The Great Ganesha

[Originally on Desicritics] One section of the capital of Puerto Rico – San Juan – has cobbled streets, brightly colored buildings and beautiful sculptures. This part, called Old San Juan, shows the strong influence the Spanish had on Puerto Rico, and also has several historical monuments and forts. The old city is very small and [...]

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We are in sunny Puerto Rico this week. I’m chairing a session at a conference here (and giving a talk). We got here on Sunday and had a little, shall we say, “adventure” on the way to our hotel. Having recently been introduced to the wonders of the navigational GPS, we decided to get one [...]

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Was reading the news this morning and I came across the following quote: ?It?s just the most fantastic thing to be free. It was an appalling experience…occasionally quite terrifying.? ?It became hard to imagine normal life. I dreamed several times of being free, but always woke up in that room.? [link] It’s from BBC journalist [...]

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Folks, please refer to me from now on as Doctor The Great Ganesha. Yours truly has successfully defended his doctoral thesis and has just racked up his fourth degree. Now the good doctor is looking to get on with that pesky task of relocating to the “real” world (although the suffering was real enough in [...]

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Google Maps has just released a new feature: Street View. This lets you get really down ‘n dirty and actually check out pictures of a neighbourhood at street-level, as if you were walking around. It’s pretty cool – you can pan, zoom and even move in intervals of around 100 feet (or so). The pics [...]

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There’s a rusty, circular metal contraption bolted to the wall in our dingy garage. I don’t know what it does, nor do I want to know. And to top it off, for some reason, there’s a yellow construction helmet wedged in there. Don’t ask – I have no clue. So where am I going with [...]

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Yours truly got married last Friday (May 4th) at City Hall here, in San Francisco. It was a small ceremony, with only family present. We did the paperwork, and were given a number… …but we didn’t have to wait long. There was no pandit to recite shlokas. Just a Justice of the Peace to recite [...]

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  I should apologize for the sudden infrequency in posting on this blog. Life sometimes (hard as it may be to believe) gets in the way of one’s blogging. But fear not, because I’ll be trying to get stuff up here every now and then. Just not as frequently as I used to. And don’t [...]

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It’s been a long, hard two weeks, guys. Lots of traveling (too much, in fact) up and down the Pacific coast. We went from San Francisco to Orange County (yup, the OC), back to San Francisco and then up to Seattle. Even spotted a Microsoft mom there, at the airport. You know – sari’d, sweater’d [...]

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Ok, not Ibiza, but folks, I am off to LA for the rest of the week. I don’t plan to visit Disneyland, I don’t plan to collect $200 and I will certainly not pass ‘Go’. Ok, maybe I’ll pass ‘Go’, but none of that other stuff that the regular riffraff indulge in. Anyhoo, the bottomline [...]

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