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Saturday, January 29, 2005

Christmas party from hell

This is a story about the Christmas party hosted by the local office of a Wall Street darling that rhymes with Hell.

So, this company uses a whole lot of contractors (consultants as they are called) in its Professional Services group to keep the costs down. Some 60% of the folks in the office are these "consultants". They call it the "leveraged" model. This year in keeping up with the eternal theme of keep the costs down the office management decided to bring in Thai lunch for Christmas (yes, the whole Christmas party was nothing but this free lunch from the neighbourhood Thai restaurant). And, they sent an email out to everyone in the office saying lunch is free for employees and costs 10 bucks for the "consultants". Needless to say there were hardly anyone for the lunch party - the employees were too embarassed to be there.

Maybe they should just do away with Christmas party and call it separation of corporate and religion.

Jassie Gift... Whats in a name?

I must confess the first time I heard the name Jazzy Gift (turns out it is Jassie Gift), I thought it belonged to a race horse. The next was - only a Mallu would do so (To be fair, I have come to expect similar names from the Bongs and the Punjus.)

Anyway, since we are on the topic of names here are a few more interesting names. These are actual people who went to college with me. There was a girl by name Sweetie Thomas - bet her poor husband cannot consider sweetie as a term of endearment (one word less, makes life difficult for men). Then, there was Shaji Kuriakose (male) and Shaji Mary (female) in the same class. And, if that was not enough there was Binu Kurien (female) a year ahead of us and Binu K (male) in my batch. I guess these are what one would call unisex names.

Back to Jassie Gift - he did not choose the name but to live up to it is a big thing. And, that he certainly does.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Is Linux a four letter word?

I often used to say - "Java is a four letter word. And, so is Unix." Of course, it had nothing to do with the fact that I worked for Redmond for sometime. I often thought they were part of the "Unholy Trinity" - Intel, Microsoft & Dell - one influences the other's sales.

Anyway, recently I decided to install Linux on my new laptop. Part of the reason was that it was an old laptop - an IBM T22. So, I installed Suse 9.1 Personal on it. Did the install over broadband from an ftp site. The install itself went off without a hitch. But, hey wait a minute. why is the wireless card from Netgear not working? Checked a few websites, found something about prism54 etc...Tried all that and gave up.

Tried doing VPN to my school. First I had to download the software, build it and then install it. Yet, it did not work.

Then, tried installing BloGTK, an offline blogging tool. The install instructions listed three or four dependencies. I found that my version of software was missing most of it. So, I began doing the download, build and install process. The libraries themselves seem to be dependent on other libraries and that link seem to be never ending. Of course, what is built for another distribution won't work on mine. Finally, after about two months of effort I gave up.

I am not a geek but I am not computer challenged either. I don't believe that Linux is for the masses - the people who mistake CD Drive for cupholder, don't know that Internet over AOL is same as Internet over any other ISP. I think Linux is suffering the same problems as UNIX - multiple incompatible distributions. And, why can't someone create a single install file that checks dependencies, installs the necessary libraries and then the software. Of course, the cost of software is free but my time is not...

Obeying orders .. remember Nuremberg

BBC NEWS | UK | 'Abuse' soldier 'obeyed orders'

So, here you have it. The keepers of democracy and freedom claiming that they were just following orders when they were torturing iraqis. Hey, isn't that what the Nazis said at Nuremberg and they did not get off so easily.