Thursday, June 29, 2006

Time for charity

If you are following the international news, there has been a sudden splurge in the charity contributions from the celebrities.
Bill Gates was followed by Warren Buffet. Now Jackie Chan joins the chain.

I am wondering will there be any mentionable charity contributions to NGOs from desi celebrities! As per tradition, the family wealth is inherited by the heirs and there is very little left over for the charity!

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

TeleMarketing at its peak

Until recently my desk phone at my workplace had only internal extension and could not be reached directly from outside. The call to my desk phone had to be routed through the front desk office or through the EPABX system. The moment DID (Direct Inward Dialling) got activated, the telemarketing calls has started coming in.
HSBC was the first one to sniff. Most of my officemates had got a call from HSBC for their free lifetime gold credit card offering.

How did HSBC get these numbers? Might be the service provider could have leaked. Otherwise nobody could sniff the number right on activation.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Too much sports to follow

If you are an avid sports buff, there are too many sports to follow these days. Coincidentally all of these events are happening at the same time of the year.

Football : FIFA World Cup
Racing: F1
Cricket: India - WI Test series
Tennis: Wimbledon
Hockey: Azlan Shah tournament

Our cable operator had just two slots for the sports channels and he use to swap sports channels in those two slots based on the coverages. These days he has increased the slots to three providing ESPN, StarSports and TEN Sports simultaneously.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Hooking through dial-up

After so much getting used to broadband, I got hooked to net from my native home through dial-up. Being slow is awfull. I had to see and wait for the progress bar to complete which normally doesn't show up while on broadband connection. Luckily the connection was solid and never dropped off until now!

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Dirty politics and bangalore

DeveGowda is always blamed for his dirty politics and his hand in bringing down bangalore to a crumbling state. Rediff published a guest column by S Raghotham on this. Substantiating it there was another news about Infy recruiting in Chennai (probably just out of coincidence).

Friday, June 09, 2006

Tribute to President of India

Though there are many qualities that one likes in our President APJ Abdul Kalam, I like to mention three top most of them

1. Not a rubber stamp

From the past experiences, most of the times the President is considered as a rubber stamp to the ruling government approving all the bills and amendments passed by the parliament. By rejecting the Office of Profit amendment bill our President stands tall from the usual claim. He has become a prefect precedent setting high standards for many other presidents to come in the future.

2. Active

Generally the eminent person selected for the President post are in the age group of 70+. At such age most presidents had lacked activeness and willingness to take risks. Again our president had ditched those myths and in this year he has tried travelling in submarines and Su30-MKI fighter planes which no other presidents would dare to do.

3. Reach people

Our president has again raised the bars in the area of reachablility. The interest he shows in mingling with common people and not staying secluded inside Presidential palace is well appreciated. Though I am not aware of how other presidents had their reachability, I am certain that our current President is much higher on this.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Win XP titbit

Have you ever noticed your screen getting color faded gradually and going into monochrome mode when you invoke and leave "Shutdown Windows" box for a while.
I am not aware of any preference setting to get this activated. Is there one?

Food poisoining

It has happened twice to me. Food poisoning on eating out. Last sunday I took breakfast at fast food hotel in jayanagar. In less than an hour I could feel symptoms of food poisoning and I had to suffer for two days with in-digestion, stomach-ache and moderate temperature. In this post I am planning to maintain an exclusion list of hotels/fast food chains. It is a WATCH-OUT list.

HotelName - Place - Food to avoid
Adthiya - Jayanagar - Karabath

New trend in surrendering

It is obvious, observing the incidents attached to the mysterious ill-health of Rahul Mahajan (the son of slain BJP leader Pramod Mahajan), of the new trend followed by the suspects. All the suspects has turned to private channels to air their statement before surrendering to the police.

With the media hypocrisy going among the channels, it is no wonder that media doesn't hesitate to air such fresh news to attract the masses.

The police will be put under immense pressure to get the real truth and prove their trustworthiness. They will not be in a position to manhandle the suspects to get truth out of them that contradicts the news in the media.

Apparently with the media airing all the angles of the story, it becomes quiet a overdose for any common man and ends up confusing things a lot. Will there be any prudence/discretion in airing such disclosures or will there be a ban on such things will be answered as time flies by.

Update: Apparently one of the suspect contradicted his earlier statement given to the media. What a heck!