playing level 2(yeah, still in level 2) of Halo 3. But enjoying the Bungie's latest offering.

lazy geek | # | Comments (7)

Who ? What ? When ?

Congrats Susi !!

lazy geek | # | Comments (16)

Pun intended.

New York Times announced yesterday that they are opening up the entire site and will stop charging for premium content/archives.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYtimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to gain access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

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Heavy rings hold cigarettes
Up to lips that time forgets
While the hollywood sun sets
Behind your back

And cant the band play on
Just listen, they play my song
Ash to ash
Dust to dust
Fade to black

Fortune, fame
Mirror vain
Gone insane...
But the memory......remains

Nananananana nananada nananananana nanananadana
Nananananana nananada nananananana nanananadana

lazy geek | # | Comments (3)

15/09/2007 Special Programmes

06.30am - 07.00am - Sudha Raghunathan
07.30am - 08.00am - News
08.00am - 08.30am - Interview With Actor Kamalhassan
08.30am - 09.00am - Interview With Maestro Ilayaraja
09.00am - 09.30am - Interview With Director K.Shankar
09.30am - 10.30am - Leoni Pattimandram
10.30am - 01.00pm - Pokkiri Movie 100Th Day Function
01.00pm - 01.30pm - News
01.30pm - 04.30pm - Block Buster Movie "Mozhi"
04.30pm - 05.00pm - Ungal Choice (Dial In) Jeyam Ravi
05.00pm - 05.30pm - Interview With Comedian Vadivel
05.30pm - 07:30pm - Super Hit Movie "Imsai Arasan 23Rd Pulikesi"
07.30pm - 08.00pm - News
08.00pm - 08.30pm - Interview With Actor Surya
08.30pm - 09.00pm - Pudhu Padangal - New Movies Review
09.00pm - 09.30pm - Interview With Actor Vivek
09.30pm - 10.30pm - Mannada Mayilada
10.30pm - 11.00pm - Interview With Director / Actor Cheran
11.00pm - 11.30pm - Magic Show

16/09/2007 Special Programmes

06.30am - 07.00am - Nityashree
07.30am - 08.00am - News
08.00am - 08.30am - Interview With Actress Asin
08.30am - 09.00am - Interview With Actor Vishal
09.00am - 09.30am - Interview With Actress Sneha
09.30am - 10.00am - Interview With Actor Arjun
10.00am - 10.30am - Interview With Actress Sandhya
10.30pm - 11.00pm - Interview With Actor Bharath
11.00am - 11.30am - Logic Illai Magic
11.30pm - Block Buster Movie "Ayudha Ezuthu"
01.00pm - 01.30pm - News
03.00pm - 04.30pm - Chandramuki 100Th Day Function
04.30pm - 07.30pm - Movie "Periyar"
07.30pm - 08.00pm - News
08.00pm - 08.30pm - Mannada Mayilada - Curtain Raiser
08.30pm - 09.30pm - Ellamae Siripputhan
09.30pm - 10.30pm - Comedy Skit By Yuhi Sethu
10.30pm - 11.00pm - Interview With Actor Madhavan.

Keerthi forwardded me this proposed opening schedule of Kalaignar TV. While this is not the finalised schedule for the opening weekend, the who's who of kollywood can be spotted already and I am skeptical if there will be any entertainment left for the coming days/weeks.

By the way(everyone writes BTW these days so this is just for a change), Kalaignar.tv, KalaignarTV.com, KalaignarTV.in and KalaignarTV.co.in are all already booked by cybersquatters. They are the most obvious names for the Kalaignar TV domain and I dont think the management is making attempts to book them.

Also Raj TV has no news about Kalaignar TV on their site. Makes me think if the media houses in Tamil Nadu are just too engrossed in entertaining people that they forget a huge business market exists for them outside of the country.

lazy geek | # | Comments (7)

Not me but Amazon is. Their remodeled site went live today and it looks a lot cleaner from all the clutter before. This is probably their first biggest re-design in the last 5 years.

The US holiday season will kick-start in a just a couple of months and Amazon should be getting ready with their big-plans, just like the last year.

It looks like LCD HDTVs(not the boring plasmas or rear projection stuff) are going to enjoy huge pricecuts during this holiday season. My guess(just my stupid guess) is that 42" LCD HDTVs with 1366 x 768 resolution will be available during the Black Friday for as low as $550 - $600, pre tax. Wait for the holiday season and if my guess goes right, send me a box of rava ladoos.

lazy geek | # | Comments (3)

Looks like Walt Mossberg is upset with Google for something. He thrashes Gmail again, after nearly a year and half. And for every other sentence he compares and contrasts Yahoo Mail with Gmail and Hotmail. Even as one reads through it, its pretty obvious that the review is biased, big time.

From the review -

Unlike Gmail, which forces you to view your emails as bunched-up “conversations,” Yahoo Mail — like Hotmail — displays them as a standard email program does, sorting them by date, sender, subject or size.

