First things first redux

The new year is here!
It's the time to cheer!
Life begins a new,
I wish good things for me and you.

Well well, I seem to have a poetic bent (maybe more bent than poetic).

A very happy and successful new year to all of you out there!

My first thoughts in the new year went out to God - thanking him for all the dreams he made come true (and begging to make more of them come true).

Then I sent the first email of the year.

And then I thought about "New Year Resolutions". I made up two - and they will remain a secret till I fulfill those goals.

Then I successfully completed the first tooth scrub of the year.

A new day has come.

First things first

Hold on a second. I have some work to be completed. BRB.

Gmail invites anyone?

Is there still anyone left that doesn't have a Gmail account? I have around 10 Gmail invites that are lying unused for quite some time now. If anyone needs one just leave a comment here and don't forget to let me know your email account where I should send the invite. If you are worried about spam-bots picking up your email from the comment, then munge it e.g. santoshAThotmailDOTcom

The Hitch Hiker and other such things

I'm reading the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This book has gained "cult" status over the years but I am reading it only now - so sue me. Douglas Adams' language has this distinct "British" touch to it. You can always tell a Brit's English from the others. An example from Douglas Adams:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very
ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

To the trained eye, language of such sorts comes across as distinctly British. I don't know how to explain it but I think you'll understand if you read stuff from British authors or listen to British comedy or speak to the many Brits floating around this world.

That apart I watched Night Shyamalan's "The Village" yesterday evening. Nice theme, though Shyamalan's treatment makes it unpalatable for everyone except those that enjoy Mani Ratnam movies (such as myself). The idea of a village far removed from the maddening world sounds nice, atleast to me.

The day after yesterday

Sunday 26th December 2004, 06:40

I woke up, shaken out of deep slumber. "Where am I?," I thought to myself. I was not thinking clear. Someone was shaking my bed. I looked around, dazed, trying to focus. I jumped off the bed, fists clenched, ready to take on my assailant. But no one was there in my room. I must have been dreaming. I sat on the bed, pulse pounding. Suddenly I felt the bed shaking again. "I shouldn't have stayed awake till 1am watching TV, I am hallucinating," I thought to myself. One more shake. This time around, I knew that it was not a hallucination. The earth was shaking.

I was thinking clear now. I looked around, grabbed my specs and rushed out of my room. I found my mom and dad rushing out of their rooms as well. The clock on the wall was swinging from side to side. We rushed out of the apartment. "Don't use the lift," my mom told us. We started climbing down the stairs.

One floor down, I paused a bit and caught a glimpse inside one of the apartments. The door was wide open, everyone had fled except for the old lady of the house who was in the 'pooja' room praying. Her prayers had not been shaken by the quake. "One more floor to go," I thought to myself.

We reached the ground floor and rush out of the apartment complex. There were people everywhere, it looked like a big carnival except that many were in their pajamas. People were talking excitedly on their mobiles and to each other.

After waiting outside for about 15 minutes we decided that it was time we went back inside.

After coming back home, I switched on the TV and watched reports pour in. The quake originated from Indonesia where it measured over 8.9 on the Richter scale. Places like Andaman & Nicobar, Sri Lanka and parts of the eastern coast of India (Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Tamilnadu) were hit by tidal waves that were triggered as a result of this quake. Over 500 people dead in Sri Lanka, with most of Colombo submerged under water. 108 people dead in Chennai as tidal waves, 50 feet high, washed away those sleeping in makeshift huts in slums that were scattered along the coastline of the city.

"It makes you 'feel small'," said someone who witnessed the huge tidal waves rushing in.

Sometimes, I think, we take life for granted that we never realize how insignificant we, as humans, really are in the grand scheme of things. We build stone walls around ourselves and think we are "secure". But it just takes a second for those walls to be broken to bits.

Podcasts rulez!

OK so you guessed my drift.

I've been spending the last couple of days download gazillion megabytes of podcasts. This is what I have on my ipodder list as of now.

