S Anand

My Outsourced Life. Hilarious article by AJ Jacobs on how he outsourced his professional and personal life. I think it’s true – hence amazing.

Bill Gates in a Coca Cola ad. In August 2005, Bill Gates starred in a Coca Cola commercial. He wanders in the halls of Microsoft late one night looking for someone to loan him change for the Coke machine. “I’ll pay you back,” he promises.

I spend a lot of time building models on Excel. I have 4 rules that help me get things done fast. Never use the mouse. The keyboard is much faster. Never type in data. You can always import it. Avoid manual labour. Use Excel to automate the task. Make your data visually obvious. Let’s look at Rule #1: Never use the mouse. Using the keyboard can be 10 times faster than the mouse. It takes time to move one hand from the keyboard to the mouse, locate the item you want to click at, move the mouse there, adjust it finely so it’s pointing at the exact spot, and then click it. For example, to insert text without formatting, I’d just go Alt-E, S, enter. It takes half a second. It took me 5 seconds with a mouse. (I timed 10 continuous attempts in both cases.) ...

Film songs by Bombay Jayshree. Vaseegara, Narumugaye and Ondra Renda being my favourites. Try this: search for any song and listen online. Comments Arun 3 Nov 2005 3:34 am: Vaseegara is heaven. :-) Graffiti 1 Dec 2005 7:13 am: I plan to sing that for a competition here…:) anu 18 Apr 2010 5:26 pm: vaseegara,narumagaye,ondra renda(kakaka) wer awesome ;) i love those songs sung by Jayasree ;) Krishna 15 Apr 2010 8:39 am: Vaseegara….truely amazing. kumaran 29 Sep 2010 4:13 am: realy superb voice of bombay jayshree mam..i rely impress wit her voice. manam manam engilum etho ganam ganam,,thinam thinam unpaadalthaan vanthu sugam sugam thanthathe……………….. Kannan 11 Aug 2010 5:41 am: Wow! What a voice… Really I admire her voice a lot and lot.. Very nice.. Beautiful voice is given to her by God… She has sung vaseegara song… But really avanga voice vaseegaramathan iruku (tamil) madhan 7 Oct 2010 10:29 am: excellent voice mam. i like your voice. my work , family all of tention relaxe only your voice mam. bombay jayasree = singing god. daily your sing the song. madhan erode 13 Nov 2010 8:51 am: mam your voice amzzing. your voice places of the heaven to god. narumugaya excellent voice. The word singing " Thiru magana" wov,. your all information i get my friend geetha mam. specially Thanks geetha., my Train friends thanks your profile detail collect. madhan erode 9 Nov 2010 8:35 am: mam.i am waiting for your voice singing illyaraja music album (sai baba).your lot of singing song of the 2010. why 2010 super female play back singer you winner.i will drems god of the gift of the your voice. madhan erode 9 Nov 2010 8:40 am: mam partha muthal nalay song very excellent. really the first word of you sing (partha ) excellent. voice excellent sound very nice. madhan erode 29 Jan 2011 4:44 am: mam, lot of sing songs to the year 2011. you most of the song singing to the year my wishes not lot of audiences wishes include me. madhan erode 29 Jan 2011 4:48 am: mam, you fist singing song illayaraja film viyatnam colany " kailyil veenai yandhum “very nice. include m s v sir film singing. A R razhuman film 1000 gingals ( back round voice )you singing songs very nice madhan erode 29 Jan 2011 4:55 am: sorry mam, you fist singing song thampathikal film M S V MUSIC you singing songs . next you singing film viyatnam colony illayaraja film. next A R RAHUMAN film irruvar next harris jayaraj film minnala vasikara.next lot of singing harris sir music thanks harris sir….. raman 18 Nov 2011 7:04 pm: madam i love ur voice its very beautiful, i love ur all songs especially cheli manohar song madam nisha 20 Jan 2013 3:59 pm: i really impressed… i love u jayashree… my ever green favt song vaseegara…

Talent wars. The interesting part was the first three paragraphs. Flying on the Delta Shuttle with Bill Gates 12 years ago, I asked, “What Microsoft competitor worries you most?” “Goldman Sachs.” I gave Gates a startled look. Was Microsoft about to try the investment banking business? “Software,” he said, “is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war, or we won’t have a future. I don’t worry about Lotus or IBM, because the smartest guys would rather come to work for Microsoft. Our competitors for IQ are investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.” ...

What Lies Beneath New York.

Cluster your del.icio.us bookmarks.

The Economist on Business Continuity Planning. The effect on Ericsson, a Swedish mobile-phone company, of a fire in a New Mexico chipmaking plant belonging to the Dutch firm Philips, has become a legend. The fire, in March 2000, started by a bolt of lightning, lasted less than 10 minutes, but it caused havoc to the super-clean environment that chipmaking requires. Ericsson, unable to find an alternative source of supply, went on to report a loss of over $2 billion in its mobile-phone division that year, a loss that left it as an also-ran in an industry where it had once been a leader. ...

An interview with the creators of InFlow (a software to map social networks) shows how social network analysis is used. Comments Dhar 30 Oct 2005 6:10 am: Anand, do you know of any freely available Social Network Analysis tool? S Anand 31 Oct 2005 6:16 pm: Afraid not. I’ve only done this twice in projects, and I just used Excel and Perl both times.

