enginerd

"Nothing gets the nation going like Cricket does." A few days ago, I would have thought twice before saying this, but the recent exploits of our Men in Blue in the European continent have ensured that we fans have converted back to our first religion of choice- Cricket! They went to Ireland down and out- written off, forgotten by their fans, away from the radar of the media. And then, all it took was a 2-1 drubbing of the Proteas in Belfast and the "Team India" was on its road to recovery- the road to fame again. Then came England and by this time, the media had got excited- again, the newspapers and Television were discussing cricket- again, and "expectation" was back- again. The Mighty Four were on their last full tour to England and all of a sudden, none wanted to miss the spectacle. Cricket was back, forgotten for just a while, but back in all its glory; much like one of its own disciples whom we all know as Dada. The nation was believing again, so ...

I'll have to admit that the nature of Pottermania is beyond my comprehension capabilities! As more and more fans of all ages and countries immerse themselves in Harry’s adventures, adding fuel to the belief that Pottermania is inescapable, I am purely and simply baffled by its ability to appeal to all ages. Bored by the inactivity prevailing in this muggle world, I began to read the first one of the series and immediately concluded that reading beyond the tenth leaf was something impossible. Undeterred, I watched the first movie. I Hated it. But with the evil-wizard becoming apple of more and more eyes with every passing moment, around the world, it could only have been something wrong with me and so I watched the second movie. And then it became so easy to establish that I loathed the Potter Kid! Just a passing thought - "Would it be a bad idea for a Potter special appearance in Oliver Twist? The poor kid could do with some wizardry."

OK. In the last few hours, I've been asked this question thrice and hence this post: Who am I rooting for in this Wimbledon? I no longer cheer for "Gentlemen's Tennis" these days. For it is unusually mundane and boring. FedEx and Nadal are way way ahead of anyone else that is clearly reflected in their rankings and hardly makes for any competition. Andy Roddick comes a distant third and this makes watching men's game a little less exciting when compared to the yesteryears of the men's game. The years that passed by had a different air to them, with the likes of Sampras, Agassi, Jim Courier, Goran Ivanisevic taking to the courts, the atmosphere that much more intense, the involvement all that much more. Plus as my friend Santosh says it- where are the serve and volley plays! (For all those jigging about on this stance of mine on FedEX and Tennis, I won't still buy your arguments about Schumi's dominance making F1 mundane though! F1 without Schumi is s...

The last Monday I woke up feeling not all that well- indisposed with some sort of weird cold, the sort that makes your nose go blue or pink, and a nasal tone that could give even  Himesh Reshammiya a semblance of some competition. This illness streak has continued for the week and it's only now, on a cloudy, windy Sunday afternoon that I feel fine, almost perfectly. Besides sickness, nothing really happening except that I moved in to a new place with another awesome bunch of guys. That adds something like 70 odd more minutes to my commute everyday and requires an ungodly time for me to wake up. But then, I get 24x7 Internet connectivity here which more than makes up for the trivialities :) And for all those, who believe that the geek quotient of the enginerd weblog has come down drastically in the recent past, here's something real cool that I came across: Piclens I installed Piclens ,a firefox plugin  which delivers an  "immersive full-screen experience for vie...

I have a disability when it comes to music- understanding it and appreciating it. So much so that sometimes when I stand with my friends, I can't help but feel that they are an alien bunch talking gibberish in an alien language about this thing they call music. I stand there dazed and confused, seemingly lost in their conversations laced with words like melody, rythmn, beats and what not. They say its World Music Day today; and that I have a serious problem.

Sania Mirza appears again on the enginerd weblog . This time for two reasons: 1. She is back in Top 50 again. Good going Miss. 2. The Indian Express (IE) goofup where her pic is with the caption: "Railway Minister Lalu Prasad cuts cake during the celebration of his 60th birthday as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress". Some correlation this: Sania in 50. Lalooji just out of his 50s. Not quite the intended caption!!! Bombay update: Last couple of days in Bombay have been hectic and a lot of fun. Back to Bangalore tomorrow morning. And I heard Desh was on Radio City!

