Sunday, April 12, 2009

…of endoscopes and biliary stasis

How would you like to put up through a marathon writhing stomach ache for a non-stop 8 hours each day?

How would it feel to stare at the blank dark ceiling clutching your abdomen while the whole world sleeps?

How would you feel to have NOT contributed to the next killer pitch when your team slogs it out?

How would it like to have a constant barrage of pills in place of a chewing gum?

How would it feel to not feel like coming to work?(that would be nice, eh? – but not for long)

How you feel when the medic pushes in a meter-long probe down your throat without anesthesia while you make noises from the Jurassic era?!

How would it feel if your stomach lining burns more than your body fat?

How would you feel on the dinner table when you are forced to have the greenest shrubs when your friend feasts on a 4 course full Indian meal?

How would you feel when the latest words you have in your vocab are only from a medical compendium?

You may be a super-worker, your boss’ blue-eyed girl/boy or a miracle manager on whom the client has bet her/his entire fortune on but let’s get it straight from the beginning. In an industry as ours, where the only periodic physical motion is restricted to our carpals and the peristalsis of your abdomen is governed by an international time zone, this should be an eye-opener of sorts.

As my medic said “Follow the 5 golden rules and you’ll be fine”
• Walk at least 2 miles a day
• Eat regularly, periodically and in MODERATION
• Maintain your time lines (I am talking about your body clock here!)
• Avoid stress. Ease that temper
• Go easy on your smokes and spirits (yeah, sad but true!)

If you have managed this all, the bile in your stomach will behave! And as I realize, love your body and if you don’t, you’ll never know when your body stops loving you.

…and yeah, work will go on!

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Seven-ed

Nothing’s constant but change…and Microsoft decided to keep this mantra alive. You may call me whatever you like, but I have been a true MS fan except for their IE series. So when they decided to roll out their Windows 7 beta, I was there. These guys seemed to have gotten their strategy right – create a buzz and keep the world waiting. At the CES 2009, Ballmer announced that the beta will be available for only the first 2.5 million users. And then began the frenzy. The servers could not bear the load and began to smoke out.

Not very strangely, the Windows 7 homepage behaved very funny on Firefox and I had to resort to IE and as you would already know that’s excruciatingly painful. Nevertheless, after continuously pinging their server for almost 3 hours post midnight, I could not get through the download button. Droopy eyes got droopier and I decided to crash only to realize that MS had tendered an apology (yet again!) confirming “huge demand” for the beta and mysteriously increased the cap to unlimited downloads for 6 weeks!!

The pipe at my home is not that fat. At a basic 256kbps/unlimited it’s kind of slow for today. And it took me a whopping two and half hours to push the mammoth installer to my desktop. A quick rip of the image to the DVD and I was ready to install it on my machine. The caveat was that it had to be on a new partition. Partition Magic 8 did its bit and I was sorted. In less than 25 minutes, my AMD dual core with a 2-gig memory absorbed it smoothly.

And there it was – a ‘spanking’ new OS, was it? Maybe, Vista a little jazzed up and considerably low on resources. The UAC has been done away with and that helped a lot. In the late 90s, a very famous software by the name of Webshots became an instant hit – for it could change desktop background at preset intervals. Take a bow MS - Windows 7 “incorporates” this feature as well. There is a buzz that the second beta and the RTM will feature an inbuilt AV (a fortified Windows Defender, maybe!!). IE is now on its eighth iteration with Web Slices and Accelerators built it. A download manager can still be missed. The Media Player is version 12 but that looked like nothing more than cosmetic. I missed the ‘Show desktop’ feature although there. MS now takes feedback seriously. The ‘Send Feedback’ link now is devoted to accepting feedback – suggestions, complaints, wants and all the brickbats that the user can throw at the developing team for them to consider and build in. All in all, a very smart move by MS to solicit all shortcomings from a wider group of worldwide audience and refine a product at zilch cost.

All in all, aficionados could probably try it. It could be real fun with some nifty little features thrown in. Mouse gestures, touch flows have been incorporated and that makes it a head turner but that comes at an additional cost, for it will not work with your current set up. Networking and adding new hardware is a breeze unlike Vista.

At the outset, Windows 7 may seem like a revamped Vista and nothing more – so much so that one might want to accord it the Windows Vista SP4 moniker. Despite its humongous market share, MS badly wants to beat Apple’s Snow Leopard due this winter and also better their image dented by Vista. Whatever it is, it’s fun, its jazz with a little bit of tweaks here and there.

In case, you need to catch up with this OS, hit this link, experience it and let me know what you think of 7. Get there, get ‘seven-ed’!.