this and that

Seveal months ago, I wrote how nice it would be to have a Wikipedia in my mother language Nepal Bhasa. Now, thanks to a medical student from Kathmandu (English Wikipedia user page, Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia user page) there is one. It uses the Devanagari script (Nepal Bhasa has her own scripts but they are not […]

The World is a radio production of Public Radio International and everyday, it features a “geo quiz” which poses a question about a location in the world and information about the answer. Today’s question, to my pleasant surprise, was about a “royal park…at the foot of the Himalayas,” “Nepal’s oldest national park.” It was a […]

amrit_ayush

I went back home to Nepal for winter break, and got back to Minnesota on New Year’s day. I had a lot of fun with my family, and I also got to see my new nephew Ayush, who was born a year ago when I was in college.
Check out […]

Nepal rebels make peace promise: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6129314.stm
And the actual peace deal [PDF, 36KB]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/08_11_06_nepal_deal.pdf
The problem is that many people will find it hard to simply sweep under the carpet, the thirteen thousand deaths from a decade-long conflict. Nevertheless, with the existing power structure, I am sure this is a positive step forward.

CBC, which broadcasts As it happens every night on Minnesota Public Radio, reports the finding of a giant rock-face three hundred miles southeast of Calgary, Canada, by a Google Earth user with the alias “Supergranny.” As CBC notes, “not all explorers require boats, or risk scurvy.” It is clear that with the power of programs […]

I spent last summer (summer 2006) in New York working as a programmer (Java, some scripting, a cool templating language called Velocity, HTML, CSS) for a big investment bank. It was a very good experience: the work was interesting, I love New York, I met some very interesting people, and the monies were pretty decent. […]

I just found out about this:
wehaveschiller.com: only at Carleton.

I usually prefer cold weather to hot weather; my usual argument is that while there is a limit to how much you can take off, there is no limit to how much you can put on (well, maybe there is a practical limit, but most of the time, it’s beyond what is sufficient). Besides, I […]

If you want to get to the point of this post, skip to this paragraph.
From Wikipedia:
A web feed is a document (often XML-based) which contains content items, often summaries of stories or weblog posts with web links to longer versions. Weblogs and news websites are common sources for web feeds, but feeds are also used […]

Time flies (fast!) when you are having fun. It’s already Spring Break ®, and it’s JUNIOR YEAR !!! Ah well.
So yes, winter term is over. It was pretty good: I enjoyed all my classes (Database Systems, Algorithms II, Microeconomics, Fencing, Guitar); we finally got a few computers set up for NEO (NEO is the on-campus […]

Here is a pretty good, honest and down-to-earth primer to Nepal’s Maoist insurgency by National Geographic, devoid of the usual hyperbole that accompanies Western media reports about Nepal. And two beautiful videos from a documentary on Nepal: Video 1 Video 2 (thanks to Jeshica Baral’s Facebook profile.)
And some others:

www.blog.com.np: “United We Blog! for a democratic […]

Good stuff. (Nepali featured in Time magazine Global Health issue)

I have been unusually lazy about writing here but I hope to write more from now on. And what better day to start than one of the most auspicious days of the Nepalese calendar. Today is Vijaya Dashami, the most important day of the great Nepalese festival Dashain (called Mohani by Newars). Although primarily a […]

Very nice.

I had heard about these but it actually happened to me today and apparently, it’s not so funny:
Err… is that the F1 on my TI-83?

Many of you probably heard of George W.’s latest bike accident, which resulted in ankle injury for the Scottish policeman that President Bush ran into, and minor scrapes for President Bush. Yesterday, there was an interesting conversation on Minnesota Public Radio about the crash. The program (I think it was All Things Considered but […]

This summer, I am in Eden Prairie, as a “Software Development Engineer Intern” at Stellent, Inc. which makes, among other things, content management software. The work is interesting; I have been doing some Java programming and learning a lot of stuff, mainly about Stellent’s own software.
It has a been a at-times-hot and at-others-rainy-and-stormy summer here […]

Recently, I have been reading a lot of articles at Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and I found today that volunteers have been working on a Nepali version. Currently, there exists only a main page, and half of it is in Sanskrit, but with enough people interested, it can grow pretty […]

I recently found out that Carleton has a really cool service: go.carleton, which creates shortcuts to long Carleton-based URLs into shortened URLs of the format http://go.carleton.edu/. As I am usually quick to use free nifty services, this and that is now also accessible through http://go.carleton.edu/33.

Last Thursday (May 5), bestselling writer Broughton Coburn came to Carleton to give a very popular picture-accompanied lecture on his book Aama in America: A Pilgrimage of the Heart. The book is about how Mr. Coburn brought an 84-year-old Gurung woman (”Aama”) to America in 1992 as what she called a “pilgrimage”—a woman that he […]