Rahul GaitondeFrom a Dilbert Cartoon strip from Scott Adams’ “The Dilbert Principle”:
Boss: “Our policy is to employ only the best technical professionals”.
Dilbert: “Question”.
Dilbert: “Isn’t it also our policy to base salaries on the industry average”?
Boss: “Right. We like them bright but clueless”.
Hmm. Very very insightful! Ask your manager that the next time ‘increment time’ comes along!
Here’s an email forward I received some days ago – hilarious and intelligent at the same time!
When you occasionally have a really bad day, and you just need to take it out on someone, don’t take it out on someone you know, take it out on someone you don’t know. I was sitting at my desk when I remembered a phone call I had forgotten to make. I found the number and dialled it. A man answered, saying, “Hello.” I politely said,
“This is Andrew. Could I please speak with Robin Carter?” Suddenly, the phone was slammed down on me. I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so rude. I tracked down Robin’s correct number and called her. By mistake, earlier I had transposed the last two digits of her phone number. After hanging up with her, I decided to call the ‘wrong’ number again.
When the same guy answered the phone, I yelled, “You’re an asshole!” and hung up.
I wrote his number down with the word ‘asshole’ next to it, and put it in my desk drawer. Every couple of weeks, when I was paying bills or had a really bad day, I’d call him up and yell, “You’re an asshole!”
It always cheered me up.
When Caller ID came to our area, I thought my therapeutic ‘asshole’ calling would have to stop. So, I called his number and said, “Hi, this is John Smith from the telephone Company. I’m just calling to see if you’re familiar with the Caller ID program?”
He yelled, “NO!” and slammed the phone down. I quickly called him back and said,”That’s because you’re an asshole!”
One day I was at the store, getting ready to pull into a parking spot.
Some guy in a black BMW cut me off and pulled into the spot I had patiently waited for. I hit the horn and yelled that I had been waiting for the spot. The idiot ignored me.
Then, I noticed a “For Sale” sign in his car window. ..so, I wrote down his number. A couple of days later, right after calling the first asshole, (I had his number on speed dial), I thought I had better call the BMW asshole,
too.I said, “Is this the man with the black BMW for sale?”
“Yes, it is.” “Can you tell me where I can see it?” “Yes, I live at 1802 West 34th Street. It’s a yellow house, and the car’s parked right out in front.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“My name is Don Hansen,” he said.
“When’s a good time to catch you, Don?”
“I’m home every evening after five.”
“Listen, Don, can I tell you something?”
“Yes?”
“Don, you’re an asshole.”
Then I hung up, and added his number to my speed dial, too. Now, when I had a problem, I had two assholes to call. But after several months of calling them, it wasn’t as enjoyable as it used to be.
So, I came up with an idea. I called Asshole #1. “Hello.” “You’re an asshole!” (But I didn’t hang up.)
“Are you still there?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Stop calling me,” he screamed.
“Make me!,” I said.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Don Hansen.”
“Yeah? Where do you live?”
“Asshole, I live at 1802 West 34th Street, a yellow house, with my black Beamer parked in front.” He said, “I’m coming over right now, Don. And you had better start your prayers.”
I said, “Yeah, like I’m really scared, asshole.”
Then I called Asshole #2.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hello, asshole,” I said.
He yelled, “If I ever find out who you are?”
“You’ll what?” I said.
“I’ll kick your ass,” he exclaimed.
I answered, “Well, asshole, here’s your chance. I’m coming over right now.”
Then I hung up and immediately called the police, saying that I lived at 1802 West 34th Street, and that I was on my way over there to kill my gay lover.
Then I called Channel 13 News about the gang war going down on West 34th Street. I quickly got into my car and headed over to 34th street.
There I saw two assholes beating the crap out of each other in front of six squad cars, a police helicopter, and news crew.
NOW, I feel better…….
Pune needs to stay awake later – at least, its commercial establishments do. Even today, after Pune’s shrugged off its ‘retirees’ heaven’ tag, most shops close between 8:30 to 9PM. For someone who’s spent two decades and more in Mumbai, this is shocking.
The other day, we decided to visit Pune Central (article about Pune Central’s launch), Pantaloon’s latest mall here. A lot of native Punekars had recommended this place highly. Well, we pulled up outside Pune Central about 8:55PM. There are three entrances and one exit. The entrances were blocked by red tape (no, really, red tape!), leaving only the exit open. When we asked the guards where the parking lot was, they pointed to the exit and told us that the mall doesn’t take in shoppers after 9:00PM, and closes at 9:30PM! We couldn’t believe our ears!
I mean, Pune Central is a decent-sized mall. Smaller than R-Mall at Mulund in Mumbai, but still fairly large. And it’s very brightly lit up and all that. But why bother with all the lighting if you’re going to shut down the moment it’s dark? In Mumbai (or for that matter any major cosmopolitan city), crowds would start coming in by 10:00PM. A mall like Pune Central ought to consider closing by 1:00AM or so.
