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January 15 Stupidest things ever saidI found this while I was lazily browsing .... It may not be the stupidest things ever said. As I am sure, there will be more to trump these. But this is a good collection to start with.
Read more here.
Its ironic that Bill Gates said, "640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981, But all Windows operating systems and most importantly Vista (I am not considering server editions because ... they are servers) cant seem to be happy even with 1 GB RAM.
Well ... read and laugh!
-Kalyan December 01 Politically incorrect adsGone are the days when one can say something without thinking of all the ways it can be interpreted and if any of them would offend any one person standing around him.
I agree it is wrong to offend someone intentionally.
But, we should also maintain a healthy sense of humor and a forgiving attitude.
Have fun reading these old ads.
Kalyan November 21 iPhone to the rescueiPhone ... not so crazy about it. It has some new features, but nothing that makes me want it badly.
Check weather ... Blackberry, Windows Mobile devices, Palm
Check mails ... same
Check stocks ... Blackberry and Palm had some applications and I am sure Windows Mobile also does
Maybe the only thing is integration of iPod & phone - but really, that is not that bright idea ...
The new ads of how iPhone saved the day ... pathetic.
Read this for more fun.
Till then,
Kalyan
P.S: All you pissed off iPhone users ... dont bother. :) November 07 Family GuyI love Family Guy ... no matter what others might say. It is a cartoon that can be categorized as "not kids". And that is what it is ... you cant get upset that a 1 yr old baby is cursing and trying to kill his mom ... I just love Stewie.
Here is something funny, Peter in real life.
November 06 Hiking in SFO and California Academy of SciencesI finally went hiking in San Francisco this weekend. It was a beautiful day - bright and sunny and not a trace of fog anywhere. One of the best days I saw in San Francisco. It was just perfect for a day out.
We started out at Embarcadero BART station, up the Lombard street, all the way around in The Presidio, across the inspiration point, on to Geary, mind blowing pizza, Half cheese and Half Adam and Eve at Pizza Orgasmica (on Clement Street) with a blueberry beer, yes, Blue berry. mmmmm..... I am drooling just thinking about it.
And we met San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. Talk about coincidence! That's my good friend, Peta, with the Mayor.
And then on Sunday, I went back in to the city again ... to the California Academy of Sciences.
It was so much fun!! Of course, it is a temporary facility for now ... see the new one in progress.
All in all, a great fun filled weekend.
November 01 Happy Halloween! and earth quake!!Happy Halloween people!!
My first Halloween and it was fun. My first earthquake and it was scary.
Ok .. I experienced my first earthquake on Oct 30, 2007 at 8:04 PM.
I did not realize what was happening till my landlady exclaimed "Kalyan, Its an earthquake!"
I am happy it did not cause any serious damage. But I really don't want to be around when a big one comes knocking. It is no longer an "If", just "when".
I accompanied one of my friends to his colleagues home for a nice dinner and an evening of "Trick or Treat" with the kids. I was so impressed by the extent of trouble some families went through to decorate the houses and entertain the kids. I definitely will decorate extensively when I do get in to a home . It sure looks like fun!!
Well, this was in Castro valley. I like the place .. nice small town, just one High School. The church had a nice community event.
I am thankful to my friend, Shane, and his friend for inviting me to share the dinner and fun with them.
I hope all of you had fun too! October 20 The most terrifying video everI personally feel very strongly about the environment. I believe in living in sync with the surroundings, like how a bird would live in the forest or fish would live in the water. Humans, are stupid. We not only live off the natural resources, we actually use them in extremes. We rob the environment of the resources that gave life to humans.
What will happen if you pollute all the water in the world? We die, along with all the other living things. That is what exactly we are doing. We don't believe in being reasonable. We call it being aggressive, being ambitious, being adventurous. But what we don't realize is that we are STUPID. Some countries and peoples more than others. For example, some countries it is legal to hunt whales and sharks. We have already managed to be the root cause of several species, do we still want to do it. Hell, yes!! Now you know how stupid some people are. And some other people, use the single most effective medium (I will refrain from saying what it is) to convince people to multiply without limits. It doesnt matter if you can afford it - health wise, money wise and means wise - just multiply. How could anyone in sound mind do it?
I came across this video - watch it, I think it makes perfect sense.
