November 26, 2001

Part 2 in the "sexual references in gas stations across America" series (see posting on May 28, 2000 below). The great part about it was that these gas stations were scattered all over the Des Moines area! (for those of you that live in the Bay Area, yes that really is a $1.17 for premium gas!)

November 21, 2001

Unbelievable, one of the Amway guys that I have spoken to in the past (see the September 3 rant below) actually called me up at home. Now before you say anything, yes, I realize I was asking for it when I gave him my home number (tho for the life of me I can't remember doing that). The really ridiculous thing is that he expected me to devote part of my Thanksgiving weekend speaking to him about his opportunity.

November 1, 2001

Why I hate Hotmail II: Corollary to point (1) below - the lack of a POP interface also means that you can't use any other mail service to read your Hotmail mail (of course Microsoft provides the ability to use POP to suck mail from another mail service but once the mail is at your Hotmail account, it is stuck there) I have a couple of free mail accounts (Yahoo, Go, Excite, Hotmail) and Hotmail receives far and away the most porn and get rich quick spam In this day when hard disk space is so cheap, it is really pretty sad that Hotmail still provides a paltry 2MB... especially when all the other free mail providers are giving more The interface won't let you in without javascript - this is just annoying, I should be able to disable it if I want

September 13, 2001

Why I hate Hotmail: Hotmail accounts cannot be accessed via POP3 (it's impossible to read Hotmail mail with any offline program except Outlook Express - you can't even use Outlook) If you click on an external (non-MSN) link from an email message you get a new browser that has this evil frame that says that "You are visiting a site outside of Hotmail. To return to Hotmail, close this browser window." Contrary to Microsoft's beliefs, there is a world outside of MSN There is no way to get messages to be always saved in the "sent mail" folder. You must specify this manually for each message The junk/bulk mail filter is way too sensitive Messages in the "sent mail" folder are cleared every 30 days Many well publicized security breaches and a weak privacy policy Spam from Hotmail has a different icon than regular mail (again Microsoft utilizes a feature not available to the general public for it's own benefit) Too much spam from Hotmail, when I get a letter from Yahoo, I always read it because it is invariably important. Letters from Hotmail are just more and more marketing propaganda and now go straight into the trash

September 3, 2001

Well, I was cleaning out my wallet when I came across the business card of this guy I met last week. Let me ask you, what is it about me that attracts all of these stinkin' Amway salesmen??? For some reason I have met way more than my fair share of these people in the last couple of years. [For those of you who are not familiar, Amway is a complicated pyramid scheme - do a Google search on "Amway" an you will come up with many sites that will explain it better than I can (obviously, skip the first link that comes up to the Amway site itself, you won't get any useful information there!)] Let's analyze my interactions so far... When Where Who approached me November 21, 2001 Unbelievable, the guy calls me up at home (I can't believe that I gave him my home number!) and wants to know if I'll spend part of my thanksgiving weekend meeting with him Either Raja or Rajesh below (can't remember) August 24, 2001 Palo Alto Fry's, I was looking at mice, minding my own business Raja, president of RM International Mid 2000 Sunnyvale Fry's, I was checking out the new flat panel monitors, minding my own business Rajesh, Bizonet Mid-1998, on 2-3 separate occasions Sapient's Perimeter Atlanta office, in the elevator Random dude in the elevator Early 1998 San Bruno Comp USA, I was looking for a parallel port splitter, minding my own business Jukka, JCM Enterprises Based on my experiences, there are many common traits that these people all have. You can recognize an Amway salesman if: they use phrases like: "own your own company", "part-time job", "supplement your income", "utilizing e-commerce/the internet", "internet enabled business". Now that the bubble had burst, my most recent guy steered away from internet buzzwords and used phrases like "creating business plans for enterprises" etc. These phrases are very standard and with practice you will recognize them in their various forms very quickly they are quick to hand you business cards with fictional companies [cards printed on cheap paper, the company name is the person's initials, the company URL takes you to a place similar to the links above, sports presumptuous titles they are vague when pressed for details and then try to get you to come to an informational session at a nearby hotel or someone's house they always feel it necessary to give you some contact information that is not printed on the card (usually a home/cell/pager number) they absolutely deny any affiliation with Amway or Quixtar Some of these guys are better at the spiel than others. A good Amway salesman will introduce their "opportunity" very casually into the conversation. If they are less experienced it will be clear that it is being forced into the conversation. I was alone at the time I was approached by each of my Away salesmen. For those of you that know me, what is it about me that attracts these people???

