Some topics that I need to investigate

1. How is the money revolved in advertising market? Where does it start from? Who starts the money flow? How does the money flow from there? Who is the next in line? How much does it cost to create an advertisement? How is the cost recovered? How much revenue does an ad generally generate? Do people really take care of all these things when they advertise? Who endorses crappy ads that I see on TV? There are wonderful ads on TV and few of them are really really crappy. How much do each of these cost? What makes an advertisement effective? I read some article which talks about how to place the people face and their eyes direction to make them effective. I wonder how many of the ad makes really take such things into consideration.
2. I have similar questions in other areas too. How does money flow in agriculture? How does it flow in clothing industry? Movie industry? Music? Arts? travel?
   
3. If for whatever reason, economy goes into complete recession, which of the above industries get affected the most? What would people give up first? travel? music? movie? what?
4. Why does economy go into recession?
5. How does a village prosper into a city? What are the required infrastructure, steps that someone (may be govt) has to take to ensure that progress?
   
6. If nature takes care of selection of which species to prevail and which to perish, why should man interfere with that process and try to preserve?
   
7. Similarly, as the nature is, so is I believe the mass psychology. If everyone is embracing western culture, why do people make so much effort to preserve eastern culture to the extent that they impose? If eastern culture is better than western culture, should it take care of itself? Dont mistake me, I like eastern culture with a tinge of western culture.
   
8. What makes two totally strangers to come in touch with each other and spend the rest of life with each other? I dont think any other species has this kind of bonding. May be lions and tigers have this. But dont the males fight to get a female for mating? And after mating season they go on their own paths?

Any help in the above points, please leave a comment. I would like to make this more like a discussion section. Who knows with all the comments left on this blog, we can make it into a book. That beckons another question, whats the money flow in writing books? and what makes people write books, apart from money?

My dream girl!

This is my sound dream girl sketching.

Windows Vista sucks!

I have no other way of putting it. I strongly believe Windows Vista sucks. I am currently spending more time upgrading it from what I got it packaged than actually using it. The screen goes blank for God knows why. It uses most of Light box effects. And for any small thing it asks user to decide what to do. I am not against it. But the way it interrupts user in most idiotic and irritating way. Just blanks the screen and one pop up pops up and gives couple of options. There is nothing you can do when that happens. Once I was on a call on Skype and this dumb Vista prompts me for a restart of course using a pop up.I hated it.
At one time I was using Mozilla firefox. For no particular reason I can no longer chose File, Edit, View or any other button. It will not stop. It keys changing from File, Edit and all other buttons rapidly. I tried typing youtube.com. Guess how it came up on the address bar? It came out as moc.ebutouy what crap?
I would think that any business if it rolls out any new version of its products it would be better than what exists already. Not the case with Microsoft. I guess that's why they keep rolling these updates everyday almost.
You should see how much time it talas for Vista to show the control panel. It is easier and faster to search web using google than to search your small hard disk. Coming to speak of hard disk, almost 40% of my 80 GB hard disk is occupied by vista. The market is moving towards reducing the weight, the power etc from what it is now. If thins oft is aware of it, shouldn't it be working towards reducing the footprint of Vista?
Do any of you guys use Vista? If so, do let me know of your experiences.

My first blog with my Tablet Pc!

Hurray!After a long wait I got my Tablet PC. In fact it's been 4 weeks since I've been waiting for this. I should say it is definitely worth the wait. Yes! I bought a Lenovo x61 Tablet PC! It took a while to decide which are to go for. There were couple of considerations while doing the research. They are:

1. It should hence good reviews.
2. It should be pretty light so that I can hold it and not hurt my hands. I already have tendonitis. I don't want to worsen it.
   
3. It should have in-built broadband connectivity possible. with this I can take discount offered by my company.
4. And of course, the price.

