With Christmas jingles flooding the air waves, here are some links which make for interesting reading.

First on consumerism.
The Telegraph reports that market research analysts estimate that 20 million people plan to hit the shops on Sunday, spending £1.14 billion. That is just one day of shopping!
The issue is here the six hour Sunday shopping law. So what store owners are planning is to open a little in advance so that customers can browse, and fill their trolleys, whereas the actual purchase begins only when the clock strikes the annointed hour. And at the end of shopping hours, stores are allowed another half an hour to clear the till. And most newspapers report that the temptation to make money shall lead to at least some chaos.

Another story on similar lines says: Thousands of branches will be staying open for an hour longer than the legal six-hour maximum to squeeze the last penny of Christmas spending out of shoppers.….read full story here

The Guardian quoted The Bishop of Worcester and Steve Jenkin, spokesman for the Church of England opposing the move. It also had Martyn Eden, of the Keep Sunday Special campaign, stating that “it was a ploy to make more money at the expense of smaller shops.” He quipped, “They are making enough money anyway”.

More on money matters here. Easier estimates that Over £700,000 per minute to be spent in Christmas Eve rush . It adds: Sainsbury’s Credit Cards research indicates that 49% of adults, intend to do some of their Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve, spending around £1.14 billion. This is equivalent to £47.5 million an hour or £791,667 per minute. The bank estimates that around 18% of this will be placed on credit cards.

But then there are the lonely people as well. Up to 50,000 people could be eating a Meals-on-Wheels Christmas dinner alone this year, figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats suggested today….read full story

IN the years gone by, it was known as the festival of lights.
Gradually it has transformed itself to the national festival of
bribery. Bribe givers now wait for an entire year for Diwali so that
they can openly slip in not cash gifts, but also jewellery and wads of
notes to those they wish to please.
Politicians, officer, bureucrats, policemen, journalists, excise,
income tax and now VAT(value added tax) officials form the circle where bribe givers
line up on Diwali. The simple old platefull of sweets is passe and
meant only for lower middle class neighbourhoods.
The joke doing the rounds is that a school going son of an IAS officer expressed his suprise that “sweet shop owners now manufacture jewellery as well”. Why? Because the sweet box that his father received did not contain sweets, but had jewellery tucked in.
Officers of some industrial towns are the most coveted persons during Diwali. “A Diwali in one of the grand cities is worth two crores for the top bosses”, reveals a source. No wonder, knowing the propensity of accepting gifts, very often during the regime headed by Om Prakash, officers would be transferred on Diwali eve. This was his way of ensuring that officers receive lesser gifts. After all, few would go and hand over a gift to an officer who has already been transferred.
Politicians who receive the most gifts from all sections of society including bureucrats are forced to splurge on the media during Diwali, though by their standards the gifts tend to be cheap. The Chief Minister of Indian state of Punjab Capt Amarinder Singh was the first to raise the bar on gifts for the media. Instead of theroutine cardigan or watch, which was the standard in Punjab, he replaced the “official” gifts with personal ones. Four bottles of liquor meant that he became a rare CM to offer liquor as a gift to journalists, in a country where prohibition is
recommended by the Constitution, A year later, Akali Dal leader Sukhbir Singh Badal was not one to be left behind. His brother in law personally went to media
persons delivering Raymond suitlelenghts.
Amarinder’s media advisor, B I S Chahal is famous for his gift culture and is credited to have corrupted some Delhi based editors as well. His Diwali visit to Delhi is famous when he goes around distributing gifts.
On Diwali day, the entire market in North India remains open, but it is not just for sales. A Patiala based cloth merchant informs, “I do not sell a single yard of cloth on Diwali, but perforce the shop is open for the half a dozen inspectors that come for collecting Diwali”. His regret this year is that one more official has been added to the list – the VAT guys.
But officers rule the roost while receiving gifts. Many have a huge box placed at the entrance just for people dropping their visiting cards. And back lawns of palatial sarkari houses are often reserved for gifts. For those foolish enough to go with sweet boxes and dry fruit, a customary check on the false bottom of the sweet boxes is made so that there are no wads of notes hidden there.
Otherwise, that is meant for their servants.