July 29, 2001

About a month back I got back from an extended driving trip on the East Coast and in the South. Here are some pics and a "brief" chronicling of my trip.

July 26, 2001

So I was having lunch today in little plaza in front of 101 California in the financial district (mmmm, Specialty's...) when I was approached by this woman from CNET who was doing interviews about people and their cell phone usage. I talked to her for a bit so keep an eye out on CNBC for me and my nerdphone. Actually, they probably won't broadcast me, I don't think I gave her what she wanted to hear (someone who was concerned about the 911 people not being to be able to automatically know my location).

July 21, 2001

From today's news - US to reject germ-warfare pact. It seems to me that dubya needs to spend less time telling the world to kiss his ass and more time coming up with an energy plan that at least tries to address the vicious cycle of fossil fuel use and global warming. On a related note, do you realize that they already have made a movie out of dubya's energy plan? It is called The Naked Gun 2½. The bad guys in the movie and dubya seem identical ideas when it comes to energy use. At least the good guys in the movie prevailed...

July 17, 2001

The thing that bothers me the most about the Chandra Levy case (aside from the fact that it is standard media carpet bombing of an issue where the big picture is lost in the day to day esotericies) is that way too much time is spent analyzing and obsessing over Gary Condit. According to the DC Police Department this case is still being considered a missing person's case. This is not a criminal investigation. It is definitively incorrect to say that there are suspects in the case and until the DC police change their status, I really wish that people would lay off the daily fine-tooth analysis every time Gary Condit farts. While it is fine (and expected) that the police will investigate all avenues in Chandra Levy's disappearance, it is clear that "all avenues" don't start and end with Gary Condit.

June 24, 2001

Having just quit my job 4 days prior, I found myself in India for a short time before the whole lot of us (Pappaji Esoofi and Mammaji Sofa and all their kids and all grand kids (minus one), 20 of us) shipped out to Bali for a week. Here we proceeded to have one of the best vacations that I have ever been on. What a way to kick off unemployment!

June 19, 2001

Yee Hawwwww!! Finally I managed to coerce a DSL provider to provide me with service and Salim's World is back! I know that life has been a meaningless waste of time without your daily dose of Salim's World but you'll be happy to know that I haven't been idle in my downtime. Many additions and improvements have been made to the site: The family tree has been updated (more pictures and more demographic info) I did another billboard run I fixed all of the photographs in the pictures section so that they are a reasonable size (not gigantic like they were before). They should download in a reasonable amount of time and not require you to scroll to see all of it A bunch of other stuff which I can't remember Enjoy!

April 1, 2001

Deep thought: SAPIENT rearranged is PANTIES. Thanks to Zain for this fascinating brain spasm...

March 24, 2001

Not that this is as cool as flying B-1 bombers, I just gave notice at my company and will be unemployed in 3 weeks! Also, I have updated the family tree (finally).

February 11, 2001

And now we once again turn our attention to people who lives are more interesting than our own... On February 9, 2001, the junior Tyabji, Abizer, has just been selected to pilot the B-1 Bomber ( info, movie (11.6MB), pictures 1, pictures 2). He will be stationed at Dyess Air Force Base, home of the 7th Bomb Wing, near Abilene, TX. He continues to live every guys' dream of driving expensive vehicles, really fast and using it to blow stuff up.

Scary facts:

• None of the pictures on this page were fabricated, they are all real... there really is a bar in San Francisco "where good friends and girls meet", there really is a store called Piggly Wiggly, the flea markets in South Carolina really feel it necessary to ban snakes and Bubba really looks like that (at least in Vegas he did).

Go sign my Guest Book or I'll send my man Bubba to your house to beat you...

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