For those of you who may be subscribing to the RSS feed, you may have gotten all the recent feed again simply because I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 and for some reason this was a side effect.

Other than that, I really like the new features of WP and generally speaking like the feel of it, especially the rich text editor that I have been wanting to see for a while.

I find myself trying out different extensions, most of which I keep. Nevertheless, the turnover of them has been high, so in order to keep a constantly up to date list of the extensions I have installed, I created a page listing all my FireFox extensions and Scripts. You will see the link to this page also on the right hand sidebar (brown) at the top under Pages heading.

 While I am at it, if you are a Gmail fan like me, and have Greasemonkey installed on your FireFox, you really are going to find the scripts mentioned under this post very useful. It is written by a Google employee who works on Gmail himself.

Back in 1996, when I visited the US for the first time, I visited Vegas as well. Fast forward to now and we found a really cheap deal, too good to pass and went on to revisit the sin city.

I was curious to see how I would feel about it this time around, 9 years later, given that my perspective on many things has changed. And sure enough I did feel different. The city no longer impressed me as I remembered it back in 96. Even though the population and the hotels and attractions have exploded in size and numbers, if you take away the giant hotels and gambling, free drinks and not so cheap food buffets the city would has very little to offer.

In any case, the highlight of the trip was definitely to see two very different yet, fantastic shows and if Vegas is good its the shows. We saw KA by Cirque du Soleil and The Blue Man Show and I highly recommend both of them.

Having used Google Analytics for a couple of months now, today I was looking around to see if I could mine any important info and found rather amusing info, that being what keywords has lead people to this blog…some make sense, others are more of a puzzle…see for yourself

New country means learning new things. A few weeks back I heard the word filibustering on the NPR (National Public Radio, my favorite channel on the radio around here) and it didn’t make any sense whatsoever, so I looked it up and was somewhat stunned to find out what it means. For any of you that might not know what it means:

1) The use of obstructionist tactics, especially prolonged (irrelevant) speechmaking, for the purpose of delaying legislative action.
2) An instance of the use of this delaying tactic.

I did a 5 minute google search on the term to find some sort of background about this and found out that it comes from Spanish filibusterowhich originates from the Dutch word vrijbuiter (which means pirate). Anyways, long story short, early nineteenth century, John Randolph, a senator from Virginia kept giving long irrelevant talks which made the other senators ticked off, so a decision was made to stop this. 1872 though, Vice president Schuyler Colfax stopped this and once again this practice of delaying tactics started and by now as you know it’s part of everyday life of the Senate.

What is amazing to me is that when asking people about this practice of our law makers here no one even finds this particularly strange, the fact that the leaders of this country, when trying to make decisions are allowed to act as a bunch of kids and try to stall each other. Maybe I am overreacting or missing something big here, but this sounds totally out of control and childish behavior at its peak. Nevertheless it is so accepted here that when looking up the meaning in the dictionary, that is what it means.

So the question is what is the difference between filibustering in the Senate and a kid that wants ice cream in the grocery store, puts a finger in each ear and starts screaming in order not to hear his mom refuse his request.

1) Since 1.5 was release some of my extension have stopped working and there are no upgrades for 1.5 (e.g. spellChecker extension). To adress this use the following trick (and be aware that it might make your firefox less stable, though I have no problem on this matter, yet at least)

1. At the location bar, enter: about:config. This will show you a list of Firefox internal preferences.
2. Right-click on the list, select New > String
3. Enter “app.extensions.version” (without quotes) for the preference name.
4. Then, enter “1.0″ (without quotes) as the value for app.extensions.version.
5. Restart Firefox 1.5, then enable those disabled Firefox extensions.
6. Restart Firefox 1.5 again to active the extensions. Done.

2) Chrome Cleaner Extension - Very Likely to help speed up your firefox (both mac and pc)

3) And here is and excellent list of extensions for your pleasure.

A few links as I go through my blogs for the last few days

• Google Maps meets NYC Subway map
• List of all Xbox Games that you can run on Xbox 360
• Google Base – Lets you share anything with the world. Kinda hosts things for you.
• Google Analytics – Tells you everything you want to know about how your (site’s) visitors found you and how they interact with your site. I registered my site, and three days later, it says it still waiting for data even though 12 hours should have done it.
• True Local – A local search that has been under radar so far, but is out in the light now.
• Riya – Nafis told me about this one. A face recognizing software that automatically can organize your pictures. Keep an eye on this one. It will be huge.

Well overdue, but I finally hold a working permit which means I will be looking for work as of today. Thank you uncle Sam!

As of today I will start sharing with my worldwide reader base (I now have one reader apparently in Santiago, Chile which means I have at least one reader in each continent) the books that I read and find useful enough to share.

Two such books are
and
. The first one at core deals with how given problem solving, a cognitively diverse group consistently will come up with better solutions (or pick the best solution alternative) in comparison to a few experts’ in that particular area or any individual expert no matter how well they know the field or smart they are. This in turn because a group’s aggregate knowledge and wisdom will always surpass an individual’s or a few individuals’ even if those individuals are experts in that field. Very interesting read and I highly recommend it if you haven’t read it yet. I find this book so useful and intersting, that I will be back to talk about this in a few months and will tell you more about it then.

