Barbad OS - The Gaddy's take

The Gaddy had his pseudo-anthropo-illogical theories on the origins and drifts of KoBras. When in January 1996, it was revealed that I will be migrating towards Barbados, he had an interesting theory about the origin of the name.

Apparently, most PC's in that country ran a shoddy Operating System called बरबाद (barbAd) - hence the name barbAd-OS. The Gaddy didn't attach much significance to alternative theories like the Portuguese looking at the trees that resembled a bearded face and naming the place 'Barbados'. ('Barbado' is bearded man in Portuguese).

Whilst there, I didn't see many of those trees, but I didn't see that Operating System, either.

Been there, done that!

This photo of Friendship Bay, Becquia, reminded me of the time I was there (26-27 May, 1996, to be precise). I would not be surpised if Lee Falk was inspired by Becquia to write about the Jade Hut on the golden sands of Keela-Wee in his Phantom Comics.

The sand was white as snow and the sea was clear as, well, water. In the unpolluted sea (Caribbean Sea, if you are wondering which), a baby shark was visible on the sea-floor.

Of course, that was not the only shark. The Jaws and the rest of the Barabdos gang were also there. Hope the sea and the beach remain the same as they were 10 years back. Those were the days when I belonged to the "young people" group and the Jaws (aka Jawahar Desai) looked like this.

Some more photos of beautiful Becquia's best beaches are here.

The Day of the Weasel

Suppose you are working for a Weasel like this one. What can I do to help you? Give suggestions, of course, some of which I may have implemented myself.

1. Plant some malapropisms and look innocent. Obviously, no spellcheck will find them as errors. For example, instead of "he was masticulating looking at the glowing portrait", write "he was master bathing...". (You know what I mean, heh heh!)
2. Since you have access to your PC as well as the weasel's, accept words like 'teh' and 'fro' in the word processor's dictionary and voluntarily mis-spell 'the' and 'for' from pages n/4 to 3n/4, where 'n' is the total number of pages. Again, spellcheck will not help.
3. Cultivate spelling mistakes and accept the word processor's correction; this option is often quite hilarious.
   
4. Make the document password-protected to everyone except the weasel and yourself. This will be a perennial annoyance for all readers and you can truthfully claim that you can open without a password and so can the weasel.
5. Or, make radical changes, leave some obvious errors or gaps, convert to PDF, send the PDF by e-mail and remain unreachable for a day. I bet your Alexandre Dumb Ass Weasel wouldn't have wouldn't know whow to convert a PDF to an editable format.
   
6. The best solution, and the one I have used partially, is the acrostic. Re-phrase the first sentence of each paragraph so that the first letters of the paragraphs spell out your name repeatedly. A month after the paper is public, sue for plagiarism, citing that you always believed that the weasel was using your material and the only surefire way for people to know is to plant your name.

Best wishes.

Red-eye deduction?

If you need a compelling reason to use red-eye reduction on your camera or in your digital photo processing software, you need to look no further than the photo of Kevin O'Connell in this article on BBC Online.

Wikepedia?

I can't believe my luck today. I find a typographical error in, of all things, an online dictionary.

Looks like ad campaign had some bad spellers. The advertisement is for Wikiseek, a tool to search Wikipedia. And, they had to spell 'Wikipedia' as 'Wikepedia'. At this rate, I will be running Shas' Snafux out of business.

Peter O'Toole's lessons

Something about the sentence in the article seemed odd. "Peter O' Toole's struggles lessoned". I was wondering if the struggles gave him music lessons, English lessons, etc.

Oh, you meant "lessened" - reduced? I am sorry ABC, you need to work on your ABC's.

Time travel with GoAir

A day thence, the site is up and running. The interesting part is: GoAir allows time travel. Open the site in Mozilla Firefox and let me know if you see this:


The circled part contains the MMM YYY of travel: March 107. I would definitely like to travel to that time, verify Wikipedia entries and do some myth-dusting.

Leave is not a problem. The intranet at my place of work shows today's date as February 21, 107 (when opened in Mozilla Firefox), so I shouldn't have a problem applying for leave for a week in March 107!

Le Chappell is now Chapple

Not one to follow cricket actively, the magnetism of typos seems to have attracted me to this news item on Aus-NZ match.


Or, have I, in my busy world, forgotten to read a news item on Le Chappell changing his name to 'Chapple' (see pic above) on numerological grounds? Or, is 'Chapple' a portmanteau of something I am too dense to figure out?

GoAir going out of Air?

A visit to the airline's website led me to believe that GoAir might be going bust, but not this bust. Before someone reacts to this post, here is what I saw:

My name is Billa

On a supposed teaser trailer of Billa 2007, which is a remake of the "original" Billa. The 'original' Billa itself was a remake of the original Don. Now, it remains to be seen if Billa 2007 will be a remake of the "original" Billa, the original Don or the new Don.

But, it definitely dawned on me that, if this YouTube video is to be believed, there aren't too many educated people around.

First,
Lacking the right punctuation, the above seems to mean that the greatest underdog story spent 27 years in Tamil before going elsewhere now. Also, I think the makers of this trailer meant to say, "underworld dog", rather than "underdog". Billa is, by no means, an underdog.

Next,
'ண' instead of 'ன' thrice in two short lines above. And, as if compensating for that is விஷ்னுவர்தன் below:

Wonder if "Save Tamil" proponents will save Tamil from native speakers of Tamil.

PeopleSoft is hard ... to use

Working on a PeopleSoft application, I noticed this slogan on the top soon after login:

PeopleSoft is Hard

Couldn't disagree with that. The application is so user-unfriendly that one wonders if that was the intent. I suppose the implementation is to blame, rather than PeopleSoft, but what stands out in that site is PeopleSoft and that "PeopleSoft is Hard". Nothing says "mea culpa" better.