Nisadas

Right above that Nalaka wheel alignment/tyre merchants joint in Colombo 02 is another branch of the famous Food Waves restaurant. This one’s called “Thiru Kumaran’s Food Waves” and it’s a vegetarian restaurant that serves South Indian food. Good food for good prices – enough reason to like it.

The reason that I wanted to blog about it was to put up their phone number on the net. After searching online in vain for the number (don’t get me started on how fun it was trying to find it on the SLT online directory), I ended up going there to place my order, which was thankfully ready in ten minutes. Of course, my order wasn’t a full meal, so that shouldn’t be a benchmark – take away should ideally still be called in advance.

The lunch buffet is priced at Rs. 130/- and is supposed to be good, although I don’t know this from experience. I can recommend the Naan, Paneer Butter Masala, Malaysian Kottu and Chilli Parota (my favourite). Very nice.

Recently, six of us dropped in for dinner, had the main dishes that I just noted plus soup (one portion is generally enough for two people), some starters and dessert, all for around Rs. 500/- per head. I’m not too familiar with the restaurants in Colombo, but I think that’s pretty good value for money.

Their flyer reads that they’re open 365 days of the year, 11:00am to 10:30pm. Lunch available from 10:30am and Dinner from 4:00pm.

The Address:

Thiru Kumaran’s Food Waves

55, Hyde Park Corner, Colombo 02.

Tel: 471 8709 / 471 9522

So recently I get a photograph in my mail of President Barack Obama checking out a young lady’s behind. While I’d normally shrug this off as instinct getting the better of the man, a friend also sends me the link where the situation behind it all is cleared through a youtube video, which proves Sarkozy to be a true frenchman.

Okay, so it’s old news but you can check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbifTbJtgJA.

Seeing world leaders’ little indiscretions caught on tape for the world to see reminded me of a good friend of mine doing a (impromptu and with only a little egging on by the compere) funky dance right out of an American Pie kinda movie on stage at an Interact function many years ago. No cameras (in phones or otherwise) to record this strange occurence or the shocked fascination of the crowd; just human memory in all its fallibility to carry those images for posterity, to be brought up at get-togethers and laughed about.

Nowadays, you can bet that any incident of that nature will be recorded and found on a social network. With any luck, the poor soul will end up tagged and watched by millions of people who never knew he existed until they saw the video.

This simply means that today, we need to be far more careful about what we say and do; especially the moments of spontaneous craziness (see the part about the Star Wars Kid in the article at Scientific American on social networks and privacy).

This point was driven home extra hard when I took part in a training recently. When the guy doing the training pointed out that my Outlook calendar was easily visible to my superiors at office – something that I understood was possible, but something that I never really thought about. I got a little bothered about this and asked him “Where’s the privacy in that?”

The response was simple – “What privacy? Your system adminstrators have full access to the information on your computer – you just need to make sure that you don’t do anything unnecessary with it.”

And then it struck me – all those personal details on Facebook? All those emails in my “personal” mailboxes hosted by big “free email” companies? Just how private are those emails? Or my events in Google Calendar?

The main argument presented in this case is that “Good people have nothing to hide”. But what if I’m just a private person? Okay, not so private that I blog under my real name, but private in the sense that I like having control of how much information about myself is revealed?

There are so many facebook photos that get saved on to folders and forwarded via email that you might wonder if being in touch is worth the price. It just means that you have to be careful about what the world sees. What used to be the private pain of celebrities the world over has now become a far more common problem. Sure, you can try and sue the moron from the photo studio who decided to share all those interesting photos of your girlfriends off your digital camera with his friends, but how do you intend on proving it?

It seems that privacy as we used to know it died quite sometime ago, around the same time that it became possible to fish out old “personal” emails and forward them to people who weren’t in the loop. All that can be done now is to watch your step – and hope that if anything about you is on the net, you know about it.

Not so long ago I wrote about the scam involving the use of the AirTel name and the promise of an iPhone to harvest email addresses. It seems that any new entrant to the Sri Lankan market can be almost guaranteed that its name will be used for a scam.

Just consider what I found in my inbox today:

If this is indeed the genuine article, whoever is behind it at AirAsia should be given a good dressing down for shoddy publicity tactics. I harbour serious doubts that this can be anywhere close to legitimate.

Why?

• The fact that there are no contact details apart from a gmail address and the AirAsia website.
• The bad spelling – e. g. “SriLankan’s” (although a misplaced apostrophe is quite common in countries where english isn’t the first language).
• The bad grammar
• The use of an older background image which was used in AirAsia’s initial promotions for the low cost fares to Australia.
• The sneaky use of the “Sale” tags on the current AirAsia promotion (the ones in red, blue, green and yellow hanging off the top) renamed “Free”.
• And finally, the use of the term “their” when referring to the company – doesn’t sound legit at all

If I were working at AirAsia I’d try to find out who’s behind all this – although I don’t know whether harvesting email addresses is an issue addressed by the laws of our lovely isle.

Alternatively, anyone who just watches and waits for the spam ads to turn up in their mailbox would know exactly who is behind this.

So in conclusion, if you happen to have gotten this email – please do the world  a favour; delete the message and break the chain!

UPDATE: It seems that Amitha Amarasinghe also came across this recently. Of course, he managed to get through to Air Asia and confirm that it’s a scam. Well done Amitha!