From  Windows Live writer.

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Planning to make my Y360 blog as photoblog, but the real problem is I can't control privacy level for individual posts :-(.

After India's (esp., Dada's) pathetic performance in day 5 of Bangalore test, want for change in the top post (both actual and >pseudo)has strengthened.

Now to top that Ganguly Jokes are on the loose. I have given a couple of'em below:

Variant 1: Phone call
India Pakistan Match has started. As to be expected, it's a charged up atmosphere and the heat is really on!
India is put in to bat. As to be expected, three wickets down, for a measly score.
There is phone call for Ganguly, at the Dressing Room. The Team Manager picks up the call.

Voice : "Hello ! I am Ganguly's friend speaking . Can I talk to him now ?"
Team Manager : "Sorry ! He has just gone in to bat . "
Voice : "No problem I'll hold"

Variant 2: How to cook noodles
Step 1: boil one cup of water
Step 2: as soon as Ganguly goes for batting, put the noodles in the
boiled water and add the tastemaker.
Step 3: stir till Ganguly is on the field.
Step 4: As soon as Ganguly is back in pavilion, your noodles are ready to eat.

Update: Looks like there are lot more to add.
( See more ganguly jokes behind this cut )

Posted by MT::MultiPost for Journal of my thoughts
The original post can be read here .

YeeHaw!, I'm on 360. Checkout my page.

I always love Yahoo, just for the integration of various services they offer and 360 hasn't disappointed me. The integration with Yahoo services (read Messenger, Groups, address book, Photos etc) is simply great. With the acquisition of Flickr, one soon can expect 360 to include a decent alternative to Y!Photos.

On first look this definetly looks like Orkut/Friendster killer, I never liked Orkut's crappy interface and poor performance. Yahoo has shown them how to do it. Will update more soon.

Want invites? Just drop a line/mail with your mail id.

Well, if you are wondering about the post title, I'm not damning myself :-), but all the other Kannans out there who consistently beat me in getting a user id in any of the new online services.
I wanted to get my page as 'kannan' in Yahoo 360. The service is not up yet, there are no invites flowing like Gmail, but the page http://360.yaho.com/kannan is taken already :-(.
Damn you kannan.
PS:- Life seems to be little easier for 'Manjunatha's and 'Suresh'es

I took a closer look at A3 Beta promotion kit just now. Hmm the art work in the posters are impressive, they are comparable to AOM but AOM graphics still are the best ;-). But the T-shirt rokz.

Normally while installing a software I care a damn for the EULA, but today I took some time to read EULA of A3. I found some interesting clauses.

about game play:

You may not loot other players kill (i.e. take money or items from a fallen creature without the express permission of those who killed the creature if they are in attendance)

You may not enter into "excessive player killing". Although the definition of "excessive" is subjective, a determination of such will be made by a Company's Game Master in response to his/her own gameplay observations, and/or complaints from other players.

You understand that you have NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY regarding the communications made by you in the Service and that all communications made by, or received from, you may be monitored by the Company or its Customer Support people.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHALL THE COMPANY BE LIABLE TO YOU OR ANY OTHER PERSON FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THIS AGREEMENT OR YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE. YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDY HEREUNDER SHALL BE FOR YOU TO DISCONTINUE YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE AND TERMINATE THIS AGREEMENT.

Checkout this cool ad for Firefox by Eric Edwards.

http://studentpages.scad.edu/~eedwar21/firefoxweb.htm

I never trusted online promotions or contests. Seriously, have you ever seen anybody who got/won any prize through these?

But I think I have to change my views.I got this nicely packed box through courier.

Boy! is this my lucky month or what?

Well I'm not a very ardent Online gamer, Ragnarok didn't impress me well (BTW Diablo II rocks). The main thing that attracted me to signup for A3 beta is the cool trailers Sify had posted.
But first (strange this comes last in the post ;)) I should thank Kiruba for posting the link for beta registration.

"I would clean my room this weekend"

This is what happened during weekend:
Saturday:
9:30 am: Woke up, the clean, neat room that I saw was a dream.
10:30 am: Strange! newspapers are not worth spending more than half an hour.
11:00 am: Boot my system with Suse 9 and to multi task switch TV to DD sports
11:30 am: How about installing dev tools?
12:00 pm: Dang! my Suse is home edition, need setup a lot!
12:30 pm: Failed tyranny over YaST and YOU: why is it so hard to find anything other than lame patches?
1:00 pm: Redhat 9.0 CDs magically surfaces before my eyes (devilish!)
2:00 pm: System up and running with redhat 9.0
2:30 pm: Aaaaargh!!! why didn't anybody tell me redhat 9.0 is with kernel 2.4 (with NO NTFS support)? and ALSA miserably fails to detect my sound card. (it is always easier to blame that 'anybody' ;-) ).
2:45 pm: miserable failure with up2date and RHN, RH 9.0 has reached 'end-of-life'. They pulled the plug, though this wasn't a news to me, it didn't come to my mind before I updated the system.
3:00 pm: start downloading kernel 2.6 and lunch to my systems ;-)
4:00 pm: kernel download completes. Life wouldn't be spicier if it is eventless. (yeah MD5 checksum error!)
5:00 pm: second download complete (from IIT's mirror) and yeah it looks fine.
5:30 pm: Damn! I have obsolete version of every tool/utilities required to build kernel 2.6.
7:00 pm: all download completes. (in the course I had to say no to two meet outs).
8:30 pm: Yay!! I'm running kernel 2.6, able to mount NTFS.
8:45 pm: No luck with ALSA. Okay what is Google for.... why the hell is my ethernet card is not detected?
9:30 pm: No luck with ethernet card yet, lemme have some food.
10:30 pm: switch to K2.4 - Google - build install - K 2.6 (repeat)
11:00 pm: aargh! 'make modules_install'
11:30 pm: no luck.

