
I've been meaning to write about this for a while now, but haven't gotten around to it (the last week of my MBA starts today! Yaay!). Meanwhile, Paul Thurrott's gone and said pretty much what I wanted to say in his article: Apple lofts middle finger at PC users, PC users thank Apple for acknowledging them. Of course, he says it much better than I ever could (and with a lot more authority, being a tech journalist and all) but that's okay.
Crave has a great article on the Anatomy of an IKEA Product. Fascinating stuff.
Almost missed this: Nadia's Token Human rant was featured in Heartless Bitches :) Awesome.
"Cool bananas" -- I've been hearing that phrase on and off since coming to Australia and I'd always wondered where it had come from but I'd never gotten around to investigating its origins. Then I heard it again yesterday and, after tormenting Nadia with it all afternoon, I finally looked it up.
Initially I presumed that it was from something like a children's TV show like Bananas in Pyjamas but, as it turns out, it's originally a Kiwi phrase from the 70s -- or at least that's what the Wikipedia consensus on it seems to be. How the Kiwis came up with it, no one seems to know. The Urban Dictionary, for example, defines it but doesn't indicate its origins.
The most comprehensive discussion on it, however, is on an ABC message board in which...well, in which all they manage to conclude is that a bunch of them have been hearing it in various parts of Australia for over 30 years. I guess that's about as close as we're going to get to its proper etymology. (Darn, and here I thought the Internet knew everything!). Oh well. At least I got to blog about it so that's, er, cool bananas! :)
One of my favourite place on the 'net is the lolcat site I Can Has Cheezburger. In case you don't already know, these fine folk also have three other equally funny sites:
They also maintain Speak LOLspeak, which is the "The Definitive Lolcats Glossary" and an invaluable resource.
And then there are three other funny, but more specialized lol-related sites:
There are, of course, many, many more of these sites but those three are, in my opinion, the funniest of the lot.
Good stuff!
Peter Gabriel, one of my all-time favourite musicians, continues to be at the forefront of technology usage -- particularly when it comes to technology for music and human rights:
On the human rights side:
So it's no surprise that he is involved in recent areas of music technology as well:
Both sound really interesting and I'll write more about them once I've played around with them a little more.
[More PG: Wikipedia, Last.fm, Real World Records, WOMAD]
Inspired by the hard-core science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke that eventually became real science, awesome article in Popular Mechanics on The 10 Most Prophetic Sci-Fi Movies Ever.
Reuters is reporting that Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Grand Master of science fiction and one of my favourite authors, passed away earlier today. Rest in peace, Arthur. Rest in peace.
I recently wrote about my entry in the Melbourne Business School Class Profile Brochure on my professional blog. Since I wrote that post on the day I submitted my profile to Career Services, I didn't have a copy of my professional photograph that will be used in that publication (MBS hired a professional photographer and got all our pictures taken).
This morning, however, I was e-mailed a copy of that photo and here it is:
Good photo, eh? I don't look half bad, either :)
This is personal website of Nadia Niaz and Ameel Zia Khan. Here we document our lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia