Dânesh Zaki

Never thought that a Toyota Qualis could look this good. DC Chabria does wonders.

I haven’t seen a limousine from this close. This one was parked just outside the hotel where I was staying. It is a Lincoln.

Reached Vernon Hills, a suburb about 34 miles away from Chicago, yesterday. The weather is pleasant here as summer has seemingly started. The taxi driver who drove me to the hotel from the Chicago O’ Hare airport was an Indian who had studied for his masters degree here. His job contract with AT&T was terminated early this year and he had to start driving taxis to make ends meet. I had found it difficult to believe stories on recession in the US but this one was true and was in front of me.

I was trying to install a software on my ageing laptop and had issues due to lack of disk space. Ruthlessly, I cleaned my hard disk - deleting some files and moving many to a portable hard disk. This made things good enough to install the software.

When trying to run the software, I had a problem as it needed 2-4 GB RAM while I had only 1 GB. Increasing virtual memory, swap size etc did not help much. That is when I thought that it would have been great had a USB-based portable RAM chip/drive existed. One could plug it in just like a portable hard disk/flash memory drive and the laptop would take whatever additional RAM needed from it.

This idea generated quite a bit of interest when I discussed it with colleagues. And I do hope that Seagate, SanDisk, Kingston and others feel excited to hear this and design it for us.