There is a girl...

who brings a smile on my face in the morning. I see her almost every day on Bannerghatta Road. When I start from home to office, I am always anxious, wondering whether I am going to see her or not. If I don't see her, I know that I am going to be less happy throughout the day. She never smiles at me, hardly even notices me, but I feel reassured the moment I see her.

Well, she is a traffic warden. She stands at the junction of Bannerghatta Road and N.S Palya main road where I take a right turn towards BTM Layout. Without her being there, our moronic drivers create a traffic jam at that junction within a few seconds. A messy trafficjam there affects my commute time to office and puts me in a bad mood. She is very diligent in her work and ensures smooth flow of traffic at that junction. Unfortunately on some days she does not show up, so all hell breaks loose.

Hard disks vs flash memories

A few years back, when the dot-com craze was at it's peak, when the need for storing large amount of data was growing by the minute, everyone thought the hard disk and storage manufacturers were going to have a wonderful time ahead. Nobody could think of any other technology that could pose serious threat to hard disks. Today, less than a decade since then, hard disk manufacturers are alarmed by the advances in flash memory technology. Fuelled by robust growth in digital cameras and other hand-held devices, flash memory manufacturersare seeing unimaginable growth. With every passing year, flash memory cards are almost doubling in size and prices are dropping. Today I saw that Toshiba is coming up with an 8GB SD card. It is now believed that very soon, 40GB SD cards will be common. Hard disks have traditionally provided larger sizes, faster data rates and cheaper storage in comparison to other technologies. But how long will they remain ahead in this race? It is clear that flash memory sizes will eventually catch up with hard disks in size. Will disks continue to have faster data rate and cheap storage advantage?

I predict that notebook computers will be the first to adopt flash memory. Since these memory cards don't have any moving parts, they will be best fit in notebook computers. If flash memory cards improve their data rates, operating systems could use them instead of a disk partition for hibernating. If they improve the reliability, they could replace the ROMs in computers. It could make it much easier to re-flash the BIOS and other such non-volatile storages both in computers and embedded devices. Whatever it is, I think flash memories have much better future compared to hard disks. Sandisk, Kingston, etc will do much better than Seagate, Hitachi, etc!

The Financial Expert

I just finished reading "The financial expert" by R.K.Narayan. I don't read all that much in English; I prefer to read in Kannada instead. Whatever little I have read in English was all written by western authors. Hence reading a story in English by an Indian author, with the story set in India was refreshingly different. I cannot say I liked the story all that much, but the people in the story, the way they talk, the way their surroundings are, everything is so very different and nice. I think I should read more stories of this type.

Planning my day

My employer allows me to work from home (WFH). I am proud of that, because not many companies in Bangalore give such a facility to employees. It greatly enhances flexibility of planning my day. For example, I can leave office at a fixed time in the evening, irrespective of how much work is still pending, because I can always work a few hours after reaching home and get the work done.

Unfortunately all good things come with strings attached. I have recently realized that WFH facility is slowly making me inefficient in planning my day. I no more have the pressure to finish off all my work by the end of the office day! Invariably I push some of the work to later in the night. So now-a-days I _plan_ to work the entire day - the hours I spend in office as well as the hours I spend at home. I am working from home later in the night on pretty much all days, irrespective of whether there is a requirement for that or not.That is definitely bad. I must get back to planning my work only for the office hours and work from home at night only if it is inevitable. I wonder how successful I will be in doing that.

Helmet rule

After postponing it roughly 200 times, the state Government has finally made it compulsory for all two-wheeler riders in Karnataka to wear helmets. Err... except if you are in Bellary. This concession for Bellary is apparently because the weather is too hot there. I would have accepted that argument a couple of months back when the CD politics was at it's peak in Bellary and it was generating a lot of political 'heat'. But now, I don't see how Bellary is any more hot than Raichur, Gulbarga or even Mangalore. Bangaloreans can't claim any such concession unless Mallika Sheravat visits the city. (No, in fact I don't find her hot.)

There are obviously many advantages of wearing a helmet. I have at least 3 friends who are alive today only because they wore a helmeton a particular day in their lives. However, I am seeing that helmets are now helping not just the rider, but everyone else on the road. It is normal now-a-days to see youngsters talking on cell phones as if their life depends on it. In a few years, if Darwin's theory is any true, we should start seeing kids being able to use cell phones the moment they are born. Now, you don't expect people to stop talking on their phone just because they are performing, in parallel, another activity like riding a bike or doing a brain surgery. So they hold the phone between their ear and shoulder, bending their head completely to one side and continue riding. Obviously, we can't expect such people to ride attentively. Heck, I have seen pedestrians hitting poles and parked vehicles on the road because they were engrossed in talking on cell phone. I am always scared to see such people riding a bike in front of my car. You never know when they are going to do something very stupid and end up under your car. Now, with their helmets on, they cannot talk this way while riding the bike. So it is a simple solution to this problem. Of course, people can still hands-free, but that is better than before.

We need helmets to come with built-in head phones. Then we could use hands-free and FM radio on our cell phones while riding, without having to carefully wear the earphones. Hey, this could be a patentable idea right here!