I've been struggling with my templates for a while now, blogged about it here and here ... and posted all my problems at the Radio Userland discussion board.  Was a bit embarrassed by this exchange at Seblogging .... where Sebastian Fiedler in an exchange with Tom Hoffman (in a different context really) wrote :

"Tom,

Unfortunately, Microsoft starting to impose their "features" and "standards" via Windows is a very likely scenario, isn't it? and if this happens there is not much we could do against it, could we? Just today I wanted to "blog" a post from Dina Mehta's Weblog and was literally blown away by the most ugly html code I have ever seen for a single blog post. All hard coded formatting crap, etc. I am pretty sure Dina is writing her stuff in one of the wonderful Microsoft packages before she posts it on her Weblog... do you know what I mean?

Sebastian "

But I think i'm finally getting there !  Just waiting for the result of this upstream.

Many people have volunteered to help, having read some of my rants .... Terry, who has not only pointed out errors in my templates but has painstakingly re-written them for me and sent me useful pointers on RSS feeds and html editing  ... Lilia, who shared relevant parts of her templates for me to hack, and some tips for easy editing ... Sameer, who is not a Radio user, yet pointed out errors and ways i could correct them ... Stuart who helped me write my original templates that i screwed up so bad subsequently !  And Lawrence Lee, and Mark Paschal, and Jim McGee who've also been helping thru the Radio discussion board.

Whats amazing is i've never even met any of these wonderful persons - Terry's in Atlanta, Stuart's in San Francisco, Lilia's in the Netherlands and Sameer in Mumbai - i've only had some interesting exchanges with them online ... and they are friends today .... thanks to networks like Ryze and tools like blogging. 

More power to meaningful conversations and exchanges, and the ease with which these are facilitated by social software.

11:36:42 PM    comment []  trackback []

I enjoyed reading this rant ... thanks Sameer ..... Anil Dash too has much to say in his comments ...

"Yeah, those fucking savages don't understand that civilized countries have four times that many deaths attributable to handguns, for no fucking reason at all. Way to call 'em like you see 'em, elpapacito!"

and

"More to the point, Indians were able to get their independence from the British without using muskets. In fact, without using violence as part of their strategy at all. Seems a damn site more civilized than the American method."

If this is what people in 'civilized' societies are spewing ... what hope do we have ?

Good to know that Elpapacito ... sorry, i prefer 'elpapaidioto' .... is seeing some civilised Indian teeth bared, for a change !

India as a punching bag. 
Bashing India and its culture or the lack thereof seems to be a popular sport all around the world these days. In just the last couple of days, two incidents have incited some irrelevant and arbitrary people to hurl some vitriol India's way.

First it was the "heroic act" by 21 year old Nisha Sharma, of reporting her husband-to-be to the police and getting him arrested on their wedding day for demanding dowry and mistreating her father. Quite a courageous act!! There was a mention of this news on Metafilter on May 15 2003 and a few comments appeared on that. That should've been the end of the issue.

But no!! just the next day (May 16 2003) the same news (although from a different source) was posted on Metafilter by a MeFi user named elpapacito.

First point about this post by elpapacito was that he, quite idiotically, had made a double post since this story had already been posted on Metafilter. But that was the least of his brainless acts!!

I quote from the post made by elpapacito...

Not surprisingly she is a "software engineer" student probably a programmer with some clue. Groom goes to jail. On a tangent, your job position is currently being outsourced to this "civilized" country with only 7000 dowry deaths in 2001.

I think that unless we all use the very same function to evaluate what is more or less civilized, we'll never be able to quantize a "civilization" level and express it with numbers, so making a comparison apples-2-apples possible.
...
And given that death, I believe, it's one of the fundamental , constact factors that excludes absolutely nobody anywhere in the world and that nobody (unless strongly emotionally disturbed) welcomes, we could try to evaluate the "civilization" level of different groups of people by how violence leading to death is tolerated or (sometimes) accepted in their social group.
I think that any group of people that has some rule (written or not written) that allows violence toward some other human being as socially tolerable/acceptable can't be really considered "civilized".

* In 1999, there were 28,874 gun-related deaths in the United States - over 80 deaths every day. (Source: Hoyert DL, Arias E, Smith BL, Murphy SL, Kochanek, KD. Deaths: Final Data for 1999. National Vital Statistics Reports. 2001;49 (8).)

* In 1999, 58% of all gun deaths were suicides, and 38% were homicides.(SOURCE: Hoyert DL, Arias E, Smith BL, Murphy SL, Kochanek, KD. Deaths: Final Data for 1999. National Vital Statistics Reports. 2001;49 (8).) Do you realize what that means??... It means in 1999, there were almost 11,000 fatalities due to gun abuse, in USA!!

* In 2000, 75,685 people (27/100,000) suffered non-fatal firearm gunshot injuries. (SOURCE: Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Reports for the United States: Crime in the United States 2000: Uniform Crime Reports. Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Justice; 2001.)

* USA tops the list of nations with the highest gun deaths in a year. It boasts of a rate of 4.08 gun deaths per 100,000 population. Canada comes in next... with the figure of 0.54 per 100,000. (SOURCE: Data collected by Philip Alpers, Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and HELP Network)

Above data taken from Gun Control Network

Violence against women is one of the most pervasive, yet hidden of human rights abuses. It is rooted in a global culture of discrimination which denies women their fundamental rights. No political or economic system or culture is exempt when it comes to allowing and justifying violence against women - in USA a woman is raped every six minutes, in Russia about 14,000 women are estimated to be killed in domestic violence annually. This year, more than 15,000 women will be sold into sexual slavery in China.

According to the Uniform Crime Report of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 30% of women killed in the United States die at the hands of a husband or boyfriend.

The FBI reports that between 1976 and 1996, domestic violence claimed the lives of more than four women each day (SOURCE: Lawrence A. Greenfeld et al. (1998). Violence by Intimates: Analysis of Data on Crimes by Current or Former Spouses, Boyfriends, and Girlfriends. Bureau of Justice Statistics Factbook. Washington DC: U.S. Department of Justice. NCJ #167237. Available from National Criminal Justice Reference Service.)

11:11:32 PM    comment []  trackback []