Usually, the comma gets left out

Read a nice article on how the comma is getting lost in the fast pace of our lives these days. I still remember the school question papers when we were asked to place the comma in the proper place in the sentence. But, seriously, in today's communication, especially the non-business ones, the comma is completely obscure !!!

5ederer

Oh Lord !!! Please make Federer and Nadal battle out many and many more title matches so that we humans get many more splendid tennis to watch.

The 5th straight Wimbeldon title for Federer, equalling the great Bjorn Borg, was nothing less than a war !!! A 5 setter lasting for more than 3 hours with the needle of success playing a free flow see-saw from the champ to the challenger was a great epic to watch.

The 2 sets that Federer won were decided by tie-breakers. The other 2 sets Nadal won by breaking Federer, 6-4 and 6-2. Federer had more unforced errors than Nadal. Federer had fewer winners at the net than Nadal. Nadal had broken Federer's service more number of times than Federer broke Nadal. Nadal won the fourth set 6-2 and was on a high when the match moved into the deciding set. Forget about winning 5 titles in a row, Federer was on the verge of losing this match !!!

So .. what does our hero do ?

5ederer had an ace up his sleeve, literally !!! The first game in the decider set, including the first point, he won with an "ace" :-) He knew that if he went for rallies, Nadal was coming to the net and winning those points. Ofcourse, this cant happen for each point, and we were lucky enough to see these guys fight it out again in the rallies. No drop balls, just plain placement. Make the opponent run from one corner to another, flirting with the base and side lines. An awesome game of tennis was on display on a bright sunny evening at the Center Court in Wimbledon. Nadal once, did come to the net and made Federer run from corner to corner, and the straight forehand return that Federer hit in reply to the net game of Nadal was just divine !!! It reminded me of Girish's forehand shorts straight down the TT table , when you expect him to be hitting it cross on the table. The only thing you can do for such beautiful forehand shots is just stand and admire. Thats precisely what Nadal did for this beauty from Federer.

Once 5ederer broke Nadal to lead 4-2, there was a sharp cry of joy, something rarely seen from Federer. Both the players knew that Bjorn Borg's dream of witnessing his record of 5 continuous Wimbledon titles being equalled would eventually come true today. You could see Nadal's shoulder sagging, and as if adding insult to injury, Federer showered more and more aces on Nadal, totalling 24 to Nadal's single ace, making sure that all doors for a Nadal comeback were cleanly shut.

The thrill and joy of watching this match can hardly be expressed in words. You got to watch it point by point and have yourself mesmerised in a beautiful game of lawn tennis.

Bartolli Roks !!!

******* Blogging this on 07-07-07 *******

Its a once in a century date !!! But then, isnt any other date a once in a century date ? ;-)

Watched a great fighting match of lawn tennis yesterday on center court. I so very badly wanted Bartoli to win and was very happy to see her win. The best thing about her game was her focus and composure. She didnt lose her composure even after winning the match. Ofcourse, may be she just didnt express her joy. After losing the first set to the world number 1, by 6-1, it was a complete uphill task for the humping and breathless Bartolli, who has a very strange style of serving from very close to her body. You could see her real game only in the second set when she was just focussing on getting just one point at a time and was very much helped with the numerous unforced errors from Henin. They had really long and very long rallies all throughtout the second set. It was Bartolli who was doing the running in the initial games, but later on she started playing on the weak forehand of Henin and started making her scamper all around on the court for every point. It was as if, she was taking a revenge on Henin for all the running she did earlier. There were really great classy strokes in the rallies where it wasnt much of luck that played, but the skills of the players that made watching the match even more interesting.

Once, Bartolli broke Henin in the second set to lead 6-5, there was no looking back for her. She had completely broken the confidence of Henin. Bartolli won 7 straight games from that point on to lead the penultimate set by 5 games to 0. Probably the fact that Henin has never made it to the Wimbeldon finals [ or is it just that she has never won the Wimbeldon finals ever ? ] started playing on her nerves and you could see her shoulders sag. From nowhere, Bartolli started finding her form playing some very beautiful forehands, pushing the ball to the far corners, reducing the match to a mere cat and mouse game, with Henin being the unlucky rat who was caught by the cat, knowing all the time that the cat was just playing with it and death was inevitable. Bartolli kinda made this evident, when she had some pity on the world number 1 and literally handed one game to Henin sparing her the embarrasment of losing the final set 6-0. Bartolli won the match 1-6, 7-5, 6-1. A phenomenal comeback I have witnessed for a long time now.

