Of company parties

A 15th anniversary of your company is indeed time for celebration, but when the number of guests hovers around a few thousand, you can only imagine the scene at dinner. Having to stand in a line for over 10 minutes just to get to the plate counter is a good time for all sorts of exercises for your brain… cursing, introspection, and any other mind games you can think of. But when that long wait for a plateful results in you reaching the table exactly when the guy in front of you picks up the last remaining plate, it is absolute torture. It makes you realize how royal the Indian pangat system is. Actually, that wait gave me a chance to apply some logic and devise a strategy to launch a planned attack on dinner queues. I am going to try that out at the next buffet I attend.

I am not blaming anybody here for that though…you gotta cut the poor hotel management some slack. It’s not easy catering to so many people at once, and I didn’t help myself by reaching the venue a bit late (particularly after the queues had transformed into a human chain). Harsh deadlines do not permit the luxury of leaving office any earlier in the evening than 8 :30, which also resulted in me missing the good (I hear) performance from Bela Shende. But what is the justification of serving cold rotis and some undoubtedly underfed chicken? And by the time I managed to finish the stuff in my plate, that I had managed to procure from one my breeziest visits to a buffet counter, the queue had now shifted to the ice cream place… damn. A few scoops of vanilla ice cream are no way worth any amount of queuing. Eventually, luckily I found an empty ice cream counter, but even there, all I got was a few thin slithers. That was all the hapless fella could dig out of the stone hard ice cream for me :( Icecream’s supposed to lift up your spirits right?, this just made the evening worse.

This has got to be one of the least enjoyable celebration dinners. Sob.

Another "Top" reason to go with Firefox

Read more about it here.

SDLC

A Software Developer’s Life Cycle in pseudo code.

while(projectNearingRelease) {
/*
if(today instanceof WEEKEND) {
party();
}
else {*/
gym();
work();
eat();
work();
eat();
if(pendingWork == null){
sleep();
}
//}
}

Sad. No wait, Horrible.

Fair and Lovely: The Fourth Umpire or the Hostess?

Those who have been watching over breakfast, Doordarshan’s hopeless attempt at stitching together a cricket talk-show will have realized (or expected) that the stuff is as useless as the actual Fourth Umpire himself. On the ground, he at least carries replacement balls. These guys carry an air of boredom and redundancy. That the show is sponsored by an all out feminine product should be a proof enough of how sure other regular sponsors of sports programmes are about the show's TRP.

You do have to sympathize with the producers though… after all, DD have only managed to come up with KKrishnammachary Shrikkanth and unsuccessful cricketer turned expert commentator Atul Wassan. Given that, pandering to sleaze such as having the hostess show cleavage is not surprising. What is surprising though is that all this is on National television, who have always found themselves within some rather sharp and implicit scissors of the censor board. After Mandira Bedi introduced spaghetti straps to cricket broadcasts, Roshni Chopra is going a step further. Unfortunately for the real cricket connoisseur, such digressions are sickening. Mandira’s claim to fame was that her presence in the studio brought women audiences in front of the TV set (which I disregard completely). Ms. Chopra’s primary aim seems to be that of at least getting the men back to watching DD’s telecasts.

Blog Silence

It’s been a while (is 6 days “a while” in the blogosphere? I dunno.) since I blogged (not that I do it an awful lot anyway), the reason being a lack of few things – mood, time, and blog-worthy material, in that order. Normally, a daily visit to the Tabloid of India’s website should throw something good enough to rant about, but even they have nothing interesting these days (apart from Shakti Kapoor finding himself in a mess, but we knew about all that already, didn’t we?). Next, it could have been about cricket, but then my good friend Gaurav writes enough about it (that I agree with) already. That along with Cricinfo, leaves precious little stuff related to cricket to blog about, although that’s hardly an exhaustive list of topics on my radar.

Then, there’s the question of time – I hardly have any of that these days. You know you have been doing entirely too much coding when, while starting off a mail with the customary “Hi foobar”, you type f and hit Ctrl+Space, expecting the mail client to auto-complete the addressee’s name.

About the mood – well, I guess I better not bore anyone with that crap.

Which then, leads me to a general musing… what is it that interests bloggers most generally, and do they make a conscious decision about how their blog turns out eventually, especially, in a one-blog-fits-all kind of situation? That was the very question on my mind when I started this thing, and now I am faced with it again! It might be a good exercise though – analyzing what people blog about, but I’ll do that one fine day when I have loads of free time. Till then, I am back to coding…

Journalistic Errors...

A pretty disappointing day for India on the field in Mohali was topped by this shockingly erronous report from the BBC. The report, referring to Danish Kaneria's performance, quite unabashedly claims that
It was the best analysis by a leg-spinner in a Test against India
and
Kaneria became the first leggie to take five wickets against India
both statements refuted by Shane Warne's haul of 6/125 against India at Chennai in 2004. Monumental slip-ups like these from as respected an agency as the BBC is surprising to say the least.

The Art of Televising Cricket

It would seem like a never ending déjā vu to someone who has the patience to watch DD Sports’ telecast of the current India-Pakistan series, if he happens to tune his TV to the national sports channel in the evenings. I just cannot understand the logic of showing the entire day’s play ball-by-ball again, given that you have already showed it once, live, the very same day. The seemingly simple concept of a highlights package is lost on the yawn-inducing channel.

