Testing the new version of Firefox (1.5 for Mac and Windows). Not blown away yet – was hoping it would look and feel more like a Cocoa app but it doesn’t. There are a lot of under-the-hood improvements, apparently but I don’t use it that much so can’t really tell the difference.

We got a new HP laser printer yesterday and I have fallen in love with the double-sided printing feature. The unit is neat, compact, and Ethernet enabled. Mac OS 10.4 comes with pre-installed drivers for almost all HP printers so no installation was necessary. The Windows folk needed to install all sorts of stuff off the CD. Hah! Would rather have spent the money on having the office painted but our previous printer just dropped dead. Well, there is pleasure and pain involved in being in perpetual bootstrap mode but give me this over complacency any day.

Abu Mohammad, Munshi Raziuddin’s son, came over this afternoon to pick up a fax and to have a chat. They will be touring India soon and after that, will jet off to California to perform at Stanford and then New York. I think I should become their manager – will get to tour the world, listen to great music, and learn Farsi from Farid Ayaz.

In other mundane news, I hate the fact that Flash-powered sites totally kill a web browser’s built-in functionality. Obviously, if you “right-click” on a Flash-based navigational object, you get the Flash menu which allows you to do a bunch of useless things like “Zoom In” and “Print”. DUH. I don’t hate Flash any more, but I wish its contextual menu would incorporate things like, “Open in New Tab”, “Add Link to Bookmarks”, and “Copy Link Location”, etc. After Adobe and Macromedia merge, we’ll probably be inundated with Flash-enabled PDFs and the World Wide Web will sink.

Apple’s new product, Aperture, is now shipping. The screenshots look gorgeous. An Adobe employee (!!!) , John Nack, writes: “Aperture is a cool product, no question. Apple’s designers have a great aesthetic, and their marketing is second-to-none.” Was pretty impressed to read this kind of stuff on a corporate Adobe blog. Read the full reaction …

Finally found a nifty product for downloading complete websites and viewing them offline. Site Sucker for the Mac is tiny, does what it says, and it’s totally free. Oh, also found Broadband Optimizer … maybe it’s my imagination but my broadband connection is definitely more sprightly now. Even if nothing has actually changed, perception is truth, so I am pretty pleased. Oh, absolute favourite software discovery for this quarter: Flying Meat’s VoodooPad. It’s a must-have for anyone who misses Apple’s original Notebook and Scrapbook and loves wikis. FlySketch, also written by Gus Mueller, Flying Meat’s founder, is also awesome. Gotta love this new breed of Mac developers who write real-world Cocoa applications and keep the spirit alive. THANK YOU!

Am reading a whitepaper entitled (oh, how I hate that word) “Information Objects: Applying Cognitive Load Theory and Object-Oriented Thinking to Information Design”. Feel like I am at school. At least I don’t have to feel terribly guilty printing such stuff out now thanks to the new duplex printer.

Read an interesting article over on Wall Street Journal’s Online Edition: Some Students Find Themselves In Principal’s Office Over Blogs – “As parents wring their hands about Internet predators, many teens are worried about a different kind of online intruder: the school principal”. The disruptive effects of social networking tools, portable media, file-swapping, instant messaging, are mind-boggling. The establishment is scrambling to figure out the new game in town and just can’t churn out rules fast enough. WE ROCK!!! Check out another great article over at Slate: The Rules of Distraction.

“There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music”.
Keats

My mother, who works at the Teachers’ Resource Centre, told me a peculiar story yesterday. TRC recently launched a certificate course on Early Childhood Education for in-service teachers and my mother has been going on evaluation visits to the schools of the course participants.

One of the private schools she went to yesterday has just taken in a fresh batch of three year olds and it was their second or third day at school. My mother was wandering around with a notebook and a pencil and each time one of the girls would see my mother and that pencil, she’d come up and stick her hand out and say “star”. This happened three of four times!! This is no reflection on the school really, because the child has just joined. But what kind of reward-oriented, stick and carrot home does this poor kid come from? She’s three for god’s sake!!!!!! She’s probably rewarded with “stars” in the form of material goods as well, each time she eats her food without fussing, goes to bed without howling, performs for guests by rattling off the alphabet in 30 seconds, or whatever it is that makes parents proud these days.

