More tinkering with the format.

I just do not seem to find any peace with my format. I have changed the colours again. What do you think???

'I was taken by surprise' - Tendulkar

The debate on whether the call for declaration (in the 1st Indo-Pak Test Mach at Multan) came at the right time will continue for some time. (I personally think that they should not have played after the tea session). However I found the comments made by Tendulkar quite unneccessary and immature. I love the guy but he needs to understand that every word he says is fanatically followed by fanatical fans. He should have better restraint than openly coming out with his disappointment. For a team to perform well it must be seen to be One...and Tendulkar's comments('I was taken by surprise' - Tendulkar) are not helpful in that context.

Thisis something that I find shocking in Sachin's communication with the world. On the cricket field you can see the amount he has matured as a player. However outside the field he sems to act childish...first with his ferrari car, now with this. He seriously needs an image advisor!!!

This was my take on the situation. Comments as usual are most welcome.
(Tum ek comment donge to main do doonga :))

RSS feed rectified.

I just realized that my RSS feed had the wrong link. Rectified it with the link provided by DarthPedro. Now the RSS feed should be working fine.

While on the topic of realization I noted that I have not apologized for my absence from this space last week.

So a big apology to all my readers, and heartfelt gratitude for people who worried about my absence. I was just a little busy with some stuff and blogging kinda took a back seat. However I am back!!!

So keep blogging all of you!!!

I confess...

...I oogled at two beauties tonight.

The beauties in question were exquisite, powerful, tempremental and the pride of their owners!!!
One was the 500CC std. Enfield of Ranjith. Great vehicle. Got the phots...will try to post it soon. His bike has a military feel to it. I like that look a lot!!! Ranjith, lets here mor about your relation with her on your blog!!!

The other beauty was the new Indica bought by Mandar. Now this is one beauty with a large heart and a large bosom. The color of this vehicle was a very fine color of mettalic blue. I think the actual shade is called Amethyst Blue. One really smooth vehicle. 1600CC, Diesel engine, power steering, central locking, sony system...great vehilce. Good buy Mandar!

Cn't wait for my vehicle to come!!!

Manchester United 1 - Arsenal 1 !!!!!

Another draw between the Gunners and the Red Devil’s. Man! You need to have a pacemaker to see these two teams fight it out. You cannot rest till the very last minute. My friends Ranjith and Mandar were over to watch the match. Ranjith is an Arsenal fan and cam in Arsenal gear. Not to be outdone both Mandar and myself were wearing Man U t-shirts. So as one can imagine we had a great time watching the match.

However my honest opinion is that the match was Arsenal’s to win. They should have sealed Man U’s fate but let them go scot-free. I think Arsene tried to get defensive too early ion the second half. Arsenal was better when they were positive and attacking.

Anyways this result will not affect the leader board too much and Arsenal seem all set to win the Premiership this year However one is left wondering that the Gunners have still not managed to stamp their authority over the Devils.

Great Innings by Sehwag!!

I do not have much to talk about today’s game as I found the wicket quite one-sided leading to a very stale first day(enjoyable only from India’s point of view). Nonetheless, I am very happy with Sehwag’s performance. Especially the fact that he stuck to the task of making runs throughout the day. I always feel that he is wasting his talent by just being a hitter. With a little more thought he can keep hitting and still make big scores. Today he proved that in the most convincing way. Great work dude!!! Go on to make 300+

A night at Gaurav, Parag and Surya's Kholi :)

We spent Saturday evening at Gaurav's place. Had a whale of a time.

First Parag treated us to exquisitely fried fish. The taste was just out of this world...to add the good feeling was the aroma...hmmmm... nothing like fried fish to uplift one’s spirits. When you add the fact that we actually had some spirits (Chivas Regal to be specific) then you can understand that the environment (mahol) was getting to be quite enjoyable.

We started off by playing UNO. This is one hell of a game. Had great fun, especially when Surya had to keep picking up cards as he kept forgetting to say UNO at the penultimate cards. This was all the more hilarious as he felt that this was the most stupid rule and no one would forget such a simple rule, and here he was picking up card after card :D. However full marks to Surya for being a very good sport!!! I for one will be ready to play another game with him anytime.