Girl: Did you know this [...] happened? Me: Yes, I read about it in the TOI . Girl: You read the TOI ? Me: Absolutely. I am a big Information junkie. Girl (with that unapproving look): You got to be kidding me! You mean you actually look up the TOI for information??? Me (quipping): Oh yes, I do! In fact, I start with the supplement- The Bangalore Times. Wonder why girls got to act so smart!

At lunch today, the topic of discussion was passion for motorcycles; and by the end of it, we had planned out midnight ride to Nandi Hills. Didn't turn out to be a particularly bad idea, considering Local Live estimated it just over 6000 miles :O Bangalore to Nandi Hill in just 6000 miles Didn't know they had a Nandi Hill in Kenya too.

So, what did I do this weekend? I drank a cup of coffee. And now, If you're wondering why would I be blogging about some cup of coffee I drank, its purely because I have understood that " life is not solely composed of tasks, but tastes." Okay, continuing: I drank another cup of hopeless coffee at the ubiquitous Cafe Coffee Day . Hopeless, I say, because that is exactly what it appears when compared to the kaapi at any of the numerous Darshans or Saagars in every nook and corner of the city. It's not that I realize my preference for kaapi only now but the law by Mr. Murphy, or any of the corollaries following from it probably played their part. I was there meeting a friend and it is only obvious that I ask the individual for a cup of tea/coffee. The answer in most cases is yes, for almost everyone knows my affinity for caffeine. The problem here was that I meant a filter kaapi and the friend here was more of a cappuccino type . No problems, I thought as it was jus...

As someone who is really hooked on to podcasts, I find it really odd when people are completely oblivious to podcasts, and that the term podcasting still remains geek to many. So much that The Times Of India once ran a whole article on Podcasting without even mentioning terms like RSS, web feeds, or subscription!!! What they said : All downloadable audio files are now called ‘podcasts’. [...]But while all those who download music from the net are indeed ‘podcasting’ Why I am writing about Podcasting today is because I just got to now that Chennai will be organizing another unconference this June 9th and 10th on Podcasting . Podworks.in , as the event is called is a "2-day workshop styled unconference dedicated to the sharing of knowledge around new / social media (audio and video podcasting, blogging, more.) The event being a workshop styled unconference, is the place to know all about Podcasting ; and then start publishing/consuming all that media content with the available syn...

Writing his guest column at the Mobile Marketing Magazine , Richard Webster writes about how SMS and intelligent targeting can produce great results: The key to unlocking the real potential for customer recruitment lies in understanding more about them and having the ability to interact with them directly. The availability of mobile data, and the intelligent application of it, is absolutely critical to SMS campaign success. Analysis and careful selection can be carried out before broadcast, and afterwards, with detailed responder profiling. [...] With intelligent application and targeting, SMS messaging can enhance a brand, and produce great results. Furthermore, it is cost-effective, measurable and intuitive: lifestyle data in particular has a wealth of additional variables, because the way in which the information has been volunteered allows for the fine-tuning of campaign targeting like no other data can.    [...] here is a pipeline for immediate, measurable and ta...

The ever-experimental Google now redefines our Search Experience with new User Interfaces for Search. The new interfaces provide a more "integrated" search experience, that means that you don't have to go about looking for different search engines for videos, blogs, news, pictures etc. New Navigation Features Navigation within search results and within different Google sites is going to be a whole new experience with a top navigation bar as seen in this screenshot: Google results: The new top navigation bar But the best part about the new navigation is the contextual navigation links on Search Results. With this, for any keyword searched, if there are relevant results in any other Google service like Maps, Blogs, Videos, the links to those would also appear. For example, a search for India would result in a dynamically generated navigation bar with links to results from Google's News Maps Blogs Groups Images Video etc. But I always liked the L...

Not in India, where newspaper readership is soaring, but everywhere else Traditional Media is finding new ways of not being irrelevant. Read these 10 New Uses For Newspaper from Net !!!

