Enlightened ... There are no special effects.

I have been waiting at La Guardia for the same amount of time, it took my travel from Detroit to La Guardia. I approached the ground transportation help desk to see if I have any options if the shuttle I booked doesn't show up. The previous day, it took me a few hours to research on the transportation options from New York La Guardia Airport to Raritan in New Jersey. I won't have much time as the flight's scheduled arrival is at 8:15 AM and I am supposed to meet my business contact by 10 AM. I have less than two hours to cover some 65 miles that includes New York traffic. Considering how bad a driver I am and my difficulty in switching near vision to far vision to keep track of maps and road signs, I chose to take a taxi or a shuttle. I searched for limo services, taxi rates etc and finally booked a shuttle. I wouldn't say my decision to go with that shuttle service can be backed up by good research, but at some point I just booked it without delaying further....

Compared what Microsoft offered through www.bhashaindia.com, Google's transliteration application much better. Considering the IME runs on the client, it could have been a lot better in detecting Tamil (though the IME is available for many Indic languages, Tamil happens to be a bit difficult one). For example, to get ன, you have to type the letter n followed by _ (underscore) within a second or so. With a small rule set and /or a dictionary, it could have detected the letter based on the context as Google does. Google does even better. To differentiate between kuril and nedil, most IME expected the users to use upper case. It has been a fair expectation. But it is also the users' common practice to begin a sentence in English with upper case. On transliteration, this caused a needless error and correction. With Google, typing 'Oru' or 'oru' results in a transliteration to 'ஒரு', which is a common word. Google also shows a context menu with oth...

I haven't been associated with any association for most part of my life. I had no option but to take active role in the association of the residents of my building. Reasons: I was the first one to move in and so had more contexts and an office 5 minutes away from home. So, I became an obvious choice to be one of the office bearers. The association is more of an administrative one to handle receipts from residents and payments to service providers like water supply, security etc., It is no more than a clerical job for the office bearers. Most importantly, the association would never involve in activities like petition to various government bodies or demonstrations or some such things associations are usually known for. I stayed away from any other associations as I do not believe in collective bargaining. We have so many caste based associations; religion based ones, political party affiliations and social networks to choose from. My strong opinion about such groups...