Proclaim: "I will cleanup my PC and my room this sunday"

Sunday:
9:30 am: exhausted all excuses for sleeping late, have to clean up my room.
10:30 am: sunday newspapers are still worse. Switch to DD sports.
11:00 am: Take bath before Malaysian Grand prix qualifiers.
11:30 am: Bootup RH 9. I miss Suse's GrUB.
12:00 pm: Multitask: DD sports - RH 9 - Start sports (and murukkus).
1:00 pm: No luck with ALSA and ASUS doesn't seem to provide linux drivers.
1:30 pm: 17th? bad I expected something better that's about 5 seconds per lap.
2:00 pm: who wrote man pages for iptables?
2:15 pm: Disabled firewall and now I could bring my eth0 to life. yay! breakthrough (pun intended).
3:00 pm: ALSA...ALSA...ALSA
3:30 pm: DD sports, Yay Kumble magic!
4:00 pm: Better go out get some fresh air.

8:00 pm: mom: "Somebody said they'd clean something" me: "eh? who?"

Now: Where can I get Bio-hazard warning posters for my room?

Need some vacation: So that I can cover the remaining states ;-).

Brought to you by pratibha75, quizling and teemus.
Which states in India have you been to?

I wanted to write this entry on a positive note about BSNL's broadband services (DataOne). Right from the point of announcement, everything seemed to be cool about Dataone.

I could register for the service online (or stand in e-Queue?). While that itself is a great thing to expect from BSNL, I found this amazing facility where I can 'chat' to a call center agent (use IE). The chat is for real and it works! The call center agent was polite and gave proper answers to my queries.

I was able to check my application status, query the availability, ETA etc. After a month from my application I got a mail from BSNL asking me to confirm my application. I was totally taken by surprise, this was the first service where I did not send reminders or stand in queue. Everything was cool.

Then came the installation part. A service man from BSNL came to my home on friday for installation (exactly at the time when I wouldn't be at home), handed over the ADSL modem to my parents and left. My parents were told that the installation would happen on saturday as he couldn't find some slot(?) in my machine. That night I finished the setup myself and waited for the username/password. Nothing happened on saturday and it was getting too much for me (excitement and patience don't go together). I started calling BSNL help line.

Till yesterday I had called around 10 differnt numbers. They include BSNL call center, BSNL technical center, BSNL toll free, BSNL DO's office, BSNL JTO's office, DGM's office and a few miscellaneous numbers. Finally when I gave up, I got username/password.

Finally now I'm a broadband user. w00t!

Now I donno how to change my password, but I'm sure about one thing; I'm not going to even think about making another call to BSNL (atleast for the next one week).

I got this carefully packed cover from Mangalore.

And it contained these

Yipeeee!!
Million thanks to premkudva.

Need I say more?

Seen below is the most precious member in my collection.

This is a coin issued by Raja Raja Chola, the most famous king of the Chola Kingdom during 985-1014 AD. I could not recognize the true value/period of this coin for a very long time and finally I stubled upon this page and some clear images of this typr of coin (it took me a while to recognize the similarity).

The text explains that this coin was in circulation in SriLanka, which was under control of Raja Raja Chola for a brief period. I wonder how it landed in India.

It is very difficult to collect old coins, even more difficult is to collect old stamps. I have a few old stamps that I treasure. One of them is this Travancore Anchel stamp issued on 1939 in commemoration of Travancore King's 27th birthday.

This "One chukram" stamp is one among the set of commemoration stamps issued that year, these stamps then were re-released with a "service" tag on them few years later.

Trivia: The rulers of Travancore were strict followers of Lord Vishnu. This is evident from the currency name "Chukram" and the state emblem was "Sangu" or the conch shell.

I clearly remember the day I started collecting stamps, I discovered a loot of stamps in my home during one of my "treasure hunts", obiviously a collection that somebody treasured once but orphaned later. But I don't remember when I started collecting coins, may be because it started so early. I used to treasure my daily pocket allowance (Dad says I used to demand 33 paise exact, everyday ;-) ).


Later I started scanning all the coins that were exchanged at the counter in my dad's shop, any coin that looks distinct would definetly land in my pocket. I started collecting them seriously when I received this one rupee coin as by birthday present (First cash present I ever received).

This is a Pre-Independence (1945) era Silver One rupee coin released by GOI. It weighs a cool 10 grams. It is very common in those days to have Silver coins, but later when rupee depreciated all these coins were melted down (some were taken back by GOI) for making silver ornaments.

Yahoo's suggest seems to have taken a leap. Check out this entry from Yahoo Blog. I use my word processor (most of the time just Thunderbird spell checker) to check spelling of the words in my mail/documet. But can you identify what spell checker Michael Mathieson uses (or used just before he wrote this entry)?

Psst.. a little hint wouldn't hurt ;-).

Finally I've got it. A stamp sized plastic piece that can hold 1 GB of data(well after all the formatting, it is actually ~960 MB).

I was always skeptical about online sites, esp. Baazee.com, but that was all until I bought this card from Baazee. The transaction went smooth (First time lucky?).I got this SD card at a price almost comparable to US shops and within two days of order.

Now I can go on click, click and click anything and everything I see. Boy! I wish I had received this card just on time for Aero India, somehow I didn't plan well :-(.