The trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is out and it's really nice. This Dumbledore is finally beginning to grow on me even though his tone of voice is almost always off from what I feel the real Dumbledore should be (I feel that Jim Dale captures it brilliantly in the audiobooks). I will reserve judgment on "young Dumbledore" and "young Voldemort" because, honestly, they're only there for one scene and it doesn't matter much to me. I really do look forward to the lake scene though and all their trips through the Pensieve. In other words, I can't wait to see the movie - the crowds are going to be unbelievable, but it'll all be worth it.



Also, a couple of days ago, trusting that future versions of iPhone software will continue to improve (or at least support) Hindi font rendering, I converted all my five hundred something Hindi songs to हिन्दी songs, meaning that my library now looks like this:



This result is achieved by painstakingly filling in "Sorting" information which was introduced as part of one of the iTunes 7.x releases. (Well, technically, you don't need the sorting information per se, but all your Hindi songs will find themselves at the end of the list in a randomly sorted manner if you don't have it.) Unfortunately, not all parts of iTunes have evolved to support all these new features and one of the glaring omissions is the lack of a way to set the Sort fields on multiple tracks at the same time. This is in some part relieved by this iTunes AppleScript, which, although not perfect, gets the job done.

This music library conversion, besides being immensely satisfying in a very OCD way, also revealed lots of errors to me both in the Latin transliteration as well as the Devnagari transliteration. For example, Ishq needs to be spelt इश्क़ but was इश्क in many places, द्र was दर, कुछ was कुच्छ (a rather overindulgent use of the क्ख/च्छ/द्ध kind of consonant cluster) and the odd ि was an ी (an easy mistake) as well as the other way around.



In continuing happiness, I will soon have another great load off my head as I will soon be finally finishing this project for my part-time job (during the school year) that I was supposed to finish in... March. It has bothered me almost every day since then but I simply did not have the time while the school year was going on, and now I'll have finally finished it! What a relief. Also, I think I seem to have done a rather better job of it than most people (who, although they submitted the thing on time, mostly did a shoddy job of it).



Finally, I've been trying out last.fm for the past few days. What it does is that it tracks the songs you listen to and then can play (in a Pandora-like fashion) songs it thinks you'll like. You can also make friends on last.fm and see how "compatible" you are with them. Since I use CoverSutra, which has a builtin last.fm mechanism to send song updates to their server, it's zero disruption to my existing workflow. So, although I doubt it has many uses for me, it does seem like an interesting little thing to play around with.

Labels: English

Wow it's been quite a weekend this one. I've been away from work for so long (five days) that it feels a bit odd. So, let's see how I spent this massive weekend of fun and frolic. On Friday morning, five of us interns from the Silicon Valley Microsoft office left for a leisurely 11 o'clock flight to Seattle where a car was convenietly waiting to pick us up. Once at our hotel, we waited for a little bit and went to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory in Bellevue Square (because, of course, all our meals were being paid for by the Company - otherwise it'd have been a taqueria).

Having satisfactorily gorged ourselves on burgers, chocolate mousse and the like, we went to the main campus in Redmond where tens of buses had lined up to take the nearly 1400 interns to Woodland Park Zoo. Now, the bus ride that followed was probably the most entertaining event that evening. When the bus was just about to start, our driver - a sweet old lady in her forties - told us that we had a police escort going with us. And sure enough, when we looked out of the window on our left, we saw about ten or twelve policemen on those gigantic police bikes gearing up to leave. Of course the real entertainment started when we got on the highway. You see, the trip from Redmond to the zoo is about sixteen and a half miles and goes over two major highways - the 520 and the I-5. So, we were quite amazed when we got on to the highway and saw that just in order to let us pass, the entire freaking highway had been corked like a bottle by the policemen who were blocking all vehicles from entering the highway and blocking all cars already on the highway, except the Microsoft buses, which were carrying interns... to a zoo... for a concert. I still can't get over the sheer ludicrousness of the fact that about sixteen miles of highway - interstate highway - was blocked (at a peak hour no less!) simply to allow for the merrymaking of a thousand something interns... at a zoo... for a concert. Hell, I don't even know if it was necessary. Talk about corporate clout! Pretty amazing though. And here's a picture of the blockade:


At the end of the zoo event, in which we were provided with food, drink and music (though ironically not a single glimpse at any kind of animal), we received a free Zune 2.0 each and were ferried back home. I honestly don't know with all these Zunes I keep getting (okay, my second free Zune); they don't work with Macs and are thus practically worthless to me.

