mind × the + gap ™

This blog entry is a fan-post about choosing the three best blog entires that Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has posted over the month of March '12. Arguably, this is also a lazy task. Understandably, this will need some explaining. Scott Adams is a genius with hypnotic calibre. He can even prove it by producing a certain Certification in Hypnotism that hangs on his office wall, and about which we, the ardent followers of his humor blog at Dilbert.com and elsewhere such as his occasional NYT and WSJ columns, have heard more often than perhaps the issuing authorities themselves. That a certain obscure yet timely reference or reminder of being a certified hypnotist can turn his otherwise benign looking paragraphs into mesmerizing wand of a wizard is something only a certified hypnotist can do (I agree that this logic defeats itself, but I never claimed that hypnotism has anything to do with logic. If you have read Scott as regularly as he writes you have already le...

HOW CAN YOU MAKE GOOGLE SERVE YOU BETTER? Customizing Google search to suit one's needs in a more controlled manner has been a fairly less exploited area - at least by the end-users. Perhaps because there are enough 3rd party widgets available to assist a normal tusker with her Blog to do this work. This post, though a diversion from the normal theme of discussion here, is about getting a little hands-on with Google Search API to put a professional looking search-box on your blog - all the while utilizing existing components available on (what's called) the Google OS. How To: Use Google Search Ap Is On Your Blog View more presentations from mutex07 . (tags: technology google ) With a little tweak, this method also works with TypePad . Now, if you have means of posting CSS and JavaScript on your WordPress hosted blog, you can use Step-1 through Step-11 to create your customised Google Search Engine and plug it into your personal blog. All the best! Seel also: Go here for docu...

TALKING ABOUT VARIOUS DATA MODELLING TRENDS, my experimental twitter footprint from the microblogsphere over the past 30 days of tweeting shows something like this. Apparently, the patterns show (at least) three trends-of-the-month, if you like: Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been influential ("tbs") A lot of gratitude-filled human interaction took place ("thanks") Cricket was largely ignored (or any sports for that matter) Overall, the positive vibes (:-), interesting, sure, lol, okay, good, ...) clearly outweighed the strains (in spite of having long and stretched work days). Surely, this would have its contributions towards the real-time positive attitude index which tracks people's moods within the twitter system. See also: Go here to get your own Wordle from your twitter-feed via TweetStats.com.

THE WEBSITE IS LOADED with a lot of caveats and disclaimers. That gets me thinking if they mean more fun than business..? After putting this blog through their "Analyzer" the results came back naming me to be a "Mechanic" and showed a brain-map claiming to indicate the areas of my brain that are supposedly activated while blogging these posts. Interesting it may seem, I suppose I would take this simply on a lighter note (in any case, this blog is deliberately focused in certain areas by specifically shoving certain ideas. So, there it goes!). On the other hand it was surely fun to put some of my friends' blogs through Typealyzer (without their knowing) and to find funny details about them..! They most likely would be getting some pointy tweets now :-) The analysis goes on describing the personality traits as follows: The Mechanics: The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to ch...

REGULAR BLOGGERS USE TAG-CLOUDS, and the sincere ones use them wisely. Whilst on one hand the tags help organise and categorise the posts and thoughts therein, they also help the author not to stray too much away (a cluttered tag-cloud is most likely an apparent symptom of this) from the topics and interests the blog is intended for and targeted towards in the first place. On the other hand, the blog posts are made up in real language using real words that make up the composition by the author. And since the author has his/her own style with grammar and sentence construction, it forms a pattern or trend of words used to produce those thoughts marked under the given tags. Wordle.net offers this beautiful applet utility that instantly creates a "word-cloud" by consuming your blog feed. Taking it one step further, one can then match this world cloud with the tag cloud of the blog, and make interesting inferences. [Above: Word-cloud from the recent posts of this blog by Wordle.ne...

AFTER SPENDING NEARLY 6 MONTHS under the old 'skin', I thought it was almost time to give " Mind the Gap " an overhaul in look-and-feel. And trust me, it turned out to be a worthwhile and satisfying weekend indeed: Loading up Photoshop for 'grafix' on one hand and coding/debugging xHTML, css, js, and the whole of tech jargon on the other. Almost reliving the time ten years ago, the dot-com boom, and designing, developing and coding of websites with a passion of a rather naive young rookie, just "out-of-the-box" programmer! It was annoying to some degree that Google has most of its products and services under Beta - and they never seem to move out of wrappers. You hardly see any changes or progress. In specifics, I was not happy at all with the tiny collection of templates that are available by default with the Blogger system (have you ever visited any of those beautiful WordPress or LiveJournal pages of your friends (or competition) that left you w...

Cheers! To The Many Faces in Life of Life as Life That Makes a Life * * * When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders. --Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (1912), pp37. Today, May 7, is also Tagore's Birth Day.

April 23 - TODAY BEING ST. GEORGE'S DAY is also considered to be the Birth Day of William Shakespeare . (Nobody knows for sure of the bard's exact date of birth.) If one wonders about the alchemists of that era, and if they would have got a couple of 'immortality' pills of which one was taken by Shakespeare such that he would still be alive at this time, what kind of blogs would he be maintaining..? Perhaps a blog with the highest hits on the net! Footnote: Sampling only Technorati may perhaps be a rather narrow view, but looking at their popular index stats available of top 100 , the most popular blog as of this moment is - The Huffington Post , closely followed by (my personal preference) TechCrunch . (Well, by including weblinks here, I just contributed one more point to the 'authority' count on Technorati for both.)

What is the reason for someone to create and maintain a Weblog? Blog is a tool to put ideas, reactions and observations into public. A personal diary in public. In the process, one creates content, expresses likes and dislikes (and gives opportunities to Web2.0 apps to sell you a relevant product!), have the contentment of speaking it out (and, in some cases, being 'heard' also), and it creates a possibility for an interaction for you where someone might respond to your views. As to the frequency of blogging , I do not suppose there could be any rules as such. I think if you get one good idea per week to talk about in your blog, and you keep that practice for an year, effectively you would end up having about 50 good ideas. I would say, that makes a really productive year: 50 good ideas! Not bad... This also goes on speaking about the new Social dynamics that the technology has infused among us. On the downside, the chief one, as I see it, is that there is a real threat to a pr...