Consumable musings

When you desire madly for something seemingly unattainable until you finally have it in your grasp, and all the world is in awe but all you feel inside is emptiness. What's the word for it? Pyrrhic victory? Winner's curse?

"The grass is greener on the other side because you can't smell the manure."

The office here in Zurich is awesomely cool of course, maybe you've seen pictures. What is absolutely coolest here is the orange juice machine. Not only is it mechanically cool - it's also got oranges that taste great.

I wondered about this the last time I was here, about a month or two ago. You see the oranges here taste exactly like the ones back home in India, not at all like the pale blandness of American oranges. No, the orangensaft here is rich in taste and color. Orange here really means orange, not pale yellow.

My theory at that time was that maybe orange plantations in India started with seeds from Europe, you know due to the history of European colonization. But, I maybe wrong, India is actually the 4th largest producer of oranges in the world, so maybe, just maybe I am actually drinking the juice of Indian oranges.

Wondrous oblivion...

P.S. Look up this movie by the same name, rather nice.

On Sundays and holidays Zurich wears a deserted look. The shops are closed, the streets are empty, there is practically no one around. The only shops that are open are in the many Railway stations that dot the city. The Swiss Railway system among the best in the world is very central to the Swiss lifestyle, and I don't mean just for the transportation. Today is Whit Monday, a local holiday, and so I had to visit a railway station (translated english link) to withdraw cash, shop for groceries, grab a sandwich and a magazine. Luckily I knew of this beforehand, else I'd have gone hungry for a couple of days.

The Swiss lifestyle forces health upon you. The (guest) house I am staying in is less than 1000 square feet in size, yet it has 5 bedrooms spread across 4 floors. I stay in the loft, so when I need to use the bathroom I descend a floor, when I need a drink of water I descend 2 floors, when I want to use the washing machine I come down 3 floors, you get the picture. Bear in mind that this is a decent sized house around here.

So, I am shopping at Migros, the grocery chain that's open on holidays, and I hand the checkout clerk my credit card. She throws me a look of scorn like I'd just insulted her ancestry. There are two reasons for this, as far as I can tell - first, there was a swipe machine on my side that I hadn't noticed, so maybe she thought I was refusing to pull my weight - you know, treating her like she was my inferior. Second, and more importantly, Switzerland maybe the banking capital of the world, but their credit card system sucks. A cab driver told me that it takes 2 months for cash to be credited to him when he accepts a credit card. I also wonder if the privacy angle isn't somehow playing into this.

Anyway, I wasn't getting away that easily from this clerk. I find that there's no one to bag my purchase, ok, so that's fine. I reach for these ridiculously thin and tiny plastic bags and I can feel the scorn-meter rise once again for being an environmentally insensitive jerk.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Switzerland is a friendly place to foreigners, but I don't suspect it's xenophobia.It's just that they have a very elaborate societal system, and a lot of rules, and foreigners are n00bs who break these rules.

The company visitor's guide told me that the Swiss are very healthy and ecologically aware. They don't rent cars or taxis, preferring instead to take a train or tram. I decided to act like the Swiss when in Switzerland and got onto a train at the Airport with my luggage, and dragged it somewhat uncomfortably the rest of the way from the train station to my destination. The journey was more complex than usual because I was navigating a strange public transport system with signs in German. My feeble grasp of German picked up from classes at Max Mueller Bhavan many years ago was finally coming in handy.

I must admit it's not the easiest lifestyle option to use public transport, but you know, maybe that's what is needed to conserve the earth. Ok...so then I chat with the guard at the office and I tell him how I found my way from the train station and he is quite curiously attentive. The reason became clear when he explained that he always drove his car and hadn't ever taken the train to work. In fact he urged me to take a taxi as long as I was here. A few minutes later I was in a taxi heeding the advice of the local, and I saw a stretch limo.

And so I learn, so much for stero-types...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7351713.stm

Free Tibet! And shame on you, Delhi...

