[{"categories":["Analysis"],"content":"PAUSD Has $35K Per Student — A Number Most Districts Would Kill For. Why Doesn’t It Feel Like It? Most school districts in America would do backflips for $35,000 per student. Palo Alto gets that — and then some. In comparison, Los Altos spends about $28K, San Jose around $18K, and the national average is about $18K. A decade ago, PAUSD was at roughly $18K — about $23K adjusted for inflation.\nYet every budget cycle brings the same story: projected shortfalls, threats of teacher layoffs, and heated board meetings… and calls for yet another parcel tax increase.\nHow can a district spending nearly double the national average still feel chronically broke? I looked at the data, and also built PAUSD Budget Explorer to understand where the money goes.\nFrom the latest budget (2024–25):\nTotal operating budget: $340 million Enrollment: ~10,200 students Per-student spending: up from ~$18K just a decade ago National average: ~$18K (Statista/NCES) At the same time:\nEnrollment has dropped from 12,261 to 10,209 students Staff full-time equivalents have risen from 1,300 to 1,384 Why the Extra Money Per Student Isn’t Translating to Better Schools? PAUSD doesn\u0026rsquo;t get paid by student count, it gets paid by property taxes. So when enrollment falls, there is more money available per student. Hypothetically, this should be a gift: smaller classes, more support staff per child, richer programs.\nI pulled NCES federal data for PAUSD from 2014 and 2024. Here\u0026rsquo;s what a decade looks like:\nClassroom teachers dropped from 681 to 597 — a loss of 84 teaching positions, even as per-student funding nearly doubled. Meanwhile, total staff grew from roughly 1,256 to 1,385 — an increase of about 128 positions. That means the district cut 84 teachers and added over 200 non-teaching positions.\nWhere did the growth go?\nInstructional aides: 194 → 247 (+53) School administrators: 27 → 35 (+8) School admin support staff: 51 → 71 (+20) Other support services: 175 → 293 (+118) School psychologists: not separately tracked in 2014, now 19.4 FTE The \u0026ldquo;other support services\u0026rdquo; bucket — up 118 FTE — is doing most of the work and is the least transparent category. This is likely where special education aides, wellness staff, tech support, and facilities positions live.\nSome of this growth is real and necessary. Special education mandates have expanded, and mental health support positions were added in response to well-documented student crises in Palo Alto. But the net picture is clear: the money went to support and admin staff, not to teachers in classrooms.\nThe cost of each employee has also gone up - about 86% of the budget goes to salaries and benefits — but a growing share of that is mandated pension contributions (the CalSTRS employer rate went from 8.25% to 19.10% over the past decade — more than doubling) and healthcare cost increases. These aren\u0026rsquo;t spending choices anyone in Palo Alto made. They\u0026rsquo;re structural costs that silently eat the gains before a single dollar reaches a student.\nThe recent conflict makes more sense through this lens. When Superintendent Don Austin proposed cutting 18 positions, it was met with fierce resistance — and he ultimately departed. The teachers\u0026rsquo; union is requesting what the district characterizes as a 28% total compensation increase. Both sides have legitimate arguments — teachers can barely afford to live here, and the district can\u0026rsquo;t absorb $42.5M in new ongoing costs. But the deeper issue is that both are fighting over a pie that\u0026rsquo;s being consumed by forces neither controls.\nPalo Alto Taxpayers (not the federal or state government) pays for all of this (and more) Palo Alto is a “basic aid” district, meaning our funding comes almost entirely from local property taxes, the voter-approved parcel tax, and occasional bond measures — all of which have continued to grow even as enrollment shrinks.\nThe budget conversation usually focuses on the $340M operating budget. But Palo Alto taxpayers are also funding ~$55M a year in bond debt service for construction, plus $16.5M in parcel taxes. Yes, bonds are legally restricted to facilities — the district can\u0026rsquo;t redirect that money to salaries. But from the taxpayer\u0026rsquo;s perspective, it all comes from the same pocket. When we approve a bond measure and a parcel tax and pay rising property taxes, the total ask keeps growing. It\u0026rsquo;s worth looking at the full bill, not just one line item.\nThis also brings up the upcoming June 2026 Parcel Tax renewal - do taxpayers really need a $16M parcel tax alongside our $340M total budget (plus $55M construction bonds)?\nThe question PAUSD needs to answer is what the right staffing mix looks\u0026hellip; What is the “right” FTE mix for PAUSD? Should we hire more teachers and reduce support staff? How will the incremental FTE hiring improve the quality of education for our children? You can see the full interactive budget breakdown yourself in the PAUSD Budget Explorer\n","tags":["PAUSD","Education","Budget","Local Government"],"title":"Understanding PAUSD Budget Dynamics","uri":"/blog/posts/2026-03-03-pausd-budget/"},{"categories":null,"content":"tl;dr: If it took you twenty seconds to generate, don\u0026rsquo;t expect me to spend twenty minutes reading it.\nI’m seeing a massive influx of AI-generated documents: deep-research reports, meeting notes, PRDs, and strategy decks.\nThey look professional. They follow a clean structure. But when I push for the “why” behind a specific recommendation, the logic usually collapses.\nWriting forces understanding: For me, writing isn’t about producing paragraphs, it’s about clarity of thought. The act of writing forces me to build a clear understanding of the topic. I have to grapple with the nuances and trade-offs.\nThat process takes time because thinking takes time. When I use AI to skip the writing, I often end up skipping the thinking, too.\nNo time to read: AI can spit out a professional looking, polished document in no time. However, it doesn’t reduce the time required to read or understand it.\nIn fact, AI docs are often harder to digest, because I don’t know what the person was actually thinking (vs what AI wrote for them). When I read a human-written doc, I’m tracking their logic. When I read an AI doc, I’m constantly wondering: “How much conviction does the writer have on this point?”\nI have stopped reading documents that are purely AI-generated. If you didn’t have the time to write it, I don’t have the time to read it.\nI use AI every day, including writing this blog post. But I still believe that writing is a reflection of thought. Using AI to write without thinking is just generating noise.\nIf you really want to send an AI-generated doc, just send the prompt.\n","tags":null,"title":"Who is reading all the stuff AI is writing?","uri":"/blog/posts/2026-03-02-ai-writes-documents-but-you-still-have-to-read-them/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Comparing PAUSD with Harker: Harker doubles your top-50 odds (though there is selection bias), UCs are the most common outcome for PAUSD, and Foothill is smarter than it sounds.\nI wanted to get some clarity on what the actual data looks like - especially comparing public school in Palo Alto with other private schools in the bay area. Fortunately, PAUSD publishes detailed matriculation data for both Gunn and Paly. I also found that Harker publishes similar data which gives us a good basis for comparison.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve consolidated it in a quick little dashboard. A few things stood out \u0026ndash;\nA lot of PAUSD students go to Foothill College. Foothill is an excellent community college, with a very clear path to transfer to UCs. It allows students to have a smooth transition from high school to getting into an excellent university, without the pressure of getting into a top university right out of high school.\nPrivate School (Harker) doubles your likelihood of getting into a top-50 school. About 33% of Harker graduates go to a top-50 school (compared to 17% of PAUSD). It\u0026rsquo;s also true for top-10 schools where Harker sends ~12.6% of its graduates compared to ~8.5% for Gunn and ~7.6% for Paly.\nThis does not account for selection bias (as Harker is a private school, it can select its students), so maybe it\u0026rsquo;s not that much of a difference in the end.\nThe UC system is still up there. Roughly 17–20% of PAUSD graduates go to a UC campus (across all 3 years).\nYou can explore the full data — by school, by university, or side-by-side — in the college tracker. Data is 2022–2024 combined and QS 2024 ranked.\n","tags":["Education","Data Analysis","Bay Area","College Tracker"],"title":"Public vs Private School College Acceptance Rate","uri":"/blog/posts/2026-03-01-where-do-bay-area-kids-go-to-college/"},{"categories":["Future"],"content":"AI is making building software cheap and accessible. This is unlocking massive productivity for everyone, but is also commoditizing software engineering. We are at the end of the software gold rush, and software engineering is going from elite to skilled trade, available to everyone.\nAI is fixing the supply side of software engineering. Software Engineers are currently a luxury. Only well-funded businesses can afford them, and most others end up using generic \u0026ldquo;off the shelf\u0026rdquo; SaaS tools. These tools are often rigid, clunky, expensive and don\u0026rsquo;t always fit your workflow.\nAI is fundamentally changing that. It\u0026rsquo;s making software accessible to everyone.\nWhile there are some recent incidents on AI-driven layoffs, I don\u0026rsquo;t buy the mass unemployment narrative. In fact, with AI, there will be tons of people who can either build their own software or help others build it.\nHowever, these will not be \u0026ldquo;premium\u0026rdquo; jobs. They will be like accountants, electricians, plumbers, etc.\nSoftware engineers have had an incredible 30-year run of amazing pay and perks. This tech gold rush is over, and software engineering is transitioning from a luxury priesthood to a blue-collar trade. When the cost of code is $1, being a 10x engineer is a superpower. When AI drives the cost of code to $0, 10x is just another way of writing zero.\nWe’re about to see a massive explosion of \u0026ldquo;invisible\u0026rdquo; software—tools built for one person, one business, and one specific problem. The era of being forced into a SaaS monoculture is over. This is going to a net-positive, businesses - even small ones - can solve their own problems - and the ones that are able to leverage this superpower will have a significant edge over others.\n","tags":["AI","Jobs","Economy","Future"],"title":"AI's Impact on the Future of Software Engineering Jobs","uri":"/blog/posts/2026-02-26-ai-impact-on-jobs/"},{"categories":null,"content":" I had subscribed to Indian programming on Dish Network, mainly to get the latest updates on bollywood movies and music. YouTube always had all the content, but never had a good way to discover it in a easy way. This is fixed now. I am super-excited to announce Video Mirchi. You can access it at http://www.videomirchi.com. Video Mirchi looks up the top charts every day and creates a continuously playing video channel powered by youtube. There is no login or signup - its just like a TV channel playing the latest bollywood videos. It works on both computer and mobile. Connect it with your TV directly or via Airplay. Enjoy! ","tags":["Streaming TV","Entrepreneurship","YouTube","VideoMirchi"],"title":"Bringing YouTube one step closer to replacing traditional TV - Announcing VideoMirchi.com","uri":"/blog/posts/2012-10-08-bringing-youtube-one-step-closer-to-replacing-traditional-tv-announcing-videomirchi-com/"},{"categories":null,"content":" I just received my Lytro camera on Friday. I played with it for 2 days, carrying it almost everywhere I went. There were a lot of 'pro' reviews on the camera, but very few consumer ones, so I thought I will write down my thoughts on it. Quick summary on Lytro as a camera:\nWhat I liked:\nIt is a very well built camera. It feels great in the hands, and its construction is high quality. Its fast. There is no shutter lag. The touch interface works great and is easy to use. It charges via USB when connected to the computer. Software is minimal but decent. Lytro uses its own image format, so you need the software to view the photos. There are tons of other things I wished it did, but it does the job for now. Image quality (besides the resolution) is pretty decent. What I didn't like: The screen is horrible. I can't believe they put such a poor quality screen on this camera. The demos that they have on their site are definitely not with a real camera.. the screen in their demos is crystal clear. It has almost no viewing angle other than 'straight'. Makes it difficult to take pictures, specially because you have to rely on looking at it so much. Its almost non-functional in sunlight. Direct view - you can see the highly pixelated image View when tilted by about 15 degrees. The image almost looks like a 'negative'. The final resolution of pictures (when exported as jpeg) is 1080 × 1080, which is ok for sharing on facebook but too low for most other uses. The camera actually requires you to take pictures that are out of focus, which can be corrected using the software. So you can't be 100% sure while taking a photo if you will get the focus you want. Taking Photos Lytro only has 2 buttons - Click and Power. It also has a touch-slider to zoom which is pretty responsive. This makes it easy to capture photos.\nIt took me a few hours to get used to the camera, especially because of the lack of a good display and mediocre preview quality. It also takes a bit of work to get used to how to pick the right focus range.\nAccording to their tutorial, you have to take the photos so that the main subject is slightly blurred, which can then be brought into focus later using the software. I had a lot of shots where it went out of the focus range - like this sample photo from gizmodo\u0026rsquo;s review so I could not get it as sharp as I wanted. I guess this is something that will improve by practice, but its a bit tricky to take an \u0026lsquo;imperfect\u0026rsquo; photo and trust the camera to make it \u0026lsquo;perfect\u0026rsquo; later.\nOverall speaking, I got used to most of the stuff and was able to take acceptable photos within a day. The camera literally has no 'settings', which is nice. Living Pictures\nLytro touts this camera as \u0026lsquo;click now, focus later\u0026rsquo;. This is cool for marketing, but is just a way to bridge the gap with existing cameras. Current SLR cameras are quite fast, and I can see exactly what the picture looks like while taking it, so the \u0026lsquo;focus later\u0026rsquo; part of lytro doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem very useful to me personally.\nHowever, the whole concept of \u0026rsquo;living pictures\u0026rsquo; has added another dimension to the photographs. You can craft the picture so that the user discovers something new when he clicks on the blurred part, which really makes the photos feel \u0026lsquo;alive\u0026rsquo;.\nFor example, the picture below looks like a standard rope with blurred background. Any camera with a decent lens can do this. There is nothing that stands out. However, clicking on the background reveals a new detail that makes the photo more interesting. This is a whole new paradigm in photography, beyond just 'decide the focus later'. It adds a new meaning to the photo which has been historically lost with traditional photos. Focus Range\nLytro does not have an infinite focusing (or refocusing) range. While taking pictures, you have control over this \u0026lsquo;range\u0026rsquo;. As far as you are within this range, you can focus on any object inside it. There are also some interesting tricks. For example, in the picture below, the frame of the mirror is on its own focus plane, but what you see inside the mirror and what\u0026rsquo;s in front of the scene is on a separate plane. Clicking inside the mirror or on the house in front of the car focuses both the regions. Until now, we have always been dealing with Aperture, Shutter speed, etc. but the Lytro adds a new dimension which is fun to play with. The software currently does not allow you to create a photo with infinite depth of field, but I believe that a future update will make it possible.\nLow Light Performance\nThe camera does OK in low light, definitely not as good as my 40D at f1.8, but better than my compact powershot camera. Here is a sample:\nConclusion\nLytro a pretty solid camera as version 1.0 of a brand new technology. With the amount of data that the camera captures, it might be able to do amazing things like 3D and HDR. However, they have started with a simple use case - excited to see where it goes from here.\nAfter using it for 2 days straight, I have already started missing the ability to click anywhere in the photos I took using regular cameras.. wondering \u0026lsquo;what was hidden there\u0026rsquo;.\nAs for now, it does not replace a regular camera, but is something fun to have and make photography more interesting.\nIf you are interested in photography, already own a bunch of lenses and a nice SLR, and have $400 to spare, this is going to be a very fun ride.\nHere is my public stream on Lytro, have fun! \u0026ndash;\nBtw, if you want your significant other to get you one, let them know by adding it to your wishlist at theicebreak.com.\nComments Paul Lloyd (March 05, 2012):\nCheers buddy! I also received my Lytro camera yesterday. I\u0026rsquo;ve waited for this camera since long time. The camera quality is very good. Thanks\nAniket (March 05, 2012):\nThanks for your views as a consumer/user. Given these views, it would be very interesting to understand your perspective about the product and/or company as an entrepreneur/investor.\nWould you have invested in them; say today?\nDwipal (March 05, 2012):\nThe camera takes advantage of all the advancements that have happened in computing, like cheap and fast storage, faster processing, etc. Even if someone wanted to do this 5 years ago, it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have been possible then.\nThere is a lot more to this technology than just \u0026lsquo;focus\u0026rsquo;, so I am quite optimistic on it. It all depends on how well they can execute, and whether they can deliver this promise in the long run.\nRegarding investing, just looking at their technology, I would have invested ( I would\u0026rsquo;ve invested in them even 2 years ago if I had a chance to - its the kind of product I like to follow ).\nGirish (August 11, 2012):\nThanks !!!\nwww.noncamerasmartphones.com\nDr.Murat Enoz, MD - ENT Doctor (February 18, 2013):\nFocuses on the location you clicked \u0026hellip; Gorgeous Greetings Burun Estetigi\ndimz (August 28, 2013):\nThanks for providing such a great article, it was excellent and very informative.\nthank you :)\n","tags":["Photography","Lytro","Gadget Reviews","Light Field Photography"],"title":"A personal review of Lytro Camera","uri":"/blog/posts/2012-03-05-a-personal-review-of-lytro-camera/"},{"categories":null,"content":" Having observed the whole \u0026lsquo;connected tv\u0026rsquo; phenomenon first hand since my early days at YouTube, contributing to XBMC since its inception and being really interested in this space personally, I am very upset with the direction where Smart TV is going.\nI think that the future should not include 'Apps on TV', 'Browser on TV', and its also not 'Read Facebook or Check Email on the TV'. They are terrible to use and there are some fundamental reasons why they will never be good: TV is a consumption device for media (photos, videos and music). An average TV is a few feet away from the user. This makes it difficult to read any text that is not blown up to the size of subtitles. It is also a shared device, so anything that is relatively personal (like email) is not practical to use on the TV. The interface on TV is simple: Big menu items and Big boxes. Anything beyond this gets cluttered up because of its size restrictions. It is really awesome at what it does: Play media. It sucks at almost everything else. Now, if you look at the trends that are happening (for TV space): Facebook / Email / Twitter / Browser on TV Big fancy keyboards connected to TV Reading news on TV Searching for content on TV Different apps on TV All these are enabled by connecting the TV to the internet. TVs have become more smarter in the last 5 years than they have ever been, and everyone is itching to get on board with these new capabilities. However, I think that loading TV with all these features is going to fail. An ideal TV experience should be: Use TV as a dumb device to play content from any source - brodcast, internet or somewhere in between. Give it a minimal interface so its easy to play this content, like play / pause / next. Use an additional device (Laptop, Phone, Tablet, etc) to control the programming. This way, next time you want to watch Netflix or listen to Pandora, you can go Netflix.com (or open its app on your smartphone) and select 'Play on TV'. No dealing with confusing interfaces, no app crashes on the TV. However, this is not happening due to a variety of reasons: There are no 'standards' around this. I cannot build a TV that supports standard X, which will enable it to play content from different sources directly without writing native apps. A TV without interface doesn't look 'sexy'. You can't show-off that it has 'no interface'. Except if you are apple :). The TV will need a companion device which actually has the interface. It can be a tablet, laptop, phone or even the source / website itself. Imagine if we had to have apps for every channel that we have subscribed to on your Cable or Dish network, all with a different UI. This is where Smart TV is going right now. Apple is the only company that has done at-least something on these lines, via AirTunes and now AirPlay that is directly integrated in iOS. Its still a bit clunky to use, but definitely a step in the right direction.\nIn the end, the primary role of a TV is to play content, and trying to make them \u0026lsquo;Smart\u0026rsquo; is like putting lipstick on a pig.\nHopefully we will see a TV that has no interface, can be fully controlled via my tablet, and can play just about anything from everywhere.\nComments None (June 17, 2012):\nwww.noncamerasmartphones.blogspot.com\nPhone Guru (September 01, 2012):\nThanks a lot !!!!\nwww.noncamerasmartphones.com\nNone (August 31, 2013):\nThe Rocket Droid Pc is a device that is aiming to be the most powerful portable mini Android dongle. It will plug directly into the HDMI port of any TV and instantly turn it into kick-butt SMART TV - bringing all the power of an Android Mobile Phone to your previously boring TV! SMART TV\n","tags":["Smart TV","Home Entertainment","Tech UX"],"title":"Smart TV FAIL. Let's go back to the Idiot Box.","uri":"/blog/posts/2012-02-14-smart-tv-fail-let-s-go-back-to-the-idiot-box/"},{"categories":null,"content":" I love Email. It just works. It works because it is flexible, open, and anyone can use it. It works very well in heterogeneous environments as the email standard is well documented, accepted and implemented.\nI have looked at a ton of \u0026lsquo;solutions\u0026rsquo; that try to replace emails, but nothing really works as seamlessly as good-old email.\nThe goal of email is to enable communication and think that it can be improved. It will be stupid to completely replace this amazing means of communication, when it fundamentally works well. What needs to be done is to make it \u0026lsquo;smarter\u0026rsquo;.\nWhat's broken is not the ability of emails to enable communication, but that the forms of communication have now become more complicated whereas email is still at its original design built for person-to-person messaging. Because email worked for everything, everything piled onto it making it complicated. What needs to happen is that a standard should be created on top of email, that can handle \u0026lsquo;special\u0026rsquo; use cases which can then be implemented by clients in a cross-platform way.