Showing posts with label Nepal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nepal. Show all posts

Monday, September 10, 2012

Dorsey, The Closest Thing To Next Jobs

A lot of people secretly hope to be the next Steve Jobs, or not so secretly. I have met quite a few early stage entrepreneurs whose idea of being Steve Jobs like is to exhibit really nasty behavior. It is like when I was in Nepal I thought crime was the only thing that happened in New York City. It does happen, but in my years here, thankfully, I have yet to witness one. Steve Jobs actually treated his team really, really well. The flares aside.

Sean Parker is too much of a visionary Chairperson, perhaps not enough of a CEO. Steve Jobs was CEO, period. His was a daily executing grind. Jeff Bezos belongs to the same generation as Jobs almost, and besides he has been with the same company the entire time. That is like Larry Ellison without his divorces.

Jack Dorsey is CEO. He has had his unhappy ouster from the company he founded. There is the drama, even the intensity. And he might still take Twitter to its promised, unrealized heights.

“I Never Wanted To Be An Entrepreneur” Says Jack Dorsey
”Twitter was not started because we had a good idea. It was started out of a failure. And that can happen today” .... Twitter is estimated to have around 500 million users — although not all of them active. Square has over 100 million active users.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Friday, August 17, 2012

Himalayan Yak Restaurant: Jackson Heights

Yelp: Himalayan Yak Restaurant
Zagat: Himalayan Yak Restaurant
OpenTable: Himalayan Yak Restaurant
Chowhound: Himalayan Yak Restaurant
About.com: Himalayan Yak Restaurant




Website
Facebook Page
MoMo At Yak: Photos


Paan In Jackson Heights
Number One Reason I Dig Jackson Heights
Jackson Heights: My Neighborhood
Jackson Heights
Jackson Heights
Jackson Heights

Joe's Shanghai: Dumplings Nazi









TimeOut: Himalayan Yak Restaurant
New York Times: Himalayan Yak Restaurant
American Nepali (Blog): Himalayan Yak Restaurant



Jennifer 8 Lee: New York Times: Where Nepalese Is Spoken, and Yak Is Served
Does the subway bother you? Sometimes, but it has now become a habit. Mustang — we have wind, crazy wind. It’s a cold desert. It’s very loud. Around 12 midday, it stops everything. People stop to walk in the day...... The breakdown of your customers: Nepalese, Tibetan, Himalayan are 75 percent, 25 percent are foreigners.


Enhanced by Zemanta

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Half Of India In The Dark

electrical sunset grid
electrical sunset grid (Photo credit: soonerpa)
Time to work to commercialize Nepal's 43,000 MW hydroelectric potential.

Something like this happening in the US would have been a terrorist attack.

The unofficial power grid is like the Indian economy's informal sector. It is kind of important.

Power Failures Hit Half of India
About 600 million people lost power in India on Tuesday when the country’s northern and eastern electricity grids failed, crippling the country for a second consecutive day. .... The outage stopped hundreds of trains in their tracks, darkened traffic lights, shuttered the Delhi Metro and left nearly everyone — the police, water utilities, private businesses and citizens — without electricity. .... an unofficial power grid in the form of huge numbers of backup diesel generators and other private power sources..... The failure happened without warning just after 1 p.m. ..... supply and demand may not explain away this week’s grid failures .... state governments which were overdrawing power. .... “We have one of the most robust, smart grids operating” in the world .... “We had never anticipated such a thing” ..... over 26,000 megawatts of power stations are idle due to the nonavailability of coal
Enhanced by Zemanta

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Adding Disqus To My Blog Was The Easiest Thing

Image representing DISQUS as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase
Wow. Point and click.

The first time I installed Disqus it was still easy, but there were steps involved. You had to grab the code and go paste it in just the right place in your blog's template code. Not hard to do but I can imagine it being intimidating to those who don't know any code at all.

This time it was so so easy, as easy as clicking on a link at the Google search results page.

Wow. I am impressed.

disqus.com/admin/blogger

I promptly added it to all three of my blogs: Netizen, Barackface, and Democracy For Nepal.

Let the commenting begin!
Enhanced by Zemanta

Saturday, February 11, 2012

If 90% Of The People Start Voting

A stylized representation of a red flag, usefu...Image via WikipediaA Facebook Supported Online Parliament

These blog posts probably belong at my other Barackface blog, but never mind.

I was thinking, if Facebook were to manage to create an online parliament for an entire country, the percentage of people voting might shoot into the sky. The average in mature democracies right now is 50% I think. I can see that going up to an unheard of 90%.

