Scrolling through the profiles (alphabetically), I stumbled upon these 3 amazing applications, all led by ladies sharing a common first name - Sapna. True to their name, their stories seem like a dream.
Meet Sapna Ganju, the art consultant, with a Gallery in Delhi. Her only indulgence and passion (which she shares with her partner) is travel on the road. Her travelogue takes us from Spiti Valley to Leh and Kinnaur, and through the highest motorable passes like kunzumla, baralacha, rohtang pass, khardungla, tanglangla, lachungla, changla,and nathula.
Meet Sapna Sharma, the Army Major with a 9+ year stint. She was the first lady officer to join the Forces from Gujarat, posted in the J&K region and lived a nomadic life for 4 years. She says she was the only lady officer to be posted in a highly militant active area. A good shooter and a golfer, adept at volley ball, basket ball, and badminton. Last, but not the least, she is a good dancer!
Meet Sapna Bhavnani, the hair stylist, preferably at her salon, Mad o Wot, on Carter Road, Bandra, Mumbai. When she is not styling hair, she writes columns, goes on road trips, listens to life stories, gets tattoos, raises goldfish, rides a pink and black motorcycle, plays Scrabble, worships Elvis, waters plants, designs pop-up books, acts, drinks no water, takes over talk shows, makes time capsules, and performs at poetry readings. Claims she is worth millions on Facebook and owns enough Pez dispensers to build a bridge to the moon. Her current pseudonyms are Tiger, Tiger and MC Polar Bear and Painting.
Type in ‘great driving challenge’ on Google and discover for yourself the multiple ways in which people are reaching out on their networks, for votes. Even if you are not a blogger yourself, you may find a friend who is willing to give you a helping hand. Just hand her (or him) your blog badge (embed code). Reach out to your network, be it on Orkut/Facebook/Twitter or your user groups and forums. I have captured some screens (low res) and organized in a slide show - but you can do the search yourself and trawl through the myriad links now available. Someone who owns a Cedia, posted a video of the same, driving round Ring Road, Bangalore. It seems GDC is indeed starting to buzz on the web.
In my last post, there was a suggestion that we should figure out a way to identify people who are attempting to caste fake votes and just throw them out. Debarring voters from the same IP is not a sensible thing to do, as many genuine people accessing the site behind their corporate firewalls, would log the same IP. Also, it is just not worth chasing people who are busy creating fake IDs. Though these users often don’t realize, that in their passion to cast fake votes, they forget to remove the telltale signatures left behind. So in a matter of few minutes, the system logs voters like Dina, Dina1, & Dina2 sequentially on the voter list
However it does leave a bitter taste in the mouth, as we go through some routine checks, and discover people using the lesser known email ‘alias’ features to caste fake votes. For the uninitiated, Gmail has a very useful feature where you can create a mail alias very easily. This was actually designed to handle spam better. So .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
is same as [email protected], or any such combination. The feature was introduced by Gmail to help consumers fight spam by submitting alias IDs on web-forms. You can read more about this feature here http://tinyurl.com/gmailalias
As you are aware technology can be put to both good use and bad. Some smart applicants on GDC chose the latter and decided to register multiple votes, themselves, using aliases. Since it does not take much effort, all you got to do is log in, create a new gmail ID, continue casting votes using aliases, before signing off for the night. Oh - these not so smart ones!