And we must not forget Parag picking up a card and forfeiting his turn though he had both a number card to play as well as a colour card and could have played either. Thoda high ho gaya hoga J

On the food front we moved to the main course…roti, chawal, chole, raita and gobi. I cannot speak for the roti as I did not have any. I preferred the combination of rice and chole with raita. My all time fav…especially as the raita was boondi raita J And the chole was fabulous…do not take my word for it…check this out with the best chole maker this side of the Vindhya’s…my wife. Both of us absolutely loved the chole…so if any of you PYT’s want a husband who can cook a killer meal of chole then try out Gaurav J (for fried fish Parag is available J)

Anyways after the meal we moved on to light entertainment; playing all MP3s and dancing till midnight.

A fabulous evening with great people…a most auspicious way to enjoy the weekend.

Song of the evening … “Jahan Chaar Yaar Mil Jaye Wahin Raat Ho Gulzar” – Sharabi.

Friday Five

If you

1. ...owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?
- Continental

2. ...owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?
- Books

3. ...wrote a book, what genre would it be?
- Detective (Noir)

4. ...ran a school, what would you teach?
- Programming

5. ...recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?
- Hard Jazz

Learn more of friday five at the following site: the friday five.

Result of malaysian grand prix web poll

As can be seen the readers of this site would make great poker players. Schumi won this poll comprehensively as can be checked here.

Dravid shines again; so does Schumi!!!

Again the old dependables came to the fore and made my day on this great Super Sunday.

First Schumi and Ferrari gave a big morale buster to the rest of the field by Schumi winning the Malaysian Grand Prix and Barrichelo coming in fourth. By winning on a track which was supposedly not so great for his car he again hpwed his quality. Hats off to him.

On to the match. Over the last few matches I have been of the view that it is the responsibility of the openers to stick till at least the 10th over. If they do make fast runs it doesn't hurt but sticking around also helps the team by wasting the efforts of the opposing lead bowlers. For eg. Sehwag might score a blistering 25 in 15 balls but he needs to be around otherwise we will reach the situation we reached today. Thanks again to the WALL and to the two youngsters, Yuvraj and Kaif for not losing their heads and playing a very composed innings. This victory is only due to their efforts. And a special thanks to our fourth batsman...the Pakistani bowlers.

Just check these stats of the top four scores of the Indian innings.

R Dravid not out 76 runs in 141 balls
M Kaif not out 71 runs in 79 balls

Extras 37 runs in 0 balls
Yuvraj Singh c Yousuf Youhana b Mohammad Sami 36runs in 44 balls.

So again, a special thank you to the Pakistani bowlers!!!

And of course one more thank you to Dravid cause...

...DRAVID IS GAWD!!!

CSS Color Names

For all you Bloggers out there with little knowledge of Web development and lots of imagination here's a site to add colors to our life and site: CSS Color Names.

Atoms, RSS feeds, Aggregators, Comments and Trackbacks and more!!!

For a detailed article of one or all of the above visit DarthPedro: Random Thoughts. Good blog. (Also gives me a chance to be lazy and go to sleep earlier:) )

Friday Five.

1. What was the last song you heard?
- Life is a Highway- Tom Cochrane.

2. What were the last two movies you saw?
- Ab Tak Chappan - one of the best movies of recent times in Hindi cinema.
- Lord Of The Rings - The Return Of The King.

3. What were the last three things you purchased?
- Maggi Instant Noodles
- Iced Mocha
- Pizza

4. What four things do you need to do this weekend?
- Study quotations for new car.
- Watch Malaysian Grand Prix. Hope ferrari do good here.
- Write a scope document related to my work.
- Watch 4th India-Pak one day match(Cricket). Very important for India to win this one.
5. Who are the last five people you talked to?
- Meghna - my wife
- Jenny - my friend
- Ravi - my friend and team-mate
- Niraj - my friend and team-mate
- Arvind - my friend and team-mate

Learn more of friday five at the following site: the friday five.

Neil Gaiman...the man behind Sandman!!!

Again Thanks to DarthPedro for pointing out this great man's weblog. Why is he great? Well just hop over to Darth's site(DarthPedro: Random Thoughts) to check that out. However in addition to all that DarthPedro has pointed out I must add my bit.

For me Neil Gaiman is GAWD for one thing and one thing alone...He made "SANDMAN". I am not in any way capable of giving a precis on the Sandman series. Suffice it to know that if you see the Sandaman comic anywhere, then beg, borrow or steal it as each of this comic is a reaaaaal trip. I kid you not!!!

It is one of the best series ever and really really deep. (please do not confuse this sandman with the sandman from the golden age of Marvel Heroes). So kiddos go out and get it!!!

You can find his blog here: Neil Gaiman's Journal

One more friend in the blogsphere!!!

