Thanashyam Raj

From Yahoo answers

What is the best way to stop your child becoming an athiest?
I don’t want any of my children to be punished by God.

Reply to this was:

Do not educate them, or expose them to critical thinking, logic or science. Lie to them constantly about how the world works. Feed them a steady diet of mumbo jumbo dressed up like real knowledge – the jumbo jet in the whirlwind for example – and pretend that it is deep wisdom. Make them loathe their own natural bodies and functions. Convince them they are small and weak and worthless and need redemption. Tell them everything enjoyable is grievously wrong to even think about, and that their only fun should be in grovelling to an invisible friend. Ensure that they resent anyone who is not like them in every way – skin color, nationality, political opinion but especially creed. Make such people out to be evil and vile and give them – impotent minorities all – the fictional power to somehow oppress and persecute the vast majority who do think like you. Teach them to laugh at and dismiss out of hand any faith but their own. Early – early mind you – make sure they are taught the difference between superstitious deadly error – that one raving lunatic in the desert told the truth about a vicious god who killed people, and divine eternal truth – that another raving lunatic in the desert told the truth about a vicious god who killed people. Instruct them with all severity and import to never question for themselves – to never think for themselves – to never live for themselves – but to seek answers only in one – just one – particular set of semi-literate bronze age folk tales. Above all – and this cannot be overemphasized – make sure they cannot spell, use correct grammar, or understand basic English words. That should do the trick.

Installed a custom ROM to get the ICS into my phone.

The biggest + in the experience so far is the speed. Most of the things happen in a breeze. The only place where it looks sluggish is the application switcher.

The UI looks smooth. There is a heavy inspiration of webOS. I have not actually used webOS but I’ve read, seen a lot about it. There could be some Metro UI inspiration as well. When Android (Honeycomb), webOS and Metro have threesome, this is what the users would get.

Facebook integration/sync is non-existant - There is an option - but does not work - This may be because I am using a beta version of the ROM.

The new Swype (using the beta version) is awesome. I dont think I will be able to switch to any other Keyboard layouts any time soon.

And in the widgets area, when the heck will google add a simple digital clock widget that can be resized (or has a few size options). It is painful to keep looking for the widget that suits me. How difficult will it be for google to add a no-frills attached native widget?

Overall experience rating of ICS on my Galaxy S: A++

I took some time off this yesterday. I had to go to Seagate Service center to replace a hard disk and watch a movie later in the evening.

Before going to Seagate service center(it’s actually a franchise/partner of seagate), I had to register an account in their website and quote the Customer ID. In the registration process, they gave me a Customer ID which was a gibberish alphanumeric code. They did not email me that code nor had a provision to get that id using email, in case I forgot that. It is a really bad practice and one of the worst possible decisions in the UX department. But maybe it works for them from a business angle, as this drives users away from seeking them for service, which usually for free.

A similar experience awaited me at their office as well, since I had the customer id already registered, my wait time and frustrations were a lot lesser than for others.

When I went to cinema hall after that, the place was so amazingly designed  - the designer who would be Interior designer/architect by profession - it always seems to place the user’s experience in the first place than anything else. Located in a premium place there could have thought of a zillion other options to cheaply monetize them instead of focussing on the end customer. But they took a long term view unlike others. This is not the first time I have been to that place, and I am sure everytime I go there I will still be wondering about the design.