On the second day, we went to the Company Picnic which took places at Mountain Meadows Park, which is about 25 miles from the Redmond office. We drove there instead of riding on the armada of Microsoft buses because we wanted to be able to leave at any time we wanted. The field was huge and the weather was really nice. The food was terrible (although all free). The activities weren't as bad. It's organized for Microsoft employees and their families, so there were loads of kiddie events and some daredevil performances by motorcyclists as well. I didn't take part in much except for mountain bike riding for 10-15 minutes which was fun, then went home after meeting a few friends and spending a few hours there eating and drinking. In the evening, we went and drove to Seattle hoping to get IMAX tickets for The Dark Knight but they were all sold out. So, we instead went to a Japanese bookstore in the downtown area, I bought a couple of books, and then we went back to our hotel and had dinner at this really posh Italian restaurant called Palomino. The Chocolate Tiramisu deserves a special mention in the "beyond delicious" category.

On the third day, we woke up egregiously early and drove to Mt. Rainier National Park (about 85 miles from our hotel), which took about three hours with some wrong turns and all, and hiked up the mountain which was completely covered with snow. I have to concede that this was probably my oddest snow experience. The sun was blazing and it was maybe between 15ºC and 18ºC outside. The snow somehow persevered. Our hike was about 5-6 miles all over and throughout the entire thing, our feet were in snow and our foreheads were covered with sweat from the hot sun, appreciative of the intermittent cool breeze. It took us two or three hours to climb 2000 something feet after which we took a break, made a snowman and came back down. This was also possibly the most comfortable climb down from a hike that I've ever had. Usually your legs and feet start killing you pretty quickly because climbing down has a tendency to do that (the faster the worse). However, since we were climbing down in snow, any impact from the ground was completely buffered by the snow and it was the best time during the entire hike. We also weren't afraid of slipping and falling down, because if we did, the hardest thing we were likely to hit was snow. July is definitely a great time to hike on Mt. Rainier. By the time we came back though, I was dreadfully tired, went to eat a great dinner at IHOP consisting of pancakes and omelets and then fell asleep almost as soon as I could.

The fourth day (Monday) was the only relatively free day because we decided not to go to one boring ol' event and instead decided to sleep in. In the afternoon, we went to visit some of our intern counterparts up in the Redmond offices, chatted with them for a while and then went and shopped at the company store. The evening was me meeting up with a couple of Stanford friends, eating burritos and watching the third Pirates movie again, which was entertaining.

The last and final day consisted of getting up lazy-ishly at around 10 o' clock, getting lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Seattle (Todai), which turned out to be horrible for me (because I'm a vegetarian), then taking the ferry to Bainbridge, taking the ferry back and heading to the airport to come back here. And now that I've finished writing this story out, it's time for shower and bed.

Labels: English

It's such a weird feeling. I'm actually enjoying my job? Like, the thing I get paid for? It's true, and sometimes it makes me feel embarrassed when my fellow office mates don't share the same enthusiasm. Today, overestimating how sluggishly I would do the whole waking up ritual, I got to work 45 minutes earlier than expected, at around 9.15am. Now, I'm really not hardworking in the normal sense, but man, I just couldn't leave without implementing that one feature I'd planned for today and crushing that nasty bug in which the windows forgot their positions! So, I ended up staying until 8.15pm... yeah. 吾嫌蟲也。

Labels: English

BBC News bàodào: Sir Ian McKellen, hěn yǒumíng de Yīngguó yǎnyuán, hé BBC de Andrew Marr tǎolùn zhōng tòulù yīnwèi tā de xìngbié shōudào le hěn duō xìn jǐnggào tā de shēngmìng yǒu wēixié. McKellen shuō, zài Yīngguó, tóngxìngliàn hái méi shòudào rénmen de zànchéng hé zhīchí, tíle lìng yī wèi chǔyú tóngyàng qíngkuàng de Měiguó tóngxìngliàn mùshi Gene Robinson; Robinson shòudào le jìaohuì de fǎnduì, yě shòudào le hěn duō pǔtōngrén de fǎnduì, méi shōudào měiféng 10 nián jǔbàn de Lambeth huìyì de yāoqǐng.

Labels: Chinese

BBC News bàodào – Běijīng Àoyùnhuì kāimù zhǐ yǒu yī ge yuè, dànshì Běijīng Shì de kōngqì wūrǎn shuǐpíng shàngwèi mǎnzú Àoyùn Wěiyuánhuì guīdìng de biāozhǔn. Rán'ér bèi cǎifǎng de yī wèi guānyuán réngrán bàochí—dào Àoyùnhuì kāimù 时 zhīqián, Běijīng yídìng huì dàodá 世界卫生组织 (Shìjiè Wèishēng Zǔzhī – WHO) de kōngqì wūrǎn biāozhǔn. BBC News jìzhě James Reynolds biǎoshì huáiyí.

Labels: Chinese