The Golden 80s

I was mostly listening to 80s and 90s style heavy metal in 2011 more than anything else. In the last two months I was listening to songs from Malmsteen's Trilogy, Poison's Greatest Hits, more of Guns 'N Roses, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Dokken, Faith No More, and less of Satriani and Steve Vai. Apart from these classics, I did check out some of the new bands like Vains of Jenna, and Crazy Lixx. Throw in a bit of Velvet Revolver, one or two songs of Saving Abel, Deep Purple (Slaves and Masters), Keel, 2011 was damn headbanging stuff. 1.  You Don't Rememeber - Malmsteen 2. Blame It On Love - Crazy Lixx  3. Look in Her Eyes - Vince Neil 4. Bloodstreets - RIOT 5. Kill the King - Masters of Reality

The last one month has been the month of Mullaperiyar , a dam in the Idukki district of Kerala. Keralites, especially the politicians, are sure that frequent earthquakes will break the dam and kill lakhs of people. Tamil Nadu is sure that nothing will happen as the water will "simply" flow to the Idukki dam and rest there. Era of disaster porn and empty jingoism .  Indians will wake up in New Year to the amended Lokpal bill which will "undoubtedly make India the only place in the planet with zero corruption. Just like Kareena Kapoor 's size zero. No soul in India will dare to be corrupt because of Lokpal. Just say the word, Lokpal; the corrupter will shudder and pee in public. Religious rules sometimes create trouble for certain self-styled intellectuals . Rules are rules.  I cannot agree more with fashion designer Julie Kagti's remarks that fashion in Bangalore is getting more influenced by Bollywod. In a city where everybody on M G Road, Brigade Road, o...

Whenever the state of Kerala reports an outbreak of vector-borne diseases like Dengue and Chikungunya, the media goes on an overdrive and as usual looks for culpable scapegoats. Following public, political, and media pressure, on September 24, 2011, the Kerala chief minister held an emergency meeting and directed waste management measures on a war footing among others. Here comes my discomfort. It may be because I am ignorant. Vector-borne diseases and contagious diseases are different ball games. What we are witnessing in Kerala is outbreaks of vector-borne diseases such as Dengue and Chikungunya, and the state’s total failure to either control, anticipate, or study the issue at hand. Knee-jerk reactions like more doctors in affected areas, urgent waste disposal measures, and local body meetings (a group totally incapable of dealing with the situation) follow suit from various quarters, and for the media this is just an issue to up the TRP ratings. This is sim...

While metal has disappeared from prime time music television, the cyberspace has hundreds of unheard, rare, and new bands rocking real hard. Some of the new bands are pretty good playing a style that critics may say retro. But the songs of some of these new bands are good and much much better than the two-chord alternative stuff that channels bombard you with. The following bands and songs, a mix of new and old, are real gems.  Talon's All I Ever Needed is a great straight-edged mid tempo/melodic song with good guitar solos and pure vocals from Chandler Mogul. The songs make me feel that I have missed this band. Talon rose from the ashes of Voxen , says Melodic Rock , and invites fans of Dokken (my favourite) and Hericane Alice to lend their ears. Both are very good bands. Melodic death metal band Evergrey is another great find with powerful melodic songs with classic guitar solos.Click here to listen to A Touch of Blessing . The vocals at times resembled the good old MSG. ...

I did not have any idea about the origins of the phrase, First come, first served, until a mistake in an email I read got me thinking. The Daily Writing Tips has an excellent article on the history of the popular phrase, which is converted by net-savvy geeks to FCFS. The same geeks create the mistake, first come, first serve. To read the mistaken phrase is definitely irritating at times. So, first come, first served, and no more first come, first serve.

Countless emails, often from the big bosses of the corporate world, contains the nauseating mistake "revert back". "....Revert back to me if you have any questions." This is what I saw a few days back in an email from someone whose name shoots everybody's BP up. The verb, Revert, here is used in the sense, to go back in thought or discussion . Therefore, revert back is a redundant expression, as the word implies the sense of going 'back".  So, do not revert back, just revert. 

Consider that you are working on a very important document and your manager wants it immediately. After a few minutes, you click Save . And to your surprise, the Word 2007 document says that "This file is "read-only". Shocked and no time to do a Google search? The solution to this annoying pop-up screen is very simple. Do the following steps to avert this problem: 1. From within the Office 2007 document, click the Office button or Ribbon. 2. Click the Word Options button. 3. Click Advanced in the Word Options screen that appears. 4. Scroll down to the Save section. 5. If the Allow background saves box is selected, click once to clear it. 6. Click the OK button, and reopen the document. Note : Repeat these steps if you get the same error again.

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.