1) Adam Curry: Daily Source Code
2) The Laporte Report
3) KenRadio (this I have been listening to even before I came across podcasts)
4) Engadget Podcast
5) IT Conversations
6) Web Talk Radio
7) KevinDevin.com
8) RasterWeb! Audio

Podcasts make for interesting listening. However, the podcast receiver software (such as ipodder or doppler) still need lots of work - they are still rough around the edges.

Stay tuned for more.

Broadband to the masses?

It is interesting to note the flurry of activity happening in Chennai (and probably elsewhere in India) on the broadband front. Several companies (many of them unheard of until a couple of days back) are promising to bring "high speed Internet" to one's doorstep. There are some established players as well jumping in - such as Reliance Infocomm (which has finally decided to offer broadband after laying the foundation for this more than a year back) and BSNL (the babu driven telecom behemoth sponsored by the Indian Government).

This is all very good and commendable. But most of their "packages" seem to have been crafted at a time when Lynx was state of the art - "Rs 200 per month for 100MB of data transfer at an incredible speed of 256kbps!" claims a flyer. I'm wondering how long it would take for one to use up this 100MB of promised utopia...

Give me a minimum of 512kbps (preferably 1mbps or more), no data traffic cap, for Rs 999 per month and then I would buy the mantra of taking broadband to the masses.

By the way, I recently switched (yet again) my broadband provider. I now have Touchtel that provides me a 128kbps line with no bandwidth cap for Rs 999 per month. This is good but not good enough. The advantage with the Touchtel line is that it just works and I have had absolutely no downtime. Perhaps the competition will force Touchtel to upgrade the 128kbps to 512kbps across the board.

Watch this space.

Death of a blog? Nope.

Yet again, its been over 15 days since I blogged. Does this mean that I am going to stop blogging? Nope.

I'm exploring the exciting world of podcasting and downloading several podcasts to get a feel of this "thing". Sounds interesting. Check out www.ipodder.org to learn more.

In the meanwhile AudioFeast seems to have improved quite a lot. Unfortunately I am not able to subscribe to their audio feeds because their payment page insists that I use a US state for my credit card billing address! So for the moment I am stuck to their free feeds - Wall Street Journal This Morning, Marketplace PM and HitzRadio.

As another year winds to a close - the time to reflect and look forward is here. Looking back there are several things that have happened over this past year that I wouldn't have imagined would happen to me. Some dreams came true, some didn't and then some are perhaps reserved from the year to come. The new year brings with it anticipation and apprehension.

Watch this space.

The G factor

Perhaps these two weeks have been the longest I've been away from blogging since I started several months back.

I completed reading Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code (interestingly I could never completely read the printed book, but managed to zoom through the e-book). I've now started reading Digital Fortress by the same author (again the e-book and not the printed version). I see some common threads in all of Dan Brown's books - crypto, conspiracies, and in his last two books the religious angle.

The past few weeks have also been witness to several shocking incidents involving revered people that are currently heading institutions that have been over hundreds of years presenting us with a human face to God. There have been both positive and negative reactions - some claim all this is a conspiracy and while some others smugly say "I told you so".

My thoughts on this are that - if the claims made were true - it simply goes to prove that when the world is full of crooks you cannot expect a few institutions to be spared. I am sure there will be those that are shocked.

Perhaps all of this can be summarized in one sentence - while God made mankind, man made religion.

God is with us at every step of the way (in fact He's just sitting near me watching me type this blog). Our very fabric of existence depends on God. However I believe a select few among us may have taken advantage of our weakness to put a human face to God.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions - we follow today principles and practices that were established several thousand years ago BUT that have been subject to interpretation over the years. Like they say, history is always written by the winners (quote courtesy Da Vinci Code). Does it look like I am overly influenced by the Da Vinci Code? :-)

In other news, the last couple of days witnessed several disastrous data losses in my personal as well as professional sphere. Several hard disks crashed mysteriously taking with them data that was not "backed up". Moral of the story - the real saviour is a terabyte portable hard drive. :-)