The Golden 80s

Powerplay is a term used in the world of cricket. It was intended to increase the othewise boring middle overs of the game. But as World Cup Cricket 2011 unfurled, the host India found the powerplay too hot to handle. Powerplay has become an Achilles heel in the host's batting lineup as the batsmen simply squandered away the side's dominant position by playing extravagant shots. India narrowly escaped from the jaws of defeat against England, and lost, in a shameful fashion, to South Africa despite raising the prospect of an imposing total. After 2004, the dreaded Tsunami returned to the news in Japan , which saw a fierce wave after an earthquake of 8.9 magnitude. The Tsunami also affected a few of the country's nuclear reactors . The effect of the Tsunami waves on the nuclear reactors have already raised questions on the safety aspects and ecological impacts of such reactors. I share my grief with those who lost their lives and dear ones in Japan.

The abbreviation, Statement of Work, appeared in an email I received today. Decided to know more about it and landed right on Wikipedia . 25 commandements for journalists from Tim Radford, former Guardian science editor, letters editor, arts editor and literary editor. Excellent stuff. "Mobile number portability (MNP), which allows customers to switch service providers without changing their cell number, will be available across India from Thursday (January 20)," says The Telegraph daily. The question is who will gain the most if people change their service providers in large numbers. "More than one out of six mobile phone subscribers (17.6%) want to switch over to another telecom company," says The Hindustan Times . Business Standard says that if the service providers tweak their plans, customers may be the winners. I wonder what will happen if the same is done for DTH services . Because DTH subscribers are the most unhappy lot, compared to mobile subscrib...

A poem can be understood by trying to answer the following: who, what, when, where, and why. But it is wise to keep in mind the following to understand it fully: Title: Understand the link between the title of the poem and the poem itself. Speaker or character: Identify the speaker or the characters mentioned in the poem. Setting: Find out the setting in which the poem is based on. Situation: Understand the situation the speaker is in and its relevance to the poem. Words: Understand the meaning of all the words in the poem, repetitions of words, punctuation, unusual expressions, capitalisation etc. Form: The form in which the poem is written and whether it changes or develops into some other form. Theme: The subject of or the idea behind the poem and the experience it tends to evoke, or the message it seeks to convey. Imagery: Note the words that indicate or describe the auditory, visual, tactile, taste, smell, and movement in the poem and their contribution to the mean...

If you have read official documents released by the central government or the state governments in India, you will know the pain. The writing in such documents is characterised by ambiguos, lengthy, and wordy sentences. " Officialese " is the name given to such kind of writing. The same applies to legal documents also. Now, the US government has decided to do something about obscure writing. The Plain Writing Act of 2010 seeks to etsbalish that "Government documents issued to the public must be written clearly, and for other purposes." Interestingly, the act defines "plain writing" as "writing that is clear, concise, well-organized, and follows other best practices appropriate to the subject or field and intended audience." So, plain writing gets legal approval. Technical writers beware!

Traitorware are "devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation . It actually got me thinking about my new smartphone, which may be leaking or accessing information to someone. Dangerous times ahead, as I started reading Web Photos That Reveal Secrets, Like Where You Live . Meanwhile, I have to check my location security settings and disable it. That is my New Year resolution.

How To Predict A Failing Hard Drive 10 Awesome Safe For Work Websites To Overcome Lunchtime Boredom A portal on tax related affairs and laws in India Free Data Recovery Software http://www.longreads.com/ to read long articles. Track anonymous and missed calls with Phone2location .

As a user, would you bother to visit this website again? If you do not recognise it, the site belongs to The New Indian Express, one of the popular English dailies in India.

