It is brilliantly surprising as to what one can perform simply by being aware of the right sets of tools for the right kinds of tasks. Some of them might be old and heard of, but should you read this and chance upon something similar and interesting, please do leave a comment.

1. Bill Monk – http://www.billmonk.com is a website that allows for you and your friends to spend all the money you want respectively on collective purchases. It keeps track of who spent how much so that people are then able to pay the actual amount at the end of the month, rather than sit and calculate how much each person owes the other.
   Sure, a cleverly written excel sheet should help do the trick, but when this feature is offered on the go and someone else is able to do it for you without you having to write VB macros to program it, it is the shiite!
2. Gliffy – http://www.gliffy.com is an online diagram software that will help jazz up your presentations beyond your wildest dreams. I learnt the hard way in B-school that in some cases, good content is not the only thing that will do the trick for you to make a sound impact on the audience and that anyone who is sitting through a presentation also needs to be aesthetically catered to, even if that need of theirs is merely subconscious.
   As a result, evolution towards the corporate ho life led to the quest for newer graphs and better diagrams and more jazzed up looking stuff that was brilliant to see even if it was utter garbage, used only to confound rather than clarify. Gliffy is the answer to all your prayers and then some!
3. Aardvark – http://www.vark.com – most of  you that keep yourself up to date in the social media space would’ve heard of Aardvark to some extent. I don’t have enough patience to sit give a detailed explanation about what this site does, and so I’ll just provide you with an illustrative example.
   I am moving to Gurgaon in April this year to begin working there, and I have been scouting for convenient and affordable accommodation options there. Google searches, searching for blogs with relevant content and other such queries led to more advertisement than content.
   However, Aardvark let me sign up for an account and let me post my question regarding “good accommodation options for a person wishing to stay alone in Gurgaon”. Of course, once I’ve got a preliminary set of answers to my query on this website, I can further distill it down to more specific details such as proximity to my new work place, proximity to shopping centers and to the metro station, availability of car parking, rent range, furnishing and so on.
   I am hoping that my questions get answered and that I get a good place to stay in a short span of time, especially considering the fact that summer will begin in full force and the NCR is not the most hospitable of locations to be in during peak summer time.
   This isn’t too different from Yahoo answers in theory, but the interactivity, response time and the ease of use and convenience afforded by Aardvark beats Yahoo answers hands down.

If you do stumble upon interesting websites that offer certain unique features, please let people know about it too. It adds to what I’ve learnt is called the ‘one-sided network effect’. Heh.

Being thrown out of class was something I was supremely thrilled with, because it provided me with a grown-up’s endorsement to go out, play in the school grounds, sit and watch slugs move and leave their slimy trails behind, help the aayah in school in ringing the bell, a few minutes earlier simply because I liked the sound of it. This was more enjoyable than attending class on some occasions, and the propensity towards missing out on classes only magnified further as the years progressed.

This particular train of thought veered towards what the future generations would think of us, the first generation of bloggers. I can only imagine my kid reading about my ‘Dorky Guffaw’ adventures, or about how strongly hippie I have allegedly been, and wonder whether his/her image of me many years hence will be the same as what I’ve portrayed now through my online content.

Our generation has been simultaneously privileged as well as encumbered in some ways due to the revolutionary changes having been brought upon us due to the internet. While communication channels have been made so easy, and long lost friends separated over space and time-zones can still stay in touch as if they were only in the next room, and information of all sorts is available to us within a few clicks, I am led to wonder whether we’re really better off compared to previous generations.

The internet has also brought about a significant invasion of our privacy, and a lot of time is spent on the internet instead of in getting a first life. The future generations might be even worse off than we are, or might ridicule us for our extreme involvement with the net. Nothing exemplifies it better than the constantly changing arbit facebook status messages.

For instance, my current facebook status is as follows: “Hari is astounded at how make-up can make the prettiest women look majorly scary.”

While I might think it is funny right now, or at least, somewhat vaguely relevant, this is just going to be arbit nonsense once I end up saying something else.

