drifting away from reality

www.way2sms.com

    I got to know about this site today, through a forward sent by a friend (who normally sends me every forward 5-6 times to ensure that I, if not read them, atleast spend some quality time in deleting them). When I clicked the link, I expected a popup-rich web-page laden heavily with ads to come up, but to my surprise, it was a real neat page with just a few lines explaining what the site is about and the login widgets.

    To send a free sms, all you have to do is sign up with your name, your email address and your mobile number. Your password is then sent to your mobile, using which you can sign in and start messaging the person sitting next to you (then, go to him and check if he got your sms. If he didn’t, try again!). Pretty cool isn’t?

    And did I sign up? yeah, I very much did. Any link that even vaguely resembles the words ‘Sign Up’ gets me into action (those weirdos into phishing thrive only ‘coz of people like me!). After signing up, I tried sending an sms to my own number and the sms was delivered so fast that I was almost startled.

    It’s neat, it’s clean and it’s fast. So, what’s the problem? The problem is the junk that gets added to every sms that you send from here. It prepends your mobile number(so, if you were scheming up something, forget it! you can’t send anonymous sms from here) and appends a “India’s Largest Mesaging portal.Now brings Free SMS to any mobile.Log on to Way2SMS.com” to every sms. Now, how many of you would like that? I, for one, would be terribly annoyed if I were to receive an sms with a simple ‘hey’ encapsulated in a whole lot of crap. Btw, it doesn’t add your name to the sms, so if you want the receiver to know who sent the message, you’d have to sacrifice a little of that ‘personal message’ space for your name (and if your name is greater than 10 characters, for God’s sake, get yourself a pet name!).

    That said, the site does have it’s advantages. Suppose your friends have gone for a movie leaving you behind, you can now message all of them at a single click (and remind them that you are still alive), how many ever times you want and at absolutely NO cost! or may be, if you’re feeling terribly bored during a weekend, you can now send lots of sms’s to yourself and feel real useful. Exciting isn’t? Go ahead, sign up and have fun. Happy spamming..er..sms’ing!

    If you’re wondering why I put this up in my blog, well, someday when my blogsite become popular (wishful thinking, I know!) more and more people will start signing up at way2sms.com and hence, I will be contributing significantly to the spam overflow in the country. You see, I always believe in making a difference, whatever be the means!
(Actually, I was just feeling bored and sleepy…and hence this post; how long can I keep sms’ing myself? ;) ).

**Update 1**

Here’s another means of making your presence known to your friends - SMS via Email You can send an email to the ‘Mobile Email Id‘ (mobile_number@provider_id.com) of the person you want to send the sms to and the message will be delivered to his/her mobile as an sms. You can find the list of provider id’s here. I tried the airtel KK one and it works. I’m not sure of the others. Depending on your degree of joblessness, you can try a few out…and if it works, please drop Ranjhith a note of thanks!

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I couldn’t resist putting up these quotes here. Though amusing, they make a great deal of sense, given the way software is being developed. Anyone who’s been in the software field for more than a day (no, make it an hour) would agree with me :)

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UNIX is simple. But It just needs a genius to understand its simplicity.
–Dennis Ritchie

Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why it works. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don’t know why.

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation.
-Gerald Weinberg

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

–Robert Firth

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works.
–Alan J. Perlis

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
–Will Rogers

Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.
–Anon

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
–Fred Brooks, Jr.

I’ve finally learned what “upward compatible” means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes.
–Dennie van Tassel

Rules of Optimization:
Rule 1: Don’t do it.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Don’t do it yet.

–M.A. Jackson

Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written, and another for which it wasn’t.
–Alan J. Perlis

There’s a lot of things I would like to do on a Saturday but working isn’t one of them :(

The holiday last Monday (for which we’re compensating by working today) was ok but it was a city-wide shutdown (colorfully called bandh) and I wasn’t able to step out of my house, didn’t get to have any fun, didn’t even get to eat good food…then why am I being made to work today? A beautiful Saturday gone entirely wasted…just not fair!

The Third Twin - Ken Follett

    This was the first Ken Follet book I read. Until I read this one, I hadn’t given much thought to Ken Follett ‘cos I wasn’t much into espionage thrillers, the kind I’ve heard this guy usually writes. The reason I picked up this book was

1. It’s a bio-tech thriller - I’ve always fancied books of this genre (since when, I don’t remember!)

2. The story’s lead role is named Steve - I’ve always had a liking for this name and I seem to fall in love with every book/movie character having this name. Before you start wondering, no, I don’t know any real person named Steve personally :)

    Anyways, getting back on subject, before starting to read, I wasn’t expecting much from the book, considering it was from an author about whom not many people talked about. Neither was the storyline anything too different from the Robin Cook books I’ve read. But as I read on, I realized there was something captivating about Ken Follett’s writing. I was hooked on to the book right from page one till the very last.

    The book is based on ‘cloning’, the popular subject for fiction these days. The story actually revolves around the female character, Jeannie, but for obvious reasons I’ll concentrate on Steve here ;) Steve comes to know that he has an identical twin, who is a murderer. He later figures out that both of them are not really biological twins but clones (I wonder how I would feel if someone told me I was a clone…hmm). Steve is disturbed about the fact that he has genes identical to that of a murderer and starts to wonder if that makes him a murderer too, by instinct. The story concludes with the implication that it is not our genes that determine what we are but our actions, upbringing and environment. Though it has a philosophical touch to it, the book is pure fiction and an absolute thriller.

    No matter what sort of books you read, if you have a thing for suspense, you got to read this book. The Third Twin and Whiteout are the only two Ken Follett books that do not fall in the espionage category.

    I heard ‘The Third Twin’ and a few other Ken Follett books have been made into movies. If that’s true, someone please be generous and get me the CDs/DVDs of those (I promise I’ll remember to say thanks!)

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    I looked up ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’ in the dictionary and here’s what I got:

Fate - An event (or a course of events) that will inevitably happen in the future
Destiny - An event (or a course of events) that will inevitably happen in the future

    Somehow, it doesn’t make sense to me that fate and destiny are one and the same. To me, fate is what happens to us and destiny is what we bring over ourselves. If we were to let life take it’s own course, in other words, leave everything to fate, would we ultimately reach our destiny? We would sure reach a destination but to reach a destiny that we can call ours, we need to take control of the wheel. This reminds me of a scene in ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets‘ (it’s amazing how much light fiction could shed on reality):

HARRY: So the Sorting Hat was right. I should be in Slytherin.

DUMBLEDORE: It’s true, Harry. You do possess many of the qualities Voldemort himself prizes. Resourcefulness. Determination. A certain disregard for the rules. Yet the Sorting Hat placed you in Gryffindor.

HARRY: Only because I asked it to.

DUMBLEDORE: “Exactly. Which makes you very different from Voldemort. It’s not our abilities that show what we truly are, Harry. It’s our choices.”

    At each step of life, we are given the free will to choose how to proceed from there. ‘Fate’ may decide what options we have in front of us. But ultimately, it’s our choices that not only show what we are but also determine where we land - the destiny. Choices are sometimes straight forward, sometimes difficult and sometimes scary too. So, how do we know how to choose best? we learn! Fatalistic as it may sound, that’s the only way (sense a paradox here?). No one can claim to have chosen the right path always, made the right decision always but the key is to learn from the mistakes and move on, ‘cos somewhere along the way, the lesson learnt would make all the difference.

    P.S: If you’re wondering what that was all about, well, just one of those times I try to lift myself up with amateur attempts at philosophy :)

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