cheeni

I've been blogging the last few days at Tsunami Warning Tracker. This is the first time I've seriously used Blogger.com's services, and I have to admit the user-interface is unparalleled.

The scale of the loss, and the sort of near brush with the Tsunami that Madras has had, has left quite a bitter after-taste to the New Year. Of course the world remains just as harsh a place, the politicians and capitalists didn't waste time in making the most of the situation. The Asian countries will be soon expected to pay for an over-priced white elephant in the form of a Tsunami early warning system that they can ill-afford. Naturally the saviors due west will expect the some thanks for their self-less services.

Time and again we hear sound bites from the man on Pennsylvania Avenue that leave my jaw hanging - he's nobody's fool, that man. He deftly claims that the USA gives 40% of all humanitarian aid in the world. Hmm...Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering ?

The Times said most Americans were under the impression, from recent polls, that the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent, the newspaper said.

This year hasn't been like 2001, or 1998 or even like 1995 - this is
one of those years that I won't miss. Surely, it's just another day
tomorrow :-)

Of material progress, he said: "I heartily detest this mad desire to destroy distance and time."

"This is a strange world, How long have I to play this game?"

from Time Magazine's obituary to Gandhi, Feb. 9, 1948

Two sentiments that have occupied my thoughts for many months this year. It's almost startling when you find someone not from your age and times agreeing with your innermost thoughts.

I guess gushing over a Google product is nothing fashionable these days. Initial reports of Google Desktop's dangers in the wake of Gmail privacy concerns convinced me not to ever go anywhere near it. Besides, I didn't think I really wanted Google to help me search my computer, "I know what's on my computer, thank you very much" - *macho snicker*

Meeting some folks at Linux Bangalore convinced me otherwise, and I now have this amazing tool indexing away the contents of my hard drive. What I find amazing is that it pops up events from my past (email) that I have forgotten - I get way too much information by email anyway. The ability to do this unobtrusively while including it in my regular google searches is pretty cool. The executable is really small, and for all the work it does, it's not a CPU hog.

I had considered setting up this tool earlier for my father, but he only runs Windows 98 :-( (requires WinXP/2000). But now I am convinced this seriously rocks, and I need to find a way to have him run this.

My concerns on privacy have only been partially adressed. First off the Google cookie used for Gmail, Desktop search and Google is not the same (at least for now, and Google promises not to turn evil (??) ). Secondly, Google Desktop now has an exclusion rule where you can specify what not to index. I can also ask it to not index https web pages, but as Schneier points out Google desktop is only making an existing bug in the OS easier to exploit.

Hmm...perhaps being on Windows land isn't so bad after all!

P.S. If you've already read this rant of mine on our favorite list, let me know how I can warn you that I'm cross posting here as well.

be in Bangalore - speaking at LB 2004. I'm hoping to meet a lot of old friends, put faces to names, and be a geek all over again. I'm speaking on Wikis - I'll try and be an arm chair pyschologist, but hopefully I'll have something worth everyone's while.

Ping me if you are attending!

Kitsch! They call this movie kitsch!

Hardly vacuous, this movie is as grounded in reality as a Kollywood blockbuster film can be. If the elements of the story look contrived, it is because we have a case of life imitating cinema imitating life.

A director's charge is entertaining his audience, and this young director's charge is more than complete. I saw happy faces in the audience, ecstatic faces even. I was mightily entertained.

The elitism of educated India bothers me, but it doesn't bother me enough to rant about it just now, thank heavens (I think I rant too much, too often). I must say, I'm really happy that I can also watch Takahata or Ray and be entertained.

AT&T sends me a wireless bill that shows me making 50 minutes of phone calls this month (in the US of A) :-) I cancelled my service last month; my single-band, no-workie in India phone has been switched off and is with me here in India for the same period.

What's AT&T's excuse this time?

Bombs away...Fuddy Duddy's a charmer!

(portions originally posted by me on a closed mailing list)

I'm settling into the Indian way of life again, and as I do that, I
occasionally perceive everyday happenings very differently from those around
me. Sometimes, it's a cultural maladjustment, and some other times it's a
phenomenon that only an outsider can recognize.

I don't know if the following incident fits this classification, but it's
certainly been on my mind for the past couple of days.
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Sometime last week I happened to watch a Kellog's commercial on the telly.
The 30 second commercial opens with a perfect faced young mother rifling
through her purse mumbling something about not finding a phone number. The
scene shifts to a bright and precocious boy of about 8 energitically
performing cartwheels on the floor. The cartwheeling doesn't stop for a
moment, but the boy gets a look of sheer delight on his face. Stretching the
logical limits of mathematics, physics and probability, the kid stands
upright and recites a series of mathematical operations like so... 32 into
(sic)[1] 2 is 64 divided by 8 is 8...you get the idea. Voila! The mother
pulls out a scrap of paper with the phone number on it, which is, you
guessed it, 3226488...

The beaming mother knows the secret of raising a boy genius, why it's his
daily dose of Kellog's gasp cornflakes at breakfast, of course, fortified
with Iron and Vitamins...!!

Besides the pig headed script and the boy doing cartwheels (I don't think I
ever did cartwheels in my life, even as a kid, I certainly believed in
gravity), what else is wrong with the picture? Why, of course, Kellog's corn
flakes just doesn't make you any brighter than you already were. If you were
as dumb as a brainless amoeba to begin with, even with the power of Kellog's
you aren't going to grow intelligence. Why then do the highly paid marketing
mavens, almost surely from the Indian Institute of MoneyBags (IIM(B)) write such nonsense? Because, it isn't nonsense, welcome to Satan's Marketing 101. The correct name for such a spot is "Aspirational marketing"!

The sucker who's supposed to get taken in isn't living anywhere near me, no,
not in my college educated neighborhood. There's probably a poor decent hard
working family struggling to make ends meet in a neighborhood not too far
away with 1/10th the mean income. Barely educated parents trying to get
their kids the best in life and with bright eyed belief in a better future.
What suckers, they surely need to get taken in...

This hypothetical wife and husband have no sense of what corn flakes are
[2], it could be manna from heaven (America) if they believe the marketing.
Their daily Indian breakfast of rice gruel or rice cakes (idlis) and
vegetables is probably just as nutritious, and certainly orders of magnitude
more affordable. When they substitute the Kellog's "American dream"
breakfast, they say yes to a second helping of misery. If the kid is
anything like me, he probably wouldn't like corn flakes any more than I did
when I had it the first time. But of course, the nutrition, but of course...

Note that the Indian kid in the commercial has no problems with eating
cereal, nope, none at all. Nothing like the tantrum throwing American brats
on the telly today who need strawberries and fruit loops to go with their
cereal. Cereal is so tasty, yum, yum! Naturally, the kid has to be a boy,
never a girl, only the best for the boys in India. [3]

Thank you for reading a spanking profit filled edition of "Satan's guide
to Marketing 101"

Cheeni

[1] 'into' means multiplied by in Indian English
[2] The Indian consumer class either knows what cornflakes are, or doesn't
(usually the case), it's as much a process of education as sales when you
market the product.
[3] I find this commercial has an uncanny similarity with American Kellogg's commercials of the early 20th century.



P.S. If I sound derisive of America, I don't mean to, I only despise the
marketroids' America (Heaven Annexe).

I spent almost an hour in the library today picking up books. Here's what I came away with, now let's see how many I get through:


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