iBlog: Nishit Shah

There’s a brighter side to India’s exit from the World Cup. Something that can cheer up disappointed fans and angry advertisers. Sri Lanka has done a great favour to Indian economy by ousting the cricket team from the World Cup. There are about 80 million cable and satellite viewing homes in India.

According to TAM ratings, the average viewership of all World Cup matches
held till now stands at about 3%, with India vs Bangladesh touching a high
of 7.25%. To reach the finals, India would have played at least seven more
matches.

Considering a TV Rating of 7.25%, at least 5.8 million people would have
watched the match. This would have resulted in a productivity loss of 371.2
million man hours (5.8 million x 8 hours x 8 matches), apart from stress
faced by mothers during exams.

About 3% of 81 million TV viewers (2.4 million) were ardent cricket fans and
would have sat through all eight hours in the remaining 28 matches. Thus
overall, Indian team’s ouster would result in a productivity gain of 481
million man hours of work (28×2.4×8 man hours), if put to use.

The Sri Lankans have given a boost to the Indian economy by saving 54,902
man years of work (one year = 8,761 hours). Indians can build seven phases
of the Golden Quadrilateral connecting Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai
spread over 5,846 kilometres all over again, with this time saved.

A daily wage skilled labourer in Delhi earns Rs 17 per hour. If put to
productive use, the 481 million man hours can produce Rs 817 crore of GDP,
which is 63% more than BCCI’s annual revenues of Rs 500 crore, last year. It
’s 401% more than the Rs 163 crore losses, corporate India has predicted to
incur due India’s ouster.

The state electricity boards are also thanking Sri Lanka for the great
favour. A TV consumes 45 watts per hour. Assuming a viewer will now switch
off his TV by 12 midnight, it will save Rs 135 watts at least per viewer
(not considering the electricity consumed by other appliances running
simultaneously. )

This will save the electricity boards 324 million watts of electricity (
3.24 lakh kilowatts) in just 28 days. According to estimates, SEB losses in
India will touch Rs 1 lakh crore by 2008.

If disappointed viewers completely switch off their TVs for eight hours, it
will save the government at least 8,64,000 kilowatts, along with many more
lives - at least three Indian citizens have been reported to die due to
cardiac arrest or suicide after India’s defeat at the hands of Sri Lanka

-Source a forwarded mail.

I couldn’t think of any better way to describe the Indian cricket team, thanks to their pathetic display at the world cup. Greg Chappell had once said Perform or Perish when he started coaching the Indian team. And, the Indian team has been defeated and perished in a way that even minnows would be shameful if anything like this happened to them. I came to know from News the day when Sri Lanka were playing Bangladesh that few India cricketers including Sachin Tendulkar had gone to watch the match to “learn” and “understand” what are Sri Lankan strategies….lol.. And what did you learn Mr. Tendulkar ? How to get out for a duck ? Cool. We are proud of you! Dude, its time for you guys to retire perish. And what is still surprising is that common India man is still hoping that our team will enter super 8’s IF Bermuda beats Bangladesh. Such worse is the situation is that our team has to relay on a minnow like Bermuda who are playing for the first time for their ticket in Super 8s. Team India should be shameful of this.

Its been a while since I have written anything techie. Its not that I am not working anymore! Its just that I am too much involved with my work and reading books these days that I seldom get time to blog it :~) Good excuse! Yeah. One of my colleague at work enlightened me with this cool thing. We, sysads, consider Nagios to be synonymous to monitoring. This is a cool Mozilla Firefox addon with which we can see the alerts on the Firefox window itself.

This addon is highly customizable and even *beeps* when there are changes in alerts. Can write a whole page on it, but .. install this and figure it out yourself!

Nagios Checker

There was a time when I was so excited about cricket and in particular World Cup Cricket. However, this year I am no longer excited. Thanks to the match fixings and pathetic performance of the Indian team before the World Cup. I still remember that when I was a kid, I used to follow cricket and World Cup Cricket like a manic. I was in school at the time of 1996 World Cup and Times of India had given a 40 pages booklet on World Cup Cricket. I used to note down all the scores and winners of each matches in the book. Those were the days sans Internet! I still treasure that booklet with all the scores written in my schoolboyish handwriting. But now due to some reason, over the period of years I have lost the cricket fever that I had once upon a time for cricket and Indian team. But, this year I am backing Aussies again for a win!