When my mother used to teach at the Karachi Grammar School’s Kindergarten section, she rebelled against the system and never gave stars to any of the kids. Lest anyone think she was mean and cruel for not dishing out gold stars to three year old babies, all the children she taught still remember their Aunty Mimi fondly, as do their parents. What she did, in lieu of the artifical, destructive reward system, was to pique the natural curiousity of children, give them a chance to ask questions, express themselves, help them make decisions, listen to them and their ideas (something teachers never do), give them the confidence to explore unchartered territory, not brand them as “difficult” or “slow”, not tower over them as adults tend to do, not sit behind a teacher’s desk – the list is endless – and the children have not forgotten – even though most of them are over 25 years old now. Yes, yes, I am very proud of Aunty Mimi and wish she could spend most of her time with children rather than mean, power-hungry, agenda-toting adults.

“Rewards” are extremely dangerous when used thoughtlessly and indiscriminately. It’s just that they’re very convenient and people can’t be bothered to think of less damaging ways to let someone know that they’ve done a great job. First! Second! Third … and, oh, the remaining 27 kids: You can just go home and try harder next year, but remember, because you aren’t very bright, we can’t waste any time on you. We have to get our A-grade students into Harvard and Yale and that’s going to keep us quite busy.

Please try and read Alfie Kohn’s fantastic book: Punished by Rewards – The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. It is an eye-opener and extremely relevant.

It’s good to be back, and thank you all for the warm welcome

Off I go now on one of my random streaks … btw, the reason my blog posts don’t have titles is that I find it too constricting to talk about any one thing in a post. Occasionally I can focus but don’t want to be tied down. Jakob, chill out and learn to relax for a change.

Zakintosh and I have been talking about earthquake donations and he raised the highly important issue about corporate accountability. Everyone is extremely concerned, rightly so, about government transparency, especially with reference to the President’s Earthquake Relief Fund. What about all the corporations that claim they will match customer donations and do all sorts of noble things with the money we give them? How do we know where the money is going and whether they are actually doing what they have pledged to do? I am not a hopeless cynic, and hopefully, they are doing “the right thing”. However, anyone who has donated has a right to know where their money ends up. Corporations and their marketing/PR departments have a warped sense of ethics so it is in everyone’s best interests to demand corporate accountability. I now look forward to being flamed

There is a new movie out called Wal-mart: The High Cost of Low Price. CEO, Lee Scot and top Wal-mart execs started getting frantic months before the movie’s release. The company’s voluntary response to Katrina earned them some brownie points and according to Geoffrey Colvin of Fortune, the “giant retailer isn’t evil – just caught up in the global economy”. Hmmm… He goes on to say that the movie is a “ham-handed snore with none of the humor, craft, or story sense that made Moore’s film (anti-GM rant – Roger & Me) so engaging.”

Is Wal-mart helplessly caught up in the “global economy”?

Countless large corporations, in collaboration with academia, governments, the military, the church, and the media, have created and tweaked the global economy to gain total control over the hearts and minds of “consumers”. Yes, of course consumers have choices. They can switch off the TV, they can choose the corner grocery store over Wal-mart and they can say NO to McDonalds. But when there is a grand, synchronized plan, deployed and managed by faceless behemoths, consumers don’t stand a chance. The rot sets in early, when children start going to school. That’s when the “dumbing down” process begins and it’s all downhill from there …

Yes, I am in a bad mood.

OH WOW. I can publish posts again

Haven’t blogged in ages because every time I’d try and publish a post, Blogger would say “Error: Broken Pipe”. Things seem to be resolved now. OK, this is a selfish, just-for-me post.

Finished Tarun’s book a few weeks ago. If you haven’t read or heard of “Alchemy of Desire”, go to http://taruntejpal.com for details. Have always loved T’s political writings but MY GOD, his first piece of “fiction” just blew me away. It’s a big, fat, arm breaking hard-back but it is totally un-put-downable. I was happily reading every comma, fullstop and semi colon, and was expecting to finish the book over the Eed holidays. Hmmm … the book suddenly went into overdrive and inadvertently, helplessly, I went on an 8.5 hour marathon and finished the book a day before Eed, at 6:00 am. I felt so cheated – suddenly it was all about finding out what happens in the end. Will they, won’t they and a hundred other questions. Will need to read at least a quarter of the book again and savour it properly. Tarun, you are a rockstar, boss, and I love you. “Sub theek ho jaey ga”.

Am reading Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and a Stanford University piece on Game Theory (latest fascination).

Saad Haroon, a dear friend, who started Black Fish, has launched a new initiative called Open Mic Nite, designed to provide a platform for aspiring comedians, musicians, poets, etc – everyone gets 5 minutes at the mike. Great fun and lots of good stuff. Black Fish is also back in action and lots else is happening on the stand-up comedy scene in Karachi. Great! We all need to laugh.

More in a bit …