popping pills and navel gazing

i wish i was an internet expert in the indian government. i would rule. really. here's an example: the president of india gets a threatening e-mail

Security officials immediately took all necessary precautions and launched an operation to trace the origin of the email, they said.

what kind of 'necessary precautions' would one take? stop checking e-mail? erase the browse cache? and the super-sleuths added:

The cyber cell in the Home Ministry was handed over the one paragraph email and it was suspected that the sender of the mail could have used a fictitious name.

well, wouldn't that be kinda obvious? given that i'm really good at stating the obvious at meetings, i would rock that organization.

the indian government banning a bunch of websites (including blogspot.com) has a number of people really pissed off.

I am very tense and angry. The ban is cutting us off from the people.
sailesh bharatwasi, blogger

neha's post (that gets super technical with traces and hops) is a quick peek into the heated debate among indian bloggers.

now, i get the intent of the ban. i really do. but the government really screwed the pooch in communicating the reasons for the ban. it seems to range from "the terrorists were using blogs to pass along orders" [heh?] to "those sites are anti-india". and indian isp's went a second round with the pooch - instead of blocking off specific blogs, they blocked out entire second-level domains like blogspot.com. it would've taken an intern all of 24 minutes to figure out how to block out a specific blog. i'm guessing they blocked an ip or a range of ip's.
while the entire episode is quite silly, things of this nature are never entirely forgotten. glenn reynolds blogged about this today.

methinks it's about time north korea took down kim jong-il's blog :)

random surfing a few weeks ago took me to this post about goats and clock towers. so i promptly forwarded the link to sid and jyo. and the following conversation ensued:
sid: this reminds me of some idiots in school who shaved a cat. the poor thing looked really silly. apparently the most cruel thing you can do to a (semi-wild) anyway is to cut off its whiskers. apparently the whiskers are as wide as the body, so it uses it to tell whether it can get into places without making noise. good no?
me: lol! kinda like a wide-body detector. well, if i ever see a cat and there's no-one around and i have a pair of scissors handy …
sid: it might make it more confusing to cut off whiskers on one side only.
me: you're sick. really.

and for those of you with visions of thunder thighs on air india, think again. air india's starting a hot-or-not contest and the "not hot"s get booted off the plane.

and now for the navel gazing portion of this post. for the uninitated, navel gazing is the obsessive act of staring into the deep, dark depths of the life you've carved out for yourself. among the the highlights are: revisiting the choices you've made, the friends you've pushed away, the relationships you let unravel - you get the idea. it's closely related to a mid-life crisis but sans the crisis component. it's an exercise in contemplation that rarely results in action. my recent bout of navel gazing has left me questioning a few things. things on the list (in no particular order):
- why do i write so infrequently? will i ever get around to writing a book?
- should i find a job that really makes a difference? do i really believe i'm building software that empowers people ... yada, yada, yada ...?
- why have i never attempted to run a marathon?
- why do i have about fifty books at home that i haven't gotten 'round to reading? why do i keep buying more? do i really believe i'm going to get an unaccounted for quantum of time to catch up with my reading?
- am i enjoying being single a little too much to do anything about it?
- why do i enjoy watching the elevator go up and down on the space needle?

did i mention that i'm reading aparajito by bibhutibhushan bandopadhyay? i'm really enjoying the book but i'm starting to really dislike the little cretin. everything's a little too easy for him. i'm hoping bando injects a little angst into apo's life soon.

i finally have internet access at home. openta23 and linksys_3 - whoever you are, thanks for not securing your wireless networks.