Going through the daily drudgery of earning to survive, one always keep wondering - “where are we going with all this?”
or “which way should I turn now?” or if you are a business, then “which way should we take today so that we are where
others would try to flock to tomorrow?”. You are always crying out for a larger view of things. And from time to time,
you find the words of someone else with a theory that can shed some light on that possible path.
I have been watching the happenings in the US election with some interest. And at the same time I keep wondering why there is not so much interest in India about this election.
What most people dont realize is that the US election is sometimes more important to every Indian than, say, the way assembly elections in Maharashtra is important to us in Delhi. And look at the difference in media coverage!
The actions of the US determines how many innocent men, women and children die in Iraq, Afganistan, Palestine, Kashmir, etc. You might call this a stretch of imagination, but think about it this way - the fate of all the children in Iraq who died last week in the continuing fight there, was decided by the decision of a large section of Americans to vote for George Bush. (And everybody knows by now, the fight in Iraq was for anything but USA’s national security interest, leave aside the morality of preemptive attacks). Ofcourse, I dont think most of these Americans would have thought things would turn this bad in the hands of their elected representative. But this blog of mine is not about what Bush did wrong, but rather it is more about how the leadership issue of a country in this world, affects so many people outside that country, in such a significant way.
Cringely has come out with a insightful article on how opinion polls are missing out on the mobile phone revolution in US. This is even more relevant to Indians.
According to Cringely, most of the opinion polls are conducted over telephone. I am not sure how many exit polls are conducted at the voting booths in India, so I can vaguely assume that this holds partly for India too.
The problem is that lesser and lesser mobile younger people/college-students/ are taking landline connections because of all the installation hassle, as well as the perennial problem that these group of people are unlikely to be found at home for anything but sleeping or studying. ;) Most of them have instead got a mobile phone.
Joel Spolsky is editing a new
book on the best software essays of 2004. He is asking for nominations
here. I hope this book, to be published by
APress, is reprinted in India too.
All those who know me, realize very well how much food excites me. I am passionate about (eating) it, though. But there are some people like Madhu Menon, who takes really shows what being passionate about somethings in life is all about. Madhu left his IT job about an year back and opened up his own restaurant in Bangalore, specializing in far-eastern cuisine. Now those are two things I truly admire - the strength to do things in life which you really really like, and of course being involved in the food art business. (Food is an art form, right?). Just to lend him a helping hand, and to express him the very best …
This cartoon strip of Rudy Park today, in some way brings out the revolution in TV watching that TiVo has pioneered.
Yes, we have all been pissed out with watching too much TV ads throughout the day. In India, there is still no no-ads subscription based cable TV service - even HBO. Star Movies is one of the nice guys, showing non-stop movies after midnight - no ads at all! Some channels like Sony AXN show more frequent, shorter durations ads, while others do the opposite.
Havent used trackbacks much, but apparently WordPress 1.2 has an annoying trackback bug. Thanks to IoZBlog for documenting the fix to it (disclaimer: This post should prove whether trackbacks are working in the first place ;) ).
Also, got my first comment spam today. Hell, this spammers dont even let lonely blogs like this in peace. A quick search at the WordPress wiki, revealed Mark Ghosh’sWP plugin for the same. I have installed it as per instructions. Lets see how it goes.
Eric Meyerwrites that the
Microsoft web site has been redesigned to use a mostly CSS based design as compared to the old table
based one. The subsequent page size decrease was 75%+!!
There is no denying the fact that CSS driven web page layouts are the future. All those web
designers who still use Dreamweaver and Golive, wake up, and give us web programmers cleaner web
pages to work on! We have become tired of those hundreds of table tags and spacers to get a web page
look just right.
I found this neat web page, which shows the various instant messenger smiley icons side-by-side. The result “obviously” shows how Yahoo’s smileys look the least “tacky”.
update (2018): The link above no longer works. Sorry. 😞