I have been speaking of the usefulness of trackbacks to a lot of people and today I can show you a practical case. I had a trackback on the Dilbert feed and took the leap to the link mentioned. It was a page named DarthPedro: Random Thoughts. A well written and well maintained site.

Now before anyone jumps to a conclusion that I am writing this piece in a kind of I'll scratch your back you scratch mine attitude please allow me to continue.

Anyways I was going through his blogs in chronological order and ended up at the latest. Now please bear in mind that I was in his area due to the fact that the Dilbert feed connected with him and he wanted to help spread the word. Well the same feeling came to me reading his blog for the 17th as i was about Neil Gaiman. Don't know who I am speaking of? I will explain more in the next blog.

As I was saying trackback is good. Thanks DarthPedro for taking the trouble to use this service.

Manjrekar was the cause of our loss!!!

Call me paranoid, superstitious or any thing you want but I think Manjrekar was the cause of our loss against Pakistan.
It is a proven scientific fact (generalizing wildly and using lot of imaginative leeway of course!) that whenever Manjrekar comments about how great the Little Master is, and how difficult it is for bowlers to get him out, his wicket falls. Even this time just when Manjrekar mentioned that it looks like Sachin will be difficult to dislodged he got out...that too to the very next ball. And this is not the first time!!! I have seen this happen for the last 3-4 years. Sachin did not perform too well in the world cup due to Manjrekar. In Australia with no Manjrekar around Sachin flourished. So the secret to winning this series...bring Manjrekar home!!! And if possible ask him to bring along Sami and Shoaib too :)

But I see you are still not convinced. You say what about the good performances of Balaji and Powar? Well you can thank my wife for that. She studiously kept her head buried in the daily paper and that is the reason they flourished!!! Guess I am going to buy all the daily papers for the next match. My wife's ken will beat Manjrekar's ken any-day!!! :D

Pakistan 1 India 1

We lost this time to Pakistan. The match was fun nonetheless. Again there is scope for improvement. Sachin’s innings was top class but failed to help India win. And it is not often that you see the Wall crumble. Balaji and Powar showed the big boys how it is done :D. However my fav today were the Pakistani bowlers. Wish we could have combined coaching camps before the next world cup. Sami was the pick of the lot and I consider that his bowling was a very important factor for tying our batsmen down. At the end of the day Pakistan and cricket (as my team-mate was saying this morning) won.

However I was more interested with the Prasar Bharti fiasco. How can a company take a free feed from someone else and still have the shamelessness of showing their own ads. Many Indians are pissed of at Ten sports for supposedly playing spoilsport. I must disagree with this view. Ten runs a business and as such they are going to watch their bottom line. It is not for them but for the government and Prasar Bharti to worry about the Indian people. If Prasar Bharti had shown last matches telecast without trying to make money by showing their own ads then they would have got the higher moral ground and Ten Sports would also have been pacified. Instead Prasar Bharti just showed what top class idiots they are by not only taking apiece of the pie but also leaving the signal unencrypted thus affecting Ten’s profits all over the world!!!

The government could have solved this issue as soon as Ten had got the rights by getting into the act earlier and convincing them to let DD also show the feed for a minimal cost with unaltered signal. I am sure that sooner or later Ten would have seen the benefit of letting their signal ride on DD thereby getting a chance to reach all oparts of India.

We Indians need to come to a decision and need to make that decision soon, do we want to take the capitalism path. If we do then we need to understand, appreciate and respect the market. A monopoly is bad but so is stealing. I am not trying to take a holier than thou position here as I am myself guilty of these very acts. However in the whole picture we need to inculcate an attitude where we either pay for what we want or else make do with the alternative. That is how the open market works and we cannot step into it half-hearted. We cannot try to use Socialistic ideas whenever it inconvenient and capitalist ideas on other days. It has to be a full push towards one or the other goal. Looking at the state of socialism around the world, and considering how Indians are more materialistic then communal in today’s age, I guess the only real approach is capitalism for us. In this atmosphere stupid acts like ones by Prasar Bharti cannot and should not be tolerated.

What do you the esteemed reader think?

WTF!!!

I have heard of close matches and easy ones. We have sat through desperate times when India has gone all out to lose matches. However, West Indies second innings in the 1st test match 1st Test: West Indies v England at Kingston, 11-15 Mar 2004 defies logic. 47 runs(5 runs were extra) all-out!!!. I do not even have any comment to make. Last time it was 54 all out now 47...are they trying for a dubious record of getting max number of low runs record!!!