With these in mind I started my research. Where does one look for what they want? "Google." So, I googled for reviews on Tablet PCs. And that's how I ended up with Tablet PC reviews.com.
after going through the reviews it seemed like there are bunch of options : HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, Fujitsu etc. I really liked Fujitsu but had to chuck it away since it neither had broadband connectivity nor is cheap. It is around $2700 But it some one can offer it, I guess that would be awesome.
I had to turn away from Toshiba even though it was good in price since it didn't have mobile broadband connectivity.I house to mention that Toshiba's site is well designed and their marketing videos are awesome. You can see them here
So it came down to HP and Lenovo.It turns out that both HP and lenovo have very similar things to offer Though HP was giving more hand drive. And Lenovo was giving better processor speed. I traded processor speed for hand drivenAlso Since their price is almost sameand the fact that I was getting Some discount from Employee purchase plan of IBM through trend of mine I had to go with Lenovo.
So here I am enjoying the beauty of tablet PC writing with my pen again and it is automatically getting converted to text. Awesome.
Somethings that I don't like about tablet PCs is that I didn't find any one of them having in built Cd-rom drive.
For someone waiting to buy a Tablet PC, do also consider buying a pen mouse or tablet mouse a Bamboo from WAcom I It would be around $200 and would hook up to USB. Any windows XP should be able to recognize handwriting, I guess. This way you can have the fun of having PC but still in cheap. You might am worry I didn't do that. wen it's been almost 3 yrs and I haven't availed of the discount on computer that my company gives.
Happy handwriting again!

Investing in Indian market from US

With Indian stock market doing so well, combined with the falling dollar value against rupee I thought it would make perfect sense in investing in Indian markets. So I ventured to find out what would be the most optimal/easiest way to do that. Here are my experiences along the way. I also gave some inputs on where to look for information on stocks, mutual funds and any other things you need. Please leave a comment if I missed something or if you need more information.
Ok! Here we go..

First thing we need is a bank to do trading. The most popular banks seem to be SBI, ICICI and HDFC. There are other banks like ABN-Amro that do provide NRI services but I couldnt get any information from their site regarding trading options.
SBI : State Bank of India.
I always liked State Bank of India for no particular reason. It could be because it is a government operated bank and I had an account in it since my undergraduate days. So I first started looking for information from SBI. Unfortunately I could not find any such information. All I could find is that you can open an account with them as NRE Rupee Account or Savings account etc. The rules for being an NRI are pretty simple. Here is what the definition is:
            "A Non Resident Indian (NRI) as per FEMA 1999 is an Indian citizen or Foreign National of Indian Origin resident outside India for purposes of employment, carrying on business or vocation in circumstances as would indicate an intention to stay outside India for an indefinite period.An individual will also be considered NRI if his stay in India is less than 182 days during the preceding financial year."
There is an SBI branch in San Diego. I thought may be I can call them up and find more information. I spoke to the representative and also the manager. The manager mentioned that I need to get an account directly with the branch in India and that these guys don't have any ties with them. ( huh? thought they are part of the same bank? ). Hence I had to call a "pass" on this bank. As expected their website is not all that great. It doesn't give much information on how we can invest in stocks or mutual funds from their bank. So I had to move on.

ICICI:
The second bank I liked is ICICI for the sole reason that is again an Indian bank. I believe ICICI n CItibank were at logger heads when I was India to gain the market. I badly wanted to take ICICI but I opted for Citibank for only two reasons. There was not ATM near my office and no ATM near my then home. So I started looking at their website, reading information but I could never find anything related to investing. They do have mutual funds which anyone can buy but the returns shown are meager. Good thing about ICICI is that they have live chat with some representative. I tried calling them and after couple of minutes (pretty fast huh?). I am not sure if there are real people on the other side or it is just a bot with a different name, but I chatted twice and both the times I got exact same answers, the same words. Either that, or they are given a set of question and answers and they just copy and paste the same. Anyway, they said due to RBI regulations they cannot let anyone NRI to do online trading. So I had to let it go and search for something else.

HDFC:
HDFC is the only bank where I could find some information about direct trading for NRIs. Apparently we need an NRE account to start off with and another thing called PIS called Portfolio Investment Scheme. Here we go, now I need to open NRE account. So I went to their website. Their website! I really think they need to redesign their website. The navigation and the coding is really bad. Anyone after a bit of research I got some forms to download, fill them and send them to their New York branch. Their forms were so damn confusing. They didnt have a help page to answer them. Anyhow I got the forms filled up (hope I filled them properly). I had to copy lot of stuff before I can send the whole application to their office. Two days after I sent the forms I get a mail from them asking me to respond to the email so that they can help me with the forms. Sweet! Cant they just put up a help page and be done with it? They can save so much of time by doing so and possibly cut down on some of the costs they incur in hiring few people.

So there you go! I am now waiting for the people to call me and let me know if my forms are correct and hoping that I would get my account opened.

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