Random thoughts

Lok Satta Party wins my support!

2009-01-25T14:11:00.005-08:00

It is almost election time in India and my home state Andhra Pradesh(AP). With Lok Sabha elections in India and Assembly elections in AP fast approaching some of my friends and I have been debating the various choices available before the people of India and AP. I guess the debate will continue till the election day for many but I have made up my mind on who I will support. The new political party Lok Satta Party(www.loksatta.org) wins my support hands down unless something dramatic happens to change it. Lok Satta Party has a visionary leader in Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan (JP). His inspiring leadership and policies of Lok Satta have helped me easily make this decision. I believe Lok Satta can definitely usher in new kind of politics and hopefully help India get rid of the corrupt politicians and practitioners of divisive politics of which most Indians have grown tired.

I just wanted to put this post out first, so that people won't be surprised to see my twitters and blog posts about Lok Satta in future. Some of you(read friends) might even get phone calls about this as I plan to actively volunteer in raising awareness about Lok Satta in the run up to elections:). Do get in touch if you want to help out too!

Are b-schools responsible for current financial mess?

2008-12-07T12:56:00.002-08:00

Here's a post wondering if b-schools are responsible for the current financial mess!
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2008/12/insidious_mbas.cfm

Can b-schools really train people to be not greedy?

Interesting way to raise money for charities!

2008-09-15T22:55:00.001-07:00

Interesting! I will probably follow this IPO keenly!

http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=12208564

Funny video about Indo-Pak standoff

2008-07-29T16:48:00.005-07:00

My colleague pointed me to this funny video about Indo-Pak standoff ! Do watch it!

Volatile India-Pakistan Standoff Enters 11,680th Day

I hope that the stand-off doesn't continue for another 60 years!

Now twitter updates

2008-07-11T21:15:00.003-07:00

Just joined the twittering bandwagon. I don't expect to twitter all the time but surely look forward to some updates when I am doing something fun or have absolutely nothing to do except twitter in frustration. So if you are into twittering, please feel free to follow me. BTW, you can find my top 5 twitter posts on this page. So keep visiting this page as I am sure there will be some new content for you in terms of twitter updates if not blog posts! I know I have been too lazy to post something on this blog for a while now. Hopefully, I will be out of my slumber soon and start posting again soon!

Great news for people applying for H1-B under Masters quota!

2008-04-05T09:55:00.005-07:00

Great news for people on OPT! OPT time has been extended to 29 months for people who fail to obtain H1-B this time. I already have friends who are wishing that their H1-B application gets rejected so that they can save money on taxes for 29 months!

Click here for more info
OR visit http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1207334008610.shtm

Who got how many H1-Bs in 2007?

2008-04-03T13:13:00.004-07:00

InformationWeek had a good article about how H1-Bs got allocated in 2007. Click here for the full article!

http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207001329&pgno=1&queryText=&isPrev=

The following excel sheet pointed in the above article has the full list of companies. Interesting to see that Microsoft had only 3 new H1-B visas!

http://i.cmpnet.com/informationweek/1179/H-1B_Approvals_for_initial_benefits_by_employers_FY07.xls

Another Wave of H-1Bs on the Way: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

2008-03-31T13:54:00.001-07:00

Interesting article about H1-Bs in Yahoo finance today

Another Wave of H-1Bs on the Way: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Good article about H1-B visa!

2008-03-30T05:26:00.006-07:00

Came across the following article in rediff.com which answers many common questions about H1-B visas. Good one to bookmark!

Point your browser to http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/mar/26visa.htm or
click here for the article!

Race - Watchable!

2008-03-22T22:05:00.006-07:00

I watched the new Hindi flick "Race" yesterday. Though nothing extraordinary the movie certainly was watchable. Thankfully not as slow and as long as "Jodhaa Akbar". Its a typical Abbas-Mastan thriller with lots of twists. The directors maintained a good pace throughout except for some of the song sequences in between which I thought were quite unnecessary. All the actors/actresses put in decent performances though I found Katrina Kaif and Sameera Reddy little irritating in some sequences.

So if you have nothing thrilling to do and looking to kill time, then racing to this movie is an option!

Lost phone numbers - Please call me !

2008-02-22T05:10:00.006-08:00

Friends, My old Moto Razr cell phone couldn't put up with me anymore and finally gave up couple of weeks ago. Alongwith, gone were all of your contact numbers :(

So people please understand and do care to call or at least send your numbers my way. My number remains the same.

BTW, I got myself a PDA with unlimited data/text plan. So in case texting is free for you, DO TEXT ME!

Indiatimes.com - Source of Malware

2007-11-11T07:51:00.001-08:00

I thought I will put this up on my blog to warn my Indian friends who I know frequently visit Indiatimes.com. There is a new report regarding indiatimes.com being source for big number of malware. More details in the following link:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=VDPPL4QFFFAS4QSNDLRCKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=202804433

I hope this will be a good enough excuse for people to stop visiting indiatimes.com which I feel thrives only on its false/gossip stories rather than good news reporting!

Hyderabad traffic videos

2007-06-30T16:42:00.001-07:00

Recently launched www.hyderabadlive.in has a cool service apart from the regular entertainment related news from Tollywood : the traffic video service. The service streams live traffic videos from some of the important junctions in Hyderabad. I am not sure how much it will actually help people in Hyderabad in deciding which route to take but people like me who have been away from Hyderabad for a long time and sometimes miss(not sure about this:)) the funny chaotic trafic of Hyderabad this service is surely fun. I couldn't help myself from laughing out loud when I watched every traffic rule being broken and it was interesting watching some the things repeating themselves. May be some transportation engineer can make better sense of these patterns . . .