\nA few examples of this are:\nMessages from discussion groups can be similar to RSS feeds. They are usually read-only and rarely need to be responded to. Special handlers to 'automatic' messages, like calendar invites, flight alerts, shipping confirmation, etc. They don't need to be shown like a 'message', just need to get to my mailbox so that I can access them if I need to. Notification emails should show up as, well, notifications. A good way to handle things like groupons, which, even though come in as email, aren't really messages. There is no one company that can 'fix' this, as any change to email needs to be standardized. However, small steps can definitely be taken to create email formats that are 'machine readable' by the client so they can be organized properly. A first step in this direction is to have a major email provider (eg. gmail) to start supporting \u0026lsquo;smart email\u0026rsquo; formats. This will make the services to send emails compatible with this format, which can then grow and expand to more and more services.\nI would love to see some work done here, and see someone solve this problem. May be its time for someone to start a new email company :)\nComments None (February 15, 2012):\nThis is 100% spot on. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about this a great deal in the past, and discussed it with some folks.\nThing is, you don\u0026rsquo;t even need a new standard, since the mechanism is already there. All we would need is for folks to agree (that may be harder) on the use of standardized x-headers. Then clients can implement \u0026ldquo;smart\u0026rdquo; filtering, etc based on the presence and value of them.\nFor example (none of these should be considered well-thought-out ;-) x-from-company = Netflix Can be used to filter on company\nx-is-billing = True Can be used to route to a folder of bills\nx-period = Monthly Can be used to determine subscription or periodic freq\nIf you put all those together, you can create a folder for my Netflix account statements and highlight it when a bill is near or past due. You could allow a search fo all bills this month. You could do quite a lot.\nDwipal (February 15, 2012):\nYes, that is exactly what I am talking about! All the pieces to do this are already in place, people just need to agree on it.\nAniket (February 15, 2012):\nDidnt Wave try to re-invent email - and faced a lot of inertia from users? Didnt reach critical mass. Although I understand what you are proposing is quite different from Wave\u0026rsquo;s propositions - but the case in point is that people (users at large) shed inertia really slowly - or just dont.\nGMail labs also from time to time have some interesting little featurettes. For example - they mark email that is addressed directly to you as important; etc\u0026hellip; I believe that such flexibility is best left to individual users to tune their mailboxes to their preferences (rather than standardize). Folders and (perhaps smarter) filters serve the purpose in most cases.\nDwipal (February 15, 2012):\nWave tried to replace email with something very clunky. It didn\u0026rsquo;t really reduce the \u0026rsquo;noise\u0026rsquo; of email, or add a good structure to it. Rather, it was really noisy. It also tried to do too much.. like editing documents, which is not meant for doing inside of email.\nJalpesh (February 18, 2012):\nOn similar lines, may be write extensions for desktop clients like outlook. show interests in people using it and hopefully one of the companies will add this in their apps. I see more and more web mails are mimicking desktop app functionality (apart from their own unique features) to move desktop features on thinner client. I think it\u0026rsquo;s difficult for gmail or Microsoft or yahoo to make these standards esp because they have to interoperate\n","tags":["Email Management","Productivity","Software Tools"],"title":"Smarter Email","uri":"/blog/posts/2012-02-08-smarter-email/"},{"categories":null,"content":" Since the launch of iPhone, everyone has been trying to replicate the App Store model that Apple created. Every operator, OEM and even independent companies are trying to create their own app stores and native app platforms. The app store/native app model is inherently a walled garden model. This is analogous to AOL in the early days of the internet. AOL was the first one to truly bring internet to the \u0026lsquo;masses\u0026rsquo;. Internet was very young at the time, and was difficult to use. AOL, by controlling the ecosystem and adding restrictions so that everything works well within it, was able to drive adoption for the internet.\nIn 1999, DoCoMo launched iMode in Japan and did what AOL did - but to mobile devices. All of a sudden, people could open emails, look up stock prices, check the weather and even read magazines all from their phone. iMode was extremely popular and put Japan way ahead of the world in mobile use. Following DoCoMo, other Japanese operators also created their own \u0026lsquo;private ecosystems\u0026rsquo; and achieved considerable success.\nThe common theme between all of them is that they created a very strong value proposition by productizing new, difficult to use technology.\nHowever, as time went on, these walled gardens became barriers and hampered innovation in the space.\nThe technology matured and people wanted \u0026lsquo;more\u0026rsquo; out of it. They started to created services that ran independently, and the \u0026lsquo;walls\u0026rsquo; started to crumble.\nIt also got difficult for publishers to time to build services and innovate on business models that weren\u0026rsquo;t a part of this \u0026lsquo;walled garden\u0026rsquo;. Slowly but surely, things started moving to the \u0026lsquo;open internet\u0026rsquo; and even though the initial experience was not as good as the walled garden, both consumers and publishers embraced it.\nI believe that the Native Apps fall under the same category. With the launch of iPhone, smartphones finally became powerful enough to be able to do things that \u0026lsquo;common people\u0026rsquo; would want. However, because the technology was still developing, the only way to create a great experience was to go \u0026rsquo;native\u0026rsquo; and build a proprietary app. Apple was able to use this to their advantage and create the app store.\nWith HTML5 developing at an amazing speed, more and more people will start to see the clear advantages of building on an open platform. Its a massive waste of effort having to write native apps on different mobile operating systems that run on hardware of pretty much the same capability.\nThere are already companies that have started to work in this space, allowing users to get the best of both worlds. The technology is still young, but extremely promising, and a couple of years down the line, the notion of \u0026lsquo;you must build your app for 5 different platforms\u0026rsquo; will be a thing of the past, just like AOL. There will still be some native apps, like we have them on desktop/laptop but they will be extremely specialized.\nApp stores - as a way to discover \u0026lsquo;apps\u0026rsquo; might always stay on but \u0026rsquo;native\u0026rsquo; as a platform should start counting its days. Until then, its the age of the \u0026rsquo;native app\u0026rsquo;.\nPhoto credit: http://sethmurphy.com/node/8 ","tags":["Mobile Apps","Economy","Tech Trends"],"title":"The Native-App economy and its future","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-10-02-the-native-app-economy-and-its-future/"},{"categories":null,"content":" Next week, I completed 2 years of leaving my amazing job at YouTube to enter the world of startups. Looking back, there is a ton of things that happened in these 2 years, including starting 2 companies, having a baby, traveling, fundraising, investing, advising, volunteering, etc.\nThere is a lot that I have learned from this rollercoaster ride, and its now time to reflect on some of the key things\nDont\u0026rsquo;s\nDo not leave a good job unless you know what you are going to do Do not start a company without doing enough research Do not think that you can go alone in building a company Dos Do make sure that you have enough savings to last a while Do find co-founders or have a founding team that you have a good working chemistry with Do have family time, startup is a marathon not a sprint Thanks to my wife for understanding and keeping sanity in some of the insane times. ","tags":["Year","Anniversary"],"title":"2 Year Anniversary","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-09-30-2-year-anniversary/"},{"categories":null,"content":" (Originally posted on theicebreak blog.) Theicebreak is all about understanding relationships. It makes sense then that we would want to ensure that we have a strong understanding of who we are in a relationship with - our user base.\nTo do so, we really focus on tracking every feature and functionality through cohort analysis, as championed by Fred Wilson, Dave McClure, Eric Ries\u0026rsquo;s lean startup movement and others.\nThere are now a couple of services that provide easy tools to do so for startups, including everyone\u0026rsquo;s favorites\u0026hellip;Mixpanel and KISSMetrics. We tried them all, but immediately hit some crucial limitations of these online platforms:\nWe have multiple interfaces (web, mobile, api) and we would have to individually integrate with analytics on each one. A way to solve this is to integrate on the server side. We wanted to combine this data with other attributes, for example, break down a certain feature by male vs female users, or married vs engaged couples. We needed to be able to run custom queries and reports based on the data in a simple way. This data is private and very important for the company, and we would like to 'own' it. It should be inexpensive :) Most of the analytics services (except the really expensive/complex ones) are typically focused on implementing the tracking in javascript or other front-end APIs. Some of them do support server side logging, but it is limited. The only way we could meet the above requirements is to build our own system. Once we started to write it, it actually turned out to be quite easier than we originally thought, and also a lot more powerful. The key requirements (besides solving the problems I described above) were: It should be quick to build and simple to use. It should be re-usable, and possible to run lots of complex analyses with ease. It shouldn't take any more effort to log different action types as the site grows. We created a very simple 'events' table called event_log (we use mysql). This table basically had 5 fields: uid event_type\nevent_action_id\ntime_created\ndescription Any action that a user takes, like answering an icebreaker, changing the password, posting a moment, updating stats, etc. gets an entry in this table. We also store the event_action_id that points to the actual action. This way we can dig deeper if needed. We focus on actual \u0026lsquo;actions\u0026rsquo;, not page views.\nThis is done via a simple api call to log an entry to this table after the user performs an action. This has been extremely powerful for us, and forms the basis of most of our decision making reports.\nBecause the table is simple but contains all the necessary fields, we can now run complex cohorts as well as simple reports just off of this table. There can be joins and other analyses that can be very easily executed without too much overhead. It also really simplifies the task of getting the same data on different types of actions, as it\u0026rsquo;s all normalized in a clean, single table.\nAs an example, a basic cohort table can be easily generated by a query similar to: SELECT week(u.time_created) AS cohort,\nweek(g.time_created) AS period,\ncount(*) FROM event_log g\nJOIN user u ON u.uid=g.uid\nWHERE\nu.time_created \u0026gt; \u0026lsquo;2011-01-01\u0026rsquo; AND\ng.event_type = 1\nGROUP BY cohort, period\nORDER BY cohort, period\nA quick post-processing of the results and you can generate some very useful charts out of it; below is an example simulation of how retention would look for a typical website for a few weeks following a launch-spike. Adding a simple dropdown for the event type, and you can get the same chart broken down by events. You can also very easily add other filters by doing joins with other tables and get real insights on who your users are.\nFor example, we can run reports like:\nWhat's the usage of the icebreaker feature among married males? What's the overall retention broken down by each relationship type (i.e. married, dating, etc)? Do males add more stats or females, and how do these numbers change over time? This is a good initial approach; it provides a lot more flexibility than other services, and will work effectively until you hit a few million users. Then you will start having 'scaling issues' (a good problem to have). There are definitely some drawbacks to this approach, like:\nThe events table can grow really large. We only track the 'important' events, and for the unimportant ones, we track it at intervals (for example, we only log one visit per day). You can also vertically split the table to keep the size under control. This is not connected to front-end analytics; doing so might complicate the system. You have to write this from scratch. Even though it was relatively easy for us to write, it's still more effort than adding 3 lines of javascript code. It can get slow... but it's not a user-facing feature, and we can cache the results. We also run this on a replica database, so it doesn't really affect the performance of our live service. We use these cohort reports in conjunction with regular analytics (getclicky and Google analytics) for traditional page views, visitors, funnels, campaigns, and conversions. This has helped us understand a ton about how the site is being used, and what our users want and are doing.\nCheers! Dwipal\nhttp://blog.theicebreak.com/blog/2011/9/29/want-to-know-your-users-better-run-your-own-analytics.html\n","tags":["Want","Know","Your","Users","Better","Your","Analytics"],"title":"Want to know your users better? Run your own analytics!","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-09-29-want-to-know-your-users-better-run-your-own-analytics/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I now have at-least 6 different devices that are used to play music, so I think its high time to look seriously at streaming music services. I tried Spotify, Rdio, MOG and Rhapsody. All of them seem to have good audio quality, and a pretty solid music catalog for western music. My requirements are simple:\nMust have:\nGood Bollywood music catalog Share accounts, so that both me and my wife can listen to music at work Android, iPhone, PC support Nice to have:Offline playback Upload songs already owned by me SpotifyMOGRdioRhapsody Bollywood CatalogYesYesLackingLacking Shared AccountNoYesDidn't CheckDidn't Check Android, iPhone, PCYesYesDidn't CheckDidn't Check To test the bollywood catalog, I used following combination of music: SpotifyMOGRdioRhapsody Zindagi Na Milegi Dubara (2011)YesYesNoNo Delhi Belly (2011)NoNoNoNo Sangam (1964)YesYesYesYes Purani jeans (Song)YesYesYesYes Patiala house (2010)YesYesYesYes Double Dhamaal (2011)YesYesNoNo Based on my requirements, MOG is a clear winner. It has (almost) the full bollywood catalog. I also like some of its other features: MOG Radio Public playlists No desktop download required Available on a wide variety of devices, like Sonos, Roku, etc. Its UI is a bit strangely designed, but should fine once I get used to it :) Go MOGging :)\nComments None (October 30, 2011):\nthanks this is exactly compare i was looking for..\nNone (June 25, 2012):\nHave you checked www.saavn.com ? both spotify and mog dont have the latest bollywood albums whereas saavn does. saavn has a nice iphone app too.\nNone (June 21, 2013):\nBollywoodFind All latest bollywood news,Bollywood Wallpapers,Bollywood Hot and latest Gossips only on bollywoodjosh.com\nNone (November 29, 2013):\nHello there, just became alert to your blog through Google, and found that it\u0026rsquo;s really informative. I am gonna watch out for brussels. I will appreciate if you continue this in future. A lot of people will be benefited from your writing. Cheers!\nMy web site :: Web site\nNone (May 31, 2014):\n3 devices for music . waooo. nice admin, i have 2 only pc and lappy :P with best whished: Nimra Yasmeen http://mp3videosongs123.blogspot.com\n","tags":["Music Streaming","Bollywood","Tech Comparison"],"title":"Spotify, MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody for Bollywood Music","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-07-27-spotify-mog-rdio-rhapsody-for-bollywood-music/"},{"categories":null,"content":"We keep reading that the biggest asset Facebook has is their social graph, the network of friends and friends of friends that is close to impossible for other companies to replicate. Facebook initially grew their network not just because people wanted to be friends with others on an online service, but because it provided a real value that people wanted to capture (according to my friend who was at school when facebook was getting big, that value was to get invited to all the parties, or spy on a girl).\nIf a service provides enough value for people, they will go through any amounts of pain to sign up to capture that. Think of dating sites like eharmony and match, they are extremely boring to sign up with forms that run for a mile, but loads of people still sign up.\nI had attended the summit series conference few months ago, and they had their own special social network which you could sign up. The had very long forms, no facebook connect and even no email notifications. However, everybody still signed up and it was a very vibrant service during the conference\u0026hellip; it was exclusive and it was useful.\nGoogle plus, though a bit too early to say, is similar. I just signed up and found enough value because of the easier privacy controls (and also the photo syncing feature).. if this does well, my \u0026lsquo;social graph\u0026rsquo; will take no time in moving to google from facebook.\nAt the end of the day, if a service has a real use for people, it will not be that difficult for them\nto get people on board. If the focus on a bottom-up approach on focusing on the value, people will sign up. In today\u0026rsquo;s world where everything spreads so fast, the social graph will take no time to move with users.\nComments Rahul Lakhani (February 15, 2012):\nI agree with the thesis of the argument. However the problem is that Facebook also knows this and they will do everything in their power to make it harder for you to move. For example, Facebook will probably never allow users to carry out its \u0026ldquo;sharing history\u0026rdquo;. Without the sharing history, I will find it hard to move to other networks. Other social services will have to exploit a niche and grow from there. For example, Google Plus is probably not betting on becoming the next Facebook. It will still achieve its purpose as #2 or #3, by capturing your social activity and sprucing up its own search/ads results.\nDwipal (February 15, 2012):\nI think there will be \u0026lsquo;parallel networks\u0026rsquo; that will build along with facebook, but they will eventually start cutting into facebook\u0026rsquo;s core. I am already seeing pinterest and tumblr doing that, there are communities of people directly connected making facebook less relevant as you use them more and more.\n","tags":["Social Media","Network Theory","Tech Analysis"],"title":"The 'social graph' lock-in is overvalued","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-06-30-the-social-graph-lock-in-is-overvalued/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Have been playing around with bitcoins lately. Even though I seriously doubt the long-term viability of such a currency, I think its pretty amazing to be able to use it right now. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t heard about it, Bitcoin is a P2P, completely decentralized currency. Its like a digital version of having cash, with all the benifits (and disadvantages) of cash. Its anonymous and can\u0026rsquo;t really be tracked (just like cash), but can also get stolen if someone gets access to your files.\nPeople have been using it to buy t-shirts and accesories, server space and a physical NY restaurant even accepts payments using bitcoins. Imagine traveling the world without worrying about currency exchange problems and having a single currency that works everywhere.\nTo get started, check out bitcoin.org or download the app. on your computer and send me your bitcoin address so I can send you some!. If you are feeling rather generous, my address is 1JcNMmEUYCieADecgUNkjE3vYTanJhD9wu :)\nDwipal\nComments zameer (December 01, 2021):\nKarnataka 562123 080736 70915 SHREE SAI PACKERS AND MOVERS #18/3, 30ft road,, sri krishna colony, kuduregere main road,, alur post, Bangalore, Packers and movers bangalore\nGuru TV Repair 52 shampura main road, Munni veerappa layout Kaval bairasandra Bengaluru, Karnataka 560032 080888 33910 Led tv repair in bangalore\nGraphica Gauges and Tools S. No. 37, Ramnagar, Ramnagar Tempo Chowk,Vadgoensheri Pune, Maharashtra 411014 098508 84992 Thread Ring Gauges\niRobo Wellness Private Limited AryaHub Mall No. 22 Hope farm Junction Whitefield Bangalore, Karnataka 560066 099806 58125 Massage chair\n","tags":["Cryptocurrency","Finance","Emerging Tech"],"title":"Bitcoins!","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-06-27-bitcoins/"},{"categories":null,"content":"So one day, I decided that I want to go wireless with my keyboard and mouse. The main reason was that I didn't want to plug in the USB cable every time I get into the office. After searching for good, full sized bluetooth keyboards, I soon realized that there is nothing good out there. So I decided to get the Logitech MK710\n","tags":["Search","Wireless","Keyboard"],"title":"In search of a wireless keyboard...","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-06-05-in-search-of-a-wireless-keyboard/"},{"categories":null,"content":" With the millions of new blog posts, news articles, tweets and updates posted daily, getting to the content we want in real time is easier than ever. The only caveat: we need to know what we want.\nTraditionally, we have relied on the major publishers and distributors to feed us the content in the form of newspapers, magazines, journals, books, etc. The publishers would decide what content would \u0026lsquo;sell\u0026rsquo;, and will then \u0026lsquo;productize\u0026rsquo; it so people can get access to it.\nThis model worked really well for over a century. However, there was one big inefficiency with this model: The content creator didn\u0026rsquo;t really get much in terms of control or revenue. In fact, for most cases, less than 15% of the revenue of a book goes to the author. The publishers and distributors were able to pull this off because they basically controlled the supply chain.\nNow, with the power of the \u0026lsquo;internets\u0026rsquo;, anybody can create a piece of content and make it accessible to users in the same way as a big publisher does. So there are a million new pieces of content created every day, ready to be consumed.Of all the awesomeness of this new model, one thing that is terribly broken is the part where publishers curate the content to make sure that it is of a certain quality before it reaches the users.\nIn the publishing industry, there are people dedicated to reviewing thousands of articles, book ideas and other content before something gets published. Because of the limited space available in physical media, they have to be quite picky what gets included and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t.\nI think that there is a massive opportunity right now to do this with online content. I have been relying on my social graph to get interesting content daily, but its still too much content and too little variety. What is needed is for someone to create a special \u0026lsquo;magazine\u0026rsquo; on the internet that is both personalized for my taste, but also contains enough variety so that I can \u0026lsquo;stumble\u0026rsquo; across interesting topics.