Boorish passengers?

Read an article somewhere about behaviour of Indians on flights. Personal experience: 3 guys harassing the checkin counter girl because they wanted to be seated together WITHOUT A SEPARATING AISLE. And this was a flight lasting barely 2 hours. The words they used - "What nonsense", "We're frequent fliers", "You should have asked us before assigning the seats". Sigh.

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What will they think of next?! ;)

Should one be surprised?

From a rediff.com/forbes article: On the other hand, statistics tell us that 70% of divorce filings are by women. So men, it's not likely you'll control the timing of the split, though you might control the purse strings. (Statistics for the US of A, of course...)

The Trouble With India

Thanks to Vidooshak for pointing this to me:

Crumbling roads, jammed airports, and power blackouts could hobble growth
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_12/b4026001.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

Search bomb part 2

Anonymous says in his comment that the search bomb is due to a corporate appointment - about which I am actually aware. What's funny is the flurry of hits to this blog which has nothing to do with the subject at hand... oh well, the hits continue.

Hilarious!

http://www.2walls.com/SOCIAL/cat_attack.asp

Alexander

From Wikipedia:

"As for the Macedonians, however, their struggle with Porus blunted their courage and stayed their further advance into India.For having had all they could do to repulse an enemy who mustered only twenty thousand infantry and two thousand horse, they violently opposed Alexander when he insisted on crossing the river Ganges also, the width of which, as they learned, was thirty-two furlongs, its depth a hundred fathoms, while its banks on the further side were covered with multitudes of men-at-arms and horsemen and elephants. For they were told that the kings of the Ganderites and Praesii were awaiting them with eighty thousand horsemen, two hundred thousand footmen, eight thousand chariots, and six thousand fighting elephants." Plutarch, Vita Alexandri

Job quota in firms may be enforced?

So says a news report. Interesting times... things are really coming to a head.

I wonder what the rules would be and how they would be enforced - especially if candidates with the right skillsets cannot be found.

Women's Day ?!

Cue all kinds of posts on message boards about how great women are and how much better they are than men. Why is it that we need to denigrate others to prove to ourselves how good we are?

My favourite bugbear is Board exams' results - where there are blaring headlines saying something about "girls outshine boys yet again". Whether the statistics actually prove this or not is a different story, what I am cribbing about is the necessity for the media to shout about this - what is the point that they are trying to make? It makes as much sense to me as saying that people whose names being with the character A outshine people whose names don't begin with A. It may be true, but what's it that you are trying to convey?

And now we will see all the rehashed lists of top women in India, actresses and politicians and businesswomen.

Hit by a search bomb?

"mitchell j. habib"

Some id^H^H ... er...person searching for the term above has hit my blog several times. I've seen this trend in the past, there will be hits from machines all over the world, searching for the same term. But the one above is different since it seems to be coming from within the same company. Strange.

3 new IITs?

News reports say that there is a proposal to form three new IITs. Aren't there enough IITs already? Weren't the NIT's supposed to fulfill the gap for tech education? Will they be able to maintain the high levels of standards of IITs when there's one in every city?

Dressing for interviews?

"The project manager of a top IT company in Pune felt distinctly put off when a candidate turned up for a job interview -- in a white floral-print shirt and a pair of jeans.

She felt that the casual dress indicated a casual attitude."

What crap! I have never come across a situation or heard of one first-hand where a person's dress caused a problem in an interview for a software job. Of course the MBA-type people probably have different codes since they live in a world of their own, but in the s/w world I would be very surprised to come across such people. And to tell you the truth I wouldn't want to work for a person who places so much importance on dressing.

In fact, if I were interviewing such a person he would be in immediate trouble... not for his clothes, but because I would expect someone who has attitude enough to wear floral shirts to be equally good technically. It's the normal, staid, conservative people who turn up in trousers and shirts and ties and polished shoes - only a person who is technically competent would feel confident enough to break conventions. And if the candidate is not technically good then he won't be hired anyway, regardless of how he dresses.

My laptop is dead...

... long live the dual core Opteron!

Because if it doesn't I'll have to fall back to the 1GHz P3... sigh.

Yes, my M6805 is dead. The power lights turn on but nothing happens after that. Of course, it was overclocked to 2 GHz but it's a bit late to think about that. The question now is, what can be salvaged from the carcass? HDD yes, a puny little 60GB, 4200rpm thing. 2x256 MB SODIMMs, but no place to put them in, and I don't think I'd get too much for them if I sell them. Mobile Athon64... hmmm... socket 754.


UPDATE: It lives! Turns out it had a dead SODIMM that it does not complain about but simply refuses to boot. Removed it and the laptop turns on as if nothing happened. But running with 256MB is a pain. The Ubuntu Live CD I tried used up all the RAM and I had to give it a flash drive to use as swap. Finally got rid of the Windows install and am running with Ubuntu. Phew...