On NYE

The thing about new years eve parties is, you see one, you've seen them all.

"The polar bears will do just fine"

I didn't say that. But a colleague did while predicting doom for environmental activism, given climategate. 

Why I hate Comcast

First off they pissed me off early this year when they repeatedly cut service because I was paying to my old account number. They had graciously changed the account number when we moved. It didn't matter that I was making payments on time every month; they took all of 4 months to get all the money I had paid them from my old account to my new account; in the mean time they cut me off every month from their service. Here was the sequence of events.

- Account due date approaches

- I just pay what is due for the current month

- They cut off service

- I call them only to be told that I had not paid 3 months of dues

- I ask the moron on the other end to check my previous account.

- This is followed by, "oh hmm.. gee sorry about that", we have now restored your service

- I get the next months bill in which there's an "account reactivation fees"! 

- I call them back and shake my fist at which point they tell me they have revoked the fees

- Repeat all of the above for the next month

For all the grief that they caused me, I cannot find another service provider in my area because the a-holes on capitol hill think it is perfectly fine for an entire industry to be made up of 3 companies that split up the country amongst themselves.  Thinking of this is one of the moments in my day where I would gladly rip a senator or congressman or woman to shreds.

Today I realized comcast took the liberty of showing me search results from yahoo for an invalid url entry - after making me wait for about 10 seconds! No points for guessing whether they asked me the permission to do that. It took me, a reasonably tekky guy, about 10 minutes to figure out how to disable the @^#%^!@*$&@ feature.

Some day, some day, I am going to stop paying those bastards for giving me so much pain.

The feel good channel

If you can get past the fact that I am watching Oxygen on cable at 3am in the morning,... I can't help wonder how much of a feel good channel it is.

First you have a movie called Serendipity (I found out the name after the movie was done while writing this) about two ppl who meet each other for a few minutes and are thinking of each other for the next several years coming together again hours after calling off their own weddings. The setting is Christmas in New York City and its snowing.

Add to this the commercials that are about cuddly pets, sunny mornings in white washed homes with kids running around breakfast tables.

Given that most TV is anti-reality these days, I hate to imagine the lives of the people who are up watching this.

Oh!

a midsummer afternoon never to come again

Jerry sent this photo to our email group a while back. It is probably from the early 90's. It was likely when the schools were closed and we hung out in either pandey's or one of the other guys' homes. We probably ventured out in the afternoon and someone likely thought a photo was warranted. We are all sitting in the middle of what was called "approach road" that led to our homes in the sprawling vizag steel plant.. reddy, pandey, nanda, myself, kutri, jerry, and pk. There should have been others, but I don't remember why they weren't there. 

We barely talk to each other anymore, let alone meet.

I once asked my dad when I was old enough to know to ask such questions, but young enough for him to talk to me about such things - if he ever had close friends like I had. He was on the our bed playing solitaire like he did most of the time when he was home - the two other things he did was listen to the radio or read the newspaper. He said he did have very close friends. I asked why we didn't know any of them, why he didn't keep in touch.  He thought for a few moments, almost pausing his game but not quite; he said, well we all just drifted apart -- everyone got married and started living their own lives.

It was unfathomable to me at that time.

Now, I get it.

Milestones

1991

1997

1998

1999

2000

2002

2004

2006

2007

2008

What was that I wanted to write?

The question is, do we loose our ability to express ourselves with age? I can vividly remember sitting for hours on end and writing about something or the other and the words would just flow out of my mind on to the paper - or the keyboard. Lately though the words keep swirling in a jumble in my head, I know they collectively mean something, but it is next to impossible to discipline them into a structure that can be laid out on a page.

I heard somewhere the other day that the human brain peaks at 27. The power of expression I am afraid appears to reach a crescendo somewhere around there too.

Lok Sabha Elections 2009

Lok Sabha Elections 2009

This is pretty neat on google's part. There is even an option to search the voter rolls if you are from one of 5 major cities. Pity they couldn't get a handle on nationwide voter rolls. Why such information isn't made more easily accessible by the Indian Govt is pointless question to ask!

Improve freshness using tweets?

Yahoo! Search Blog » Blog Archive » Q&A with Vik Singh on Yahoo! Search BOSS and Open Web Search

This is a really interesting approach.. quoting the Y! architect featured in the article:

When breaking news happens (like the Mumbai bombing, Hudson River plane crash, or wildfires), it’s difficult for traditional news sources to discover and prioritize all the information in a timely fashion. It can take several minutes or hours for traditional media to converge on the important stories. However, new social media outlets like Twitter are breaking these important stories faster than traditional media. By looking at the number of users chatting about these topics, one can measure the future newsworthiness of a very fresh story despite its potentially minimal traditional news coverage at that moment.

From credit default swaps to a bad case of recession

Some interesting reads about the current economic,.. ahem.. crisis.

1. Revenge of the glut
2. This white paper by a couple of professors at the NYU Stern School of Business
3. The paradox of thrift in today's Marketplace edition
   

One thing that is certainly emerging is this: it is not just a bunch of bad mortgages. In the last 20 years, American household debt has increased to around 13 trillion, which is almost the size of the GDP!