While those bloggers who have a defined intent which leads them to blog, and have something topical to write about will have their work appreciated over time, those who use their websites as a means of unleashing arbit (case in point being yours truly) might just as well be better off covering their tracks, lest our children get inspired to do crazy stuff and then conveniently state how their folks’ blogs provided them with the inspiration.

In any case, such an eventuality is quite a long way ahead, and we shall cross the bridge, if it shows up, when we come to it.

Being a cheap and lazy guy who doesn’t want to spend all his time at home online, I have consciously avoided getting another internet connection at home, after a previous TATA Indicom wireless modem connection outlasted its usefulness and was therefore unceremoniously discarded.

This meant that I did not check email / update my website / surf arbitly for seven whole days, and this has led to much rejoicing because it has shown me that I don’t depend on the net as much as I had previously assumed.

Nevertheless, despite the past seven days of my life having as much content as an entire season of Seinfeld, there were some random things I did manage to do, and one of them was to check out the new Swagath Garuda Mall in Jayanagar, after having written about it a few days ago.

Right at the outset, let me tell you that this building is an excuse for a mall. In fact, I would go on further to say that even a big bazaar in its place would’ve served a far better purpose, despite being among my least favourite establishments. At least the latter stacks up on half liter packets of Nestle Goodlife milk and Oreo cookies, combined with attractive discount offers on the purchase of Real Activ juice containers.

There is no common area in the mall like you have for most malls that you might’ve seen. There are only two entrances – one to climb the stairs to get to the third and fourth floors to reach the food court and INOX, and the other entrance to the Westside store, which occupies the entire ground floor.

The Landmark bookstore has no direct entrance and one has to get in through the Westside store to access it, and the entire roundabout way of accessing the few stores in that ‘mall’ would lead anyone to believe that they skipped the entire design phase during the making of this mall.

The ‘multiplex’, on a Monday afternoon, was screening three movies, one Telugu, one Kannada the other one being ‘Hello’. I’d rather have watch the same episode of ‘Hum Paanch’ six times in a row, than sit through any one of those three movies being screened at that time.

At 1600 on Monday, I think I was the only person not employed at that mall who was present there, and although I was totally thrilled about the absolute lack of people, it was quite evident that the lack of people was due to the lack of anything worthwhile to do at that place.

I wish to apologize to anyone who wants to take this apology for having gone out on a limb to engage in premature celebrations with regard to how this mall and the multiplex and bookstore within would change the face of south Bangalore as we knew it. To my immense relief, PVR isn’t that far away from this mall in any case. Maybe south Bangalore doesn’t really need a mall because we aren’t mall rats per se.

Despite using my twitter account regularly now, I doubt that I put up anything of significance, much like how I unleash on my website as well.

Nevertheless, the integration of my website + twitter + my mobile phone has resulted in some cool things happening.

• The twitter widget on the right column of my website updates tweets from my profile regularly
• The twitter tools plugin provided by wordpress sends out a tweet onto my twitter profile whenever I put a new post
• Integrating twitter with my mobile courtesy of vakow ensures that I don’t have to be connected to the internet to have at least some part of my website updated on a continuous basis

Twittering is microblogging, for those that don’t want to unleash long posts. However, even for those painfully verbose characters like yours truly, the site really is some good shiite.

In turn, on receiving that link and having seen it, I was labelled a woman for forwarding links that contained pictures of cats, and this has subsequently cemented my reputation in various other aspects including that of being a chick-flick God and so on. The point of the extreme absurdity and the horrendous language that those pictures contained that made one laugh at it was totally missed by those otherwise observant people.

Now that we’ve eliminated the irrelevant back-history out of the way, I wanted to speak about LOL code and the potential impact it could have on our tech industry.

Most IT firms in our country keep a close watch on the development of technology all over the world, in order to have a jump start on their competitors when the technology hits the market newly. Building expertise in the same is financially viable for said companies in order to bid for projects involving these nascent technologies, and to establish themselves as leaders in this area.

