Too much happening...

Boy, its been a hectic week of news. In other words, too much happening to even formulate an opinion! Meanwhile, there are scores of theories on every issue, as always, and thanks to the www we have easy access to so many of them.

Carly ($21.4 M richer overnight, so its hard to say "poor Carly") was fired, Bloglines (the founder has done it again, he last sold the groups company to yahoo) was acquired by Ask Jeeves, Ash was on Letterman (which I missed because of the last minute change in the date), South Africa thrashed England (like someone thankfully hit the reset button just when England thought they were getting ready to conquer the world again!), Condi Rice has hit the road immediately following her confirmation (check out the recent follow on news about Richard Clarke's clear warning to her in Jan 2001), Howard Dean is the DNC chief (ok, but don't give him the microphone!), Chalabi is back in favor in Iraq (man, what a change in fortunes!)...... and oh-oh, finally Harvard University chief is continuing to battle the repercussions of his "....biological factors should be explored as a possible explanation for why fewer women than men succeeded in math and science careers" comment as heavy weights at Stanford, MIT and Princeton get ready to weigh in their views!

Note: NYT and SJ Mercury require registration, but its free.

Ash on Letterman - Impressive

Check this out! Ash is definitely going places, literally! She seems to have hired an excellent PR firm/agent to represent her. After the CBS 60 minutes performance it will be interesting to see how she survives Dave Letterman!

Foreigners in India

Check out this blog by a person from Portland living in Bangalore. Interesting! With all the outsourcing happening to India a number of foreigners do live in India for an extended period of time. Its an interesting transformation happening in India with hordes of NRIs and foreigners moving to cities like Chennai and Bangalore.

Lara's super knock against Pak

Lara thrashed Pak's bowling in the recent ODI. Man, at 35 this guy is still so good! I can't remember the last time Sachin produced an innings like this. Its not cool to compare, but...I hope we can see Sachin display some of his best in the months ahead, ie., if he manages to get past his injury problems.

Sun Solaris "me-too" opensource

Sun announced today about joining the open source bandwagon (sorry, they were always committed to open source, now they have reiterated their committment!) . As usual there is plenty of clever spin. On the one hand I think Sun joined the race a little too late (by this time hordes of Sun hardware users have already switched to Linux running on Ontel boxes), on the other I still feel Sun is somehow going to make it! (though most people have written off Sun!). I have no idea how. Its just my gut feeling at this point :-)


"Give stuff for free, charge for support, hardware" seems to be the in thing. Wonder where this is headed. Anyway, time will tell, I suppose.

What's all this fuss about iPod?

The media is full of news about iPod and its various incarnations. I guess its a fad that's catching on real fast. What's all this fuss about? I find that most people who buy iPods do it because of the craze and thinking that they can use it during their work out, and of course because it looks "cool". Interestingly, I find that many who purchased it with this intent pretty soon lose interest and let it lie around with minimal usage. It remains to be seen how long can Apple sustain this craze. In any case, hats of to Apple for continuing to bring such cool products to the market.


As for myself, in the car, I am quite happy with the car stereo. At home, I listen to a conventional CD player and on the web I listen to desi music on Raaga. (btw, if you want a large desi collection of songs that you can listen to via the web, this is a great site). I never really felt the need for a gadget that can hold more songs. I never ever used a walkman, so I am not sure I'll ever buy an iPod.

Getting past the pop-up blocker!

If you use the Firefox browser and think that you have managed to avoid more pop-ups, go to Chennai Online website.You'll see a small message window pop-up saying "Your browser stopped a pop-up" (or something on these lines) followed by an "ok" button or a "x" to kill the window. No matter which option you choose a new browser window pops up! Arrrggghh!!!