Thought of the day

"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else." - Sam Walton

The Dilbert Blog: The Specialness Quotient

The Dilbert Blog: The Specialness Quotient: "One type of intelligence that I never hear discussed – and might be the most important one – is the degree to which you believe you are “special.” Or to put it bluntly, the more special you believe you are, the stupider you are."

Is Scott the most insightful person of our age? He comes up with such keen observations on life and people around us - things that are bothering you but you're not quite able to put them into an intellectual argument.

You must subscribe to Scott's blog if you haven't already done so. I think his comic strip is great but his blog is sometimes beyond amazing.

technorati tags: dilbert, scott+adams, special, psychology, philosophy, stupid

If telecommuting is so easy, why do we travel for work more than ever? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

If telecommuting is so easy, why do we travel for work more than ever? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine:

Tim makes some excellent observations in this piece. His analogy of the unfulfilled telecommuting phenomenon with the pipe dream of a paperless office really struck home.

I truly agree with him that mobile phone and email are not a substitute to face-to-face meetings but a complement to it.

Here's to our Airlines Miles!

technorati tags: airline+miles, travel, telecommuting, paperless+office, mobile

Brain Teaser

Imagine you are in a room with 3 switches. In an adjacent room there are 3 bulbs (all are off at the moment), each switch belongs to one bulb. It is impossible to see from one room to another. How can you find out which switch belongs to which bulb, if you may enter the room with the bulbs only once?

Leave your answer in the comments - I will post the solution in a couple of days.

Learn Your Kids' Language

Finding it difficult to understand what your kids are saying on SMS, IM, etc? Well, here's a quick cheat sheet:

http://www.ebuddy.com/lingo.php

CIO (Check it Out) :-)

Sensitive data dumped at recycling center by Indian Consulate in San Francisco

As if the incident itself was not bad enough, the consulate officials went on to put their proverbial feet in their mouths with quotations like:

- "As we see it, the documents are not confidential," said B.S. Prakash, the consul general. "We would see something as confidential if it has a Social Security number or a credit card number, not a passport number."

- At the Indian Consulate, Consul General Prakash said there may be a cultural dimension to the level of outrage related to the incident among Western visa applicants.
"In India, I would not be alarmed," he said. "We have grown up giving such information in many, many places. We would not be so worried if someone had our passport number."

- Deputy Consul General Sircar said that in other countries, Indian officials are able to go to the roofs of their offices and burn documents they're no longer able to store.
"In America, you cannot do that," he said.

At a time when Indian IT and BPO companies are going out of their way to assure their customers that their intellectual property, customer data and other confidential information is secure with them, this will come as quite a shock.

But to blame it on Indian culture is outright dumb. We expect much better judgment from our foreign service officials.