iConverged

As a frequent traveler, I’ve flown several airlines to several places. However, the one airline I’ve categorically avoided in the past is India’s own Air-India (AI) for international travel. I guess it’s because pretty much all my life, I’ve only heard bad things about its service, quality of airlines etc from my parents , their friends and friends of friends. But this was 15 years ago. Times change. However, I was still not willing to try AI due to its (in)glorious past track record that was handed down to me by word of mouth and from generation to generation.

A week ago, I had to travel to India for work. This was January 2010 and the fog conditions in Delhi were particularly bad. As I sit in my hotel in India and look out of the window and write this article, the fog is really bad – hardly any visibility. With this much of fog,  most flights that arrive in Delhi late at night get rerouted to other cities and make it into Delhi only during daytime the next day. My colleagues who arrived in India earlier warned me of the condition, so I looked around for flights that landed in the day in delhi. Pretty soon I realized there was only one option for me to try: Air India. Drat. All the other flights like Lufthansa, United etc all arrived late at night and the only other daytime options were ridiculously expensive. I had read that Air-India had recently re-done its entire international fleets and there were new planes and newly re-designed business class and first class seats which according to their marketing was “comparable to other international flights”. Furthermore, the fact that it flew directly from IAD to Delhi with a short stop at JFK was a very attractive option for me, so I decided to take the plunge and try out this carrier for the first time in my life. What follows next is my experience.

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I finally get why people tweet. It lets you speak your mind the way it is, without requiring you to make a paragraph out of it. When I blog, I think, then form, then rehearse then post. When I tweet, I think and tweet. The link between my thoughts and the tweets is more direct. And of course, very often, I don’t have paragraphs to talk about, but still experience exciting new things that can be written in 3 lines. So now I understand the subtle difference of tweeting vs blogging. I’ve wiped the dust off my twitter account. I will use that more often now. I will still occasionally post, but only if I have lots to say.

Follow on at http://twitter.com/arjunrc

XKCD has a hilarious cartoon on “Estimation”. I just burst out laughing when I read the footnote. If you are a windows user, you will burst out laughing too.

Estimation

Like all the apple fanboys like to squeal and shout, here is my obligatory squeal of delight on having my phone shipped out today. Let me join the ranks of the ‘I feel so proud that apple condescended to ship me something I paid for’ list with the obligatory, but totally useless details:

When did I order: July 11, 6:44AM PDT to be exact

What did I order: Iphone 3GS, 32Gig, Black as an AT&T upgrade

Where did I order it from: Apple Store (online)

When did I get my “shipped” status: June 18, 2009, 2:14 PM ET to be exact. Interestingly, I happened to be on the appstore site hitting refresh so I saw the status change from ‘Prepared to ship’ to ’shipped’ (Another squealing shout relevant only to me)

What does the fedex tracking status say:

Picked up from Memphis TN

Delivery on: Jun 19, before 3:30PM

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You know, one would think a person interested in technology always would do his research before adoption. Well, in my case, my heart always conflicts with my mind. Consider my sudden move from blogger to wordpress.com. It went sort of like this “oh cool, there are some neat wordpress.com templates, I’m bored of blogger, so let me migrate”. I know, it was a ridiculous reason. I did not research wordpress.com’s limitations. After migration, I realized:

1. No google-ads allowed. Darn. I had just about started to see a reasonable return on my old blog
2. The import tool imported the articles alright but did not import images – they kept the blogger URLs. Once I removed my blogger blog, several of the images disappeared. My guess is others will disappear over time
3. No detailed stats. Wordpress.com’s own stats is very limited. Statcounter was far superior, but since I can’t plug in JS code, statcounter works with wordpress, but cannot show referrer stats
4. No linkage to analytics.
5. No customizations to CSS unless I buy it.
6. Article URLs were not rewritten – so if you go to my yearly roundups (which I forgot to do for 2007), they will all point to my blogspot.com URLs which don’t exist.

Like I said, a badly researched option for me. Guess I deserve it. Can’t blame wordpress.com at all. Gee, maybe I’ll migrate back and pain my readers to re-do their entire subscriptions etc. Or maybe I’ll just stick to this limited functionality. Gee.

On the plus side, I think Akismet rocks. It’s a godsend for spam.

Presenting the most powerful framework for conceptualizing your company.

Credit: here
Source I read it from: here

See this: http://www.tdbspecialprojects.com/

Click on the central ’shuffle’ button for ‘innovation’.

Hi Readers,

Just a short post to let you know that this blog just may be quiet for the next few weeks (hopefully shorter). I am in the process of discovering how lovely yet strenous it is to manage our newborn son

A Note to my friends from Russia: Thanks for your email – I apologize for not having responded yet – I will certainly put some thought on your questions and write back by next week.

(c) Corporaterat (please retain copyright if you copy)

Oh just a cartoon. Sometimes, I get the itch to draw.