all future posts shall be available at http://www.bajinder.com/blog

IN the years gone by, it was known as the festival of lights.
Gradually it has transformed itself to the national festival of
bribery. Bribe givers now wait for an entire year for Diwali so that
they can openly slip in not cash gifts, but also jewellery and wads of
notes to those they wish to please.
Politicians, officer, bureucrats, policemen, journalists, excise,
income tax and now VAT(value added tax) officials form the circle where bribe givers
line up on Diwali. The simple old platefull of sweets is passe and
meant only for lower middle class neighbourhoods.
The joke doing the rounds is that a school going son of an IAS officer expressed his suprise that “sweet shop owners now manufacture jewellery as well”. Why? Because the sweet box that his father received did not contain sweets, but had jewellery tucked in.
Officers of some industrial towns are the most coveted persons during Diwali. “A Diwali in one of the grand cities is worth two crores for the top bosses”, reveals a source. No wonder, knowing the propensity of accepting gifts, very often during the regime headed by Om Prakash, officers would be transferred on Diwali eve. This was his way of ensuring that officers receive lesser gifts. After all, few would go and hand over a gift to an officer who has already been transferred.
Politicians who receive the most gifts from all sections of society including bureucrats are forced to splurge on the media during Diwali, though by their standards the gifts tend to be cheap. The Chief Minister of Indian state of Punjab Capt Amarinder Singh was the first to raise the bar on gifts for the media. Instead of theroutine cardigan or watch, which was the standard in Punjab, he replaced the “official” gifts with personal ones. Four bottles of liquor meant that he became a rare CM to offer liquor as a gift to journalists, in a country where prohibition is
recommended by the Constitution, A year later, Akali Dal leader Sukhbir Singh Badal was not one to be left behind. His brother in law personally went to media
persons delivering Raymond suitlelenghts.
Amarinder’s media advisor, B I S Chahal is famous for his gift culture and is credited to have corrupted some Delhi based editors as well. His Diwali visit to Delhi is famous when he goes around distributing gifts.
On Diwali day, the entire market in North India remains open, but it is not just for sales. A Patiala based cloth merchant informs, “I do not sell a single yard of cloth on Diwali, but perforce the shop is open for the half a dozen inspectors that come for collecting Diwali”. His regret this year is that one more official has been added to the list – the VAT guys.
But officers rule the roost while receiving gifts. Many have a huge box placed at the entrance just for people dropping their visiting cards. And back lawns of palatial sarkari houses are often reserved for gifts. For those foolish enough to go with sweet boxes and dry fruit, a customary check on the false bottom of the sweet boxes is made so that there are no wads of notes hidden there.
Otherwise, that is meant for their servants.

No, this is not about things that you could do to your mobile (like smashing it on someone’s head), but these are things that your mobile
could do for you.
Earlier mobiles were  used only to strike a conversation. But as the teaser says “Is it a mobile or your wallet?” Yes, the mobile is all set to
fast replace your wallet as well.
Consider this. When you reach the metro railway station you can book your ticket with your mobile. Dial a specified number, enter the
destinations and your ticket is booked. The handset can be used as e-money, credit card, ticket, or even house or office key. Walk into
your office, and instead of the swipe card, use your mobile to dial a number and enter the office. This could be cumbersome in case you
change mobiles a bit too often.
At office, dial a coke and a pizza, and you need not pay the delivery boy. It is automatically credited into your mobile account. Use your
mobile to send multimedia messages while working.
On your way back, the mobile becomes a music player. Download the latest music or just let the handset play some stored music for you.
Browse through the news headlines at your favourite websites, now specially tailormade for mobile phones. In the meantime, switch on
your AC or house warmer with your mobile so that your home is ready to receive you when you reach back.
Back home, use the mobile for unlocking your house, and then switch on the microwave and television as well. In case you forgot something,
use the word processor on your mobile to compose a document and email it to office. Amidst booking a table in a posh restaurant or tickets
in the cinema hall, do not forget to set the mobile alarm for waking you up next morning.
All said and done, do expect an inflated bill by the month end. By the way, this column was written while travelling from office to home on a
mobile handset and was emailed to office.

