I realise, I am a sucker for change. I get bored too easily, and I am always looking for what’s next and what’s new. Not in everything I do, but definitely in things I’m passionate about.

Music, web design, books, quotes, even people. If I find it interesting, I consume voraciously, and before I know it, I want more. And I want something different.

Flippant? I don’t know. Maybe. As Horsie put it, ‘Tu manager nahi, artist aadmi hai be’. I get tired of doing something that isn’t stimulating enough. God knows where this will lead me to.

Anyhew. Point being, I changed my blog theme. Again. I like this one, I must say; at least for now. Has a clean feel to it, lot of customizable areas, I can be creative (changing headers, a third widget space above sidebars, easily codeable navigation bar). Hopefully will stick with this one for longer.

One of the reasons I love fingerstyle guitar. One of the reasons I think genius can actually make an instrument come to life in a way that mere talent struggles to imagine. One of the reasons I discovered Chet Atkins and one of the reasons I own a TE thumb-pick even though I can’t even play basic chords on the guitar.

Discover Tommy Emmanuel. I present two videos here. Angelina, recorded from a Korean TV station, and Somewhere over the rainbow, again a live recording.

Angelina: Notice just one thing. How much he is in love with the instrument, how he caresses it, how he enjoys his song. The mix of melody, chords and harmonics are second to none.

Somewhere over the rainbow: Beautiful harmonics, speed and incredible life in a song played on just one instrument.

Yes, there are many fingerstyle guitarists who are really good. Many classical guitarists who are also brilliant. But this is the first of the geniuses that I discovered, so the first I will write about. Read more about him here. And yes, go listen to the rest of his videos on Youtube.

Pudu (n.): A person as irritating as a sneeze in the middle of a pee. Nothing you can do about it, can’t be stopped, totally unpredictable, and something you totally don’t want happening to yourself.

Gaa!

Too much work, too many things happening at the same time, lots of internal team changes, shifting responsibilities, and a limited quota of 24 hours a day. Recipe for utter chaos.

Hopefully things will be better by end of August. Until then, someone pass me some Chyawanprash, Glucon D and a can of orange juice.

Yawn.

It’s been a year in Singapore. One very eventful, enriching, happening year where I learnt a lot, made many friends and most importantly, opened my mind in ways more than one.

More of all that later. Just recalled the musical events that I was fortunate enough to catch in the past year:

Kailash Kher: Live in Concert. What a voice, and what an attitude. “People ask me why I do not have extras and dancers in my concerts. I’m here for my music, I just want my music to do the talking. And that will get me my fans and admirers.” Touche!

Dream Theatre: The doyens of Progressive Metal. With the best drummer in the world (No one handles double bass better than Portnoy) and one of the best guitarist (Petrucci) and bassist (Myung), this band that has its genesis in Berklee College of Music is an experience, live. (I hate the lead singer though. Sounds like the bastard child of a tom-cat and a banshee. Anyhew.)

Mandolin U Srinivas: Boy oh boy! The god of Carnatic Mandolin was here. And he was divine. Period. The ragams are a part of him now, they run in his veins. And his fingers do more than his bidding, to say the least. Never heard Carnatic ragams jump out and tease my ears as I did that evening.

Shubha Mudgal: Whatay voice! And this wasn’t even her belting out raags. Just plain old Surdas and Meera Bhajans. But splendidly delectable, every one of her songs.

Harini: A regular concert, nothing too impressive. But good, nevertheless.

Hyderabad Brothers: Enna tavam (Kapi) still gives me goosebumps.

We Will Rock You: Have already written about this mother of all concerts here. ‘Nuf said :)

(1 votes, average: 2 out of 5)

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“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.” — Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time)

Poignancy. As the name says; moving, emotional, a feeling that reverberates a sadness, a plea, almost.

Composed 2 weeks ago. Comments welcome.

Download here.

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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J.K. Rowling’s terrific commencement address at Harvard is available as a video, MP3, or text. Thanks BoingBoing, for making me read it. We all love rags-to-riches stories, but this one talks potently about the power of desperation.

The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure….

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. ,…Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way….Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned….

Link

Buzz marketing has been around for a while now, but I would like to point out one of the best examples I have seen in recent time.

HP along with Buzzcorps launched a campaign for the launch of the HP HDX Dragon Notebook PC. Very simple campaign, where one had to take part in a simple contest, answer a few questions and win one of these swanky powerful machines for free.

The brilliance of the campaign is not in the concept. Nothing new in that. The secret here is not the ‘what’ or the ‘how’ of the launch. It’s in the focused needle-pointed choice of the ‘where’.

Blogging, tech opinions and gadget acceptance is driven by opinion leaders (lead users, as we know them). These are the people who try new software, new plugins, new platforms, and are the beta-testers and alpha-testers who are always one step ahead and in the know.

Knowing this only too well, the campaign (called 31 days of the Dragon, www.31daysofthedragon.com) was launched in all the key influencing sites (31 of the best read blogs / online tech guides / product review guerillas) and the sites have different interesting tasks (from answering simple questions to posting a video of the existing PC on Youtube). Makes sure that the big guns write about the new PC, makes the visitors participate in hordes, and makes them talk about this to hell lot more people.

In short, pin-point, textbook, buzz marketing. Well executed and well noticed.

p.s: Buzzcorps was started by ex-AMD PR guy Chris Aaron who specializes in blog buzz marketing and influencer marketing. Nice niche to live in, at the moment :)

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Rocca (n.): The silent creeping realization that one has gone onto chats with office friends replete with expletives and wry humor WHILST still connected to NetMeeting at work, thereby broadcasting arbit conversations to a bewildered Aussie colleague. Word can be used as a replacement for ‘blooper’, ‘boo-boo’, ’shit-creek’ or even ‘mammoth screw-up’.

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