October 18 Gutsy GibbonSo I upgraded my Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon RC day before yesterday. I was sure the day Gutsy is released there will be a huge demand for downloading it and it would just choke the bandwidth. So I figured two days before release, the build would be pretty stable and any new packages could be downloaded easily.
The upgrade itself was the best experience I ever had with any OS till now. All I did was force the update manager to check for new distributions.
update-manager -d
The update manage detected the new distribution, asked me if I wanted to upgrade and thats it. It smoothly downloaded all the packages it needed, about 800 MB and proceeded to upgrade my system. It prompted a couple of times when it had to replace some system files that I customized like blacklist, networks etc. A quick reboot and I am in 7.10. Its the best upgrade ever - no pains, no hassles.
Enjoy.
Kalyan October 14 Taxi No. 9211I liked the movie Taxi No. 9211 when i saw it. The music was good, the performances were good. The movie was good. However, if there is one thing that I hate when watching a movie, it is the feeling of "I have seen this somewhere", "I think this is what is going to happen" ... Turns out, it is a remake of "Changing Lanes". Looks like now a days many in the Indian movie industry have lost their originality.
Movies are remakes of something - from a south India film in Hindi, a Hindi remake in Telugu, Tamil remake in Telugu or Kannada remake in Tamil. Well, it is not wrong to have remakes but copying the film scene to scene and note to note is. The worst part is they do that and still put a different name under "director", "music", "story". "Saathiya" is a good example.
What I hate further is the blatant copying from Hollywood movies to Hindi or local language movies. They don't even care to buy the rights or acknowledge the original credits.
What happened to the film industry? Have we lost the creativity? Is it just easy to copy then create?
:( October 13 TG Video: Wirelessly hacking Gmail and more - tutorialI am sure this video would have scared a lot of people. Many go and check email etc from public Wi-Fi access points. But don't people know that unless they use encrypted connections, every packet can be snooped? Thats exactly what is happening here. As long as your packets are going across on unencrypted connection, anyone can see it. I don't see what is new in this.
Watch the video here. The function you are trying to use needs macro language supportI opened a document today in Word and it displayed a Help dialog with a message similar to "The function you are trying to use needs macro language support" and gave me instructions on how to set the macro security. I know for a fact that I set the level to "Disable all macros with notification". Well, I checked it anyway and it was set right. A quick search on Google sent me here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HP030853041033.aspx
That's when I realized I didn't install VBA when I installed Office 2007. Well, I just opened up "Programs and Features" (the erstwhile "Add Remove Programs") from Control Panel and selected "Change" after selecting Office 2007 Enterprise. I digged in to the list of options and opted to install VBA. You can find detailed instructions on the above link.
Kalyan October 04 IE7 on Vista and Flash - TroublesWell, I finally made the move to Vista a few weeks ago. The first that I had problems with is IE& and flash. Well, I was using Flock primarily, and it didn't bother me too much. But later it got annoying. Then I anyway re-imaged my laptop with a fresh Vista install and still the same problem cropped up.
Here is the problem:
Open IE
Goto Adobe site and install Flash.
You will see the flash animation and it will prompt you to restart IE
go ahead and do that and you might as well restart Vista, just to be sure.
open up the same page and you will notice that it says Flash is not installed
but Manage Add-ons applet shows Flash is loaded and enabled
some flash sites will work. ex: YouTube main page will show static "now seeing" videos but if you click on any video, flash player will initialize and load and start playing movie.
depending on how they script the flash object, some sites will work, some wont.
It was getting frustrating and I noticed many others had the same problem and none of the said solutions worked. some I tried were:
uninstall and resintall flash
use flash cleaner
set registry keys
register ocx etc
finally on egghead forums, I found the solution that worked for me.
Goto C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash, change the permissions for Flash9d.ocx and FlashUtil9d.exe so that "Everyone" has "Full Control". Note you need to be administrator to do this. Vista will prompt you to enter password when it needs it. Once I did this, everything was fine! However, note that this might have some security implications. Use it at your own risk.
thanks,
Kalyan June 17 More SafariI continued using Safari on Windows and I must say it is FAAAAAASSSSSSST! Don't ask me why or how. It is actually faster than IE and FF/Flock. However, there are somethings missing:
But I like it ... I am sure all these and more will be fixed and lot more features will be added.