On a more personal front, I have been feeling on cloud nine since yesterday after being fascinated by the awesome MotoRokr E6. It truly rocks !!! A touch pad screen with clarity better than my laptop, sound clarity unheard of in Motorola phones [ well, its about 3 years back when i tried a Motorola mobile and was so very dissappointed by its sound clarity, the most basic part of a mobile. ] I have been hooked up to the FM Radio that comes with this handset all day long. Except for RealPlayer scrolling list being very very very slow, everything about this handset is just so very cool. The coolest thing being that its based on Linux ;-) and probably the main reason for *not* making a huge hole in my pocket. Great video recording with 2 Mega Pixel screen with 1.4X focus zoom, that comes with a 1GB storage space for mp3, pics, video and a business card recognizer, its centuries ahead of my first mobile, the Sony Ericsson T310.

Nightout at Lokhandwala

me : Hey Reddy, can you quickly complete that review in another 30 minutes ? I need to check-in the changes before i leave today
me : Pat, did you create the investigation report and upload it ?
Pat : yeah ... done .. I have started working on the new bug already
me : Good .. Raj, how far have you reached ?
tring tring .. tring tring ..
Raj : I think we need to [ tring tring ] change the implementation ...
tring tring ...
me : just hold on .. will take this call .. hi Niv .. how are u ? ... what ?? today ?? night show ?? dude ... its already 7pm !!! how will we get the tickets !!! ... its friday night !!! i have got to finish off so many things .. btw .. which movie ?? haha ... yeah, how does it matter !! .. 10 pm show ?? hmmm ... let me think for sometime ... no no .. wait ... count me in ... :) .. ok .. will start by 9 from here...


Thats how the plan for the night out originated. When I reached the theater, I found out that the other 2 of my friends who had pulled me in for the movie, were actually celebrating their temporary freedom from their wives who were out of town :D One of them was hell bent on seeing "Lokhandwala", and the other 2 of us were ready to just watch any movie. Since it was a friday night, It was impossible to even expect a ticket. The only hope was that it was the night when "Sivaji" got released !!! .. we were hoping that people would be too interested in Sivaji and we can get the tickets for other movies. But, I guess, almost all who came there had the same thoughts :p This got confirmed when no tickets were available for all the movies at the ticket counter. We decided to fall back on plan B. Just go out and eat at the food court. Surprisingly, the service was fast, and we finished eating in about 40 minutes. We gave the movie a final last shot and to our luck, with only few minutes left for the movie to start, we got the tickets for "Lokhandwala" !!!


We were hurrying to enter the movie hall, when our eyes chanced upon a known face. But, it was the height that puzzled us. Was he the one whom we were thinking he was ?? The hair style matched the posters we had seen him in, but definately not the height !!! After a good stare we realised that it really was our own "Uppi" , a Kannada movie actor better known as "Upendra" !!! Boy, what wonders can camera tricks do !!! When i saw him in his world class movie "A", he looked like he was atleast 6 feet tall. But only after seeing him in person, we found out that he was just about 5'6" in height.


We entered the movie hall talking about Uppi and were surprised to see that the movie was just about starting. We felt bad on missing the "comically" made so very funny commercial ads :D .. Given the backdrop of events based on which the movie is made, it was terribly sad to see the way it was made. The main shootout that happens covers only about 15 minutes of footage in the almost 100 minutes of the movie span, that too after adding the emotional drama of gangsters calling up home confessing their mistakes !!! now, how real is that ??


The movie definately tries to glorify the police and it does it in a good way, but could have taken some "inspiration" from Die Hard kinda movies and concentrated more on the planning aspects of the shootout itself. It was funny how Sanjay Dutt disposes off the bullet proof jacket as an unnecessary garment when the whole police force of about 100 officers is all wearing it religiously. The gory scenes make the movie a bit more harsh. And I have no idea why a movie based on such a serious event should have songs !!! Are the publishers so paranoid that the movie wont sell without songs ? They should be really paranoid now with the utter failure of the songs themselves .. they neither fit into the story, nor do they avoid people from leaving the movie halls for a quick smoke.


