bid chronicles

With the latest innovations that helps you get more and more information from the net faster, the net has finally become a boring place for me. It almost feels like the net was more lively a few years back. I’m not denying that the net is still filled with information. Specially living in USA, where I have Google Maps giving me all the things I need to know about a neighborhood, and other sites like that. But it doesn’t change the fact that on a day to day basis, the ‘wasting time’ use of the net have been declining for me.

Sure there are still tons of options to waste time online, but they aren’t as appealing as they once were. I keep up with about a dozen non-personal blogs about another half a dozen personal ones, but with the help of RSS feeds, they all wait for be patiently in one place. And in an hour or two I’m done with that. Then what?

Chatting? It has its peak hours too. I’ll get bombarded for 25 minutes and then everyone will go away all at once. I’m telling you, the net has become boring. But hey, at least the two hours of reading blogs and Penny Arcade is entertaining

Like most people in the world, I wish I could win the lottery. Just imagine all the good stuff I can do with the money. This led me to thinking about the lottery system here in USA. Back in Bangladesh, you buy a lottery ticket which has a sequential number on it, and there is multiple drawings for the multiple winners. (Not sure if they changed it since I left, however).

But there you have one drawing, and based on the numbers you have matched you fall into the different winning level. Of course, if they all match you get the jackpot. Now, when you go to buy the ticket, you have several options too. I mean, you can chose your own set of numbers or if you just want it to all happen fast, you can just let the computer pick the numbers. So essentially you up with a computer generated random series of numbers when you do a “QuickPick”.

Now, isn’t the drawing done by a computer that is randomly picking numbers (or balls)? What is the probability that both these computers will chose the same series of numbers in a span of 3 or 4 days? Pretty slim I think. Probably less than me picking a random set of numbers. So may be if I try my luck in it, I shouldn’t go for a QuickPick. I mean who wants to win only $2, when you can go for at least $12 mil.

Sometimes I just love how the technology have improved so much. Recently I have been doing a lot of work with Unicode and also typing a good bit in বাংলা (Bangla). In fact, Avro Keyboard has become one of those software that I install on every machine I use. Today, just out of curiosity I was trying Bangla in Foobar2000.

Isn’t that amazing? I mean just look at it. I don’t have to deal with Bangla in roman letters. Though tagging every single Bangla MP3 that I own might be a bit of work. Oh by the way, the song that is playing is the only one I wrote that have been published so far