\nI highly doubt that something like this can be completely crowd sourced. It will have to be a hybrid between a person collecting interesting content along with stuff that is popular. There is a dire need of a \u0026lsquo;human touch\u0026rsquo; here - a curator for online content.\nUnless someone does this right, it is going to be difficult to justify its value. However, the time is ripe for someone to create a \u0026lsquo;Facebook of Content\u0026rsquo;.. a place where everyone goes to get the latest news customized for their taste, but also containing enough variety :).\nTill this happens, back to twitter + facebook + google news + google reader + timesofindia.\nDwipal\nPhoto credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vincentgallegos/4562911007/\n","tags":["Publishing","Media","Tech Trends"],"title":"Where is my digital magazine?","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-04-18-where-is-my-digital-magazine/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Last year, when my parents were visiting the US, I decided to get Indian TV programming so they can watch it here. As Dish Network bill can go above $100 per month with such programming, I decided to go the Internet route by signing up with a service called WatchIndia.tv. WatchIndia streams TV channels directly from India (including the ads, which is nice) over the internet. Its a subscription based service with monthly/yearly subscriptions. I purchased their 1 year service package.\nWithin a few weeks of getting the service, their quality started going down. It will constantly buffer or not work at all, and was overall very slow.The worst happened in december, when the set top box stopped working, and I was without indian programming for over a month during holidays.\nTheir customer support was polite but not helpful at all, and after a lot of arguing, they fixed my box and told me that I will get 3 months of extension to my service. My service would now expire in June instead of March.\nYesterday, I suddenly received an email from them saying they have 'renewed' my subscription for the next year and charged my credit card. I immediately called them to cancel it and refund the charge but they refused to do so without major fees. There was no notification that my subscription was going to get renewed, and I had not signed up for auto-renewal in the first place. Now, the thing about WatchIndia is, even though they are focused primarily on US consumers, they have no US presence. There is no US office address or contact information (except a toll free customer support number). The only recourse I have is to dispute the charge on credit card, which I can luckily do. Basically, the company used typical sleazy tactics to renew my account and refusing to cancel the subscription.\nThis brings a question to the fact that as more of international companies start selling their services in the US, what recourse do the US consumers have so that they follow the law. Most states in the US have strict guidelines on companies that subscribe people for auto-renewal on their credit cards, and you can file a complain at the BBB in case they break the laws. However, international companies might not follow these guidelines, and its very difficult to actually go after them if they break the rules.\nHopefully, as more of these services start getting traction, the legal system will evolve to keep them from cheating their customers. Until then, we just need to be careful :).\n","tags":["Business Ethics","Globalism","Economics"],"title":"Enforcing honest business practices in a 'Flat World'","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-03-04-enforcing-honest-business-practices-in-a-flat-world/"},{"categories":null,"content":"VIM 7.3 recently got released, and supports persistent undo! This post describes a simple way to configure it. You have to compile it / get it from unstable repo, but totally worth it :)\nEnjoy!\n","tags":["Vim","Software Tools","Productivity"],"title":"VIM 7.3 with Persistent Undo","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-03-04-vim-7-3-with-persistent-undo/"},{"categories":null,"content":" A few people asked me what we use at TheIceBreak, so here it goes:\nLinux / Apache / MySQL / Python Pylons Framework (SQLAlchemy ORM, Mako Templating Engine) Lucene for Search JQuery for website Appcelerator Titanium for mobile app. Redis for caching GIT for source control, hosted on github nginx as load balancer Linode VPS for hosting webservers / database Amazon S3 for images Besides this, it consists of: 3 main servers: Web, Search, Database 1 dev server, which also contains a database replica (in case the main server crashes) The dev server also hosts a 'stage2', which is as similar in structure to the live site as it can. Everything that is pushed live goes through stage2 to make sure that nothing breaks. Using this setup, I have been able to keep the latency of most (dynamic) pages to under 150 ms. ","tags":["Tech Stack","Software Engineering","Startups"],"title":"TheIceBreak Tech Overview","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-02-15-theicebreak-tech-overview/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I recently watched an excellent episode of Fareed Zakaria GPS on the topic 'What makes a good leader' that was sitting on my DVR since months. He had some of the biggest leaders in business and politics (Lou Gerstner, Tony Blair, Admiral Mike Mullen and others) talk about their take on Leadership. I thought I would summarize what were the biggest tasks that a Leader should accomplish:\nSet up a clear long-term vision and guidelines for the company. Make sure that the execution follows this long term vision / guidelines. People are free to do whatever they want as long as it helps the company reach its vision. Be a good listener, you will need all the data you can gather to come up with a good vision True leaders will show their strength during a downturn, its easy for anyone to do well when the company has a strong momentum for growth. Even though these points can easily be found in any leadership/101 class, its amazing how many companies and products fail at the basic task of having a clear vision and eventually loose their significance. I have had first hand experience with all the above points, and can\u0026rsquo;t agree more with all of them. The last point was particularly interesting that you can identify a true leader only during a downturn. If you hire someone when your company has a lot of momentum and is growing well, you don\u0026rsquo;t need a lot of leadership skills to run it (too much leadership might actually disrupt the growth). True leaders can really be identified clearly during a downturn.\nFinally, a great quote by Eisenhower: \u0026ldquo;Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it\u0026rdquo;.\n","tags":["Leadership","Business Strategy","Management"],"title":"On Leadership","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-02-10-on-leadership/"},{"categories":null,"content":"There have been numerous startups and trends that use crowdsourcing to generate their desired results. Most of them rely on people to publicly share the (public) information, whether they are tweets, status updates, checkins or shared links and then aggregate this information to generate interesting results. This model works great for public content, but completely breaks for anything that is private and personal. There have been a very small number of products that exploit this facet of crowdsourcing properly. Basically, the idea is simple: Get private data from users and present it to others in an aggregate, anonymous way so that it benefits them (users).\nThe company that has done this quite well recently is Mint.com. They hold tremendous amount of private, transactional data from their users which is not directly shared with anyone. Then, they mine this data to generate interesting stats that give users a new insight on their usage. Utility companies have started to use this to show comparisons to their users, like I recently got a letter from our city that we are using more power than our neighbors.\nWe use a similar model in my current startup TheIceBreak, where we provide insights that help users improve their personal relationships.\nWith any service of this kind, it is absolutely important to maintain the trust of users. Failing to maintain the privacy or trying to move beyond the comfort zone of what people consider private will work against the utility of the service.\nThe results from such a service can be quite fascinating, giving users an insight which they might never have had before. I am curious what other services will emerge in the future that follow a similar model.\n","tags":["Crowdsourcing","Private","Data"],"title":"Crowdsourcing private data","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-02-05-crowdsourcing-private-data/"},{"categories":null,"content":" General Software\nChrome (Primary Browser), Firefox 4 (Looks quite good) Digsby IM Postbox Email Client OpenPandora Paint.NET Audacity TightVNC VLC Media Player Online Services LastPass password manager Pinboard.in paper.li Development Tools SecureCRT WinSCP Quick HTML Color Picker NoMachine Eclipse S3 Browser ","tags":["Software","Tools","Productivity"],"title":"Software I Use...","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-01-28-software-i-use/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Don't talk to me about investments. Do introductions if someone is doing something I might be excited about, not just about investing. My primary reason to invest is not to make money (though its a nice outcome), but to get involved in products that I get very excited about.\n","tags":["Finance","Investment","Personal Strategy"],"title":"On My Investing Strategy","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-01-27-on-my-investing-strategy/"},{"categories":null,"content":"We were recently discussing a new feature for my new startup TheIceBreak that involves building functionality that has never been done before. In order to design it, we relied on a few assumptions that are difficult to validate without actually building the product. This reminded me of the fundamental differences between dogfood-style (bottom-up) vs vision driven (top-down) product development, and the companies that follow them: Google vs Apple, and how this approach defines how products are built.\nGoogle has a strong bottom-up culture and believes in being extensively data driven. All the products that are built at google go through extensive number-crunching and analysis before (except the 20% projects). It is very difficult for someone to justify a brand new product as there might not exist enough existing data to validate it. Also, someone who is a small contributor might not see the \u0026lsquo;big picture\u0026rsquo; and help move the company in that direction.\nApple (or Facebook), on the other hand, are driven by vision. There is, of course, a lot of data analysis that happens to get to the vision, but they repeatedly build new products which create a brand new market that never existed before. They have changed the company focus multiple times in a major way that it affects more than 50% of their revenue or users. It usually involves the high level teams define a clear product vision for the company, and everyone works towards executing on that path.\nCreating something that is truly groundbreaking is extremely difficult to validate using existing data, so it relies on someone who has a clear foresight on what is going to be useful. It is very difficult to create something using iterative, data driven techniques that will change people\u0026rsquo;s behavior in a major way. It is, however, a great way to do incremental improvements to an existing product and get big results and can work quite well until someone \u0026lsquo;changes the game\u0026rsquo;. Top-down, vision driven strategy can refute the existing mindset to create something truly revolutionary, but it relies on a \u0026rsquo;leader\u0026rsquo; to be able to analyze the data they have and define this clear \u0026lsquo;vision\u0026rsquo;.\nHaving a clear overall vision for a company also helps the teams to know what\u0026rsquo;s good and what\u0026rsquo;s bad, and they have a clear path that they can execute on and be highly successful. This vision has to be broad enough to cover global trends, but also sharp enough so it can actually be followed, and it is absolutely the most critical thing for the long term success of a company.\nOne can also argue that the difference is similar to a democracy vs dictatorship. On paper, under the ideal conditions, dictatorship based governance can be more efficient. However, its more prone to \u0026lsquo;rouge dictators\u0026rsquo; which leads us to the belief that democracy is better in the long term.\nIn the end, getting the right vision is extremely difficult (and a lot of people actually find it boring to try writing one down), but might be the biggest factor in determining long-term success of a company!\nComments None (May 15, 2013):\nGreat post! Your examples really enforced the bottom-up versus the top-down strategies. It is so important for companies to establish which product design would fit them the best. From custom product development to the simplest form, the process needs to be stragically considered from beginning to end.\nNone (July 06, 2013):\nAking Web Tech a leading IT company \u0026amp; Provides web services :- website Development in just 1,999 Rs/-, software development like {Billing software, School Management Software, Inventory Software, ERP, CRM}, Domain \u0026amp; Hosting , SEO website development in indore\nNone (July 08, 2013):\nAking Web Tech a leading IT company \u0026amp; Provides web services :- website Development in just 1,999 Rs/-, software development like {Billing software, School Management Software, Inventory Software, ERP, CRM}, Domain \u0026amp; Hosting , SEO Software companies in indore\n","tags":["Product Management","Business Strategy","Design"],"title":"Top-down vs. Bottom-up product development","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-01-25-top-down-vs-bottom-up-product-development/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Just finished reading the book \u0026lsquo;Presentation Zen\u0026rsquo; by Garr Reynolds.\nIts a really good book if you want to do an actual presentation, when you are the speaker on a podium and everyone else is listening.\nThe concepts in this book revolve strongly around keeping the \u0026lsquo;deck\u0026rsquo; as simple as possible with heavy use of images, etc. The author also suggests that instead of adding more details on the presentation, there should be a separate handout.\nThis approach makes sense for one-way presentations to a large group of people, and there are some really good points made.\nI find that this approach is not very useful while presentating to a smaller group of people whome you are more involved with, like a product review with the team. Such presentations involve a lot of discussion, and its good to have all the data cleanly presented. There are lots of charts and tables (though, less bullet points), which does not blend well with the style in this book. People also expect to be able to just \u0026lsquo;read\u0026rsquo; the deck and understand the key messages.\nThere needs to be a balance between keeping the deck at a high level vs adding details. It needs to have enough details that people can recall the presentation by looking at the deck, but not so much that it overwhelms them.\n","tags":["Public Speaking","Design","Communication"],"title":"Presentation Zen","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-01-06-presentation-zen/"},{"categories":null,"content":"While pitching my startup to investors, or listening pitches from founders for their startups, the topic of Exit Strategy often shows up. In general, there are 2 kinds of startups:\nStartups built to stay independent Startups built to be acquired I think both of them are valid exit strategies, but entrepreneurs who build them with the goal to get acquired are thinking very small. ","tags":["Startups","Business Strategy","Entrepreneurship"],"title":"Startup Exit Strategy","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-01-04-startup-exit-strategy/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Pivot is one of the most overused terms in the startup world in 2010. The general thinking is that Pivoting is a good thing and founders are very proud to say that they have \u0026lsquo;pivoted\u0026rsquo; X number of times for their current startup. I have seen funding pitches which even contain a slide on \u0026lsquo;possible pivots\u0026rsquo;, where the founders talk about how its easy for them to change their vision.\nHaving \u0026lsquo;pivoted\u0026rsquo; my own startup (Pickv -\u0026gt; TheIceBreak), I feel this is definitely something that is important in a startup\u0026rsquo;s lifecycle. However, it is not all that fun or glamorous, and there are very strong reasons to have a plan that does not involve pivoting as the strategy.\nPivoting usually involves changing the vision of the company. From what I have seen, there are 2 kinds of \u0026lsquo;pivots\u0026rsquo;:\nPivot to a bigger opportunity: You have a generally decent product getting tiny amount of traction, but see a bigger opportunity so you switch over to that. Pivot to a new product: What you have done is not doing well, or has very little hope of getting traction, so you pivot to a new product that might or might not have anything to do with the original idea. In both cases,Pivoting is extremely painful: You have spent a ton of time and energy really optimizing the service for a particular use case. Now you are dumping that use case. Pivoting doesn't really solve the problem: It shifts the problem somewhere else, or results in a different problem. Too many Pivots = lack of vision: If you have a clear long term vision, there might be changes required in the execution where you take 'diversions' to get to the final goal, but there is not usually a full 180 degree pivot. If there are too many pivots, the long term vision might get lost and the company might flounder and stutter without getting anywhere. Pivoting means something has failed, and its time to try something new. This applies to the first kind of pivot that I described earlier. While its good to accept failure early and move on, there should be enough time and resources spent on each iteration so it can reach its potential. In general, I am still a supporter for pivoting, but has to be done thoughtfully. There is absolutely nothing glamorous about doing so and it should generally be the last resort. Comments Salil (January 04, 2011):\nGood post Dwipal! Really liked the thought process.\n","tags":["Startups","Business Strategy","Entrepreneurship"],"title":"Pivoting + Startups","uri":"/blog/posts/2011-01-04-pivoting-startups/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Having built YouTube Mobile, which is doing very strongly in both app and browser space, the question of browser vs apps on mobile frequently comes up. Below are my thoughts:Now: Apps are better than browser The only way you can get an 'awesome' looking mobile interface is via a native app. People have been trained to use the app store to find the services they want rather than just visiting the website. App store is the new Yahoo Directory. Mobile website usage is also improving, but does not come close to most mobile apps. Mid-term: Browser based apps catch up with native apps for most cases, but are still available via app stores because of discoverability Long term: People will be back to visiting the services that provide the apps directly, making app stores less relevant There are 4 factors that determine whether a mobile interface will be native app or webapp:Ease of development Quality of Interface Distribution Monetization Apps vs Browsers2011 will be all about Apps, but browser will start taking over towards the end HTML5 based apps will finally get to a point where they are actually of good quality and usable This is going to be the worst year for mobile developers, as they will have to deal with building a ton of apps which will drive more force towards html5 based apps ","tags":["Mobile Strategy","Web Design","App Development"],"title":"My thoughts on browser vs app for mobile","uri":"/blog/posts/2010-12-27-my-thoughts-on-browser-vs-app-for-mobile/"},{"categories":null,"content":"\u0026hellip;but decided to stick with Blogger.\nTumblr blogs are definitely better looking, and the interface is cleaner, but its an absolute pain to customize or add anything external. You can\u0026rsquo;t change the theme once you have added simple things like facebook buttons, and it has no comments!\n","tags":["Blogging","Tech Trends","Tumblr"],"title":"Almost Switched to Tumblr..","uri":"/blog/posts/2010-12-27-almost-switched-to-tumblr/"},{"categories":null,"content":"If you are thinking of buying something, but are not in a hurry, and want to make sure that you get the best deal, check out camelcamelcamel.com. They have an awesome amazon and 3rd price history of different items.\nHappy shopping!Dwipal","tags":["Shopping","Data","Finance"],"title":"Price History","uri":"/blog/posts/2010-01-25-price-history/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Of all the news, debates, articles and bills that are going on regarding \u0026lsquo;healthcare reform\u0026rsquo;, most of the talk is more about \u0026lsquo;health insurance reform\u0026rsquo;, or \u0026lsquo;how to get a net increase in health insurance payments from people\u0026rsquo;.\nEveryone is talking about taxing the rich to get more money in health insurance, putting surcharges on so called cadillac plans, making it mandatory for everyone to take health insurance, etc. without any significant (if at all) improvement in the actual health care. How about our politicians re-think this problem again, and go to the root of this: Healthcare is ridiculously expensive in the US, so try and reduce the actual cost of health care. If this happens, then, automatically, insurance premiums will go down and people will be able to afford it. From my personal experience, healthcare is a big mess because of these main reasons:Its ridiculously expensive. Even something like a regular physical runs into 1000s of dollars.People are not used to paying from their own pocket: hospitals directly bill the insurance companies. So people who have insurance don't know (or care) how much they got charged.Every small medical need requires a person to go the insurance company to pay for it. Not that it really matters, but in my opinion, an ideal healthcare / insurance system should behave like:Basic health care (for regular fever, minor injuries, etc) should be inexpensive enough that no insurance is needed. People who get hurt or get sick very often pay for it from their pockets. As it will be affordable, it will not have an adverse effect on the finances.Catastrophic illness, accidents, surgery should be covered with a real insurance.Everyone should first pay from their own pocket, and then claim insurance. Currently, as people don't see the bill at all, they never know how much things cost.High emphasis should be given to preventive care (but this is not a part of health insurance)Insurance is always against major expenses, but our health system has it for everything. Imaging that you have to claim auto insurance for doing an oil change.. this is what we are doing in health care... it just doesn't make sense. ","tags":["Healthcare","Finance","Social Issues"],"title":"Health Care or Health Insurance","uri":"/blog/posts/2010-01-13-health-care-or-health-insurance/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Just launched my new website: http://pickv.com.\nIt's a new kind of relationship and online dating site that helps you to find someone based off of your favorites (movies, music, tv shows, and books). Not single? No worries - you can also use the site to connect with a new friend.