nathan....My Name is ShanmuHAnathan

Yipee! Google has recognized my blog - this is such an important event, that I have rewritten this post, pushing the news about that unfortunate piece of software which would have become famous for being the most short-lived installation on my PC.

Thanks Amma, Appa, for naming me,rather, spelling me Shanmuhanathan - with a 'ha' between 'mu' and 'na'. All the search engines point to me and just me, when someone searches for Shanmuhanathan (ignoring askjeeves' lone different entry).

This was such a pain when I was a student - had to keep on repeating, like a parakeet, "thats ShanmuHAnathan..no..no..no.. not shanmuGA.. (not shanmuGHA, not shanmuKHA, not shanmuKA)...its shanmuHA with just a H" to all those people who took on the Herculean task of trying to spell/write my name. Believe me, there were quite a few people who wanted to write my name, because of my prowess in that arcane art of Quizzing. Whenever I attended Quiz Contests, my desire to win them matched the pain of getting the certificate with the correct spelling, after that. As they say, "No Pain. No Gain."

That doesnot mean that once I quit being a student, people found my name easier to spell - just that I got used to wearing my company ID tag around my neck and whenever somebody tries to spell my name, I just stop them midway and shove my ID card (which, wonderfully, has the correct spelling) into their face. Considering the fact that the number of people of wanting to spell my name decreased, (due to my ignoring the Quizzing part of my life, after joining the big Corporation to work) it did get spelt, worse still, pronounced wrongly at my workplace. This forced me to the drastic measure of calling myself Shanmu - to prevent all those non-south-indian tougues from going into a palsy.

That didnot prevent the nameboard contractor to our company to spell my name according to his whims:
When I was a newbie, I used lust at all those glossy plastic nameboards stuck over other senior employees' cubicles - 'Mera number kab aayega?' was the biggest question. After my training, I was put into a seat between 2 proper cubicles - making it uncomfortable for all the three of us. To my utmost disppointment, there was no holder to stick my nameboard into. Had to console myself with a printout, which I composed, with the correct spelling. People were so impressed with my compositing skills that they froze ordering new nameboards and I was beseiged with requests regarding how I had taken such a authentic-nameboard-standards-compliant printout as my nameboard!

Then, that wonderful day came, when we moved into our new building and I skillfully hid my printout and left my nameboard holder blank. Senior Management must have went into a tizzy to know the name of that harworking guy who stays 24X7 in office - My ruse worked and they started ordering nameboards again. So, with great glee and anticipation, went to the reception and demanded my nameboard. The conversation went something like -
"Can you give me my nameboard...", demanded me with uncontrolled anticipation.
"Your Name please...", asked the receptionist.
"Shanmu...er..Shanmuhanathan T", said me with confusion.
"Sorry, I can't find any Sanmukhanadhan here", chirped back the receptionist.
"er...its Shanmuhanathan", with my BP increasing and my hand automatically displaying the ID.
"Did you request for it?, Sir", came back the receptionist.
"Oh..OK..where do I request for it?", crestfallen me.
"Please send a request to the admin department,Sir, It would be delivered to your workplace within a week".
So I came to my computer, composed a nice email to the admin guys, taking care to spell my name properly as "Shanmuhanathan T". Just like those half crazy fans of the superstar awaiting his next release, I marked the one week eagerly on all the calendars I could get my hands on (including the ones in Outlook and Mozilla). After that one week, when I came to my workplace, to my horror saw that it had been given to some guy called "S Thiagaraja". Reality dawned on me slowly: I was shanmuhanathan.thiagaraja in the company records and either the admin guys or the contractor decided to save on the plastic and shorten my name to "S Thiagaraja".

