Review 21st Century Breakdown

21^st century breakdown is a fitting sequel to American Idiot. Be it, in terms of musical ability or lyrics Greenday have outdone themselves. The album 21^st Century breakdown is organized into three acts. It falls under the Rock opera genre. All the eighteen songs revolve around two central characters, namely, Christian and Gloria.

The lyrics come out with emotions of a rebel, an angst-filled cry against being controlled by a government. It’s about being “born into a Nixon”, being “a non believer”, having a restless heart syndrome and how people were before the lobotomy. Ranging from direct accusation to subtle hints, Greenday brings out the anger and passionate rebellion in a way that reminds you of your teen days.

In terms of song quality, there are no eight minute songs and the lyrics are loud and clear. Sometimes, a little too loud but that’s excusable. Lyrics stick to the central theme and the songs are organized in an operatic fashion. The orchestration brings out the grandiose of opera in some songs while in others rock is more prominent. In all, the tunes are very catchy and you’d find yourself humming them in no time. Some chord progressions are extremely melodic. The drums could have been better. Needless to say, Greenday do their thing with the guitars.

Special mention for the album art and cover design, which is typically Greenday. Geenday have managed to strike a balance between maintaining their brand image and include some experimentation into their music. Best songs of the album would be Peacemaker, East Jesus Nowhere, Viva la Gloria, 21^st Century Breakdown and know your enemy. I find that the songs in the third act seem to bore you a bit. Overall, this is an explosive album.

Pub Culture

A woman was sexually harassed in public in a very well known pub in Chennai. She was with her husband and she was a regular at the pub. The people who harassed her were also regulars at the pub. They beat up her husband and tried to strip her off her clothes in public.

The pub now claims that security interrupted and the two groups separated amicably. The police refused to take action in the beginning because the accused had high connections. They blamed the woman and her dressing for the incident.

I don’t want to side with any of these groups, because I denounce the pub culture completely. Pub hopping in the middle of the night is a very bad idea for both men and women. I was discussing with a cousin of mine who asked me this disarming question: “How does going to a pub compromise your culture?”

Well here’s your answer: It doesn’t take moral policing by Shiv Sena to understand what happens when you toss in men and women into a dark room in the middle of the night and get them all drunk. Well? But I refuse to take the culture angle because we are the land of Kama Sutra.

The police definitely should have behaved better. Would have saved them some unwanted bad publicity and would have saved the woman more embarrassment on having to recount the incident to several people and provide details in print.

So when I denounce the pub culture, I mean it. If you’re a girl who hops regularly, then you better have your pepper spray and karate lessons ready because we can’t change who these people are. If they can survive stripping a woman in full public and the police sides with them, you make your choice. If you’re a guy who takes your wife to a pub, be sure you are man enough to protect her.

Getting that perfect Resume

Writing a resume is an immensely important. I'm listing out some of those factors that I consider while designing my resume. Mostly these are just rules, although certain considerations listed out here make for a better aesthetic appeal. Rest assured, I have failed a million times before getting my resume right. Follow these steps to ensure getting that perfect resume:

1. Contact Information

The primary purpose of your resume is to get people to notice you and give you that much-awaited call. For that purpose, your contact information should be right on top. I generally have my name and contact information at the header level. This ensures easy access to information regarding how to get in touch. One shouldn't try to get too creative with the design and obscure or hide this information. It is perhaps, the most critical part of your resume. Also please avoid writing “Resume” on top of your resume. It is utterly pointless and unprofessional.

2. Objective and Summary

Objective and summary are both meant to be short, crisp and to-the-point. It's like adding tags or labels to you. Your summary should compulsorily contain your education background and your experience. Eg: "Computer Software Fresher, Software Professional with one year experience". Your objective should be very specific, preferably, a job title where you would like to see yourself in five years. Eg: "To be a System Analyst in a Software firm".

Please avoid objectives such as "Seeking a challenging position where I can harness my skills", "climb up the corporate ladder". Not only are they clichéd, they also convey that you are clueless about where you are headed in terms of your career. If you can't find a suitable objective, it would be better if you skip this part.

3. Length

A resume gets a maximum of 5 minutes of a recruiter's time. Your resume should be very specific and direct. Your resume should be an answer to the question "Why should we select you for this job". It should contain all mandatory information such as your qualification, year of passing et al. At the same time, it should not contain irrelevant information. More in next point. An ideal resume should either be one or two pages long. That’s all.

4. Relevance

If you are applying for the job of a trainer, the part time you held at McDonald’s does not count as experience. Most people advice to have job-specific resumes. Maintain a master resume that lists out all your awards, additional qualifications and work experience. When you are applying for a specific job, list out ONLY those sections from this master resume that matter for this job. List out only relevant work experience and additional qualifications, which make you all the more suitable for the job.

