Philosophies...

Before the subject of this post could confuse someone, I am talking about sports and specifically football. :-)

I was hearing some experts talking the other day on TV on how Liverpool has lost its way, its philosophy and how it will be a slow slide down as Spurs, Man City, Villa and possibly Everton push on for the elite Champions League slot. And this got me thinking about the match I am watching right now, the Champions League QF between Man U and Bayern Munich. Thanks to the telecast timings, I see more of English football than German and maybe things have changed off late. But the days I remember, Germany used to play flank to flank. Their legendary long passes used to define the style and philosophy and also variety of European football. But in this particular match, I am seeing a host of small passes. They are playing consistent and strong and for a change Man U seems to be the team without the plan. I am sure things will be very different when they play at Old Trafford, but for now, this is a very interesting game. The experience in the midfield of Van Bommel is defining the game and the relative ineffectiveness of Scholes to do something similar speaks of the lack of midfield superiority, though a very hardworking midfield of the current Man U team.

The match just got over and a surprising result with Bayern doing to Man U what Man U does so often to many a team, pipping the opponent at the finish line. An open game and a treat to watch... just wondering what tomorrows match between two of the most creative midfields in todays football, Arsenal and Barcelona will have in store. :-)

Its all an act...

When the Karnataka CM, Yeddyurappa made a tall claim of 23/7 electricity supply in the summer months leading up the school exams, most of the residents of Bangalore (whom I know :-)) had a huge sense of relief and disbelief.

It is not as if this was the first summer time that Bangalore has had power shortage, yet, such bold claims were not made in the past. So, what really prompted this magnanimous move? Actually what is more important an event that the yearly exams of kids is the once in nine years BBMP elections! And since the elections got over on Sunday, the place I stay has been witness to an average daily power cut of 5 hours!

Mr.Yeddy, I am sure the kids still have their exams on... wanna continue your magnanimity a little longer of should we wait a lot longer... say another 9 years!!

Start chirping...

... or tweeting.

Airtel has collaborated with Twitter to make tweeting available and affordable to all those non smartphone types who are still stuck in the world of sms's (your truly included). If you couldn't tweet coz your office blocks visiting non-work related sites or don't have net access at home or don't have phones with GPRS (nor 3G) enabled, your tweet solution is here.

I called up Airtel to confirm this and to find out if we had to pay a premium for sending and receiving these tweets. The answer I got was that the SMS's to this special number will cost the same as your local SMS and there are no other hidden charges. Happy tweeting...

Take a hike...

The industry in general may be recovering to its better days and the Finance Minister has helped us out a bit more with some tax sops. Below is the only meaningful extract I could make of everything.



As a good friend of mine said, the fuel price hike and the resulting hike in prices of everything else will more than make up for whatever IT sops Mr.Pranab has bestowed on us. The folks who know more about money and stuff claim that this is not a bad budget in general. I will go with that sentiment for now. :-)

On a related note:



:-)

Shadowy Google

It has hit the press and spread like wild fire, that google has threatened and in fact is pulling out of the biggest and possibly the fastest growing internet penetration markets in the world, China.

Google started with the "Don't be evil" as part of its code of conduct but has been walking a tight line as it has grown into the behemoth it now is. One the times when it turned a blind eye and chose to flirt with this code of conduct was in China. China has been a tough market to penetrate for many and the chinese cyber wayside is full of their remains. Google of course thinks it is special and can break the jinx and has been spending considerable time beefing up their china plans. But the cyber attack seems to have changed everything and a hasty plug pulling has happened. But I think there is more fire beneath all this smoke!

What if the attack on google sites (gmail) was in fact more than what google is making it out to be? What if there was a serious breach and google is trying to hush-hush the whole thing away while they take time to plan a cover up? Baidu is still the most popular search engine in China and google is not used to losing, at least not in search game. What if Google has lost patience as it fights the local search engines and are too big to claim defeat and see this as the right opportunity to get out of a bad state ?

Google has been pretty shrewd with its business dealings belying its otherwise geeky image. But this move is definitely business impacting and seems indefinite by nature which makes it even more real. Something is brewing or already has brewed, but the might of Google will definitely manage to close the lid on this faster than we think.

Two left feet...

... if I were talking about dance, sure there are many who qualify to be categorized as having two left feet. But if I were referring to football and if I were referring to Lionel Messi, you probably will understand that Messi with two left feet would be unstoppable!

And if you thought Messi was the only one from Argentina in today footballs to have a gifted left foot, then think again and watch the below video.

This is Angel Di Maria from Benfica who is being linked to move to the English Premier league teams like Chelsea or Man U this year. This kid is talented and has an attitude to boot!

A Thousand Words?

