THE WAREBLOG

It’s an year since Autograph released. Not only was the movie impeccable, the songs were perhaps a shade better. Here’s a translation of the most striking song from this super soundtrack – “Aamake Aamar Moto Thakte Daao…”

And to round it off, the quick embed follows. Share & Savour!

It is interesting to go through a novella form of a short story you had visited as a child.

While Ruskin Bond weaves his patent magic of making the most mundane things spark to life, the story is so named because of a very important reason.

I haven’t seen the movie myself, but have read the original script (also included in the paperback available in bookstores now). However, I have come across a lot of discussion on who the seventh husband was and who was the seventh one she murdered – and the like.

It would be interesting to note that Ruskin Bond never suggests the concept of seven murders – either in the title of the novella or anywhere within. What simply remains is a subtle yet clear indication towards the end of the original story – precisely pointing out all the seven husbands.

However, the film-makers chose to toy with the idea of extrapolating what happens in the end. And yes, they did clearly suggest seven murders (not necessarily husbands, but as it turned out – and also the very words of the script, all seven murders were indeed of husbands). But as in the original story, so in the script, the concept of the seventh murder & husband is again very prominently conveyed – not quite needing you to be a Nolan to move out of the theatre with your head held high, knowing the secret of the universe. It’s there for everyone to see and absorb.

As for me, I loved the novella and well, the script was pretty well extrapolated too.

The bottomline – This is a treat for all Ruskin Bond fans out there. Go for it!

I write this post to pay my respectful and glowing tributes to the art of website designing (here, the lack of it) and share your grief in having to sit through each of these links.

So, here goes…

10. DPS BOKARO & LIFE IN BHOPAL
To start with, I pay homage to the spirit of developing these two sites (especially because of my association to these two cities) –

9. I KISS YOU
There were worthy competitors to this – but with my admiration for Turkish cuisine, music & locales; here’s something that became the most popular thing back in 1999 and would later inspire Borat et al.

8. HIGH ON FIRE
What happens when you sleep under a rock & still surface – after over ten years!

7. ROD C DAVIS
What was that? I thought it had to do with supernatural healing… I already feel a paranormal experience.

6. YALE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ART
It would be just another migraine-ingrained site if not for the Yale part of it. Seriously, is this one of USA’s premier art schools?

5. GEORGE HUTCHINS
I won’t exactly gift such a personal portal to even the worst of my enemies!

4. TIMECUBE
So, what are we trying to do here?

3. ALMIGHTY WIND
Ok… so what exactly is this wind, people??

2. HURR-DURR
Please… Why? PeTA… Alpha, Beta and Theta… Somebody!!

1. DOKIMOS
This is epic.
If Jesus’ site actually looked like this – Christianity would not exist today!

For wider circulation, here’s one of my favorite posts -

When Manmohan Singh opened up the economy, little did he know the ramifications of it. Yes, we have great plasma TVs, IT jobs and foreign cheerleaders in our tournaments and calendars. But it has brought in some side effects as well. As I browse through my Facebook feed through various tinted photographs of poor people and a crow eating from a bowl of rice, it only compounds my irritation.

Apparently anyone can now own a DSLR without knowing what it expands to. The moment you get one, you update your Facebook status with technical specifications of your camera that serves as a harbinger to us. Then you have two passive Facebook users(Their role in online social life ends with the like button) to like it. I think they are like assassins. You can hire them and get them to like stuff on a temporary basis. An innocent girl falls for the bait and comments “Wow”. A hound of wolves go and like her comment, which tallies to a higher rational number than the likes for your original post, thereby embarrassing you. I mean, why this hoopla? Aren’t bloggers like me shamelessly publicizing blogposts on Facebook enough for humanity?

When you get your DSLR, do you start looking at everything as a prospective photograph. Poor people are now the target of your black and white pics. Suddenly old senile men clad in loin cloth are of value to you. A wrecked car becomes an object of art. I mean, how suddenly? You categorize stuff into different senseless albums. Stray dogs come under the category of wildlife. Why man, why?Do they live in the forest? Are they endangered? I really don’t think so. They chase me all around the housing colony, as I ride my bike with my legs near the handle bar out of fear, when I return home after 11 pm. Your cycle bell is shot in high resolution and uploaded into “random pics”.”Random pics”, the worst ever name, not just for for an album. If you hate your child, you should name him “random pics”.

Doors, windows, bullet enfields and light switches go under the category of classic pictures. Who certified it as a classic? The Academy awards jury? Sigh, self-proclamation. And yes, find new names. “What I see”, “Brilliant shots from my eye” and “Shots through my lens” are trite names for an album. Just like fatuous names such as “Virtualjunk” for a blog.