The second one, Freakonomics, looks at economics from a very different perspective, one that we dont usually think about and tries to answer questions such as why legalisation of aboration really was the cause of decrease of crime rate, why drug-dealers tend to live with their mothers, simply put hidden side of things that we don’t always think about. I found it to be a fun and interesting read.

So the last day or so I have played around a little with Google Analytics and Google Webmasters. There has been some complaints about them, but they have worked for me and I found the information very accurate and very detailed in Analytics. So as you can see from the image, I have reader(s) from all continents except for South America…gotta start a fan community over there…(click to see larger a picture)

A while back I wrote about getting a free mini mac and that two friends reported success stories. Today I read on Scott Hanselman’s blog that he also got one. So I checked my account and saw that three people have actually signed up through my referral which means seven more people are needed before I get my mac mini. So I decided to put a big billboard on my blog as of now until hopefully someday seven more people sign up for this and I can get a mini mac as well. Wanna help this cause and get one step closer to getting your own mini mac? I know, I find it funny myself.

A while back reporting about life on this side of the water, I mentioned the way a person’s credit history and score is built. As a couple of comments indicated and I heard it elsewhere that it was not the complete story, this is how it actually works:

A credit score is a numeric value between 300 and 850 here is the States. This scoring system which is the most widely used was developed by FICO, Fair Isaac Corporation and it tells a lender how much of a risk you are to be able to pay back the loan as agreed. The higher number the better score.

Once you’ve opened a credit account, the issuer sends periodic reports to three national credit reporting agencies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — about the status of your account. They show whether you are paying on time, the amount of your balance, and how much your limits are.

The key to managing and maintaining credit score is understanding the following five factors that go into calculating your FICO score.

1. Payment history (35%) – Paying your bills on time is the best thing you can do for your rating.
2. Outstanding debt (30%) – i.e. if you have credit cards you’re close to maxing out, that doesn’t help your FICO score
3. Length of credit (15%) – The longer you’ve had an account and handled it well, the better.
4. Credit mix (10%) – Having a mortgage, a car payment, and student loans is preferable to having just credit cards.
5. Searches for credit (10%) – FICO research has shown that a flurry of simultaneous applications for credit indicates an unsettled, and risky, financial situation.

And once a year you can request a free credit report from www.annualcreditreport.com or by calling 877-322-8228. My source for all this info? Reading an article in Stages magazine.

My new favorite app on my Audiovox cell is Google Local for Mobile

Virtual Places is a mashup of Virtual Earth, and various Internet Connected Components (including Amazon, Weather.com, Flickr, Feedmap, GeoBloggers, GeoURL, MSN Search and MapPoint
Meebo – This site allows you to login to your MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, Jabber, ICQ, AIM….you name it and the good thing…no pop ups and you can login with more than one msn login (which messenger doesn’t allow)
Orbitz.com – I know, it is old but I really like this travel site.
Text Twist – My favorite game. Warning! can be addictive (press space to scramble the letters)

Yep, yet another meaningless test that takes 15 sec. And I turned out to be:

Click on the image and try the test yourself. And here is a link to stats on which characters people that have taken the test have turned out to be.

A couple of thoughts I want to note down after seeing Hotel Rwanda last night, which is a well done movie. What stroke me is the fact that by now there have been a few genocides in the last decade and there are still a couple if not few in development. What is astonishing is how desensitized the world has become to this phenomena and how the word unity is used on a daily basis where we are so far away from it. Let’s break down what I mean here. Take the genocide story of Rwanda, during the course of some three months around 1 million Hutus and Tutsis were killed. That is the population size of greater Seattle or greater Stockholm, take a second to imagine that, one of these cities disappear withing the course of three months. This doesn’t shock people anymore, and in fact to use a line from the movie itself, “people will see it on the news, say oh my God! that is tragic and then proceed to eat dinner”. Now obviously a lot has to do with the fact that this didn’t happen in one of the developed country or we wouldn’t have heard the end of it (e.g. if it happened in one the cities I mentioned). But nevertheless this brings me to what I mentioned about unity.

What does this have to do with unity? Well, I believe if there was unity between the peoples of this planet, these genocides would never have taken place or even if they were, they would have been stopped very quickly. I hear the word unity here and there, how doing this brings unity between the people or the fact that a city’s basketball team winning a championship makes the people of that city more united. What does that mean? The way I see it the highest degree of unity we see in the world today is empathy and I am talking between larger populations, whether within or between countries. If we see people starve, suffer or murdered, which we do on a daily basis on the news most of us feel bad and empathic and move on with our lives. What is unity then? Well, unity to me is when I simply can’t bear to see someone starve, suffer or die and have to stop and help them. Just the way I would do for any of my family members. Imagine the power of this now for a second. If I see my child sick and unable to eat, I simply cant eat anything until I make sure everything is done in my power to help my child. If the population of America or any other developed country stopped eating simply because they can’t bear seeing another people die of starvation, would the leaders of that developed country not help out to their maximum ability the poor country? So, the power a unity is something very few of us get to experience and see on a larger scale. In ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s word from the book Foundation of World Unity, true spiritual unity

“…creates such a condition in mankind that each one will make sacrifices for the other and the utmost desire will be to forfeit life and all that pertains to it in behalf of another’s good.”