Check out this pic of all ten England fielders round the bat, West Indies on the receiving end of a field setting that used to be their speciality.

Ides of March

Beware the Ides of March Ides of March they said. He did not and fell prey to the scheming sycophants and the misguided friends close to him. This was thousand of years ago.

Yesterday was the Ides of March and I had my warnings. I almost went the way of Caesar but clear sense prevailed and I was saved. Maybe I am being melodramatic but the 15th of this month is quite a date for me as it is closure of all the year’s finances for my company. In other words means that it is the last day to put in your claims. People who know me will realize how this is one of the most difficult chores for me. Nonetheless this time I grit my teeth and managed to find every damn bill from the whole of last year and (surprise, surprise!!!) managed to file all of them in TIME!!!

It saved me a hell lot of money and pleasantly surprised all people close to me (especially my darling). I even managed to get a few comments on my growing sense of responsibility and maturity. Luckily for me she does not know that I watched WWE at night. : D

Getting back to the claims part, is it just me who hates taking care of all the bills and making claims to the finance departments? An open question to all of you. Please feel free to use the comments link to answer.

Dilbert RSS feed

For people out there who have a RSS feed reader(more about RSS here: Scripting News Feed and here: About Blogs, Atoms and RSS feed!) here is a great feed...daily Dilbert to your desktop.

Next gen browsers - Firefox!!!

Installed Mozilla Firefox today. It is the latest in the Mozilla chain. To be more specific Mozilla was an Open Source offshoot of Netscape, combining a whole suite of browser, mail and newsgroups readers, chat engine etc. Then the team cam up with a standalone browser called Firebird. The plus point was that as it was not a suite it was much lighter in its memory footprint. Now do to one reason or another (which can be found at their homepage) the name has changed to Firefox. His browser is a lean mean killing machine. Its footprint is really small and it has a whole slew of features attached. One very good feature is that we can use keyboard quote efficiently in this browser. Another plus-point is the concept of extensions, which are basically add-ons or bolt-ons, that can be attached to the browser for specific needs. One must try it out!!!

once more refactoring of the page.

Many of my friends viewing this page in IE with lower resolution and medium text size were having to span width wise to read my blogs properly. I am not yet conversant with web designing, hence this stopgap arrangement. Once I clearly understand what my code is doing I might be able to make a more elegant look. Please comment if you are finding any problems with the layout of this page.
Please note that I have also changed the date format for the archives to make it less foreboding and added the poll as a link to the top of the page.

1 down 4 to go!

India wins the first ODI. Made heavy weather of it but won it; and for now that is enough. The match was tense as usual (cannot remember the last time India had an ODI which was not nail-biting…ICC should give us special allowances since we make every match, even one’s with Kenya and Canada, a nail-biter).

Nonetheless for all the problems both teams had the match was great fun. It was to be expected that the ODI series is going to have batting friendly wickets but the totals amassed was way beyond expectations. It was a treat to watch Sehwag, Ganguly and Dravid play the innings they did. (At this point I just wanted to put forth a new idea…how about Sehwag gets only half his match fee if he does not last till at least the 25th over) However the innings of the day, and the one instrumental in a well deserving man of the match title, was the innings of Inzy. He has always been a person with immense potential but has rarely lived up to it in recent years. This innings was worthy of his legend and completely overshadowed all the other innings of the day, including a gusty from Youhana. Really shows how an Indo-Pak match can revitalize the players.

A special mention must be made of the crowd who made it a point to applaud good cricket irrespective of nationality. With such auspicious beginnings we could resurrect the greatest rivalry of all time. Here’s to a hope that all the other matches are played with equal enthusiasm (albeit with less mistakes and more accurate and tighter bowling) and healthy spirit of competition.

An aside, did anyone notice the look on Shoaib Akhtar’s face when he bowled out Dravid. He was happy for the wicket as signified by his upraised hands but I felt that his face betrayed a tinge of sadness for Dravid. This was the first time I have seen a muted celebration of a wicket by Shoaib. I guess it shows that the respect for a good cricketer knows no boundaries.

Footnote: Pak got back by winning the hockey game against India 4-2. Well you win some and you lose some.

We are going to Athens :-D

India has qualified for the coming Olymics and so has Pakistan. Please read the story here: FOX SPORTS | Breaking News | Pakistan, India book Athens spots (March 10, 2004). Well done to our lads!!!

