It’s stuff like this that makes me want to get married again!

To Anandi again.. Of course!!!

No seriously!

Apparently, the Russians are developing an airport security device that eliminates the privacy concerns that come with full-body scanners at the airports.

It’s a booth that you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will simply detonate any explosive device you may have on you.

They see this as a win-win for and there would be none of this junk about racial profiling.

This would also eliminate long, expensive trials. Justice would be quick and swift. Case closed!

It’s so beautifully simple . . . Visualize it . . .

You’re waiting in the airport terminal.

You hear a muffled explosion.

Soon, an announcement comes over the PA system . . .”Attention standby passengers: We now have a seat available on flight number XYZ.”

Why didn’t anyone think of this earlier?

Found this here.

Jack in the Box

A mobile phone company has suspended the number 0888 888 888 – after every single person assigned to it died in the last 10 years. [via telegraph]

The first owner Vladimir Grashnov – the former CEO of Bulgarian mobile phone company Mobitel which issued the number – died of cancer in 2001 aged just 48.

Despite a spotless business record there were persistent rumors that his cancer had been caused by a business rival using radioactive poisoning.

The number then passed to Bulgarian mafia boss, Konstantin Dimitrov, who was gunned down in 2003 by a lone assassin in the Netherlands during a trip to inspect his £500 million drug smuggling empire.

Dimitrov, who died aged 31, had the mobile with him when he was shot while eating out with a model.

Russian mafia bosses – jealous of his drug smuggling operation – were said to have been behind the killing.

The phone number then passed to Konstantin Dishliev, a crooked businessman, who was gunned down outside an Indian restaurant in Bulgaria’s capital Sofia after taking over the jinxed line.

Dishliev, an estate agent, had secretly been running a massive cocaine trafficking operation before his assassination in 2005.

He died after £130 million of the drug was intercepted by police on its way into the country from Colombia.

Since then, the number is understood to have been dormant while police maintained an open file on Dishliev’s killing and his smuggling ring.

Now phone bosses are said to have suspended the number for good. Callers now get a recorded message saying the phone is “outside network coverage.”

A Mobitel spokesman would only say: “We have no comment to make. We won’t discuss individual numbers.”

A banned adv during IPL

I am wondering why the Zynga folks haven’t sued them yet!

HQ – MINIVAN RAP – SWAGGER WAGON -

• June 7th : 16:30  – 17:30
  Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design with Serge Jespers
• June 7th : 20:30  – 21:30
  Connecting your design to PHP services with Mihai Corlan
• June 8th : 16:30  – 17:30
  Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 with Michael Chaize
• June 8th : 20:30  – 21:30
  Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project with Mike Jones
• June 9th : 16:30  – 17:30
  Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 with Tom Krcha
• June 9th : 20:30  – 21:30
  Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services with Tom Krcha
• June 10th : 16:30  – 17:30
  Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2.0  with Piotr Walczyscyn
• Jun 10th : 20:30  – 21:30
  Code once and run on multiple mobile devices with Mark Doherty

Build an app in a week is intended to teach you about the Adobe® Flash® Platform, including Adobe® Flex®, Adobe® Flash® Builder™, Adobe® AIR®, Adobe® Flash® Player, and how it integrates with Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 technologies. This weeklong event features free, live webinars presented by Adobe technology experts. See live demos and have your questions answered by the experts during interactive Q&A sessions.

Who should attend?

• Web designers
• Web developers
• Application developers
• Rich Internet Application developers
• Interactive design specialists

What you will learn
By attending this e-seminar series you will be able to create your own Rich Internet Application at the end of the week, using all the power of Flash Platform, in combination with the device and technology of your choice. 

What Do You Need to Participate?
Online live webinars are scheduled events simulcast over the web via Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro. You’ll need a computer with a browser, Adobe Flash player and Internet connection. Voice-Over IP will broadcast over your computer. Access details will be provided once you register.

