Thank you!!

The traveling Narayanan's went on one of their most adventurous and eventful trips in recent memory over the last four days.

We went to Alaska.. saw Glaciers, Grizzly's, natures beauty and wonders at its finest and to just round it off.. we encountered another one of natures anomalies on our return flight from Anchorage to Portland enroute to San Jose.

A guy for reasons we don't know decided to open the exit door while we were still way above the cloud line. We heard a hissing sound and a lady screamed "Someone please help.. someone help now!" and a bunch of passgengers set about securing the door and tacking the guy. 

After a few tense moments the guy was on the ground restrained and we made a speedy landing and watched as the cops took the guy away. He seemed to be calm and collected as he was taken out. 

Why someone would want to do that is beyond me.. why want to take a bunch of others with you if you have a death wish?!

Like a fellow passenger told me after we came out "the good news is that we are all still here!" 

To the alert lady (as most of us were sleeping!), and the folks and crew who held the door and restrained the crazy dude, many THANKS from the bottom of our heart. 

There are heroes all around us! There are 10 heroes for every idiot! At least that is the lesson we are teaching our kids today after this experience. They were both disturbed, as were the adults for the second flight.. they kept watching the exit rows for action. 

This puts a lot of things in perspective!

The rest of the pictures and videos can wait. Time to get some much needed rest...

Buzz ain't bad for a bumblebee like me..

Ok, there is a lot of negativity these days around anything Google.

Since I am not employed by google, am a self proclaimed techno nerd (not the software type though), and have had an open love-hate relationship when it comes to the products they dish out, here is an open heartfelt feedback of why this is actually a good thing..

1. Now that they fixed this contact business, it is no different from facebook. You can share all info to all public or choose to share your info with select people. You do have to invest some time and effort to set up the group lists for friends, family, etc. etc.. then what you share gets viewed by different people. Have checked it out and it works nicely. (it also tells you which items you shared with the world and which ones with family).

see the example shot below..

2. if all your buddies put their accounts and share it in the buzz stream, you get to see their feeds, tweets etc. just like you see blogposts on reader. the look and feel of a reader is maintained.

3. You don't have spam on this yet with stuff like "so and so took the How much do you know Shah Rukh Khan quiz and scored 13%. would you like to take the quiz?", in a quiz where even Shah Rukh would score only 5%.

4. the picture viewing is great!

5. It is almost a blogger and reader combined into one.

Now, if google makes you selectively embed links and images into the text box.. in other words, integrate the blog editor into buzz status updater, and have the ability to selectively show only my posts in the buzz stream, then will I even use blogger? highly unlikely.

So when people say Buzz is trying to replace facebook, twitter etc.. it also seems to be trying to replace blogger and blogreader as well!

They should have done this two years ago!

Just look at who are on your facebook list. Friends from school, college, work, friends you make thanks to who your kids go to school with, friends you make because of your hobbies and that is pretty much it.

It is usually the same bunch of people you email the most. I fundamentally had an issue with Facebook calling everyone a "friend", be it an acquaintance or a thick pal and almost stopped using it because of how it had security issues. Facebook fixed those issues and have a way to send your status updates to select folks only and have a way for you to say "NO" when it comes to information on your profile going out.

Buzz is doing the same thing.. It does surprise me that they didn't learn from the mistakes of Facebook before launching Buzz! The good thing with Google is that the react fast when you point out things to them.

Looks like someone heard my plea for a one stop shop with one login!

The second impression on this one is "I could get used to this!"

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Security...

Security is a double edged sword!

Take for example the full body scanners that are going to be at most major airports in the near future. You pretty much get an x-ray picture of everyone's nakedness (be it man, woman or child) and the airport security people get to watch you and your dear ones naked on the x-ray machine.

1. This is a violation of privacy in the name of security

2. Reminds you of those Holocaust movies where the Jews get paraded naked past a checkpost and they have that bleak resigned look on their faces and their biggest concern is not the nudity but the fear of losing their life. (except the irony here is you are being stripped bare on a machine by the supposed good guys!)

3. Apparently this doesn't work as intended.

4. These machines are made by companies which have a connection to the officials who is responsible for putting these machines in the airports. . . (this is like politicians who are on the boards of weapons manufacturers pushing for the Iraq war). Looks like somethings never change)

Someone posts an inappropriate comment and we think of turning on comment moderation. Then we realize the hazzle it becomes and turn it off. (Wish google would publish stats of how many people turned off comment moderation after turning it on for the first time).

People start violating my openness in facebook and I stop using facebook! There are only so many things where you can go into a shell.. you choose your options based on the bandwidth you have to handle all these security vs. freedom compromises!

Have pretty much stopped using facebook, twitter etc. and this blog is the only online thing I do. So imagine my surprise when I was presented with this security thing to read...

and I failed!

On a sidebar note, why should all these different sites have different logins, userids, passwords etc.

The way the world is going, the best thing would be to ask for the dad and mom to request a userid for the kid the day it is born, along with the birth certificate, social security number etc.

That way the kids birth certificate will arrive in 2 days.

The Social Security number in a week

Passport in 6 weeks

UUID (Universal User ID- I am patenting this concept if it hasn't been patented already) will arrive same day with premade google, yahoo, hotmail, twitter, facebook, myspace, etc. etc. accounts...

The kid will be able to use this ID on his/her 10th birthday?!

In any case, back to the topic of security, I think if we take the first family, and the top 10 Homeland security officials and post their full body scan pictures on the internet, this thing will go away real soon!

What do you think?

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