\nCheck it out! Dwipal\nComments wnc78 (December 30, 2009):\nLooks good man \u0026hellip;. -Wasim\n","tags":["Entrepreneurship","Startups","Video"],"title":"My New Venture: Pickv.com","uri":"/blog/posts/2009-12-10-my-new-venture-pickv-com/"},{"categories":null,"content":"My perspective on the Palm Pre\u0026hellip;\nPros:\nKeyboardIM / Chat Background AppsAddress book integration with Gmail, Facebook, etcSprint's networkCons: No international / global roaming possible (due to CDMA)Plastic body, prone to scratching easilyBrowser seems to have some font/rendering issues (check out yahoo.com on the pre)Device a bit too small (its a plus for some people, I would prefer to have an iphone-sized screen) Verdict: Still confused. ","tags":["Mobile Phones","Palm Pre","Tech Decisions"],"title":"To pre or not to pre","uri":"/blog/posts/2009-06-06-to-pre-or-not-to-pre/"},{"categories":null,"content":"May the fourth be with you!!\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Day\n","tags":["Happy","Star","Wars"],"title":"Happy Star Wars Day","uri":"/blog/posts/2009-05-04-happy-star-wars-day/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I signed up for Twitter a long time ago (March 2007 to be exact), used it for a few days, realized its fun but useless and stopped using it.\nSince then, twitter has had an exponential growth, and specially exploded in the last few months. However, unlike Facebook or YouTube (to which twitter is being compared with) I don\u0026rsquo;t find it sticky or interesting enough on a regular basis.\nA recent report by neilsen just confirmed this: 60% of people who sign up for twitter stop using it within a month.\nCurious how long will the \u0026rsquo;twitter effect\u0026rsquo; last??\n","tags":["Much","Twitter"],"title":"How much do you use Twitter?","uri":"/blog/posts/2009-04-29-how-much-do-you-use-twitter/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Being the first few employees at YouTube and responsible for building a slew of YouTube features and heading the mobile efforts, I often get asked on the thought process that goes behind building something that can be wildly successful.\nBelow are a few of my thoughts on this:\nDo:\nBuild a product that solves a complete problem, not just a part of it Think long term, execute short term. Have a clear vision and direction. Iterate at the speed of light (to follow your vision) Keep the product quality very high Be extremely passionate about your product and hire someone who is Make sure you are building something that you will use regularly Don\u0026rsquo;t:\nDon't launch features just for the heck of it. Have a long term plan and track it. If you can't explain what you do in 10 words, you don't have focus Don't over-engineer. Worry about scaling when you have to, not before that. Don't hire too many people in your team that are in management role until you have to ","tags":["Repeat","Success"],"title":"How to repeat success","uri":"/blog/posts/2009-04-27-how-to-repeat-success/"},{"categories":null,"content":"So there is big \u0026lsquo;shift\u0026rsquo; towards the \u0026lsquo;cloud\u0026rsquo; in the industry nowadays. Everyone has started to provide (really good) server based services, whether its for your contacts, documents, email, pictures, storage and even the more niche things like your browser favorites, your search history, things like notes, snippets, your friends and their friends.\nMost of the companies providing these services have a pretty clear privacy policy, which basically states that they won\u0026rsquo;t be viewing any personal information unless they are obliged to do so. They treat it fairly well, and don\u0026rsquo;t generally release the information unless it becomes absolutely necessary. Companies like google even take it to the court to not release this information.\nHowever, at the end of the day, your information is with a company and it is in the hands of that company to decide what to do with it. You have absolutely no control over it. At a lot of places, it is replicated across machines for disaster recovery, and might never ever get physically deleted. If you read Google\u0026rsquo;s privacy policy, it does not say that it deletes everything you tell it to delete! Yahoo\u0026rsquo;s privacy policy is similar, but have more clearly defined that it takes 90 days to delete your data, but some of it might be in their archives forever. So if you delete an email that you don\u0026rsquo;t like, chances are, it can be brought back to life with enough motivation to do so. Also, despite of the best intentions, information has been leaked numerous times even by respectable companies.\nSometimes, I just want to delete an email and never think that its still there somewhere. This is not possible anymore. So, before you use any online service, be prepared to realize that there is a slight chance it will become public.\n","tags":["Privacy","Security","Internet Ethics"],"title":"Your Privacy Online","uri":"/blog/posts/2008-08-08-your-privacy-online/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Just came back from Shrinathji, and caught my rickshaw ride on camera. A fun conversation to listen to (its in Gujarati).\nComments None (February 15, 2008):\nNelscoinc Mobile Phone ltdWe are legit distributor of mobile phones and TVs like Samsung , Nokia , Sony Ericsson , Qtek and Imate . They are Brand New Sealed and they come with 1year international warranty. We ship via FedEx Express{2days delivery}. Note : If you buy two you will get one for free.If interested , you can contact us through via Email : nelscoinc@netzero.comApple Iphone 8GB.. $300Apple Iphone 4gb \u0026hellip;$200Sidekick phones:Sidekick 3 \u0026hellip;.USD$140Sidekick LX\u0026hellip;.USD$200Nokia Phones.Nokia E50\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$170Nokia E61\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$190Nokia E70 \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;USD$200Nokia 3110\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;USD$170Nokia N80\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$200Nokia N93i\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;USD$300Nokia N75\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$350Nokia N95 8GB\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$300Nokia N81 8GB..USD$200Nokia 8800 Arte Duo\u0026hellip;$250USDNokia N82\u0026hellip;$200Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition..USD$150PLASTATIONS: GARMIN 660\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..$200GARMIN 396\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..$130 Playstation 2\u0026hellip;..$120 Playstation 3\u0026hellip;..$250 Sony PSP Value Pack\u0026ndash;$100 Nintendo Wii \u0026mdash; $155 Palm Treo Phones:Palm Treo 650 GSM \u0026hellip;USD$120Palm Treo 700w \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;USD$140Palm Treo 600\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;USD$100Palm Treo 680 \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..USD$120Palm Treo 700p\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$150Palm Treo 750V\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$250Eten Phones:Eten glofiish X650 $300USDETen G500\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$240Eten M500 \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$200ETen Glofiish X500 \u0026hellip;..USD$230ETen M700 Glofiish\u0026hellip;..USD$240ETen E-Ten M600 \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$220Ben Q Phones:BenQ Siemens-EF81 \u0026hellip;..$200BenQ AL26 \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.$190BenQ-Siemens P51 \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.$230BenQ-Siemens SL91\u0026hellip;.. $280Siemens SL75 BenQ \u0026hellip;.$210Benq Siemens Ef71 \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;$190BenQ-Siemens S88 \u0026hellip;..$175Benq Siemens E71 \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;$180Siemens BenQ SXG75 \u0026hellip;.$185BenQ-Siemens S81 \u0026hellip;..$150Benq Siemens Ef91 \u0026hellip;..$220BenQ-Siemens CL71\u0026hellip;$180BenQ-Siemens P51\u0026hellip;.$230Siemens SL75 BenQ\u0026hellip;.$210Dopod Phones:Dopod 830 \u0026hellip;$230Dopod 900 \u0026hellip;$400Dopod 577 \u0026hellip;.$180Dopod 818T \u0026hellip;$210Dopod S300\u0026hellip;$150Dopod D810 ..$270Dopod 818 Pro\u0026hellip;$240Dopod 696 \u0026hellip;$210Dopod 585 \u0026hellip;$180Dopod C720W \u0026hellip;$230Dopod C800 \u0026hellip;$300Dopod 838 Pro \u0026hellip;$300Dopod 595 \u0026hellip;$200Dopod 696 ..$210Dopod U1000..$450LG Phones:LG KU990 Viewty\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;USD$270LG 8360\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..USD$235LG 8380\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..USD$300LG G262\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..USD$185LG G7200P\u0026hellip;USD$210LG KG920\u0026hellip;..USD$250LG M6100\u0026hellip;..USD$165LG P7200\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;USD$215LG U400\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..USD$250LG U830\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..USD$210LG U880\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..USD$235LG U880 Cavalli\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;USD$245LG U890\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$245O2 XdPhonesO2 Xda Atom\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$300O2 Xda Atom ExecP\u0026hellip;USD$310O2 Xda Stealth\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$320Sony Ericsson Phones:Sony Ericsson P910i.. \u0026hellip;..USD$200Sony Ericsson W760\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..USD$200Sony Ericsson W810i \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;USD$220Sony Ericsson W850i\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..USD$230Sony Ericsson K790\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$180Sony Ericsson W500i \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.USD$180Sony Ericsson W350\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..USD$220Sony Ericsson P1\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..USD$200ipodsApple 4 GB iPod Mini Pink M9435LL/A \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;40 USDApple 40 GB iPod photo\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..40 USDApple 4 GB iPod Mini Silver M9160LL/A \u0026hellip;.40 USDApple 60 GB iPod Photo M9830LL/A\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.60 USDApple 60 GB iPod photo \u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.55 USDApple 30 GB iPod Photo M9829LL/A\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.50 USDApple 512 MB iPod Shuffle MP3 Player\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;40 USDApple 4 GB iPod Mini Blue M9436LL/A\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.45 USDApple 2 GB iPod Nano\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.50 USDApple 4 GB iPod Nano\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.60 USDApple 30 GB iPod Video\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.110 USDApple 60 GB iPod Video\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.150 USDIf interested contact us via Email : nelscoinc@netzero.com\n","tags":["Travel","India","Personal Stories"],"title":"Rickshaw Ride in Shrinathji!","uri":"/blog/posts/2007-11-14-rickshaw-ride-in-shrinathji/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I finally decided to make use of the fancy Symbian S60 phone to listen to internet radio (shoutcast) while on the go. We have fast 3G connections, so there should be no reason to tie up with the computer to listen to internet radio.\nAfter a few hours of effort, I got the S60 Internet Radio to work.\nHere is a link to the wiki with instructions on getting it. I had to figure out some stuff, but have updated the wiki so you should be good to go.\nEnjoy!\n","tags":["Music","Mobile Tech","Streaming Radio"],"title":"Listening to internet radio on the go","uri":"/blog/posts/2007-10-03-listening-to-internet-radio-on-the-go/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I decided to play around with Google\u0026rsquo;s Coop search, and created a Indian Guitar Chords search engine.\nYou can check it out here.\nIt does allow people to collaborate and add more sites to it, which is pretty interesting. Hopefully the quality of this search engine will improve as more specific sites get added to the list.\nComments None (October 21, 2007):\ngreat job ! I will also contribute to it.\nNone (February 11, 2008):\nPretty cool. Also check out desitabs.com\u0026hellip; they are trying to make it easier to find Indian guitar tabs!\n","tags":["Custom","Search","Engine","Indian","Guitar","Chords"],"title":"Custom Search Engine - Indian Guitar Chords","uri":"/blog/posts/2007-09-29-custom-search-engine-indian-guitar-chords/"},{"categories":null,"content":"\n","tags":["Personal","Life Events","India"],"title":"Absolute Carnage","uri":"/blog/posts/2007-09-20-absolute-carnage/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Nowadays, there is no time for anything. It just seems that you have spent a lot of time staying very busy, but there is nothing done. One reason for this is when there are a lot of things to do, you get excited and don\u0026rsquo;t get anything done. As a result of this, you loose \u0026lsquo;peace\u0026rsquo; and always feel stressed out. There are tons of books/ideas on how to manage your time, but here are some easy things that will get some peace in life:\nTake a good lunch break, and eat slowly. Eating fast is not only unhealthy, but also keeps the brain busy. Taking a nice short break with a change of pace during lunch will revitalize the mind and get it ready for all the work coming up.\nRead a book. In this speed-age, we have gotten used to getting information fast and lost patience. Reading a book not just for the heck of reading it, but for enjoying the text helps relax.\nListen to music (and not in background). Just chilling for a while, listening to some music that you like will help relax too. Make sure that the computer is not on, and you are not doing anything else but listening to music, though.\nSleep. Sometimes, this is just what you need to relax. If you have been very busy, having a few extra hours of sleep is really helpful.\nGo for a walk. This is not for exercise and weight loss. Just taking a brisk walk in the park is quite helpful.\nTalk to some far-away friends. Not only this helps you stay in touch with them, it also feels good to talk with them and definitely gives a break from the current jargon of thoughts that could cause stress.\nWatch a movie. Sometimes, there is no time even for movies, so this will make you find atleast 3 hours of good relaxing time.\nEnjoy!\n","tags":["Mindfulness","Productivity","Work-Life Balance"],"title":"Peaceful easy feeling","uri":"/blog/posts/2007-05-20-peaceful-easy-feeling/"},{"categories":null,"content":"An interesting publication by the Royal Society of Chemistry on how to make the perfect cup of Tea:\nhttp://www.rsc.org/pdf/pressoffice/2003/tea.pdf\nEnjoy! D.\n","tags":["Food \u0026 Drink","Tea","How-to"],"title":"How to make a Perfect Cup of Tea","uri":"/blog/posts/2007-02-27-how-to-make-a-perfect-cup-of-tea/"},{"categories":null,"content":"\n","tags":["Travel","Spain","Barcelona"],"title":"Pirates of Barcelona","uri":"/blog/posts/2007-02-17-pirates-of-barcelona/"},{"categories":null,"content":" Comments None (February 01, 2007):\nawesome picture ! dimaag pe itna zor mat daalo ghutna dukhega. -jyotsna\n","tags":["Deep","Thought"],"title":"In deep thought..","uri":"/blog/posts/2007-01-29-in-deep-thought/"},{"categories":null,"content":"\nLink to Playlist\nComments gsdm1975 (May 29, 2008):\nDownload pdf file of list of kishore da songshttp://w16.easy-share.com/1700262830.html\n","tags":["Music","Bollywood","Kishore Kumar"],"title":"For Kishore Kumar Fans","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-11-24-for-kishore-kumar-fans/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Sprint LG LX1200 (08/2002) Samsung VGA 1000 (01/2004) Sanyo PM8200 (08/2004) Sony Ericsson T608 (06/2005) Nokia 6225 (12/2005) Sprint PPC 6700 (01/2006) Cingular Sony Ericsson z520a (02/2006)\nSony Ericsson W600 (03/2006) Sony Ericsson K750i (04/2006) Verizon Palm Treo 700p (04/2006)\nVerizon Motorola Q (11/2006) Motorola RAZR V3x (11/2006) ","tags":["Mobile Phones","Gadgets","Nostalgia"],"title":"Phones I've owned","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-11-01-phones-i-ve-owned/"},{"categories":null,"content":"\u0026ldquo;I do use the computer and learn something new about it every day, and probably forget something about it every day.\u0026rdquo;\n- probably the eldest YouTube user ( geriatric1927 ).\n","tags":["Wisdom","Inspiration","Motivation"],"title":"Quote of the day :)","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-10-25-quote-of-the-day/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Talking all about saving paper and things like that, I noticed my mailbox gets totally spammed with credit card offers and such, which I have never ever used. Besides the annoyance that you have to shred those \u0026ldquo;offers\u0026rdquo; so that nobody misuses them, they also fill up the mailbox and make a big mess.\nMost of those companies get the details from credit reporting agencies. There is now a number you can call that will stop the credit agencies from giving out this information:\n888-567-8688\nIt seems to be like the do-not-call list for phone, but this one is for mail.\nI just got mine removed, time shall tell how well it works.\nComments None (February 08, 2007):\nHi,If you have a complaint about credit card, load or any financial institution, please postthem at this website:Review your credit card @ www.pissedconsumer.comor you can also check out our blog atBlog your complaint @ pissedconsumer.blogspot.comRegards,\nNone (August 24, 2007):\nOh\u0026hellip; Thank you. I\u0026rsquo;ll use your links.\n","tags":["Security","Finance","Identity Protection"],"title":"You have been pre-approved for identity theft!","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-10-24-you-have-been-pre-approved-for-identity-theft/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I ran some numbers to find out what is the optimal time to sell a car. This is what came out of that.\nAs most people know, a car deprecates the maximum in first year, and then when its around 5 years old. After that, the deprecation becomes lower.\nNumbers for Toyota Camry Solara SE Coupe. Original Cost $ 18,500. Source: edmunds.com\n","tags":["Automobiles","Finance","Investment"],"title":"Car Value and Deprecation","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-10-21-car-value-and-deprecation/"},{"categories":null,"content":"People complain about DRM a lot:\nDRM sucks, its too restrictive. I can't play a song on all the devices I own because of DRM, even though I have paid the full price. My car stereo can't play the songs bought from iTunes unless I burn them in a CD. My linux machine can't play the songs. I totally agree with the fact that DRM is killing the experience, and its actually quite cumbersome and annoying to use for the end users. But, looking at what people have been doing, if there is no DRM, and if movies and songs get available to download easily, people will definitely copy them, either knowingly or un-knowingly. DRM does give us some benefits, like:\nHaving been able to provide a eat-all subscription based service.Providing movie rentals based on download.Having been able to download files you have bought again, if u loose them. Studios being able to monetize on individual downloads, and hence (probably), passing on the profits to content creators.Stopping people from unauthorized copying the media. What we really need to not \"Kill\" the DRM, but to \"Fix\" it. Right now, there are multiple providers of DRM: Apple, Microsoft, Real, etc. They do not work with each other, to the extent of hardware level. Creating a good DRM system takes a considerable amount of effort, and has a big business advantage for \"lock-in\". A person who owns 500 songs from iTunes will not switch away from Apple, just because it will all be lost. To have DRM do a little better, we need to: Have just one DRM format, which is open, and controlled by a non-profit organization.Make this format available for everyone royalty free, so people can get wild and implement it everywhere possible.Have this format implemented in all the hardware devices, car stereos, phones, etc. and be able to authorize any device.This will provide a better user experience, as people will be able to play their purchased media everywhere, and not locked in to a single provider. It will also be beneficial to the studios, who can focus on better content rather than fighting with the DRM companies to support more devices. People and Studios will be happy, the middle-man (iTunes, FairPlay, etc) will become redundant. A typical use case for this will be:\nListening to a song on XM radio, you like it and immediately buy it in your JVC car stereo.Now you copy this song to your iPod, and carry it around with you.Once you reach home, you get this on your windows computer, and the linux based XBMC media center in living room so you can listen to it everywhere.You can also put this song on your Symbian phone and set it as ring tone.You can even buy a song from the gas station, and listen it on any of your device without worrying about compatibility issues. There is nothing inherently wrong with DRM, its just wrong with one company controlling it. Comments None (October 15, 2006):\nInteresting topic, on which I probably know next to nothing.However worth noting that people are divided on the view if DRM is useful in the first place. Like many \u0026ldquo;necessary evils\u0026rdquo; it may be here to stay anyway, but wouldn\u0026rsquo;t that slow down any encouragement to developing an open standard?Sun seems to have initiated one. Specs are ready and it\u0026rsquo;s open for implemenatation: http://www.openmediacommons.org/\n","tags":["Technology","DRM","Ethics"],"title":"My view on DRM","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-10-15-my-view-on-drm/"},{"categories":null,"content":"An old poem I had learned in School (not sure who wrote this).\nHe who knows not and he knows not that he knows not is a fool. Shun him. He who knows not and he knows that he knows not is a child. Teach him. He who knows and he knows not that he knows is asleep. Awake him. He who knows and he knows that he knows is wise. Follow him.\nD.\n","tags":["Knows"],"title":"He Who Knows...","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-09-22-he-who-knows/"},{"categories":null,"content":"There is a XBMC script that lets you watch YouTube directly.\nEnjoy! D.\n","tags":["YouTube","Streaming","Home Entertainment"],"title":"Watch YouTube on your TV","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-08-25-watch-youtube-on-your-tv/"},{"categories":null,"content":"We all wonder what will be the optimal time to buy an air ticket. It typically is a couple of weeks beforehand, but if you have already missed that, there is this new website http://www.farecast.com which helps.\nThe site gives a graph of fares for your destination across a few months, and gives you recommendations on whether they are expected to rise or fall. They recently added a lot of cities (were only seattle previously), and chances are you will find your city there.\nA really useful \u0026ldquo;web 2.0\u0026rdquo; website which is not about social networking :).\nComments None (August 22, 2006):\nYeah :-) This website started with Boston and Seattle. It\u0026rsquo;s out of USC and U of Wash in Seattle. They have some 6 billion records to predict. And they are also trying to come up with Hotel fares prediction. www.farecompare.com is good too, not as sharp as the one you have cited.\nNone (September 11, 2006):\nUse farecast along with kayak.com and jetblue and southwest, and you have the cheapest fare on the web\n","tags":["Travel","Finance","Planning"],"title":"When to buy air tickets..","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-08-21-when-to-buy-air-tickets/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I am very passionate about cell phones, and the cellphone trend in US is quite disheartening. A major part of US wireless is on CDMA based technologies.