5. Chronology

Dates of graduation, year of passing, the duration of your education or work in an organization should be specified clearly. Eg: Worked from 2005 – 2009 or Passed out – June 2005. Also, when you list out your work experience or educational qualification it should be in reverse-chronological order. Your latest degree should come on top. The last job you held should come on top.

6. Proof reading

The importance of Proof-reading cannot be stressed enough. Nothing can be more embarrassing than a spelling error or a grammatical error on your resume. Spell check on word processors can only detect obvious mistakes. Many of us are still not clear about the difference between “its” and “it’s”. Minute details like that can change the course of your interview. Imagine having to explain a mistake to your interviewer. Or being told that there are inconsistencies in your resume. Check, double-check and triple check every single sentence in your resume.

7. Consistency

Your resume should be consistent i.e. in terms of grammar, tense, formatting and alignment. Your resume should always be in third person. “I participated in a writing competition and won second place” is not accepted. It should rather be “Participated in Writing Competition. Secured Second place”. Also, spellings of schools, colleges and people should be the same throughout. Sometimes, silly errors such as change in font size or font-face in certain places can result in a very awkward looking resume.

Twitter is going Places

One question that has been projected at me everytime I tell someone "Twitter is going places" is how? How do they profit from it? First up, thats an excellent question. Twitter does not make much money right now. Because, they haven't figured out what they are going to do with it. But what they do have is a HUGE database of users and their 140-character updates. This information is any social marketer's dream.

Think about it. You have a 1000 updates. And 400 friends. If I can sit patiently and read through all your tweets, won't I get some sort of idea about what you like and what you dislike? If I could go through all those links you posted and pictures you uploaded, I can profile you. Not just you, I can profile your friends as well. If twitter can do this for every single user, what they have is comprehensive intelligence for targeted marketing. Content/Context based marketing. If you tweet, say,

"Just finished GTA San Andreas"

Twitter can use this information to understand that you are a computer gamer, and you like role-playing games, specifically GTA. Also they know which version you played and hence your potential interest in upcoming versions of the game. If the producers of GTA now want to do some targeted marketing via ads all they have to do is send you a direct message or an @reply on twitter. As simple as that. This is one tweet, one user, one marketer. Now magnify that into the number of twitter users multiplied by the number of updates and raise it to the power of number of potential targeted marketeers. That is the potential of Twitter.

As of now this potential remains just that. Potential. Twitter has no definite plan as to what they are going to do with all this information. They haven't figured out how they're going to generate revenue. As of now, people really admire twitter because there are no irritating ads. Take facebook or google, established giants but they generate revenue through ads. Twitter's different mainly because there are no nagging ads. There's no clutter. Once they start, there'll be some changes in people's opinion. "After Boom comes Recession".

Truth is, 60% of the people who sign up on twitter do not return. They simply sign up cuz all their friends talk about it. Cuz they say its the next big thing. Add to the mix spammers and targeted marketeers already on the prowl, the number of genuine twitter users would only be a fraction of the total.

Twitter has great potential. If they don't figure out what they are going to do, they will burst away as just another web 2.0 bubble. To my support though, twitter is still going places. Where are they headed? Only one way to find out.

9 Steps to a Consummate Twitter Experience

Here are Nine steps to the Consummate Twitter experience.

1. Bio

The first thing you need is a well thought of bio. Twitter gives you 160 characters to write about yourself. Use it well. Think of all the keywords you would use if you wanted a search engine to return your name. Use all of them. A better way is to ask someone else to write a bio and use that as a starting point. Your bio is one of the first few things people will notice. So mull over it and update your bio.

2. Desktop Client

Get yourself a nice desktop client. Tweetdeck is pretty good. There’re loads of twitter desktop applications. Search through them and find out which suits you best. I use Seesmic Desktop and would gladly recommend it.

3. Following Meaningfully

Make it a point to follow meaningfully. As in, do not follow twitter accounts of websites unless you really HAVE to. I have two twitter accounts, one personal and another one that I use to follow all the websites I want to keep track of. This way, I only follow REAL people from my personal twitter account. Also, most of the time they are people I personally know, know through friends or want to know. Twitter is a form of Social networking. There is no point following absolute strangers. The other account I use to follow famous twits like Cnn’s breaking news, Barack Obama and some of my favourite websites.

4. Following and being followed

Do not follow every tom, dick and harry. Have your own criteria and follow only those people who fall within your standards. Nine times out of ten, people you follow will follow you back. I personally make it a point to have a balanced follow-ship. But sometimes, based on the kind of topics you tweet about, certain twits follow you. For instance, I tweet about SEO and blogging. There are probably a dozen automated twitter accounts that follow me because of those keywords. All of them post links to articles on SEO and blogging. There is no need to follow such accounts.

