Entries from December 2007 ↓

Today has been a mix of joy and sadness, I woke up to shrieking sounds coming out of our neighbors house. On inquiry we got to know that 2 of my neighbors (Husband and Wife) had committed suicide. Although i did not know them personally, i have seen them at various times and they seemed like nice people. What made the whole thing worse was they tried to hang their 5 year old daughter too. As it turned out the rope was too long for her and she survived, although she had to stay with the corpses overnight since they had tied up her hand and mouth.

I don’t really want to go into the morality of the whole thing but i hope their souls rest in peace and i hope her daughter grows up without being affected by her convoluted past. My heart goes out to her and if she continues to stay opposite our house, i will make sure to get to know her and help in anyway possible.

After such a dampening start, my day got much better thanks to a great Christmas lunch at our very own Rockstar’s house. Lots of interesting chatter and absolutely sublime food (*slurp). Thanks for the invite Gaurav, certainly made my day.

All in all, A day of mixed emotions. Reminds me of the Alanis Morisette song Ironic

Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything’s okay and everything’s going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out when
You think everything’s gone wrong and everything blows up
In your face

Merry Christmas folks! May the force be with you all.

Paul Grignon’s 47-minute animated presentation of “Money as Debt” tells in very simple and effective graphic terms what money is and how it … all » is being created. It is an entertaining way to get the message out. The Cowichan Citizens Coalition and its “Duncan Initiative” received high praise from those who previewed it. I recommend it as a painless but hard-hitting educational tool and encourage the widest distribution and use by all groups concerned with the present unsustainable monetary system in Canada and the United States.

Must Watch

If this interests and intrigues you then i also reccommend reading “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”, The two put together makes you understand why big Foreign Corporations invest tons and tons of money into developing nations knowing well enough that they probably wont be in a position to repay that money. The system is driven by credit!

Spooky is all i can say.

A common subject of discussion at the various Indian conferences is, how vast majority of Indian Software Programmers code for a good living v/s coding for fun and how this affects the kind of innovation which comes out of India. As much as this sounds like a plausible explanation, I have over time come to believe that it is not essential to be in love with something to be good at it. What is more important is competitiveness, If you are one of those people who hates losing then you will never be bad or dispassionate at anything!

That puts a different perspective to the hallway discussions, Are most afore mentioned people “happy go lucky” people v/s dispassionate code monkeys?

The song “Code Monkey” says it all.

[youtube=”http://youtube.com/watch?v=5W_wd9Qf0IE”]

“The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved. Desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes awwwwww.” — Jack Kerouac

From here: Matthew J. Szulik steps down as president and CEO of Redhat

There is something romantic about growth of companies, from tiny shacks to global empires. And as much as we all hate the “Empires” that some of them become, No one can ever deny loving them while they grew up.

I woke up this morning to find emails from about 10 of my friends scrapping me on Orkut. The common part of all the scraps was this text:

“2008 vem ai… que ele comece mto bem para vc”

It looked like a virus and i quickly did some checks to see if i am infected too, but havent found any proof of it yet. The only common pattern seems to be that these guys are on Windows, in essence there seems to be Windows Virus spreading (luckily no traces of windows
on my machine).

If you use windows and orkut i suggest you change password immediately and also run updated virus definitions.

Here is a link which reports the problem:

http://tinyurl.com/2suxsl

[Update]
Mrinal points out that it seems to be a cross platform js and flash virus. Ad blocking this url could solve the issue.
http://files.myopera.com/virusdoorkut/files/virus.js

[Update]

How do you notify other people of trolls without giving him link love?

My blog has decently high ranking and i need to make other people aware of this troll, but i dont want him to feel happy that a fairly high ranked blog linked back to him!

What we need is something like this
a href=”link” id=”troll”

Any best practices in such a situation?