YAHOO GO FOR WINDOWS MOBILE REALLY SUCKS

Has anyone tried this abomination called Yahoo Go? It really, really sucks. Seems like Yahoo can't get anything right these days.

I need a miracle to recover my investment in Yahoo. Anyone out there who expects it to touch 35 AGAIN?

Indian hopes dashed - nation eats humble pie

A nation is crestfallen today. The high flying "Team India" had to eat humble pie as the Lankans handed them their return tickets.

I hope they will do away with this "TEAM INDIA" nonsense. Why can't they just call them the Indian cricket team?

And while they're at it, maybe they can stop using the term "India, Inc." in the Indian business media too. Let's relearn the basic Indian virtue of humility while we're still at the top of our game.

*This entry was posted from my Windows Mobile phone.

The Worst Cube-Dwelling Offenses

For me this one takes the cake!

Nuclearization and Indian National Identity

A very good analysis of the Indian identity that resulted in nuclearization and the subsequent impact of nuclearization back on the Indian identity. Do listen to the .mp3 file that is available on this page.

Hazy view of Mission Peak

Hazy view of Mission Peak from my Fremont office

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.

Index of Economic Freedom - Wall Street Journal

This is the kind of crap you get when you take on such research based on so called "objective" criteria. I mean, how do you justify Saudi Arabia having more economic freedom than India? And Pakistan? And Tajikistan? And Cambodia? I mean, "Freedom" is an alien concept in most of these societies.

You can download the full report card here.

technorati tags: economic, freedom, wall+street+journal, india, pakistan, saudi+arabia

DMS: the Indian angle - Express Computer

DMS: the Indian angle - Express Computer: "DMS: the Indian angle"

"New-found enthusiasm among government organisations to leverage IT as an enabler for their growth is propelling DMS adoption. Vendors foresee an opportunity in providing state-of-the-art products and solutions to Indian enterprises that are setting up offices abroad, as well as to MNCs coming to India. The rapid growth in telecom, manufacturing and retail has added fuel to this fire. The telecom sector expects to tap 500 million consumers by 2010. Forecasts Diwakar Nigam, MD, NewGen, “Greater storage capabilities and tools for automated management of data, increased demands of mobile users, integration of other enterprise applications with the DMS, superior workflow capabilities providing quick access to voluminous information such as high-quality video and pictorial data (in addition to the traditional documents flow), and last but not the least, compliance, will drive the market in India.”

Things are really hotting up in the Indian market - and Document Management is an idea whose time has really come. ‘‘Owing to the large number of public sector enterprises, which are still paper-based, there is considerable scope for DMS in India. Due to continuous geographical expansion and the launch of new operations, enterprises are demanding solutions to manage their massive amount of content, both structured and unstructured.’’ says Diwakar Nigam, Managing Director, Newgen Software.

technorati tags: ECM, Enterprise+Content+Management, Document+Management, Newgen+Software, Diwakar+Nigam

BlackBerry Orphans - WSJ.com

A good wake up alarm - at this time of the year when you are likely to be in a reflective mood - particularly with respect to work-family balance. I guess like all fads, this too will pass - after a while you do realize that if you receive an email on Saturday evening at 7:00 pm, you don't have to reply it then - nothing's gonna happen till Monday morning anyway. You might as well ignore it and go on having quality time with your family. Then Monday morning when you get to work, fire up your Outlook and start replying.

To me it seems like a vicious cycle - someone sends you an email at an odd time - you are tempted to respond immediately - I don't know why - to show you're a busy person, you are always on, you're hip to mobile technology, you are always connected, you've go the latest tech gadgets, etc, - then you do the same with someone and so on and the cycle continues. I guess if enough people decided this new year's day to break this obsessive compulsive behavior, the cycle might break a little.

technorati tags: GTD, BlackBerry, OCD, Obsessive+Compulsive

How to use a personalized email address with Google Gmail

You love the ease of using Gmail - but you already have a personalized email account on your own domain - e.g. mail@yourname.com, or yourname@yourbusinessname.com, etc. Wouldn't it be fantastic to combine the advantages of both? Here's a DIY (Do It Yourself) guide to do it this holiday season - and it doesn't cost a dime:

1. Create a Google Gmail account.

2. Get the host for your domain to change your email address from a pop address to a forwarding address. If you have access to your hosting configuration, you can usually do it yourself. Please be careful doing this - it does lead to a short window of breakdown - when your email stops working temporarily. Best time to do it is over weekends if you are a business.

