Brij Singh's Random Musings

Razor's edge ?

At friend's daughter's birthday party, happened to meet some old college friends. Generally catching up on the social front, came to know about Suryan's brother. His brother Sridhar is now adays in China.

Somewhere in my mind Sridhar's life has made a permanent mark. He did 10month long trekking of the east coast . As if that wasn't enough for this fellow he went ahead and signed up for the teaching job in China. He is sure living a life which lot of us talk about but rarely make a transition. His paintings sure suggest love for the wierd and kinky, but then he is Suryan's brother.

He should start blogging instead of usual html publishing.

MT community not happy

Unbounded confirms it, time to invest energy into Wordpress.

thanks Pankaj for offering your support. Will start digging into it. How hard it is to get hindi language support in Wordpress ?

MovableType 3.0 Licensing stinks

This is what users get for supporting this application during it's infancy. What was wrong with the dual licensing ? Developer's aren't stupid that they would just write plugins for the company who doesn't even allow unlimited blogs for the personal use.

What's next Mena ? Licensing by the byte size of the posts ?

Surely there is some short-distance runner thinking going on here. Oh well time to invest energy in the wordpress project now.

Google's official blog is on now

As of now their posts look they are from some PR guy who has recently joined Green Peace party. It will help if they can put some human faces and their brief bios as well.

Pallavi versus Googlebots

Is Yahoo pitching Pallavi versus Google robots in the coming email war ?

Confession time

Confession time - ever since I started blogging my world has changed. I have read more content in last 10 months than in my last 10 years. Funny part is it's not just the 150-odd RSS feeds that I try to digest daily but also the newsletters, books, white papers, and 4 email accounts. While geneticians are working on the technology where by brain cells can have it's own self-categorizing and information-to-wisdom conversion techniques I need to give this constant down pouring some rest. Looking for some tools and best practices on making this more manageable.

On a lighter side, this blog-aura has started showing some outward signs as well to the extent that wife has started relating blog-happy and blog-sad days to my moods.

Sometimes running helps in doing the necessary cleansing. Will start doing 10miles going forward. Doing marathon one more time is a major time commitment.

Long distance running is fun.

No full stops in India

It was BBC's Delhi-based journalist Mark Tully while working on his book - No full stops in India commented about the maturity of common Indian in political matters. Only in Indian villages you can sit down and get a comfortable critique on why Chinese communism survived whereas USSR collapsed. Though in media and other expert hangouts you will find plenty of India-should-do-this-versus-that but in every election Indian electorate (largely rural) has surprised pundits. There are instances in recent history that whenever any political party has taken an extreme stand on any issues - be it V.P. Singh's backward caste issue or BJP's stubborn stand on the temple issue or Congress's shameless investment in Gandhi dynasty - electorate has punished them severely against all the popular predictions. At the same time for some strange reason same common man keeps cycling these issues and the same leaders every 5 years !

So what's going to happen now besides the obvious anti-incumbency shakeout ? 5 years of Congress and 5 years of communal politics. "India shining" movement wont go away but in it's place you will see more belligerent and angry BJP party without the middle-of-the-road puppetry of Bajpayee. One should be scared of that part now. BJP's real base is not known for open dialog oriented politics.

This is a crucial point in India's economic future. It has to be seen if the new government and hopefully it's young politicians can drive the growth of India from it's rural base without unfairly penalizing the new economy. Though I will be cynical about that since it was the same Gandhi family who had plans one after the other and they were all named after one of their family members - Jawahar Yojna, Indira Vikas Yojna, Rajeev etc etc. Obvious point to add here is that each of these plans were billion dollar worth bureaucratic heists.

I will be optimistic in the meantime.

Gasoline stealing the gas from recovery

From Rob Black -

Economist Irwin Kellner says there is a rule of thumb that every penny per gallon that gasoline prices rise takes $1 billion out of the economy. Since the end of 2001, gasoline prices have jumped by over 80-cents a gallon, effectively negating more than one quarter of the $316 billion in stimulus that was provided by the three Federal tax cuts

House where nobody can be saved

Watching Thin Red Line. Sean Penn in his usual stellar performance -

Just runnin' into a burnin' house where nobody can be saved

This movie reminded me of Remarque's classic - All Quiet On The Western Front. It's sad to see Google page ranking system messing up the search listing for this great novel. I guess the result page tells us how our generation treat the war novels and it's utility only as a term paper material.

Overall war is a sad story. Doesn't matter which side you stand.

Zempt needs a blog-compliant spellcheck

Zempt is a very handy tool but it lacks integration with the browser. I would prefer combination of Onfolio and Zempt to make surfing, annotation, categorization and blogging a seamless experience. Maybe throw-in Newsgator there as well.