\nThere is nothing wrong with CDMA in general (its a better technology than GSM), but in the implementation. Here is a list of some of the (consumer level) things where GSM has an edge:\nCDMA was created by Qualcomm, which holds most of the patents in it. As it is mainly controlled by one company, the cost of maintaining a CDMA network is quite high as compared to GSM, which is an open standard.Most of the chipsets in CDMA phones are also made by qualcomm, so there is lesser innovation as compared to GSM phones, which are made by a bunch of companies (compare any CDMA phone with a Nokia or SonyEricsson phone). CDMA based phones are tied to the carrier, and there is nothing like 'SIM' card in it. You can not simply buy a phone from a store and activate it. The newer versions of GSM (WCDMA, etc.) are getting mainstream, which is breaking CDMA's advantage of a better protocol (faster data transfer speeds).Given these points, it becomes a very easy decision for the user to pick up GSM over CDMA, if there is no cost benefit. GSM is also gaining more and more ground as carieers are moving away from CDMA. Here are some numbers on GSM and CDMA penetration (source: www.gsacom.com ) Comments None (March 15, 2007):\nGSM carriers are all migrating to WCDMA which requires almost an entirely new build out because its CDMA technology\u0026hellip; it is not GSM. you are clueless.GSM is a TDMA technology.GSM carriers are migrating to CDMA so how can you say GSM(WCDMA) is better than CDMA? they are both CDMA so CDMA is the best\nDwipal (March 15, 2007):\nThere are distinct differences between the CDMA phones and GSM phones. The underlying technology is the same now for 3G, but the application framework is different. Why I like GSM (or WCDMA/HSDPA/etc) based operators is because the phones are more open. Nokia and Sony Ericsson don\u0026rsquo;t make any significant CDMA (or EVDO) phones. Its all about how \u0026lsquo;open\u0026rsquo; the platform is, and GSM and its derivatives are more open.\nNone (June 15, 2007):\nHaving traveled all over the world, especially in Asia, I can without hesitation say that GSM is BY FAR the better bet\u0026hellip;.Voice clarity, fewer (if any) dropped calls, SIM cards, etc. are infinitely superior to CDMA..I am on CDMA in North America, as it is the more accepted standart\u0026hellip;unfortunately.\nNone (December 16, 2009):\nIt was certainly interesting for me to read that blog. Thanks for it. I like such topics and anything connected to this matter. I would like to read a bit more soon. Alex Cell phone blocker\nSurya (July 16, 2012):\nIt is time to expand this blog to cover LTE - Thanks, GSM Module\nNone (March 18, 2014):\nnew news\nNone (March 18, 2014):\nCDMA(Code Division Multiple Access) is a digital cellular technology that uses spread-spectrum techniques.CDMA consistently provides better capacity for voice and data communications than other commercial mobile technologies, allowing more subscribers to connect at any given time, and it is the common platform on which 3G technologies are built.It doesn\u0026rsquo;t have sim card. The reason for more GSM usage is that the international Roaming of GSM is Very good and it has sim card,So you can easily swap your sim card when you need.If we got a locked phone means we can unlock it by getting the unlocking service from any one of the online service provider like UnBBLock.com\nHS Blogger (January 21, 2016):\nReally nice post\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.i like it very much\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;Thank you for sharing it\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;.Get more www.mobileprice24.com Buy \u0026amp; Sell Old - used mobile phone Apple gsm mobile\n","tags":["Cdma"],"title":"GSM vs CDMA","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-08-11-gsm-vs-cdma/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Someone: What do you do Me: I am an engineer Someone: So you are a developer. Me: No an engineer Someone: Isn\u0026rsquo;t that the same ? Me: No. Someone: Huh?? Me: Engineer is someone who solves real world problems using science. Developer is someone who writes code. Someone: Ahhhhh. Ok.\nEnjoy! D.\n","tags":["Tech Career","Software Engineering","Professional Growth"],"title":"Developer or Engineer","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-08-10-developer-or-engineer/"},{"categories":null,"content":"There are 2 kinds of people when it comes to travelling:\nThose who plan the whole trip out in detail Those who don\u0026rsquo;t I recently had a discussion with someone going to Europe through a travelling company (so was a package tour, everything included) on how in-depth they had planned the trip. They had talked with other people who had taken the same trip, and had a detailed plan on what to do each day, what to eat at which place, where to shop, where not to shop, what shows to see, what clothes to take, what care to take at each hotel, etc. They had notes that the Pizza you get at the Leaning Tower was not good, and they will need paper napkins on their first day in Paris because they will be served food out of a box.\nNow, it is definitely going to make their trip a more comfortable, but then it sort of killed the whole excitement about going to a new place. There were no surprises left in the trip, everything they were doing was excepted. Also, their trip now got biased from the experiences of people they talked to. They also knew the jokes that the tour guide will make, which won\u0026rsquo;t be funny any more.\nSome planning is always good to do, so you don\u0026rsquo;t end up in a mess, but planning like this is spoiling the trip. Next time you plan a trip, leave some place for exploration in that :). You might end up doing something totally unexpected, and will totally love it. As it is said, plan but don\u0026rsquo;t overplan.\nComments None (August 10, 2006):\nWow!! Cool Blog:D\n","tags":["Travel","Planning","Life Hacks"],"title":"Plan your travel?","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-07-29-plan-your-travel/"},{"categories":null,"content":"\n","tags":["What","Brown"],"title":"What can brown do for you","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-06-16-what-can-brown-do-for-you/"},{"categories":null,"content":"A girl wearing really \u0026ldquo;high\u0026rdquo; platforms. These bricks (oops\u0026hellip; shoes) are the highest I have come across. Not sure about the reason behind wearing those, would be interesting to know how much they weigh. Menu at King of Krung Siam Thai Restaurant, Mountain View. They have amongst the strangest (funniest) item names I have come across since a long time. Where else can you order \u0026ldquo;Ocean Girls\u0026rdquo; at a restaurant ;) (Pictures taken with Sony Ericsson K750i)\n","tags":["Photography","Personal","Visual Journal"],"title":"Picture(s) of the Day!","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-06-12-picture-s-of-the-day/"},{"categories":null,"content":"These is a short list of some words that are useful from Indians travelling to US (and vice-versa). Words in brackets are Indian versions.\nApartment ( Flat ) House / Studio / Condo (Bungalow / Flat) Job ( Office ) Office (Cabin) Soda ( Any Cold Drink ) Gas (Petrol) Gas Station (Petrol Pump) Last Name (Surname) Photocopy (Xerox) Cop (Police) School ( School / College!! ) Grade (Standard) [ for school, like he is in 4th grade ] Kids (Children) Comforter (Blanket) Shower ( Bath ) To Go (Packed) Candy (Chocolate) Check (Bill) Rest Room (Toilet) Yogurt (Curd) Couch (Sofa) Hood (Bonnet) Elevator (Lift)\nIf you know of any more words, add a comment to this blog :)\nComments None (June 12, 2006):\nBungalow ~ house doesn\u0026rsquo;t sound right. Check this: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Bungalowand you will know why?May be you want to correct the title of your post to \u0026ldquo;Survival Guide to Gujju \u0026lt;\u0026ndash;\u0026gt; US English\u0026rdquo;\nNone (June 20, 2006):\nHighway - Freeway\nNone (August 16, 2006):\nTrunk(of a car) - Dickky\nComments None (June 12, 2006):\nBungalow ~ house doesn\u0026rsquo;t sound right. Check this: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Bungalowand you will know why?May be you want to correct the title of your post to \u0026ldquo;Survival Guide to Gujju \u0026lt;\u0026ndash;\u0026gt; US English\u0026rdquo;\nNone (June 20, 2006):\nHighway - Freeway\nNone (August 16, 2006):\nTrunk(of a car) - Dickky\n","tags":["Culture","Linguistics","Humor"],"title":"Survival Guide to Indian (Gujju) \u003c--\u003e US English","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-06-09-survival-guide-to-indian-gujju-us-english/"},{"categories":null,"content":"The most thoughtless gifts I have ever seen (Unless it is extremely well thought of):\nPhoto Frame Key Chain Flower Vase Purse / Wallet Pen Set (A gift certificate might be more useful\u0026hellip;)\nComments None (August 04, 2006):\nwatch?\nComments None (August 04, 2006):\nwatch?\n","tags":["Worst","Gifts"],"title":"Worst Gifts","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-06-08-worst-gifts/"},{"categories":null,"content":"\nStrings just performed in Oakland. They are awesome performers on stage, and it was a charm to watch them sing. They played all their popular songs, and also some of the other songe (my fav. being Dama dum mast kalender, Koi kahe kehta rahe, etc). This is what sets apart great performers from just bands. Strings really involved the crowd, and made sure that they enjoy every bit of it. I wished they would sell CDs of their albums at the end of the show.\nHere is a small clip someone took off their concert.\n","tags":["Music","Concerts","Events"],"title":"Strings Concert in Oakland, CA","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-06-06-strings-concert-in-oakland-ca/"},{"categories":null,"content":"It seems that Yahoo Messenger removes all messages with youtube.com URLs in it. I was trying to send a link to a friend, and it never reached the other side. Even though Yahoo has a right to do whatever they want on their servers, this seems completely wrong.\nComments None (August 03, 2006):\nThat is true. I just figured it out when all messages with the youtube links in it are deleted or in other words, never delivered. That is not cool\u0026hellip;\nNone (October 11, 2006):\nI share youtube.com links all the time on Y messenger. I just did it this morning.\n","tags":["Tech","Messaging","Censorship"],"title":"Yahoo Messenger blocks YouTube URLs","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-06-05-yahoo-messenger-blocks-youtube-urls/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I recently bought the SE K750i Phone. It is a great phone, with a 2 MP camera which actually takes pretty good pictures. However, there were some issues with the phone which caused a minor annoyance:\nIt did not have the \u0026ldquo;search\u0026rdquo; function in address book. You can only go to the first character of a name, but cannot actually type in the full name. Even though it had walkman functionality, you cannot use it on airplane. I was having issues with its reception at some places (like my living room), where my old SE z520 was working fine. So anyways, these things were enough to do something to resolve them. Because of the poor reception at home, I was even considering getting the Nokia 6270 (Nokia has a reputation to have really good reception). On looking up the web for playing around with K750i, I found some links where people installed the W800 firmware on this phone without any problem.\nI followed the guide on http://www.esato.com/archive/t.php/t-113981. It uses a software from totalserver.net (which is around 15$) to flash the phone. However, the operation was flawless and within half an hour, I had a perfectly working W800 phone.\nFrom initial looks, W800i is almost the same as K750i. Some people claim that it takes better pictures, and has a longer battery life. I have to verify this yet. But having a searchable address book and better reception alone was totally worth it.\nFinal Verdict: Sony Ericsson K750i with W800 Firmware ( Highly Recommended ).\nUpdate: There are still major signal issues with Cingular on this phone.\nComments Pang M.Y (November 01, 2006):\ni just bought a K750i with W800 software but the reception is still poor even when driving in town, the line will cut off suddenly. Have you ever experience this? Music sound quality is superb but call sound quality is bad maybe due to the reception\nDwipal (November 01, 2006):\nYeah.. I have constant issues with the reception on this phone. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t catch signal where other phones easily work. Guess was a bad purchase :(.\nNone (December 01, 2006):\nYou can search in the K750i. you just need to keep typing as you would do in a search and it will keep moving by itself in the address book.\nThe reception of course remains a minor issue. I am more pissed off by the fragility of the phone me being a rough user.\nNone (April 07, 2008):\nSony Ericsson W900i video blog at mobile zone blog\nNone (September 16, 2008):\nComments Pang M.Y (November 01, 2006):\ni just bought a K750i with W800 software but the reception is still poor even when driving in town, the line will cut off suddenly. Have you ever experience this? Music sound quality is superb but call sound quality is bad maybe due to the reception\nDwipal (November 01, 2006):\nYeah.. I have constant issues with the reception on this phone. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t catch signal where other phones easily work. Guess was a bad purchase :(.\nNone (December 01, 2006):\nYou can search in the K750i. you just need to keep typing as you would do in a search and it will keep moving by itself in the address book.\nThe reception of course remains a minor issue. I am more pissed off by the fragility of the phone me being a rough user.\nNone (April 07, 2008):\nSony Ericsson W900i video blog at mobile zone blog\nNone (September 16, 2008):\nNone (December 04, 2008):\nHi Nice Blog .ipod battery share the characteristics common to Lithium-based technology found in other devices. Like other rechargeable batteries, these batteries may eventually require replacement.\n","tags":["Mobile Phones","Sony Ericsson","Gadgets"],"title":"Sony Ericsson K750i -\u003e W800","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-06-04-sony-ericsson-k750i-w800/"},{"categories":null,"content":"","tags":["Web Browsers","Tech Stats","Analytics"],"title":"Firefox usage on website","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-05-12-firefox-usage-on-website/"},{"categories":null,"content":"There are 2 kinds of programmers: Creators and Followers\nCreators use the existing programming techniques to create something totally new, which has not been done before in that sense (example: AJAX). Other people then follow them and improvise on their techniques to solve their programming puzzles. People get surprised how the creators come up with all these interesting solutions, which are then posted on some forum or newsgroup for everyone else to use (copy).\nHowever, as you might have guessed, you can never be a creator by simply going to newsgroups to find a solution of your problem. Solutions that other people have posted may or may not be the best solutions, and unless you think independently, it will not be easy find out. This does not mean that you should never look how other people have done it. I think the best approach is to come up with a solution yourself, and then compare it with what everyone else has to done rather than googling it at the very first shot. In some of the cases, you will end with the similar solution as other people, and in some, you will have your own unique solution (don\u0026rsquo;t forget to compare it with others). In order to do this, you will be going through manuals/documentation of the language or tool you are using, and are most likely to learn at-least one new thing, or a better solution to something you have done in the past. You also have more confidence on how things will work than just pasting somebody else\u0026rsquo;s code.\nSo to conclude: Think before going to google for that solution.\nComments None (May 22, 2006):\nJust saw your header \u0026ldquo;Me you and everything we know.\u0026rdquo; Awesome!-Cab\nComments None (May 22, 2006):\nJust saw your header \u0026ldquo;Me you and everything we know.\u0026rdquo; Awesome!-Cab\n","tags":["Practical","Learn","More","About","Language","Tool"],"title":"A practical way to learn more about a language/tool","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-05-12-a-practical-way-to-learn-more-about-a-language-tool/"},{"categories":null,"content":"So I saw the new hindi movie \u0026lsquo;Maalamal\u0026rsquo;, and despite of my friends loving the movie, I could barely stand it. On thinking about the \u0026lsquo;funny\u0026rsquo; stuff in the movie, I realized that there is a particular \u0026rsquo;type\u0026rsquo; of humor that I find quite irritating.\nIts basically when they try to produce humor with confusion and stupidity. Now, it does not mean that this kind of content is bad by its own. But when confusion is created without it being necessary, on the basis of \u0026rsquo;lies\u0026rsquo;, just to create \u0026lsquo;humor\u0026rsquo;, then it looses the funniness. An example for this will be someone will lie in the beginning of the movie for no reason at all, and then try to hide the lie by saying more lies (again, which are not required). Or someone doing something insanely dumb to create confusion.\nConfusion created genuinely is funny. Seinfield or Raymond has all the confusion that can be present in the world, and that is quite humorous. This confusion is not created just for the heck of creating it, but it actually just \u0026ldquo;appears\u0026rdquo; naturally.\nComments Sumeet Savla (May 07, 2006):\nI agree about malamaal (i had told u the movie is stupid) and about this confusion thing as well - finally, we agree about some movie and some thought!\nComments Sumeet Savla (May 07, 2006):\nI agree about malamaal (i had told u the movie is stupid) and about this confusion thing as well - finally, we agree about some movie and some thought!\n","tags":["Confusion","Funny","Annoying"],"title":"Confusion: Funny or Annoying?","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-05-04-confusion-funny-or-annoying/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Here are some clips from the 2002 AIS Diwali Function at USC. Comments None (October 01, 2009):\nHi!\nNice Video, though a bit dated. You can get some more information about diwali and also download Diwali 2009\nthemed wallpapers at this link below:\nDiwali Gift Hampers\nComments None (October 01, 2009):\nHi!\nNice Video, though a bit dated. You can get some more information about diwali and also download Diwali 2009\nthemed wallpapers at this link below:\nDiwali Gift Hampers\n","tags":["College Life","Culture","Events"],"title":"USC Association of Indian Students Diwali 2002 Videos","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-04-27-usc-association-of-indian-students-diwali-2002-videos/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Words can\u0026rsquo;t say it. Click here for more.\n","tags":["Happened"],"title":"And so it happened...","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-04-23-and-so-it-happened/"},{"categories":null,"content":"There is a very easy way to find out which cell phone carrier does a person have from their voice mail. This is the message played after their personal message.\nT-Mobile: Record your message after the tone. To send a numeric page, press 5. When you are finished recording, hang up; or for delivery options, press 9. (Beep).\nCingular: To page this person, press 5 now. (Beep).\nSprint: To leave a voice message, press 1 or just wait for the tone. To send a numeric page, press 2 now. (Beep)\nVerizon: At the tone, please record your message. When you are finished recording, you may hang up or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5. (Beep)\nEnjoy!\n","tags":["Voice","Mail","Messages"],"title":"Voice Mail Messages","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-04-12-voice-mail-messages/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Its been a really long time since I\u0026rsquo;ve heard anything against Apple, it seems that they are doing everything perfect. People are loving them, and their market share in computers is expected to reach around 8% by the end of this year! However, we must realize that Apple was never able to gain a bigger market share because they \u0026rsquo;locked\u0026rsquo; their users to use everything made by them. Even though they make cool products, it does not mean that they are less \u0026rsquo;evil\u0026rsquo;. Here are a few points:\niPod only supports iTunes, and iTunes DRM. It can not be used with any other media player, so you are locked on it.Apple DRM only works with iTunes+iPod, and not with any other hardware. Mac OS X runs only on apple hardware.You have to buy a 'pro' version of Apple Quicktime to watch full screen videos!Apple has a reputation to destroy companies who have made innovative apps (Sherlock, Konfabulator, etc). The companies are not even credited for it.They have way too many releases with really miniscule changes (Mac OS X 10.1 - 10.4 have very small changes in each subsequent release. Same with iLife. Its ridiculous how Apple makes you buy a new version of OS and iLife every year). Now, as compared to them, windows locks you to use their software, but you are free to use any hardware. Also, they don't charge their users for Service Packs :D. So who is more evil ? Written on a 15\u0026quot; Apple Powerbook\nComments None (April 21, 2006):\nare you nuts,I always thought you are an apple fanatic,Gosh, time changes everyone, not even allmighty DD remains same\nNone (October 03, 2007):\nOne year later and you are still correct. If Apple were subjected to the ruling the Europeans just issued Microsoft, they would be hurting.From a developers prospective, Vista is much better than OS 10 - Microsoft even gives away basic development tools like asp.net and visual studio on their website.The iPod is a rip off. There are better sites for music and there are better players.What Apple did do correctly is allow users to submit their own podcast and homemade music in one location - the itunes website. Because of this \u0026lsquo;open\u0026rsquo; philosophy on podcasting, Apple has seen some spill over to their computers and phone. Once the shine is off this recent Apple phase, people will see them for what they are - profit driven dictators who charge too much for products IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Palm, Nokia, Toshiba, and Sony have been making well for years. The main draw to Apple for consumers will always be industrial design. Choosing Apple will always be like choosing ask.com over google because ask.com has a \u0026lsquo;prettier\u0026rsquo; interface.And Bill Gates (resignedly dorky and gauche though he may be) is 1000 times more of a responsible citizen than the always narcissistic and unlikable Steve Jobs.\nbaceman007 (June 30, 2008):\nAmen Paul, Check out a disturbing post about some recent Apple behavior at baceman007.blogspot.comI will say that Apple does give away XCode tools which is cool. I use both Vista and OSX extensively. I also work on some servers. I come home to my Ubuntu Linux box which I love. It\u0026rsquo;s true that Gates is a great citizen especially compared to Jobs even if I don\u0026rsquo;t agree with Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s behavior totally over the years. I mean they both took their original OSes from Xerox anyway so we kind of all paid for the stolen property in a sense that gave them enough money to become what they are today. Still the recent iPhone SDK stuff that\u0026rsquo;s going on where tons of drones are lining up to be allowed the \u0026ldquo;privilege\u0026rdquo; to pay to develop for the totally locked down phone is disturbing. I mean why are they charging $100 bucks for people to develop free applications? Developers make your product better, so why charge them? It\u0026rsquo;s sick, but at least Linux is at a point where most of us, I\u0026rsquo;d say like 90%, can switch to it and never pay for Apple image whore development products again.