[Update: Link fixed]

3rd link on a Google search for "Pondicherry weather"

http://www.pondicherryonline.in/Profile/Geography/climate.asp

The climatic condition of Pondicherry varies greatly due to variation in altitude and proximity towards Himalayan ranges. There are two distinct climatic regions: the predominant hilly terrain and the small plain region. The climatic condition of the plains is very similar to its counterpart in the Gangetic plain, i.e tropical. Summers are relatively hot and winters are chilly with temperatures going below 0°C. The lowest temperature recorded is -3.0°C at Mukteshwar and highest is 43.2°C at Pantnagar.

Pondicherry comes under Himalayan region with Alpine conditions characterized by cold winters with snowfall for quite a long time, good rainfall in the monsoon, and mild summers. The overall climate of the state is salubrious and it attracts millions of visitors every year to have its natural charm with religious flavour.

Amused...perhaps Pondicherry has been acquiring territory.

Great Britain is set to change their change. Their Royal Mint just announced the winning designs for their coin currency refresh. 26 year old graphic artist, Matthew Dent’s heraldic design was chosen as the new face of British booty. He designed a set of clever cut-aways of the Shield of the Royal Arms. Each denomination is a part of this shield and when brought together, the shield looks complete. The Royal Arms is divided into four parts: England being represented by the three lions passant guardant in the first and fourth quarters, the Scottish lion rampant in the second and the harp of Ireland in the third, with all four quarters spread over the six coins from the 1p to the 50p. Completing the new range of coins is the £1 coin featuring the shield of the Royal Arms in its entirety, uniting the six fragmented elements into one design. Anyway you look at it, I am still six pence none the richer…

 

Yanko Design is a great design blog, the SNR is really great.

That's the perfect Youtube video - strangely it doesn't seem to have gotten all that many views :-)

This is probably a comment on what an exciting city New York is, or I am just having more than my usual share of run-ins with incidents worth writing about.

I was at the Apple Store yesterday, waiting in the checkout line which was being held up by a bunch of people with unusual orders. I saw someone pay cash for two mac book pros - nearly $4000++, someone else paid cash for a $2000+ gift card. While these were unusual, they are not really very surprising. For example the couple buying the macbookpros were from UK and they wanted to use up their spare dollars possibly avoiding their bank's usurious charges.

However what I saw next was something else. There was a kid of 18-21 who was looking to buy $43000 (yes, forty three thousand dollars) worth of Apple store gift cards. Of course, it took for ever for the store clerk to activate the gift cards, but that's not the point.

The kid tried to pay with 3 different credit cards, and each gets rejected. And each card has a different name on it. Everyone around gets really suspicious, and then the kid shows some ID and explains that one has his middle name, and the other card has his last name or some such. Then he says he's got a friend standing outside who has a card that will work, so he goes to fetch him.

A few minutes later, in walks a 30 year old guy, dressed in a leather jacket, turtle neck sweater and baseball cap. He is holding a stack of some 2 dozen credit cards of various colors, held together with a rubber band. He extracts an American Express Gold card which actually works. The ID he produces to validate the sale is a New York State driving license that looks like it has been through the wash cycle more than a few times, it's faded, and bent at the corners. There's really no way to tell if it is fake, but I'll tell you that most bars will not let you in with that kind of ID, but surprisingly the Apple store clerk had no trouble believing the story.

Now there could be a harmless explanation for that kind of thing, in fact I can think of some. However, I am willing to bet money that the credit cards were stolen and the gift cards are already on ebay, like this one...

Drum roll...



[via Fake steve]

I took this cab yesterday from JFK to Manhattan driven by a Sardar, Sukhwinder Singh, Cab #1W93. Near the end of our journey we get talking and he discovers that I am Indian. After the usual chit chat, we arrive at my destination, and he says - "Oh, I guess you will be needing a receipt since you work for a company, oh well here it is." and then he pauses for a moment, and then rips out a blank receipt, hands it to me and says, take the sister fuckers for all they are worth...

