Aditya Chadha

“There is thought and there is action. Do not confuse the two. When the time comes to act, your thought must already be complete. There will be no room for it when the action begins” - Harlan’s World’s ancient samurai heritage

I’ve been a pretty big fan of cFares ever since I found out about them. But a couple of days ago I tried to book an international ticket through them, put in my credit card number and confirmed payment but no ticket confirmation has arrived so far. Just their regular “We are in the process of issuing your ticket(s).” email with a “confirmed” travel itinerary.

I also sent out an email requesting my rebate (since I’ve never really been able to find their online rebate system, let alone use it) to support@cfares.com, customerservice@cfares.com, and ceo@cfares.com that got ignored. The phone number on their contact us page goes to voicemail. No response there either.

I thought they’d just raised funding? Is cFares dead or are they just acting sleazy like hotwire? Does anyone know?

Update (01/29/08): Started a thread on GetSatisfaction - and in the meantime American Airlines seems to have charged my credit card for the required amount. I’ll update this post if my rebate gets processed by cFares.

Update (02/06/08): Victoria Wong (vwong at cfares dot com) responded and applied my rebate, notifying me that rebates take 7-10 days to process. This doesn’t explain the fact that the first reservation was NEVER EVEN ticketed, let alone eligible for the rebate. Air tickets are not a cheap commodity and I’m amazed how careless it is of cFares to not give you any updates regarding a $1000 (or more) charge on your credit card!

Update (02/25/08): My rebate arrived in early Feb as promised. I just got asked (politely!) by cFares to take down the CEO’s personal cellphone # that was left by an anonymous commenter in the comments to this post and have done that since it seems fair to me, leaving the rest of the comment intact.

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Tags: cfares, airline, ticketing, travel, online_booking, travel_agency, cheap_tickets, review, experience

Ever see a book on amazon or bn.com and have the urge to buy it, but not sure if it will be worth buying? I do - all the time!  Hence my wishlist keeps growing!

But I just found the lovely LibraryLookup tool which grabs the ISBN from any web page, and looks it up in your local library.

For some reason the New York Public Library link in the Innovative library list doesn’t take you to the place where you can reserve books.

A bit of poking around and we have a new link, so this is how it works:

1. Drag NYPL Library Lookup to your bookmarks bar
2. Find a book on Amazon or BN.com or any other place with an ISBN on the page.
3. Click the NYPL Library Lookup bookmark, and watch it find the book at the NYPL in a new window!

…magic.

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Tags: books, hacks, technology, library_lookup, amazon, library, knowledge

Recently I’ve been running into a lot of silliness that appears in files exported from MS applications (Word, Excel, etc.) called ‘Smart quotes’.

Basically MS uses higher level ascii characters to represent quotes that mean more than regular quotes (whatever for?!). You see this weirdness in vi as <93><92> etc. which are the hex values of these characters. I had to hunt a bunch on google to find out how to fix this, although the fix is very easy.

For each value that you see in your file, just do a string substitution, like so:

:%s/<93>/\’/g

of course, you can’t just type that <93> in there, so to get it in there you use (via: http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/usr_45.html)

CTRL-V x 93

which inserts hex 93 in place.

In recently exported CSV’s from excel, I’ve seen hex 91-97.

Quite annoying, frankly.

–

You could also use perl, like here

perl -pi -e”s/\x92/’/g” myfile.html

and use it on multiple files.

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Tags: smart_quote, vim, ms_word, ms_excel, string_replacement, substitution, windows_unix, export, import, decimal, hex, 92, 93, <92>, <93>

Not as painless as installing it, but the upgrade instructions here work pretty well.

1) wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

2) cp -aR blog/wp-content/* wordpress/wp-content/

3) cp blog/wp-config.php wordpress/

4) disable all plugins http://example.com/wp-admin/plugins.php?action=deactivate-all

5) mv blog old-blog && mv wordpress blog

6) make sure you hit http://example.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php

7) and manually re-enable all your plugins.

and you’re done.

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Tags: upgrade, wordpress, blog, painless, wordpress_upgrade

Three memorable things:

1) The “private security” people are assholes. They will be rude to you.

