Sunday, October 26, 2008

Happy Diwali


Wish you all a happy and enlightened Deepawali. May this festival of lights dispel all darkness and fears from your life and brighten up your and your families lives.


I will miss this festival this year also! For consecutive year, I am here in US all away from my family and friends. Miss you all. Have fun and take care.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Freezing days not far away

Winter is gonna hit pretty soon this year here. It has already started getting cold and this week, for the last 3 days we have seen the gusts gaining speed. Today was another damn windy and chilly day towards evening. It has been predicted that this is gonna be a tough and rough winter this time! Boy, I imagine how much snow I am gonna witness.
You know, for tomorrow the prediction for low is -1C!! All I can say for that is turn on the heat and hide :)

Friday, October 17, 2008

Something to write about

Yawn.. and another one just followed the first...
Can't help..it's 1:27 AM to be precise and usually I would have been in my dreams by this time, but today being a Friday night..oops it's already Saturday..I have the privilege of staying awake n rising late in the morning :)

This week has been busy..work has always kept me on tips and toes and thankfully tennis is back in daily routine..Sad part is that we are playing just for an hour now :( reason is that the lights are no more available after 7 PM. It starts getting dark at 6:30 and by the time we decide to wrap it up it's almost 7 and we have to leave the court sadly..Anyways, I got a new racket for me coz the one I had broke early this week. I know we wont be getting to play longer, but I wanted to utilize every single day we have. Come November 2nd, and Daylight saving will be off and we will not be having virtually any time to play on weekends if the lights are not on!

Today, like most of this week, I was damn busy in work. Was glued to my desk till the last minute to 5. I wanted to finish up all pending tasks before leaving office today and didn't really wanted to finish up from home. Luckily, I did what I was aiming for. After coming back to the apartment, we decided to go to Chilli's for Dinner and then head to a movie. We had two options, either Body of Lies or Max Payne.

When I reached apartment, the first thing I had to do was finish up the last 5 minutes of the last episode of Friends. What a way to end. I felt like an era has ended. For the ten seasons, I felt like I was so much involved with every character, that I can not come to terms that it has ended. I know, I am watching it all over again, but then that is with Friends. You can see it all over again and again. I was able to connect to many things in different episodes at times to different situations I have been. I will be writing another post on this whole thing, some time late next week. But, I wanna say that I love this series and this is a hell great series. So much emotion packed, that I will never forget Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler and Ross!

We hit Chilli's around 9. Food was great as has been last time. I had no drinks :) and I'm cool about that right now! Presidente Margarita was quite appealing, esp when it's on your table, but I know very well that I can control myself when I really want to. So, was clean :) The cool thing there was that most of the time, I was checking on a hot waitress who was most of the time standing by the computer where other servers were coming and keying in their orders n stuff like that. She was in my direct vision zone and I never left a chance to look at her! Man, she was hot! Had I had guts, I would have at least asked her name :( Whew!

We left at around 9:45 and reached GSP well in time for the show. Hmm, now about the movie, Body of Lies. Well, what would you expect out of a political drama-cum-thriller? I don;t expect to see sleazy bodies there, nor do I expect screwed up songs and some spicy bollywood stuff. The movie delivers what it is expect to. Perfect direction, some tight acting by two greats. But, here Leonardo DiCaprio stole the thunder from Russel Crowe. Leo as always has performed intensely and with all emotions needed for his part. Russel did not had much of screen presence, but I really noticed the perfectionism in some scenes. Last time, I had marked the details was in American Gangster. I liked the movie, but not all will like! It had some thrilling scenes and also some chilling ones...Overall, I will credit Ridley Scott for exploring a sensitive subject and he did well!

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Boost your Brain

Interested in boosting your brain? Of course, you will be. So don't stay back and jump on here to learn 120 ways to boost your brain.
Thanks to StumbleUpon!

Website Finds of the Week!

Fun Website
Scrabble Yippee
Photo

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Skwee-mish

I think I am squeamish when it comes to food. I have found myself often in situations where I have to starve myself due to the appearance of the food. No matter, it is tasty or someone is asking me again and again to try some stuff, my mind does not allows me to go for it. I know this is not good for me. I should have a knack for tasting things and trying out. But then, I am often lamed by my taste buds who reject new things coming my way. Rarely, I have appreciated a new delicacy.