Kalyan
June 14 HCL is smuggling Software Eningeerins out of the country!?Don't proceed and read ... this is a private post, just for my friends .. just this one. please ... don't read ... you have been warned ... get out now! well ... I am not responsible for any hurt feelings now ... So, did you see the new HCL ad? Although it is a good ad, there are some funny aspects to it. At least, they were funny to me. 
Enjoy, Kalyan P.S: All trademarks acknowledged, no malice intended, only pun! June 13 Apple Safari on WindowsSo ... Apple released Safari for Windows. I downloaded it to give it a shot. It is nice and simple. However, do we really need another browser on our desktops? I don't think so. However, I am open to new ideas and new usability features. Well ... what is it that prompts us to move to a new browser?
Coming back to Safari, its nice and its a bit stable. However, I wouldnt throw out my Flock or IE just yet. For starters, Safari doesnt seem to work well with Live Spaces. I tried posting this massage from Safari, the menu bar didnt appear and shortcuts didnt work. Also, some messages in the Google Reader didnt display well. Telugu fonts are not properly rendered. The browser includes a software update utility and a bug report as well. So, file your bugs away! Update: I forgot to add one important feature I loved on Safari - It automatically grabbed all the plugins from Firefox and IE and didnt ask em to install anything. It sure is innovative and offers the best out of the box experience. Yahoo Mail new interface isnt working really well. Once it opened, it started working fine. the fonts look a little funny though. Have a good day! Kalyan June 04 Calculate Pi by throwing foodWell... after writing the title, I was confused. How should I classify this post? Food and Drink? Mathematics? Entertainment? You decide ... Anyway ... back to the topic ... I stumbled up on this site which describes how you can calculate the value of Pi using your food. Yes, using food, rather ... throwing the food. http://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-Pi-by-Throwing-Frozen-Hot-Dogs I wish I knew this when I was in high school ... :) Stay safe, work safe. Kalyan December 22 HiPC 2006We had a successful and a wonderful conference this year. It was F.U.N. A bit hectic, but FUN. You could do everything in your control to make sure everything goes well, but there will always be something that slips everyone's attemtion. Well, we didnt have anything like that this time. It was running like a well oiled machine. There was a bit of a scare on the first day, when we almost lost a laptop. That lasted for about an hour but thanks to the AV team, we managed to recover it. That was a relief! None of this would have been possible without the wonderful volunteers team. They were just wonderful. My sincere thanks to all of them. Well, ring out the old, ring in the new .... Bye bye HiPC 2006 (Bangalore) Hellooooo ..... HiPC 2007 (Goa)!!!! See you all at Goa. -Kalyan December 05 Superman should feel ashamedSo, I though I would go out watch Sainikudu on the Sunday. I am not a big fan of Mahesh Babu but his movies did well and they seemed to have good entertainment value to me. Well, until now. The day started out hectic as we had the committee meeting for HiPC at Palm Meadows. Thanks to Raghuram for a wonderful breakfast. I spent the next three hours at Marathahalli for some shopping. The day was going perfectly till I decided to go and watch Sainikudu. I didnt want to goto PVR Cinemas since it is next to impossible to get tickets on holidays and the only other option was Pallavi theatre. The show was at 7:30 PM, so went there by about 6:45 and there was about half a kilometer long line of cars outside the gate. Tickets were all sold out. So went and bought a Ra.40 ticket for about four times that price and went in full of enthusiasm. Well, God must have been laughing at all the craziness for this movie. People who couldnt get tickets were almost in tears and all that mayhem. Forutnately, got last row tickets and I couldnt believe the luck we were having. That feeling lasted for exactly 10 mins from the moment the show started. For the first time in my life, I felt like leaving the theatre. All this in less than 10 mins. The only other movie that even came close to giving me this feeling was Kaal. Our hero seems to have become more powerful in this movie. He has been gaining a lot of power starting from "Athadu". But in Sainikudu, he is at his peak. He is able to pick up a fully grown man, with one hand - mind you, and throw him off to a distance of at least 25 feet. Now, can superman do that? The music is a drag and the songs are pathetic. There is no story, no plot, dry dialogue, no comedy, extravagant and irrational stunt scenes. What else? Hmmm ... yes, cant forget Irfan Khan. You have to see the movie to know why. The only reason why you can consider watching this movie is to see Trisha and Mahesh Babu. Well, it doesnt mean she has any meaningful role. Rest you can figure out for yourself, after watching the movie. Consider yourself warned!!! |
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