ctrl.altered.mind

Stumbling upon this cartoon reminded me of a rather bizarre incident a friend experienced, while vacationing someplace in the US of A that probably does not win the company of too many foreigners. My friend, who’s Indian, got told, “Go back to Arabia you Jew!” (correct me if this isn’t verbatim, M)

Each time a Mac versus Windows article hits the Web, a maelstrom of comments from each camp is whipped up on forums and discussion boards. It would be an interesting socio-psychological experiment to dissect the average fanboy mind, to understand how some people can, time after time, argue to virtually no limit about the virtues of the operating system of their choice - and enhance the pitfalls of the other in the same breath. Pick any Digg article on Mac OS X that also includes a comparison with Windows (or not!), like this one for example.

While I’m all for healthy debate, one observation cannot be discredited - significantly many (if not most) Apple OS X users are former and/or current Windows users, while very few people fighting the battle on Microsoft’s side have even used OS X for more than a few minutes. I’d guess that they are basing their beliefs about the adversary on hearsay. That said, here’s a picture that I stumbled upon, which sums up my argument on the topic as far as design philosophy for the two companies is concerned.

Mike found this Penn Masala video on Youtube, called The Facebook Skit. Its a parody of Enrique Iglesias’ Hero. Funny, and with complete desi authenticity as it features a Patel mentioned in the video.

Penn Masala is the world’s first and premier Hindi a cappella group formed in 1996 at the University of Pennsylvania. Their website even has a media player that features the most popular songs from the five albums that the group has produced in the last ten years. I didn’t realize that two of their songs were also featured in American Desi, a movie that most desis probably end up watching (through strong recommendation or otherwise), in their first week after stepping ‘off the boat‘ - well, I did anyway.

Penn Masala also has their newest song, ‘Aankhon Mein Tu Hai’, available as a free download. Its a good song with some north and southern Indian classical influence. Check it out.

If you have not (attempted to) visit my website in the past few days, you wouldn’t have noticed. The site was down through most of this past week because of a domain transfer that went wrong somewhere, and I ended up with a bad A-record and incorrect DNS servers. Well, I’m glad that’s fixed now. I was dreading having to get in touch with technical support by my domain and hosting providers to help get this fixed as soon as possible, but surprisingly, it was not too hard getting in touch with a person each time I called. Unfortunately, the fix itself took days to fix, because of the whole 24-48 hour DNS propagation time involved with each change (but that’s beside the point).

It is really nice to be able to get talking to a person when calling a phone-based service, despite the great advances that have been attempted (and accomplished by a few) in phone support technology - like voice recognition. Instead of hitting keys on my phone keypad, I can now be spotted (albeit rarely) conspicuously uttering single words, punctuated by long pauses, on my cellphone in public. English.. Register.. Yes..

Fortunately, there’s an easier way out in most cases. Thanks to the GetHuman project, a database of phone-based services along with the method of reaching a human at the other end of the line, is now available online. Check it out. Most of the time, hitting ‘0′ at each prompt helps speed up the experience, but a lot of services have different combinations, like a cryptic ‘1433′ code for Wal-Mart (but really, who in the world needs to call Wal-Mart?). I wonder if these codes are present for better assistance, or as easter eggs waiting to be discovered. I can say for sure, from experience - please consult the GetHuman directory if you’re planning to call your credit card company