Chowrasthas, traffic signals, bus-stops and traffic jams ...

Chowrasthas, traffic signals, bus-stops and traffic jams ...

Events-Calendars Confluence

One of the things I love about Bangalore is the wide range of cultural and technical fests and events that take place on almost an every day basis in different corners of the city. The impetus on art, especially music, both classical and western is remarkable. In the last 15 months alone, Bangalore has played host to some of the biggest rock bands like Iron Maiden, Aerosmith, INXS, Sepultura, while at the same time presenting an eclectic line-up of music artists from around the world like Frank Gambale and Maurizio Colonna who played at the Good Sheperd auditorium late last month.

The internet, of course plays up its role of harnessing all this information and delivering it to you, with the help of sites like this , to be used at your disposal.

When I come across a post about an event, which I might be interested in attending, here’s what I do.

1. I sign in to my Google calendar.
2. Click on the “Create Event” link, on my events calendar.
3. I now enter the following information in the fields provided.
1. What -> Name of the event
2. When -> date of the event
3. Where -> Venue
4. Click on ‘Save’

Now, to come to the point I am trying to make.

With the plethora of information on events that go on around the city, it would be very neat if I could mark a specific event that I come across on a web-page, on my Google calendar directly with the click of a button.

There are multiple ways in which this could be achieved, but I’m guessing the easiest would be to create a widget, that resembled the Skype extension for Firefox, shown below

This widget would single sign on with my Google calendar, (using the relevant browser cookies), and use the APIs to directly mark the event.

A script would run on every web-page that picks out dates in different formats and uses some primitive intelligence to detect location information, and other "event-attributes", and render the widget for the collection of this information.
A click on the widget would now enable this information to be written directly to the calendar. Optionally, in case of multiple calendars, the widget would even give a drop down of available calendars, and allow the user to select one of them.
In this scenario, ideally, of course, you would want to mark one of the calendars as the default, instead of prompting the user to select one, every time he wants to mark an event.

Crossroads

Every once in a while, you find yourself at the crossroads in life, taking stock of everything thats happening to and around you.

At this tender age of 24, a couple of weeks ago, I found myself doing exactly that, and here are my musings :

India has finally won a cricket championship, which by-the-way, did not include the likes of The Netherlands, Tumbuktu, and all those other countries, which have no colorful colonial past. (Although, I must admit, I was secretly praying India wouldn't have to face Bangladesh again)

It'd been quite a while since I graduated to listening to Pink Floyd, Coldplay , The Beatles, Elvis, Muse among others, which, by the way, does not include any band that has the word "boy" in it. (the last of the above-mentioned bands is a bit depressing. Listen to it at your own peril.)

I haven't combed my hair in 4 months (My handy foldable comb-cum-backscratching device has apparently been misplaced when I shifted houses 4 months back) 'mind you, that does not necessarily imply that I haven't washed my hair in all that time.
I do it regularly, which is to say, every day. Thank you.

Talking of hair, of late, I have noticed that there's more of my hair on the spanking new vitrified floor at my new home, than on my head. Sweeping the floor clean everyday doesn't help either. It gets filled up faster than I can say "Twenty-Twenty".

I can't get myself to don the fancy accessory-helmet that I bought along with my new bicycle a coupla' weeks back, and by the looks of it, I doubt if I ever will.

The chick downstairs still gets to decide what decibels my sound system at home is allowed to hit.

And life rolls on ...

iTunes - Thoughts on Usability

'Have been trying to play around with my not-so-old ipod, and my efforts with syncing it with iTunes and configuring the ID3 tags of the songs have given way to the following list

1. Why can't I use the trackball to scroll within the iTunes playlist.

2. While selecting multiple songs for deletion, using the keyboard alone, is there a way I can unselect songs . Normally I would select multiple songs using the "Shift + Down" key combination .

For example, say, I selected the songs 6,7,8 and 9 using the intuitive key combination mentioned above, and then realised I did not intend to select the song 9, I would typically use the "Shift + Up" arrow key to unselect it. However, doing this only results in song no. 5 getting selected as well.
This is utterly frustrating. Whatever clever workaround iTunes has to unselect songs, which I might not be aware of , I would think it highly counter-intuitive.

3. Anyhoo, once the songs that I wanted to delete have been deleted , I use the "Down" arrow key to traverse further down the list, right ?.... wrong !! it takes me back to the very first song in the list, instead of the song after the last one to be deleted.

And since the friggin' trackball doesn't work anyway, I have to drag my mouse pointer all the way to the dull grey scroll bar to actually come back to the song I was at.
The other alternative is that I can just have a paperweight put on the "Down" arrow key, go cook my breakfast, and come back just in time, to arrive at the point where I was hijacked.

4. Finally, it would be nice to have a plugin, that could configure the ID3 tags of the songs
, by itself off the net, which could provide seamless integration.


An update here :)