You know what I dread the most? When you go for a photowalk. Apparently it is exactly like your normal walk, except for the fact that you annoy other people with your camera during your walk, thereby intruding their privacy. You shoot pictures of mango sellers, beach, shops, and everything you find. Then you post process it and make it look pretentious. And then you put your logo and copyright. Yeah, because Ram Gopal Varma is looking to sneak away your photos and plagiarize it in his next movie. Some of you even put “Rights reserved” at the footer of the image. I wonder what rights you have reserved for yourself. I will plagiarize it and see how you effectively sue me in Mumbai high court. It is tiring to see “Ram photography” , “Shyam photography” or “Soorpanakha photography” as image footers.
You don’t stop with that, do you? You have to bestow your photography tips on us. When we common men click photos with our “point and shoot” cameras, you go all over our pictures and say “This should have been shot in Macro mode” ,  “That should have been shot at this exposure”. Ok, I know you understand the nuances of photography. However all I want is just to click a button and get a picture. From now on, your shooting tips will be met with shooting, from a gun.
End of rant.

P.S: Not intended to be derisive – just an ironical perspective on photographer idiosyncrasies. No need to outrage.

Although I am not averse to Gill Sans, nor hold any personal grudge against Times New Roman; I rarely find myself being satisfied with a presentation or document set in the same. Make no mistake, I still respect the Tahomas & Verdanas of our time – not to forget the Couriers, our first big break into the world of digital typefaces!

But if I were to sit through a session of hand-picking my best bets to live the rest of my life with, I would choose the following ten of a kind -

When I walked into my new workplace last week with no customary laptops being doled out, it meant two things –

• Probably, no work from home (“this works both ways ”)
• And a question mark on Outlook sync from outside my workplace

Having known how to setup an exchange server account on Outlook, it took parts of online help and tid-bits of permutation and combination to set the ball rolling.

As for the steps, here goes –

1. Open the Mail option in Control Panel – if you’re running 64-bit, please go to Additional Options and select “View 32-bit Control Panel Items” to uncover the Mail option.

2. Click on E-mail Accounts and then click on “New” to kickstart the account creation process.

3. Select “Email Account” and proceed.

4. In the resulting screen, click on “Manually Configure Server Settings or Additional Server Types”.

5. You will now be presented with four options for your server type, select the second one – Microsoft Exchange or compatible service.

6. Enter the Exchange Server Name relevant to you. For instance, for Hyderabad users, the same is – ctsinhydsxug (You can obtain your server name from your workstation Outlook settings, it is the server name for your account sans the trailing cts.com part).

7. Enter your Employee ID in place of the User Name field.

8. Click on More Settings to setup the server name resolution.

9. Head to the Connection tab, in Exchange over Internet, select the Connect to my Exchange Mailbox using HTTP check-box.

10. Click on Exchange Proxy Settings.

11. Therein, under Connection Settings, enter the following information –
a. Against Use this URL to connect to my proxy server for Exchange field, please enter mail.cognizant.com
b. Select the Connect using SSL only check-box.
c. Select the Mutually authenticate the session when connecting with SSL check-box.
d. Enter msstd:mail.cognizant.com against the Principle Name in the proxy server box.
e. In the Exchange Proxy Settings dialog box, in the Proxy authentication settings window, in the Use this authentication when connecting to my proxy server for Exchange drop-down, select Basic Authentication.

12. Click OK.

13. Click on Check Name against your entered user name (in this case, employee id) and you will now be prompted to enter your Cognizant network password. Enter the password and press enter.

14. You will be greeted with a confirmation message of resolution of your name and exchange server and upon starting Outlook, the mails will start flowing in

About Adam Hartung –

A brief look-up on any search engine would lead you to impressive essays about the aforestated. I zeroed-in on one that seemed to be one of the popular results.
It was really heartening to know that someone had achieved so much in a span of two decades and remained rather unknown to most circles. One of his most impressive lines read having been the leader of the team that introduced the concept of home delivery at Pizza Hut – all the more impressive when you know that pizzas have been home delivered for over a century now and Domino’s started out with this as their mainstay in the 1960s!
So much about the author though – and if it helps, well he has an MBA with distinction from Harvard and also a stint at Boston Consulting Group.

About Forbes –

Forbes has been a synonym for listing the Czars of Capitalism. However, the organization as such is not in the best shape so to speak – by the COO’s own admission, “On many occasions, we’ve been materially out of sync with the prevailing wisdom of the moment and where the world was,” Tim Forbes continues, “The tide seemed to be going the other way, but we don’t change our fundamental view.”
As for its digital version, Times had this to say in their 2009 report – “one of the top five financial sites by traffic [throwing] off an estimated $70 million to $80 million a year in revenue, [it] never yielded the hoped-for public offering.”