:-)

A common scene among prosperous sections of an Indian city is the ubiquitous presence of new cars and still newer drivers. The drivers are either first time car owners (all too common among the IT districts of Hyderabad and Bangalore - driving brand new cars sporting a huge red L and a dented fender or two) or first time urban immigrant cab drivers - who start with the less popular night shift to master their skills behind the wheel.

If I were to pick the top three cities in India for bad driving, it would have to be Calcutta, Delhi and Hyderabad. I still haven't figured out why exactly they are the worst, but they appear to be so for different reasons, Delhi just seems to breed bad drivers, the traffic cops in Hyderabad are pathetic at stopping violations and Calcutta has perhaps always carried the immigrant burden - where Biharis and Bangladeshis get their first taste of city life before moving on to a better city and the fatalistic attitude of Bengal if not all of India doesn't let the locals be bothered about piddling things like traffic accidents.

I don't think there's a whole lot of effort at educating the drivers to drive better, but I just came across
http://driving-india.blogspot.com/

I haven't watched the videos, but it looks hopeful. BTW, the site says that 10% of all traffic accidents in the globe occur in India. With 1/6th of the world's population that isn't a bad number, but with a tiny fraction of the world's automobiles that's a huge number.




Learning To Drive: Blind Spots - video powered by Metacafe

Take care that you don't apply for a "Jumbo" passport - which is 60 pages instead of the usual 30. It is handwritten, and has a non-standard serial number (1-digit less than usual) and is known to cause no end of trouble at foreign embassies and visa offices. This bit of useful information is not found on an application form, but is gently handed out to you when you ask for one. I suspect the Comrade Karamcharis (TM) don't appreciate the extra work.

Me: Do you issue Jumbo passports?

Lady at counter 1: Jumbo passport chahiye? (Rhetorical repetition of my request?)

L@C1 to Man at counter 2: Jumbo passport issue karthe hain kya? ("Do we issue Jumbo passports?")

M@C2: *Nods head in response?*

L@C1: Scribbles "Jumbo passport" across my application (Oh the agony and care it took to fill in the ICR boxes without characters touching the box edges, and all for this?)

L@C1 to me: *with a note of warning* 500 Rupees extra!

me:  *submissively* Ok, no problem *followed by a swaying of the head from side to side that Indians understand to be a yes*

L@C1: Wait in line at counter 2 to pay cash

[Wait 1 - notice people heading off to a corner and figting it out for a piece of thread - think, look around - notice fellow applicants with their applications sheafs bound with said thread  - join crowd, notice the ice pick tethered to a railing - prick thumb with tethered pick while poking a hole in my paper stack of application annexures - wait 1 for thread - procure thread - wait 1 - examine thread, dive into crowd and re-procure thread without missing metal edges - wait 1 - knot - wait 1, think - procure second thread - wait 1, suck injured thumb now hurting - knot second thread as a safety - wait turn]

M@C2: *Throws me an irritated look even before I've opened my mouth, I shut my half-open mouth and quietly slide the papers and the money*

M@C2: * Hurls back my additional 500 Rupees without an explanation and continues to scrawl something in a book and type my name into a computer terminal *

Me to M@C2: *Nervously* Don't you issue a Jumbo passport? ... *No response*

Me to Man behind M@C2: *Repeat the question with more confidence - loudly - BUT not disrespectfully - and not with too much confidence - and with a pleading look*

MBM@C2: Useful insight into the workings of the Jumbo passport system as explained above.

How I love my Comarade Karamcharis (TM) - they rule!

P.S. The term Comrade Karamchari was invented during my patient wait in the queue at the passport office. How I love the mental imagery it paints.

Here is my email to Citibank:





So the site is owned by Citi after all, but sits on the standard domain parking server of an ISP not known for its technical savvy, and running a version of Apache with known vulnerabilities. Great going Citicorp.

