National Geographic's Air Crash Investigation is an extremely interesting programme to watch, mainly because of the drama they introduce in narrating air disasters and the cinematic recreation of the last moments of a crash. Of course, the crashes where nobody gets killed are more fascinating than those crashes that involve fatalities. Air France Flight 358 was one of those miraculous escapes where everybody on board survived.

Flying seems a pretty dangerous business until you realize how many thousands of flights take off and land every hour of the day without incident in all parts of the world. Puts things into perspective. My advice: Never watch one of these programmes if you're a regular air-traveller.

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I'm geting increasingly annoyed with internet fads and memes (how I hate that word!). I'm even more annoyed with the excessive importance people attach to SEO. My policy has always been: take care of the content and SEO takes care of itself. Popularity (or notoriety) doesn't really have any attraction for me and I prefer to remain an obscure nonentity online.

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I briefly touched on the subject of blogs fading away in this post. Now I'm seriously considering removing some of the dead blogs from my link list. By dead, I mean blogs which haven't been updated in over two months. This doesn't include those who who are in touch with me by e-mail or those who comment on my blog on a fairly regular basis.

My reasoning is that if somebody hasn't updated in more than a couple of months they're either too busy in life to bother about a blog or have just abandoned it for other interests. In either case, they probably don't care whether I continue linking or not. Of course, if some of these blogs do get updated later, I will restore the link. It takes just around half a minute to write a post which says "I'm back."

On a slightly different note, if you have a blog and want a link exchange with Hari's Corner, do comment on this post.

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Following on a similar thread there are two kinds of people: those who respond to e-mails and those who do not. An amazing number of people do not seem to understand the etiquette of responding to (non-spam) e-mails. Their mail-boxes are probably like black holes: mails go in never to see the light of day. Why on earth do such people continue having an e-mail ID I will never know. Even Richard Stallman responded personally to a message that I'd sent him some time back and my brother had got a doubt in C++ clarified from none other than Bjarne Stroustrup himself. They probably get hundreds of legitimate e-mails a day and still find the time to answer.

Is it too much to let the sender know that the mail has been read? Something as simple as an acknowledgement (not an automated response) is much better than no response at all. How on earth will the sender ever know whether the message has been read or not otherwise?

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The server on which this blog is hosted has been experiencing some wierd issues of late. Drew, who kindly provided this hosting space, has been looking into the problem and suspects that it might be a hardware issue. So if you have trouble reaching this site, LiteraryForums.org and harishankar.org at some point then you know what might be the issue. So far I've only noticed the site go down once.

I really appreciate Drew's timely updates. Not many professional hosting services seem to have the basic courtesy of informing their paying customers of server downtimes.