For many weeks, all I had in lunch here was Cheese Pizza :) Being a non-vegetarian does not gives you full liberty to try and eat stuff here in US. Obviously precondition is your religious beliefs, which in my case places restriction. Here, you have to specifically ask for no-meat to mean that you don't want beef. Once I was with my friends in Woodbury Premium Outlets, up in NY state and feeling the hunger in stomachs we went to food court. I wanted to go for egg roll,which I did not had for a long time. I ordered it on a Chinese joint and then waited for my order. Thankfully, one of the staffers from the joint came to me and said that the egg roll will contain beef! I was taken back and at the same time was thankful to him for letting me know! He would have seen an Indian ordering something which hsa beef :)

Taste buds wake up and accept new things coming your way. At least try!

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Delhi Bomb Blasts 2008


Delhi was hit by a serial bomb blasts on 9/13 when 5 blasts took place in different parts of city. The target areas where prime markets and a public park. The terrorists chose a weekend as the number of people outside in the markets is obviously more on such days. The blasts took place in Karol Bagh, GK M-block market, Central Park in C.P. and Barahkhamba road again in C.P. Around 3o are dead and 100 injured. 3-4 live bombs were found in the following raids. One was found near India gate (which draws huge crowds on weekends during evening hours), Regal Cinema (a popular theater in C.P.) and then one in Central Park. Bomb disposal squads of NSG were in action and detonated all live bombs. A 10 year old balloon seller, who has become prime witness to one of the bombing locations had seen tow men in black clothes, getting down from an auto-rickshaw and putting a black polythene bag in a dustbin. All bombs were put in trash cans at the bombing locations. A terrorist Outfit named Indian Mujaheddin has claimed responsibility in an email which was sent to many media organizations, 5 minutes before the blasts actually took place. The email was traced back to Mumbai.

This whole episode is connected to Bangalore and Ahmedabad blasts which took place earlier this year. The same outfit was behind those blasts. In the email released before Ahmedabad bomb blasts, the group has shown their dirty face and the venom against India and the Hindus in particular.

Abdul Subhan Quereshi, the alleged mastermind behind Delhi bomb blasts as well as Bangalore and Ahmedabad blasts, it the current most wanted man in India. He is still not traceable by police or security agencies and he is continuing to mock security establishments and threatening more bloodshed!
He presents the ugly face of Islamic terrorism, where again and again educated people are surfacing as masterminds and executors of heinous act of slaughter. Such people let me think the strong brain washout centers which the Islamic terrorists are running. How they do it and how long they take to washout an educated civilian before he becomes a hard-core terrorism expert? If they can get an educated person to do such things, how easy it would be for them to do the same to an illiterate fell coming from a village? Again these things throw a challenge to the world as to completely track and destroy every single center and immediately terminate every single human being associated with such centers, where such insane teachings are imparted and people are trained to become beasts who are zombies. We all know how strong the terror network has become and every day, its proved in our face like a slap that they are getting better and more gruesome and obviously we are showing again and again that we are helpless!

Why can't we come up with solutions and master plans for hunting down the terrorists like we come up for city development? Why is it so hard for the central government and state governments to launch an offensive drive country wide against such inhuman bastards? I do understand that terminating the current breed of terrorists won't do good and so some people might question my offensive statements. But at the core of heart, I guess most of us know that offense is the only thing left with us at this hour. This is the reason, I had said in last para that we have to track and demolish every such institution where such immoral and heinous teachings are imparted! Unless and until the source is cut off, we will not be completely safe. The time is ripe for all political parties to come together and join hands so that their state governments can work in tandem with the center in launching a drive which will make sure that Islamic terrorism is eradicated from it's roots. If we don't start it now, we will be too late for sure.

Intelligence Bureau, the Indian Army, RAW, CBI, CID, STF and every police unit of this country has to come together and share information and launch drives if we want to put an end to this fight in our country. Those bloody bastards can't hide in our country unless we let them. We have enough resources to track every damn bastard and show doors to hell. We can do it, all we need is a day when we decide it is time! And I don't know how many more cities we are waiting to blast before we actually do anything? How many more dead bodies?