I couldn't help but post these two pics I saw in TOI today. They are varied and have no relation to each other, other than both having evoked strong and immediate responses in my mind.

First, Eeco from Maruti Suzuki. Somebody told me that Maruti is going to release 10 cars this year. If they are all going to be like the Eeco, I don't wanna see them!



The front of a Maruti 800 and the rear of the Omni! Wow... got to give it to the Maruti guys for creativity! But then, this is a super cheap family vehicle and starts at 2.8L. This is also most likely to be super cheap on safety features too, but does the segment that this car caters to really care about safety?

Secondly, what freedom really means can only be told by someone who doesn't have it or more so by someone who had it and lost it. This tiger sure was in a hurry to get back to his free life... and who could blame him?



Yes... pictures sometimes do say more than a thousand words.

Foolhardy

While casually browsing I came across a website which is supposedly useful to take meeting notes, agendas etc. I don't really know how useful something like this would actually be, but I thought of giving it a shot.

The site has a minimalistic look about it and before signing up, I wanted to understand what all it can actually do and I clicked the "intro" link and it didn't work. I was using firefox and switched to chrome and the link still didn't work. Last option, I went to IE 8 and then I get the below message.



Quite a gutsy company I would say, but it has got many things wrong here.
1. It is gonna take a while before IE dies, so don't narrow your user base.
2. I was using IE 8 and not IE 6
3. I used IE only coz firefox and chrome both couldn't open the link.

A brave but foolhardy company. :-)

Movie Review: Paleri Manikyam

A mallu movie in a theater after a looong time. We were five of us and we paid a total of Rs.200 for the tickets and no parking hassles. I would have paid the same amount for a single ticket in Bangalore! Anyway, back to the movie.

Paleri Manikyam is a period thriller which goes back to the time of the first communist government being installed in Kerala. Since it is a detective "whodunit" kinda thing, I obviously can't delve too deep into the actual story, but it is to do with the rape and murder of a young lady and then the elaborate cover up. The story is well taken forth in the first half with very limited yet accurate depiction of the 1950s. The second half starts well, but then tapers down a bit and ends as a whimper. Mammotty in his many roles has done a good job, while his supposedly platonic criminal analyst friend is absolutely useless. She neither serves as good eye-candy, nor is she playing any part in the story other than smoking and questioning. The rest of the characters have too small a role to be really impacting, but the convenience with which some of them volunteer information is unexplained. Above all this is the very reason as to why the protagonist starts on this investigative journey some five decades after the incident occurred. A good detective movie must drop enough hints for the viewer to play detective and solve the mystery and not just drop an obvious clue at the end or a totally new character introduced to close the mystery loop.

All in all, Paleri Manikyam is a good attempt at a thriller, but fails in certain areas which tends to slow the movie down and hence can't keep the audience glued down and wits challenged. I give it a 6.5/10.

Upgrading To Inaccuracy

The Indian Railways have come a long way in last decade. A lot of modernization, cleanliness and expansion drives have happened. One of the big pluses of the last decade has been irctc and the other numerous sites maintained by the railways that have sprung up.

I happened to visit one of them to get to know if the train I was to help someone board was on time. It said the train was on time and I got to the station on time. The train was blissfully late by 50 minutes and Bangalore can be quite cold this time of the year around midnight! Below is the information I got of the train after I just witnessed it being 50 minutes late!!



Either give accurate information or give no information at all. Half knowledge is dangerous and cold!

Hope...

First off, a very happy new year to all!

Looks like the year is going to be one for the greedy one in you. The doom sayers have not had much to do since the world economy has shown some recovery steps. And if the below chart is any indication, the US economy (the bellwether) is back to its spending ways.




Here's hoping for a pink-slip-less year ahead for all (can one ask for more than this these days?). :-)

Home, Sweet Home...

The term "home advantage" is used very often in sports and also with a similar meaning in situations that have nothing to do with sports. In a sport like cricket, playing on home ground means a lot. This is coz the game has a lot to do with the nature of pitch, the pace of the outfield, the weather, the humidity, the moisture etc etc. But this never made sense to me in a game like football. What could a home ground (other than spectator support) be of significance in football?

I got the answer, surprisingly, very close to home. :-). We at office play a game of football every week. There is a regular public ground that we visit and we rarely go to any other ground. Last week, for reasons of overcrowding (and this time the population of India was on display), we had to switch grounds. This new ground we went to, was bigger, but we also had a full complement of players. But before long, we knew the game was going to be very different. We are no great players, but don't suck too much either. Yet, the passes were not as accurate as usual, the ball trappings were not as clean, the flank angels were all awry, and most critically, the auto orientation on where your team players are more importantly the goal was completely missing. It was a fun game because it was well contested and not because of the quality of the game.

