Had a great weekend, not counting Saturday. Sindha was here from Sun till Wed. We went around shopping and saw the movies we had planned. Funny thing, Sunday morning was half an hour back. Two days later its still Thursday.
Mailed what I wrote earlier on the 80s to a few friends and relatives. Everyone seems to agree that I'm lonely. ;-)
Had a pleasant surprise at work today when I received a Diwali bonus check, a box of dry fruits and a bunch of gift coupons. i2 does this every year, but I hadn't expected it this year on account of the slowdown. Anyway, I'm not complaining.
Started reading Rabbit Remembered. Its good so far, but I get a sneaky feeling that its just something Updike wrote to drag out Rabbit a bit more. There are lots of references to old scenes, characters, etc. No one - the author included - appears to be able to forget Rabbit all that easily. And the daughter turning up on the doorstep right away seems a shade too pat.
Loved Wishbone Ash (Time Was, the Hits). Didn't like CSN all that much. Burnt a few CDs, need to buy more.
Ever tried chatting on indya.com or rediff.com recently ? I used to chat on indya.com, on their trivia chat room. Stopped after some time since the questions were getting repetitive and boring - they have a lot of US-specific stuff like "whats the name of the New York softball team ?", "what was the engine used in the 1997 Taurus ?" etc. Sheesh...
Anyway, I just found out that these chat sites - indya and rediff - have pretty harsh censors. One of the qns on indya.com's trivia room was 'Who directed the movie Psycho'. Now no matter how you try, the site wouldn't allow you to write 'Hitchcock'. Guess why. It would also not allow you to give answers like 'Charles Dickens'. The minute you type out any of the above, you get a message 'Indyan Culture does not allow such language. CENSORED!". I'm not joking. Go try it out.
On rediff, you can type out 'Dickens', but it appears as ' ****ens'. How nice.
I'm so very thankful that the guardians of our morality and culture are on these chat sites as well.
This is just bad programming.
ReplyDeleteA language-censor program needs to be smart enough not to catch substrings of words. It should only catch words like "cock" (which certainly has several meanings) and not "Hitchcock". Several innocent words can get caught in such filters and frustrate people. For example, "abreast", "cocktail", "suckers", etc. What morons!
If only Indya.com spent money to hire decent programmers instead of blowing it all up on foolish advertising...