Infinite thoughts

This is interesting. Read this article from TechCrunch - the shop owner is charging the patrons for looking at the items in her shop. I believe this was long overdue. Most of us (including myself!!) visit a store, check out the item, ask numerous question, look at the comparable models, negotiate and step out with shaky promise of coming back for purchase. Then go online, check out the lowest price available and order. Boom... there goes the profit of the brick and mortar store.. Not just the profit, but it also cost him/her the time, probably the salary of sales person, rent of the place, inventory cost and what not!! The amount of $5 is not important. It may not really be the cost associated with each onlooker. What is important is that the shop-owners are facing very different problem which they have not yet solved and trying to find out ways to monetize the physical shop that they have setup with huge investments. While it doesn't cost the Internet savvy customers to do ...

It was time to celebrate Meghana 's Birthday and after much deliberation we headed to Southindies - a high-end south indian restaurant in Pune. I had visited it a while back but decided to visit it again to cater to Birthday girl's with :) We started with Thakkali chaaru i.e. tomato soup flavored with ginger and curry leaves and Kaya kooralu chaaru which is mixed veg soup flavored with coriander and garlic. Kaya Kooralu Chaaru was very tasty and brought good taste for the dinner. Along with soup we also ordered "podi tossed idlis" which were essentially small idlies tossed in gunpowder; "Mokka Junna miriyalu fry" made from babycorn coated with bason flour. Gunpowder being very strong in taste, the idlis were tasting only gunpowder and unfortunately it also made the babycorn taste bland. We decided to try standard veg stew ( Kai Kari Stew) and appam as a safe option along with "mirapakaya pattani curry" along with Vishalakshi Roti. Veg Stew an...

You use Google for searching quite a few things. Thanks to the browser feature where you type in some name in the address bar, if it is not a FQDN , it simply uses default search engine to search that term. So when you type in "google" in the address bar, it will search for google . And if you search for "bing" it will search for bing . Now if you search for a website using Google, which also uses the adwords, it will look like this:  I wanted to visit SurveyMonkey.com and instead of using the shortcut (ctrl+enter) I just pressed enter in the address bar, and this is what google search threw at me. If SurveyMonkey is going to be displayed as the topmost result, does it really make sense to also display the ad for SurveyMonkey on the same page? User invariably tends to click on the ad displayed, which means revenue for Google and actually loss for the company using the adword service. Couldn't and shouldn't this be changed? Is this a problem with the...

Jolly LLB - Nice story line, but wasted.  This movie is about an aspiring lawyer from a small town, who wants to make it big in some or the other way. Jagdish Tyagi aka Jolly ( Arshad Warsi ) is a small time lawyer from small town in U.P. who is struggling to get established. With a strong belief that he can settle down Delhi, he reaches the capital, but there's no change. As part of his presence in the court he happens to attend a high profile case of hit-and-run, represented by a well known lawyer Mr. Rajpal ( Boman Irani ). The case gets dismissed due to the usual reasons of no eye-witness, no evidence and all similar *t. Mr. Rajpal was expecting a huge fees from Mr. Diwan, whose son was the main culprit in the hit-and-run case. And Mr. Diwan makes a mistake there. Rajpal is given peanuts as his compensation since the case gets closed in just about 6 weeks. And this hurts Rajpal's ego.  Jolly sees an opportunity in his attempt to get established, and files a PIL (...

After spending awesome 15 months at mSauda , I have decided to move on. The destination is not decided yet, but I think I have some idea about where I want to go.  It has been a roller-coaster ride and I enjoyed every bit of it. It wasn't easy to make up my mind to move on, but some personal constraints forced this decision.  To List two of the most important things that I learnt from this venture: If your basics are clear, you can get into any technology after any amount of time - This was an absolute surprise to myself. I wrote code after almost 3.5 to 4 years when I started with mSauda. But by refreshing the basics, I could get comfortable in a short time span. Once you have learnt something, it is very difficult to forget it - Yes, I logged in to Linux terminal almost after 4 years, but most of the commands started flowing as I typed and I actually wondered - oh *** where did I type this from... But it was very comforting too - I could even do a block copy/delete ...