Vishal Kothari

I have been hearing a lot about the Swine Flu or the H1N1 Virus. After the cases that have been reported, it sounds really scary.

Personally, I would advise to avoid travel. That’s the first step. Few others would be to wash your hands regularly, covering your mouth & nose while sneezing & coughing.

Just thought it would be good to share some other info about it here:

Source: WebMD

Who is at risk?

Those who are more at risk from becoming seriously ill with swine flu are people with:

• chronic (long-term) lung disease, including people who have had drug treatment for their asthma within the past three years,
• chronic heart disease,
• chronic kidney disease,
• chronic liver disease,
• chronic neurological disease (neurological disorders include motor neurone disease, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis),
• suppressed immune systems (whether caused by disease or treatment),
• diabetes,
• pregnant women,
• people aged 65 or older, and
• young children under five.

Source: National Health Service, UK website

More resources:

http://www.cdc.gov/H1N1FLU/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza

http://www.in.com/swineflu/

Please take good care of yourselves!

Employment statistics from the US Department of Labor show what most IT people have already realized: IT jobs are getting harder to come by. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 13,000 jobs in the information industry were cut in July, bringing the total to 44,000 year over year. An additional 5,000 jobs were lost in telecom this past month.

The statistics reinforce a recent survey of top CIOs who indicated that they will be reducing their IT staff over the coming year. According to a staffing research firm, some jobs have gone to outsourcers, while other jobs are simply going away, either due to cost-oriented automation efforts or due to increasing the remaining staff’s workload.

Last Sunday, had been to watch Batman 2 - The Dark Knight. I was very impatient to watch it, hence went alone when a couple of friends said they were busy.

I liked the movie. Has a lot of good stunts in it. A couple of them like the Batman jumping down from a sky-scraper & a truck swinging like you would swing a pen in your hands.

The ‘Joker’ character is a really crazy character. And it bounds to take you by surprise everytime. The character is crazy in it’s actions as well as looks.

The end also took me by a bit of surprise when the Batman converts all the cell phones in Gotham city to microphones to find where the ‘Joker’ is & has the image of the entire Gotham city in 100 to 150 odd screens in the R&D department of ‘Wayne Enterprises’

A good watch I would say. Go Ahead & Book your tickets.

Another Slashdot story which interested me:

Before reading the article, I was pretty sure like most of you that Working at Google will always be a better choice than at Microsoft. The article proved me wrong.

It contains remarks from an employee who has shifted from MS to Google. Here is the link to the article:

http://web2journal.com/read/603827.htm

It could be true or could not be true. Posting a couple of key reasons mentioned by that employee:

On one hand, there are beneficial effects - it is easy to ship software quickly…On the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there’s just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it’s a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more

The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values “coolness” tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.

The conclusion:

“Google’s big problem is that the company hasn’t realized that it isn’t a startup anymore.”