3. Forward your email address (from Step 2) to the new Gmail address you created in Step 1.

4. Go into the Settings tab of your Gmail interface in the web browser and then to the Forwarding and Pop Tab. You need to Enable Pop Access here and Archive Gmail's copy after accessing from POP client. That way your emails will always be available through Gmail (that is, till you run out of the 2GB free space)

5. Click on the Configuration Instructions link to follow directions for setting up your POP Email client - Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc. Remember to set your SMTP to the one that Google provides -that way your outgoing emails are also archived in your Gmail account - thus your Gmail account serves as a foolproof instantaneous archive of all your emails.

6. Sometimes you want to use the browser interface of Gmail to send emails (say when you are on a public access kiosk, etc. at an airport, convention, etc.). However you would still like to send out the emails using your personalized address - not you Gmail address. Gmail provides for this also. Go to the Settings->Accounts tab in Gmail and set your personalized account there. Also, don't forget to put in your signature in the General tab - it saves you a lot of typing.

7. This setup works great from your mobile phone also - Gmail is now accessible not only through smartphones, but pretty much any Java capable phone with a data connection. Now you can receive and send emails from your personalized account using any phone.

technorati tags: Google, Gmail, Yahoo, email, pop, pop3, free, disaster+recovery, online+backup, smtp, life+hacks, GTD, Computer+tips+and+tricks

Beautiful, Sunny December Day in the City

Mind of Mencia- 7/11

Mencia's amazing enactment of a Hindu 7-11 store owner - dissing all the races. Hilarious doesn't begin to describe it.

Smile

Congratulations!

MoonBeam - the DIY 100 MPG Car

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze6omtd/jorysquibb/index.html

All you ever wanted to know about building a 100 mpg car but were too afraid to ask!

Jory Squibb lays it all out here - a 1000 hours DIY project - $2500 in parts from used Honda scooters. Looking at how simple this is, I wonder why the automobile companies are not picking up on this trend.

"If we were to keep track of how we use our cars on a weekly basis, it might become clear that we are often using a large car when we could be using a very small car. Getting groceries, picking up kids, going to the doctor's--these are often errands which don't take us far from home, or require more than 40MPH. Perhaps we could substitute a tiny car, a sort of enclosed motorscooter for these situations--a microcar."

Specially in USA, there seems to be a craze for useless horsepower. Look at the median family sedans - the horsepower has gone up from about 125 in early 90s to 240 now. Yet, if you look at traffic patterns in major urban areas, the average speed on highways and city roads has been reducing every year due to congestion. Where do you get to use this horsepower - the speed limits have not changed - and fast acceleration is a sure way of attracting cops' attention.

Same thing has happened to motorcycles. While anywhere else in the world you will see the average street bikes in the 100 - 250 cc range, in USA they talk about 600 cc bikes as a starter bike - the desirable one being more in the 1000 cc plus range.

Tags: 100 mpg, gasoline, gas prices, petrol, oil, honda, motorcar, scooter, motorcycle, automobile, green car, environment, conservation

India doesn't need SEZs: Bhagwati- The Times of India

India doesn't need SEZs: Bhagwati- The Times of India:

Here's a great quote from the Columbia University economist - Jagdish Bhagwati on the potential economic growth of India and China in the near future:

"There are three things around which there needs to be consensus.

Development is a powerful cocktail made of three liqueurs. One is openness. Greater integration with the world can bring you benefits in trade and investment.

Two, economic freedom, which I don't like because it sounds ideological, like judicious use of markets—not a knee-jerk reaction against them but being pragmatic about it. Use markets more freely whatever your objectives.

The third is political democracy, what we call political freedom, which is a great value in itself,'he said.

'India had democracy, not the other two (openness and free markets). Now we have all three. Now we are poised for dramatic growth. China, unfortunately, has the first two but not democracy. And there it's leading to a lot of problems. It can go on to create massive social destruction. We have the ideal brew,'he adds. "

technorati tags: tom+friedman, bhagwati, columbia+university, india, china, economic, growth