It is like in Nepal there was a democracy movement in 1990. And it was successful. Nepal became a multi-party democracy. Before that it was a monarchy that called itself a no party democracy. As in, there was a parliament. What else do you need to be a democracy, right?

Anyways, there was now democracy. But then the communists came out of the woodworks. The most ultra among them called for a boycotting of the "bourgeois" election. 60% of the people voted. Those communists then claimed that means 40% of the people sided with them! Go figure.

But then I just had to share that relevant story.

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

US Ambassador To Nepal On Facebook


It started here. That took me to here. And to here.

This is the US ambassador to Nepal using Facebook to step right into a controversy. If all US ambassadors did this, Wikileaks might go irrelevant, like I said in a comment. By now I have left four comments. My latest comment is as follows.
(1) Biotechnology is like software, like nanotechnology, like green/clean energy. A country that wishes to go into the future can not be saying no to any of those. That is not me saying a big yes to Monsanto. Monsanto is just one company, although a big, influential one, and some might say a little notorious.

(2) Hybrid seeds are not news. Nepal has been using hybrid seeds for a long time now. But I must admit the kind of hybrids Monsanto seems to have in mind are leaps and bounds beyond what Nepal has been using so far.

(3) A new medicine sometimes is not what it was thought to be. But that is no argument against medical progress. Hybrid seeds can have and have had drastic eco consequences. That is an argument for a much more rigorous regimen to how the new hybrids get approved for the market in the first place.

(4) Biotech is going to play a key role in upping Nepal's agricultural production by a factor of something like 10, something dramatic. Again, that is not a vote for Monsanto. That is my positive vibe for biotech as an emerging field in applied science.

(5) Monsanto does seem to have some notoriety. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto A lot of it seems to come from its non biotech moves, in how it lobbies governments, how it influences decision making, how it enters countries. The solution to that is to have a full fledged intelligent discussion. It is for the Nepali people to decide if Monsanto is to be allowed. But at this point my stand is that a pilot project will not hurt. With a pilot project the Nepali people will have something concrete to talk about and debate.

(6) In this day and age of internet and globalization that pilot project local to Nepal can be coupled with global experiences with Monsanto. There's some good and some bad out there. Software programs have bugs. The early ones had even more of them. Windows crashed a lot in the early years. Some of what we blame Monsanto for is the fact that humanity is in its early stages of using biotechnology. And so there are "bugs." The effort has to be to fix the bugs. For that a corporation like Monsanto, a government like that in Nepal, and collectively a people all have to work hand in hand. I think cooperation is possible, and that starts with an open dialogue like this one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotechnology

Thursday, December 01, 2011

Shakira Or Hydroelectricity?

ShakiraCover of ShakiraSeveral months back I mentioned at this blog that I had been approached by a group in Kathmandu who wanted Shakira perform there. But they never really followed through. I think they considered her too big a ticket item and perhaps not affordable, or whatever.

Doubling Down On Tech Consulting
US Royalty: Staying Together

But recently I have been approached by another group that wants to build a six plus megawatt hydroelectric dam in Nepal north of Kathmandu pretty close to the Chinese border. This is a bigger, better deal than the Shakira deal might have been. And done right this could be the first of many deals. If you know investors who might be interested in hydroelectric dams in Nepal, let me know. This also allows me to be part of Nepal's economic revolution, its next challenge after the political revolution of a few years back.

Why do I mention this?

I blog profusely. But I don't want the label of a blogger, a writer. I am a consultant with a few different hats who happens to blog. Blogging is working out for the mind and I recommend it to everyone. I exercise regularly, but I don't want to be called a bodybuilder. I think everyone but everyone needs to exercise. The networking I have done so far in the NY tech ecosystem I could not have done if it were not for this blog.

March 8, 2012: Next Immigration Court Date

I am going to be a tech entrepreneur once the immigration gestapo in this fucking country finally lets me, but until then I consult. And it has been interesting. Primarily I do tech consulting. But I stay open to business opportunities otherwise. An entrepreneur is a jack of all trades who assembles masters in their specific fields. I be Jack.
Hydroelectric damImage via Wikipedia
Cruise Ship Coding
Looking For Holiday Parties To Go To

Nepal is second only to Brazil in terms of hydropotential. And it is a country mired in massive power cuts. And neighboring India growing at China like rates has a massive thirst for electricity.

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Steve Jobs — 1955-2011

LONDON - JUNE 15:  (FILE PHOTO) Steve Jobs, Ch...Image by Getty Images via @daylifeI just got back from an event near Times Square. I had some roadside momo - dumplings - with a ton of hot sauce. Usually I burn the midnight oil - it is a body clock thing. But today I was hoping to go to bed early and to wake up earlier than usual to work out some - I do freehand.

