Category: Life and Personal

Life teaches a lot. Sometimes, sharing those experiences leads to deeper insights.

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Life and Personal

“You have a great personality”

Normally, I don’t post entries like this, but I just had to this time. I am starting to believe that I really do have a nice personality. I have been getting this a lot lately, and so many people can’t go wrong. 🙂

This weekend, I hung out with members of a social networking group I had never met with before, and a couple of the people called me a “go-getter” with a very nice personality. Needless to say, I was flattered!

Then, last month, I got an email from a CEO that had to say this – “The team was impressed with your knowledge and personality.”

Sometimes, all one needs is a series of ego boosts!

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Life and Personal Tech and Culture Travel

Local Information – Microsoft: 1 Google: 0

Background: Google runs a mapping service that’s available for mobile devices, as well as in the form of an application for the iPhone. Microsoft’s subsidiary TELLME Networks runs a similar service, only with more features available on their free 411 service.

So, last week, I was in downtown Washington DC for business, and decided to get a hotel room for the night. Someone suggested the ‘Renaissance’. I quickly keyed in the hotel name and location on my iPhone and Google presented me with the address and the phone number. Only problem was that the phone number appeared to have been changed since the last time Google updated their directory. I figured that calling Google’s free 411 service would have the same results, and so decided to call 1-800-555-TELL, which is a Microsoft subsidiary company. The process was something like this:

TELLME: Welcome to TELLME
ME: Business
TELLME: What city and State
ME: Washington DC
TELLME: Business name
ME: Renaissance Washington DC
TELLME: Street or Intersection, or say I am not sure
ME: 9th Street
TELLME: (Address and phone number). Say ‘Text me the info’ to have it sent to your phone.
ME: Text me the info.

As simple as that! The speech recognition was impeccable, even though I was standing on a busy downtown street with a lot of hoo-ha as expected. I was very impressed.

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Life and Personal

Another interesting astrology reading

“You have a lot of support behind you, and a lot of people want to see you succeed”

After the last couple weeks, I don’t doubt that at all!

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Life and Personal

Time to roll out a new layout

So, I upgraded the WordPress software to version 2.3.1 last night, and due to some changes in my database tables, couple of functions in my PHP code got broken. It would probably take me more time to fix these than to implement a new theme, besides, it was time to change it anyway.

Hence, be on the lookout for a new blog layout soon! I plan to redesign my site, too.

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Economy Life and Personal Tech and Culture

Are you a smart shopper?

I have come to believe that you’re a smart shopper if the stock price of the company whose products you consistently buy keeps on going up.

Since my move to Apple products, and since the time I bought AAPL stock, it has gone up roughly about 10%. I own a Mac, an iPhone, Airport Extreme and Express, couple iPods, and some Apple software. It is the best operating system I have ever used, and I find Objective C so much better than anything else I have seen, it is amazing. Java and even C# were more than inspired by Objective C.

Similarly, I am a big fan of OS hardware and software virtualization, and most importantly VMWare. The last few months have seen EMC’s stock price skyrocket along with moving towards a spectacular rating by stock analysts.

I use Tide to do my laundry. The PG stock is one of the best performing stocks in NYSE right now.

I think the only stock not doing relatively well (at least in my opinion) for which I am a regular customer is Microsoft. But then, there’s really no competitor to the Xbox 360 right now!

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Life and Personal

Water Restrictions @ Restaurants

Just read about this…City of Durham has enacted ‘Stage III Moderate Mandatory Conservation of the City of Durham’s Water Conservation Ordinance’ effective today. While the goal remains to reduce water consumption by about 30% in light of the current drought conditions, the thing that surprised me for a bit was the following restriction:

‘Do not serve water in a restaurant or similar establishment except upon request’

Talk about a drought!

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Economy Life and Personal Tech and Culture

Free email no longer charming enough

I just realized that I have completely transitioned myself out of using any sort of free email service (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.). One of the lures of free email used to be the cost associated with getting our own domain, along with hosting services, but thanks to mass consumer adoption and services like Google Apps for Domains, that no longer holds true.

If I am scared of spam, I just create a temporary email address on my domain; if I am scared of running out of storage, well, Google provides 2 GB!

Apart from my personal domain, I now use .Mac for almost everything else. It costs a lot, but is more than just an email service.

I wonder if this is going to be an increasing trend as people move away from free email services for personal communication.

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Life and Personal Tech and Culture

iPhone

Posting this from my new iPhone, and have to say that I am pretty impressed!

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Economy India Life and Personal Tech and Culture Travel

10 years ago: Then and now

I was thinking how much things have changed in the last 10 years. We now live in an increasingly connected society, at least from a technological point of view. Yet, at the same time, there are things that haven’t changed at all. We still have the middle east crisis. We’re still fighting hunger and poverty, and we’re still in search of a new source of energy!

10 years ago:

  1. I was trying to get in a good college.
  2. My primary computer was a desktop PC running Windows 95. The processor was 66Mhz Pentium.
  3. I was experimenting with Linux in a big way.
  4. I did not have an Internet connection at home.
  5. I used to dial in to a few BBS’ across the world.
  6. I was excited about being able to finally have a cable TV connection at home.
  7. I was a computer “whiz-kid”.
  8. I couldn’t cook to save my life.
  9. I wanted to grow up to be an engineer working for the Indian Government.
  10. I never thought I would move to a distant country.

Now, things that have remained unchanged:

  1. The Simpsons is still the longest running prime-time animated series.
  2. Human cloning is still banned.
  3. Tony Blair is still the Prime Minister of Britain (although he’s retiring on June 27th).
  4. India’s President is still from the minorities.
  5. Toyota Prius is still quite a buzzword.
  6. The middle east is still strife-torn.
  7. The space race is still on, albeit between the West and the rest of the world.
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Life and Personal

It wasn’t a cancer !

LesionI got rid of my leg cast yesterday. The good news is that the lesion was not malignant. Even though the cast is gone, I still have about half of my sutures still remaining, and am avoiding putting force on the incision area, which means no driving for yet another week.

Now, I got a chance to look at my toe for the very first time post-surgery, and I almost had an upset stomach. Basically, I was wrong when I mentioned that the incision was only 2cm long. It was actually about 2 inches in length, in the shape of a curve that extended from one end of the toe to the other. As you can see in the illustration, the surgeon removed the circular lesion by making a rectangular incision, but also made 2 additional cuts at the opposite ends to help sew up the incision. A straight line cut would not have held steady. According to him, it was one of the most difficult plastic surgery operations on the bottom part of the big toe, simply because of the lack of available skin and flesh. The incision is called a “Hurricane incision“, with the eye of the hurricane in the center. In his words, the post-surgery toe “looked like it was a gunshot wound”.

I am wearing what they call a “post-op shoe”, which is basically a well-padded protected slipper. Working from home has been a good, albeit boring experience so far. The good thing is that I saved a whole lot of money on gas by switching to telecommuting 😉