It may have triggerred a natiowide debate on security issues, but online maps are now providing succour to happless victims of natural disasters. Be it Hurricane Katrina or the Pakistan earthquake, online maps have emerged as handy tools in the hands of both the amateur as well as the expert.
With many governments continuing to restrict publication of detailed maps, private individuals have effectively utilised satellite imagery from providers like Google to identify spots that require help. Scores of individuals all across the world have uploaded relevant maps of quake-hit areas on the web, with details like location of rehabilitation centers as well as access paths and routes. Today relief agencies are looking towards online maps for directions rather than governmental help.
Blogs are full of maps of earthquake hit areas with minute details like locations of relief teams and informing others of locations where help has not reached.
In India, Google maps did create a furore when the President AP J Abdul Kalam raised the issue of security of developing countries after he saw details of many important installations on the Google website. This arms the terrorist with information about vital installations and could seriously breach our security, he reasoned. Kalam, who was a pioneer in India’s missile development program, remarked that current laws on spatial observation were not adequate.
While Google did respond to security issues stating that the images provided are not real time, and that they are willing to discuss the issue with governments, the help provided by their maps in facilitating relief operations has opened a new vista in spatial observation.
Competing with Google maps is the service, Visual earth, by Microsoft where you are able to view even your car parked outside your garage, since you can view pictures at a 45 degree angle as well. Other services include MapQuest and Yahoo Maps, Most have API (Application Programming Interface), which helps you browse the map with ease.
So next time you plan to visit Survey of India to seek permission for a detailed map of your city, think again.

You ask, and you answer. Here is the entire world for you, answering your questions for free.
Or do you need some help with your homework? Try asking questions and get answers from Yahoo. This is the new beta service from Yahoo and it is called ‘`answers”. Launched last week, it draws upon the collective knowledge base of surfers.
The procedure is simple. Just login at http://answers.yahoo.com and post your question. The question could be “What is the tallest structure in the world” to How to poach an egg in the microwave? Wait for fellow surfers to chance upon your question and let them reply. You do get to evaluate the answers and see if the question has been resolved. Better still, why not answer a few questions yourself.
Within hours of its launch, the cyber community was abuzz and trying out the service. Some questions can be outright simple, and the answers, amazingly correct. In other cases, opinions rule the roost.
Check on this. Ques: When we eat eggs are we actually eating the embryo of a chicken? Ans: Not generally. Most egg laying chickens are not kept with males, and so are never fertilized. Much like a woman, however, the egg still comes out, but it’s not been fertilized. So, like with humans, you wouldn’t call the egg an embryo.
In another case, a patient at a hospital wants to know how to keep annoying people from finding his room number. Another wanted to know about the tallest structure in the world.
Is Yahoo Answers an answer to Google answers. Maybe, except that Google charges for your response. While Google claims that more than 500 carefully screened researchers answer a question for as little as $2.50 — usually within 24 hours, Yahoo goes about it differently. It does not charge and there are no select researchers, but people like you and me who seek to enlarge the social networking circuit.
But there are some funny answers as well. Someone wants to know what is the greatest scapegoat ever. And pat comes the response: George Bush.

So it was the year of the iPod craze? Not just you, but even the Queen thinks on similar lines. No wonder, the chief designer of iPod, has been named in the Queen’s Honours List. The 38 year old Janathan Ive, who is incidently London born ,has been awarded the title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth.

If one Galileo shook the world in the sixteenth century, this one promises to shake the skies. The first of a series of 30 satellites, Giove A has been put into orbit, and it promises to be accurate to within one metre. This is significant since traditional GPS systems are accurate within 30 metres for civilian applications. With Galileo, it would be even easier to track mobile locations. And more important it is designed to work inside buildings and congested areas as well.