It is a fact that albums released by Joe Satriani are good. Or no albums by this virtuoso guitarist is bad. The latest album, Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards , is simply perfect, melodious, and technically excellent. Right from Premonition, through keyboard laden Pyrrhic Victoria, bluesy Littleworth Lane, rocking Light Years Away, and The Golden Room with an Indian sound, the album is a listener's pleasure. Like all his previous albums, the songs are simply beautiful, but more world music oriented stuff with a tinge of dance music thrown in the right measure. The album is an intelligent shift towards international music, and drifts away from the 80s harder and heavier sound. If I compare Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards with his previous stuff such as Surfing With The Alien, Flying In A Blue Dream, and The Extremist, then I feel disappointed. Gone are the lighting fast solos, power chords, and exploding riffs. Satch is no more a metal-friendly act. He has abandoned the "m...

Is it Walk in, Walk In, or walk-in? The word, walk-in , appears as a noun and an adjective in Merriam Webster online .  I could not find the word without the hyphen. The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary website showed the hyphenated word only. As you know, the word means someone who walks in to a place without an appointment. Typical examples are walk-in customers for a bank, walk-in interviews for fresh graduates, and walk-in patients in a hospital.

As technical writers, most of us get a chance to review documents prepared by colleagues or writers from other teams. While a few may be reluctant to do reviews, it is a fact that the reviews provide technical writers with an opportunity to participate in the quality control process of user and technical documentation. If the team has a technical editor, he or she may be left with enough time to do a thorough review of documents. A process will be in place to plan and complete editing. If one of the team members take up the taks of editing, the edits mostly will be a mix of “copy-editing” and “technical editing". A“production edit” can also be done on the draft versions of the PDFs created to ensure that everything is all right before it is send to the customer. The limiting factor indeed is time. The first step in editing is to read the entire document once. It is indeed a quick read just to get an idea of what is it all about. Such a reading does give me a...

How different is copy editing from the editing you do as part of your technical writing? Some might feel that it is nothing compared to what is done in technical writing. Others might say a lot can be carried from newspaper copy editing to technical editing. Others might say both are miles apart. I can't help from saying that there is an awful lot of misunderstanding about a copy editor's work in newspapers. On the internet, one of the best quoted or linked source of what a copy editor does is at The Slot. Click here to read The Slot's article on What Exactly is a Copy Editor .  Here, I don't intend to pass judgements on which one is more challenging and complex, or which one is easy. Let me put my perspective what a copy editor (sub editor in Indian parlance) does. Firstly, it is neither a "mere" editing job, nor a proofreading job. It is job with lots of responsibility, pressure, and requires syncing with the editorial team, the reporting team, the grap...

One of the words that technical communicators should have in their vocabulary is Engage. Because the word also means to "become involved." In reality, many technical writers refuse to get "actively" involved with the project teams and refuse to accept responsibility for mistakes on their part. A few even consider themselves as "individual contributors" in a team. Technical writers cannot sit before the desktops and imagine that everything—information, reference documents, software build, and so on—will reach them automatically. They cannot simply shift the blame for incorrect information or missing information in their documents to someone else. For technical writers of any level, engaging themselves with the project team is the most crucial aspect. This may require lots of legwork, casual chat, and intent to even befriend a few team members. The primary benefit of such an interaction is more or less complete documentation of the software and feature...

Pictures of the just concluded Commonwealth Games in Delhi.  Very few photos of Indian winners anyway. Adobe Dreamweaver's tutorial on building a first website. More here . This PDF on Introduction to XML and Structured FrameMaker 7.x gives a good overview of concepts. Alcatel-Lucent opens regional delivery centre in Bangalore, says CNN-IBN . A science story that was too premature to be published: IISc scientists make progress on new thyroid drug The Sunday Times on the literary feud between Noble laureates, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.  30 lakh mobiles disconnected over verification. Oct 16 was World Food Day . "United Against Hunger" is this year's theme. Nothing great in this list of top 50 guitar riffs of the decade.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a markup language that allows you to define and structure data using tags and attributes. The capabilities of XML can be extended by creating new tags. Data can be structured and validated easily. XML documents works cross-platform. In XML, there is clear separation between data or contents (XML document) and presentation. The presentation is specified by the Stylesheet. Processing Instruction (PI): The XML declaration statement that begins the XML document. Tags (< >): The name that identifies the piece of information. Element s: Basic units that identify and describe data. A Root element contains all other elements. Elements that contain other elements are parent elements. Elements contained in Parent elements are Child elements. Conten t: Data represented by the elements. Attribute s: Provides additional information about elements and includes a name and value pair. Elements and attributes are the building blocks of DTD. Entit...

