Self By Self

I love land line

Set the clock back 10 years . I miss the good old days of only wireline telephones. No caller IDs and no phone books. No guessing who is calling or why. Just pick up the phone and answer. I bit my tongue many times after answering but the point is I answered. Life then was divided as calling hours and non calling hours. But now......

The other day a guy told his friend " I have his mobile number and we can call him anytime. " Anytime......... ??? He sounded like its his birth right. How many understand basic phone etiquettes. In all of 2005 I don't recollect anybody asking me " Can I talk to you now ? " before starting a conversation. I had people complaining I didnot answer the phone after 10 pm.

Phones ringing at all the wrong places is common. Worse still Charlie takes off in such a loud voice he can be heard at the other end of the city even without any network. Yapping on the phone while driving, crossing the road and in all public places. Marketers hawking all and sundry. The list is endless.

Did you notice. Call rates have crashed across all categories. But our total telecom costs have increased.

TechnoBabble

The technorati is engrossed with technology explained in a language which a average computer user cannot understand. Recently I visited the home page of the tech company. Reading and rereading just the one page revealed it was just a bolts & nuts web developer with content development and aggregation or segregation thrown in free. They made it look like rocket science . Plain vanilla " TechnoBabble". God bless their prospective customers who happen to visit the page.

If I visit a doctor with an ailment and he goes on rattling out the complexities of the disease and explained in all professional grandeur and glory well........ He is there to cure me. Keep it simple stupid. I am not here to listen to your professional technicalities. I am here to get well and get well soonest and at the least cost.

Same with technology, the jargon used scares most people away. Even the divine assurance that the PC will never explode and go up in flames does not encourage most of the 6 billion alive to get anywhere near the machine. ( See.... Why is it called a machine ? To scare away ? )
And for those of us more adventurous the next big tech hazard is obsolescence- planned obsolescence mind you.

By the time I got a hang of DOS 6.2 there came Windows. Got conversant with Lotus SmartSuite & its gone IBM bought Lotus and have better things to do than worry about me and my investment . ( If an app is abandoned by the developers we the hapless users should be entitled to a compensation.) The real investment in IT was believed to be the hardware & software. Right ? Wrong. Is it the legacy custom code or the data ? Again wrong. The REAL INVESTMENT IS THE TIME SPENT LEARNING A NEW WAY OF DOING THE SAME OLD THING. And you claim it gets easier and better by the day. Can anyone be more wrong.
The average user types a few pages on a word processor, sends email and at best uses a spread sheet and may be some custom made applications for his / her special needs. Wont you leave us alone. Is anybody listening ?

Keyboard for the net

Its very simple. While the net is very big the monitor is not. Still worse is the browser. There is this browser buttons - s , m , l , xl, 2xl, 3xl ....... Then there are rows and rows of tool bars- you name it I have it ( each with a single use ) Google bar, Yahoo bar and what else ? I keep loosing track of them. What I am left with for the world wide web is the area of a post card. Scrolling up & down, left & right I developed tennis elbow.

Can someone think of hardware to do the essential mundane commands of the web which will be less than 10 so the browser can be freed for browsing. While you do that see if you can build a pointing device as well in the keyboard.

One Application should do it all

I am not a nerd. But use the computer a lot. Will someone tell me why I need 3 different applications for the most common use of a PC with net connection viz a separate browser, a e-mail client & a word processor. Can't one application handle this without having to launch anything. Yes, direct from the desk top. I cannot imagine something easier than that. While so much is happening in organizing my desktop and drives nobody thinks of getting started easy. For some eerie reason I am scary about desktop searches engines & disorganized or cluttered drives which people are talking about which encourages me to be more disorganized than I am today.

Another very desirable thing is tags ( and maybe sub tags ) to all my files and folders. Tags should be upto 300 character long and can hold brief descriptions about what the file / folder contain so I don't have to open each file or name them 300 character long. A separate tag search will be real cool. The Redmond monster won't listen. So it can be a separate application. (For heavens sake please don't name it Tagger.)

All in the name of God

No god worth his salt will encourage fighting among mankind. If man kills man in the name of god then there is something wrong with the god or the interpretations of his teachings. ( I am not a MCP. Nouns like man and pronouns like he/ his are only notional and does not discriminate between sexes. ) Is there anyone left who follows or tries to follow the essence of any system of divinity.

Cost of Life in Chennai-India

Going by the recent repeated deaths in flood relief centers the cost of life in Chennai seems to be Rs 2000 + 10 kg rice + basic clothing.