You can find more detail on the registration site here: http://www.adobe.co.uk/appinaweek

The talk went well and the audience were pretty responsive and involving. I managed to finish my talk within the time limit. Nice experience on the whole.

For non-Indians…. Parotta is an Indian food. It’s something that looks like a pancake and is made of dough.

Once when guru was travelling with his disciple, by the end of the day they arrived at a village, where they were treated with nice food, place to sleep, and overall hospitality. in the morning when they left the village, after coming out, the guru held his hands up to the sky and said – may they never live in one place for too long. may they wander the whole earth.

The next evening they reached another village where they were treated badly, like beggars and thieves and no one gave them any food to eat or shelter to sleep. as they left the village, guru again asked god to – may they always live happily in this village forever.

The disciples had somewhat accepted the last wish, but this one was too much, and one asked the reason for wishing prosperity to the second village.

Guru said – like a true sannyasi, good people should not stay too long in one place. how else will goodness spread in the world?

*Note to my wife: Ahaaaaa!!!!! What do you say now???? So, headphones and loud music doesn’t necessarily damage hearing!!

Despite all the Walkmen, boomboxes, 8-tracks, iPods and Bluetooth headsets that have delivered raucous noise to the ears of Baby Boomers, hearing loss appears to be declining among adults.

This counterintuitive finding from the first study of long-term changes in hearing loss is that for every five years a man or woman was born later in the 20th century, their chance of having hearing impairment dropped 13 percent and 6 percent, respectively.

A key suggestion of the report is that other, positive changes in the last 50 years — reduced noise levels at work and better overall health — are more important than the rise of headphones and other entertainingly noisy new products.

“Because many people think that the world is getting noisier and noisier, they think that the prevalence of hearing impairment might increase,” said Weihai Zhan, a population health scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “But the prevalence of hearing impairment is decreasing across the generation.”

The new work draws on a long-term study of health outcomes for the people of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, a small town in between Milwaukee and Madison. More than 2,000 people underwent three health screenings at five-year intervals.

The study also underscores that hearing loss clearly is not wholly determined by genetic factors or simple aging, but rather stems from
several “environmental, lifestyle or other modifiable factors,” the authors wrote in their new paper in the American Journal of Epidemiology January issue.

Read More @ Wired.

Bangalore: Social networking site Facebook, which connects old friends and allows users to make new ones online, is being blamed for an
increasing number of marital breakdowns, reports the Telegraph.

Divorce lawyers claim that the explosion in the popularity of websites such as Facebook and Bebo is tempting to people to cheat on their partners. One law firm, which specializes in divorce, claimed almost one in five petitions they processed cited Facebook.

Suspicious spouses have also used the websites to find evidence of flirting and even affairs which have led to divorce. Mark Keenan, Managing Director of Divorce-Online said, “I had heard from my staff that there were a lot of people saying they had found out things about their partners on Facebook and I decided to see how prevalent it was I was really surprised to see 20 percent of all the petitions containing references to Facebook. The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to.”

Flirty emails and messages found on Facebook pages are increasingly being cited as evidence of unreasonable behaviour. In fact, computer firms have even cashed in by developing software allowing suspicious spouses to electronically spy on someone’s online activities.

One 35-year-old woman even discovered her husband was divorcing her via Facebook. Conference organiser Emma Brady was distraught to read that her marriage was over when he updated his status on the site to read: “Neil Brady has ended his marriage to Emma Brady.”

Around 14 million Britons are believed to regularly use social networking sites to communicate with old friends or make new ones. The popularity of the Friends Reunited website several years ago was also blamed for a surge in divorces as bored husbands and wives used it to contact old flames and first loves.

(source: SiliconIndia)

Nice!

Bangalore: An apartment on the 100th floor of ‘Burj Khalifa’, the world’s tallest building and one of the most-sought after addresses in the world today, comes at a price of Rs. 38,000 per sq ft. But if you think that’s a soaring price, consider this – the real estate price in Delhi will beat that by a mile, reports Economic Times.

