Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

News

Liverpool in blue and to be sponsored by AIG

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STOP PRESS!

Liverpool Football Club has just announced that, as from the next match against Fulham, the Liverpool players will wear blue outfits (as too many people mistook them with players from a somewhat less successful club operating in the same country) and will be proudly sponsored by American International Group, Inc. (AIG)

Steven Gerrard, the captain, says: “I am delighted. Blue is easier to wash. And AIG is easier to spell.”

Ideas to make Mauritius better one month later

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Since creating Ideas to make Mauritius better one month ago, 43 different people have submitted 145 ideas and cast 1,570 votes which is great.

For example, here are a few ideas which have proved to be very popular:

  • All young people must be taught about the economy, how to spend wisely and why it is important to save money (yes, everyone gets old after some time…) This might be done at secondary level for that matter.
  • Mauritius Telecom should offer powerful hosting facilities (e.g. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) for free. If this is done, a lot of Mauritians will choose to host their websites locally hence decreasing international traffic. Everyone benefits.
  • People should stop thinking in terms of communities, casts and their “own”. We are all just Mauritians.

 

Some ideas have proved to be very controversial:

  • People ,who can afford, should be made to pay in the public health sector (Hospitals, Community and Local area health centres) so that quality of care dispensed can be improved and load on government budget decreased.
  • There are too many casinos in our towns and villages. Something must be done before people lose too much money and start doing bad things. Incidentally, casinos seem to attract prostitutes and drug dealers too…
  • Death penalty should be introduced for some extreme cases. “Extreme cases” should be decided very carefully though. Our current laws are IMHO, too kind towards rapists, molesters, murderers….

The experiment is still on. You can easily participate by visiting

https://www.noulakaz.net/ideas/

15 minutes of fame on BBC News but no joy from Last.fm (yet)

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Yesterday, I was astounded to learn that Last.fm was going to charge people €3.00 per month to listen to streaming radio except those living in the US, the UK and Germany. And I thought that was Technological Racism from Last.fm.

 

Some people argued that streaming radio is expensive and it this should be a paid service. Of course! In fact, most sane people don’t have any problems paying some money provided everyone does it. As someone said, it would have been so much better to charge everyone €1.00 instead of selecting people based on place of birth. How the PR people of Last.fm came up with such a controversial idea and thought it was a good idea defies logic.

On the Last.fm blog, I proposed the following:

If I were you, I would have introduced some kind of quota for the radio. Say a few hours per day free, the rest (if any) being paid.

This would allow people like me (who have been contributing to the Last.fm database for years now) not to feel completely abandoned. Don’t forget that last.fm is what it is because of us.

One hour ago, I starting receiving Twitter messages from friends telling me to have a look at an article on the BBC News website, Last.fm to charge for streaming, and that I would be surprised. I went there and, lo and behold, my proposition was there in the article. And as a bonus, I was presented as a blogger (blog poster?) and a Last.fm-contributing musician from Mauritius!

I’m sure Andy Warhol is smiling somewhere. I am having my 15 minutes of fame!

Will Last.fm come to its sense? I would be extatic as I love music!