Well, after the movie, we ventured out back home on empty lanes filled with pockets of ever vigilant dogs who thankfully stayed away from showing their skills at running along our bikes. It had been years since I reached back home at 2am !!! Just the thought of entering home at that time, drove me down the memory lane .. to the good old college days of living life as if there was nothing like a "watch" ever invented .....

Mahiya

Watch, listen and enjoy the music in this song sung by and performed by an indian version of Shakira :D

iit divas rocking performance

If anyone happens to find out a way to download this song, please let me know.

Virtual Barbershop

This does not work with Speakers ... you HAVE to have your headphones on .. that too in the right alignment .. the speaker that reads "R" should be on your right ear !!!

If the above thing doesnt work .. well then try downloading from here

You have been Tagged

Here's my small attempt at explaining what tagging is all about.

In the World Wide Web, we come across plenty and plenty of webpages which give us the information we seek. Humans cant remember the IP addresses of the machines. so we have hostnames. From here comes the URL. To remember the webpages that we visit, we "bookmark" these URLs. Now, since we keep on bookmarking a huge number of webpages, we start clubbing them together into categories.

These categories have a small problem. I can have categories like, "blogs", where i bookmark all the blogs that i often vist and categories like "technical", where i store my bookmarks that link to webpages discussing technical stuff. The problem occurs when we have to bookmark a page which is a mix of both the categories. Like for example, this post of mine. Do you want to bookmark it under "blogs" since its a blog, or under "technical" since it talks about some techy things ?

Most of the times, we end up wasting a lot of time digging through the various categories of the bookmarks to find the link we bookmarked a couple of months ago. We try to decipher the possible webpage the bookmark points to by reading the text that forms the URL. Not the best thing to do, but then thats the only choice we have. This basically boils down to the fact that, just plain categories of bookmarks doesnt help us.

This is where tags come into picture. As you must have tagged a single conversation in gmail with multiple tags since those tags describe the contents of the conversation, in the same manner, when we bookmark a webpage, we can give it tags that would be like some meta-data or "indexes", that would describe the contents of the webpage the bookmark points to. So, the next time you want to dig up a bookmark you saved a couple of months ago, you simply use the tags to "index" through your bookmarks thus increasing your chances of finding the bookmark you were looking for in quite less time than earlier.

Now, if you store your bookmarks on your browser, you have the problem of not being able to use those bookmarks on a machine where you did not save them. If you use a workstation at office and another one at home, you need a mechanism to be able to synchronise the bookmarks on these 2 machines. To solve this, there are websites where you can login and save your bookmarks online. some of these sites provide you the flexibility of storing these bookmarks personally for your use, or you can share them with the public.

Websites like del.icio.us, bring together these 2 thoughts of "sharing bookmarks" and "tagging bookmarks". Once you login and create an account for yourself, you can install a button on your web browser, and everytime you come across a webpage you want to bookmark, you can click on that browser button, and it will save that bookmark into your account. While doing so, you can give this bookmark some tags that would decribe the contents of the webpage. The main intention being to create useful "indexes" that will help you in searching through your own bookmarks at a later point of time.

Things start getting a bit interesting when you start bookmarking and tagging blogs. People write blogs and there are very few ways in which they can publicise their blogs so that more and more people on the World Wide Web can read through their blogs. When you visit an interesting blog which you want to bookmark, more often than not you would give the name of the person who owns the blog as a tag for this bookmark. This is called "tagging the blog". Websites like del.icio.us, have a public list of these bookmarks and tags. People can surf through these tags and thus increase the chances of them visiting your blog. So, tagging of blogs can help you popularise your blog !!! I have already "tagged" the blogs of my friends whom I visit so very often :)

The confusion about tags starts creeping in since lots of blogging sites provide you a feature where you can add tags, or labels to your posts in the blog. There is no easy way of linking these labels with the bookmark tags :(, well atleast for blogspot. Guess, this is another thing just waiting to happen in the near future ...