See, this is where Doordarshan gets it wrong. They shouldn’t need highly smart and overpaid marketing guys to tell them that for people like me, having spent 10 long hours at work, highlights are the only preferred way of relishing the superb batting by Virender Sehwag. Mind you, I still love Test match cricket enough to watch an entire India test match live if I have the time, but watching the replay is like sitting through a serial-killer movie with the opening credits declaring who the killer is, and with advertisements every five minutes. The sadder part is, when eventually they have mercy on us beleaguered souls and do show the highlights, it’s on the next morning when again you are busy with getting ready for the day’s chores. To top it all, they have been so conceited that they aren’t even giving out the highlights package to anyone else. What’s the reason of such misplaced vanity? It’s not as if they have the greatest quality of footage or the best commentary team to back it up. Of all the men behind the microphone, Sanjay Manjrekar is perhaps the only one worth lending an ear to. The rest of the line up comprising of Arun Lal, Sivaramakrishnan & Co. is just plain negligible. Of course, there’s always Ravi Shastri to provide the necessary redundancy in case people are lost for words.

Now, for the whole highlights business - there’s three things DD could do:
A. Sell the highlights package to someone like ESPN and make a cool profit.
B. If option A is infeasible due to legal constraints, show some heart for public service and let them show it for free
C. Show them yourself at a time convenient for most people.

For Doordarshan, it seems the mammoth exercise of logically reaching the option C, is just another facet of the art of televising cricket, worthy enough of spending a lifetime learning.

Pot Calling The Kettle Black

This is a good example of exactly that. The JMM is accusing the NDA of "hijacking democratic norms" (!) in Jharkhand. If this is Congress' idea of damage-control by outsourcing the task to the JMM, it comes a wee bit too late, doesn't it?

Indian (I)Dol(l)

TV audiences in the country have been gripped by a new kind of idol-worship. Abhijeet Sawant from Mumbai was yesterday voted India’s new Idol. Ehh? Have we come to such a state that we now have to search for idols from competitions? Reportedly, people sent 31,077,330 SMSes for the voting. Whoa! That’s lot of text messages floating around the network. (Hmm, so no matter who loses, the telephone companies win). I did like Abhijeet’s voice, as I did Amit Sana’s. (That’s the only two people in the show whose names I can recall) and I am sure there must have been many other talented performers on the show, and that they can make it in the entertainment business, yet I have my doubts whether they can be slotted in the idol category. The selection process itself was quite questionable, what with people in the form of Farah Khan and Anu Malik on the judges’ panel. Sonu Nigam was the only one who I gave regard for. I just can’t see what the whole fuss is all about, so much that it can stretch people’s curiosity to the end!

A similar yet much less hyped idea is Dream Job - Harsha Ki Khoj. At least the judges there are ESPN-Star’s experienced commentary team and Perizaad Zorabian who, lets face it, is there to pull the crowds than anything else.
Surprising, what you can sell if you wrap it in the right eye-candy.

The Formula for entertainment…

Formula 1 is back and it is as good as it gets!! It was just the start I was looking for to the new season in Melbourne. There was a lot of criticism last year against the complete dominance of Ferrari over the driver’s and constructor’s championship, but that doesn’t look to be the case this time around, until Ferrari unleash their new 2005 car, that is :) It’s been a long while since Michael Schumacher has had to scrap for a good finish in a race of any significance, and he had to do that at the back of pack today! Only fools would write off this man though.

FIA’s new technical regulations raised quite a few eyebrows, but that didn’t make as big an impact on this race as the weather. Sudden rain in the middle of qualifying resulted in a completely jumbled up starting grid than we have come to expect, and honestly, I was having a hard time keeping track of the race leaders… I have gotten used to seeing Schumi, JPM, Kimi and Rubino at the top! Only time will tell how the new rules are going to affect the teams. Fisichella came out a worthy winner – he drove a clean race and didn’t put one toe out of the line from qualifying to the chequered flag. Renault seem to have a really good car that can now really compete with the big boys on their terms. There’s a loophole in the rules that was clearly evident today – the rules state that the engine has to last two races except if the driver doesn’t finish the race. So, if drivers aren’t going to get any points anyway, teams might as well call them in on the last lap, and have a new engine for the next race, which is what BAR Honda did. Still, the FIA are doing their bit to make the sport less monotonous - ICC, are you taking notes?

Just a word for Narain Karthikeyan – a good race it would have to be said… he had moments of concern on a few corners, but a 15th place finish on debut is not bad at all, considering that apart from Barrichello, none of last year’s top four made it close to the podium today. He will only get better with time and let’s hope he can even get some points this season. All in all, a good start for the season and a nice sporting appetizer for the India-Pakistan test series coming up. After long last, there is going to be something on TV that’s worth watching.

When was the last time you did something for the first time?

Yesterday was one the rarest and probably the first day in office when I did not even login to either of the messengers and neither did I put on my headphones for listening to music!! Just far too much work leaving no space for gossip or entertainment…bah. That I did manage to get an awful lot of work done, does say something about the percentage increase in efficiency with the shutdown of distractions like IMs, but it was the sheer amount of work looming ahead, that did not allow for such pastimes. Still, all work and no play make Jack dull, doesn't it :) I guess now that I have got a little break from work, I'll have a look around.

Political drama…

I am neck deep in work, probably even beyond, with some atrociously steep deadlines on the horizon, and yet I find time to have a peek at what our wise leaders have been up to lately. That too for the sheer dramatic value of the political events that have taken place, vis-à-vis elections in Bihar & Jharkhand. The Congress, which had propelled itself to a lofty perch as a savior, protector and what not of the nation’s Constitution, by keeping out the so-called "communal forces", is now back to its imperial, hegemonist ways. Found a good article about that here.