2) Bags, Computers/Cellphones and any electronics are not allowed inside the US Consulate - but there’s a nice network economy of fastfood joints/stores across the street from the consulate that will keep your bag for you for the duration of your interview for CAD10 - smart entrepreneurship

3) It now takes 4 days to get your visa, or at the least, 3 days including the day you had your interview. No more same day or next day processing, as of 11/20/2007.

I don’t remember how the security guards at the Toronto consulate behaved but they definitely weren’t as rude as the people at the Vancouver consulate. The visa officer himself was pretty cool, and joked about me being single!

Update: Most people that came from big companies (such as, one of the Top 1000 Visa sponsors via this blog) got their visa’s in three days - if you’re at a smaller company your visa will most likely take 4 days.  But this is my guess, based on some empirical evidence, only, as is most of this blog!

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Tags: h1b, visa_interview, visa_appointment, visa, us, canada, vancouver, consulate

Wow, the Elite theme completely barfed and so did all my backup options so I’m back to Wordpress Classic. It might have something to do with that last post, I’m still investigating.

Hopefully a black theme will be back soon!

Edit: Okay, the TED Embedded video was the culprit. Let’s see if I can embed in this post.

Edit2: Yes the video was the culprit, thanks to Robert’s awesome wordpress plugin  - we’re back!

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Tags: blog, wordpress_themes, broken_layout

It is very hard to express what you’re thinking. Your brain wakes up, a few neurons fire, a pattern emerges trying to penetrate your subconscious, fighting a million other synapse connections to break through to your subconscious. Then, something that feels like a thought - bubbles up into your subconscious trying to attract the attention of your conscious brain and if a few factors combine and you spend some brain cycles, a final coherent thought is formed.

If you’re to believe Jeff Hawkins, the brain functions by running a massive prediction engine based on matching patterns that it has seen before. So, for example, you know how to open a door because your brain sees a doorknob and matches it to a previous occurrence of seeing a door knob and watching a door open by turning the knob, so it predicts that the same thing will happen (the door will open) if you turned this door knob. This is obviously a very radical way of thinking about the brain and the way it functions.

If I was to extend this theory to how the brain expresses new thoughts or how you create new thoughts, you get the model where your brain has actually had a thought before and when you think about something similar a pattern emerges. But, the pattern is incomplete, you’re not thinking about the same thing you thought about before but you’re trying to map this new thought to a thought that you’ve had before. So to create this new pattern the brain fuses the older but similar pattern with this new pattern that you’re experiencing and forms a new (as yet) untested pattern. Once you test this pattern multiple times, your brain ‘remembers’ the new pattern and uses it to repeat the process. An example of this would be to extend the ‘doorknob’ experiment above with a new ‘doorknob’ that looks different or is placed in a different part of the door, or to make it even more complicated we could replace ‘doorknob’ with a completely different ‘door-opening-mechanism’. This is all pure conjecture on my part, of course, but something to think about as I ponder creativity more.

Going back to writing about expression, we have the fact that once you have a blob of neuron connections, and it goes through a few layers of brain tissue and emerges as a coherent thought it looks very different from the real blob that you started thinking about. This depends on how much experience you’ve had in expressing a similar thought, or to put it in Jeff’s terms how many stored patterns you have that approximate this new thought you’re having now to articulate it in the best way possible.

So, then the most articulate people should be those that have expressed as much as possible. But that’s not true, because mere expression doesn’t tell you if what you’re saying is what someone else is understanding, that’s where communication and the feedback loop come in.

So, in essence, the most articulate people are those people that have expressed as much as they can but also received as much feedback as they can to understand if they’re getting through to the rest of humanity, thus improving their pattern matching algorithm to express every single thought as clearly as possible.

I think that’s why most people write, to get their thoughts out there, but to also affect the thinking of everyone that understands their thoughts.

Food for thought, yes?

[This is a new series of posts on thinking about creativity to better understand it, next up will be On Mediums of Expression]

Video of Jeff Hawkins’ talk at TED:

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Tags: creativity, thinking, the brain, expression, changing_the_world

Started a tumblelog: http://sublucid.tumblr.com to keep this space clean of re-posts like the one right below this one!

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Tags: tumblr, web, expression

Re-post from Marc’s blog

Hilarious explaination of the subprime mortgage mess with classic British humor - worth every minute of the 7minute video.

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Tags: humor, subprime, mortgage, finance, and_all_that_is_wrong_with_the_world