‘
The people of Pune are now prepared for the onslaught of ‘new-age’ commercialism, of the kind that hit Mumbai about 6 years ago. But clearly, Pantaloons doesn’t seem to have realised that – and it isn’t the only one. Given the opportunity, there are enough yuppies in Pune to continue to throng its malls, shopping arcades and parks well after midnight. So why shut down at 9:00? For God’s sake, that’s when most of the young working population returns from work! Wake up, Pune, and stay awake longer!
The power of collaborative development on Wikipedia is amazing – Mark Felt declared he was Deep Throat only on May the 31st, and I just happened, entirely by coincidence, to be reading about the Watergate scandal on Wikipedia, when I came across this:
“Decades of speculation ended on May 31, 2005 when the No. 2 official at the FBI in the early 1970s, W. Mark Felt, revealed that he was Deep Throat.”
An ordinary website would have taken a few days to update this page, ’cause it’s a bunch of guys in charge of a lot of information. With a wiki, there’s one person who ‘owns’ the page – that is, takes responsibility for keeping the page up-to-date (of course, anyone with a wikipedia account can edit it). The moment he/she read about the news item about Deep Throat, the page was updated.
Here it is: ThinkWiki.org. You will be astounded at the richness of information there is on this website. And model-specific data, to boot! And as if to prove that the authors are true-blue hackers (as if the very existence of the website wasn’t enough!), there are articles not only on achieving the same functionality on Linux as on Windows, but also taking things ahead! For instance, this article here on changing the boot-up BIOS screen to a picture of Tux the penguin! How’s that for true hackery!
I have had a look, this weekend, at a lot of the custom-built tools for the TP that IBM‘s been building for Windows. I aim to enable the full functionality of these tools on Linux (I have Fedora Core 3 installed here), and plan to document the whole effort (given enough time, of course.) I predict that a lot of the information I’ll need will be here at ThinkWiki. Watch this space!
The inimitable Rob Miller aka Roblimo, has a Windows XP review on Newsforge! If you’ve read the hundreds upon hundreds of reviews of Linux distributions over the years (I’ve been doing that since 1999), you’ll have noticed how everyone pays lip service to the fact that the Desktop is evolving so well, but then concluding that it’s *almost* usable, and that *if only* there were better hardware support, or better third-party software, then Linux could be a serious competitor to Windows. For now, the average user is better off with Windows, and that Linux is Not For You (TM).
Well, Roblimo turns the tables! As an average Linux user, he evaluates Windows XP home with SP2, and writes a critique of the pros and cons of the OE. Delightfully, he writes a review which is identical to the scores of Linux reviews we read about so often on OSNews and MadPenguin, but with the OSes reversed! What is supposed to suck with Linux also sucks with Windows – that’s evident!
This is an article which is tempting to brand as satire, but the funny part is that all of it is true! A must read!
The inimitable Rob Miller aka Roblimo, has a Windows XP review on Newsforge! If you’ve read the hundreds upon hundreds of reviews of Linux distributions over the years (I’ve been doing that since 1999), you’ll have noticed how everyone pays lip service to the fact that the Desktop is evolving so well, but then concluding that it’s *almost* usable, and that *if only* there were better hardware support, or better third-party software, then Linux could be a serious competitor to Windows. For now, the average user is better off with Windows, and that Linux is Not For You (TM).
Well, Roblimo turns the tables! As an average Linux user, he evaluates Windows XP home with SP2, and writes a critique of the pros and cons of the OE. Delightfully, he writes a review which is identical to the scores of Linux reviews we read about so often on OSNews and MadPenguin, but with the OSes reversed! What is supposed to suck with Linux also sucks with Windows – that’s evident!
This is an article which is tempting to brand as satire, but the funny part is that all of it is true! A must read!
Story from the BBC: The assault on software giant Microsoft
Supposed to be part one of a two-part series. Examines Linux, OpenOffice.org, the GIMP (surprise!), Gmail and Firefox. Also discussed are the dominance of Apple’s iPod and Nokia’s bid to push MS out of the mobile software business.
True, Microsoft is under attack from every single area of technology it’s got its finger in. A quote in the article says, “Companies are not afraid of competing with Microsoft anymore”.
Interestingly, Gates has tried out Firefox too, but thinks it’s “just another browser”. No justification.
There are far too many brands available for every goddamned thing out in the U.S.! And each brand says that it offers something obscure which the other ones don’t. Of course, this makes simple tasks, which we’d usually perform almost involuntarily here, take many times longer to do than here. This is the Problem of Choice.
Take good old Coffee, for example. At the Conference, I wanted a simple cup of coffee. You know, the few hundred millilitres of steaming, muddy brown liquid we consume in unstable, thin, crumply plastic cups at weddings, scalding the tips of all fingers by the time we’re done. How long does it take to get yourself a cup of coffee? Fifteen seconds at max? Well, it took me far, far longer than that the first time at the conference. Let me contrast Here and There:
Here:
Locate where they’ve got coffee and tea tanks. There’s one labelled Tea, and the other Coffee. Big pile of plastic cups beside. Take one, hold under Coffee tank, turn the tap on, fill cup, turn off, walk away. Enjoy juggling the cup from hand to hand.
Time: 15 seconds.
