Archive for WriteThings

3 realizations as you grow-up

  • The more the money a guy spends, the more the money he gets.
  • The sharpest/smartest of the guys, gets to work for the least known company or gets the least known pay-cheque.
  • The best known rogue of your group, gets the prettiest girl amongst all.

You can’t deny quoting some rare exceptions!

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Bug Business

A few realizations:

  • A bug ignored now, will remember to trouble you later.
  • A dirty fix of this day, will vouch for a certain embarrassment on the other day.
  • A fix in time, saves your 9pm.
  • 80% of bugs are solvable. While the rest can be concealed.
  • Engineering team thrives on bugs. Marketing thrives on fixes.
  • A bug with no fix is no more a bug; Its a limitation.
  • A bug in the fix is a recurring problem, for which there is no fix.

PS: Lets get things going. Btw, thrattle gets a new look & now served with WP v2.5.

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Sauce & Ketchup

I was really unaware of the difference of the words Sauce & Ketchup until I got one when I ordered the other. Here are the differences for clarity:

Sauce Ketchup
Savory thing of several kinds, chillies, cheese, BBQ, … Sweet thing made from ripe tomatoes.
Seen as thinner liquids. Thicker semi-liquids.
Usually served hot Is always cold.
Comes as a part of the food. Just an optional additive.

In the US, when you order for tomato sauce, you’ll get a big tin can with tomato pulp. Nothing more! So next time you visit a pizza shop, you know what to ask for.

Idea: Aparna

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Search Phenomenon

Way back in 1998, my 1st encounter with the Internet was via www.yahoo.com. People publicized saying that one can find anything & everything in the Internet. Such a statement indirectly portraited the power of search engines. The importance of Google in www, in the recent times, just reinforces the potential of search.

Take a look at my “all time” search queries with Google:
Search History
The slump in December is because, I still have 30 more days to go. This is just Google, un-accounting things with Wikipedia & IMDB. But its hard to believe that one can do, on an average, about 400 searches a month. Thats the index about our dependency with Google or any other search engine.

Search queries are very much disjointed. Meaning, I may search for “OLPC” & once I get to know, I may move on to find out how a “Platypus is poisonous“. I may search for “Hill stations in India” one day & for “axxo” the other day. Such terms may prove meaningless in isolation but when associated with the person who queried for, one can manage to derive a lot of information. His personality & interests gets converted into related search terms. Provides a good amount of insight & introduction about the person.

With the visitor tracking tools available with the search engines, they can very well predict the various areas a particular organization is working on. Think of DRDO secretly starting to work on a Humanoid project to help-out troops in loading nuclear warheads on missiles. Google might instantly get to know this with the rise in search queries related to warheads & robots from DRDO. Or be it ISRO wanting to do some Diamond mining on the moon during its Chandrayaan mission. The search engines would be the 1st outsider to know about it. Policies on IT Security apart from blocking access to certain websites, should also offer guidelines on search engine usage. Or the IT team can annonymize HTTP connections made to the search engines.

Yesterday, we re-scanned all the channels in our set-top-box & the original channel ordering got messed up. So, we didn’t know which channel belongs to which number. We had to merely push the channel-up button & wait for our favorite channel to appear. Won’t it be good, if we have a search button & an AlphaNumeric keypad on our remote, & backed by a dictionary of channel names?

Search is a Gaint. Sometimes, a Goliath, maybe.

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PG Marriages

One day:

Mom: Shall I get you new clothes for your Birthday?
Son: Don’t worry mom. I’ll buy it by myself.

Another day:

Mom: Your Dad & me are just thinking. Shall we get you married?
Son: Hmm! Ok. But try to get a nice girl who suites our family.

Such a situation occurs for fellas, be it a guy or a girl, for whom love didn’t strike or even if it had struck, it would have struck the wrong chord. Yep! We are talking about arranged marriages that aren’t out of love. There can be love from the parents, but definitely not between the guy & the gal.

Such marriages are good in a societal setup; telling people that the guy or the girl isn’t on the loose. But certainly, its a blow for the internal values of the individual. For a person who grows with fulfilling his needs by himself, this is for sure a failure case. A desire un-accomplished with his mere & meek abilities. Something he is incapable of, that brings in embarrassment to the core.

You may counter, that its all within the parents & the child, & there’s nothing to feel low of. But the truth is, the parents are so very caring, forgiving & more importantly forgetting the real twists in their child’s behaviour. Even the child is little bold enough to ask for things that he/she hasn’t mastered enough. It all happens for the sake of “One Big Happy Family”.

In case you are still wondering what the PG in the title means, its Parental Guidance. :)

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