Hu Ha India, Aaja India

But eventually it is a game of cricket. - Sachin Tendulkar

Itz easy for him to say and ago ahead to throw a sunfeast biscuit at u in ur television. But what about the real billions who are in blue now ?

We all love cricket, won’t we. When the intensity fades in us, then there is media which rekindles the josh in you. We remember the few match dates like we remember our loved ones birthday. Literally the roads of Bangalore were choking at 5.00 pm when people were rushing out of their offices with only one mission, not to miss a single ball or run. Ironically Ganguly wasted more balls than the fans would have missed watching. The whole India was elevated when jayasuriya was dismissed cheaply but they feel deeply within few hours.

Yep. its just a game. We should not get disturbed. But if it just a game, then the players should not be given a demi-god status. they should not be hyped, worshipped, and elevated. they should not be in every other advertisements and every who -is who should not come and encourage the team to win the cup while they are not out there encouraging jaspal rana or anju bobby. Why the hell we didn’t bother about not winning much gold in commonwealth games or not winning at all in Olympics but cried in our pillows when india lost to srilanka. Two guys didn't die because anand lost a chess game on the same day. they died because india lost, not few individuals ....

Indian cricket fell to new low now and has to rise. Apart from blame games and sacking few who are remotely responsible, a serious thought should be given about the importance of the game itself in our lives.

Did u regret today ?

How many Ads are u thrown at every day?

I can't say a figure, but a minimum of 50 will be my guess. Say, In home - Newspaper, magazine, TV - On Road - the bill boards on either side of the road, RJ's of radio-city and In office - every website I visit have a pop-up and to top it all Google ads are there everywhere. This doesn’t include the covert advertising in the movies and the serials which we watch.

Point is not that. The point is how many bill board ads led u to open their webpage?

Till recently - none. Most often I forget them as soon as I cross the board except for real catchy ones like Fitness one which filled the city with boards having two good looking couple and lines with 'in-depth' meaning like - ”After a hard day's work, we can't wait to do it”. I was waiting to find out what those ads were for and was bit disappointed after knowing it is for a gym. But still, I didn't enroll myself to fitness - one though the ads made me smile whenever I look at them.

I hear to Radio City or Radio Indigo while riding to my office. Sadly from Jan end onwards these folks were just filling u with what u can do on every minute on ur valentine day with ur valentine. Buy this… buy that to her .. crap crap crap. They fill u too much to make u feel guilty for being alone. And then, on Feb. 13th, I saw a board on Marathahalli bridge which read, “Did u ever regret for not saying those three words?"

I was surprised to see this. The ad had that line with a link www.myregret.in below. Entire travel time to my office I was pondering over the purpose of this ad. I went to an extend of assuming it to be a Yet another Virtual social networking site for those who don't have it in real life.

The website repeated the same but this time it generalized the regretting factors and asked me to enter my regret reason and asked me to come back on 15^th for a surprise. I too entered my regret and entered my mail-id to register. Since the whole concept of valentine, partner, love vanished from radio city after feb 14^th , I forgot about this.

I remembered recently when I was regretting for some real thing. Since the site name is chosen such a way that its easy to remember, I opened and BANG, found out that it is actually an ad of kotak mutual fund!!!

Bit surprised but I liked the idea. Rightly timed with right words and made people (at least me) to visit the website. Good thinking. These ads make u smile when u remember them. One more such ad is ads based on munna and circuit. Lots of ads were created after lage raho munna bhai became a super hit. I probably enjoy them just because they remind me of the characters of the movie. But at the same time, not ads with celebrities are creative and appealing. Now-a- days I really hate ads in which multiple cricketers appear. For instance the recent Pepsi ad in which a boy runs away with a Pepsi bottle from sachin. Not sure why I hate it, but I do.

More and more innovative types of advertising need to come into existence as the advertising world matures. That leaves me with the questions. What if all of fifty ads are innovative? How many in those fifty ads have an affect/effect on you?

Not sure. But I know one thing. At least a catchy subject line (borrowed from yahoo) brought u till the end of this post!!!

17 ways to kill a sentence

Actually this is an fwd from chax. I kinda liked it .
So bringing out to an broader audience ;)

Jack and Jill climbed up the hill to fetch a pail of water.

Use weak verbs:
Jack and Jill went up the hill to get a pail of water.

Use unfamiliar words:
Jack and Jill climbed up the hill to fetch a ewer of water.

Put introductory phrases at the beginning to push the subject back:
To fetch a pail of water, Jack and Jill climbed up the hill.

Keep the subject and the verb as far apart as possible:
Jack and Jill, to fetch a pail of water, climbed up the hill.

Put the action at the end of the sentence:
Jack and Jill, to fetch a pail of water, climbed up the hill.

Keep modifiers as far as possible from the words they modify:
Jack and Jill climbed to fetch a pail of water up the hill.

Use passive voice:
The hill was climbed by Jack and Jill so that a pail of water could be fetched.