The apartments on Prithviraj Road and Aurangzeb Road in Central Delhi are much more expensive. While, the per sq ft rate of apartments in Marble Arch and Tata Apartments on Prithviraj Road is around Rs. 65,000 per sq ft, Ansal apartments on Aurangzeb Road have a price of Rs. 55,000 per sq ft, according to Senior Broker Hemendra Sharma.

In Vasant Vihar and Chanakya Puri in South Delhi, apartments built on smaller plots of 400-800 sq metres are commanding prices of around Rs. 45,000 per sq ft. In fact, there are not many luxury condominiums available in central and south Delhi. However, there are several bungalows on independent plots of around three acres with a permitted area of construction of 3500 sq ft to 10,000 sq ft. These plots are commanding a price of Rs. 200 crore to Rs. 500 crore. So the per sq ft cost of these bunglow comes to a whopping Rs. 5 lakh per sq ft.

Condominiums in Mumbai are even costlier. The per sq ft rate in Mumbai’s NCPA Apartments at Nariman Point is between Rs. 90,000 and Rs. 1 lakh. 

Gulam Zia, National Director, research and advisory services of global property consultants Knight Frank says, “In the posh upmarket localities of Delhi and Mumbai, where there is a scarcity of land, property prices have shot through the roof.” Adds Zia, “Property prices in Mumbai’s western and central suburbs of Worli, Lower Parel and Prabhadevi are upwards of Rs. 40,000 per sq ft.”

Real estate prices in India are inverse to the country’s image of a developing nation. “Mumbai and Delhi command one of the highest per sq ft rates in the world,” says Anshuman Magazine, CMD, CB Richard Ellis, South Asia, a leading global property consultancy firm.

In India while the land cost itself is high, the cost of quality is even higher. If one is paying Rs. 38,000 per sq ft for an apartment in the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, for the same price or more in Mumbai or Delhi one will only be paying for the location and not for the construction or amenities. In terms of amenities and quality there is just no comparison. Magazine adds that, in the U.S. when a buyer looks to buy a home, he or she first looks for the amenities on offer that would suit his or her lifestyle, whereas in India it’s all about land and location for the buyer.

While Mumbai and New Delhi are in a zone by themselves as far as realty pricing is considered, other big cities like Chennai and Bangalore are yet to see such pricing, though the rates have dramatically shot up in the recent past. 

[/source]

Mind you… I am not talking about some 3rd world slaughterhouse or pub. I am talking about a MNC with guys holding masters and doctorates from all over the world. Not just at my workplace, I have seen this happening in many hotels as well. This post is a aimed at saying a few words at those who have this disgusting habit!

I used to think that its an ‘Asian thing’ and then I just googled it before writing this post and I find that it’s a global phenomenon. There are questions on this even in Yahoo! answers! If you read this post and you are in the habit of doing this. Please try and stop it. It’s very very disgusting for some people when they ‘hear’ you do that.

I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who were interested in the science of Prototyping. The industry and the community has always regarded Prototyping as an optional phase in the idea-to-market process. While many other industries like mobile, automobile, mechanical have embraced Prototyping long ago, the software world still seem to be a bit reluctant in realizing the advantage and relevance of this science. Looks like more and more people are waking up …. The audience seem to be growing larger and larger with every talk I do on this subject and thats a good sign …

Dislaimer: Some slides in the above PPT have been re-used in multiple talks to people of USiD 2009, NID – Bangalore, IIT-Kanpur Tech Tour.