\nNone (December 14, 2008):\nI agree. I\u0026rsquo;ve got nothing against Apple. They sell solid hardware and even their OS ain\u0026rsquo;t half bad. But why all the lock downs? It\u0026rsquo;s bad behavior.And with the iPhone seeing all these developers pay to contribute their hard work to the world makes me want to vomit.Don\u0026rsquo;t get me started on their environMENTAL issues.\nSpockTron (November 24, 2009):\nI seriously believe Microsoft wrote, or paid someone to write this page. DO NOT FORGET that Microsoft has done so many horrible things like Bing. Remember that day when suddenly, Bing had mysteriously become your homepage, and Google was\u0026rsquo;t even set as an option for the small search bar to the right of the URL, so, those who were not total computer geeks found it impossible to quickly access Google\u0026rsquo;s search without a download that required Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s stupid UAC (Apple could never dream of making something as evil as that)to pop up and annoy you. Also, can you recall the day when Google Earth mysteriously ceased to work around the time Bing 3D maps was released? Hmm\u0026hellip; And how biased Bing\u0026rsquo;s search results are. Type \u0026ldquo;Google is\u0026rdquo; into the search box, notice the auto complete. \u0026ldquo;Google is evil\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Google is crap\u0026rdquo; etc, and everything strongly anti-microsoft will not appear anywhere except auto complete. Try the same phrases with Google and see what you find. Nothing is biased there. I am sure you are thinking I have been hired by Google or Apple to say all this, but i\u0026rsquo;m not. PC\u0026rsquo;s aren\u0026rsquo;t friendly at all with Apple hardware, Microsoft seems to be the ultimate photocopier. Whatever it likes, it makes a crap-quality copy of it, tries to destroy the original, and force its users to go to MS and use their crap. And, their \u0026ldquo;send error report\u0026rdquo; is only to give people peace of mind. THEIR SOFTWARE WOULDN\u0026rsquo;T HAVE ANY ERRORS IF THEY ACTUALLY LOOKED AT THE ERROR REPORTS AND TRIED TO REPAIR IT! Next, The Ten Commandments of Microsoft:\n1: Thou shalt experience daily crashes\n2: Thou shalt not contact us (you can\u0026rsquo;t, even if you try)\n3: Thou shalt abandon all products of our rivals, and use our crap! (you really have no choice in this)\n4: Thou shalt not store files on your PC that you would not want us to see (the main one they don\u0026rsquo;t want you to know)\n5: Thou shalt not install antivirus software without insanely slow speed and trouble (therefore, no antivirus, buy a new PC every year from infections)\n6: Thou shalt not understand error messages (so you won\u0026rsquo;t know hot truly horrible the computer is)\n7: Thou shalt read biased information only (like I said above, compare Bing and Google results)\n8: Thou shalt not install ANYTHING without contacting the administrator first (to install is basically to move data around the computer. If you are not allowed to move data, then there is something seriously fucked up about your computer)\n9: Thou shalt not run ANYTHING but windows on a PC (Microsoft makes it so their hardware manufacturers make it extremely difficult to install another operating system)\n10: Thou shalt be taunted, frustrated, treated like a child, never get useful support, etc. combined, in general, Thou shalt not be happy.\nNone (July 14, 2010):\nApple must Die for there to humanty\nComments None (April 21, 2006):\nare you nuts,I always thought you are an apple fanatic,Gosh, time changes everyone, not even allmighty DD remains same\nNone (October 03, 2007):\nOne year later and you are still correct. If Apple were subjected to the ruling the Europeans just issued Microsoft, they would be hurting.From a developers prospective, Vista is much better than OS 10 - Microsoft even gives away basic development tools like asp.net and visual studio on their website.The iPod is a rip off. There are better sites for music and there are better players.What Apple did do correctly is allow users to submit their own podcast and homemade music in one location - the itunes website. Because of this \u0026lsquo;open\u0026rsquo; philosophy on podcasting, Apple has seen some spill over to their computers and phone. Once the shine is off this recent Apple phase, people will see them for what they are - profit driven dictators who charge too much for products IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Palm, Nokia, Toshiba, and Sony have been making well for years. The main draw to Apple for consumers will always be industrial design. Choosing Apple will always be like choosing ask.com over google because ask.com has a \u0026lsquo;prettier\u0026rsquo; interface.And Bill Gates (resignedly dorky and gauche though he may be) is 1000 times more of a responsible citizen than the always narcissistic and unlikable Steve Jobs.\nbaceman007 (June 30, 2008):\nAmen Paul, Check out a disturbing post about some recent Apple behavior at baceman007.blogspot.comI will say that Apple does give away XCode tools which is cool. I use both Vista and OSX extensively. I also work on some servers. I come home to my Ubuntu Linux box which I love. It\u0026rsquo;s true that Gates is a great citizen especially compared to Jobs even if I don\u0026rsquo;t agree with Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s behavior totally over the years. I mean they both took their original OSes from Xerox anyway so we kind of all paid for the stolen property in a sense that gave them enough money to become what they are today. Still the recent iPhone SDK stuff that\u0026rsquo;s going on where tons of drones are lining up to be allowed the \u0026ldquo;privilege\u0026rdquo; to pay to develop for the totally locked down phone is disturbing. I mean why are they charging $100 bucks for people to develop free applications? Developers make your product better, so why charge them? It\u0026rsquo;s sick, but at least Linux is at a point where most of us, I\u0026rsquo;d say like 90%, can switch to it and never pay for Apple image whore development products again.\nNone (December 14, 2008):\nI agree. I\u0026rsquo;ve got nothing against Apple. They sell solid hardware and even their OS ain\u0026rsquo;t half bad. But why all the lock downs? It\u0026rsquo;s bad behavior.And with the iPhone seeing all these developers pay to contribute their hard work to the world makes me want to vomit.Don\u0026rsquo;t get me started on their environMENTAL issues.\nSpockTron (November 24, 2009):\nI seriously believe Microsoft wrote, or paid someone to write this page. DO NOT FORGET that Microsoft has done so many horrible things like Bing. Remember that day when suddenly, Bing had mysteriously become your homepage, and Google was\u0026rsquo;t even set as an option for the small search bar to the right of the URL, so, those who were not total computer geeks found it impossible to quickly access Google\u0026rsquo;s search without a download that required Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s stupid UAC (Apple could never dream of making something as evil as that)to pop up and annoy you. Also, can you recall the day when Google Earth mysteriously ceased to work around the time Bing 3D maps was released? Hmm\u0026hellip; And how biased Bing\u0026rsquo;s search results are. Type \u0026ldquo;Google is\u0026rdquo; into the search box, notice the auto complete. \u0026ldquo;Google is evil\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Google is crap\u0026rdquo; etc, and everything strongly anti-microsoft will not appear anywhere except auto complete. Try the same phrases with Google and see what you find. Nothing is biased there. I am sure you are thinking I have been hired by Google or Apple to say all this, but i\u0026rsquo;m not. PC\u0026rsquo;s aren\u0026rsquo;t friendly at all with Apple hardware, Microsoft seems to be the ultimate photocopier. Whatever it likes, it makes a crap-quality copy of it, tries to destroy the original, and force its users to go to MS and use their crap. And, their \u0026ldquo;send error report\u0026rdquo; is only to give people peace of mind. THEIR SOFTWARE WOULDN\u0026rsquo;T HAVE ANY ERRORS IF THEY ACTUALLY LOOKED AT THE ERROR REPORTS AND TRIED TO REPAIR IT! Next, The Ten Commandments of Microsoft:\n1: Thou shalt experience daily crashes\n2: Thou shalt not contact us (you can\u0026rsquo;t, even if you try)\n3: Thou shalt abandon all products of our rivals, and use our crap! (you really have no choice in this)\n4: Thou shalt not store files on your PC that you would not want us to see (the main one they don\u0026rsquo;t want you to know)\n5: Thou shalt not install antivirus software without insanely slow speed and trouble (therefore, no antivirus, buy a new PC every year from infections)\n6: Thou shalt not understand error messages (so you won\u0026rsquo;t know hot truly horrible the computer is)\n7: Thou shalt read biased information only (like I said above, compare Bing and Google results)\n8: Thou shalt not install ANYTHING without contacting the administrator first (to install is basically to move data around the computer. If you are not allowed to move data, then there is something seriously fucked up about your computer)\n9: Thou shalt not run ANYTHING but windows on a PC (Microsoft makes it so their hardware manufacturers make it extremely difficult to install another operating system)\n10: Thou shalt be taunted, frustrated, treated like a child, never get useful support, etc. combined, in general, Thou shalt not be happy.\nNone (July 14, 2010):\nApple must Die for there to humanty\n","tags":["Apple","Microsoft","Tech Ethics"],"title":"Is Apple more 'evil' than Microsoft?","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-03-28-is-apple-more-evil-than-microsoft/"},{"categories":null,"content":"So I realized that I have like 7 different types of lip balm sticks, so thought of writing a short review. Its not that I am obsessed with them, but most of them don\u0026rsquo;t do the job well, and you are required to apply them every now and them, so I end up buying one whenever something interesting appears on the shelves.\nHere is the list:\nChap Stick ( $1-2) Neutrogina Lip Balm ( $3 ) Blistex Lip Balm ($1-2) Some \u0026lsquo;Nature\u0026rsquo; Aloe Vera Lip Balm from Trader Joes ($1-2) Jamba Juice \u0026lsquo;Aloha Pinapple\u0026rsquo; Lip Balm ($1.5) Loccitane Shea Butter Lip Balm ( $10 ) Burt\u0026rsquo;s Bees Beeswax Lip Balm ( $3 ) Of all these, the first 3 just feel like solidified petroleum jelly. They just form a layer over the skin, and are far away from any sort of moisturizer. You have to apply it very frequently, and it does not really help a lot. The Aloe Vera one does have something added to it which gives a slight cooling effect, but its the same. Jamba Juice one is more for the \u0026lsquo;flavor\u0026rsquo; ;), isn\u0026rsquo;t really helpful for the purpose it is made for.\nI would say that the Loccitane one was quite good, it does have a decent amount of \u0026lsquo;moisturize\u0026rsquo; effect. However, its price is quite steep at 10$ a piece. Also, the actual \u0026lsquo;stick\u0026rsquo; has a wierd plastic case, which tends to crack. I think the clear winner in this is the Burt\u0026rsquo;s Bees Beeswax. It contains peppermint, which is really awesome, and it has a good moisturizer in it, so has to be applied less frequently. Its also reasonably priced at around $3 a stick. Its available at most of the stores in malls and other places.\nComments None (March 27, 2006):\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to have to agree with you on Burt\u0026rsquo;s Bees lip balm being the winner. The peppermint leaves a \u0026ldquo;tingley\u0026rdquo; feeling that makes you think you are getting something medicinal out of it (even if it isn\u0026rsquo;t, really).-Cab :)\nNone (August 08, 2007):\nTalk about tingley, try Plum Pure Peppermint lip balm. Beats Burt\u0026rsquo;s lips down!( :–{ )\nNone (October 22, 2009):\nI like Burt\u0026rsquo;s Bee\u0026rsquo;s because they are natural, but I also found another site that has Vegan safe balms. www.PoutPerfect.com. They also have a lot more flavors!!\nNone (February 15, 2010):\nAunt Bee\u0026rsquo;s dominates Burt\u0026rsquo;s Bee\u0026rsquo;s! And they just came out with Aunt Bee\u0026rsquo;s 5 Flavors in Certified Organic and SPF35!\nbads928 (June 11, 2010):\nMake a different, this lip balm is made up of sheep. It\u0026rsquo;s natural and a purest product on earth. And it has 100% Ultra Medical Grade Lanolin.\nInnocent Mwangi (July 15, 2010):\nInteresting topic on lips balms. I have been using Aloe Lips and it has worked wonders on my lips. Besides restoring cracked lips, it also heals minor cuts and burns due to the aloe content that it contains. Besides, the soothing properties of Aloe Vera in it are ideally suited to care for your lips. Aloe, Jojoba and Beeswax combine to create the finest all-season lip product on the market today. Aloe Lips soothes, smoothes and moisturizes chapped and dry lips. I highly recommend it; and you can find it at http://www.aloelips.com\nUnknown (August 13, 2010):\nwhen i notice my lips dry i have to find a solution soon like to wear a lips balm, because my lips can lose the smoothness, even the natural colour because of the dead skin or dry and try to keep my skin young always. This is very important for a woman who want to be sexy. So i always recomend to buy viagra to the men who i go out.\nUnknown (August 18, 2010):\nI prefer to use a balm lip when i feel my lips dry. i think the smoothless of our skin is very important most of all our lips that is a erotic part. i take care very much my image specially when i have an important meeting that i had recently in\ncosta rica investment opportunities.\nComments None (March 27, 2006):\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to have to agree with you on Burt\u0026rsquo;s Bees lip balm being the winner. The peppermint leaves a \u0026ldquo;tingley\u0026rdquo; feeling that makes you think you are getting something medicinal out of it (even if it isn\u0026rsquo;t, really).-Cab :)\nNone (August 08, 2007):\nTalk about tingley, try Plum Pure Peppermint lip balm. Beats Burt\u0026rsquo;s lips down!( :–{ )\nNone (October 22, 2009):\nI like Burt\u0026rsquo;s Bee\u0026rsquo;s because they are natural, but I also found another site that has Vegan safe balms. www.PoutPerfect.com. They also have a lot more flavors!!\nNone (February 15, 2010):\nAunt Bee\u0026rsquo;s dominates Burt\u0026rsquo;s Bee\u0026rsquo;s! And they just came out with Aunt Bee\u0026rsquo;s 5 Flavors in Certified Organic and SPF35!\nbads928 (June 11, 2010):\nMake a different, this lip balm is made up of sheep. It\u0026rsquo;s natural and a purest product on earth. And it has 100% Ultra Medical Grade Lanolin.\nInnocent Mwangi (July 15, 2010):\nInteresting topic on lips balms. I have been using Aloe Lips and it has worked wonders on my lips. Besides restoring cracked lips, it also heals minor cuts and burns due to the aloe content that it contains. Besides, the soothing properties of Aloe Vera in it are ideally suited to care for your lips. Aloe, Jojoba and Beeswax combine to create the finest all-season lip product on the market today. Aloe Lips soothes, smoothes and moisturizes chapped and dry lips. I highly recommend it; and you can find it at http://www.aloelips.com\nUnknown (August 13, 2010):\nwhen i notice my lips dry i have to find a solution soon like to wear a lips balm, because my lips can lose the smoothness, even the natural colour because of the dead skin or dry and try to keep my skin young always. This is very important for a woman who want to be sexy. So i always recomend to buy viagra to the men who i go out.\nUnknown (August 18, 2010):\nI prefer to use a balm lip when i feel my lips dry. i think the smoothless of our skin is very important most of all our lips that is a erotic part. i take care very much my image specially when i have an important meeting that i had recently in\ncosta rica investment opportunities.\n","tags":["Reviews","Personal Care","Small Wins"],"title":"Lip Balm Reviews","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-03-23-lip-balm-reviews/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Starting March 5th, I had decided to put a 1 month moratorium on all the spending except basic necesseties like food and drinks. There were multiple instances during these 10 days where the moratorium saved me from spending, which I would have done otherwise. This is specially to stop spending money on \u0026lsquo;impulsive purchases\u0026rsquo;, which are the things that you don\u0026rsquo;t need.\nIf you feel strongly for buying something, make sure you don\u0026rsquo;t buy it for a few days. It will kill the desire of unwanted spending, and will actually make you happy that the money didn\u0026rsquo;t go wasted. Now, even after a few days, if you feel the need of that item, then you can go ahead and buy it. Most of the time, you won\u0026rsquo;t :).\nFollowing are the list of items I would have bought otherwise:\nSony Erricson P910 PDA Phone Building a custom DVR (Tivo) Playstation 2 with Katamari Damacy So, during this time, I have learned to delay purchasing anything by atleast 10 days. If you can live without it for that time, you probably don\u0026rsquo;t need it.\nEnjoy! D.\np.s. I am not sure how long this kind of control will last, and the bubble will burst ;)\n","tags":["Finance","Savings","Life Hacks"],"title":"A way to prevent spending..","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-03-22-a-way-to-prevent-spending/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Here are some views on the days of a week.. Monday: This is the first day of the week. You just had a super-exciting weekend. You are all charged up for work. \u0026ldquo;I Love Mondays. Anything can happen on a monday.\u0026rdquo;\nTuesday: Hmm.. the week is going on. Last weekend\u0026rsquo;s memories are fading, and there is no weekend on the horizon. Life starts to suck. So much work to do.\nWednesday: Oh man. There are no memories left of last weekend, the the next weekend is sooooo far. There is very little work done in the last 2 days, and tons of work to do. Can there be a worse day in life ??\nThursday: Ahhh.. finally weekend can be seen. Tomorrow is friday. The best day in a week. Work is winding up. People are getting in a holiday mood. Spring is coming, the snow is over. Plans are being made for the weekend.\nFriday: Needs no explaination. Undisputably the best day of the week.\nSaturday: Oh man.. such a hangover from friday. Lets chill in the day, have to go out in the night. Oh wait.. we have to go hiking today and rest tomorrow before partying in the evening.\nSunday: Tired by friday and saturday, out of energy. No more holidays left. A dreadful work week waiting for u. No plans for the evening. Why does good things get over so fast?\n","tags":["Days","Week"],"title":"Days of a week..","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-03-19-days-of-a-week/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I used to be a big supporter of gmail for the features it provides. I was totally addicted to the threading, and their pop+smtp support. They have some really cool (and useful) features, like the outgoing mail from smtp server will be added to the thread, popped emails will be archived instead of deleted, etc. My primary email (off dwipal.com domain) was being routed to the gmail account. However, gmail has always been plagued by realibility issues, which, even though I hoped will be resolved soon, are still there even after almost a year of usage.\nTheir pop and smtp servers go down a lot. Emails get delayed, sometimes by hours. I am not sure about this, but some friends claim to have sent me an email which i never received. So i got off gmail till these things get resolved. Wonder when they will come out of \u0026ldquo;beta\u0026rdquo;!\nComments None (March 16, 2006):\nThats why you use Hotmail, most reliable ;)\nNone (July 23, 2006):\nNever had ay serious problems with gmail :)\nNone (October 11, 2006):\nHotmail sucks. I am also wondering why Gmail is still in Beta after 1+ years of being used\u0026hellip;. Betas arent usually permanent stages for a product. lol.\nSteven Berry (May 10, 2007):\nNever had one single problem with Gmail. I use all of their SMTP and POP Services, along with SMS, Pop-up, and E-mail Notifications. Amazing Service. Period.\nCharlie Arnold (June 29, 2007):\nGmail just cost me hours of work, entering information to send to my insurance company contacts, attaching files and photos, then it crashed. It let me enter infor for an hour and 15 minutes, crashed, and didn\u0026rsquo;t come back up for 2 HOURS!!! Google needs to start working toward making the reliable product they promised nearly 2 years ago when they advertised to get people to sign up! Thanks gmail! You a**hole!\nNone (September 04, 2007):\nCharlie, Charlie\u0026hellip; you are one sad human being !Gmail/Google never said you have to use their products. It was always optional. Besides, crashings you mentioned are such a nonsense, better check your system for viruses that are probably crashing your browser. You should learn your manners first and then go in public and start cursing\u0026hellip; because it seems like that\u0026rsquo;s the only thing you really know.\nNone (February 20, 2008):\nmy friend use pop or imap any one not boththat should solve your delayed mail problem , i solved it that way\nRay Beavers (September 21, 2008):\nOkay, I would not say that Windows Live Hotmail was really good, because it really is not the best. I think if you\u0026rsquo;re referring to the old MSN Hotmail then maybe. But, if you have been with Hotmail since like 2002 when it was still MSN Hotmail, you would still have Outlook Access (http) which Windows Vista Has Removed, with their new product called Windows Mail.Otherwise if you want reliable Hotmail you just need to download the Windows Mail (From ideas.live.com) Try it ;)\nNone (November 21, 2008):\nHotmail is trash. Do you know how many deviant art accounts I\u0026rsquo;ve stolen due to their lackluster security efforts? Jesus Christ, anybody using Hotmail and saying it\u0026rsquo;s great is really really stupid. Yahoo isn\u0026rsquo;t much better but at least they\u0026rsquo;re secured a lot better.\nUnknown (May 31, 2009):\nlol 2006, in 2009 its still not out of beta\nComments None (March 16, 2006):\nThats why you use Hotmail, most reliable ;)\nNone (July 23, 2006):\nNever had ay serious problems with gmail :)\nNone (October 11, 2006):\nHotmail sucks. I am also wondering why Gmail is still in Beta after 1+ years of being used\u0026hellip;. Betas arent usually permanent stages for a product. lol.\nSteven Berry (May 10, 2007):\nNever had one single problem with Gmail. I use all of their SMTP and POP Services, along with SMS, Pop-up, and E-mail Notifications. Amazing Service. Period.\nCharlie Arnold (June 29, 2007):\nGmail just cost me hours of work, entering information to send to my insurance company contacts, attaching files and photos, then it crashed. It let me enter infor for an hour and 15 minutes, crashed, and didn\u0026rsquo;t come back up for 2 HOURS!!! Google needs to start working toward making the reliable product they promised nearly 2 years ago when they advertised to get people to sign up! Thanks gmail! You a**hole!\nNone (September 04, 2007):\nCharlie, Charlie\u0026hellip; you are one sad human being !Gmail/Google never said you have to use their products. It was always optional. Besides, crashings you mentioned are such a nonsense, better check your system for viruses that are probably crashing your browser. You should learn your manners first and then go in public and start cursing\u0026hellip; because it seems like that\u0026rsquo;s the only thing you really know.