b(ond)log

I guess the outage at the Danger division of Microsoft has given us a new term for when things go wrong in the cloud. Would you be willing to let your data and applications live in the cloud and be Sidekicked?

Danger Hiptop – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia#Data service outage 2009.

Caught this while I was loading up on my weekend dose of BOFH on TheRegister.

Not now darling I’m twirping • The Register.

Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession anchored just east of Singapore | Mail Online.

While deleting email that was from grad school, I chanced upon a mail titled Living Life in Chunklets. I never actually read the full article but was pleasantly surprised to find the archive online:

If every moment, even outside of work, is spent striving toward some officious end–reading a quick article in a trade journal, exercising to keep heart disease at bay, maintaining a network of potentially useful acquaintances with quick personal emails–then something has to fall away. And some people think it’s the fragile things that go first: contemplative time, time to just be and not do, time to let the mind drift and spin.

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/01.06.00/cover/humantech-0001.html

Chinese guy singing Hindi Song:

Jai Ho in Spanish:

I am too old but makes me want to learn the guitar:

Reading about all the news with the oil futures spike, peak oil theories and inflation makes me wonder if good old two hands will become more important in the future for a country.

Whenever I compare India (where I was born) and USA (where I live), I find that anything that requires human touch is a lot more expensive in the US than in India. The opposite is true for highly automated machines. Household help/caregiving, massages, drivers for hire, etc. are all less expensive to hire in India. Hiring people for cheap is usually the most common differentiator when people compare the quality of living in India with USA.

I even remember a speech at my college by the Human Resources Development minister (who is the ex-officio head of the IITs) highlighting this point. He was berating the computer science students for working on Robotics when we should be focusing on trying to better utilize India’s best resource – the abundance of human resource.

If automation (automobiles, manufacturing, et. al.) gets more expensive then in a hundred years we might be back to using human power to power everything! Not back to the dark ages, but to cycling and hammer and tongs…

Imagine Eli Manning and the NY Giants missing the points on their last drive. Many (if not all) news bulletins would have carried the photo of Randy Moss hauling in the pass from Tom Brady while Corey Webster was spread eagled even before the Ball was anywhere near Moss. It would have been painted as Tom Brady’s clinical effort and Randy Moss’ redemption for a poor post-season. However, more interestingly, Corey Webster would be forever the guy who was on his ass behind while NE scored. Instead Corey Webster is the guy who deflected the Hail Mary pass in the last 10 seconds and who (ahem!) inexplicably fell down on the previous drive.

Note: I am only a USC and OSU fan and not even a 49ers or Raiders fan.