When I came in this morning, there were 37 spam comments awaiting moderation. Yesterday, the number was pretty much the same. In a matter of 1 hour (when I was out for a meeting), spammers attacked 10 times on 10 different blog posts of mine.

Of course, you don’t get to see any of it because all those spam comments get moderated and nuked by me

I tried to add a list of banned words. The list is growing. First, all spams were about Casinos. I banned that word, and then it spam relating to insurance started appearing. This morning it was the most popular of all spam words - Viagra. Looks like the spammers have a thing for Viagra. Many of you Yahoo mail users would know.

Since these words have been banned, there is a new kind of spam word appearing (even as I write this I deleted two comments). The new word is Lindt… I now have a fine collection of banned words:

There was a time when my inbox was so full of sex related spam, that if my girl friend ever saw it, she would have surely asked me to get tested for all possible STDs. Not to mention that she may have suspected me to have artificially enhanced my you-know-what.

Last week’s rains were very much welcomed by Bangaloreans. I thoroughly enjoyed getting wet. It was fun riding back home from work in the rain. Riding in the rain is a little dangerous, but well, it’s summer and the rains are meant for us to cool down. Unfortunately all this cost me something. My cell phone went dead.

Now I am sure that it did not fall into water or something like that, but the service center guy told me with some element of shock that my phone was ‘waterlogged’. He even had the gall to ask me if I dropped it in water. If I remember right, it was in a pouch, which did get a little damp, but he made it sound like I dived into a pool with my phone. Aaarrgggh…dealing with these service center guys is always a pain. Be it a bike, a phone or a T.V. The handset costed me only 2k and change, and this guy tells me that the service may cost me around 1k. It’s been hardly 6 month since I purchased this handset, and I am not ready to spend 1k on it.

So as of now I am un-mobile. I am pissed. Not because I am un-mobile, but because getting wet has costed me my phone. Why can’t they make phones that are water resistant. Hell, why can’t the service center guys replace whatever component they need to replace, and bill it to the big rich company that manufactured it (the phone’s anyway under warranty)? Why is there no corruption in the service center industry? Damn them all

I watched Ice Age 2 - The Meltdown yesterday at PVR. The movie was good, funny and all, but I was surprised by the amount of ‘adult’ content in the movie. Not that I disapprove of it, but hey, I thought this movie was for kids! The movie has a PG rating, so that means when kids ask you why the mammoth Manny gets attracted to Ellie the female mammoth’s behind, you gotta be prepared with a good answer. So folks, remember, Ice Age 2 carries:

I wonder what the ‘mild peril’ stands for. Does it apply to the destruction shown in the movie? Or questions like "hey mommy, how can Ellie and Manny keep the mammoth race going? Aren’t baby mammoths too big for storks?"

Funnier than Ice Age was the standup comedian Russell Peters. My cousin had some clips of his show at home, and we stayed till late watching it. His racist, self-mocking jokes are just too funny!

I attended a seminar on networking at Interwoven today. The seminar was titled ‘Know Thy Network‘ and was really enlightening. What’s more, I liked the attitude of knowledge sharing. Two developers, Amita and Vaibhav, where brought in to educate a bunch of us Tech Writers. The presenters did a great job of simplifying some of the networking jargon for us. In fact, none of what was presnted to us today was new to me. I had learnt it all in college, but yet had never really retained anything in my mind.

This brings me to the question - what is the education we recieve worth? No, I am not saying that our schools and colleges are worthless. I learnt a lot of about life, relationships and whatnot during my student years. And the type of educational institution you are in really makes a difference. I only wonder if our teaching and quizzing methods we follow in our schools and colleges can be improvised. I don’t seem to find any measurable practical worth in the material taught to us, and the way it is taught to us.

Reminds me of what our H.o.D once told another examiner at a laboratory viva-voce - "I am here to see how much the students know. Not how much they don’t know." Most examiners would like to trap students by asking what they don’t know. Gives them some sort of satisfaction I guess. From the student’s side, most of them just manage to be good at cracking examinations. Knowledge assimilation is seldom the intention. And yes, this is the reality among a sizeable majority of students.

Whatever I just said isn’t brilliant realization but something all of us would have thought about by the time we are 20. But today after the seminar, it really struck me how easily I could relate to networking funda now as against when I was taught a couple of years ago.

Is there a solution? Can we bring about a change? Can we make our syllabus more knowledge-oriented?