Scripting News feed

Continuing on news about Atom and RSS read this feed of Dave at scripting news Scripting News: 3/9/2004 Interesting reading to say the least. Maybe the last few blogs have felt very techie. It was not my intention, however a little knowledge would help one surf the net much more efficiently:)
(Of course the only minus point is that my page will miss the hits:( )

Changing the subject; looking forward to the India-Pak test series more than the onedayers. Nowadays with tests giving results onedayers feel like half the fun!!!

About Blogs, Atoms and RSS feed!

For people who are dropping in here, are interested in blogs but still are deciding whether they want to try their hand at blogging; as usual I say take the plunge. There are many blog sites that help you out. Sites like RediffBlog and BlogDrive seem to be the easiest for a person to start blogging. However I find BlogSpot most convenient primarily because it is connected to the Blogger engine, which I feel is the best. However to use this site to the best potential one needs to know some basic info of setting up web pages. Then you can really make a slick site.

However at this point you will still only have the functionality to put up your blogs. If you are using BlogSpot then you will have to use an external agency like Haloscan for putting up comments (Comments are integral to RediffBlog and BlogDrive) and trackbacks. More about trackbacks later.

One interesting thing that almost all of these sites provide is a functionality called site feed. This site feed is in one of two forms either RSS or ATOM. Read about RSS ( check for definition in this page ) here: XML.com: What is RSS? [Dec. 18, 2002] and about Atom here: BLOGGER - Knowledge Base - What is Atom?. Basically both of these are protocols of representation of the data you put up. If this feature is enabled then every time you post, in addition to serving the new web page, the blogging engine also creates an XML feed of the page. Softwares like blog readers or blog aggregators can then read this feed. A blog-reader is just like a newsreader (I use SharpReader. Read more about it here: SharpReader's home page). It makes the job of a blog surfer very easy as the software collects all the latest blogs from all the sites you have subscribed to and you can read all his info from one program rather than having to visit each site. This makes for more efficient blog surfing. Read more about this at EContentMag.com: Can RSS Relieve Information Overload? and at How To Speed-Read the Net - Ditch your browser, RSS makes surfing for news a joy. By Paul Boutin.

Keeping this in mind it is the duty of every blogger to make the life of the reader a little bit easier by setting up this functionality for his/her site. If I am not mistaken this functionality is a default in RediffBlogs. In BlogSpot one has to go to settings/site feed and enable the functionality. For bloggers like most of us I prefer to give the full text but the choice is yours. I am sorry I have no idea how to do this for BlogDrive.

So all of you Bloggers and would-be Bloggers do not forget to add the feed. May our tribe increase!!!


P.S: BlogDrive users do have other plus points, like their Blogdrive Mini-MEditor . If you are a blogdrive user you really need to use this.

Quickie!

A quick blog at the end of a fun-filled and exhausting day. Managed to view LOTRTROTK in the theatre. Magnificent movie. No other words for it. Deserved all the Oscars it got. I was especially glad that I waited so long to watch it in the theatre(unlike certain other people About LOTR ;)) as the experience was excellent. Will not leave any links for this movie as you can easily google for it.
Schumi starts the season with a win!!! YES!!! Loved the race. The best thing was that this race proved nothing. My feeling is that it is going to be a close run thing this season, and Schumi is gonna win:D Was checking out the F1 mag in Crossword and read some excerpts of an article by Hakkinen about this season. He pointed out that he did not think that Ferrari had the best car. However he said that this was not good news for other teams as Schumi ends up driving even better when he has a car which is not performing to the best of it's ability. According to Hakkinen the secret of Schumi's success, and the reason he is such a dangerous competitor, is that he is driven and never gives up. He does not let the past colour his present and just keeps pushing on and on. These are he same reasons I love the guy. And before Raoul gets into the fray with the cheating part, I must point out that last year I spent considerable reading up on F1 history and I so not see the facts in the same light as he does:) Guess we can always agree to disagree!!!
Again no links as a simple google will get you everything you require.
Really sleep so I will sign off...G'Night!!!

Blogging!

Hello folks. I started this adventure of blogging on the 18th of January. As is usual for many things I do I was pessimistic about the longevity of my blogging. Though it is still early days I am happy to find myself still blogging diligently, though the quality of my posts are erratic, to say the least. Today I read more into RSS and ATOM feed and felt that I was the right time for me to take stock and pen down a lot of stuff that I have been meaning to write for a long time.

I heard about Blogger and blogging sometime in 2002. At that point I was still quite confused with all the stuff happening on the net and was slightly overawed. I must confess that I have a Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde character with respect to technology. I am both a big techno-phobic as well as a techno-fanatic. Anyways everything be as it may, I did not get involved.