2005 continued to be a spammer’s delight. The American giant AOL stated that it stopped an average of 1.5 billion spam messages daily and by the end of the year blocked 500 billion e-mails during 2005. Spam, according to the company accounts for 80 per cent of the email sent to its servers.

Moving to online shopping. A report from Goldman Sachs, Nielsen and other reveals that Oct. 29 and Dec 23, i.e the shopping season, retail shoppers in the U.S. spent $30.1 billion on online purchases. People spent 3 billion $ on books, 5.3 billion $ on clothes and 4.8 billion $ on computer harware and peripherals.

But if online shopping was going up, RSS and podcasting was not really up to that mark. A recent research conducted by Yahoo! and Ipsos reveals that while 12% of surveyed Yahoo users know what RSS is, while only 4% of use it. Regarding podcasting, 2% of surveyed people use it.
Computers are entering diverse fields and wine making seems to be the latest. A scientist from Carnegie Melon University is now trying to deduce a model of the behaviour of yeast, so that the fermentation process could be controlled to produce better designer wines.

here’s to more merrymaking

He is the creator of the World Wide Web, and he too is taken aback by the way it has developed. The web has now become a publishing medium, and the creator thinks that he too should join the pack. So finally, on the 15 th anniversary of his creation, the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee has started a blog of his own.
In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that thershould be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute, he says.
“Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline”. And in 2005, with blogs and wikis running riot, Lee remarks, “the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn’t crazy to think people needed a creative space”. His blog prompted many a reactions, with people asking him whether he had envisaged the course that the web has adopted.
Someone teasingly asks, “Now let’s see how you’ll interact with all the junk coming from social blogs, social networks, social software”. Another quips, “With YOUR WWW we have got messengers, Internet games,webmails, free videos, P2P and wiki(pedias or not) and now blogs and IPPhones”.
The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights. Then came the trend of editing offline and later uploading the stuff on the net. There were others at mit, where his blog is hosted, who thought that they would not be able to cope with Tim’s blog.
“First, is our machine ready to handle the load of a bunch of blogs and technorati and Slashdot and digg and everybody else linking to him all at once?”, asked one. But Tim began his lates sujourn very simply, “So I have a blog”, he said. It is called “timbl’s blog” and can be accessed at http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4 , wherit goes under the name of breadcrumbs.
By the time, this column was written, over 450 comments had been posted and an fair number of other blogs were abuzz about timbl’s. Berners-Lee first proposed the Web in 1989 while developing ways to control computers remotely at CERN CERN, the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research. He never got the project formally approved, but quietly tinkered with it anyway, making the first browser available at CERN by Christmas Day 1990.

January is the time when many swanky gadgets make their apperance at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and this year in no exception. Techtalker takes a look at a few of them.

This is the world’s smallest headset. The Motorola H5 Mini Bluetooth Headset fits inside (yes, inside) your ear, with no one even realizing that you are sporting one. The grand gizmo has the ability to pick up your voice through the ear canal. You may feel that you are working for the secret service when you wear this. But then, being such a small gadget, you could easily lose it as well.

For astronomy enthusiasts, Celestron has a telecope called the NexStar, which makes gazing more easy. It has launched a SLT series, where SLT stands for Star Locating Telescope. It does away with countless hours trying to locate stars. You can just type the ID number of the 4000 odd heaveny bodies and the computerized telescope locate it for you. It can even track the star as it moves across the night sky.

Plasma TVs are getting bigger. And at the CES, a Panasonic Plasma TV hung on the wall proudly claimed that it measured 103 inches diagonally. Also competing there was Samsung with 102 inches.

The Treo 700 model has also been unveiled. More than the cult phone, are two interesting packages that are an optional buy. “Traffic for Treo” smartphones lets you avoid unnecessary delays with up-to-date traffic information for many major US cities. Not only does it show you where jams occur, you can easily tap the screen for details on each incident. It also gives you a four-month subscription for mobile TV. You get minute to minute news, sports, weather, and more and this application has won a technical Emmy award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.