Archive for the 'Administration' Category

My India Trip

Published on February 3, 2011 in Administration. 48 Comments

For those who follow me on Twitter (and if you don’t…nudge nudge), you may know that I am coming to India for a brief trip. In this post, I am putting down a list of my “events”—–please do try to make one (or more of them).

February 6: TEDxIITKgp, 3 pm [Link to event]

February 8: Kolkata, 4 pm to 7 pm, City Center Salt Lake, (I will be sitting outside on the stairs…..or may sit at a coffee shop) Tweetup

February 11: Mumbai, 7 pm, Crossword Bandra Linking Road, “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss” book event. [GR Floor, Unit G-1, Plot No 250-B, Kanaiya Building, Mala Mahal Co Operative Society, Linking Road, Bandra West, Mumbai - 400050]

February 12: Mumbai, 6:30 pm Oxford Churchgate,  I will be in conversation with Amish Tripathi, author of “Immortals of Meluha”

I will also be an invited speaker at INFOCOM 2011 at Kolkata in two sessions—Social Networking The Next Business Mantra on February 17th and Information and Communication Technology in Health Care on February 19th. [Link] These two sessions are however not open to the public.

[Apologies for not making Bangalore. Or Hyderabad. It is just that Crossword and Oxford expressed interest in organizing events. Hence Mumbai. For the "Mine", will do Bangalore and Hyderabad]

Appeal For Votes And An Update On The Book

Published on November 26, 2009 in Administration and Blogs. 65 Comments

Update 1: The confirmation email, sent from “confirm_vote@Sparklit.com” and may be stuck in your spam. Remember your vote is not registered till you click on the link you get sent to your inbox

The Indibloggies 2008 is taking place and Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind has been nominated, aap ki kripa se,  in two categories: Indiblog Of The Year (Category 1)  and Most Humorous Blog (Category 5)

[Voting link]

In an ideal world, I would have been able to promise many things to get your vote—tubewells, blankets, quotas, the opening of an IIT or IIM in your neighborhood, free desi liquor or at least guarantee that my “friends” will not torch your house out of “spontaneous anger” should I lose.

But since we do not live in Utopia, I only appeal to the goodness of your heart.

If this blog has touched you in appropriate ways and in appropriate places,  please vote for Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind in the Indiblog Of The Year and Most Humorous Blog categories. [direct link into voting area]

Continue reading ‘Appeal For Votes And An Update On The Book’

Some Cosmetic Changes

Published on July 26, 2009 in Administration and Blogs. 43 Comments

You may have noticed that “Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind” (RTDM) looks a little different today. Not as different hopefully as say Koena Mitra did after she had her disastrous nose job which in essence put a pakoda between her eyes.

But yes yahaan pe kuch to hua hain.

Well the news is that RTDM underwent a slight cosmetic enhancement over the weekend. This was necessitated by changes to WordPress, the software that I use to create and maintain my blog. In theory, WordPress is this marvelous bit of open-source community software which rules over all its competitors because of its extensive extensibility both in terms of functionality (through what are known as plug-ins) and in terms of visualization (through what are known as themes). In practice, it is riddled with security vulnerabilities and feature instabilities, requiring very frequent updates and releases (sometimes within weeks of the last) with the problem being that updates are prone to sometimes “break” your blog beyond repair. WordPress developers blame plug-in/theme developers for this state of affairs while they deflect the blame back and in the midst of all this passing the buck, the poor user as usual suffers.

Continue reading ‘Some Cosmetic Changes’

Please Follow Me On Twitter

Published on July 12, 2009 in Administration. 12 Comments

In addition to blogging here at Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind, I have recently taken to twittering (whether I can keep the tempo up is of course to be seen) as a way to post links and assorted “mini-thoughts”. If you find that interesting, you are requested to “follow” me on Twitter hopefully in the same passionate way that Obama follows other things. [Twitter Link].
There is also a RTDM Facebook group which I would encourage you to join (if you have not already) so that I may contact the readers of this blog in case something happens to this website (like what happened last year when my host kicked me out for using too much bandwidth).

Thanks For Attending

Published on June 1, 2009 in Administration. 16 Comments

For all of you who attended the Asha quiz on Saturday, a big thank you. A special salut to my wonderful hosts at Asha and my apologies that I could not stay back for the Karoake since we had to rush back to Manhattan. And a sincere “shukriya” to all of you who came from off-campus—Pankaj, Anantha, and Gaurav Sabnis’s team. A heartfelt shout-out of gratitude also to my old Stonybrook pal Puloma who came with her entire family.

The quiz was a close affair with Anantha’s team edging out Gaurav’s by a mere 5 points. My favorite moment of the quiz was when the audience whistled “lustily” at the video of Manoj Tiwari creating a truly subaltern Chapra zilla mahaul in the academic climes of Rutgers. Topics covered included male exotic dancing, strategic bathroom breaks, exorcisms, “lota” dance, Mithun-da, Night Lovers, singing chuckers and presidential roommates. Many of us have asked me to post the questions online.The only reason I do not do so is so that I may repeat a subset of these questions in the future.

Thanks again and hope to see you all in the future. Now back again behind the blog wheel.