Geek of All Trades

More international note for Filmi Geek

I mentioned almost two months ago now that my Hindi movie blog Filmi Geek was a highlighted as a "Featured Blog" by my bloghost Typepad. 

Now it has also been featured here, in Typepad's German version of the "Featured Blogs" blog. 

My German isn't quite as good as my Hindi, so I had to rely on Google's translator to get the gist of what this feature says about me:

Bollywood cinema - who thinks there only of heart pain strips for hours and handpainted film posters, is exactly correct with Carla Levy: in its English-language Blog Filmi Geek shows it, what hides itself still in such a way everything behind this term. Films for Bollywood Einsteiger, classical authors and English-language productions are presented; five decades Hindi film, crime film classical author such as Don, Arthouse trips such as park Avenue and films from other regions such as Ghare Baire pass revue. Listings after star and alphabet round Filmi Geek off to the purposeful search.

This is quite nice.  I particularly like the phrase "Arthouse trips."   

There seem to be quite a few Bollywood fans in Germany - I have discovered an entire webring of German language Bollywood blogs (does anyone still use the term "webring"?  It sounds so 1999 to me and evokes memories of flagrant abuse of the HTML 1.0 "flash" tag), and I am lucky to count many of their authors among Filmi Geek's readership. 

2006: Another year of all trades

A year ago, I posted a microcosm of Geek of All Trades - a year in review post that summarized what had happened on GOAT in 2005 by excerpting just the first sentence of the very first blog post of each month of the year.  Here is the 2006 edition of this Year of All Trades post, but I have to admit that last year's did a better job of conveying the condensed flavor of GOAT. 

January:  What better way to start the new year than with a dispatch from the Department of Dubiously Useful Skills?

February:  One morning a few weeks ago, my usually indomitable friend J. turned to me with furrowed brow and said, fear edging her softened voice, "Do you think the United States is going to bomb Iran?"

March: Susie Bright is rightly depressed about the state of reproductive rights.

April:  I just spotted this in an AP story - I think it speaks for itself.

May:  I came across this item today - an AP wire story highlighting several law professors who have banned the use of laptops in their classrooms.

June:  I have been quiet here lately.

July:  Demetrius is diabetic, and we give him insulin shots twice a day.

August:  This is the fourth installment of Geek's Indian movie list.

September:  It's been a while since I posted, I know.

October:  Last night we heard a fantastic concert featuring two very different groups from East Africa - Mombasa Party, from "Kenya Mombasa" (as the band said), and the Royal Drummers of Burundi (pictured above).

November:  The fascinating Data Mining Blog reports that Microsoft has launched a mapping service to compete with Google Earth.

December:  As I was alighting from an Amtrak train in in New York's Penn Station the day before Thanksgiving, I spotted this sign near an escalator...

A worldwide sensation!

Thanks to having been a Typepad Featured Blog, as well as being linked on a number of other wonderful blogs, my new Filmi Geek blog is already getting about 120 visits each day.  I think it's quite neat - and it shows, also, that a single-interest blog is more likely to attract readers than a general interest blog.  So I thank those of you that read this blog, even though it isn't really about anything in particular. 

I am curious about my readers - very few of them leave comments - so I've been playing around with visitor mapping software.  So far I've only tried on service, gVisit, which provides a very pretty Google map view of the distribution of my last 100 visitors.  Here's what it looks like:

(Click the image for a larger view.)  That's a real map of Filmi Geek's visitors from a couple of days ago.  I think it's interesting that so many of visitors are from the eastern United States.  But there's a fun worldwide distribution.  Most of my visitors come from North America. and Europe, but each day I have a hit or two from China, a handful from Australia, occasional visitors from Indonesia, Malaysia, or Singapore, and a couple from South America.  And then there are those visitors from South Asia, of whom I am particularly proud. 

You can see the most recent map by clicking here.  I think it updates once a day, a little after midnight my time (Eastern time). 

