Saturday, March 14, 2009

Good reads

Over the course of time I have read plenty of novels, books, publication and short stories by various authors. My favourite author so far is Michael Crichton , god bless his soul, I was really looking forward to his next book. But later on that, for that's not what this post is about. I would like to share a few of my favourite short stories with the readers. Both of these are very amazing stories which always give me goosebumps near their ends. I have to warn you though, me being a Sci-Fi fan, they are all total science fiction stories, and may sound nerdy at times so if that's not really your cup of tea, you might just want to skip these stories.

The first one is without any doubt - The Last Question (1956) By Isaac Asimov.
This story is about a super-computer of sorts which has been asked a very import question which it is unable to answer. It ponders over this question for the rest of eternity, surpassing trillions of zillions of years overseeing the progress the human beings make during this time. But finally at the end of eternity and at the end of time it finally figures out the answer and in one burst of brilliance its executes the answer in an act that would make any reader completely change their perspective about time, life and eternity.
 You can read the entire story here.

The next in line is - Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke
This story is timed around the time when our sun , the sol, is about to go supernova. Someone arrives at Earth to know more about the inhabitants of this doomed third planet and possibly rescue some of them. There is nobody on the planet, but they discover the trace of a not-so-ancient civilization. Their mission a failure, they  leave the solar system and following a heavenly direction pointed by a transmitting antenna array they finally make a discovery which surpasses their wildest imaginations.
 You can read the entire story here.

So, do read those stories and let me know what you think of them. I'm post about more interesting works of literatures in a later post.

Reg,
PeeKay

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Digital Will

So you have developed a nice little presence on the internet, have a nice bolg, a well balance paypal account, your podcasting solution, your social networking profile, your online shared photos , files and documents, may be you have pending cretits at online stores like the itunes store. Ever wondered what would happen to them in the sad event of your death or incapacitation ?
 You would think that the accounts will pass over to your family, but sadly that's not the case. If you read the entire Terms and conditions shown while registering for the website, you will realise that most of time the information there in is not actually your property - it belongs to the service and you are just being leased access to it. This is especially true in case of free services. And in most cases the access is not transferrable. So, your relatives are going to have a hard time getting access to that information, or even trying to close down public access to it - like for example : your facebook profile.
 That's where LegacyLocker comes in. You enter your account information , referred to as Digital Assets and select benificiaries for each Asset separately - for example your PayPal information may go to your spouse or your online documents to your business partners, and so on and the details are stored with them using very high level of security . On the event of passing away your death is confirmed by contacting two 'verifiers' - who are people whom you can trust to convey the true information, and by your physical death certificate and then your assets are securely transferred to your benificiaries.
There's a one time fee or an annual fee. The service is also available for free but you are restricted to 3 assets and 1 beneficiary.

Legacy Locker - http://www.legacylocker.com/