Any visitor probably first experiences Sydney at its harbour, which gives a million vantage points to view the city from. There’s one secret to the charm — multiple perspectives of the heart of the city; each spectacular.

There’s the architecture — a mix of old colonial and modern glass, even leaving aside the Opera House.

And call me stupid, but I couldn’t get over how well Sydney’s signs were written.

In my travels so far, I’ve found cities to be variously amusing or drab, zippy or sleepy, grand or quaint; but I never thought I’d ever find a city beautiful. Sydney, however, had a beauty so unexpected it left me in disbelief.

We had just planned to be in Sydney for only a day. It felt like we could stay a lifetime.

It was a risky venture — six lives had been lost in the previous decade trying to fly across a sea that Brits and Yankees today fondly refer to as ‘the pond’. Whats more, Lindbergh went against conventional wisdom and used a custom-designed plane, hacked together in a couple of months, using only a single engine when all earlier attempts had used at least two.

It was a time of tremendous excitement and anticipation. Over the next thirty years, aviation progressed at a frenzied pace, and in 1957 the venerable Boeing 707 commercial airliner entered service, marking the beginning of the Jet age. What would the next half-century look like?

The sad, no, tragic, answer — exactly the same. Show them a file picture, and 95% of people today wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a Boeing 707 and an Airbus A380, the so-called “latest and greatest” commercial aircraft. And while the rest of may be able to distinguish the two, isn’t it astounding how similar they are?

Yeah, yeah, there have been significant improvements. Carrying capacity, range, comfort, safety, fuel efficiency, blah blah. I’ve read the brochures. Whatever. Significant improvements is polite-speak for no leaps. The cruising speed of the A380 is actually a tad slower than the 707. Meaning it takes the same time for me to get from Point A to Point B while flying today, and don’t even get me started on the airport security lines. What the hell happened?

I don’t know. But this post isn’t about the aviation industry.

It’s about a sinking suspicion that I’ve been having. That the computing world is on the same kind of flight path.

See, when I was a kid, I used to hate having to go out anywhere, except to this family’s home that we knew. Because they had this awesome thing called a Computer. Much later, I would learn that it was the PC XT, the first computer that came standard with a hard drive (a 10 megabyte hard drive). But to me it was just the Computer. It was like a combination of a TV and a robot — it had a screen but the screen responded to what you did. Intelligently. It would produce words that you were typing, or it could show graphics. I played the original Prince of Persia on it.

Then my father bought home our first computer – an AT 286. With a colour monitor. That had VGA resolution. I cannot begin to tell you how much better Prince of Persia looked on it. And it was FAST. It had a small “Turbo” switch and light and when it was on, boy, did the machine race. The only time I turned it off was while playing Pacman because Pacman was so fast at Turbo that it was unplayable.

The next few years of my life were frantic. I grew so attached to the computer that I actually would agree to type pages and pages of work-related documents for my parents just to be allowed to use it. I learned AutoCAD and marveled when we upgraded to a 40 MB hard drive, because then we could keep AutoCAD installed along with the rest of our applications. Then came GW-BASIC, my first language, the first programs. The addition of a multi-media kit, we could actually listen to CDs on a computer!

I remember the two months a friend and I spent running around borrowing audio CDs from family and ripping them. And then filling up a 640 MB hard drive with MP3s and taking it to a guy in a garage who had a CD-burner; praying that the auto-rickshaw ride wouldn’t screw up the drive. And the badass feeling of “do we rock or what!” at possessing a 5-inch disc with 110 songs on it. All the years of painstakingly recording individual songs on cassettes were finally behind us.

Junior college in Singapore, where I discovered e-mail and keeping in touch with family; and finally, 1999, when I bought and assembled my first desktop in undergraduate school; discovered the Internet and that through it, I could get music and movies and news and chat with people half a world away, using these strange but exciting programs called IRC and ICQ. And using a neat little software called Photoshop, I could scan and edit pictures that I took from my little film camera.

It’s more than a decade later, now, and I have much nicer computers. But I’m still listening to movies and music and writing some code and trying to keep in touch with people half a world away. Some of them are using their computers to raise virtual pigs and grow virtual cabbage. I still use Photoshop, and the latest drool-worthy laptops from a company called Apple, I believe, offer a Turbo mode.

When I quote Star Wars it’s usually Yoda or Luke; but Han’s gotta have this one.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

What the hell happened? I think I have a vague clue; but I’ll leave it for next time.