I was thinking about the steps which we need to take at the earliest. Some of my thoughts are here under:
1. We need to step up security everywhere in our country. The first in these should be more secure checking of every person leaving or entering our borders, which should span our international land borders (esp the Indo-Nepal and Indo-Bangladesh borders), Airports, docks and for sure the entry-exit routes through water (which will include the whole coastal line).
2. We need to install more numbers of high-clarity close circuit cameras at all strategic locations mentioned above and need to have the supporting back-end infrastructure. I am pretty sure our government has enough money to support such installations. If not, cut the fuel bills of the politicians in offices for a week. I am sure, that will bring in so much revenue that it will cover one month bill of such installations and the man-power behind that. (Well, I may be wrong in the estimates, but then this is the initial draft).
3. The next step should be stepped up security at all public places in each and every city. This should include railway stations, bus terminals, multiplexes, theaters (the owners should be responsible for this as a community service effort), shopping malls (again the owners should be responsible), public parks, government offices and buildings.
4. This whole information (the surveillance and other digital information) should be hosted on a distributed network where all government security agencies can have access to without much red-tape. Obviously, we are talking about READ access here and not the write access. The subsequent action by a non-owner of the information has to be shared with the owner. This will make sure that the credit is made to both the owner of information and the information grabber. And secondly, this will make sure an efficient and timely execution.
5. This whole computerized infrastructure will not be hard to build, operate and maintain as we have NIC for our help. They already have offices in every state capital and so building such a network won't be so tough. On a side note, some more jobs will also be created!
6. The next step should be hiring more computer security experts and training officers in cyberspace crimes and computer security. If the terrorists want to use technology as their helping hand, let's tell them who is more of an expert. A team should come up which has all computer experts, who can track information flowing on web, the hosting parties, the emails, the phone calls and related stuff. This organization should be under purview of some central agency (CBI can have a department under them, if they don't have one already). Again the base will be the distributed network where all state agencies are pouring information for one-another.

This will be an example of community effort towards a good cause. A front-end website will be of great use, where the interested citizens and of course the media can keep track of things which are safe to broadcast.

Well this is just an initial draft of a master plan which I have in my mind. I will be brainstorming on more such ideas and ways which we can have in place and which are completely feasible.

Every single citizen of this country has to know that the terrorists are not killing only a single religion when they preach their fabricated statements of hate towards other religion. It's humanity they hate and not non-Islamic religions. And it's all due to some of the insane people who are bringing more people with them and killing them morally before they actually die. We as citizens have to know that we have to cooperate and come together if we want this all to stop. You may never know when you or someone of your family and known ones become a target to their fanaticism.

The bottom line is United we Stand, divided we fall

Rock on and A Wednesday ...

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Back with a Bang!

Prison Break returned on Fox with its 2 hour special first episode of Season 4 on Fox. Of all the current thrillers going on TV right now, this one is the best in my opinion. Wentworth Miller is as always...tight acting and yes Sarah is back!!! Yippe... Thanks a lot to the writers and producers who got her back. Sarah Wayne Callies is so cute that had she been taken out of the series, half of the excitement for the series would have died down.
Keep Watching ...

Google Chrome


Google launched Beta version of its own web browser named Chrome today. It's available for download and use, currently only for Windows users. They will be unveiling the Mac and Linux versions pretty soon as listed on their website.
Google has announced the launch on Sep 1 on the Official Google Blog. The project is Open-Source and Google has credited Apple's Webkit and Mozilla Firefox for some of the components and ideas. Chrome is based on Google's V8 engine, which is Google's open source JavaScript engine.
They have come up with a comic introduction for the inception and features of Google Chrome, which is worth read! Do read it here for two reasons, you will get to know about the ideas behind the browser, technical as well as non-technical. Then the best thing I liked was the thought and presentation! God, I never had thought that someone will introduce some tech app through a comic. What a brilliant thought it is! Whoever thought of the comic deserves accolades. It keeps you with itself and you keep on reading all pages. I don't remember when was the last time that I was reading about some product's brainchild and technical details. Whew, Well done Google! Another innovative idea, I will say!

Hiccups
I tried to install the browser and it was smooth. A 474 KB exe was downloaded in a snap and installation also was fast like other Google Apps. But, but but the pages failed to load and the browser threw an application error :(


I am gonna reinstall it and try again after some time.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Medal number 2 for India \m/

Time for some more celebrations. Sushil Kumar has won a Bronze Medal in Men's Freestyle Wrestling (60-66 Kg).
Congrats Sushil and thanks a lot for bringing some more laurels to our motherland.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Finally, one for Shawn!



Shawn Johnson hasn't been that lucky so far. She missed Gold on three occasions once to her friend Nastia. She was touted as a favorite and must-watch for apart from Michael Phelps. Nevertheless, she managed to keep her cheered and was always smiling, no matter how much she would have felt at inside for loosing by close margins.

18th was a different day and she won the Gold in Balance Beam outpacing her fellow team-mate and friend Nastia. I was really happy for her! She deserved more than that. I would really love to see her and Nastia back in 2012 Olympics.

All the best to Shawn and Nastia!

Friday, August 15, 2008

It's that time of the year!

