More is happier. Maybe. Maybe not.

The Oliver (“Please, sir. May I have some more?”) state of mind is very much a nearly constant part of the human condition. If that sounds too convoluted and pretentious, what I mean is we always want more of anything whether we have enough of it or not. What triggered this thought was a recent Iconoculture report claiming satellite radio is as unsatisfying as cable television, contentwise. http://view.exacttarget.com/?ffcb10-fe9013787365027f74-fe2b15787761007e701775-ff2217797c6c. “Why isn't the sheer volume of content – much from big name personalities - enough? One word: relevance,” explains Kate Muhl, Director, Travel/Leisure and Transportation. All this brings to mind something quite relevant to the topic under discussion. It’s a poster I noticed in my morning workplace. It’s the sort that presumes to make a seemingly witty though in fact a rather vacuous comment about something topical. In the present instance, it is about Farhan Akhtar’s Don. “Priyanka. Kareena. Isha. Gauri,” it reads. Then the punch line: “One lucky Don.” Not necessarily. It could mean trouble four times over. Well, Don could sort it out with a bullet or two, though. The fewer, the merrier? Maybe. Maybe not. Kemo Sabe?

My portable typewriter tale.

There’s a story, apocryphal perhaps, about Woody Allen’s technophobia. Every time he needs to change his typewriter ribbon, a friend gets invited to a home-cooked dinner. (Read ‘printer cartridge’ just in case he has switched to a PC by the time you read this.) True or not, it goes well with Woody’s screen persona. I used to think of myself as a technophobe till the time I got myself a portable typewriter, back in 1958, to pound my M.Com. thesis on. (I never admitted even to myself that my handwriting was atrocious and illegible.) My new acquisition was a made-in-India machine. I forked out the princely sum of Rs.1500/- for it. My dissertation ran into some 700 and odd pages. After reading it, my external assessor, Dr. K. N. Raj, told me that had I waited one more year I could have got a Ph.D. for my trouble. That’s not apocryphal, trust me. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/09/almost-ph-d-me-who-else.html. Technophobe and techno-illiterate – I’ve continued to be both most of my life. I gave up driving long back because I was terrible at it, even worse at parking. When the PC came along though, I was among the early majority in getting converted by around 1995. I even managed to write a part of my still unpublished novel directly on my PC. I’m okay with surfing, e-mail and word processing but haven’t yet ventured into spread sheets. A part of the reason is I don’t really need to use Excel. This memory segment is brought to you by courtesy of Mr Gerry McGovern in whose article (Metadata is essential web writing skill.) I came across the Woody Allen anecdote which I had read before. “Metadata is the: who, what, where, when and how, of your content. … (and) may include: heading/title, summary/description, author name, date of publication, geographic classification, subject classification, keywords,” explains Gerry. The core of his argument is: “Metadata gives your content context.” Part 1 of the article at
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2003/nt_2003_06_02_metadata_1.htm. Part 2: http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2003/nt_2003_06_09_metadata_2.htm.