Cell phone waiting area

Few weeks back when I went to pick up my sister at Dulles airport, I observed an uncommon sign on my way; it read “Cell phone waiting area”. I found out later that, people coming to the airport to pickup their friends/relatives can wait in this lot, which is free of cost until the person comes out of the terminal and calls you. I thought what a great idea. Check it out.

Field placements during the final overs

This was a nice sight to see. Munaf Patel bowling the last few overs with kumble. But bad luck it was too late to win the game.

Pic from Cricinfo – I liked the comment below it – “Fielders take position to grab just about anything that comes their way, including the ball“

THE best prank I ever heard/read

Bestbuy prank.

This is really hilarious. It took me 20 mins to read the entire page, and I was laughing all the time. These guys rock and Best buy obviously did not take it easy.

Just imagine a group of 80 people entering best buy wearing dark blue half hands T-shirt and kakhi pants. (Which is Best buy’s uniform). They just stood there. On their part, they did not try to steal, nor do anything unlawful. They just stood in the store and the Original Best Buy employees freaked out. They even called the cops.

I mean, I understand the frustration of a customer who goes to one of these 80 guys with a question and they do not get an answer. I will be frustrated. But most of them were just saying that they do not work here. They did not direct the customers to a wrong aisle or anything like that. But surely customers will be frustrated and thats the only thing wrong about this prank. But even if u are not dressed in the uniform some of us are mistaken to be working in the store. Personally, I always make sure I ask the question to the right guy. I also ask them sometimes do u work here before asking a question. But anyway keep that aside. Some of the conversations were hilarious.

The one I like the most is this -

“Do you know where I can find a USB port?” she said.
“What is that?” I said.
“It’s a computer thing,” she said.
“What does USB stand for?” I asked. She gave me a strange look.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You just plug it in…”

At that point a Best Buy employee wearing a black shirt came running over shouting “She doesn’t work here!” but the girl was already heading down the escalator.

He turned to me and said, “You can’t help her!”
“Oh, believe me,” I said. “I wasn’t helping her.”

Facelift

It has been 2 week effort to move from blogger to WordPress. The tougher part was to deploy wordpress on my webserver and then import my existing blogs from blogger to the new setup. With the help of tutorials and some help from googling, I was able to complete this. Also I was able to spend some time installing plugins and customizing the theme to this.

I did involve working with little bit of PHP and lot of CSS.

The plugins I installed are -

Inline AJAX Comments by Kashou [ Customized CSS colors to suite the theme ]
dc* theme 0.5 by Jon Roobottom. [ Customized a lot, changed colors, removed background images ].

There are many features provided by WordPress, that are not in blogger. But the one I will be using the most is the “Categories”. I posted about categorizing blogs using del.icio.us and blogger sometime back. But now, with the categories feature built in to WordPress, I do not need to tag my posts any more to categorize them.

There is lot more control in WordPress as it is deployed on my server. Refer to the features list of WordPress for details.

Frustrated…

I think there is no other way I can express my views about the second test. The way the match went on, on the second day I thought pakistan had a plan. They made enough runs and got quick wicket of shewag. But we stuck to the field but got a lead of just 15 runs. When they started batting on the fourth day, they were in real good knock and also the pitch was assiting the bowlers some what. There was late swing for the medium pacers like Irfan. Younis the acting captian being on the field would have noticed this for sure. But it almost looked like he wanted to make some runs for himself. If he wanted to put us on pressure he should have declared by playing some 30 overs on the fifth day. Which would be real pressure on india. Sehwag was out on food poisoning, so India would have troubles to open up with a good pair and for sure we would have lost some early wickets. They made 391 runs and declared and how many overs were left to bowl?? just 10. Even Harbhajan wouldn’t mind to open in such situations…. RIDICULOUS.

Online photo hosting…

Last year I was searching for photo hosting services, to publish my personal digital pictures.
I was not that inclined towards yahoo as I use my Yahoo ID only with IM. Also I found the process of uploading pictures one by one painful. A good friend of mine was already hosting his personal pics on his website. I took his reference to coppermine photo gallery and installed it on my website. It was a pretty neat software. It runs on any web hosting server which supports PHP and MySQL. It had all the necessary features to host personal photo gallery. I had it for little more than a year. Coppermine has a pretty neat and simple admin interface. It worked for me pretty well. I had lots of albums created and after Nishant’s arrival, I had good use of it. The only disappointing thing about Coppermine is, it has a standard way of displaying the pictures of an album. After sometime you get bored of it. So I started searching for alternatives.

There was flickr and other similar picture sharing websites now. I was pretty much impressed with flickr. So I created an account (you can use your yahoo account also) with flickr and uploaded the pictures. Another thought was also that, if I use flickr, I can save space on my webserver. I can upload my pics on flickr and use some flickr tools that are built around the flickr API to access and display the fotos on my website. But I hit a road block. Flickr allows to get information about Public fotos only. If you want to access your private fotos or tags, using flickr API then you need to sign in. There is no other alternative. I was not ready to make my fotos public on flickr. It does not make sense. I tried a lot but had to give up flickr.