Phew, it came and went. Yesterday was my birthday. I grew an year older and became more mature and seen some more of the world. Had one more year of my share of happiness, sadness, agony, ecstasy, expectation, despairment, thoughts and what not. More things went away and some things came along. More things were archived in my head and some things became just part of memories; good or bad is something I will think of later.
It's really amazing that the feeling starts building up few days before and when the day actually comes, you feel great. Something happens on the day, which can't be explained, which makes you happy and keeps you tuned up the whole day. Towards the end of the day you start getting a sinking feeling that it's soon gonna be over.
Yesterday, the day started off well. I got few calls from my friends and family and then scraps were pouring in throughout the day. Had to come to office so nothing much happened in the day. Late evening, Manish and Pooja hosted a small party at their apartment and rest of the folks came over to preside the cake cutting :) So towards the end of the day, it turned up quite well. I felt good coz earlier in the day, It was just another day for me with nothing much happening. Nevertheless, in the end it was all good with cake and red wine (my fav).
This was followed up by watching Olympics. Two great events were lined up. 200 m IM for men, where Michael Phelps was gunning for his 6th gold and then there was Woman's All around gymnastics final where USA was having two hot favorites in Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson. Believe me, watching Phelps in action is a treat in itself. The guy is really like a torpedo in water. He starts smoothly and slowly and by the time he has to turn back he is the fastest. He starts building a lead as soon as he starts his second lap and by the time he crosses the half-mark of the penultimate lap, he maintains a full body length distance from his next closest opponent. He made another WR yesterday and won the Gold Medal in that event.
At National Indoor stadium, US was going to test it's luck with Nastia and Shawn. Both of them started pretty well. Shawn faltered a bit at the uneven bars and was low on points. But on vault she was splendid. Nastia on the other hand was great at uneven bars but the judges were not much appeased in giving her points. But then she was absolutely amazing at balance beam with a perfect execution. Both of them scored equal points on floor where they dominated the rest opponents. In the end, Nastia edged past Shawn by a mere 0.6. But the US national anthem played in the National Indoor Stadium at last. Nastia bagged Gold and Shawn had to do with Silver. It was really an amazing performance to watch. I must mention Ksenia Semenova of Russia who was so beautiful at uneven bars and deserved the highest points in that event but somehow the judges disagreed and gave Yilin Yang (China) most points, despite not so impressive performance. Anyways, end is all that matters.
So, this is how this birthday of mine went by. Tried to call somebody as promised but wasn't able to talk. Later I thought that maybe I was not supposed to call and talk. Was kind of a signal.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Pool Shark continues his dominance



Michael Phelps of US has made history with being the Olympian with most medals ever. Phelps has 11 golds so far and he is eying another 3. He is literally destroying every race he is entering.
So far in this Olympics, he has participated in 5 swimming events and he has won Gold in all of them. What makes this whole thing more spectacular is that he kept on making World Record in all of them. 3 more events are to go and he is eying to break Mark Spitz's current world record of 7 Golds in a single meet!
I pray to God that he does it! Good Luck Michael!

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

The Chinese Gymnasts Debate!

You must have came across the news about the possible fake staged by Chinese authorities regarding their women gymnast team. It's been widely discussed and debated as to whether the Chinese gymnasts fulfill the age criteria imposed by IOC? IOC states the minimum age to be 16 years for competing in any event. This restriction is in place to ensure that younger children do not burn out in wake of pressure and preparations. It seems China thinks otherwise.
When I watched the Chinese gymnasts, I came on the side of the people who think that Chinese gymnasts are under-age. The US team coach, Bela Karolyi commented that some of the Chinese gymnasts are still having baby teeth and may be watching Dora, The Explorer :) I think he is right. China has produced passports for all these athletes which has their ages as 16 years old. Passport is the only document which has been ratified by IOC as the Identification and age-proof.
Check out the video posted on Yahoo which covers this debate and has a forensic expert trying to guess the age of Chinese athletes!

Let's start covering Olympics!

Well, this post forward my posts will center around Olympics. And yes Kudos to Abhinav Bindra from bringing honors to the country!

