5 Things About Me You All Probably Don't Know

Viral Tarpara — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:12:00 GMT

So apparently my best friend since joining Microsoft, Anand Iyer, feels the need to involve me in his childish online ice breakers. Apparently he is currently involved in an inescapable game of blog tag. To better understand this phenomenon to the masses, I decided to research this odd online social dynamic with the world's definitive source for accurate, updated, and editable information--Wikipedia.org. According to Wikipedia:

Blog Tag, or better known as memetag, and I quote, "is a blog tag that is included in all posts that reference a meme. When a meme is started on a blog — for example, 'your top five favourite movies' — the meme tag is included at the foot of the text of each post that responds to the meme invitation. By including a memetag, bloggers are recognising the initial creator of the meme and allowing them to track how their meme has spread across the blogosphere through the use of social media tools such as Technorati. While inclusion of a memetag is not mandatory, it is done in the spirit of information sharing across the web and is a system based on trust."

In all honesty, if there wasn't a wiki about it, I was going to create one and attribute it to Stephen Colbert ~~hey it's true he created it~~. But I suppose it would be interesting how far my online presence could propagate ~~you can't start a sentence with 'but'~~. So...

#5 - I wrote production design code in Intel's XScale Monahans chip. ~~Did you ever wonder why your battery meter didn't work?~~ I converted old VHDL legacy code into fresh Verilog code. It was pretty cool work and it taught me that I could never work in a cubicle again. After my experience at that company, I was ecstatic to come to Microsoft.

#4 - I use Gmail for my personal email and my personal computer is an iBook G4. I know what all of you are thinking. That being said, if I didn't have my work laptop with Outlook 2007 on it, my productivity would go down 80%. Please forgive me if I seem less than convinced when Eric Schmidt and Douglass Merrill say they completely "eat their dogfood" and use Google Apps within their company. It wouldn't surprise me that they actually have a super-duper version of it running internally, but lets be honest, Google Apps, in its present form, is a half baked attempt at an enterprise suite. Enterprises would be better off with deploying Office Live even if Microsoft is currently only targetting small and medium businesses with that offering. The funniest part of the Google Apps video is when Merrill makes the argument that Google Apps meets your compliance standards because it meets Google's compliance standards. WOW...I'm pissed, I should write an article about this.

#3 - My first computer was my Dad's AT&T 8088 machine with two double-density floppy drives and a green monochrome monitor. I was age 4. I learned how to turn on and load "Zaxxon" and "Wheel of Fortune" from disks. Oddly I got glasses by age 5. I wonder if it is a coincidence?

#2 - I've seen a lot of the world and done some amazing things in my life so far. I've gone skiing in the Himalayas, went white-water rafting in Nepal, seen half of Europe, seen some of Hinduism's and Jainism's most holiest shrines, and faced certain death in a Los Angeles drive-by but survived ~~don't ever flip the bird at LAX~~. If my life ended today, I would leave satisfied.

#1 - And finally the number one thing you probably don't know about me, when I was 3, I rode a red tricycle down the stairs in my uncle's house because I saw a guy do it on a motorcycle on TV. Let's just say to this day, every person in my family never fails to remind me of my...err..daring ~~retarded~~ nature.

*Tags TBA*

Thank you. That is all. Here it is! Your moment of zen! ~~milk does her body good~~ *cards flying* *laughing like Letterman*

Video: Milk does body good! It did for Carmen.

Google Study on Harddrive Failure Released

Viral Tarpara — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 01:08:00 GMT

Google Labs is known for periodically releasing internal statistics and research to the general public. Just released a few days ago is a study showing the rate of failure for Google's harddisk infrastructure in their insanely huge data centers. Surprisingly, "heat" is not concluded to be a significant factor in harddrive failure, relatively speaking. Among other things, it breaks down the failure rates of drive between 0-5 years old and acknowledges the benefits and short-comings of SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) that is built into all modern drives today. If you're planning on building a data center in the near future ~~5 FIOS in my mom's basement muahahaha~~ this is a must read!

On a related noted and as a Hindu, I am eagarly waiting for Google Caste Beta to be released! ~~Beyonce Subhramaniradhakrishan?~~

And now ladies and gentlemen, "your moment of zen."

The Vacuum Tube : Google

5 Things About Me You All Probably Don't Know

Google Study on Harddrive Failure Released