Life teaches a lot. Sometimes, sharing those experiences leads to deeper insights.
…which explains the lack of any updates in a month. I have moved back to Raleigh, a place I’ll always cherish, and have a very busy schedule. Hopefully, I’ll be back soon with some new stuff about technology and the like!
PS: God bless Microsoft! They are sending me a free copy of Office 2003 Pro after I lost my original media and key.
As you can tell, I am an avid gamer, and love my Xbox 360. It is a phenomenal gaming platform. Micro-soft has managed to make a huge community around it as well. The forums are abuzz 24/7 with interesting discussions ranging from the future of video gaming to the latest 360 accessory out in the market. Xbox Live is a phenomenal online gaming service, growing at a very fast rate. In fact, I was recently chosen as an official Xbox Ambassador to help new gamers that speak Hindi, Urdu, and English feel at home while using the service to play online with others from all over the world.
One aspect of the service is voice communication. I rarely use my headset to talk online with other gamers, mostly because I find it somewhat weird to have vocal conversations with strangers I have never met. Now, every Xbox 360 game has a set of locked achievements that give you a set number of points once unlocked. Some of these achievements require a certain level of online multiplayer participation. One of the games I am currently playing requires you to join a virtual club made by someone on your friends list, and then have some inter-club competitions. The problem was that none of the people on my list played that game. So, I went to the official Xbox forums online and saw a few people that were looking to expand their clubs. I sent a friends request to one of them, and within minutes I had the achievement unlocked.
This person was a South Carolina resident. I started talking to them, and in a matter of a few minutes we were talking like we knew each other for a long time. I think the person covered everything from their new home, pet dogs and cats, last few trips/vacations, married life, the HDTV on their Christmas shopping list, and their profession to the current weather. I never knew it could be so interesting to talk to people on Live.
Up until now, I had only used online social networking to research things or to connect with other people in my field of interest, but this “gamer networking” looks promising.
Now, if only people started buying Xboxes in India!
…and I just saw three snow scraper trucks make rounds on the street in front of my apartment. It’s 5:50 AM. Compare this to 2 days of disrupted life in NC when the snow first strikes.
Lately, I have been getting a lot of spam emails in my inboxes (both gmail and gargs.com), inspite of the usually reliable spam protection provided by Google. A lot of this spam has attached images that I usually discard without looking. I decided to look at one of these emails tonight, and it was spam sent by someone paid indirectly by a listed company to coerce investors into buying their stock! 
As you can see, the company is not doing very well, but it has some good news in the form of about $275,000 in non-brokered private proceeds. It has also appointed a new President, and a new Mining Consultant. I believe this company has only recently been listed, but due to my limited investment and stock exchange knowledge, I am not sure if that is correct. Nevertheless, what took me by surprise is the fact that the picture has a legal disclaimer that says that the spammer was paid an amount of $25,000 to “publish” the “report”! I knew that email spamming was big business, but didn’t realize it’s so easy to earn 25 grands just by sending an image to random email addresses.
My reading for today says, “Celebrate what is sure to be a good day by getting out and connecting with people.” Come to think of it, today is in fact a very good day. There’s lots of sun outside, and I do feel like going to the lake and talking to people. Maybe, I’d call up a friend today to catch up with them.
The extended forecast goes like this:
“Remember that it’s your duty to shine, so put away any excessive modesty. The stars declare that it’s time for you to share your talents. The world needs what you can give. What have you been too shy to declare?”
I am still trying to figure out how I could make the extended version more relevant. That’s the fun about reading horoscopes. They are usually cryptic messages that could be deciphered in a multitude of ways. What have I been trying to be modest about? Hmm…maybe it’s a signal that I need to stop doubting my capabilities, and just do it!
Horoscopes provide me joy…
Yesterday was election day in the US, something that happens every 2 years. The responsibility of electing representatives to the 435 House seats as well as 33 out of 100 Senate seats was given to the public today. As I sit here watching the Democratic party take control of the House for the first time in around 14 years, I find the election coverage very familiar.
There’s the usual reporting of live precincts, live interviews, the usual anxiety, and the usual rejoicing by the winners. I am a big fan of the statistics and graphical analysis, and it seems that not much is different in the way newscasters and reporters function in India and the US.
Now, if only I could vote in this country…
Want to use that college degree to make higher than average money? It’s simple – become a live-out nanny! I used to think that nanny jobs were typically low paying teenager jobs until I actually made a friend who worked as a nanny. Now, this girl was college educated and could have probably found at least a receptionist job at an office, but she really loved her nany job. For one, she enjoyed spending time with kids. The benefits from her job weren’t too shabby either. She made about half a grand a week, and perks included paid leaves as well as gasoline for transportation! You could say she was getting the perfect training in being a future mom, and getting paid for it. Sure, she was making less than 50 grand a year, but it was more money than being a homemaker.
With the couple having their own day jobs, child care and development has become a very important issue for the new age parents with lots of disposable income. This is more true for celebrity or executive parents. These are the people with personal jets and a payroll for the domestic support staff. The live out nannies (those who don’t live in with the family) make as much as $50k a year on top of the regular benefits like health insurance, paid leaves, and sick days. This is no small change.
A casual Internet search would reveal at least a dozen nanny agencies specializing in training and placing them. This is especially interesting if you consider that Phillipine women remitted over $7 billion to their country in 2001, creating the country’s second biggest source of hard currency after electronics exports. There is tremendous demand for bilingual qualified nannies.
Another way to think of this would be to appreciate how you actually save $50k a year by marrying a homemaker, and how she deserves at least part of those savings!
It wasn’t until 1988 that I got my first home computer, the Atari 65XE. I was less than 8 years old at the time, and the system was phenomenal. Not only was it a great home computer, it also came with an extensive library of games that could be loaded through a cartridge, or through a cassette drive.
We didn’t have LAN parties back then. No one had predicted anything of that sort at that time, at least no one my age. Traditional computer networks were extremely expensive, and a modem was a geek’s dream. Our gaming parties were constituted by getting together at a friend’s place and playing almost every game we had in our arsenal. We could spend entire evenings, or even days just playing against or with each other. Games were a lot simple back then. %5B2%5D.jpg)
So simple that even my parents enjoyed playing games on the weekends! The four of us would regularly gather around the Atari, and spend hours competing with each other in a game of River Raid or Pac-Man. I probably had around 50 different games, and the best thing was that my parents were always more excited than me when it came to buying new games or software.
Another allure of the Atari Home Computer was the fact that it wasn’t just a gaming console. It was a full fledged computer in the sense that it came with RAM (64K!), ROM, and a BASIC interpreter. This meant that I could type in my own programs and save them on an acoustic cassette. This was phenomenal. I learned to write programs in the BASIC language all by myself at the age of 8! In fact, I might still have some of them lying around at home. Too bad, the Atari doesn’t work any more. The last time I played River Raid on it was in 1995.
Portable video gaming at that time was mostly little LCD screen based battery operated handhelds. Again, I had almost a dozen, if not more, different video games 
from Casio and Nintendo. They were good to play while on the way to school, going on long drives, or when the class got boring 😉
The best thing in portable video gaming was definitely the Casio game watches. At one time, they were so pervasive that almost every kid in school wore one.
I was looking around on eBay when I realized that most of these video games and watches are collector’s items these days with a lot of the ones I have fetching close to $100 each. I still have all my video games and watches with me, so I wonder how long before they start fetching really good prices. At that point, I could truly go out and say that I have an antique collection!
I love my childood. I was able to learn everything much earlier than other kids my age, and had access to the best things out there. And, now I am old.
