Its the morning of January 15th in India and I wish it were opening time for Macworld Expo 2008 already. I know ‘Theres something in the air’. I just bought myself a Macbook a month back and realized that there’s a new one - Macbook Air (?) coming out today. Fortunately for me there are 2 other people in my family who are going to buy Macbooks so I hope to ‘replace’ mine with theirs. But it has to be compelling enough. I really love my machine. 12″ maybe a tad small, but if its done right the way only Apple can, why not?

Viva la Apple!

Hello You,
You know who you are - the angry young, old man and woman. You, who’s always in a rush to get into the airport, to breathe down my neck till I move aside and let you go. You, who throws your luggage onto the security scanner and runs around and look into the darkness of the machine as if you were searching for your mate in the abyss of life. Please tell me why do you need to stand next to me when I am checking in, with your tickets pulled out and yelling on your phone as if your life depended on it. Is there an ‘An Amazing Race’ episode being filmed that I am not aware of?

Why do you never smile? Why are you never thankful or regretful? Why do you deserve to get everything before everyone else and without any gratitude for the hostess? Are you the reason that Indian Airlines has given up on hospitality? Are you the reason Jet Airways charges more for making sure their people are paid well enough to pretend to care?

Do you ever take the time out to enjoy your travels? The plane will take-off when it’s meant to and will land when it should (for the most part). If you get your bags ready and cell phones humming your latest gratuitous downloads, do you believe we will get to disembark any quicker? Maybe all of us will get out of your way cause you seem to believe you are more important than us mere mortals. Maybe if you push a little bit more we will retreat to our Gandhian roots and selflessly retreat to our seats. Maybe your luggage will get it’s own conveyor belt and we will cheer you on your way to a record-breaking exit.

I know that I will applaud the departure of this depraved indifference to your co-passengers and people in general. I like to believe that we all want friendlier flights.

Hey you, o roamer of the Indian skies, please chill the fuck out.

Yahoo! launched its mobile interface Go with 3.0 (beta) a couple of days ago and its been an anxious wait. I have a Blackberry 8700g and my friends all carry Nokia and Moto Razr2 or alike and none of our devices are supported yet. Now that Yahoo! is doing something about Android in it’s own meager way, it supports 3rd party widgets for this application. Google is going down a different path but I wish Yahoo! wouldn’t forget all of us who aren’t running the latest of the phones and still spend significant amount of time on GPRS/EDGE.

I can’t wait to try out this on my phone but if anybody out there has a nice video of the interface, I would love to see it.

Here’s the latest Telecom Regulatory Authority of India report on the scene in India -

…the total number of Wireless Internet (GPRS + CDMA Internet Access) users, at the end of September 2007, was 46.37 million. (is churn being reported?)
…
Outgoing SMS per user declined approximately 11 percent, from 36 per user per month by for Q2 2007 to 32 for Q3 2007.
…
All in all, the total number of wireless subscribers increased from 184.92 million to 209.07 million, with 55.08 million CDMA subs (26.35%), and 153.99 million GSM subs (73.65%). GSM subs increased by 13.4% during the quarter, while CDMA increased by 12.12%.
…
Average Revenue Per User:
GSM: all India Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) declined by 7.4 % from Rs. 297 to Rs. 275. Post-paid ARPU declined from Rs. 655 to Rs. 632, 3.5 percent.
Prepaid ARPU declined from 7.2 %, from Rs. 248 to Rs. 230.
CDMA: ARPU (prepaid+postpaid) at Rs. 173, down significantly from Rs. 206. Lowest ARPU is in West Bengal (Rs.127) while the highest blended ARPU is in Mumbai (Rs. 274)
…
Internet
There were 9.63 million wireline Internet subscribers at the end of September 2007 as compared to 9.22 million at the end of June 2007, a growth of nearly 4.37%. Readers will remember that the number of subs had declined by 0.5 percent in the previous quarter. The number of broadband subscribers increased by 10.33 percent, to 2.67 million. 72 broadband service providers had a subscriber base of 2.67 million, with 98.3 percent of those subs with 13 sevice providers. Some stats:
– Broadband connections: 2174401 are DSL based; 319010 Cable Modem; 100592 Ethernet LAN; 21688 Fibre; 27664 Radio customers and 28183 Others.
– Average Revenue Per User per month for dialup Internet Subscribers is Rs. 200
Internet Telephony: Total minutes of the use (MoU) for Internet Telephony during the quarter were 129.43 million as compared to 112.26 million for the last quarter registering an increase of 15.29% over the previous quarter.

via ContentSutra 

I just discovered posts from my old blog - vritti.net and it was surreal. It was an impromptu trip down memory lane with some positive revelations. Reading through it I realized I haven’t changed much. The outlook that I had back in 2003 seems to be consistent. I am still excited by the unforeseen and at many levels I still feel like an outsider trying to carve my own niche, though the circumstances defining these realizations have markedly progressed.

It was nice to read lost thoughts on the future that is now part of my past, I feel happier about the present future outlook.