In India we often observe Mediocrity everywhere. It is deep rooted, right from Office Assistants to Politicians. Other than in Education, we are often satisfied with Average performance. That's why we still hear grandfather's talking of how things were punctual and better under British rule 60 years back - how Trains ran on time, etc. I was reminded of this topic today when I read this article in LiveMint that has brought made this observation nicely.

I am optimist and I certainly see things improving, especially with globalization and more awareness to world wide events.

I am not much into listening to music on the move. Most of the audio I listen happens in my car, office room or in my home office. So I use my Zune most of the time to show the pictures in the Living room TV to my parents using the Zune A/V cables. I tried to put Zune to better use by connecting it to a Car Kit and tune into FM from the Car stereo, but the reception was very bad. Lastly I thought the best use of Zune will be to listen to songs in my home office and retire my conventional CD/Cassette player.

So recently I got from Amazon - the Altec Lansing speaker set for Zune which includes an automatic charger for Zune. I am impressed with the voice quality and the remote is convenient too. I recommend this speakers if you have a Zune, unfortunately no Bose Speakers are yet out for Zune, but I am not missing it.

I am unashamed to say I am a fan of Nokia phones, especially the communicator series. For last 18 months I have been using Nokia 9300 which is  a fantastic phone. In between briefly I used Nokia Communicator 9500, when my 9300 was taken by our mobile team for testing. Both 9300 and 9500 (which is heavy) are great phones and if you are used to them its very difficult to move to another phone.

My experience with Windows Mobiles have not been pleasant (read this earlier post on Benq P50) so I am skeptical about buying one. Anyways, both my 9300, 9500 were taken away from me for testing, so I was left shopping for a new phone. I was tempted by Nokia E90 Communicator & E62 but I wanted to give Windows Mobile another chance. So hesitatingly for last few weeks I was using Dopod (HTC S620) borrowed from Vishwak's Mobile test lab. Being a Nokia user, I did encounter some nuisances with Windows Mobiles, but overall I got hooked to this phone. This is the first Windows Mobile that I had used which has a good battery life of few days without charge. Most items about the S620 phone were good - it was sleek and light, but it was difficult holding it during long calls and I don't like using Bluetooth headsets. Its keys were too small for my big fingers. So I wanted a clone of S620 but in smaller form factor convenient for single hand use. I am not a fan of PocketPC form factor, so I was not attracted to the new HTC Touch. So when it was time today to buy a new phone, I went with HTC's new SmartPhone - HTC S710. This runs Windows Mobile 6.0, Camera/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, mainly no stylus and a good spaced QWERTY keyboard that pops out when needed.

Chennai (my city) proudly celebrates its 368th Birthday today. It was on this day on 1639, a British East India Company officer bought a strip of land and the city was born. I am proud to be a Chennaite - Happy Birthday Chennai!

One of my good friends is a doctor. Few years back when we were chatting he was talking about how Opposing Fingers (a.k.a Thumb) are very important to us humans. He went on to give a lecture on how Thumb as the only finger opposing the other 4 fingers helped apes/human ancestors in using Tools for hunting and eventually to invent Fire/Wheel, etc. I hardly gave this any thought, until few days back. Reason?.

An Infection few days back in my right hand thumb possibly through a cut or piercing I am not sure how. My thumb is swollen and entire right hand is numb and painful. My Doctor has assured I should be fine in next few days, but till then it is painful. This episode made me remember my friends comment and what little I can do with my right hand without using my thumb. For example, I can drive my car with my left hand, but how do I turn the ignition key without using Right Thumb?.

Uninteresting update (22/Aug/2007): After 3 painful surgeries to cut the infection(s), drain the puss and several tiring dressings - my thumb is healing. It should take another week or so for the thumb to be fully functional.

When you thought most of the basic innovations are done in the web search (at least to what is searchable on the WWW) there comes a new feature from Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft. That is the power of competition.

Last month it was Microsoft's turn, where Windows Live Search team posted about the enhancements they have done in their image search. This one is interesting - it allows you to look into the photos and describe about the image inside. For example I can say, show me only Black and White Images (filter:bw) or only images with face closeups (filter:face).

Google too has these features, but I found the face filter to work well in the Windows Live Search.

In Web today there are plethora of Encoding used for Tamil including TAB/TAM (Tamilnadu Govt. standard), TSCII (popular 8bit), TUNE and more. For each of these sites you need to download and install respective fonts, definitely a pain. Recently I found this Firefox Addon that aims to solve this problem. After downloading and installing this addon "Adhiyan" - press Alt-2 (for TSCII), Alt-5 (for TAB) and it changes the text in the page to Unicode. So without installing the respective fonts, you can read all the text in Unicode. Since it finds and replaces characters in the webpage, not all pages come out correctly. But still a very handy utility.

TiE Chennai usually brings practitioners & champions of Entrepreneurship to speak about their story in its monthly sessions. Recently it brought out one such session (29/06/2007) by the 2003 women entrepreneur of the Year Ms. Hemu Ramaiah, CEO of Landmark.

Hemu Ramaiah, who needs little introduction, shared her truly inspirational entrepreneurial journey especially the challenges & triumphs in setting up one of the leading and famous bookstores in India - LANDMARK. I have recorded my notes taken during the session as a PDF document here (352.53 KB)

Most of the times when you are asked to complete a feedback survey, you are left wondering whether anyone actually read it. It seems they do in some companies. Last Sunday (29/July) I was travelling to Chennai in Paramount Airways and completed a survey. Surprise!, next day Monday (30/July) morning I got an email acknowledging the survey. I guess all the survey gets into a system, generates an auto reply and goes through a workflow/BI.

Anyways, good job Paramount Airways, please keep it up.  

For the last 3 weeks, every Wednesday I had to go through this ordeal of a Dentist Appointment. Thank God, with yesterday I am done. I don't know what it is with Dentist (like any other Doctor they are also in a Noble profession), but majority of the people - Kids and Grown-ups dislike going to a Dentist. In the 3 hours of time that I was staring at the roof with my mouth wide open while the doctor filled my cavities I came up with this thought-provoking list of why we might be disliking Dentists (List is in no particular order):

• The pain while surgeon is operating, especially the drilling
• The thought of keep your mouth opened for long period
• The discomfort of so many instruments inside your mouth
• The fear that the dentist will pull off your teeth
• The idea that you will be told not to eat sweets/ice cream hence forth
• You are awake and the fact you have lost control over your body
• You can't cry or shout for help