I guess I decided to log into my computer just as I gulped the last dumpling, and there was a Google Talk message from a friend out in the MidWest, someone I have yet to meet, a doctor from my hometown in Nepal. A few weeks back he mailed me a book he has written - Enduring Everest - about enduring ethnic prejudice as a Madhesi in Nepal.

"Steve Jobs died," the message said. It was not a new message. His status said he was idle.

My first reaction was disbelief. I expected the guy to retire, not to die. I felt sad. No, I did not see this coming. I was expecting him to stick around for years. This guy truly, truly stands out among the tech titans of my lifetime. It is going to take me days to digest the news.

Walt Mosberg: The Steve Jobs I Knew
Larry Page
Mark Zuckerberg
Bill Gates
The White House: President Obama on the Passing of Steve Jobs: "He changed the way each of us sees the world."
Dick Costolo

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Events: Week Of September 19

Monday, September 19
07:00 PM - 09:00 PM Feedback Forum: Campbell McKellar & Anna Thomas of Loosecubes.com
New Work City, 412 Broadway , 2nd Floor

Tuesday, September 20
08:00 AM - 10:00 AM New York Telepresence Open House sponsored by AT&T and Cisco
AT&T, 630 Fifth Avenue (btw 50th & 51st St)

07:00 PM - 09:00 PM Skillshare Presents Creative Arts: a party, art show & lesson!
Gallery Bar, 120 Orchard St
F to Delancey

07:00 PM - 09:00 PM Post BUILD: Metro, Windows 8 and the future of .NET
Microsoft 1290 6th Avenue
B/D/F/M Rockefeller Center

Wednesday, September 21
5:30-7:30pm Technology You Can Touch
AOL Headquarters
770 Broadway

Thursday, September 22
06:00 PM - 08:00 PM Network and drink with Time, CNN and Turner executives
Time Life building, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, 8th floor
B/D/F/M Rockefeller Center

06:00 PM - 11:00 PM OBLITERATI sponsored by: Google Places
Sweet and Vicious
5 Spring St

07:00 PM - 09:00 PM Bain Capital Ventures Cocktail Hour
General Assembly
902 Broadway, 4th Floor

07:00 PM - 09:00 PM New York Tech Karaoke
Karaoke Cave
9 East 13th Street

Friday, September 23

08:30 AM - 10:00 AM DUMBO Tech Breakfast Meetup
The Gallery
108 Jay Street

Dr. Baburam Bhattarai, Prime Minister of Nepal
1245 PM to 245 PM Theresa Lang Center, The New School, 55 W 13 St


San Gennaro Festival (Saturday)
Dumbo Arts Festival (Sunday)

Friday, July 22, 2011

So I Did It


I wrote the two blog posts that were so heavy on my chest for almost two weeks now. I feel relief now.

The posts don't read as angry as I thought they might read, and that's okay.

At The Buspark (2)
Kentucky Blues

Now my three blogs are all exhibiting the same piss on racism graphic. I think it is important. I think it is important to say fuck you to racism.

At The Buspark (2), Kentucky Blues
"Can You Understand This?"
"Bring Home An African Next Time"
Padgurum
Hawai Chappal
Deaths In The Family
Gonu Jha
Hum Jayega Burnt His Ears
"Thanks For Asking"
Prax
"It Was A Nigger!"
Little Flickers Of Racism
Australian Woes
Kathmandu Woes
"Do You Have An Email Address?"
Race, Gender, Tech
Doubling Down On Tech Consulting
Paradigm Shifts And Challenged Assumptions
Think Different
Alabama
Enhanced by Zemanta

At The Buspark (2), Kentucky Blues


I have been struggling to work on a few autobiographical blog posts. I have wondered if I should publish them at this blog, my most active blog, or maybe they belong at my other blogs. The buspark post belongs at my Nepal blog, and the Kentucky post belongs at my Barackface blog.

They are going to be angry posts. I don't intend to mince words.

I have put out some posts at my blogs that people have described as "hilarious" and "hysterical." Well, these posts will not fall into those categories. They will fall into the angry category. They will fall in the nonviolent militancy category. I have been toying with the idea for about two weeks now. Longer perhaps. But for about two weeks in a more concrete way. It has been hard to get down to it.

If it is hard to talk about now, how much harder must have it been to go through them when they happened? Long time. Long time coming.

At The Buspark
Southern Hospitality
Third World Guy
Deaths In The Family
Enemy Of The State
Enhanced by Zemanta