Watch it completely…. ::ROFL::
(source: Tweet)

(source: Lamebook)

(source: TOXEL)

[/source]

IT professionals with these in-demand skills are expected to earn the following salaries in 2010:

    * Flash developer: $75,000-$100,000
    * Flex developer: $90,000-110,000
    * PHP/LAMP developer: $85,000-100,000
    * Ruby on Rails: $75,000-95,000
    * CRM developer: $80,000-110,000

While the Bluewolf research was primarily focused on salaries in the New York, Connecticut, New Jersey area salaries — which are approximately 25% higher than the national average — Bluewolf said salary increases in other areas of the country will follow the trend, just at lower base levels.

All the more reason, you should move to Flex!!!

I do appreciate and respect the lady’s boldness in trying to speak a language she has no clue about in national television?

Nice way to look at things

Last night my spouse was berating me for wanting to check my
email as soon as I got home from work. “You know”, she
complained, “I think that work rules your life”.

“No dear,” I replied, “_you_ rule my life. I just prefer work.”

Musicians Want to Know if They Were on the Guantánamo Playlist
By DAVE ITZKOFF

Hiromi Yasui for The New York Times
Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and Trent Reznor are among the musicians who have joined a campaign to close the prison at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as they seek to learn whether their music was used during the questioning of detainees there, The Associated Press reported. The National Security Archive in Washington said it was filing a Freedom of Information Act request on behalf of a coalition called the National Campaign to Close Guantánamo, including an effort to gain more details about how loud music was used as an interrogation device. Based on public documents and interviews with former detainees, the archive said, Guantánamo prisoners were played loud music, including songs by AC/DC, Britney Spears and Marilyn Manson, as well as advertising jingles and “Sesame Street” tunes, in their cells and in preparation for interrogations. Thomas Blanton, the executive director of the archive, told The A.P., “At Guantánamo, the U.S. government turned a jukebox into an instrument of torture.” A spokeswoman for Joint Task Force Guantánamo, which handles the care and custody of detainees, said loud music had not been used with prisoners since the fall of 2003. [more]

And here’s the slideset -

Cool Facts

Scientists believe the bloodybelly’s red belly helps mask bioluminescent light from the prey it swallows. A predator with a glowing gut could easily become prey.

The bloodbelly’s depth range is from 984 to 3,320 feet.

It grows to a length of six inches.

The genus name Lampoctena derives from the Greek roots for “brilliant comb,” referring to the bright iridescence diffracted from the animal’s comb rows.

New Delhi: A retired Indian engineer, Chewang Norphel, 76, has built 12 new glaciers already and is racing to create five more before he dies, and by then he hopes to train enough new ‘icemen’ to continue the work he is doing to save the world’s ‘third icecap’ from being transformed into rivers, reports Telegraph.

His race against time is shared by Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, who called on the region’s Himalayan nations, including China, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan, to constitute a united front to tackle glacial melting.

The Himalayan glaciers, including Kashmir’s Siachen glacier, feed the region’s most important rivers, as they irrigate farm lands in Tibet, Nepal and Bangladesh and throughout the Indian subcontinent. The acceleration in glacial melting has been blamed as the reason for the increase in floods that have destroyed homes and crops.

But Chewang Norphel, the “Iceman of Ladakh”, believes that he has an answer.

By diverting melt water through a network of pipes into artificial lakes in the shaded side of mountain valleys, Norphel states that he has created new glaciers.

A dam or embankment is built to keep the water in, which freezes at night and remains frozen in the absence of direct sunlight. This water remains frozen until March, when the start of summer melts the new glacier and releases the water into the rivers downside.

His glaciers have been able to each store up to one million cubic feet of ice, which in turn can irrigate 200 hectares of farm land. This can make the difference between crop failure and a bumper crop of more than 1,000 tons of wheat for the farmers.

Norphel says that he has seen the effects of global warming on farmland as snows have become thinner on the ground and ice rivers have melted away.

His work has now been recognized by the Indian government, which has given him 16,000 pounds to build five new glaciers. But time is his enemy, he told The Hindustan Times. “I’m planning to train villagers with instruction CDs that I have made, so that I can pass on the knowledge before I die,” he said.