A script map

Isn't this lovely?  It is a map of South Asia, with the name of each region written in the dominant script of the region.

It has some errors, noted in the Language Log post by Bill Poser from which I discovered it. 

When I heard Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar speak at Harvard, Shabana ji said, "A script is not a language," and Javed sahib agreed.  This map highlights this fact, as many regions that share scripts do not share languages.  Marathi-speaking Maharashtra, Nepali-speaking Nepal, Hindi-speaking Uttar Pradesh, and Kashmiri speaking Jammu and Kashmir, just to name a few, all use Devanagari; how many languages are represented by the Arabic/Persian scripts to the north west?

The map also makes my brain tingle at the thought of what to learn next.  I've had a little book on Urdu script for months but I've been intimidated by it.  Bill Poser is intimidated by the Sinhalese; I bet he can read Urdu.  I've got to start catching up! 

Big day

It's been a big 24 hours for me.

Yesterday, I met Shabana Azmi.  Today, my other blog, Filmi Geek, is a TypePad Featured Blog. 

I will have more to say about that first bit later.  For now, here's a bad, grainy, stalker-ish picture I snapped with my camera phone a couple of minutes after I met Shabana ji, while she was talking with someone else.  The gray-haired fellow to the left is Shabana ji's equally revered and gifted husband, the screenwriter and songwriter Javed Akhtar.

And here's another one (again, bad light, bad color), taken about an hour later while Shabana ji and Javed sahib were taking questions from the largely student crowd.  I don't know who the bald-headed guy in the middle of my shot is, but the woman whose face appears to be poking out of the upper-right quadrant of his head is my wonderful former Hindi teacher Naseem ji, who did me the honor of introducing me to Shabana ji at a moment when I was too flabbergasted and sweaty-palmed to do it myself. 

As I said, more details to follow. 

Earth: now, in three dimensions

The fascinating Data Mining blog reports that Microsoft has launched a mapping service to compete with Google Earth.  I have played with Google Earth; it integrates Google Maps' satellite images with a cute interface that allows you to fly around on the globe and zoom in and out, from orbiter altitude to the tops of buildings. You can also mark locations of interest and upload your marks so that others can access them.  But Google Earth's images are ultimately the flat, two-dimensional projections of satellite photographs.  According to Data Mining, Microsoft's service includes 3-D models of locations (I'm not sure how complete the 3-D models are; they may be limited to just certain cities at this point).  Data Mining has a post with screenshots of some of the models.  Microsoft apparently plans to generate revenue by selling advertising space on billboards in this virtual world!

In Neil Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, the main character (the aptly named Hiro Protagonist), is given an elaborate piece of software called "Earth" that he uses in his quest to save the world from a  narcissitic zillionaire's nefarious plot to reprogram the human brain.  Hiro's "Earth" program looks on the surface very much like Microsoft's Virtual Earth - Hiro can spin the globe, swoop down on a model of any location he wishes, zoom from place to place just by moving a virtual overhead camera.   

The difference is that Hiro's "Earth" incorporates real-time data from all over the internet - news footage, personal photographs, written reporting - to provide a view that it is up-to-date as information permits of whatever is happening at any spot on the globe.  So when Hiro wants to pinpoint the location of "The Raft," the zillionaire's giant floating city, which he knows is somewhere off the California coast, all he has to do is train his "Earth" program on the western pacific and find The Raft on the virtual model.  He  can see news helicopters buzzing around it so he knows that the information is fairly up-to date, likely based on video footage transmitted from the helicopters directly to the internet, accessed and integrated by the "Earth" program.  He can compute The Raft's heading and speed, and use that information to choose which port he should fly to so that he can meet The Raft and board it. 

I wonder whether these mapping programs will ever approach the integrated power of Hiro's "Earth" program.  That could be incredibly useful.  But it would also carry a great potential for abuse, whether by government agencies or by private organizations bent on disrupting the peace of others. 

