Posts from Pennsylvania

Pretty Pensylvania, with a provocative past, the place of parturition of the American Constitution. ( I thought I'd do all P's but I ran out of synonyms) .Anyway that's where I am now... in Pennsylvania- near Philadelphia, "The City of Brotherly Love" . It gets its title from the initial purpose for which this land was clained- to allow people practising different faiths to escape from the persecution of King George the Something-or-the-other, in England.

Philly is a pretty nice place, well, at least what I saw of it was! (Supposedly downtown is not so nice - but downtown is never so nice, so I'll restrict myself to commenting on what I actually did see.

The famous Liberty Bell and the Independence Hall for one, and the Halls for Congress where the first Senate and the House of Representatives sat, the place where they framed the Constituition. There was some contention as to whether the chap whose silhouette you see on top of City Hall was Benjamin Frankin or William Penn; it turned out to be William Penn- dear old and reliable Wikipedia confirmed it for us- he was the founder of the state and the cis obviously named for him- but Benjamin Franklin- who's an amazingly prolific guy- Scientist- remember the lightning experiment... Diplomat- he was America's ambassador to France, philosopher- this guy did everything, and he lived here as well.( His house is preserved here as a museum, but we didn't go there)

We heard an interesting side note to his story- his son fought on the side of the British, while he fought for the Americans in the Revolutionary war- you'd expect it to be the otehr was round wouldn't you?

We heard other interesting stories that gave depth to those shdowy figures who wrote the basic structure of American Law , the famous Declaration of Independence; they became people, with quirks and eccentricities, 'tis the flaws that maketh the man....

That little sidenote to history being done, for the rest of the time I've been enjoying the Christmas spirit, the lights and the lighted reindeer, the Christmas trees and the ubiquitous christmas Carols, the SALE, SALE, SALE written everywhere, simply seducing you to buy madly as you would not at ny other time of the year!

Incidentally, I find the whole contreversy over whether to wish people "Merry Chrismas", "Happy Holidays" "Happy Hanukkah" or just... whatever, rather amusing, and just pointless, its thoughtful alright, but talk about making a mountain out of a molehill!

Anyway "Merry Christmas", or "Happy Hols" to you and a "Happy New Year"!

Going the Google Way!

It seems that there's nothing Google doesnt offer anymore... you want it... they have it. They started off as a great search engine... and if they had been less ambitious they might have stopped there. But being Google, they had to be better at simply everything... and you know what? They are!

First it was gmail- which opened with much fanfare- the whole gmail id by invite only added to the mystique of it, and of course it made sure that people didn't go around randomly creating id's they didn't use, at first, and the humungous amount of space they were giving us to store mails- made everyone sit up and take note- What's the 250 MB that Hotmail offers to Googles 2+ GB huh?

But, MSN (and yahoo and others) still had Chat going for them. And then Google brought along Gtalk- granted you can't use emoticons the way you can with MSN and Yahoo- you can't have interesting profiles like Yahoo- or send funny "knocks" and "Hallos" but you can send enormous attachments easily, and in less time, on Gtalk- and you can talk- I mean actually listen to another person's voice at the other end, clearly- without the sort of static that still bothers Yahoo's voice messaging for instance - when it comes to substance over form , google's got it any day!

They've pulled out all the stops these days- Picasa for pictures, Blogger for blogging, Earth to look for places and find directions,Maps, News... And now they offer to look not only through the web, but through books and through Journals(Scholar) . And there's Froogle- the shopper's paradise (and I love the name- Froogle- Frugal- cheap joke, but makes me smile everytime)... and it goes on... there's still some stuff in the labs- (Try Google labs) - Google video, Google Transit for checking out public transportation... whoa... these guys are not runnin out of ideas anytime soon!

Of course there are always naysayers, the conspiracy theorists... the ones who say that "Google is Evil "- who knows they may be right- mybe we're just blinding ourselves with the plethora of facilities that Google offers, and overlook these things that get privacy advocates so riled up:

1. Google records everything they can : Your IP address, your cookie ID(Google's cookie expires in 2038- it places a uniqueID number on your hard disk, and notes it everytime you make a search), your browser configuration, search terms, time and date...

2.They retain data indefinitely, and won't say why they need this data.

3. And gmail- did you know that mail you get may never get deleted from Google's system? http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com/... and other such things here...

Well.. actually I really don't care too much... if anyone wants to know how many E-geeting I got... the bad (occasionally good) forwards I keep gettting... news or(lack thereof) from home... I don't even have any interesting love letters that I'd want to hide... I'm assuming that all those spooky points are for people with "interesting" lives. Google seems perfectly good for the vast mass of perfectly dull and normal people like me though.