Yeah, who said bunching-up emails are considered to be a cool Web 2.0 conversational feature. We still want to live in 1995.

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Click To Play

Prasanna's next short film, ART. The film is a review by itself. Hence no review for this short except for an adjective, brilliant.

lazy geek | # | Comments (9)

If I were to be an application in this weird weird world of Web 2.0(that's four Ws), I would be Gmail or Google Reader.

Gmail can also be called as old wine of email in today's Ajax world. But Google Reader, is set to become one of the most useful and dominant tools of the near future. The ever expanding world of the web has so much information in itself that its already too much for someone to handle and feeds are probably the only way(as of today) to get one's information world under control.

Dave Winer, the RSS champ, should be a happy man. We are going to see more and more people in the future joining the RSS club.

To read a thousand websites in one single app, it takes a neat reader with an unbeatable User Interface. Google steps in. Google Reader's version 1 and 2 are certainly masterminded applications with a good insight and understanding of the present web. I still remember what was written here when GReader's first version was introduced. Today Google Reader is undeniably the number one feed reader for the web, given that they just introduced a search bar also with it. Some users like Scoble track nearly 600 feeds through GReader already.

If you are newbie to the RSS/Atom/Feed world, just logon to Google Reader and subscribe to a bunch of sites. You might want to start with personal weblogs that will help you come back and login to GReader everyday. Also if you are a mobile internet user, Google Reader has a fantastic interface that you will be addicted to. I browse the reader, on my cellphone and that's how I read most of the tech blogs. It is such a darling of an app.

Check the Reader and I'm sure you will never come back here. Rather you would read this blog only through its feed. Truly, don't even bother to visit those personal blogs, especially the ones with 4 lines of blogpost and 40 advertisements blocks around it. There is no free lunch so don't provide free advertising dollars for those loser blogs. Make them earn it. If the content is really appreciable, check their site regularly else feed reader is should be more than enough.

There are also other extreme users who end with a lot of feeds but never read them. I'm a heavy GReader user and from the experience of using feed readers for quite some, here are some tips that I keep a check on the information overload.

1) Don't allow the count of unread posts on each feed to grow beyond 100. You will never read any of them. Instead mark them as read and move on. You are not losing anything, trust me. If you end up marking them unread for more than 5 times, just unsubscribe the blog. If you subscribe to feeds like Digg or Del.icio.us, they will grow beyond 100 in a single day. Be sure that you need them and you will read them in future, else unsubscribe right then.

2) Be truly diligent of what feeds you subscribe to. Just because a nerd around you bullies you by referring to Slashdot, you don't have to subscribe to it. Though how much ever you want to read the blog, you may not have time or the blog is awfully boring. Exercise your right of un-subscribing. Think of it as one way of taking revenge of blogs of boredom. No Mercy.

3) Make a habit to login once a day. If you aspire to be a go-getter of tech world, which is, as of today, nearly impossible, login to reader once a day and try to get rid of the posts by reading it. Procrastination is evil. By the time you ge to read about the 5th generation IPods, Jobs would have already introduced the 8th generation PODs and IPhones will cost $50 a connection. It's changing every nano-second. Read it once-a-day.

4) Read posts using the list-view. Not the expanded view. This will enable to read the title and then decide if you want to really read the post. Don't read all the posts of all the feeds. It's a crime of time. With that extra time, you can crack the solution of Petals Around Rose or watch Desperate Housewives Season 3 DVD, the dirty laundary edition with lots of extra footage !!

5) The last but the not the least(aargh...what a bad used-to-death cliche. Will someone ban those words - 'last but not the least'), don't have more 50 feeds to the max. If you are the owner of some gambling casino at Macau(not Vegas anymore), sipping martini in Honolulu, you can afford to read 250 - 500 feeds a day. For others, 50 hits the roof.

And yeah, don't bother to come to this blog, even though the blog has some nice random banners(are they ?) and no ads whatsoever. Read the feed.

lazy geek | # | Comments (3)

Its 10:42 pm PST on Sep 05 and Google has been down for the last few minutes. I am unable to reach any of its services under google.com domain. Blogger.com still works but no search queries are going through. What Why When ? Any clues ?

I may be too silly to jump on this but can't see google(of all domains) go down.

Updates

10:56 pm : It's still not up. No word of google being down at technorati. Is it just for me ? Should I sleep now or what ?

10:59 pm : Gmail works but not Google.com. A friend on GTalk tells me he is able to query google's malaysian version and international one also. Its probably my ISP. It has been couple of years since I've done such frantic updates to posts.

11:08 pm : Google.com works like sweet now. No re-starting of PC, not even the browser. Still no idea on what why & when. Anyway, who cares now.

11:17 pm : Not working again. What the heck ?

11:18 pm : Works.

11:30 pm : Nope.

lazy geek | # | Comments (5)