end of the year ritual..

It's end of the year ritual for us friends to share our favorite 5s of the year.

5 memorable things this year:
1. gave birth to 2 lovely babies
2. spent quality time with my mom, something I hadn't done in last 10 years
3. been a good listener and support to a friend
4. learnt many many nursery rhymes
5. reconnected with 2 friends with whom I had lost touch

5 things I did this year that I have never done before:
1. well #1 above applies here
2. did not have any alcoholic drinks this year
3. made more online purchases than I have ever before
4. stayed indoors for 3 days without stepping out
5. had dental work done on 5 of my teeth(!!)

5 favorite books:
1. What's going on in there
2. Rishis, Mystics and Heroes of India
unfortunately the pregnancy books do not count so that's all I have.

privileged audience that we are!

Being part of a fairly visible non-profit software foundation like OSAF makes us privileged audience to quite some prominent speakers. Last year we had Vice President Al Gore who gave us a truly enlightening talk on Global Warming which is now made into a movie called 'An Inconvenient Truth' - a must see if environmental facts interest you. We had no media, no cameras just some 50 of us between OSAF, LPFI and Creative Commons and him. Even though most of us have heard of the alarming effect of global warning, pure statistics presented in his slides were staggering. We all came out pretty shocked at how little we are doing to fix this. Eventually something was done about it - OSAF office became the only green office in all of San Fransico city. We use only recycled products, we recycle all unused food items into compost and use vendors and restaurants who adhere to environment friendly standards. It feels quite rewarding being part of such an environment aware organization.

Next was Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. An eloquent speaker who walked us through how he founded Wikipedia and how it became the biggest free encyclopedia on the internet. He also gave us some insight on how it is a self-governing organization managed by a handful of paid employees and hundreds of dedicated volunteers.

Later part of the year we had Mayor of San Francisco city, Gavin Newsom who had come for a student fund raiser hosted by our sister organization, LPFI.

Well, with the new year only a few days away we eagerly await the new list of prominent speakers who might walk the ramp of 543 Howard Street.

sometimes it's important to remind ourselves..

A recent news item making it’s rounds in the blogs, describes the experience of a well known Kenyan author, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, being kicked out of Hotel Vitale, in the SF bay area. It just highlights how very different peoples’ realities are based solely on skin color – yes, even today. Ngugi was here to promote his most recent book. Here’s a post that made it around in the blogs, describing Ngugi’s experience:

“…What happened next could have been a scene from a pre-Civil Rights Era of a Black man caught in a “White Only” section of a hotel. A hotel employee approached the Professor and said:
“This place is for guests of the hotel. You have to leave.”
Handling the matter calmly and intrigued by the assertion of the man, the Professor asked
“How do you know that I am not a guest of the hotel?” ..”

Here's an interesting article on that.

Here’s another post that also prints the CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality response, which begins “Prejudice still exists in America. It is real and palpable…”



And finally, here’s one of the comments from a staff member at the hotel, which reveals the distance we need to travel to clarify the insidiousness of bias to people that consider themselves rational, logical, and only ‘doing their job’.

our little adventure to kauai

We had little hope of making this trip anything close to a relaxing vacation but to much of our surprise it was quite so. Taking the twins on a 6 hour flight from SF to Honolulu to Lihue seemed quite daunting at first but turned out to be manageable after all, not pleasant but manageable. I have to agree with Viral that most important thing about traveling with kids is Planning, Planning and Planning. We had a good checklist of things we had to take - their everyday items, emergency items, medical items, play time items etc. Of course we also took our nanny along which is what made this easy. Viral and I actually got to spend some time together. Also the ensemble of 8 other friends were a great support around. While the reason for the trip was to cheer one of our dear friends Rakesh who ran the Honolulu Marathon, we didn't quite make it to the event. We cheered him with our enthusiasm and support remotely from Kauai. The weather switched between being scorching hot and humid in the day time to being cold in the evenings and night. The sunset on the Poipu beach was breathtaking. Here's one for a starter..

Open Source, Open Standards

Time and again this has come up in various discussions with people - how are open source and open standards related. Most people think they are entirely complementary. Finally here's a blog post from a fellow colleague who has done a great job addressing it.