Hide Amazon's list price to prevent impulsive shopping

Would you prefer

to this?

Note the missing list price and savings. If you want the only factor in your buying decisions to be the actual price of the item, install this stylish extension.

Edit:

Use in conjunction with an extension like Priceblink to know the true value of an item, by comparing with multiple vendors.

Authenticating people over telephone

Never seen this being done before.

I contacted a Bank of America representative over the telephone, and they needed to authenticate me before we could get down to business. I was asked my name, and was then asked to confirm a series of questions. I was not asked to state these facts myself - they stated it themselves, and asked me to confirm it.

Silly way to verify a person's identity, one would think. Anyone could pass of as me, if they had my name and my account number - and if they simply confirmed every detail that the CSR gave them. However, the CSR did make one minor mistake while stating the details - my phone number was off by one number, and I corrected them promptly. Looking back, it is quite clear that the mistake was deliberate. In this way, I did not say out any of my personal details out loud (which would have been terrible in public), and I pretty much authenticated myself by correcting one random mistake that they chose to make.

The other side

This is my first attempt at making noodles, the Indo-Chinese way. I put a bit too much of soy sauce, but otherwise, it was nice. In fact, it was good enough for Hao to prefer it over the cucumbers that he had cooked! I wasn't that great with the chopsticks though, and used them as long as the volume of noodles was large enough for me to aim at.

Finally ...

... I had someone from China mistake me for a Chinese person. This, after years of being told that I look like Chinese person while in India. Inevitable, I guess.

Cabbage and rice tastes great!

Or maybe it is the hunger speaking. I didn't have breakfast - skipped directly to lunch.

This was a day after I visited NYC. Thanks to Shrikanth, I have some photos from my university now.

Have a look. NYC photographs will follow soon.

Edit: Let's try a slideshow -

The weaker sex?

From http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2118:

... women, in general, are not willing to eat the kind of shit that men will swallow to work in this field. Now let’s talk about death marches, mandatory uncompensated overtime, the beeper on the belt, and having no life. Men accept these conditions because they’re easily hooked into a monomaniacal, warrior-ethic way of thinking in which achievement of the mission is everything. Women, not so much. Much sooner than a man would, a woman will ask: "Why, exactly, am I putting up with this?"

... if we really want to fix the problem of too few women in computing, we need to ask some much harder questions about how the field treats everyone in it.

More like the wiser one.