\nNone (February 20, 2008):\nmy friend use pop or imap any one not boththat should solve your delayed mail problem , i solved it that way\nRay Beavers (September 21, 2008):\nOkay, I would not say that Windows Live Hotmail was really good, because it really is not the best. I think if you\u0026rsquo;re referring to the old MSN Hotmail then maybe. But, if you have been with Hotmail since like 2002 when it was still MSN Hotmail, you would still have Outlook Access (http) which Windows Vista Has Removed, with their new product called Windows Mail.Otherwise if you want reliable Hotmail you just need to download the Windows Mail (From ideas.live.com) Try it ;)\nNone (November 21, 2008):\nHotmail is trash. Do you know how many deviant art accounts I\u0026rsquo;ve stolen due to their lackluster security efforts? Jesus Christ, anybody using Hotmail and saying it\u0026rsquo;s great is really really stupid. Yahoo isn\u0026rsquo;t much better but at least they\u0026rsquo;re secured a lot better.\nUnknown (May 31, 2009):\nlol 2006, in 2009 its still not out of beta\n","tags":["Gmail","Google","Tech History"],"title":"When will Gmail come out of beta!","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-03-15-when-will-gmail-come-out-of-beta/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I am kindof a social person, like to have people around me. Staying alone usually bores the hell out of me. So I was once having a small conversation with a friend, and she is the completely opposite of me. She likes to spend time with \u0026ldquo;herself\u0026rdquo;. Her favorite dialogue is \u0026ldquo;I love my company\u0026rdquo;.\nSomeone may say that if you have a ton of people hanging out at your place, you will prefer to spend time on your own self, and if you usually are on your own, you will enjoy some company, and there is always a balance created. But knowing my friend since a long time, I can totally deduce that some people just like to spend time on their own, and I simply to prefer to have people around me.\nJust a point to ponder.. what kind of person are you?\n","tags":["Much","Space","Like","Have"],"title":"How much space do you like to have?","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-03-07-how-much-space-do-you-like-to-have/"},{"categories":null,"content":"So I have finally released the MIB Browser on sourceforge. It now uses the SNMP4J Libraries, and provides better \u0026ldquo;Set\u0026rdquo; support.\nHere is the sourceforge page:\nhttp://sourceforge.net/projects/jmibbrowser\n","tags":["Software Development","SNMP","Open Source"],"title":"JMIBBrowser released on sourceforge","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-03-01-jmibbrowser-released-on-sourceforge/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Inspired by the goldfish in \u0026ldquo;Me, You and Everyone We Know\u0026rdquo;, and having nothing better to do on a rainy sunday afternoon, I decided to buy a fish. It is also a precursor of my ultimate target to get a dog.\nSo I dragged 2 of my friends to a store called \u0026ldquo;Seascapes\u0026rdquo; in mountain view. I wanted to start small.. just 1 fish in a hassle-free container. The lady there was very helpful, and patiently answered all the random questions we shot at her.\nFinally, we ended up buying a nice bright strawberry colored \u0026ldquo;Male Betta\u0026rdquo; fish. Bettas are one of the few fishes that can survive in a small tank. They breath the oxygen from air, so don\u0026rsquo;t need a filter in the tank. They also are \u0026ldquo;loners\u0026rdquo;, will actually fight till death if 2 of them are kept together.\nAfter an extremely strong and threatening recommendation from a friend, the fish has been named \u0026ldquo;Splash\u0026rdquo;. In the last 20 hours, he has been pretty active. He immediately eats the food dropped in the pot (will upload a video soon). He is expected to live around 5 years under normal circumstances, am looking forward for that.\nHere are some pics for your viewing pleasure\u0026hellip;\nComments None (March 04, 2006):\nput a link to seascape store! We ate the lady\u0026rsquo;s head with a million questions and she was kind enough to answer all of them - she deserves some free marketing :-)\nNone (October 11, 2006):\nBetta\u0026rsquo;s r cute. But, just be careful not to overfeed them. Not to scare u but mine died as a friend of mine overfed him. cool name!!\nComments None (March 04, 2006):\nput a link to seascape store! We ate the lady\u0026rsquo;s head with a million questions and she was kind enough to answer all of them - she deserves some free marketing :-)\nNone (October 11, 2006):\nBetta\u0026rsquo;s r cute. But, just be careful not to overfeed them. Not to scare u but mine died as a friend of mine overfed him. cool name!!\n","tags":["Pets","Personal","Domestic Life"],"title":"A Splash of Life :)","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-02-27-a-splash-of-life/"},{"categories":null,"content":"There has been some noise around google coming out with their payment option on their google base service. Having worked with paypal in the past, things like these are always interesting to dig into. I was never exactly convinced with the idea of google base to replace ebay or craigslist, their interface simply doesn\u0026rsquo;t appeal. (Check out http://www.edgeio.com if you like structured blogging) Anyways, so I thought of checking it out by trying to find out tickets of \u0026ldquo;Yeah Yeah Yeah\u0026rdquo; concert due in SF on 2nd March.\nGo to base.google.com Click on \u0026ldquo;tickets\u0026rdquo;. Get a long list of tote bags (wtf)! Search for \u0026ldquo;Yeah Yeah Yeah\u0026rdquo; in tickets. Click on one of the ads for san francisco The ad is by some site called \u0026ldquo;http://www.mostwatchedmovies.com\u0026rdquo;. The \u0026ldquo;Buy Now\u0026rdquo; button on this ad takes you to the eBay listing! (Ahhh.. free advertisement for ebay) This is a side effect of google base allowing people to list items for free. Because they have APIs and stuff to post, it becomes very easy for someone to dump their entire ebay items list on google base. As eBay charges for items, and craigslist needs manual involvement for posting each item, the junk stays away.\nLets see if google gets lucky on this one..\n","tags":["Google","eCommerce","Product Analysis"],"title":"Google eBayse","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-02-27-google-ebayse/"},{"categories":null,"content":"A friend just recommended me this movie.\nIts about how people struggle to connect with each other in today\u0026rsquo;s world. Its an extremely simple, light hearted movie which will leave you with heavy heart. The more you think about this movie, the more you realize how true it is.\nIf you watch only one movie per year, this is the one.\nHere is the homepage of this movie: http://www.meandyoumovie.com/\n","tags":["Movie Review","Relationships","Independent Film"],"title":"Movie: Me and You and Everyone We Know","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-02-23-movie-me-and-you-and-everyone-we-know/"},{"categories":null,"content":"So I just visited portland and seattle over the long weekend. It was a pretty much chilled out vacation, basically relaxed and hanged out with my whole jingband of friends. We visited Multinoa falls in Portland, 2 Indian restaurants in Seattle( Cedars was one of them) and Trinity Club. The best part about this trip was there was absolutely no rain (Saturday was actually a nice sunny day). It was pretty cold, though :)\nThis video summarizes the entire trip..\nIn case you are curious how it was made:\nAll pictures and clips taken using Canon SD400 CameraMovie editing done using iMovie HD on G4 PowerbookOriginal movie encoded in DIVX Format. Video hosted on YouTube.com","tags":["Travel","Photography","Video Production"],"title":"Sunshine in Portland!","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-02-23-sunshine-in-portland/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I recently switched to Cingular because i wanted a GSM based phone. For some unknown random reasons, GSM phones are less crippled and have more \u0026ldquo;basic\u0026rdquo; features than CDMA phones. They also have a SIM card, which can simply be put in a different phone.\nMost of the new GSM phones that are coming out are either tri-band or quad-band. Cingular runs on 2 bands, 850 MHz and 1900 MHz. However, the new (and awesome) tri-band phones like Nokia N Series, SE W800, etc. dont have the 850 MHz band. This is probably because the rest of the world do not use this band.\nIs it that difficult to create a quad band phone? Are American phone companies so annoyingly bad that they don\u0026rsquo;t promote a quad band phone? People who buy these unlocked phones are paying the same service charge, so the companies actually make more money as they dont give away a free phone! If a small phone like the Motorola RAZR can be quad band, what might be stopping other phones from that?\nIts so not fair.\n","tags":["Mobile Technology","Telecommunications","GSM"],"title":"GSM Phone Rant..","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-02-23-gsm-phone-rant/"},{"categories":null,"content":"So I have been in the market for a new phone since a really long time now. After giving a shot to the Sprint PM6800 PDA Phone, which was a really bad experience in all the terms (Windows PocketPC+Mac interoperability, Sprint Customer Support and others), I decided that it was the time to move away from CDMA to the more \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; GSM phones.\nAfter checking out all the phones, there were not many options available for Cingular compatible phones (there are very few quad-band, or 850 Mhz tri-band phones in the market). So I decided not to get something very fancy and ordered the Sony Ericsson Z520a from Amazon.com (it was -100$ after rebates!)\nHaving waited impatiently for 3 days, it finally arrived, and I set it up and called cingular to port my old number to this new one. They advised me to confirm with amazon if I can do this. Well, anyways, I called Amazon, and they said that my rebate will be cancelled if I ported the old number to this one !!!! Its like WTH! I could have just bought the phone from a store and not wait for 2 days !!! No wonder AMZN stock is going down.\nSo basically, in the end, I decided to give it all up and just got the number ported. Now I am a proud owner of the Sony Ericsson Z520a GSM phone. This phone has all the features I wanted (bluetooth sync, remote control, flip phone, good battery life) without the extra baggage. Its all going to be a happy ending with a good phone that is not badly crippled by the provider.\nComments None (February 12, 2006):\nCheck out http://www.cingular.com/SLVR_iTunes/Forget iTunes part, its still a cool phone, quad band and stuff, and iSync! \u0026hellip; I want to trade my k700i now!\nDwipal (February 13, 2006):\ndont like the SLVR phone..1. not flip (i like flip phones)2. not sure if it supports salling clicker (RAZR does not support), salling yet does not say that this one does.3. 200 bucks?!4. Check this out: http://www.1800mobiles.com/motorola-l6-phone.htmlits the slvr without itunes (and its triband :( ) but its PRETTY CHEAP.5. sony has the UI stuff, so actually, even though i bought salling clicker, i was able to control itunes and all using the phone directly.\nNone (February 14, 2006):\nI hate flips :)- there is hope from salling clicker :)http://www.salling.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1949\u0026amp;postdays=0\u0026amp;postorder=asc\u0026amp;start=150check out the last post by \u0026lsquo;salling\u0026rsquo;. might take a while for an update though.- the phone is already on amazon for $50. (albeit with conditions \u0026amp; rebates), but the unlocked one is starting to show up for $250 at some sites and ebay powersellers Comments None (February 12, 2006):\nCheck out http://www.cingular.com/SLVR_iTunes/Forget iTunes part, its still a cool phone, quad band and stuff, and iSync! \u0026hellip; I want to trade my k700i now!\nDwipal (February 13, 2006):\ndont like the SLVR phone..1. not flip (i like flip phones)2. not sure if it supports salling clicker (RAZR does not support), salling yet does not say that this one does.3. 200 bucks?!4. Check this out: http://www.1800mobiles.com/motorola-l6-phone.htmlits the slvr without itunes (and its triband :( ) but its PRETTY CHEAP.5. sony has the UI stuff, so actually, even though i bought salling clicker, i was able to control itunes and all using the phone directly.\nNone (February 14, 2006):\nI hate flips :)- there is hope from salling clicker :)http://www.salling.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1949\u0026amp;postdays=0\u0026amp;postorder=asc\u0026amp;start=150check out the last post by \u0026lsquo;salling\u0026rsquo;. might take a while for an update though.- the phone is already on amazon for $50. (albeit with conditions \u0026amp; rebates), but the unlocked one is starting to show up for $250 at some sites and ebay powersellers ","tags":["Mobile Phones","Customer Service","GSM"],"title":"The Phone Story...","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-02-10-the-phone-story/"},{"categories":null,"content":" LOGO2.0_2 Originally uploaded by Stabilo Boss. Found this on flickr, has logos of all the great Web 2.0 companies. (No, yahoo, ebay, google etc. are not on it and yes, YouTube is there in the list.). In case you are wondering where these compnies are.. someone has done a great job using google maps. http://www.fourio.com/web20map/\nComments alprazolam online (March 12, 2007):\nWe are the specialists in tickets we have all the ones thatneed to obtain and for any event that desire to attend notlate more and contact us now.The best place to obtain tickets for: Sony ericsson open, NCAA Final Tournament Four, acc tournament, big east tournament, at: http://www.ticketsofamerica.com\nNone (September 12, 2013):\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know if it\u0026rsquo;s just me or if perhaps everybody else experiencing problems with your blog. It looks like some of the text on your content are running off the screen. Can somebody else please provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to them too? This may be a issue with my internet browser because I\u0026rsquo;ve had this happen previously. Appreciate it\nHere is my blog post - outils referencement\njessicasteve (April 28, 2017):\nI Will Provide Seo Blog Comment Service. \u0026amp; niche relevant blog comment service we provide a quality service with 100% Buyer satisfaction and My team Believed in Quality work not Quantity Contact me Now 24/7.\nMichael Smith (April 30, 2017):\nI Will Provide Seo Blog Comment Service. \u0026amp; niche relevant blog comment service we provide a quality service with 100% Buyer satisfaction and My team Believed in Quality work not Quantity Contact me Now 24/7.\nComments alprazolam online (March 12, 2007):\nWe are the specialists in tickets we have all the ones thatneed to obtain and for any event that desire to attend notlate more and contact us now.The best place to obtain tickets for: Sony ericsson open, NCAA Final Tournament Four, acc tournament, big east tournament, at: http://www.ticketsofamerica.com\nNone (September 12, 2013):\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know if it\u0026rsquo;s just me or if perhaps everybody else experiencing problems with your blog. It looks like some of the text on your content are running off the screen. Can somebody else please provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to them too? This may be a issue with my internet browser because I\u0026rsquo;ve had this happen previously. Appreciate it\nHere is my blog post - outils referencement\njessicasteve (April 28, 2017):\nI Will Provide Seo Blog Comment Service. \u0026amp; niche relevant blog comment service we provide a quality service with 100% Buyer satisfaction and My team Believed in Quality work not Quantity Contact me Now 24/7.\nMichael Smith (April 30, 2017):\nI Will Provide Seo Blog Comment Service. \u0026amp; niche relevant blog comment service we provide a quality service with 100% Buyer satisfaction and My team Believed in Quality work not Quantity Contact me Now 24/7.\n","tags":["Web 2.0","Tech History","Design"],"title":"Web 2.0 Logos","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-02-07-web-2-0-logos/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I am very happy with my life. Everything is great. However, there are still a lot of moments of \u0026ldquo;unhappiness\u0026rdquo;. So on thinking the reasons for that, I realized that a lot of this is directly connected to satisfaction. If you are satisfied, you will be happy. Ok, there are some contradictions to this, like if you are satisfied with the life then you will never grow and stuff like that, but thats not the topic of this blog.\nNow, if you have no \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; issues, what can make you unhappy (or unsatisfied?). For me, these are the small things that are supposed to make the life better, like the phone, the computer, the televsion, the ipod, the apartment, etc. I have realized that these things in generally keeps me more unsatisfied rather than satisfied. There is always a compromise when u get a new one, the features you want are either not available or they are not affordable. Whenever there is a compromise, the level of satisfaction goes down. It also depends upon the expectations. There are so many people who are satisfied with what they have, and do not really expect a lot from these things (these are just stupid worldly things, afterall). I have a few friends like that, and I feel they are truely happy. They don\u0026rsquo;t really understand how someone can be unhappy because their cell phone does not support a software which lets you control the computer mouse with the phone.\nAll these materialistic things only get you temporal happiness, but then not getting these things is probably even worse (unless you are a monk). I don\u0026rsquo;t know what the solution is, may be will find out some day (become a monk is not a solution) !\nComments Gee2 (February 14, 2006):\nVasa directed me here -I guess this attitude would make you a better designer / coder and successful at your work, but not necessarily make you happy - satisfied.To me, this is the essential difference between the east and west. The west being focused on bigger,better, more. East being impressioned with contentment,satisfaction and ideals of spiritual living with attitude towards conservation, savings and non-violence.Religions propose similar solutions to these questions and hence flourish in doing so.God help you !\nNone (April 17, 2006):\nHowdy,It\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that you don\u0026rsquo;t feel satisfied because you are an engineer and you should always feel that an improvement could be made. That\u0026rsquo;s your competitive edge. Embrace it. peace,A\nNone (January 30, 2007):\nRead \u0026lsquo;Autobiography of a yogi\u0026rsquo; if u get a chance\nComments Gee2 (February 14, 2006):\nVasa directed me here -I guess this attitude would make you a better designer / coder and successful at your work, but not necessarily make you happy - satisfied.To me, this is the essential difference between the east and west. The west being focused on bigger,better, more. East being impressioned with contentment,satisfaction and ideals of spiritual living with attitude towards conservation, savings and non-violence.Religions propose similar solutions to these questions and hence flourish in doing so.God help you !\nNone (April 17, 2006):\nHowdy,It\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that you don\u0026rsquo;t feel satisfied because you are an engineer and you should always feel that an improvement could be made. That\u0026rsquo;s your competitive edge. Embrace it. peace,A\nNone (January 30, 2007):\nRead \u0026lsquo;Autobiography of a yogi\u0026rsquo; if u get a chance\n","tags":["Philosophy","Happiness","Consumerism"],"title":"Temporal Happiness","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-01-30-temporal-happiness/"},{"categories":null,"content":"My first attempt towards song-writing\u0026hellip;.\nYou think you like it, just because its always there You think you know it, just because its always fair But now you are thinking, what has it ever given to you All this time, and nothing that you ever do\nStaring at the TV, with the laptop in my hands websites scroll and the episodes go by, but my heart dont give a damn and my eyes say go read something, but my brain dont understand \u0026lsquo;coz im staring at the TV, with the laptop in my hands\n(inspired from a Bon Jovi song) Comments Gee2 (February 14, 2006):\nStaring at the window, with the suitcase in my hands !- Do you have this album ?\nComments Gee2 (February 14, 2006):\nStaring at the window, with the suitcase in my hands !- Do you have this album ?\n","tags":["Modern Life","Poetry","Screens"],"title":"Staring at the TV.. with a laptop in my hands.","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-01-26-staring-at-the-tv-with-a-laptop-in-my-hands/"},{"categories":null,"content":"As we all know, life is full of challenges. Challenge to get into a good school, good college, good job, good position, everything. Some of them are long term, and are generally resolved as time passes. Some of them are short term, and need immediate attention, for example, to finish a very important assignment at school, or to get a job after graduation. Short term challenges create a sense of tension in us, and when they are achieved, we feel happy. They also keep us busy and minds occupied until they are resolved.\nHowever, what happens when there are no challenges? There is no tension, the mind gets free. Then we start thinking about doing new things we like in this free time. We go on vacation, eat good food, watch favorite movies, go partying with friends. However, there is still a sense of boredom. When you tell this to other people who are fighting with problems, they laugh on you. There are no problems in our life, which starts becoming a problem. There is nothing to look forward to, no big mountain to climb. Life becomes predictable. We cannot figure out how to get the zing back in life (and creating problems is not the answer).\nOne solution is to create challenges for yourself, doing things that you always thought to be difficult or impossible to do. For example, playing a musical instrument, writing a poem, training for marathon, learning a new sport, or simply watching all the movies involving Woody Allen. These things may not be real challenges, but they surely brings hapiness back to the life when they are achieved. So whenever you think you are bored, take up something you have never done.\nComments None (May 24, 2006):\nhello Dwipal.exactly. we need to do challenge ourselves. I just read 5 to 6 of ur articles and they were quite good in the sense that they made me as a reader, think. And it is good. I mean, this article was really good. Thanks a lot for sharing it with the readers. And, secondly, inspiring too.\nNone (September 15, 2012):\nUnquestionably believe that which you said. Your favorite justification seemed to be at the net the easiest factor to be mindful of. I say to you, I definitely get irked while folks consider issues that they just do not know about. You controlled to hit the nail upon the highest as smartly as outlined out the whole thing with no need side effect , folks can take a signal.\nWill probably be again to get more. Thank you Also visit my web-site :: Visit This Link\nComments None (May 24, 2006):\nhello Dwipal.exactly. we need to do challenge ourselves. I just read 5 to 6 of ur articles and they were quite good in the sense that they made me as a reader, think. And it is good. I mean, this article was really good. Thanks a lot for sharing it with the readers. And, secondly, inspiring too.