I believe that companies that face the prospect of laying off employees who were previously employed in capital markets projects should instead focus their attention towards having them learn and prefect working in LOL code. LOL code is the way to go for the future, and here is why:

• It is new ‘technology’, and everyone likes new stuff.
• Most techies are already experts in Tech Speak. LOL speak and consequently, LOL code employs the same deviation from the normal standards of coding as do Tech Speak and LOL speak from the conventional ways of english grammar and syntax. Learning curve will not be very steep. Basically, techies will take to LOL Speak and LOL Code like fish to water.
• Companies have an excuse to retain employees it might have previously fired, and thus seem more humane in their dealings, while actually making them work towards the time when the next big wave will hit the tech industry.
• Being in its incubating phase, the potential for developers to make modifications to LOL code and customize it to make it compile and run on virtually all platforms is immense.
• It is amazingly funny, and all those who appreciate its attempt at humour would have a good time coding, thereby improving developer morale.
• How can you NOT code in a language that says – ‘CAN HAS STDIO?’ for file inclusion, ‘KTHXBYE’ to indicate return and ‘AWSUM THX’ to indicate that a condition check returns true? 

If someone who is in a position to implement this absolutely genius level idea chances upon this post, please do take it up on yourself to bring about the attack of the gramatically incorrect developers. Who knows, with the kind of expertise we already possess, the world might be our playground!

KTHXBYE.

I confess to cheaply conforming to LOL speak in my post ‘Hai World’. Additionally, some of the tech offices of the more chilled-out kind in the US use this lingo in official communication or while checking in code into the version control repository. LOL Dogs and LOL Code are further spin-offs of this phenomenon.

I would encourage all those willing, able and enthusiastic enough to use LOL speak in their lingo, so long as they don’t mess with regular english spelling and only tamper with the grammatical aspects of the language.

Moving on, Tech Speak is a relatively lesser known malaise plaguing the Indian IT industry. Instances of Tech Speak have effects on virtually every IT office within the country, but incidents of its break out have been brushed under the carpet and despite awareness of its presence, no remedial actions have been taken to stem its growth or to quell it once and for all.

Examples of Tech Speak are too many to be exhaustively listed here, but some of the gems that one can come up with are as follows:

‘I can’t able to access the central server.‘
‘He is bad at communication. He can’t able to speak properly.‘ (Reason stated for turning down a person’s candidature during an interview.)
Our country national anthem are voted by UNESCO as best. I am having proud tears of joy.

Tech speak is prevailent in all IT offices, and is something that can be remedied among the nicer guys who ail from it by correcting them nicely and guiding them appropriately. The sad part of this is that there are enough bozos and clowns around who think no end of themselves and their ‘communication skills’, who are hit by this in an even worse fashion, and are therefore past the point of salvaging.

I am highly certain that ‘fraandship‘, popularized by Orkut, is also something that originated from Tech Speak.

The first step towards addressing this is to become self-aware of its presence and acknowledging it. One way is to embrace Tech Speak much like LOL Speak has been adopted. Now, if you feel that LOL Speak is cool and Tech Speak isn’t, you’re a prudish one-dimensional wannabe. When we make Tech Speak cool enough, more people will notice it, and those that are not lazy enough will try to remedy it.

Additional measures to keep Tech Speak in check can be put into place. I had come up with this idea of creating a simple software, appropriately named ‘Tech Speak, given to firangs who work with us Indians, for them to understand the nuances of our language.

This software will act similar to Babelfish and have two fields:

• What the techie says:
• What the techie means :

Filling up the first one and pressing enter will give out the corresponding string in coherent English, thereby eliminating all possible communcation gaps.

Lastly, I recently overheard someone singing a Kylie Minogue song in Tech Speak:
‘I just can’t able to get you out of my head….’

What can I say, Tech Speak rocks!

Not knowing what to do, I had previously linked my domain name to my blog, which most often than not received random traffic from search engines due to reasons I’d rather not be too proud about, for now.

I was additionally maintaining a livejournal wherein I had initially started putting in any arbit rambling that I wanted to pen down and preserve, and this sounding board then turned out to be the one that I used with greater frequency compared to my blog, which I was afraid I was going to abandon.