They must have read about it. They must have heard about it. They must have planned for it. Graeme Smith, Jacques Kallis and Hashim Amla have played a Test there before. Nothing, though, can be preparation enough for an Indian comeback from the dead at Eden Gardens.

If you click ‘Disable Google Buzz’, it claims to completely remove your Google profile, Buzz posts, and unfollow you from anyone you’re following in Buzz as well as Reader. This did happen for me.

What I still don’t like is there seems to be still no place where I can monitor state, i.e. be assured that Buzz is “disabled” on my account. Even after you click ‘Disable Google Buzz’, your settings page will display exactly the same message, which technically would lead you to believe that Buzz is still active.

Laminated photos affixed to the walls tell a story of black-and-white into color, of arranged marriages and love affairs, of constancy and change. As I walk through the house, I find my face, too, framed and on display. As always, it surprises me that I belong here, that even after I return to my American life, my child’s image will persist in a rambling home in the two horse town of Elevanchery.

A friend of mine whom I got in touch with after a long time told me off quite sharply for not being on Orkut or Facebook. Apparently, he had scoured the social webs looking for me. It didn’t occur to him to Google me, which would’ve led him quite easily to my blog or public website.

A news source whose top headline on any given day may be that a casual acquaintance (who’s name I cannot match to a face) has just acquired three pigs on his virtual farm does not spark my interest. Nor does it amuse me to learn that twenty-three other complete strangers “like” the fact that this casual acquaintance of mine has just acquired three pigs on his virtual farm. Well, maybe it amuses me a bit. That I’m expected to devote any serious attention and time to a page full of such stories is, to me, laughable.

Sure, 350 million people and counting disagree with me, and that’s fine. It’s a free Internet. As long as I’m not forced to use Facebook any more than I want to, I can keep my information as private as I want and most importantly, I can delete my Facebook account any time I want to, I’m happy.

Along comes Google Buzz. Whatever may be wrong with it, they named it perfectly, though I’m sure they didn’t mean “low-pitched irritating, senseless and humming noise that bees make”. That’s the perfect description of what a social network these days is like: there’s just so much noise that even any tidbits of useful information get completely lost.

Nothing else about it feels right. I’ve no problem with another social network on the web. I get it: there is pots of money in social search and networking; so Google wants in. Some even find this a unique and useful service. But did they have to do something that left me feeling screwed over?

I was signed up for a social network automatically when I didn’t want to be. Even before I knew about Buzz, people had started ‘following’ me on Buzz, and other people were informed that I was following them. Even worse, anyone who was following me could see the list of people that “I was following”. Lets make this clear — “I” had no intent or even knowledge of following anybody. Yet the statement “Anshul is following these people” clearly indicates deliberate action and intent on my part, and therefore for Google to make that statement was just factually wrong and untrue. And letting anyone who was “following” me (without my consent or knowledge) have a peek at my most frequent contacts… words fail me. That three-letter three-word motto of a famous search engine company? The opposite of that.

So, when I did figure out that there was this thing called Buzz, I turned off all the stuff it was sharing on Buzz about me (Picasa photos and Google Reader links), I modified my profile not to show anyone whom I was connected to, and finally, I turned off Buzz in Gmail. It was a bit disturbing that it was down in the fine print section. How come obscure labs features get their own settings page and something like Buzz doesn’t?

Unfortunately, people can still follow me on Buzz. True, as of now nothing will be posted since I’ve turned Buzz off; but just knowing that I can be followed by someone makes me feel quite uneasy, especially given this background.

Here’s the worst part — Buzz is tied to Gmail, something that I not only love using, but something I’m basically tied to. Almost all of my email activity — personal friends, blog comments, former work colleages, internet banking, utility bills, credit cards, travel booking — goes through GMail. I can delete my Facebook account in a heartbeat, but for me to dissociate myself from Gmail would be extremely difficult. It is easier to change my physical address (I know, I’m moving house in a couple of weeks) than to change my primary email address. Here’s hoping that Google will iron out the privacy issues sooner rather than later, and let us choose to live without the buzz.

For example: there are two popes per square kilometer in Vatican.

Wow. Sure, they had to do this for the iPhone eventually, but only after it released. Looks like Apple saw some polling data, and is running scared.

One thing’s for sure: this will lead to far fewer pre-orders at the current price.

If only I had a screen with that much real estate. The dream faded after the update was completed and the system restarted.