This is a post with further details about my tryst with Airtel and their not-so-great high-speed DSL plan. Please read on if you are interested in this sort of thing - what follows is my conversation with technical support, some useful debugging information if you are on Airtel and the secret location of their non-flaky DNS servers.

( the gory details... )

Speakeasy tells me I don't have a 2mbps connection, Airtel tells me I do, and what's more expects me to pay for it. Now what should I do?

I don't ever make new year resolutions, I think they are impractical.

A year is a very long time to measure yourself. It is all too easy to postpone the realization that your resolutions are failing. I resolve this year to instead hold quarterly resolutions. As the old adage goes, what is tracked well is done well.

Speech recognition on Windows Vista is exceedingly good. My initial attempts with using it were successful but I did not attach much importance to it since I did not see myself using it in day to day life.

I'm not really sure what has changed, but I've been using it all of today for pretty much everything I do on the computer, which includes typing emails, chatting and suchlike.

Consumer acceptance with regards to speech recognition reached a plateau a few years ago when it seemed like it was universally prevalent on most operating systems, but it never took off because accent training was impossibly hard. Vista seems to have cracked the barrier of intuitiveness - -right out of the box it seems to comprehend any normal accent, and seems to interpret words based on the context. This is awfully hard to do and terribly useful if implemented well, as Microsoft has. For one thing, it distinguishes between speech that is meant to be interpreted as text and system commands. The system commands are not rigid, which means you can pretty much use a logical command and expect the system to comprehend. Furthermore, there is a comprehensive set of navigation aids that allow you to use your voice to achieve a remarkable dexterity in navigating the computer. For example, in the above video you will see a demonstration of using the speech recognition to draw a line using MS paint.

Personally speaking, this is the first time for me that speech recognition has extended beyond an interesting plaything to being a useful tool. I can see myself getting by with speech recognition for most chores where I would have needed to use a keyboard. This is really helpful since I have been using a keyboard for a very long time now and I fear carpal tunnel syndrome and RSI as an occupational hazard.

It works well for now with Microsoft products such as Internet explorer and badly with a browser like firefox. This is to be expected for a number of reasons, but I am not going to complain about having to type my letters in notepad and copy them into gmail. This is my first day and the experience is already quite good, I can only imagine that it will improve with further training.

Mac OS X (leopard) has speech recognition for system commands as well, but I can tell you that it isn't half as good as vista. Which is a pity, because I have come to depend upon the Mac for most of my work. Luckily I also have a Vista desktop at work which I hope to capitalize upon. Give it a try! Soon, you will also sound like a robot, just like me :-)

P.S. This post was not composed using a keyboard.

[x-posted to cyberabad]

Hyderabad gets its own version of the eye-in-the-sky, a set of 4 spy cameras, according to this Hindu article.

"The uniqueness of the system is its capability to view images during the night and the face of a person or number of a vehicle as far as six km. The cameras also help to view and record images till a distance of 15 km."

The cameras are pointed at the city from atop a building at the edge of the city and remotely controlled via an IP circuit. Fancy technology indeed, but there is no mention of accountability in all that journalistic prose. As a society we need to grow a healthy distrust of all things "big-brotherish" to remain free and democratic. The lesser we question institutional safeguards, the more the chances become that there will exist none.

The guardians of the law have a duty to keep the city safe, but there is also a question of ensuring that the technology will not be misused. How does this prevent the creation of a very powerful voyeur cam? Are we sanctioning the creation of unlimited copies of camera recordings to be collected and stored? Who will have access to these recordings? Our laws that protect your right to private phone conversations were certainly not created at a time when such fancy technology could be envisaged. Whither are the debates that should drive this decision? There are important questions to be answered before the city plonks down serious cash that could just as well be used to pave the roads on my morning commute to make it a little less worse.

[Update: Popular mechanics has a really nice story on this general phenomenon]