I love wikipedia. There's no other word for what I feel when it comes to The Free Encyclopedia that Anyone can Edit. God knows, if I had spent the time I spend reading up stuff at Wikipedia on managing my money, I would have been a millionaire by now!
This wikipedia reading fever manifests itself mostly at the nights - "Wikipedia Nights" - periods when I have been up entire nights reading up article after article on Wikipedia on some subject. I love it. Chikki hates it (I guess), but is nice enough not to say anything about it (yet) :-)
Yesterday, I happened to be reading up on art. Art as in paintings. Paintings as in Rennaisance paintings. It actually started with a visit to Live for some search. As the search results loaded, I recalled Sushma saying that her experience with Live Search was that it was very slow, and me telling her that the reason Live Search loads real quick for me is because all my content by default is hidden. Now I haven't clicked on the "Show" button on Live for quite a while (blame it on TechEd!), so I decided to have a look at what was on. One of my fav gadgets on Live is "Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)". Now since I haven't visited Live in while, I have been missing on my daily dose of APOD, so I visited the APOD Archive. Browsing the archive led me to "Starry Night," which is a Van-Gough painting. And the astronmoer illustrating the picture was nice enough to point out the Wikipedia link for the pic.
From here started a journey which took me to Van Gough to Post-Impressionism Period in European Art to Western Art Movements to Rennaissance Classicism to Leonardo da Vinci to Rennaissance Artists and on and on .... I just couldn't stop! It was an awesome experience reading up about the artists, watching their works, reading up on them, the socio-religious phenomena happening around that time in Europe which influenced the artists and the sheer magnitude of creative output from that period .... fascinating stuff. I wanted to read up more and read up everything and then some more, but was too tired to continue. Obviously I could not understand most of it, but it is so interesting that I do want to study it at some point in life.
This is one of my biggest regrets - that I did not read enough history and economics during school. I can't have enough of either these days and do not have the luxury of enrolling in a formal course. Advise to any young ones who are reading this: use the school time well ... it will never come back. And I don't mean in terms of friends and enjoying school - sure that is important, but you will have a good time even after school. What you will not have is the wide exposure to the world around you as you get more and more specialized. School is the time to know your world better, and it is a fascinating world to discover.
Coming back, as I browsed, I could not resist downloading a whole bunch of HQ pics of these paintings. Now I am not too sure if this is allowed, or whether I am allowed to upload them somewhere else, but right now, I have a collection of some 170 odd paintings by some of the top Rennaisance masters. The thing to do next is to write an app that would allow me to associate metadata with these pics and make a changing desktop / screensaver out of them which also displays the metadata. In a future version, if Wikipedia was to have an API, I would not need these pics on my disk, the app would be able to query for them and pull the pics and the write-ups them from the net. In fact, it would be awesome to have a Smart Client to Wikipedia!!
Ok ... now back to writing that app again!!