This year I got a new Internet connection at home and started to surf the net at home rather than in the office. During one of these nocturnal sessions, I suddenly remembered about my curiosity regarding Blogs. The name, which popped out of my head, was of course Blogger; hence I searched for a Blogger.com and started blogging. The intention at that point was to work on my writing skills by writing something everyday and try to live by that discipline. Writing regularly was something that a lot of people had advised me to do and an article in Joel’s archive(Joel on Software - Painless Functional Specifications - Part 1: Why Bother?: search for weblog in his page) just helped me make the decision. As writing on paper marinating some kind of Diary was not my style I decided on a blogsite. This site would also help me fulfil another to-do item of having a website. Work on the blogsite would help me narrow down what I wanted out of my website! Again, irrespective of all logic and reasoning and gut feel etc. I started the blogsite and by doing so made blogging an integral part of my everyday life.

I am my Ego and over time I have found out that I will do almost anything to win a bet or to escape being ridiculed. In my younger days this ended up being self-defeating, as I would do nothing innovative or different. Nowadays I am much more secure and confident and am not ready to throw myself off a cliff. My Ego normally helps me nowadays to maintain what I have begun and try to stick with it till it is successful. I took the same approach with my blogsite. On the 3rd day itself I had broadcasted the presence of this site to anyone who came in contact with me. I even went to the limit of actually setting up my site on people’s computers so that they had to read it. His helped me immensely as now I had an audience and I had to keep writing or face the ignominy of failure and the ridicule of almost everyone I knew. Yes! It is official, your reading and hits are the fuel that drives me to provide constant and consistent content on this site. Hopefully this site will become better with time.

In addition to the obvious advantages that I gain by writing daily, viz. Formulation of a personal say and better-written communication, I was pleasantly surprised by certain side effects:
1. Many of my friends started blogs of their own. This was very useful as I had my gang with me as we stepped into the big blog world,
2. Made new friends in this new world, friends who shared the same passion with me with respect to blogging, and
3. Felt a part of an ever-growing community. This was not something that I had envisaged (though looking back it was pretty evident that it would be so) and hence was all the more sweeter.

As usual I fumble for words to close this blog. Just wanted to create a milestone for myself with this blog. A point where I could stand on the rooftops and confess, �Yes! I am a blogger�. So what are you folks waiting for? Take the plunge; you have nothing to fear but bad grammar!!!

Vroooooooooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!

The F1 circus starts all over again. Time for the passionate afternoons spent in front of the telly taking in the meow-meow races (If you concentrate while watching F1 you will realise that due to the Doppler effect one hears the sound of the cars as meeeeeeAAAAOoooooooon, sounds like a loud meow, doesn't it).

Anyway to kick off this joyous occasion I thought I would put up a poll for gauging who you think will be winning the Australian Grand Prix. So folks please feel free to vote in he poll set-up in the side panel. The poll is just below the archives section. It will be good practice for the coming elections:D

I am of course a Schumi fan and a fan of the scarlet car! What about you? But the new BMW does look kewl:D

cryptic crosswords anyone?

For people who love cryptic crosswords here is the free site you always wanted to go to: Free Crosswords Online!

Technical days are the best!!!

Today was a surprising day. Most of the time I try to keep my work away from this blog however this time it is something deeper than just work. We needed to work on this difficult piece of code and with pressures of deadlines ever present I put my hat into the ring and tried to help with my bit. In the process I touched a throbbing, wriggling, squirming, kickass code after a long long time. For almost a year I have been caught at the higher level(strictly in a management context) of things. This was the first time after eons that I had a day where I did not work on MSWord, MSProject or MSExcel and instead was knee-deep in code alongwith my experts. To say that the day was fun is an understatement. It was exhilirating. The sheer pleasure of reverse-engineering and adding comments which say " written by BK" was unbeatable. Added to all this pleasure was the fact that there were no client calls to diturb me. So for one day after a year I was happy, truly happy again. The withdrawal (from coding) is going to be that much more painful again:(.

Anyways enuff about me... lets see what our friends at Severely Confused Orangutans are doing by checking out these three articles : IBM ordered to provide SCO with code, documents - Computerworld & Document shows SCO prepped lawsuit against BofA - News - ZDNet & SCO Collides With Cars And Drivers (TechNews.com).

Pawan, Ranjeet and Roadshakers!!!