There:
Locate where they’ve got coffee and tea tanks. Realise they haven’t got any. They’ve got a whole line of flasks there, along with multiple envelopes, stirrers, glass cups, plastic cups, mugs, glasses and a large subset of an average kitchen-full of other things. Read labels on flasks. Latte. Decaf. (?? What about “Coffee”?) There are other machines with buttons that have a picture of a coffee cup on them, but have weird names like Expresso, Ristretto, and other ones. No, I don’t think I saw a Stiletto. I don’t think that would have gone too well down my throat. Where’s Coffee? A kind soul tells me that I could have any one of these; all of them were Coffee. OK. I settle on Decaf. The name sounded the most like Coffee – perhaps it was American slang for “The Coffee”. You know? De Caf. Take a cup. Pour out Decaf. Out comes the darkest, most foul-smelling liquid you’ve seen. Oops. Perhaps Decaf is slang for Skunk Gland Juice. No way can I drink it like this. Maybe here we need to add milk too.
Locate Milk. Turns out they have Full-fat, Skim, Toned, and numerous others labelled with varying percentages of fat. Hmm. Skim looks the least harmful. Pour Skim into cup until we get Normal Colour, till it at least *looks* like the Coffee back in India. Sip nervously. Nope. Still tastes like something from a skunk. Maybe sugar would help. Do I try sugar cubes, powdered sugar, sugar crystals, sugar packets, or sugar-free sugar substitues? Aarrgh! I want ^$%#ing sugar, dammit! I try the crystals. Nope. Keep adding more. Traces of the skunk reduce, but they’re still there.
By now a small crowd of about a half-dozen curious onlookers has gathered. I try to give them my most winsome smiles. One of them later tells me it looked like those faces you make when Nature calls most vociferously. I try more sugar. In fact, I keep trying till I can see the letters D-I-A-B-E-T-E-S floating in the cup. After a few iterations of Try-Sip-Almost Retch I can tolerate the concoction. Coffee, anyone?
Time: 11 minutes, 39 seconds = 699 seconds.
And they say it’s Easy the American Way! Bah!
Hi.
Not a peep from me for about a month. Where have I been? My readers, who usually would like nothing better than for me to shut up for a while, have been increasingly clamouring for an explanation for this most unusual silence from me. Strangers have accosted me on the streets: “Why hasn’t your blog been updated?” Cranks have called me up on my cell phone, my land line; my email inbox is flooded with messages from the same puzzled junta asking the same questions, and National Television is doing an investigative series on why rahulgaitonde.org has been lying untouched for all of April. A conspiracy theory is being constructed which links the silence on my blog to the arrest of the Shankaracharya, the upcoming session of Parliament, and the worsening power crisis in Maharashtra.
Enough said. Today, I shall lift the curtain, finally, on this dark secret.
I have attended an IBM Academy of Technology Conference at the T. J. Watson Research Center in New York. I presented a paper that I and my colleague Pallavi wrote. I am not at liberty to disclose what it was exactly that I did at the Conference, but then you wouldn’t be too interested in that. Nothing much apart from a LOT of techie-talk and techie-techie-hobnobbing, duscussing hypothetical solutions for even hypothetical-er problems. But that’s what happens at all conferences, right?
I did, however, have a fun week in the USA, where my most significant (non-IBM-confidential) activity was exploring the island of Manhattan. Have I got a lot to tell you guys!
Actually, there were some very typical reactions from the people around me when I returned. Surprisingly, more people were disappointed than happy:
The old granny in the next wing was very downcast when she observed that I had not grown taller, thinner and had not become any fairer. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could end up with a pink-and-white schoolgirl complexion after eight days in the U.S.?
Aunty next door insisted that I had found a Girl while I was there. She wanted to know her name, whether she was Indian or not, if she was vegetarian, and when I was going to get married. Talk about getting ahead of oneself! Very disappointed when she realised that my emphatic, then pleading, and finally indifferent NOes were actually true.
Friends wanted to know I had ‘met’ any ‘sexy babes’ in the U.S. Since my answer to that was ‘No’, the painfully obivious, predictable, uncomfortable sequence of follow-up questions were not asked of me. Thankfully. Older Gujju friends wanted to know how much I had earned, in ‘Amreeki dollarz’. Immediately followed up by an inpromptu, totally unasked-for Finance Tips session.
Some friends, already legends for their conspiracy theories, lived up to their reputation by insisting that I had found a job in the U.S. when I was there. The only way these guys will be convinced of the contrary is when they find me at IBM months later, sitll working as diligently as before the U.S. trip.
Then the usual taunts, supposedly richly sarcastic and full of wit (ugh!), about Rupees v/s Dollars, whether I could tolerate drinking water or the weather here anymore, left-hand drive, how my colloquial language has changed (my God, where’d they get that one from?!), and other inane ones I’d rather not waste time and space enumerating here.
Anyways, I have written a lot during my travel and suring my stay there. I’ve edited the documents, cutting out the parts which pertain to Internal IBM Information. For your reading pleasure, dear readers, here is a first-hand account of my first trip to a foreign land. Enjoy!