\nNone (September 15, 2012):\nUnquestionably believe that which you said. Your favorite justification seemed to be at the net the easiest factor to be mindful of. I say to you, I definitely get irked while folks consider issues that they just do not know about. You controlled to hit the nail upon the highest as smartly as outlined out the whole thing with no need side effect , folks can take a signal.\nWill probably be again to get more. Thank you Also visit my web-site :: Visit This Link\n","tags":["Personal Growth","Motivation","Self-Improvement"],"title":"Challenge yourself !","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-01-24-challenge-yourself/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I have been an avid video-game player since childhood, and used to spend entire days playing games like mario, tennis, pro-am, etc. Then came the computer, and it immediately replaced the gaming consoles for me. I started with the old DOS games like cat, para-trooper, bricks on a good old hercules \u0026ldquo;soft white\u0026rdquo; monitor. They were replaced with more graphic games like gpcga, indy, prince of persia, F15 Flight Simulator, and then by the great 3d games like wolf, doom, duke, sim-city, warcraft, and the list goes on and on. There were always the PS1, dreamcast, etc. consoles, but they never got big in India.\nThen I came to US to study, and got myself a nice XBOX as soon as I graduated. However, surprisingly, I never caught on to it as i was on the older games, they were all the same games with slightly more bells and whistles. The XBOX controller was same as the original nintendo controller, just with more buttons on it. No fundamental change (well, except the online gaming stuff). And before I could fully utilize it, all is upgraded again. We now have the XBOX 360 out in market, with PS3 and Nintendo Revolution following.\nThese new consoles are a major upgrade to the existing ones in all aspects, processor, memory, graphics capability, etc. However, there is still no fundamental change in XBOX and PS3, they are just beefier now. They are super-hyped for their graphics capability, I wonder if it actually makes the gameplay better.\nTalking about innovation, the Nintendo Revolution is the only one that has been designed \u0026ldquo;out of the box\u0026rdquo;. Nintendo always had the \u0026ldquo;less powerful\u0026rdquo; consoles, but always had the games focussed on more fun-factor and game play rather than graphics. With this new console, I have my full faith that they will be back on the top. You can check out this video to find out why its worth the wait.\nHappy Gaming !!\n","tags":["Gaming","Tech History","Nintendo","Xbox"],"title":"Video Game Consoles: Then and Now","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-01-18-video-game-consoles-then-and-now/"},{"categories":null,"content":"America is all about capitalism. Its about the big corporations. There are various good and bad things about capitalism, which is not a part of this blog.\nHowever, what I want to write is what Starbucks has done to people who start their day with these beverages. Starbucks has bought a whole lot of smaller/better/competetor (Seattle\u0026rsquo;s Best, Torrefazione Italia, etc.) coffee chains and replaced them with their own franchise.\nA result of this is, a lot of people have gotten used to drink really crappy coffee and tea. I am not a coffee connoisour, and am mostly a tea drinker. I have tried all the different varieties of tea available at these places, and its so bad that I actually had to throw it away. Whats even more amusing that starbucks advertise themselves as selling the best tea/coffee. They call the Indian tea as \u0026ldquo;Chai Tea\u0026rdquo; made from some \u0026ldquo;powder\u0026rdquo; mixed in milk, which simply shows how shallow they are. (Chai actually means \u0026ldquo;tea\u0026rdquo;, specifically from \u0026ldquo;CTC Tea\u0026rdquo;, which is boiled with (optional) spices and milk.).\nWell, the bottomline is that places like these are corrupting the minds of people in making them believe that the special \u0026ldquo;burnt\u0026rdquo; roasted coffee they sell is actually good, and the \u0026ldquo;chai tea\u0026rdquo; in a plastic cup with a small hole on the top (which may be designed to hide the foul smell of the beverage) is an exquisite beverage to drink. The only way that we can stop these places from prospering at the cost of good coffee is to not buy beverages from there. Because of their scale, they will probably never be able to sell the best beverages around, but atleast they will stop shutting down the smaller chains who actually care about the quality rather than fancy names and wireless internet.\n\u0026ldquo;Friends don\u0026rsquo;t let friends go to starbucks\u0026rdquo; (A quote from Dana Street Roasting Company, Mountain View)\nComments Empress of Blandings (January 24, 2006):\nYeah, I\u0026rsquo;m sick of all these big corporate chains and their penchant for gobbling up smaller/better players.. only to replace their products with something that tastes foul\u0026hellip;n shove them down consumers\u0026rsquo; throats with aggressive, monopolistic marketing gimmicks and ploys.\u0026ldquo;Chai-tea in a plastic cup with a hole on top\u0026rdquo;?? One shudders.Gawddd!! I still miss Gokul bhaiyya\u0026rsquo;s chai n Bakshi\u0026rsquo;s chai n cream-rolls\u0026hellip;. :-)\nNone (February 16, 2006):\nHi #NAME#. Just found your site via contacts. Although I was looking for contacts I was glad i came upon your site. Thanks for the read!\nComments Empress of Blandings (January 24, 2006):\nYeah, I\u0026rsquo;m sick of all these big corporate chains and their penchant for gobbling up smaller/better players.. only to replace their products with something that tastes foul\u0026hellip;n shove them down consumers\u0026rsquo; throats with aggressive, monopolistic marketing gimmicks and ploys.\u0026ldquo;Chai-tea in a plastic cup with a hole on top\u0026rdquo;?? One shudders.Gawddd!! I still miss Gokul bhaiyya\u0026rsquo;s chai n Bakshi\u0026rsquo;s chai n cream-rolls\u0026hellip;. :-)\nNone (February 16, 2006):\nHi #NAME#. Just found your site via contacts. Although I was looking for contacts I was glad i came upon your site. Thanks for the read!\n","tags":["Coffee \u0026 Tea","Culture","Consumerism"],"title":"Tea, Coffee and Starbucks","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-01-18-tea-coffee-and-starbucks/"},{"categories":null,"content":"I recently made a very simple observation that seems to be the basis of failure of people to commit in a relationship. Basically, a person knowingly (or unknowingly) sets a certain level of expectation from their partner. If the partner exceeds these expectations, then the person will be willing to commit. The same holds true for the partner. Now, in real life, people always tend to go out with people who make them feel good, and exceed their expectations. Expectations may be in different forms, like looks, money, certain hobbies, or everything ;). So, when someone is looking for a partner, they will only commit to people who are above their expectations. However, as the other person is above the expectations, the first person might not match the expectations of this person, and fall below his/her expectations and there will not be a commitment. Having a casual relationship is a completely different issue, where the expectations are not properly set. However, as it goes forward, they get more and more clear. This is probably a reason why people with different professional backgrounds get along well with each other\u0026hellip; their expectations are completely disjoint from one another.\nComments None (January 16, 2006):\nGood thought. Especially at 1:30 AM in night :)Other big problem is that expectations keep on changing - with time and circumstances, be it casual or commited relationship, be it same profession or different. So when looking for a partner, it is important to \u0026ldquo;size up\u0026rdquo; the person\u0026rsquo;s flexibility, optimism and maturity more than anything else. It\u0026rsquo;s easier said than done, but then what\u0026rsquo;s life without chances taken? :-)\nSpundun (January 21, 2006):\nકોઇનો પ્રેમ ક્યારેય ઓછો હોતો નથી, આપણી અપેક્ષાઓજ વધારે હોય છે. \u0026ndash; હરિન્દ્ર દવે.\nNone (August 30, 2012):\nMay I simply just say what a comfort to find an individual who actually knows what they\u0026rsquo;re discussing on the internet. You certainly realize how to bring an issue to light and make it important. A lot more people must read this and understand this side of the story. I was surprised you aren\u0026rsquo;t more popular given that you surely possess the gift. Also see my website: how to delete cookies from computer\nComments None (January 16, 2006):\nGood thought. Especially at 1:30 AM in night :)Other big problem is that expectations keep on changing - with time and circumstances, be it casual or commited relationship, be it same profession or different. So when looking for a partner, it is important to \u0026ldquo;size up\u0026rdquo; the person\u0026rsquo;s flexibility, optimism and maturity more than anything else. It\u0026rsquo;s easier said than done, but then what\u0026rsquo;s life without chances taken? :-)\nSpundun (January 21, 2006):\nકોઇનો પ્રેમ ક્યારેય ઓછો હોતો નથી, આપણી અપેક્ષાઓજ વધારે હોય છે. \u0026ndash; હરિન્દ્ર દવે.\nNone (August 30, 2012):\nMay I simply just say what a comfort to find an individual who actually knows what they\u0026rsquo;re discussing on the internet. You certainly realize how to bring an issue to light and make it important. A lot more people must read this and understand this side of the story. I was surprised you aren\u0026rsquo;t more popular given that you surely possess the gift. Also see my website: how to delete cookies from computer\n","tags":["Psychology","Relationships","Human Behavior"],"title":"Why people fail to commit in a relationship","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-01-14-why-people-fail-to-commit-in-a-relationship/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Apple has always played games with me. Here is a list:\nI bought the iB ook G3 (my first apple). 35 days after that, all iBooks were upgraded to G4. The iBook came with Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). It soon got obsolete and Tiger came in. So i bought Mac OS X 10.3 (Tiger). Within a couple of months it was upgraded to Panther. Same thing happened with iLife. 2 upgrades in \u0026lt;2 years. Then I bought the all new upgraded powerbook G4, with a ultra bright LCD and stuff. And now apple announced the new Intel Based Apple MacBooks. Because things got upgraded as soon as i bought them, I got the new iPod Photo as soon as it came out. And then they slashed the prices in 1.5 months of that. Well, technically, it might be my fault, that I am stuck in the wrong upgrade cycle. However, I strongly feel that a Mac should feel like its the latest for atleast 9-12 months.\nComments None (January 10, 2006):\nAgree. But then \u0026hellip;. this always happens in high tech stuff. The trick is, if you want something you buy as soon as that product/upgrade is released. But, I agree, atleast with the ipod its been crazy release cycles. Likely driven by the equally crazy market.I\u0026rsquo;ll be waiting for the 1st revision of the macbooks. :p-Shreeramhttp://shreerams.blogspot.com\nNone (August 14, 2006):\nI hate apple for host of different reasons that are all summed up like this \u0026ldquo;The worst hardware and customer support I have ever experienced!\u0026ldquo;In the last three two Mac\u0026rsquo;s died and I just bought(was forced to buy) a Macbook for my daughter and I could not get it out of the apple store before it broke. It is sitting at the store right now and the apple \u0026ldquo;genius\u0026rdquo;(an oxymoron) is trying to diagnose and fix the problem. This has gone on for two days. Oh and did I say that the apple store told me the Macbook was ready with all my data transfered from an Ibook and whn I checked it nothing had been transfered. Great cusotmer service.To close out this rant\u0026hellip;3 IPod\u0026rsquo;s in three years all broke\u0026hellip;my cheap MP3 player from MPIO has not skipped a beat in the same time.That is why I hate apple!!!!!\nNone (September 13, 2007):\nWhile it does happen in high tech stuff, I must agree. However, most things you can get for a PC will last you a year or two, if not three. I have been posting some stuff about some things that people don\u0026rsquo;t realize about Apple on my blog: http://kelpie.xenoci.de/blog/ Check it out. It\u0026rsquo;s the first post, however, the other three posts may fancy you.\nComments None (January 10, 2006):\nAgree. But then \u0026hellip;. this always happens in high tech stuff. The trick is, if you want something you buy as soon as that product/upgrade is released. But, I agree, atleast with the ipod its been crazy release cycles. Likely driven by the equally crazy market.I\u0026rsquo;ll be waiting for the 1st revision of the macbooks. :p-Shreeramhttp://shreerams.blogspot.com\nNone (August 14, 2006):\nI hate apple for host of different reasons that are all summed up like this \u0026ldquo;The worst hardware and customer support I have ever experienced!\u0026ldquo;In the last three two Mac\u0026rsquo;s died and I just bought(was forced to buy) a Macbook for my daughter and I could not get it out of the apple store before it broke. It is sitting at the store right now and the apple \u0026ldquo;genius\u0026rdquo;(an oxymoron) is trying to diagnose and fix the problem. This has gone on for two days. Oh and did I say that the apple store told me the Macbook was ready with all my data transfered from an Ibook and whn I checked it nothing had been transfered. Great cusotmer service.To close out this rant\u0026hellip;3 IPod\u0026rsquo;s in three years all broke\u0026hellip;my cheap MP3 player from MPIO has not skipped a beat in the same time.That is why I hate apple!!!!!\nNone (September 13, 2007):\nWhile it does happen in high tech stuff, I must agree. However, most things you can get for a PC will last you a year or two, if not three. I have been posting some stuff about some things that people don\u0026rsquo;t realize about Apple on my blog: http://kelpie.xenoci.de/blog/ Check it out. It\u0026rsquo;s the first post, however, the other three posts may fancy you.\n","tags":["Apple","Tech Rant","Consumer Cycles"],"title":"Why I Hate Apple","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-01-10-why-i-hate-apple/"},{"categories":null,"content":"\nUpdate: Its actually probably in Malaysia or Indonesia.\nComments Terence Monteiro (January 17, 2006):\nHi, where was this performed? The language is Hindi for sure, but the cast may not be Indians. Anyway, interesting!\nNone (March 06, 2006):\nhi there..is there any way you could email this video to me? or any place i could download it from please?my email address is rima@nyu.eduthank you so much!\nDwipal (March 06, 2006):\nI am sorry, i don\u0026rsquo;t have the original video.\nNone (September 24, 2006):\ntoo gud\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..\nComments Terence Monteiro (January 17, 2006):\nHi, where was this performed? The language is Hindi for sure, but the cast may not be Indians. Anyway, interesting!\nNone (March 06, 2006):\nhi there..is there any way you could email this video to me? or any place i could download it from please?my email address is rima@nyu.eduthank you so much!\nDwipal (March 06, 2006):\nI am sorry, i don\u0026rsquo;t have the original video.\nNone (September 24, 2006):\ntoo gud\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;..\n","tags":["Music","Culture","YouTube"],"title":"Ladki Badi Anjani Hai.... in chinese!!","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-01-05-ladki-badi-anjani-hai-in-chinese/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Every morning, the first thing I (and a lot of people) do is to check the news. Internet has made it easy to get the latest news whenever we want. News aggregator sites like news.google.com help by consolidating everything on one page. However, I am still in the look of \u0026ldquo;the perfect news site\u0026rdquo;.\nGoogle news has a good 2-column layout, but their news are \u0026ldquo;too automated\u0026rdquo;. Yahoo news has good content, but their layout sucks. I also go to some other random sites for different news. In general, no website gives the ease of an actual newspaper with the latest news.\nRSS feeds from news websites can help us achieve this, but most RSS readers aren\u0026rsquo;t meant for reading multiple feeds at the same time. I have attempted to create a news page according to my taste, which gives a feel of a regular newspaper. It has too much content, but the content does not change much during the day. You can check it out at http://www.dwipal.com/news.php.\nLet me know if you have some good suggestions for this.\n","tags":["News","Information Management","UX"],"title":"How do you read the news?","uri":"/blog/posts/2006-01-05-how-do-you-read-the-news/"},{"categories":null,"content":" Kaun Banega Crorepati 2 ads everywhere at Metro Park Station, New Jersey. Talk about India going Global (or globalization going to India..).","tags":["Travel","Culture","Globalism"],"title":"Edison Rocks!","uri":"/blog/posts/2005-12-31-edison-rocks/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Its winter time, the time to wear warm clothes, time to turn on the heaters, time to wear shoes all day long, and time to get shocked every time you touch something metal. I digged some sites on the net to find out how to avoid getting shocked, and tried the various methods.\nHere are some practical things you can do:\nTouch the metal surface with other metal surface. For example, touch the car door with your key first (make sure you are touching the metal part of the key). This way, the spark will be between the key and door, and u will not feel it.\nDischarge yourself first before touching anything metal. You can do this by touching a wall or any other (non-plastic) surface before touching the metal sufrace.\nEnjoy!\n","tags":["Life Hacks","Science","Winter"],"title":"Static.. Static... Static!","uri":"/blog/posts/2005-12-20-static-static-static/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Since a very long time, I wanted to get a phone that is actually just a phone. It should:\nLook like a phone (not a brick) Synchronize with the computer (Mac) without any special software Have bluetooth (if possible) NOT have a camera. You will find tons of phones with the above features for GSM (T-Mobile/Cingular), but there are none for Sprint. Sprint is very notorious in crippling the features from their phones. So recently, I needed to get a new phone, and found the perfect one: the Sony Ericsson T608. This phone was sold by Sprint 2 years ago through phone sales. You can not buy it online or through the normal sprint stores, but if you call them and complain that you want a bluetooth phone, they will send this one to you. This phone has everything that a phone should actually have, and it seems to be untouched by Sprint, so has its features intact. I had decided to leave Sprint if this phone was not available.\nAs this model has been discontinued (rumors say that Sony made only 10,000 of these), I bought a used one from eBay. Turned the phone on, clicked the bluetooth button on the mac, and its up and working! All my contacts, calender, etc. is perfectly synchronized. I can also send files (ringtones, pictures, etc) through bluetooth to this phone, so no need of using random software. Finally there is peace in the Sprint World.\nWell, sprint just released the \u0026ldquo;Samsung Blade\u0026rdquo; (a motorola razr copy), which claims to have OBEX support. Its not added to iSync as for now. And its not exactly cheap. Till then, T680 Rocks!\n","tags":["Mobile Phones","Gadgets","Carriers"],"title":"The Perfect Phone","uri":"/blog/posts/2005-12-17-the-perfect-phone/"},{"categories":null,"content":"Below is the list of a few good restaurants (in random order) alongwith their main highlight. The restaurant has to have good food, good service and good ambience according to their category.\nShiva\u0026rsquo;s (Punjabi): Ambience Madras Cafe (South Indian): Fast Service Taaza Hut (Punjabi): Low Prices Spice Hut (Manglorean!): Chicken Biryani Passage to India Bakery (Weekend Buffet): Indian Sandwiches, Pizza, etc. ","tags":["Bay Area","Food","Indian Cuisine"],"title":"Good Indian Restaurants in Sunnyvale/Mountain View","uri":"/blog/posts/2005-12-09-good-indian-restaurants-in-sunnyvale-mountain-view/"},{"categories":null,"content":"October 27, 2005 on 12:20 am\nNintendo/NES (called Samurai in India) just completed 20 years of its release. Its a moment of nostalgia for a lot of people who grew up with the beeping sounds of its games. One of the best things nintendo has done is to stick with more playability and fun factor of the games as compared to other consoles, which added a lot of flesh and blood and adult content.\nEven though nintendo is no more a market leader (it used to be 95% of market at its peak), it still has a great legacy of games that are still more fun to play than a lot of the new high-tech games. Some of my personal favourites were Super Mario Bros, Tennis, Contra, Bomber Man, Pro-AM, Jungle, Excite Bike, etc.\nBelow is a tribute to the greatest game ever made, Super Mario Bros. Super Mario by Punk Covers (for Rock fans) Super Mario by London Symphony Orchestra Super Mario Remix!\nReference: http://www.lehigh.edu/Epms6/\n","tags":["Gaming","Nintendo","Nostalgia"],"title":"Nintendo Completes 20 Years","uri":"/blog/posts/2005-12-09-nintendo-completes-20-years/"},{"categories":null,"content":"October 12, 2005 on 11:45 pm So today was a “And One More Thing” day by Steve Jobs. And they came out with video on iPod! I remember steve jobs telling last time that video ipod does not make any sense. The screen is too small. You cannot connect it to the TV. Content is not present yet. But they still came out with one. And as usual, I got super-excited. Felt something missing in life, and the sudden urge to get the new iPod. But then i thought about it. Its not a big deal.\nIts just an incremental update to the iPod that we have been expecting (since apple started using chips that supported video decoding and itunes supporting video podcasts). I still have the memory fresh in my mind when I jumped on Photo iPod bandwagon immediately when it came out. Its not even an year ago, and now the video iPod. I cant justify this one as the iPod dosent have speakers. So i cant show the video to a bunch of friends like pictures. But who knows…time shall tell.\n","tags":["Apple","Consumerism","Technology"],"title":"The Apple Effect","uri":"/blog/posts/2005-12-09-the-apple-effect/"},{"categories":null,"content":"So I am looking for a good ultracompact camera which does not suck. The main criteria is the pictures should be good without flash and camera to be compact. I am not really into printing the pictures, so a 3 MP camera does the job.\nPanasonic LumixThere was one camera that was always on my mind, the Panasonic Lumix DMC FX7. I wanted this camera because it has an Optical Image Stabilizer, which really helps while taking pictures with a slow aperture speed and without the flash. However, the camera sucked big time. It has a huge screen with a really bad resolution, and the pictures are horrible indoors. The worst thing, it does not have manual shutter speed setting, so the image stabilizer dosent really matter.\nCasio S500The next one was a really cool looking camera: Casio S500. Its truly “ultracompact” and records video in MPEG-4. This was also a total waste of money. MPEG4 is just for name sake on this camera, it records movies at 4 MBPS at 640×480 resolution (this is what all other cameras do). Again, the indoor pictures are quite horrible.. so another waste of time.\nPeople say sony makes good ultracompact camera, however the company is having quality issues nowadays and also it uses too much proprietory stuff in it (like the memory card).\nI guess i will be getting the time-proven Canon SD400 now.\n","tags":["Photography","Gadgets","Reviews"],"title":"In search of the perfect Ultracompact Camera","uri":"/blog/posts/2005-12-09-in-search-of-the-perfect-ultracompact-camera/"}]