Monday, August 11, 2008

Worst movie so far of the year

It's again a proven fact for me. Never go for movies which have a lot of hype around them! I went for Singh is King on Sunday night. Believe me, I am clueless how and why people are enjoying this movie back in India! The movie is such a waste and I can say insane.
Let's start from Direction. Well, there was no direction at all. It looks like the director let loose everyone esp the editing staff to do whatever they feel like. And the editing staff made much of this gift and acted like drunkards! At one moment, you are at a place and the very next you are taken to a totally different situation as if there's no gradual shift between scenes. I don't know who is the lyricist and I don't even want to know! A complete shit in terms of lyrics! Abusive words are the prominent show of the first song in the movie. It looks like Hindi movies are slowly and slowly demeaning the Indian cinema. It's alright to have some stuff for the sake of some people's ART. But when the mukhda of a song is an abusive word, what do you say! Some of the scenes are a total mess, without logic without any thought! This irritates me more when I think that Bollywood is churning sensible movies like Taare Zameen Par and then you see a crap like this. Well, there should be no difference of opinion that Katrina doesn't knows acting. All she can manage is her smile. She proved this again here. Akshay, I don't know what he saw in this movie before signing this one! May be he knew that this is what Indian Cine goers are waiting for and that's something which is making this movie hit! It was disappointing to hear that this movie is doing good in India. Makes me sad to think how and why people are loving such stuff.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Cricket

I got a chance to play cricket today morning. I guess I had not played since Apr 2006. There was not much of a gathering, only 9 people were there. Nevertheless, it was so fun playing with others and that too in US.
Thanks to Manish :) who asked me. We will be meeting again next Saturday and we will be almost 15 then. Waiting for next Saturday :)

Monday, July 28, 2008

Cuil


Cuil (pronounced "cool"), a new search engine was opened to public today morning. This company has been founded by some ex-Google employees. Anna Paterson, her husband Tom Costello, who worked for IBM being at the helm of things.
Ms. Paterson and Mr. Costello have a history with search engines. They founded a search engine in 90s called Xift. Anna then wrote a search engine used for internet archives which was ultimately sold to Google. She was with Google with one of the product groups which is involved with rankings - one of the most important part of a search engine. Ms. Paterson has claimed that Cuil has searched 120 billion pages with only 140 servers, thanks to the new algorithm in place which was kind of designed by Tom. Cuil has raised $33 mn in all till date and has spent only $7 mn. Cuil has an index which is three times of Google's index as claimed by Ms. Paterson.


So, how does it fare in the game? Well, for me it was not great. OK, the presentation is new, which kind of appeals with a newspaper/magazine layout where you can read something about the link before actually opening it. And then there are pictures also along with those text snapshots from those web pages, which sometimes has nothing to do with the actual site! The search results are not that impressive. Maybe Cuil needs a bit of in-field work out before going for big claims. No matter how good you are your theories, you need to go in the field to have a feel of the real thing. I say that because, in the morning I was trying to search for "Web 2.0" as a test string on Cuil and all I was getting on the first page were companies who develop applications for Web 2.0. There was only one link, which was pointing me somewhere where I could have known about what the term means and that link was not under direct focus of the eye. That particular link was placed under the category's box! A place where your eye won't go in first look. I kept trying with the term till late afternoon and I was getting same sort of results. The same query string on Google, Yahoo returned me more meaningful links where I can learn about Web 2.0. Only a few hours ago, the result set changed on Cuil and now the first link there is Wikipedia article about Web 2.0 (which was not even present till 3 pages in the morning). The O'Reilly link which was present under Category box in the morning has also shifted towards left. Nevertheless, 80 percent of links on page 1 are more of commercial nature. Well, I hope the results will improve with days.


The Explore by Categories feature is a nice one which is kind of helpful with many search strings. But this is also giving an unrelated set of links for a lot of query strings. An example is, I searched for "New Delhi" and under Categories box, I get "Chief ministers of Jharkhand"!!

Nevertheless, a nice attempt and hopefully Cuil, if not merged with some search giant, can be a nice companion to Google but not a competitor in near future! Here's NY Time's article on Cuil.

Google did not commented on Cuil's launch (even after some of it's top ranking employees have started it) but they posted a blog on their official site which commented that Google always knew that web was big. They kind of thwarted Cuil's attempt to say that they have a larger index than Google by saying that there are infinite number of unique web pages and they don't know the exact number nor had the time to look for it as it all depends upon how you define what is a useful page. Their comment really impressed me. And after all, it's out there, you can go on and see for yourself.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Fighting for being Lesbian???

The world is indeed full of strange people and strange places. I have often came across people or have heard of some who have an interest in trying to be in limelight without giving a thought. What I mean to say is that, there are people out there who will stand up for something funny, pointless issue and try to gather people's attention towards them. All such acts often draw attention but almost every time the people behind such things become point of ridicule! At least from my perspective.

Today I came across of one such act. Lesbos is a Greek island located in northeastern Aegean sea. I had never heard of this place before and I would not have heard in future also but thanks to those three residents of this island who filed a court case to ban the use of word Lesbian to describe Gay women. The residents argued that using the term in reference to Gay women insulted their identity. Nevertheless, the Athens court ruled against them saying that there was no justification for their contention.
 
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