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The incompetency of our police and government in handling our security is often sought to be hidden by fear mongering. Knee jerk reactions like banning liquids in airlines, utterly stupid checks while entering malls, and the topic of this post, actively discouraging photography at all public places. Citizens and private organizations, getting these clues from our public administrators, in turn have made life hell for amateur photography enthusiasts worldwide. Some years back, I was almost handed over to the police by some folks in our neighborhood for “suspiciously” taking photographs in streets in the night.

The state of health care insurance in this country is turning as pathetic as some other countries that we know of. The private health insurance companies being the pests that they are, have already decided that theirs is a no-risks, high gain game. Their business plan is that the people who need the highest medical attention are the ones who should have the biggest problem in getting insurance, if they are given any at all.

ILUGD is presently furiously discussing a legal procedure to get refund for the Microsoft Tax applied to all desktops and laptops that you buy from the branded market in India. Here is a good definition of Microsoft Tax. Some relevant snippets for the impatient. The Microsoft tax is an unofficial, but commonly used term that refers to the licensing fee that Microsoft charges major suppliers of personal computers for each unit sold and that purchasers thus usually pay for such computers, regardless of whether or not they want or intend to use a Microsoft operating system.

Takes me an hour to travel just this 2 km stretch every morning and every night. (Pai layout on the left. RMZ Infinity in the background)

Watching Arun Jaitley’s interview about POTA, and his criticism of the PM’s idea of a federal investigation agency made me recoil with disgust at the games these political parties play. POTA was created during the NDA rule in 2002 as a replacement for the much maligned TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act) which was allowed to expire in 1995 during the Narsimha Rao government. It was created not after some major event in India, but after 9⁄11!

I was quite irritated to find out recently that if you have a Google hosted domain and use that to login to Gtalk, you cannot communicate with Twitter without jumping through a few hoops, and even then, only under certain conditions. My first thought was that “these sort of things” should just work ™. Turns out I was really wrong … Kavinda explains in detail how to get this setup the right way.

For those handful of people who are subscribed to this blog :) , you can subscribe to a tech only version of my blog here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SandipBhattacharyaTech . This was done “in anticipation” of me ranting a lot on non-technical issues in this blog in the coming days. :D

I was looking around tonight to check out some celebrity blogs out there. It seems to be a fad nowadays - celebrities blogging is now almost a statement! Here are some that I found, and I will be adding more to this list when I find more: Aamir Khan: Aamir’s controversial blog which keeps making headlines. No blogging software used. The code looks like generated from some offline data. No comments on the blog page.

Just now got an invite to Pagii, from some stranger, sent directly to my office email. Bad, bad. This turns me off such ventures completely. Getting invites from known folks who are trying out different YASNs, is irritating but not completely obnoxious. However this is. Looked around a bit to see what this is about. Turned out this is a social venture from Freewebs, and descriptions from various places on the net makes it out to be a place where you can make fancy home pages in ajiffy, and comment on other’s.

An interesting read. People are not resources. Computers are resources… people are individuals with particular skills, passions, and ways of thinking. It is really easy to get lost in the “people are resources” mind camp. “Human Resources” We create departments in order to re-enforce this way of thinking. On charts and in discussions I hear this over and over. I catch myself saying it. It is a mental trap, something similar to saying “I want art on that wall”