Just came across  Pipl , a Search Engine for People on SEL.Pretty interesting is all I'll say at the moment; but the results I looked for were far from accurate. Here's what SEL had to say about it: Pipl is a people search engine that tries to be a little different. Rather than just go off and hunt for email addresses, this tries to search through the deep/invisible/hidden web to return content that other search engines are going to miss. [...] This however maybe a little churlish, given that it's only recently launched. It's an engine that's worth taking a peek at - even if it's only to see what they have on you and your namesakes. It will probably be more than you expect. Technorati tags: pipl , search

start.com , the incubation experiment that finally led to the hyped Live.com is all set to retire on the 22nd of May 2007. I actually used start.com for a while before I moved on to Newsburst and finally Google Reader.   Announcing this , Sanaz Ahari wrote on the start.com blog: This is a bittersweet moment as I reflect on what start.com accomplished from it's inception in February 2005, helping pioneer ajax homepages and gadgets on the web. We accomplished great things both in terms of technology as well as being an agile small team and connecting with our customers. A successful incubation project that evolved to live.com . Unfortunately it is now time for us to retire start.com as our incubation ground for live.c om.  Effective next Tuesday, 5/22/07 , start.com will redirect to live.com .

How to search using google  without seeing those ads in the right and top? Simple: Use http://www.google.com/search?output=googleabout Doesn't make sense, but that is the way it is!   Amit Agarwal at DI has another method to block all Google ads from showing in your browser by making certain entries in your computer's HOSTS file.

The last time I wrote about mobile advertising , I had written that push based advertising could really get annoying. However, speaking at the PMN Mobile User Experience conference, Antti Ohrling -co-founder of advertising-funded MVNO Blyk said that it might just work! From mobileuserexperience .com : [...]push-based advertising will not annoy customers if it is correctly targeted. In fact, Blyk's research in the UK market (where it will launch this summer) indicates that customers perceive value in receiving push messages if they provide unique offers. Ohrling , who also chairs a global advertising agency, explained that push advertising can be a way of enabling customers to differentiate themselves from their peers by giving them access to information and events unavailable through other channels.

Microsoft, for a dead company has pretty lively profits, says The Var Guy. He sits down and comes up with 10 Stunning Facts About Microsoft’s Profits. He compares Microsoft's profits with other giants, and computes how long does it take to beat the quarterly net income of some of the companies like Apple (just 2 weeks), IBM (5 weeks), Google ( just 18 days ), and Nike (1 week!)

Timing is Everything Telecoms.com has a wonderful piece on Mobile advertising. Timing is Everything , it says: "The key to the promise of mobile advertising lies in the fact that the mobile device provides a very personal, direct and interactive communications channel to customers, he points out. In advertising terms, mobile operators own some of the best advertising inventories available anywhere. In addition they own two key assets: the customer's location and personal identity in terms of behaviour, demographics and content preferences. This puts mobile operators in a very strong position when competing for advertising budgets." Somehow I am confused by the two possible ways of mobile advertising: First, the push based advertising where you just send an advertisement through an SMS to the user. The second, where the user sees an embedded text ad on his screen, say while browsing on his mobile. While the former seems too intruding and offensive, the second simply ea...

"Life" has to be spiced up in Bangalore! Absolutely no second thoughts about it and when someone in the Government thinks the same way too, you can't help but wonder if what you're hearing is right. Back in college, I can recall everyone excited about the prospect of moving to Bangalore. After all, it was supposed to be the city with a "night life" worth boasting about and what not. And boy, weren't expectations hurt when we set foot in Bangalore. Creatures of habit- we, who hardly went to sleep before pinging Sun God that it was his time to take over, were left devastated that there was not even a cup of tea and Parle-G to be had after 11pm. I've seen many an individuals feel let down by this city of their dreams seeing the roads deserted, the shops and eateries shuttered down, the auto-rickshaw -wallahs shouting obscene fares at them (come on folks, assuming you are a Software Coder and since almost all autowallahs in this city consider it their ...