Love to see my friends in print. Also it coincides with my bike melodrama:) so go on all you bike lovers and check out the following site : Royal Enfield - The Ride
And these guys travelled all the way from Punjab to Goa for the meet of Enfield lovers!!!

And now for Pakau time: I have been speaking of Yam and Bull for a couple of days now and have started getting dreams of Death in the form of Yama on his Buffalo. Ha ha ha! No ha ha??? Well!!! I did point out it was Pakau!!!

Orisinal : Morning Sunshine

For one really well-made site containing beautiful flash games try out Orisinal : Morning Sunshine. And for the Jigsaw lovers among you; try out Jigzone - Jigsaw Puzzle.

Tribute to a Yam!

I have always loved the beauty of engineering, and nowhere else is this more manifest than in motorcycles. Somehow motorcycles are the point where we get a confluence of engineering excellence, pure application of physical sciences, machismo and personality. As people who are regular visitors would already know I am a big big fan of the Bull. If I might digress for a moment here; I saw Rover after quite a number of day and she looks kewl. Pawan had attached this single bucket seat and she looked absolutely fantabulous!!! Coming back on track, I am a big fan of the Bull. However due to different reasons I never had one. Nonetheless I never felt too bad cause I had Divya's bike to ride...a dyed-in-wool YAM(circa 1994ish). Now this is the best consolation prize ever. Riding on a Bull might be great for long distance but riding a yam in the city is the best experience ever. What is so good about the Yam you might ask? Where do I begin, the sheer acceleration, the linear curve of acceleration and deceleration, the nimbleness of its body, the sound of its engine(beautiful symphony, the kind dreams are made of) and the punishment it could take. Never have I found a more powerful bike (especially in the 2-stroke category) which can take the kind of abuse that a RX-100 can take. I am not allowed to ride bikes due to a groin injury. Due to this reason, I have not ridden Divya's bike for around 3 years. Divya is also not in Pune. In other words the bike has not been out for close to 3 years. Last month Divya's cousin came to Pune and wanted to use this bike if possible. I asked him to come and take it but conveyed my reservations on the state of the bike. When he came over we cleaned up the dust accumulated on the bike and then took it to a nearby garage. I assumed that we would need to spend a grand at least to get the bike up and running. Anyways left the bike at the garage and came back home. Next day in the morning when I visited the garage I found the bike all set up, shiny and back to its glory days. I was totally impressed with the garage guy(Pappu was his name, reminds me of Amit's Parker joke) On being asked what repairs had to be done, imagine my surprise when he tells me that he only had to do some minor work on the clutch. It seems he just pumped air into the tyres, filled the tank with petrol, rectified a small hitch in the clutch and the bike was ready to go. Imagine!!! She was in coma for close to 3 years and she starts up without any irritation. Now THAT is a piece of engineering!!!

Hence this ode to the Yam.


Links: none for today as I am not in the mood. However Raoul seems to be big time blog-surfing today...so I thought I might introduce him to others. Raoul is my friend, nuff said:)

P.S: The yam I speak about on he top is the RX-100. I am a fanatic of RX-100s specially the one with the black tank with thin gold trimmings. Please do not speak of any other Yam model except the RX-100, they do not deserve to spoken on the same page as a Yam RX-100 or a Bull. Other bikes!!! Please let's forget we even thought of speaking about other bikes:D

Links and an excuse!

I have been playing around with five ideas today which can potentially become blogs. These ideas are as diverse as ideology, bikes, elections, SDLC(Software Design Life Cycles for non techies) and LOTR. However I spent more time than expected getting through some software design links and am completely bushed. Hence I am going to take the easy way out by using my friend's hard work.

First Sujith has updated his site. Speaking of Sujith he should now rename his site from Title_TBD to B(ack)LOG :)
N'ways he has written a lot of stuff (conscience acting up???) this time around. I specially liked his LOTR article. Do not forget to follow the link in the article to another site where there is a spoof on LOTR. This site basically gives us a glimpse of how LOTR would have looked like had it been written by other famous authors. I specially like the Ernest Hemmingway version and the Meatloaf version. So what are you waiting for, open Sujith's site in a new window and read the article.

People (xcept Pawan and Sarat) have been all updating their sites with thought-provoking and interesting posts so please do move around.

Links of the day:

.Spent lot of time on Joel's site today going through his archive. Reading back on a certain article I followed his link to the following page nomo zilla. Interesting reading which gives us a perspective on how Netscape lost the web-browser war.