5. Numbers aren’t everything

Ever heard of the quote “Quality is better than quantity”? That holds true on twitter too. It doesn’t matter how many people follow you, what matters is how many really care about what you tweet. It does not matter how many times you tweet in a day, what matters is how good and how original your content is.

6. What you tweet about – content is king

Tweeting is fun. You can tweet just about anything. Develop your own style. For instance, I mostly tweet about what I do during my day. Thats what most people do. But thats boring to people who don’t know you. If you want to be interesting, try tweeting jokes. Try tweeting lyrics of your favourite songs. I generally tweet which song I’m currently listening to. Just develop your own unique style. There may be a million twits out there. Try tweeting differently; something that will make you stand out in such a huge crowd.

7. Etiquette

Follow general rules. Be polite to people. Reply to every @reply you receive. Respond to direct messages. There are some things you can tweet publicly. There are other things that would seem more appropriate. Ensure you maintain your etiquette. Decide on your language. If you are the professional who wants to drive traffic to your blog or website, its better you be formal and do not swear. So decide on what kind of image you want to project and use an appropriate language.

8. Conversations

Conversations on twitter are fun. Try to strike a conversation. That means, if you find something interesting on your timeline, reply to it. People return the favour. And don’t stop with one or two replies, try to keep it running. People notice such conversations. Sometimes people join in. Sometimes you can invite them to join in on your conversation. It’s fun and it’s definitely better than simply tweeting all day all alone.

9. Retweeting and Posting links

Again set yourself standards. I retweet jokes. Sometimes I retweet links. I always test the link, see where it goes, read it and if i find it interesting, only then do I retweet it. Sometimes I retweet, if I know the person posting it is credible. With the advent of these bit.ly and URL shortners, you never know where a URL is going to land you. A broken link or an irrelevant link compromises YOUR image. So ensure that you only retweet and remember what you retweet is for a more general audience. Post links to interesting articles. Show off to the world the kind of stuff you read. If people come up with related articles, they’ll probably tweet it for you. Again this is an excellent way to show your standards.

7 Reasons Why News Channels Are No Good

1. Content

If Content is King, then 24 hour news channels are dabbling in anarchy. Apart from the daily digest of all over the world/nation news, 24 hour news channels have very little content to offer. They air re-runs of the same news stories with nothing more than trivial updates throughout the day. They have lifestyle shows to cover up for the slack period. In order to get more TRPs the focus nowadays is more on Bollywood gossip and cricket news. They sell news. They market news. They give you what you want to see. But isn't that tangential to their purpose of existance?

2. Sting Operations

Sting operations have become a big marketing tool. If you watch any sting operation, you can understand that this is nothing but a publicity stunt. More than the news you hear "Our channel has brought you exclusive footage", "a sting operation carried out by our channel" and all that. What's the purpose? If the news channles are present only to REPORT, then why a sting operation? If they take themselves so seriously and want to expose the lawlessness in this world, what next? Just expose and let the people ACT?

3.Breaking News

Breaking news has become as cliched as the word "SALE". This term has become so hackneyed and lost its intensity thanks to over usage. There's somehting BREAKING or earth shattering every ten minutes. Some channels are gracious enough to call it FLASH news. Again, these are just overused words. When Britney Spears walks into a public toilet without slippers thats breaking news. When Rakhi Sawant hosting a show thats flash news. Breaking news is just news.

4. Follow up

There's every possibility that a news item that featured on the breaking-news section today might not make the news tomorrow. They move on to other interesting events, as these uninteresting, un-TRP-gathering, breaking-news items fade into the background. Some fade gradually others vanish instantly. Following up is not on their agenda. As far as they are concerned, they need to give you interesting stories everyday. Yesterday's news is boring. Not fresh. Not hot news. And if they don't provide you with that dash of freshness everyday, they lose their viewership. Compromise on integrity. After all, it is business.

5. Advertisements

Everything I've said so far cannot be applied to all the channels. Ads, however, are the bane of ALL 24 hour news channels. I have no problem with commercial breaks. They provide the viewers with much a needed break. What's irritating is when you have ads on the tickers. Its mixed with other news items. Sometimes its actually confusing if its an ad or a news item. Yes they can get ridiculous. "Stock quotes brought to you by" and then there's a brand logo shining, animated, grabbing your attention away from what you really want to see.

6. Bias

News channels are not unbiased. Their ownership is no secret and if you dig deep enough, you'll understand the political links these channels have. Who owns it, who runs it, who supports which ideology and how they will never go against their kin. Their choice of sting operations, the subtle and intelligent phrasing, the diplomacy with which they accuse people. Its all one big farce. Regional news channels are nothing more than political propoganda channels. Some are subtle. But then again no one can take on big shots even if they knew what was going on.