Then I came across another PHP & MySQL based hosting application called gallery. I was very impressed with it. It has a clean admin interface (better than coppermine) and supports lots of themes. I deployed it on my web hosting server and it works well. Check it out. I have not solved the web server space issue, but thats fine for now.

Firefox extension to blog

I came across a post on gadgetopia – Performancing for Firefox | Gadgetopia which pointed me to Performancing for firefox extension. Installing this extension, provides a spit screen interface to post to your blog. The interface is clean and has all the options available to post. I am posting this, using the same plugin. Check it out. There is also a tutorial avaiable.

Bring it on Google….Yahoo

Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us and Six Apart, Inc in a period of 2 days. It was an interesting move by Yahoo, and opted to remain silent about these. Yahoo also acquired flickr and few weeks ago.

Google was known for such acquisitions. When I started using del.icio.us, I was more hoping that google would make a move to acquire.

So here we have, 2 giants on web acquiring and building their service-base. Google offers lots of services as of now. Look at this blog that lists all of them. On top of these, Google came with Mobile Gmail today. Google also is improving their existing services like GMail and Google Personalized homepage. I feel that Yahoo is also heading in the same direction.

As of now Google is offering more services as compared to Yahoo. We need to wait and see whats ahead. Here is the list of some similar services offered by Google and Yahoo [most of them are very familiar].

Google vs Yahoo
GMail vs Yahoo Mail
GTalk vs Yahoo IM
Search vs Search
Picasa vs Flickr
Blogger vs Movable Type
Answers vs Answers
Maps vs Maps
Toolbar vs Toolbar
Groups vs Groups
News vs News

These are the most common services that both have. The similarity stops there, I think. Google has many more services. Customized searches, AdSense, Froogle, Googlebase, Earth, Print are some of them. Google also has a service called code.google.com

Google always improves its existing services. Notice RSS Feeds in GMail? or GMail for Mobile?

Del.icio.us should be an interesting addon to Yahoo family. Looks like It is already shaping up in My Web 2.0 of yahoo.

Using RSS readers

I was never a big fan of reading blogs or websites using RSS readers. Everyday I come to work and spend my first half hour visiting my morning set of websites one by one, until recently.

Last week I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 and was pretty happy with it. Downloaded new set of plugins and started playing around. Then I noticed that there were a bunch of RSS reader plugins for Firefox. Firefox by default comes with an option of “Live Bookmarks” which acts like an RSS reader. So I thought of using an RSS reader as I got addicted to some blogs recently.

First option was to try the “Live Bookmarks” feature of FF. It was ok. There was no indication of new posts or anything like that. So I was not happy.

Moved onto something called “Wizz RSS”. It was pretty impressive at first. Its a proper RSS reader plugin for Firefox. The main window opens in the Side bar of the browser and notifies of new posts and stuff like that. But it was not really that impressive. It comes with a clunky toolbar and the options can be set only from the toolbar and not from the main side panel. I hate additional toolbars on my browser. And also the side panel had lots of bugs. I could not drag and drop the feeds into different directories. I had to use a pop window of the plugin to do that.

I was doing some searching on google and found this service called “Pluck”. I found only this website that integrates the web account with a firefox plugin to access my feeds. It needs a simple registration. I tried it. IT IS SLOW. Not at all intutive and the plugin interface was nothing new.

I tried another one called Sage. This was good and I am now sticking with it. It has a refresh button and notifies us with new feeds. Look at the screenshot. I can right click on the feed and mark them as read/unread.

I can say that I started to like RSS reading. I am happy that I tried it .

Another problem I faced with any RSS reader plugin is.. it occupies alot of browser window space on the left hand side. So I downloaded another plugin, All-in-one Sidebar, which allows me to minimize the sidebar.

Also on a side note, there is a new delicious plugin available for firefox. It integrates well into every website visted and works pretty well.

The final match….all eyes on the indian team

It is frustrating to see Pathan to bowl on the off side to Smith all the time. It is evident that the ball is not swinging by the end of 5th over. But still, Pathan bowls on his off side expecting him to miss the ball and hand a catch to the wicket keeper. But everytime the ball pitches on the offside it goes to a four. Smith played a good innings. I cannot call it great because the runs to score for a win is just 188 and the ball was not swinging at all. All smith had to do was to wait for the easy delivery and hit it. And thats what he did.

I am not really worried about the loss. What worries me is the attitude. From the very first over pathan was not bowling in the right places. SA was is the same situation in the banglore match. Look at the bowling figures of Pollock (6 – 3 – 10 – 1). That says alot. Banglore pitch had the same amount of due. But Pollock bowled at the right places. I agree that there were no wickets, it is because of the due factor. But he followed the right line and length. Where as Pathan and Agarkar always tried to beat the batsmen.

I hope they will look at the replays again and again. They should look at every 4 that Smith hit in the calcutta match. You bowl short, he hit onto his left side. You bowl slightly on the offside, he used to push it towards the offside and the power he uses, pushes it to a 4.