About ‘The Article’ –

We now go through the article that all this background leads us to.
Before I begin, I find it sufficient to state that I am an ex-employee of Microsoft but none of this holds any relation with residual affinities of any sort. Quite simply put, it’s a take on quite a punctured hypothesis – if I can so put it.

The article basically takes you through a classic story-telling weave (which I term ‘S.E.E.’) –

1. A carefully chosen Hard Fact that prevails today (STATEMENT)
2. Statistics; again carefully chosen, transformed & interpreted to justify the hard fact (EVIDENCE)
3. Offer a prospective vision with conscious attempts to sound impartial, yet append bottom-lines that defy it. (EXTRAPOLATION)

This is akin to the most basic form of argument skills. From Judith Glaser to a host of other people, anyone having a brief insight on the structure of story-telling would be able to differentiate between a discussion and a hypothesis.

Let us look at each of the SEE elements in isolation –

1. The statement is based on the fact that Apple has overtaken Microsoft by quite a significant margin when it comes to Market Capitalisation – quite an achievement, but Microsoft has always been a company operating in a steady ‘top five’ band and it last lead the technology market-cap space in 2003. In a similar comparison, one could take the pretext of overall revenues and suggest Apple needs a lot of catching up to do; however, in essence, we acknowledge the fact that Apple has done well over the last one year (finally, after having been around for close to Microsoft’s agile & impressive lifetime!)

2. With a valid statement, the general idea is to select graphs & figures that drive home a message, in this article for instance, we make the following observations –

• Microsoft invests more than one-and-a-half times its nearest R&D rivals towards its own research and development – something, that the author uses as a tool to show where Microsoft is leaking money. What makes it more interesting is that he had to use MS-Office to generate that graph with the default Calibri font in place and still a convenient yet muddled remark for Office 2010.
• He then goes on to compare Smartphone market shares, whilst conveniently not choosing to cite projections from credible sources for Android, Windows Phone 7 and iPhone in the coming couple of quarters.
• The third graph probably gives away the bias in flashlights – with an app-pool comparison being a top-tier metric.
• He then meanders around Jack & Jill before concluding why Apple is the future.

3. The extrapolations, as we look at them, are pretty optimistic about Apple’s performance in the days to come while being equally critical of Microsoft’s strategy – why not, if you have as high an awareness level to leave out the fastest selling gadget of all time (Xbox Kinect), you can be pardoned to at least question Microsoft’s strategy.

I am assuming here that awareness is a precursor to strategy – something that we thought was the author’s true forte.

Disclaimer – This post reflects the opinions of the author and findings based on an experimental methodology. In no way should this be treated as an absolute reference to the true state of tourist destinations.

The cities rated & ranked include -

___________________________________________________

Having visited a few European cities, I thought of finding out not just for getting others to refer but more so for myself to find out whether deep down I really know which of these places I have liked the most.
The ubiquitous surveys are a great tool – but getting other travellers to rank was subjected to the following:

• It’s tough to find a sample of people who’ve been to these places
• The rating process exposes an issue that I wanted to experiment and address

Think of the following situation –

You have been asked to rate ten different cities on the basis of four parameters like food & stay, transport etc. Now if you were to fill not one but two such forms – do you think you would write exactly the same ratings in both of them?

I myself tried doing it and found them to be different. More so, you can fill such forms in two ways, I call the first one ‘Object-Based Rating’, wherein you rate one city first on all four parameters and then move on to the next city, a screenshot of such a table would look something like this –

The other way of course is ‘Attribute-Based Rating’, wherein you choose to fill the ratings column-wise or rather for one particular attribute, say ‘Places To See’ for all the cities referred to. A typical screenshot would look like this –

Now, an interesting piece of information is derived from the deviations in ratings observed for different cities – cumulative as well as parametrized. To filter this in and then come up with the final rankings (basically using means such as variance to determine the winner in case of a tie – in favour of the lower variance city) is something that allowed me to address two things:
• Addressing the whole business of ranking the cities on the basis of overall ratings
• At an individual level, understanding the common threads that show which cities appeal to me more than others – not surprising though that I actually found the rankings to reflect my lack of attraction towards the more touted tourist destinations in general
I present here the findings of the whole experiment, the final ones that is
Of course, I would be more than happy to elaborate on the other facets involved in using the rating numbers to come up with various statistical terms mentioned in the overall results – but that can happen via comments or mails.
From an individual perspective, I realized why some tourist places with a rich ancient history and monuments/artefacts from that era draw me more than plastic structures of the day. Perhaps a few floored me by the sheer feel good factor itself when they lacked the ‘Places To See’ per se but on the whole, I do realize that the sub-conscious actually knows what it wants unlike the conscious rate-the-cities guy. I will not think twice before embarking on a trip to any of these locations – I hope to actually go… ideally, to all of them

_____________________________________

The Top 10 Destinations -

___________________________________

The Statistical Backbone -