Demographics, at your command

I just learned of an excellent website, Social Explorer, that generates zoomable demographic maps of many types based upon 2000 U.S. Census data as well as earlier data.  It's quite telling to look at the distribution of the black population throughout the United States, for example, or to zoom in and get a close look at how much segregation still exists in your favorite city. Or see where Swedish immigrants are concentrated.  Or which counties have the highest concentration of health care workers.  There are also a few slide shows available, like the black population of New York City from 1910 to 2000.  There is so much to explore that I could really lose a whole afternoon there if I'm not careful.

Below, the density of people holding PhD degrees in and around Boston.  The darkest color on this map represents 15-25% of the population.

Announcing Filmi Geek!

After mentioning that I was thinking of reorganzing the Geek Indian film list, I have decided what to do with them - I have created a new blog, Filmi Geek, which from now on will be the home for all my comments and reviews on Indian movies.  I'm hoping it will be an interesting and fun resource for folks interested in Hindi films, seasoned fans and neophytes alike.

I have only begun migrating all of the existing reviews and comments to the new blog, (thus far contained in the Geek Indian film lists parts I, II, III, and IV) so expect the Filmi Geek archives to grow quickly over the next month or two.  After that, I'll add a new movie every week or two, as fast as I can watch them.  Oh, and there are already a couple of new entries there for films that were slated for part V of the Geek list. 

So please check it out and let me know what you think.  There's an alphabetical index and also categories from which you can select types of films you might be interested in, get a quick look at my favorites, or browse the films I recommend to folks who are looking for a good introduction to the diverse and colorful offerings of Hindi cinema. 

I'm spinning Filmi Geek off of Geek of All Trades in order to preserve the eclectic balance of GOAT and avoid giving too much attention to any one area, and also to provide a focused space for Hindi film fans who might be less interested in all my other blather.  But I won't stop talking about Hindi films here at GOAT - I just won't do it as much.  And I hope you'll all stop in to both sites from time to time.  I'm always interested in your comments on my comments, and your suggestions for more and more useful categories.

फ़िल्मी गीक - Filmi Geek - www.filmigeek.net

On the internet, no one knows you're a ...

In my visitor logs, I noticed that I had gotten a number of hits from people searching Google for "goat indian movie list."  At first I thought that was cool - someone out there was looking for me by name.

Then I took a look at what that search actually called up, and, well, let's just say that there is something out there called "goat list" that is not exactly something I want associated with my happy little blog.  So I've changed the names of the lists, to "Geek's Indian Film Lists."

It's so odd the way chance combinations of words can lead to strange, unexpected search engine hits.  I've commented on this twice before. 

I may as well announce, also, that I've registered the domain "geekofalltrades.net" and pointed it to this blog.  So from now on, if you are looking for me, you don't have to remember all that Typepad stuff - just point your browswer to http://www.geekofalltrades.net.

Typepad mapping

That's me, in the tiny red circle toward the bottom right.

That mysterious picture is a graph showing the interconnections of a subset of blogs on my bloghost, Typepad.  It was created by the keeper of a blog called Data Mining, which looks very compelling even beyond the Typepad graph.  I can't say I fully understand what a "graph of the largest connected component of only Typepad blogs" actually is, but if you visit Data Mining's post featuring this graph, you can click on any dot - including the dot I circled above - and find your way to some unexpected corner of the Typepad blogiverse.  I discovered Data Mining's excellent Typepad graph in the GOAT logs - evidently someone clicked on my little dot and found his or her way here.  I hope that person wasn't too disappointed. 

An interesting feature of the graph is that blogs with similar subject matter tend to lump together.  I think this is because the lines on the graph represent interlinks between blogs, and blogs tend to link to other blogs having similar subject matter.  I actually found my blog nestled in a section of the graph that contains mostly law blogs - I think that is due to a couple of trackback links I have to Patently-O that seem to direct one or two readers a day to my little old GOAT.