Anyways, people away in Hyderabad who are missing the traffic there, go watch the videos. I am sure you would love it too. As for people in Hyderabad just be careful . . . there are cameras all over watching you :)

How to build pyramids? Mystery solved!!!

2007-03-30T17:02:00.001-07:00

A French architect has come out with a theory on how pyramids were built. Details in the following website:

http://khufu.3ds.com/introduction/revealed/

Good timepass!

Good article about using cellphones abroad

2007-03-18T07:01:00.000-07:00

I came across the following article in Nytimes titled "Guidelines for using cellphones abroad":

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/technology/15basics.html?em&ex=1174363200&en=6afdb42824a6ab47&ei=5087%0A

I thought it was pretty informative and got to know of some good cellphone related websites. You(Ppl in US mainly) might find it useful too.

Pray for me brother - A R Rahman's album

2007-03-03T11:19:00.000-08:00

I saw the new video album of A R Rahman titled "Pray for me brother" on B4U music today. I was very impressed with what I heard and saw. The music, message and visuals truly had an international appeal. The video also immediately reminded me of Rahman's previous project with Bharat Bala (Vandemataram) and was curious to know more about the song. So as soon as I was done watching the video, I immediately scurried back to my computer to research about this video album. And not surprisingly found that this video is another Bharat Bala production and is towards fighting global poverty. A great effort for a very noble cause.

Anyways, I see this video as also another step by A R Rahman towards greater international fame. I hope with this video he will get more opportunities to work in good international projects and hopefully a chance to win a Oscar for himself someday through those projects.

Anything to crib about the video -- hmm, wish it had some obvious Indian elements to it ;) desi me :)

BTW, for folks looking to watch the video - search for it on Youtube.com, you will get lucky!!! :)

Community developed wifi network?

2007-02-24T20:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my colleague mentioned about this new startup called Fon during our lunch conversation. I was really impressed by their business idea. I looked up their website to find more details and here is how they describe themselves"FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. Our members share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point.".

Isn't that a great idea? It sounded more like those community developed software models, where people collaborate to build software together and distribute it freely to each other later. In this case they are trying to build a worldwide wifi infrastructure with very little investment with the help of the community and plan to share the infrastructure freely among members(Foneros). But the interesting aspect to this is, once this infrastructure is in place they can actually start making serious money too. I am pretty sure people would prefer this cheap access to internet than other alternatives currently available. But for people to actually pay for this service it needs to be reliable and I think that is going to be the biggest challenge for this business . I really wonder whether they would be able to provide a consistent(somewhat) highly reliable service at all the hot spots. I think the same disadvantages of open source software will also apply to this business.

Anyways, it is a great idea and it would be interesting to see how popular this business will be in the near future.

BTW, Just looked at the Fon map to see if they have a hotspot in my city and the search yielded a negative response. So wondering if I should be the first Fonero in my city? :)

Firefox 2 extensions

2006-11-02T08:41:00.000-08:00

I stumbled upon the following page about FireFox 2 extensions (http://www.econsultant.com/i-want-firefox-extension/index.html)
on digg.com yesterday. First look at the page and I was like "wow!" and then after a few seconds I was saying "but why?"

I was amazed that someone had the patience to go find out the various extensions and neatly organize them based on their utility. I am pretty sure many people are going to find that page really useful. But the thing that made me say "but why?" was the fact that there were many extensions that looked completely useless to me. Nevertheless, I bookmarked the page using del.icio.us. BTW, folks I have this del.icio.us extension to my browser and I should admit that it really is delicious. It makes it lot easier to organize your favorite links. So having said that, I now think probably there are many other people who actually use those extension which I feel are completely useless. Anyways, people go and check out that page. You might probably find some really useful extension to add to your browser!!!

Am I weird?

2006-10-17T06:59:00.000-07:00

Couple of days ago, for some reason I decided to add more content to my google personalized home page. As I was looking at the various content that was on offer, my eyes quickly fell on the "Quote of the day" link and I thought it would be nice to have some nice quotes come up daily on my page. After adding some other content, I quickly checked the stuff that was being shown in the new content sections that I had just added. The "Quote of the day" section had like three quotes and one of them really caught my attention. The quote was:

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. " by Hunter S. Thompson
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/33780.html

The qoute really caught my attention because not only was it a clever manipulation of the more famous "When the going gets tough, the tough get going" quotation, but also probably because of the "weird" problems that I have been facing in my current task at my work place. It has been a tough last few days for me at work because of problems which I choose to qualify as "weird" rather embarrasingly. I was really agitated because of these problems and this quote seemed to provide the right inspiration to tackle the problem with greater vigor. As soon as as I read the quote, I was begnining to think that I was going to turn pro soon. But even before that happy feeling began to sink in, I realized that according to the quote, I need to be weird first to actually turn into pro and this thought kept bothering me for the rest of the day :) . And whenever this thought kept popping into my head, I tried to wean away from that by saying to myself that you don' t really need to be weird to turn into pro but for some "weird" reason the question "Am I weird?" kept coming back to me. Then I thought I guess I am not the person to judge weather I am weird or not. It is probably for people who know me to make that judgement. So now you know why I have this post!

So guys do you think I am weird??

Should Zimbabwe be kicked out of ODI's too?

2006-10-16T20:23:00.000-07:00

After the terrible performance of Zimbabwe in the Champions Trophy, I was all for Zimbabwe being relegated to non-ODI playing team. But the insipid batting displays by West Indies, England, South Africa, India and New Zealand in their respective matches has mellowed me a bit. Now in the hindsight, Zimbabwe I think still deserves to be around for a while and if the so called strong teams continue to put up such below par performances then Zimbabwe can even start believing about getting its test status back soon.