Happy 4th Birthday!

After 180 blog posts of relentless yapping, I finally complete 4 whole years of my online existence. Yes 24th July was officially the 4th Anniversary of my blog. What started as a not-so-thought about introduction has helped me to “voice” my opinion to you unsuspecting souls for all this while.

Thank you for having patiently read my blog and also for having commented occasionally :) !! On this happy occasion, I decided to play around with the data that I have collected and bore you readers with some mundane statistics. So (drum roll please) here is the best statistics I could collect:

Number of Blog Posts	180
Most commented Blog Post	My Language Problem
Most viewed Blog Post	Wasabi
First Blog Post	Hello World
Most common label for Blog Posts	funny

And now, like a true wanna-be statistician, here is some analysis of my Blog Posts.

Let me be very frank. I try hard to be funny on this blog. Yeah. If you have not realized all this while I have been desperately trying hard to crack silly jokes to make you guys smile. But very early in the existence of this blog I realized that most people do not realize that I am trying to be funny (thanks to my sense of humor – or the lack of it!). So I started labelling my blog posts "funny” for people to “laugh please”.

As you can see I am funniest in March, September and December. So following the logic that I proposed in this blog post, girls interested in meeting me should schedule to meet me only in those 3 months :) !! (My Calendar is open as of now)

And then, I tend to write the most in July. That's because every July I have my blog’s anniversary, and it makes me feel all the more to write I guess. Or probably I am most free in those months :) !!

This is the last stupid statistic that I pulled out. Apparently I blog most on Weekends (understandable!). What I found interesting is that I tend to blog a lot on Wednesdays. So I guess I face mid-week crisis and try to cheer myself up by writing to you folks.

That's it from me. Thank you for being a part of my life.

East Asian Gene

In an unprecedented development, scientists in Singapore have isolated a gene amongst East Asians that stops their aging process at age 16. The gene is supposed to stop the visible effects of aging in individuals like change in appearance and the “mature” looking face. The gene seems to mysteriously stop working its magic beyond 60 years of age. Scientists are now working to introduce this gene in other races.

Well, I just made that up. But every non- East Asian will agree with me on this one. People here don’t seem to age. They just all look 16 years old ( I am lying – some do look close to 18, but I guess that's about it). Then for the next 40 odd years they look the same. So if you bump into a 15 something “looking” person on the public transit don’t just assume he/she is just in high school. They very well might have kids that age.

And why did I have to write this up on my blog? Well, I just realized that since last week, I have become the leading authority on Wasabi for the Brazilians. Google Brazil has been redirecting awfully lot of traffic from Brazil to my Blog post for people’s queries on Wasabi. I wonder what the Brazilians think when they read that lame post on Wasabi. And I also wonder why suddenly soo many people are searching for Wasabi in Brazil after the FIFA World cup.

So going forward, I am the leading authority on East Asian genes (if there is one :) !!). We anyways tend to trust what we read on the internet even if it is written by someone who has no clue what a gene is.

Tight Integration?

So I use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare. I diligently follow what my friends write or do on all these Social Networking sites (that sounds soo 2009).  All was good with these sites last year. But this year its all been so awful.

These days you can combine your status updates. So you come up with a witty 140 character line and post it on Twitter and zap – it automatically updates your Facebook status and your LinkedIn status. Then you Check-In to a place in Foursquare and zap – it updates your Twitter and Facebook status again. Whoa. And what happens to people who follow you at all 4 locations? They get the same update 3 more times. And then you crack a not-so-witty joke. You end up irritating your followers 3 times all over again. Imagine having 100 friends doing that and you have a nightmare of status updates to read every hour, every day (How am I supposed to accomplish anything else in my life? ;) !!)

I am hating integration. Each site exists for a purpose. LinkedIn is the professional side of me. I definitely would love to know what Project you working on professionally, but I definitely ain’t interested in seeing you pruning your cat there (but I don’t mind your cute cat pictures on Facebook). And then if you show me your beach pictures with pina-colada in your hand on Twitter and LinkedIn it just pisses me off (that’s called a case of sour grapes). I hope you get my point.

I don’t want excuses like - “if you get irritated then stop following me”. I just am not gonna do that. Thou shalt be stalked. So just be more courteous to your stalkers.

Big Bank

So some poor soul named Girish (I am a poor soul too, but that’s not me) opened a Credit Card account with The Big Bank. To save the environment he signed up for email statements. And he did this 6 months ago.

For the last 6 months though, I am getting his credit card statements on my email address. Well, I can’t really read it because the statements are password protected. But every month I get an email with a PDF document attached stating it contains my expenses for the last month, and every month I get the shock that someone has opened an account in my name with the Big Bank only to realize that it is - poor soul Girish.

The email is followed by this wordy disclaimer and warning:

This email and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged.  If you are not the addressee, do not disclose, copy, circulate or in any other way use or rely on the information contained in this email or any attachments.  If received in error, notify the sender immediately and delete this email and any attachments from your system.  Emails cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error free as the message and any attachments could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, delayed, incomplete or amended.  Big Bank and its subsidiaries do not accept liability for damage caused by this email or any attachments and may monitor email traffic.

And for the last 6 months I have been diligently notifying the sender and deleting the email. But the joke is Big Bank is not bothered about notifying poor soul Girish about his plight. And, I can’t block their email address because someday I might want to open an account with them.

So what is the moral of this blog post? If you have signed up for email statements, please check that you are actually receiving them!