This experience of playing away from our "home ground" has definitely improved my appreciation of the home advantage theory being applicable in football too. :-)

Big!

Useless trivia... :-)

Search is on...

It has been a long time since I have covered a gadget on this blog. I have been on the hunt for a good TV media player which has the required HD play power and at least DTS downmix if not decoding capabilities. There are quite a few pretenders, like the Asus O!Play, Ryan AC PlayonHD etc, and I had almost narrowed down on the WDTV Live, but my perennial indecisiveness ensured I didn't jump the gun and boy am I glad I didn't!

A couple of days later, I see this! Now, this thing is super cute, super powerful (for its size) and feature rich. And as luck would have it, it is also super costly, approx $500. But as a colleague of mine at office suggests, you can never get more future proof (at least w.r.t media players) than a comp as upgrades are more easily available. Maybe I will wait for a few more months and see if more like these crop up and if they can be price competitive with the current slew of TV media players.

Until such a time... droooooooool! :-P

Really?

Our President, Pratibha Patel is no where as dynamic as Mr.Abdul Kalam. As a result, she is hardly seen or heard doing anything significant other than trying to ensure her family has a holiday every time she goes on an "official" visit abroad.

Off late, our leader has been donning the newspaper for equally frivolous reasons. She is going into the record books for sitting inside a Sukhoi fighter jet. Really? Is this really so important? What the hell does this accomplish for anyone? Is anybody "proud" of her? Damn as hell I am not! She just wasted a shit-load of my taxpayers money.

I wonder why our leaders are still stuck doing these kind of cheap gimmicks even in this time and age!

Genius!

I happened to read this article and view the video just a few minutes back and it just blew me away! Here is the wiki-link for the more interested folks.

A prototype device of $350 and you have further integrated the two worlds we live in today! This invention has the potential to be the next killer technology wave and when commodotized, it will be available to the common man at a price which will pressure M$ into thinking differently on their surface computing plans. Lets hope and pray for all the philanthropic dreams of Pravav Mistry to also come true!

...make it even better!

The football world cup is round the corner and there are a few final slots to be booked yet. One of them was going to Ireland or France. I didnt see the match live but heard so much about it that I had to see the videos on youtube. All the talk was about how Henry, the captain of the French national team used his hand quite deliberately to control the ball before passing it to gallas to score the all crucial goal.



As shocking as this was for Ireland, it really isn't shocking that incidents like this go unnoticed on a football field. Most sports today use technology, some more than others, to keep the game fair and controversy free. Will technology ensure zero controversy? Of course not, but it will dramatically reduce the number of absolute insults to the game. During football discussions at office and we have some very passionate discussions, I have heard of how the intervention of technology will slow down the game. Well, my counter argument to that is, the number of fake injuries, dives and unsporting conduct already eat a lot more time than technology could. And once the players know that the cameras all over the place are tracking not just their deft footwork but also their deft fakework, and foulwork, the number of actual minutes of "football" will only increase. There is another argument which says that technology will kill the charm of the game. While this could be true in a very minuscule manner, the way the game gets played these days, there is more cheating skills on display than football skills. And there is no charm in cheating!

Another way to look at this would be, these kind of controversies keep us talking about the game longer and this only helps the game get more popular. :-)

Pushing it...

Google is at it... again. We were today welcomed to watch the first glimpses of the Google Chrome OS or simply Chrome OS.



I have used the Chrome browser on and off. It is quick, it is more secure, it is not as customizable as firefox (yet), but in my experience it does hog a lot of memory incrementally. But none the less, it is a good attempt at a browser with certain clear innovations.

Now, the Chrome OS seems to be pushing the envelope even more considering the paradigm shift that we are expected to take compared to our regular OS use. This is probably the reason why they are releasing it more for the smart phones and netbook market rather than make it mainstream. The one thing about Chrome OS which sucks (at least for us poor souls in India) is that the whole OS is built on the assumption that you have a super fast net connection, which in India costs a bomb.

Anyway, we can be spectators watching the spectacle unfold and waiting for when our ISPs can offer us world class broadband at world beating price (like the telecom industry has). :-)

Irritated!

I don't follow cricket like I used to, but still something like this really irks me!

What did Dravid do wrong in the champions trophy that he is being dropped from the team? He was the top scorer and possibly the only guy who looks like he did his best to get India to a win! What did Raina do right that he is in the team? Who sees talent in Virat Kohli compared to Badrinath or Manoj Tewari or even Abhishek Nayar.

No wonder cricket (probably Indian cricket) no longer holds the special place in my day to day life. :-(

Reality beckons

The "startup days" of Linux seem to be behind it. Saw this interesting article come by and I couldn't agree more.

The more popular linux becomes, the more user friendly it becomes, the more it looks and feels like Windoze.