Put the doer at the end of the sentence:
To fetch a pail of water, the hill was climbed by Jack and Jill.

Introduce false subjects:
It was Jack and Jill that climbed up the hill to fetch a pail of water.

Pile on the gobbledygook:
Jack and Jill ascended the acclivity to retrieve a vessel of Adam's ale.

Turn verbs into nouns:
Jack and Jill did the hill climb for the purpose of water retrieval.

Use unnecessary technical jargon:
Jack and Jill traversed the gradient to fetch an alembic of H2O.

Feature inappropriate precision:
John Q. Wembley and Jillian Fitzgerald climbed 1.6093 kilometers to fetch 3.785 liters of water.
Add wordy phrases:
Jack in the company of Jill climbed their way up the hill for the purpose of fetching water in the approximate amount of a pail's full.

Multiply redundant words:
Both Jack and Jill climbed all the way up to the top of the hill's summit to fetch a pail filled to its capacity with water.

Throw in clichés indiscriminately:
Jack and Jill, who need no introduction, climbed up the hill by leaps and bounds to fetch through their good offices a pail of water by hook or by crook

String lots of nouns together to form the subject:
The Jack and Jill water retrieval hill climb was achieved.

Put all 17 together:
It was the Jack and Jill H2O retrieval in an alembic vessel that was achieved via the ascent of the acclivity up to its summit in leaps and bounds through the good offices of John Q. Wembley and Jillian Fitzgerald who need no introduction.

G-Sheets

Past couple of days, all I am doing is maintaining spreadsheets.

In my office, the Linux work which I was doing went to QE and they found enough bugs. It’s a buggy life after all! My manger, before going on his vacation, told me to coordinate the fixes and delivering the fixed build to QE. From then on, I am coordinating with excel, :) with lot of color schemes, remarks, corrections, blah blah blah ..

On the other hand, p9 too needed some attention from me. Sri was telling me his idea about collective fund rising. But his initial idea of asking people to fill in exact-committed amount and getting them regularly didn't appeal to me much. So I proposed an alternative where a GSheet will be sent to the group every month and every one will fill in their contributions for that month. Since I proposed, I did that GSheet work.

GSheet is Google spreadsheet. Its pretty cool and very useful if you want to share among friends or groups so that multiple people can update simultaneously. Whereas an attached excel sheet fails if the group needs to update them simultaneously.

Also the sharing options are good. We can allow some people to edit and some people to read only. We can always pull back the options.

I kinda like the GSheets . Guess it is pretty useful if you want to keep some accounting information online.

Ofcourse it is Google ;)

Yahoo Beta!!!

I had heard about this from my friend. I wanted to get one but heard that it is only thru invitation. ! I was curious to know how yahoo is going to improvise its mail in order to beat gmail. There is no doubt that yahoo is the leader in that space, yet google is google;) . So I was desperately waiting to try yahoo beta. Then I saw it in techspot.


So do the following if you want to upgrade your yahoo!!! It worked for me and it may work for you too, though I saw some comments that it doesn't work for few. :(

1. Log in to your yahoo mail account
2. on the top left, besides "mail" button, there is one down arrow, click there..
3. Go to "option"
4. on the left panel, click on account information...
5. Click on "edit" under membership information
6. In the first panel, u will find "Preferred Content", click on it.
7. Select "English-United Kingdom"
8. Save changes
9. Go back to your mail window...
10., Now keep this window open, and in a new window, open www.mail.yahoo.com, and login...u'll get an invitation to join "yahoo mail beta version"!!!!

Looks good n cool. Similar to local web client (what we use in office) with scrollable inbox and other stuffs.
I am finding it bit slow when it loads (unlike yahoo!!!) but it is fine after sometime (ajaxified??)
Yet to use it properly, but first impression is good, though not that exiting!!!

Also not sure how many know abt this.
Click on ! of Yahoo! [www.yahoo.com] top left corner :)
Don't forget to keep your speakers on!!!

Yahoo Rocks!!!

Going colorful..

The Blogger .com is in the process of upgradation. This morning I logged in to report the happenings of the last weekend and hardly knew I was in for surprise.

A beta version of the blogger is ready and I was asked the option of moving ahead.
For which of course, I will always be ready!!!.

Any case, here I am, typing my post, after successfully migrating to the beta version.

Lot of good things is in store. The look and feel has improved evidently, as the Dashboard looks different and definitely betterJ. Font color options, new and better layouts make it kinda cool. Best thing is u can upgrade ur existing theme without any hassle. Label is a new option provided by default, apart couple of other new things to put it on ur blog page. Another good thing is improved access control to have private blogs!!! . I definitely need one.

You need a gmail account to port urself to this beta version and eventually to the new blogger (I believe) and hereon ur gmail account will be ur login.
As such really happy about it and it really looks cool and atleast some change in my life ;). So decided to put a small post on that...

Google rocks!!!!