7. Talk shows

They rope in experts from the field. They bring in opposing mindsets onto an arena and watch them play with words. They get frank and open. There's a war of words. They fight. They talk. They get dirty. But whats the point of all this talk. There's a lot of talk and no action. Again I don't say these news channels have to get their hands dirty and clean up the nation. But if all you're going to do is talk, then why claim otherwise.

Contact Me

=====================================

R.Vinay | +91 - 91766 77364
Blogger | Content Developer | Programmer

Contact Me

=====================================

About Me

Hi! rvinay88 completely profiled:

I am a Computer Science Engineer. I enjoy programming. Every problem is a puzzle that I enjoy solving. I like to learn. I'm alwaysintrigued by newer things. I am on my way to be a Software profesaional. I enjoy blogging. Am passionate about blogging more than I am about writing. Hope that makes sense. I freelance as a content writer. I'm well versed with SEO and keyword rich writing. I enjoy the DESIGN aspect of websites. Love deciding on color combinations, alignment deciding on fonts and the like.

I love reading. My favorite Books are Tell No one - Harlan Coben, Hannibal - Thomas Harris, Master of the Game - Sidney Sheldon. I also admire Dan Brown, Johnathan Kellerman, John Grisham, Jeffrey Deaver.

I love my Music. Metallica, Iron Maiden, Nirvana, Audioslave, Greenday. Basically form of metal and rock. Preferably Heavy Metal, Grunge Rock and Hard Rock. My favorite Songs are Fade to black, Man who sold the world, Doesn't remind me, Dance of death.

I watch movies. Shawshank Redemption, Fight club, Face off, The Rock are my all time favorites. I like watching tv shows. I'm done with Friends, Scrubs, Prison break and Arrested Development. Watching Lost now.

I am a computer gamer. Call of duty and Sands of time are my current favorites. I enjoyed playing the two thrones, age of empires and I dislike quake and counter strike cuz they are HIGHLY competetive. Going to play rise of nations now. :D Enjoy my gaming.

The Unforgettable Day

This is my first shot at a guest post on a friend's blog . I should thank Vinay for asking me , No one other than my first girlfriend , current girlfriend and permanent wife have shown so much trust in my till now .I guess that makes him pretty close to me from now on . Now coming to the point , his blog has good content and I should not screw it up . So here goes my guest post . If it is good it is all Vinay and if it bad , it is all me !

This is about an unforgettable day in my life . It was a thursday , I woke up late , was up at office the previous night .There was no one at home , The house was silent . The power was out , which is pretty usual in Bangalore for most of the days . Before going to sleep I had seen "Evil Dead' very late at night. The day was particularly dark and clouded . There was an eerie calm in the air .There was a very pungent odour around the place . Suddenly there was a shrill whistling sound . All my nerves tightened up . All my hair was standing vertically , my mouth went dry . My eyes were loosing focus . Then there was a HUGE thud heard at the backside of the house . Then a banging sound followed by that whistle again . Now my mind was playing games with me , what was it ? or rather who was it ? I picked up my mobile and tried to call my wife , at the other end , I heard the same whistling sound !!

Now I was at my wit's end , I tried calling my best friend's mobile , the line was busy . I retried after a few minutes and was greeted by the same eerie whistle ! Now my head was spinning like mad , the images from the horror film started rolling in front of my eyes . I was feeling my heart pumping like a huge pile driver ! Suddenly there was a sound that broke my thoughts , a series of small thuds that were getting louder , I immediately picked up the broomstick that was lying near me and stood at the door side . The noises came closer to me . Then I heard my wife shrieking loudly . It was like she was in pain ! The man inside me woke up at that instant and I decided to throw caution to the winds . I opened the door and gave out a loud cry waving out the broomstick like a mad man !!

The scene that followed was hilarious ! My wife was standing right in front of me , she had her slipper in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other . She was shocked to see me in shorts trying to hit her . After calming her down , I explained the whole thing to her . She laughed like mad and went to the back of the house , a coconut had fallen from a tree to a drum that was below it . Then I asked her about the whistle , well, there was a boy next door playing the latest Himmesh hit , that was the whistle , or rather Himmesbhai . And both my wife and my friend had it as a Hello Tune !!

Even now when I think of that day , I laugh for atleast half a day . But then there is no way I will ever forget that day for the rest of my life !!

V.Shakthidharan 

------------------------------------------

Blog    : http://shakthidharan.net

Twitter : http://twitter.com/sakthidharan 

Help    : http://shakthidharan.biz

Digsby  : shakthidharan

Gtalk   : v.shakthi 

AIM     : shakthi@shakthidharan.net

 -------------------------------------------