--interlude--
S.Thiagaraja is my father you see.As a part of the joining formalities, We were forced to give a second name by the HR. We freshers with our feet barely touching the ground (were on cloud 9), obeyed all the instructions given and faithfully expanded our initials. My roomies Kitcha and Venky became krishnamoothy.sethuraman and venkatesan.rajasekaran, respectively.
--/interlude--

After much threatening, the contractor agreed to have it corrected and promptly returned it with 'Shanmukhanathan T'. I was forced to 'escalate' the issue to the contractor manager. He came down to my desk and said in that comforting voice, "Son! These things do happen. What you have to do is give me a proper spelling of your name and I will ensure that this mess is cleaned up". He was talking as if all this mess was because of my mistake. I was ready to forgive and forget everything, provided my nameboard came back to me with my spelling. So I dug out my precious prinout and gave it off to the contractor and Voila! The guy was true to his word and my nameboard now sits proudly in my cubicle, proclaiming that a unique person is working here. Still, all those non-southIndian Newbies coming to my desk are bowled clean, when they try to prononce my name...I smile and say, "Call me Shanmu, Kid!". This does remind me of the travails-of-single-south-indian-men, by Sidin.

Coming to the would-have-been-headline part of this post:
Record Break
I have uninstalled Thunderbird and Firefox and have moved to Mozilla 1.7. So Thunderbird has the dubious record of being the most shortlived installation on my PC. since I was using a Mozilla based mail client and a mozilla based browser, it seemed foolish to have more memory used for the two of them separately - Mozilla 1.7 provides me a similar browser and mail client with a much smaller memory foot print.

PS. All those who think my ego is superinflated - reconsider! I didnot pepper my post with all the links to the search engines, searching for me. Here they are:
MSN
Yahoo
Ask Jeeves - The second hit is not me.
Lycos
HotBot
Nicely consolidated at the end of my post!

Bye for now!

One More Upgrade

Moved from ageold Netscape 7 to Thunderbird and FireBird and it rocks! I am not sure if the applications have become really faster.. And finally chucked out IE from my default browser. You should never even think of using it for default browsing when guys tell you not to use it even on a microsoft site OK. Gotta rush

PC under pressure

PC would increase rates. PC would decrease rates. PC will do nothing. PC for P.Chidambaram, India's Finance Minister. The media has turned all of its googol candela spotlights on the Indian budget 2004. Every channel you surf, every newspaper you pick up, every site you visit has the some advice or other for the poor guy. He has a huge expectation to satisfy,generated due to his 'Dream Budget' presented in 1997.

There was one very nice ad in the Economic Times. The caption reads 'Budget Simiplified', followed by what is a snapshot of a class VII kid's notebook, in which he has written(with all the trademark scratches and blobs of ink) that how he has started reading the Economic Times ("..a pink paper..") and what he is able to make out the expectations regarding this budget and how it would affect his mom's Cooking, his pocket money. Finally, he mentions how his mom is happy to see her nahna-munna baccha reading ET and how she feeds him three extra mooli-parathas ("..which is a very bad thing..").

This weekend was good, stayed home and watched TV all along and made a fair bit of progess in reading Forward the foundation. My sporting weekend ended in what one could call a fifty-fifty. Maria Sharapova won with surprising ease but Ancic crashed out. Portugal lost Euro 2004 and Schumi won yet another race (9 out of 10)! Greece reminds me of the 1983 cricket world cup champs - rank outsiders who none expected to come into semi-finals....

I am not satisfied with any of the blogger clients available for Mozilla. So as usual, having a grand plan to write my own blog client and a RSS/ATOM reader based on the mozilla paltform using the excellent book - Creating Applications with Mozilla. Hopefully, the interest I have in updating this blog would be there long enough for me to develop this client/reader.....

Off went another week

As Sidin says, Humble Apologies for not posting for the last....um.. 6 days. I donot believe in 'post gratis postia' (Thanks MGM). However, my earlier posts might belie this belief. Looks like Greece is going to romp home with the Henri Delaunay Trophy. Even though Figo looked sublime in the match against the Dutch, Maniche could bend it like you know who, I think they might not be up to crack the impeccable Greek defence. Unfortunately, I find it hard to remember all these -isis names.

Sharapova would look much better as the Ladies Champion and should make a nice pair with Ancic...but lets see. Even if the pair of Federer-Serena does not look good, they actually play better tennis.

ok. Gotta rush now. Bye!