Tips to circle text or object for emphasis in PowerPoint . Which kind of technical writer are you? Robohelp tutorials on You Tube. More about Immersive Journalism . HTML, CSS, and Java Script videos on Google . How to avoid risks posed by tabbed browsing . Adobe TV for technical communication. Getting started in technical communication . Things non-technical users do not understand about software. Earth-Like Planet Can Sustain Life, says Discovery . The Social Network : Ecosystem vs. Egosystem. A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices .

Swinge - A verb meaning meaning thrash or punish. Obama wants to keep them for all but the rich; the doves think they should be continued for everyone and the hawks say they should not only be abandoned but accompanied by swingeing tax rises. . The following terms impressed me very much: Pluralia Tantum - A word meaning nouns that have only plural forms. Thanks to Richard Nordquist . Singulare tantum - Nouns that appear in singular form only. The following are extracts from an Prospect magazine article: "...Psychoanalysis was born 113 years ago when Freud applied the term “psychical analysis” to his treatment of disturbed patients....CBT, now the NHS treatment of choice, was developed in the 1960s by American psychoanalyst, Aaron T Beck." The End of Science (1996) is a book written by John Horgan, a staff writer for Scientific American.

1. Water molecules in Antarctic fish "dance a more ordered" dance due to the presence of anti-freeze proteins in their body, said a news report . The technique used to study this is called "terahertz spectroscopy". Spectroscopy is a method by which an object's properties are studied by the way it disperses light passed through it. This is just like passing sunlight through a prism. When light is passed through a prism, it breaks into its constituent colours. By studying the constituent colours, scientists can know more about an object's properties. Terahertz spectroscopy uses frequencies in the range of 0.3 THz to 10 THz. This frequency is invisible to the naked eye and can penetrate matter. In this study, Terahertz spectroscopy was used to study the interaction of water molecules with the anti-freeze proteins. 2. "...Universe was formed because of laws of physics and not divine intervention, " said acclaimed scientist, Stephen Hawking . He has add...

The Environment was back in the news because of an oil spill at the Gulf of Mexico and the release of a report by US president Obama's cancer panel of the link between chemicals and cancer. Oil spills cause irreparable damage to fauna and flora, and people who depend on these resources for livelihood. The recurring episode shows that we have not yet learnt the right lessons from Exxon Waldez . The report prepared by Obama's cancer panel says that, "...Approximately 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and about 21 percent will die from cancer...". The panel, in its 240-page report, suggests strengthening of research into environment chemicals and cancer. The chapter, Environmental Exposures Related to Modern Lifestyles, is a great read on how humans are being exposed to environmental carcinogens daily. After carbon footprint, the digital footprint is also affecting the environment or is going to affect the environment i...

I have a fascination for terms and jargons. My eyes lit up when I feel that the connotation of something I read is more than skin deep. Commonplace books: I saw this word in a post titled, The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book . Wikipedia defines the words as "Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into book." Echo Chamber Effect: Echo Chamber effect is used to describe how media outlets follow stories reported by a major media outlet.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting- Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Beauty, the last triumph possible for man who can no longer hope- Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel . We live in an age of conspiracy theories, some people preferring to believe that nothing is ever what it is but an elaborate plot by powers elsewhere- From Malcolm Bradbury 's Doctor Criminale. The sea is a symbol of collective unconscious because unfathomed depths lie concealed beneath its reflecting surface- Carl Jung in Dreams Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end up by destroying the Earth- Albert Schweitzer