Month: February 2005

Alumni event in the bay area

Attended a get together of IIT Kharagpur alumni in the bay area yeterday (I forgot to post this earlier). It was a fun filled evening with on stage live entertainment ranging from classical dances, live band, vocals with karoake, bollywood dancing etc. The Director in his short and sweet speech stole the show, especially with his joke on heaven and hell. There were a number of alumni heavy weights attending the event.

Post office

Been to the US post office lately? You go to the post office most often to mail something. This often means you want to send something fast and of course, cheapest. Unfortunately, these two don’t go together (in case you didn’t already know this!). On the other hand, you are flooded with options — Sir, would you like to send this by priority mail? Would you like a receipt? Would like delivery confirmation? Or would you just like to track it online? Btw, you can also send this by certified mail? Just when you think this might be your magic formula, the next question comes along — Sir, certified ok, but priority also? Receipt also? Deliver confirmation? How about express mail? I’ll give you an envelope for free! Would you like to buy some stamps today? (this is straight from the “ask about fries” McDonald’s school of customer training) Finally, an easy one, but no thank you!

The guy in front of me in the line was hilarious. He told the service agent, “Send this package the cheapest way, lose it if you can, I just want some proof that I mailed it!”.

Lost bookmarks, email folders!

I was shutting down my computer. Yahoo IM was on. And then it happened…my computer frooze. I was in a hurry, so I had to forcefully shut it down. Then, later I turned on my computer, and guess what. All my email folders in Outlook Express have disaapeared, my bookmarks in both IE and Firefox have disappeared. I did some web searches to find out about fixes, nothing has helped (getting bookmarks.bak from the application data folder didn’t help). My email folders are not much of an issue, since I use IMAP. But my bookmarks are a big source of grief. I had just cleaned it up, re-organized it etc. Btw, I did install the latest Windows update before this happened.

Any ideas will be hugely appreciated.

Too much happening…

Boy, its been a hectic week of news. In other words, too much happening to even formulate an opinion! Meanwhile, there are scores of theories on every issue, as always, and thanks to the www we have easy access to so many of them.

Carly ($21.4 M richer overnight, so its hard to say “poor Carly”) was fired, Bloglines (the founder has done it again, he last sold the groups company to yahoo) was acquired by Ask Jeeves, Ash was on Letterman (which I missed because of the last minute change in the date), South Africa thrashed England (like someone thankfully hit the reset button just when England thought they were getting ready to conquer the world again!), Condi Rice has hit the road immediately following her confirmation (check out the recent follow on news about Richard Clarke’s clear warning to her in Jan 2001), Howard Dean is the DNC chief (ok, but don’t give him the microphone!), Chalabi is back in favor in Iraq (man, what a change in fortunes!)…… and oh-oh, finally Harvard University chief is continuing to battle the repercussions of his “.…biological factors should be explored as a possible explanation for why fewer women than men succeeded in math and science careers” comment as heavy weights at Stanford, MIT and Princeton get ready to weigh in their views!

Note: NYT and SJ Mercury require registration, but its free.

Foreigners in India

Check out this blog by a person from Portland living in Bangalore. Interesting! With all the outsourcing happening to India a number of foreigners do live in India for an extended period of time. Its an interesting transformation happening in India with hordes of NRIs and foreigners moving to cities like Chennai and Bangalore.