Check out this Aerosmith is gonna perform here in Bombay on 2nd June’07. Its gonna be just awesome. Aerosmith is a prominent American rock band, regarded by some as “America’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band.” All I need is just some more reason to headbang! Looking forward for Aerosmith’s gig in Bombay.

Am a proud owner of Aerosmith’s discography. My favorite songs are: Janie’s Got a Gun, What it takes, Amazing, Crazy, Livin on the Edge, Pink, Angel, Dude looks like a lady, Sweet Emotion, Last Child, of course I don’t wanna miss a thing.

The movie is based on the true story of Christopher Gardner, a family man struggling to make ends meet along with is 5 year old toddler and his struggle to break into the stock brokerage business as an intern, despite a rocky financial situation. The movie is really inspiring and it is funny at times. Christopher Gardner is played by Will Smith and his son by Jaden Smith who is also his son in real life. The unusual spelling of the film’s title comes from a sign Gardner saw when he was homeless. In the film, “happyness” is misspelled on the daycare facility where Gardner’s son attends. The two discuss the misspelling and thus the name is purposely misspelled in the title of the movie and the book by the same name written by Mr. Gardner himself.

Gardner actually makes a cameo appearance in the film. In the last scene he walks past Will and Jaden. Gardner and Will acknowledge each other; Will then looks back at Gardner walking away as his son proceeds to tell him knock knock jokes. Go, watch the movie…

iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business is an unauthorized biography by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon about the return of Steve Jobs to Apple Computer in 1996.

There is only one icon, only one legend, only one GOD of all things and he is Steve Jobs. This dude in his lifetime ( which is not over yet! You never know what’s next up his sleeve ) has changed the face in fact single handedly revolutionized 3 major industries. First with Apple Computers, then the Animation with Pixar animation studio and now the music industry with iTunes and to some extent iPod. This book tells us how unpredictable he is, how smart and charismatic leader he is now who once upon a time was a hippie and had come to India in his early 20s in search of Nirvana and stayed at ISKCON temple in Bombay because of free food!

This talks about how Apple started our from his garage, moved to Cupertino. How Jobs was chucked out of Apple by the very guys whom he had chosen to run Apple. How he started his next venture NeXT while he was away from Apple and how Pixar came into being. It was good that George Lucas divorced his wife Marcia Griffin! (Otherwise Pixar might not have been what it is now. Wanna know the connection? Read the book.)

Steve was given up for adoption soon after he came to his world and was brought up by the Jobs. A must read for everyone who knows who he is and for everyone else who doesn’t know what he is made up of. Some interesting quotes of this book:

Steve Jobs “When I was 23, I had a net worth of a million dollars. At 24, it was over ten million dollars. At 25, it was over a hundred million.“

Xerox venture capitalist Stevan Brinbaum said, ” Normally, a company provides us with a five-year plan as a part of investment process. The good companies accomplish the five-year plan in seven years. In the case of Apple, they had more than accomplished the eighteen months!” The Xerox investment of $1 million brought a return of “over 30 million”, Brinbaum said. To this day, he’s still impressed how two very young men without college degrees, money or experience” went on to build a Fortune 500 company in less than 5 years.

Steve Jobs to John Sculley “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want to change the world?“

As per the guys who worked with Steve in Apple, they didn’t want to be called in front of Steve to do a product presentation because he might decide to lop off the product and the employee with it. They didn’t want to encounter him in a hallway because he might not like an answer one gave and would say something so demeaning that it could undermine one’s confidence for weeks. And they didn’t want to get trapped on an elevator with him because by the time the doors opened, one might not have a job! Some Apple-ites took to walking the stairs to avoid the possibility of an elevator encounter.

Steve Jobs “Pixar is the most technically advanced creative company; Apple is the most creatively advanced technical company.” Think over it, this sentence means a lot!

WikiQuotes on Steve Jobs
Do check out the movie Pirates of the Silicon Valley which is based on how the computer industry was born. Really good movie and do I need to tell ya where to get it from ?

One more thing …. ( If you know what it means )

One really really cool site on all about Steve Jobs