First they made sure that medicines cost the earth. Then they made sure that you need insurance before you can get health benefits. Then they made sure that you are completely surrounded - rocket high medical bills and insurance not enough to cover it. And now they are making sure that when you get bankrupted, it is impossible to get bankruptcy protection. Hmm .. social security?
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0310-22.htm
U.S. senators are about to pass a bankruptcy bill so hostile to ordinary American families that it could only have come about in a place as corrupt, cynical and unmoored from reality as Washington, D.
Some months back, the lug-delhi.org HallOfShame was written about in an article at Techtree. The article also features a short tele-interview that I had with the author.
Link to article. I have, for the time being, suspended any additions by me to the hallofshame list. I have some plans for the future for this drive which I intend to pursue shortly.
Since my bad experience with Sify, I have been looking around for other similar complaints against Sify. It turns out that they have been running a country-wide racket.
Ankur Raheja has filed a case against Sify broadband for losses due to downtime and misleading claims in their advertisements. Take a look at the comments on that page - Chandigarh, Chennai, Bangalore… every city has a problem with Sify. (Thanks to Puneet for the link)
Here is the letter I sent to Sify contact points in Delhi yesterday. It chronicles my Sify broadband experience here in Delhi.
From: Sandip Bhattacharya <sandip AT lug-delhi.org> To: Sanjay Bhandari <sanjay_bhandari @sifycorp.com> , Puneet Sharma <puneet_sharma @sifycorp.com> , anamika <bbcoordinator_delhi @sifycorp.com> Cc: India Gii <india-gii AT cpsr.org> Subject: Official complaint - My sify experience and a request for refund Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 14:21:23 +0530 Mailer: Evolution 2.0.2 (2.
Inspite of my contempt for their loathsome Internet fleecing plans, I had to reluctantly sign up for a Sify cable internet plan today. Cost me a neat pile for installation and pre-payment for one month. The most painful part of this transition is going back to a NAT-ted private IP. This means no more gnomemeeting, no more yahoo voice/video chat, no more Bittorrent, no more gnutella/fasttrack/openft and other P2P networks, no more logging into my home machine when stranded outside my home office to retrieve a document I left at home.
It was my parents anniversary yesterday. We had cake and flowers and candles. Uploaded pics for the day to my Flickr account. The pictures are collected into a set here.
I am loving Flickr. Having a hosted services for storing my photos is the best thing that has happened for a while. No more running to upgrade the gallery software whenever a patch is out. Flickr allows me to store the high resolution photos itself, something that can easily cause your own web site to get out of hand in a short while.
Ubuntu Linux is a Linux distribution which Ubuntu promoters ship to enthusiasts all over the globe. The distribution was featured recently in a daily at Mysore. Excited by the article, Satish places an order for Ubuntu CDs at the Ubuntu shipit webpage.
The CDs arrive promptly, and so does a show cause notice from the Indian customs department asking Satish to provide “Importer Code Number, Invoice, Purchase Order, Order Confirmation and Technical write-up” failing which he would be fined and/or have the goods confiscated.
Yes, it is over an year old now. I never posted them publicly because, frankly, I felt others had better cameras and better photos from the event. But rather than having them languish in some forgotten corner of my computer, I am uploading them to my Flickr account. So here is:
Linux Asia 2004 - a photoset on Flickr
Novell “open sources” its Netmail product to start off Hula Server - a new calendar and mail server available under both LGPL and MPL.
Interestingly, the licence is the more permissive LGPL and not GPL. Perhaps, this is so that the result of the community work can be integrated into proprietary solutions like Novell’s own enterprise offerings.
The screenshots look real pretty. I dont see any mention of Evolution in any of the initial pages.
Updated my blog to Wordpress 1.5. The new release has lots more than the last version.
Currently it is running the default Kubrick theme, which I don’t find too bad. Not too many new templates available right now for this version of WP, so I will wait till I decide to change the theme later.
One feature I like is the new anti-spam features. There is an option to prevent open-proxies from posting.