November 2000

First Round On Saturday (25th November 2000), I dress up in my best suit (only suit, really), and find my way to the Green Park station for an interview with the Boston Consulting Group. Of course, being terribly conservative, I arrived an hour early, so it was time to walk around Green Park and have a look at the Buckingham Palace, while singing “I have confidence…” from Sound of Music. The walk did lift my spirits a bit. There was this tiny poodle that was busy licking a bulldog. The bulldog didn’t seem to mind, though it was large enough to eat up the poodle. Then the poodle’s owners picked it up, and walked away. The poodle was reluctant though. It just hadn’t finished licking the bulldog. After about 5 minutes, the bulldog (and owner), were about half-a-kilometer away, when the poodle was finally let down. Being the determined creature that it was, it ran ALL the way to the bulldog, and proceeded to lick. The bulldog, right through, was wearing a puzzled expression on its face, as if to say, “Are you sure you don’t want me to smack this little white fluff?” ...

moneycontrol.com is an Indian financial site. Yahoo gets most of its Indian news feed from here. Comments Jayesh 22 Nov 2000 12:00 pm: very good site

Not that I’m into art or anything, but ever since I saw the Louvre, and came out wondering what’s so great about the Mona Lisa, I figured I may as well get some culture. The Van Gogh light exhibition is a good start.

Just the service I’ve been waiting for. The Scout Report – one of the oldest and best sources of what’s good on the Internet, has launched a web log.

Fortune has a 6-part post-mortem of dot-coms. In contrast, the FTC lists the top ten ways to make a quick-buck on the Internet – the dot cons.

Websearch has an interesting set of articles on how to search the Web. Makes interesting reading at the very least. But more importantly, it tells you so many ways of searching that you never knew existed.

Advanced Stock Information has a nice set of collections of the top-10 financial sites in various categories.

From online scripts, I’m moving to online short stories. Never could resist O Henry.

Because of a shortage of disk space on unix2.iimb.ernet.in, my reports are now at briefcase.yahoo.com/root_node. Long live Yahoo!

IBM’s made 5 of the top 10 most powerful supercomputers. India doesn’t seem to have made a single one.

The Fat Project tried to get two people to gain 30 pounds in 30 days. One made it. One didn’t. For the first time, you can actually see flesh grow.

AdFlip is an archive of famous print advertisements.

If you’ve been following the Nobel prize broadcasts, don’t miss the Ig prizes – for the goofiest achievements.

Sorry, didn’t get time to write more. This page will no longer be updated.

The next stop was Inverness. I didn’t know Inverness had any history to it. It wasn’t till we got there that I learnt that the Inverness castle was where Macbeth (of Shakespearean fame) ruled from. In fact, it turns out that Macbeth was a really nice king. There was this barbarian who fought him, lost, and turned to the English for help – who of course were delighted, and they killed Macbeth. This barbarian stupidly signed a document saying that Scotland would pay tributes to England, and that’s been the source of all the trouble. ...

Scotland’s wonderful. We left on Friday night at 10:30PM on a ‘coach’, as they call it. A bus, really. We would’ve gone by rail, except that because of the recent flooding, trains weren’t available to Scotland. The coach was far too uncomfortable to sleep, until exhaustion overcame me at around 2AM. We reached Edinburgh at 7AM. (Incidentally, it’s pronounced Edinburough, though if you heard a Scot say it, you would be forgiven for thinking it’s ‘Edinbarra’) ...

I’m leaving for Scotland tonight, and will be back on Monday morning. Await interesting stories… While academics has prevented any outdoor adventures over the last few weeks, the underground has been an unending source of intrigue. This morning, for example, I decided to take a survey of what people in the underground were reading. People on the trains would either read something, talk on their mobiles, or listening to a walkman. The last category are uninteresting. The only mobile phone conversation I overheard is too embarrassing to be be printed here. So I’ll stick to what people were reading. ...

A study shows that the world is producing about 250MB of info per person per year. It means that, on average, each of us is writing 50 times the size of the complete works of Shakespeare every year! If you’re wondering how that’s possible, just wander around this web page :-)

I win the bet. ~sanand strikes 14340 to 2931 versus ~mkalidas. Must admit that some people disagree with the majority, though.