In the midst of maintaining a blog and a livejournal, I chanced upon a few blogs that were hosted on their own server spaces and had exclusive URLs, and this, combined with the need to customize what I spew out in writing prompted me to purchase server space and host this website on wordpress, which is what you are seeing right now. In this regard, I have to thank Aadisht and SKimpy, for their random tech support level assistance on gtalk as well as for having guided me to Madhu Menon, who provided me with the necessary server space, and deserves to be thanked as well.

Thanks also to Monkee, the cheap guy that he is, for having been the first person to subscribe to the RSS feeds of my new website, much before I could do so myself, and for some invaluable inputs and constructive criticisms that prevented me from doing some things that I realized in retrospect were stupid.

Shrenik Sadalgi, friend, colleague and photographer extraordinaire provided me with his old camera – a Canon powershot A620, which is super enough for my face, to shoot the pics that you can see in the header. Refreshing or clicking on other links will switch the header image, thanks to a php script written by Matt Mullenweg.

The wordpress forums are stud level so far as resolving issues related to everything under the sun is concerned, and it is a result of their assistance that I’ve been able to put my site in the current shape that it is in.

Clicking on the bars on top will take you to the different categories under which I’ve posted, and I will update and add new stuff to it. Currently, if your office’s internet proxy isn’t benevolent enough, you will not be able to see any media under the music category.

The primary intent of the blog is to fan my already bloated ego, and also to serve as a means of providing me with more freelance writing opportunities, the likes of which I have engaged in for a few print as well as online publications. I have managed to import and include most of my blog and LJ entries into this site, but I haven’t been able to tag and categorize all 400 (approx) of them for now, which means that you will still see that ‘uncategorized’ label on the top bar until I’ve had enough time, patience and enthusiasm to remedy it.

Feedback is most welcome, just leave a comment, and do subscribe to the RSS feeds of my site. This new blogging journey will be awesome!

I wholeheartedly intend to Rock you like a Haricane.

However, Al Jaljira has been around for longer, and is the space on which I make dedicated posts only on occasion when I feel that I have a ‘quality post’ in the offing.

Of course, you may choose to disagree with me on the standard definition of quality. Piss off.

But the fact of the matter is that this post came into being because you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet.

Having read the latest post on Sidin’s site, I figured out that I would run my blogs through the supposed readability test, and the results have left me confounded and quite frankly, a tad disappointed at the same time.

My live journal came up with a blog reading level of “Genius“, while my Blogspot venture ranked a lowly “Junior High School“.

Go figure.

The bright side of all this is the fact that I can hope for stupid 10 year old kids also to read my blog and get some cheap thrills out of it.

One such is as follows, and was put by Abe, (like in Abhimanyu, as opposed to a dead ex-US President):

To stoke the fire furthermore, Monkee had his two paise to add to the profound observation (and I paraphrase here to eliminate esoteric lingo):

Or something to that effect.

I love the internet.

I had heard of last dot fm while searching for Indian bands to write stuff about, but it was blocked at the office, and I just used to look at the cached pages, and see if there was any relevant material that I could extract to write about and then close down the tab.

Vamsi, someone I acquainted myself with through the RSJ forums, told me about Last FM, raved about it, rather, in a manner that more than just piqued my curiosity.

The office I am currently working at, mercifully, has a slightly more lenient internet usage policy that I am milking the most of, and this site is not blocked (neither is IMDB!!). I logged on, created a user profile and am now listening to stuff as I type away.

I could listen to music all day, and this just makes things so much more easier for me. This site even has a widget for playing music straight off your desktop.

The wonders of Last FM, which I am discovering with each passing minute, can’t be extolled enough, but here’s an attempt at doing so. I wanted to listen to ‘The Fray’, because their song ‘over my head’ is stuck in my head, and I got to listen to an acoustic version of the song, and a lot of other songs that are of a similar genre.

Next, I switched to listening to Judas Priest, and then managed to listen to some power metal, along the lines of Nightwish, Saxon and EdGuy. The possibilities are endless. You could traverse from genre to genre, artist to artist and listen to new music all the time.

Last FM ki jai!!