Yes, change is slowly happening. Quite a few schools I know are getting innovative at teaching. A lot of stress is being given to all round development of the child. Students themselves have access to more knowledge than ever before. But the only stumbling block I see is the lack of good dedicated teachers. C’mon, who would want to be a lecturer after doing a B.E, when the easiest of IT/ITES/BPO jobs can fetch you double the salary of what you would get teaching? This is where the government needs to step in. But that’s another problem for another day

My bike is 11 months as of today. Just got it back from its fourth service yesterday. After a lot of initial quirks, it is now one mean machine! My bike has finally come of age!

Here’s one for my bike

I work for an MNC that has fairly lenient firewall policies. Apart from web-mail sites, I can browse a whole lot of other websites, including blogs. I know some companies that restrict internet access to only mails, and some that totally block blogs. Hell, I can even access The Best Page in the Universe! If you cannot access that page, then try looking up Wikipedia.

I totally understand why companies restrict access to the Internet. Sometimes it can be annoying, like when I cannot access Microsoft’s Windows XP SP2 page (the IT department has apparently not yet tested SP2 on our machines and do not recommend it). However, one thing that beats me is how they allow access to job hunting websites! I have no problems access Monsterindia.com, naukri.com or any of those job sites. Is it in the spirit of ‘free speech/freedom of expression/we-don’t-restrict-people-from-making-choices’ ? Something I haven’t yet figured…

Incidently, would you apply for a company that doesn’t get its facts right?

Taken from MonsterIndia.com

I picked up this book to remind myself all over again what the whole deal about blogging is. The book tries to be funny (like all For Dummies series), but succeeds only in a few places. For example:

The High Road: Self Installed Blogging Programs
Installing sophisticated blog software in your own server space is the most cost-effective way to get full-throated blogging power over a long period (I disagree). This method is also the most challenging way to start blogging. I don’t mean scratch-your-head challenging. I mean tear-your-hair-out challenging. Grown-men-weeping sort of challenge. Self installation of a blog is like building an SUV.

Ha ha! Now that was funny. And I agree with the latter part. But I guess people like Arun may not. He successfully hacked Wordpress to make his site: http://www.split-magazine.com/ And it looks damn good! I wish I had the time and expertise to hack my web-gallery and make it look the way I want it. Which brings me to the question: Are PHP templates editable in WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver? Something I intend to investigate today (yea, most of my weekends are spent in front of the ‘pooter). I am completely self-taught on this whole website building thing, and sometimes I wish I spent my 4 years of college learning such useful things rather than trying to find something to do in the jungle!

It’s on Ebay.in. Details here.

Why am I selling it? Because I would like to have a bag with detatchable shoulder straps. In all other aspects, this is a great bag at a great price! (salesman mode just came on and went off)

Oh, btw - that lens looks damn sexy I know. But I don’t own it. This is a product shot from Adorama’s website. Copyright theirs. Accessories shown not included with the bag

Serious digital photographers can’t rest with just buying a good camera/lens. One of the key aspects of DP over traditional photography is control. In DP, the photographer has almost total control over his end result. This does not mean that traditional photography doesn’t offer control. Think of it this way - how many amateur film photographers set up their own darkroom? In DP, 95% of the time, the darkroom is Adobe Photoshop. What you once instructed the developing & printing lab to do, you can now do at home.

The downside of this is the amount of investment one needs to make - beyond the camera and lens. For a person as naive as me, I have struggled with:

1. Memory - which brand, how fast, how much….all these questions I have investigated
2. Deciding on a decent bag to carry all the stuff. Should match my cost v/s performance ratio
3. Building a decent computer. - best possible graphics card, RAM and all
4. Calibrating my monitor (!) - yes, this has been a nightmare. Especially after my monitor came back from repair. If i am deadly serious (and rich), I may even have to invest in a monitor calibration equipment.
5. Choosing a good software for that ultimate workflow. Will it be RawShooter? CaptureONE Pro? Or any one of the many other options available. And again, struggling a bit more to see if the colour profiles match.

So here I am. Feeling wise after getting my hands messy with monitor calibration, computer freeze due to memory/CPU overload etc. But I am not complaining. It’s fun!

Hey folks, I have a new email id.

From now on, send me all your love mail, hate mail, fwds, invitations, innuendos (gals only, please) etc to

                          pixelshooter.net [AT] gmail [DOT] com

For all official purposes, my email continues to be: pratapj [at] rushpost [dot] com

Please update your address/little black books!