. Check out this page 2 + 2. The disenchanted articles are really good but this one was very well written. Again I am not in a position to judge it but it did bring back a lot of information I used to know about pi and phi and came to know about a concept called strange attractors. A must-visit.

.Continuing in the same techie frame of mind I ended up, yet again at Joel's site. As a parting link for the day visit User Interface Design for Programmers - Chapter 1. Well worth it!!! Check out this sneak preview "So that's what days were like. A bunch of tiny frustrations, and a bunch of tiny successes. But they added up. Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don't seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality.

And I started to learn that the days when I was happiest were the days with lots of small successes and few small frustrations.

Years later, when I got to college, I learned about an important theory of psychology called Learned Helplessness, developed by Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman. This theory, backed up by years of research, is that a great deal of depression grows out of a feeling of helplessness: the feeling that you cannot control your environment."

Of course the above extract is taken out of context, so go on, visit the site. It will be useful!

And Good Night all!

Link round-up of the day - offshoring!

As expected Offshoring is one of the most important topics of discussion all across the different techie as well as non-techie forums, boards and blogs. One interesting solution that I found was by this guy, I, Cringely who has a very strong, yet quite logical sounding, opinions about almost anything under the sun. Nice site. Another fun site was: Make me one with everything.A must-read:D

The world's a stage...!

Reading Rohan's blog gave me a good feeling today. This guy is getting very good at writing a tight piece. As I was perusing his post I was reminded of how much I love drama, of the arts kind. Nowadays either drama is the what people call about soaps like Kkusum or it is what people do to get something.

However the drama I speak of is defined as : a play in a theatre or on television or radio. I really love plays. In recent years I enjoy watching Marathi plays on Alpha TV, though I find the language a bit tough. In earlier days I used to watch Malayali plays when drama troupes used to visit Vashi. However over a period of time I find that quality of plays have suffered and most profitable plays tend to be of the slapstick variety. There are many reasons for this downfall and maybe we can discuss these reasons in another post. The silver lining is that there are still plays being written and performed which are unique, serious and makes one question oneself. It is sad that these plays make up only 5-10% of the whole gamut but at least they are there.

As I have mentioned in the previous paragraphs I love watching plays. However what I love even better is reading them. There is an unique pleasure in reading plays. You are the director, the actor and the audience. Your imagination gets a complete workout. Reading plays is not like reading prose, primarily due to the inherent structure. Prose is not as easy to read aloud as are plays. Plays also tend to have more dialogues in them, these dialogues being very expressive as the dialogues have to convey a lot of emotions. In prose the writer is not bound by dialogues and can express himself more freely. However due to this lack of the spoken words prose is not fun to act out. This is the precise reason that despite the greatness of a novel it takes a skilled playwright to convert it into a great movie.

Though I like reading plays I prefer reading stuff like Shakespeare as prose because I find the Old English quite difficult. Furthermore over the years my patience is not what it used to be . More often than not modern plays irritate me. So nowadays to get my kick of reading a play to myself I read screenplays of my favourite movies. For e.g.. I have read the screenplay for Pulp Fiction at least 15 times. Another great script that I regularly read is The Dead Poet's Society.

I would highly recommend all of you to try reading screenplays out. Choose your favourite English movie, stop over at the sites pointed to by this search(Google Search: film scripts) and read the screenplay. It is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon indoors.

P.S:I glanced at my post again and am embarrassed at the way all my thoughts are just flying around without coming together. Specially after reading beautifully put ideas in other blogs. Got to keep trying harder. Maybe I need to implement reviewing in my blogs too:( :D Any advise?

Data-Models

As all of us know there have been three major data models, Relational, Heirarchic and Network. Over a period of time relational has got the lion's share as the choice of modelling a databse. Though I appreciate all the plus points this model brings I must confess a certain nostalgic longing for network databases and the network model. The reason for this nostalgia was that I felt immediately at ease with the network model (once one understood currency), specially the ease with which I could map the real-life context to the database. As I was reading Marin Fowler's bliki (blog + wiki) I realised where this prejudice of mine comes from. He notes in his post that though relational is the model of choice for databases most programmers and designers use network and heirarchic models while representing data within their code. He explores this thought further. I would recommend all of you to read his post : MF Bliki: DataModels

Ooops! No money...no award!

Well well well, to make issues more interesting the Zee Cine Awards show had an auction for charity. My wife was quite suspicious about whether the person who won the bidding could afford it. I asked her not to be cynical. However she was right!!! Read on: 'Highest bidder' says it was a mistake.