Thursday, April 27, 2006

Harvard Author Caught Plagiarizing

Commentary on The Onion:
Harvard Author Caught Plagiarizing
Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, who was paid the largest advance for an unpublished author, admitted to having "unintentionally" borrowed passages from author Megan McCafferty for her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. What do you think?

Kim Bellings,
Croupier
"It's sad when a negative stereotype is reinforced by incidents like these, but I've always said: Indians are dirty plagiarizers."

In another news, Sanjay Kumar, formerly of Computer Associates, is not an Indian but a Sri Lankan. Still, he is a Tamil. Is that reinforcing a negative stereotype that Tamils are crooks, and corrupted?

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The Case of the Boss' Minion and the Mysterious Timesheet

He comes in on time and leaves on time. He spends an hour chatting with his buddies here, an hour or so in lunch, fag breaks, etc. That's 6 hours a day available for work which translates to 30 hours a week. He also spends a lot of his time trading online, searching for household items, planning trips, etc. That can be maybe an hour or so, which effectively leaves him 25 hours a week.
Basically, he does actual work for utmost 25 hours, but his timesheet always shows more than 40 hours. How is that possible?

I wonder how many of the valued employees out there have to fill in timesheets, and how many fudge the time entered? Yesterday morning I filled in my timesheet and realised I can fill in enough time on the work completed in the previous 16 hours to satisfy 28 hours!

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Chennai in Google

Hi resolution satellite image of Chennai is available on google maps now, after debuting on google earth a couple of weeks back. Now, LTTE can use it to plan some stuff!

Chennai on GOogle Maps

For some odd reason, they have left out Chennai city and centred it on Chennai Airport! You can see runway 07 clearly along with some planes (they look like ants.) You can see Meenambakkam, Guindy, Saidapet railway stations, Guindy race course, Velachery Aquatics complex, Mount Road, River Adyar, Guindy Engineering College, IIT Madras, the elevated MRTS, the Raj Bhavan.
Surprisingly, Chennai looks green, and the traffic density is very low!

Almost all the people I went to college with gave me a piece of trivia - the main building of my college looks like "E" when viewed from above, because, according to them, it is an "E"ngineering college. I disputed some, and realised it was fruitless. Now, I present the proof

Guindy Engineering College / Anna University

anna university, guindy engineering college, red building

Monday, April 24, 2006

Orkut Banned, please help

Orkut, the site of choice for friends and others, where I met some good people recently, and found some long-lost friends, has been blocked in my beloved company. I've tried everything I knew - using IP number, orkat.com, and proxies, but I've been unsuccessful till now. What would little Manoj do to play now? For the last two weeks, I was spruced up and ready to go (to work) that I have been working 5 hours of my 8 hours spent here, clearing all my backlogs (except a few remaining) I am so dedicated that I even slept in the office a week back; nothing official, but neither I nor my roommate had our keys after we saw the movie Munich, which ended at 1.30 am. Instead of waking up our neighbours, who had a set of keys, we just decided to go to our offices and sleep there. Now, I think the vanity is wearing off. Anyway, saw Ice Age 2 last night, and went back to Jai Jawan Chicken andFish Centre - they stopped selling chicken after the birdflu scare, but restarted it. It is very difficult without having a non-veg activity partner in this city.
If anyone could provide a workaround to this Orkut ban, I would erect a statue in your name.