Ganesh Swami

I remember how expensive flat screen televisions were a couple of years back. These days it’s hard to find a CRT if you want to buy one.

(via digitimes)

I’m having a lot of fun with a Web2.0 startup that was just launched: Geni. From the about page,

Geni lets you create a family tree through our fun simple interface. When you add a relative’s email address, he or she will be invited to join your tree. That relative can then add other relatives, and so on. Your tree will continue to grow as relatives invite other relatives.

In about ten minutes, I was able to add thirty of my immediate family. As I get further and further from my immediate family, I couldn’t recall details off the top of my head. I have family with whom I’ve talked and chatted over IM, but never seen in person.

Some observations:

• It doesn’t seem to be able to keep track of last names as I add nodes. This shouldn’t be a very hard feature to implement.
• My family tree isn’t actually a tree, it’s a graph (in the mathematical sense.) It happens when you have nine kids with about thirty years between the first and last child.
• I don’t have a last name in the traditional sense. My last name is my dad’s first name and so on. Though that stops pretty soon up the hierarchy.
• I have just one word in my first name. My brother has two words in his name, but the second word isn’t his middle name.
• One fine ancestor of mine decided to stop using his family name, because it was uncool to do so back in the day. As a result of that I don’t have one too.

It should be interesting to look at my tree in a few years from now. I’ve heard that I have a lot of relatives in North America – let’s see if I can track them down. Maybe there’s a few in Vancouver!

I’m pretty exhausted from being up for almost 22 hours yesterday. Six of those were spent writing everything I had learnt in the last four months. They’re called exams.

A major chunk of the financial accounting exam was on justifying certain business decisions, or making suggestions to the CEO as his financial advisor. One of those questions I found really interesting:

You are the CEO of a mid-sized company. It’s typical to tie senior manager’s compensation with the performance of their respective divisions. Would you base the compensation based on the cash flow from operations, or on the net income? Give the pros and cons of each method.