Video sharing service round-up.

The Economist explains why Emirates Airlines is so cheap. It’s not just the Government subsidy. Zero tax, low interest rates (Government-backed), and low staff cost without unions. Apparantly, they are the only low-fare long-distance flyer. Comments Arnab 30 Oct 2005 8:04 pm: “low-fare” you mean. S Anand 31 Oct 2005 6:22 pm: Fixed that typo. Thanks!

How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking.

Indian Railways introduces e-ticketing. Comments ritzkini 25 Oct 2005 1:16 pm: wouldnt it make more sense for them to introduce it on on a pilot basis in one of the more e-savvy states ? rather than amritsar,kalka and lucknow..bu then again we are talking indian railways here..

I switched to Google Reader as my blog reader (I was using Mozilla so far). The reason was simple: speed. Thanks to the Google site’s speed and keyboard navigation, I can read blog entries 10 times faster. Now there’s a unique proposition for Google that a lot of people are missing: that their site loads a whole lot faster than others. It makes a huge difference to the whole browsing experience. ...

Romance on the cricket pitch. Fan proposes. Zaheer Khan gracefully accepts. Watch it on Google Video. Comments Dhar 23 Oct 2005 10:47 am: I have had great difficulty in watching videos from Google and this one is no exception. I wonder if I am the only one facing this problem. AlphaGeek 23 Oct 2005 6:26 pm: Me too.. Facing the same problem !!! Anyone can u pls help us ? Amit 24 Oct 2005 6:47 am: the India head of Google said this a few days ago that video.google.com is not allowed in countries like India, Germany, etc because of some compllicated laws. Guess thats what is causing these problems. Dhar 24 Oct 2005 9:13 am: Wow… this is very interesting. I tried accessing this through a proxy server in Britain and was able to view the video. There may be something in what Amit said…. S Anand 24 Oct 2005 9:17 am: Hey, that explains why my family is not able to view my videoes!

Petals Around the Rose. A simple dice parlour game that Bill Gates apparantly cracked by memorising the sequences. Comments SlaSh 17 Oct 2005 11:15 am: hey is that you who writes articles and does interviews by the name S.Anand in the mag Outlook S Anand 17 Oct 2005 1:29 pm: No, that is someone else. jayant 18 Oct 2005 4:08 pm: Any place where I can get a solution. Sorry to say but I am dumb..:-( Raghav 18 Oct 2005 7:41 pm: As the man says - “The name of the game is petals around the rose, and the name is important” :-) Dhar 19 Oct 2005 3:29 am: Arrgh! I have not been able to figure this out. Utterly Frustrating…Solution appreciated… Please mail me at sumit.dhar at gmail Aman 19 Oct 2005 10:59 am: the solution is in the name…….for every odd no throw of dice, simply add the digits surrounding the centre on on each dice… A 19 Oct 2005 2:37 pm: aman, I dont know if I shld kill you for posting the solution or shld thank u for making my day… R 20 Oct 2005 3:22 am: what happened to your blogroll? ritzkini 20 Oct 2005 5:36 am: fantastic game..and so simple a solution..once u have read it… :P S Anand 20 Oct 2005 8:25 am: Killed my blogroll. I use Google Reader now. Will post the OPML. jayant 20 Oct 2005 3:25 pm: Well still didnt figure out…it does nt add up…and if even throw, then? jayant 20 Oct 2005 3:26 pm: Anand, any clues…since u posted, u know of any answers? S Anand 20 Oct 2005 3:39 pm: Have mailed you. Prakash 17 Nov 2005 11:55 am: I got the answer for the same ! it was a good one

Now, Google search history lets you tag and bookmark.

Charade starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant is now in public domain (you can download it for free). So are some other classics like His Girl Friday and Dressed to Kill. See Archive.org’s feature films. (Actually, it’s not a Hitchcock film. But it’s said to be the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made.) Comments Dhar 18 Oct 2005 10:25 am: Wow! This is amazing. Have been trying to lay my hands on His Girl Friday for quite some time. WILDMAN 3 Mar 2009 5:30 pm: RE: CHARADE…DOES THE PD INCLUDE THE MUSIC? S Anand 3 Mar 2009 6:19 pm: I’m not quite sure, really… it’s been a while. Besides, it looks like the page I’d linked to has vanished. Maybe it’s no longer in public domain. Unidyne 27 Jun 2010 5:19 am: There’s a debate on the film’s public domain status, because the music composed for it and the story on which it was based are both under copyright. Also, while the film has a number of Hitchcock style touches (big name stars, plot twists, romantic scenes), it was directed by Stanley Donen. Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963) 11 Jul 2011 12:56 am (pingback): […] can easily be mistaken for an Alfred Hitchcock film. With wit to spare, the presence of Gary Grant and an innocent […]

How to buy nothing and What not to buy first-hand (like books, CDs, and cars)

Lal Bihar formed a society of dead people. In 2003, he won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. … to prove that he was living sought arrest, tried to run for parliament, kidnapped the son of the uncle who had stolen his property, threatened murder, insulted judges, threw leaflets listing his complaints at legislators in the state assembly and demanded a widow’s pension for his wife.