What do you Call This.....

According to this article the Vice President Dick Cheney's office is missing an entire weeks worth of email messages. And this not any ordinary week we are talking about. The week was Sept. 30, 2003, to Oct. 6, 2003, the opening days of the Justice Department's probe into whether anyone at the White House leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Now that itself should make you queasy. But lets leave that aside for now.
If your are working in the highest level of the government ,and the Vice President damn sure is, shouldn't there be safeguards set to archive all emails for such high government officials. I am certain that my office emails are archived in a server somewhere and my importance is minuscule compared to the Vice President. I would think no body would miss a heartbeat over my missing old emails unless I have done something wrong. But the emails to/from the Vice President of the United States office, that's something else.
Don't you think with all the taxes collected from us individuals they would have the state of the art technology in place to archive emails. Apparently this is not something which just happened out of the blue one day. Well that's government at its best for you. What else can you call it...

Godhra Riots Anniversary

Tomorrow marks the sixth anniversary of one of the most deadly communal riots in post independent India's history. It all started when a train compartment carrying Hindu activists and pilgrims was allegedly set on fire at Godhra station in Gujarath. The incident sparked communal riots which resulted in deaths of about 1000 people (mostly Muslims) across the state of Gujarath. An inquiry led by Supreme Court judge Umesh Chandra Banerjee, found that the fire started accidentally. Numerous cases related to the riots are still pending in courts due to witnesses either turning hostile or lack of evidence.

Read more about what happened on the day by clicking Godhra Riots

Hitler, Frankenstein Contest Elections

Whats in a name you may say. Tell it to these people who are contesting in the election for the legislature in Meghalaya, India. Candidates seems to have very unusual but sort of humorous names. Mind you though, that the person bearing the name does not in any way uphold the political, ideological or cultural notions that the original name may signify. Read more by clicking Funny Names

Also Read
Whats in a Name?

Welcome to The Free World

Amit Varma's article Welcome to the Free World published in the Indian Express provides a very good insight into how a market free of regulation and unnecessary govermental intervention thrives and develops. He gives the example of the internet in general and blogs in specific, and how market forces channel knowledge and creativity into something useful and better for the public at large.

Tit for Tat?

The Desmoines Register carries a story of a guy, Dave Steward, who was fired from his job because he posted a cartoon which compared Managers to Drunken Lemurs on his office's bulletin board. In response to this, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert is running a series of cartoons this week (starting from Feb 20th) basically lampooning the managers at Catfish Bend Casino where Dave Steward worked. You can read more about the story and also look at the cartoons by clicking Tit for Tat?. Is this just a case of, as The Desmoines Register puts it, art imitating life, or life imitating art. I dont know but its just some great stuff.....

Whats in a Name?

Who would have thought that having a hyphen or an apostrophe in your name would be cause for some much trouble. According to this article, computer systems have a hard time recognizing hypens, spaces and apostrophes. So good luck O'Connors, D'Angelos, N'Dours and D'Artagnans or Al-Kurd, Al- Hussaini. As for me am I glad that I do not have to deal with this.....

Getting Things Done

Today while driving back from work I was listening to the NPR as usual. They had a story on this supposedly great time management concept called Getting Things Done or GTD.
This intrigued me quite a bit and after coming back home, I did some Google search. It turns out GTD is something that I have been sub-consciously practicing at work, at least partly I must admit. Part of GTD involves using Lean Manufacturing Techniques and Tools and applying them to better organize one's own tasks and priorities. The other part of GTD involves something called as six levels of focus. This basically is organizing your commitments and priorities from bottom to top. the bottom being the things that you need to get done right now and the top being "Your Life Goals".
The other concept that I liked about GTD is the concept of 43 folders or tickler files. Twelve folders are used to represent each month and an additional 31 folders are used to represent each day. The folders are arranged to help remind you of activities to be done that day. Each day you open to the numbered folder representing today's date and look at the activities that need to be done that day.
After doing some preliminary research, I believe that this is something worth trying. If successful, may be, I would be a bit more organized. That would only help right.

Where are my Tax Dollars Being Spent?

The website Budget Graphs provides a very nice pictorial view of where our federal tax dollars will be spent in the year 2008. You can view the poster at My Tax Dollars

Quote of the Day

This seems like the quote of the day. Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” says that she got the idea for the book when she was a fellow at the library back in 2001, on 9/11. Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
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“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
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Read more at The Age of American Unreason

India a True Democracy?

Amit Varma in his article Where is Inner-Party Democracy in India? for Mail Today raises a very interesting question. The article questions whether we are truly a democratic nation when there is hardly any democratic process in how the parties select their leaders. Pretty interesting article.....

Lost in translation

One of my colleagues has a quote called "Catherine is a nasbian!". Though we knew what it implied, we set out on finding where it really originated. Our quest led us to these list of badly translated subtitles from Old Cantonese movies . Enjoy... And passout out laughing

Taxing Plastic bags to save the environment

In a remarkable example of how smart government policies can save the enivronment, the government in Ireland has begun collecting taxes on plastic bags in order to curb their use. The policy since its introduction five months ago has had dramatic impact with about 90% reduction in the use of plastic bags. And the good things about this is that all the extra tax money will be used on projects that will benefit the environment.

Read more about it at Taxing Plastic Bags

Mumbai for Maharastrians?

The recent comments by Raj Thackery about Amithab Bachchan and the ensuing violence where Maharashtra Nav Nirman Sena party workers attacked taxi drivers and small shop owners from North India has created a tense situation in Mumbai. After being marginalized from the Shiv Sena, this stunt by Raj Thackery was his latest ploy to keep himself in the limelight ahead of next years assembly elections. And the victim of his latest political maneuvering is the common man of Mumbai including Marathi speaking people.
It is no wonder that this cheap political trick and his parochial mentality will get Raj Thackery and his party no where in the long run. In a state where farmers suicides are the order of the day with Maharastra accounting for the highest number of them last year, more then three times that of Andra Pradesh, the real focus should be on how to tackle this situation and not squabble on whether somebody is loyal to Maharastra. Alas if Raj Thackery had this much common sense it would have served him well in the future.