Post the success of Chandrayaan, there is yet another set of comments that have poured in, on that old post, this time rightfully cheering hurrah for Chandrayaan and more scorn for me. I have allowed most of them to go through, except those in which I had concerns on decency. I want to let all those folks know that I am as thrilled on Chandrayan success as they are. In fact, I have written a subsequent post on Chandrayaan launch that they may want to check out. Cheers to Chandrayan.

Links:

• The offending post
• My recent post on Chandrayaan launch.

Surprised, he asked the sculptor “Do you need two statues of the same deity?”

“No,” said the sculptor without looking up, “We need only one, but the first one got damaged at the last stage.”

The gentleman examined the idol and found no apparent damage.

“Where is the damage?”, he asked.

“There is a scratch on the nose of the idol”, said the sculptor, still busy with his work.

“Where are you going to install the idol?”, asked the passer by.

The sculptor replied that it would be installed on a pillar twenty feet high.

“If the idol is that far, who is going to know that there is a scratch on the nose?”, the gentleman asked.

The sculptor stopped his work, looked up at the gentleman, smiled and said, “I will know!”

I noticed an excellent slideshow on YouTube via Edelman Digital blog. It is quite an eye opener on the kind of information overload we are suffering. Perhaps not just suffering, but the mindless bytes of data we are creating all around.

(To those who do not follow cricket - Sourav Ganguly is a cricketer who retired recently, he was labelled the Prince of Kolkota by the media)

My another recent favourite is on, you guessed it.

More Amul topicals can be seen here. And of course, I remain a happy customer of Amul Butter and the topicals have played a key role in that .  The oldest topical I remember is on 1984 LA Olympics when PT Usha missed the Olympic bronze by whisker and the nation could not sleep for days.Wonder if anyone has a copy.

Meanwhile, keep going, Amul.

Having grown up traveling long distances in trains in India (Since 1989 kms, have stayed more than a thousand kms away from the city my parents lived in). As a student, I used trains extensively for the travel and if you have travelled even half as much as I have done, you would know that ascertaining the location of a train in India can be such a problem.

No more, because someone has started this mashup that gives useful bytes of information. It gives fairly detailed position but not real time information which is still pretty good. I wish someone could give me a solution to an answer that I oh-so-frequently heard from the Railway Enquiry office which was that the train is almost in (In Hindi, the answer used to be ‘Outer par  khadi hai’). The same answer would be repeated for upto an hour sometimes!

The second must see site is this Mashup which mocks up Swiss Rail train movements. This site lets you almost travel with the train and see birds eye view of locations as a train passes along but does not use real data but only simulates the movements and the stoppages based on the time table.

And if you thought not having real time data is a bad idea, wait till you read the below notice available from the Swiss Rail mashup. You have obviously forgotten that Swiss Trains operate on time and hence real time data is inconsequential and so wasteful of money!

Instead of the high end and increasingly perceived must have features, this phone a flashlights- for anywhere applications in a village, the phone has five different phonebooks ( so that papa, mamma, Bunty, Gullu and Soni can all share the same phone).

The phone has been designed to work in dusty surroundings, and has an amazing standby stamina of 26 days so that even the most wretched  powercuts in the village do not debilitate the connection with the mandi (agri mart), or the son working in the nearby city or village. Smart. It will also capture the usage of individual users . What’s more, its price is a jaw dropping ~USD 32 (~ INR 1500) and it is targetted at Dr Prahalad’s BOP.

Incidentally, Nokia sold more than 200 million of a previous model of this series - the Nokia 1100. The ad below captures a typical environment in which the 1100 was targetted.