I guess they were really serious about this Click It Or Ticket enforcement campaign. The other day, I was going calmly along El Camino Real in Sunnyvale and I stopped behind an old lady in a big car when I see a cop on a motorbike come next to me, slow down and check me out through the tinted window!
At the time I thought it was really strange and creepy, but I saw him check out the old lady in front of me too, and then at some point I heard on the radio about this new campaign and realized it was not me or the lady, it was the campaign! :-)
The Indian test team for the West Indies tour was announced yesterday and as usual I feel that the explanation provided was quite funny.
More here talks about Agarkar’s exclusion:
More defended Agarkar’s exclusion, based on his poor record in Tests but praised his performance in the three ODIs so far. " We saw the statistics and Agarkar has not been performing as a Test player", he said. “We also saw the situation on a green top in Karachi where three other fast bowlers were looked in before him. He is bowling well now [in ODIs] and we are happy for him."
And here he talks about how VRV Singh comes in:
On VRV Singh making his first Test tour, More said, “He has done very well in domestic cricket. He always had potential. He did well in the Abu Dhabi tournament but not in the final. We just can’t count out any player [based on one bad performance]. Somebody gets three ducks we can’t say he is a bad player. We always have to back them up as they have potential."
So let me get this right - Agarkar is the best bowler today, but he is the best bowler in one day internationals. He did not bowl well some time ago in tests, and so he should not be taken. At the same time, VRV Singh bowled well some time ago, and that too in one day internationals, and he should be taken??
Gosh, either stop explaining the composition of the team or put some thought into the explanations before handing them out!
India has lost another one day international. It seems like they have become a little complacent, what with West Indies being so bad for such a long time. But I hope these losses work like the New Zealand trip worked for the team before the last World Cup - serve as motivation to do better.
I will save the nonsense analysis of the match because it was quite a pathetic performance, first with the bat and then with the ball.
The truth is coming soon to a theater near you: Al Gore’s New Global Warming Movie “An Inconvenient Truth”
Al Gore’s critically-acclaimed new film “An Inconvenient Truth” offers the best opportunity we’ve ever had to capture the immediate attention of all Americans and move this country forward quickly to stop global warming. While the problem is urgent, the solutions are clear, and with American ingenuity and leadership, we can avert disaster and restore the world’s confidence in our values. Let’s work together to make this movie a success, and turn the audience interest into action.
One easy way to get involved as virtual marchers is to buy a ticket and bring a friend to see this movie. Then help spread the word. The more people go see this movie on opening weekend, the more theaters will pick it up. Bring the power of the Virtual March to movie theaters across the country.
* Email your friends and family to pre-purchase tickets for opening weekend. * Forward this e-mail to everyone in your address book. * Tell your coworkers, book clubs, teachers, classmates, dinner party guests, neighbors, church groups, relatives…shout it from the rooftops! * Organize a group to go (Call the Paramount Group Sales office at 323-956-8896). * Sponsor your office or company to see the film. Sponsor a school, sponsor a science class, sponsor a youth club. * Take someone who you don’t think would be interested in going. * Host post-viewing “Take Action” parties. * Blog about the movie in advance, and after you’ve seen it with your reactions. * Have your own website? Are you on MySpace? Post Online banners, icons, and other info about the movie. * Ask your local theater to show “An Inconvenient Truth” if they aren’t planning to already.
I watched pretty much the entire game (except for a little bit of the 1st quarter) today - Dallas was kicking butt big time, and San Antonio, the champions that they are, came back fighting and got it to the last possession in regulation.
So many things I think could have been done just slightly differently to send the Mavs packing - worst of all was the foul on Dirk at the end to give him a 3-point play. If not for that, there was a good chance the 1-point differential would have sealed the deal for the Spurs.
Oh well, all the coulda-woulda-shoulda just reminds me of not too long ago in the Rose Bowl where we Trojan fans keep thinking … if not for x, if we could just do y, etc. Ultimately, we had to accept that it was over.
Similarly, the NBA season is over for me. I do not care much about the Eastern Conference, and I know now that Detroit has a clear path to the finals and will beat whoever remains from the Western Conference. Dallas has a chance to finally make it to the Finals, and most likely will.
A Detroit-Dallas finals matchup is the perfect opportunity for me to catch up on some reading - Da Vinci Code, some work-related books, etc.
India lost the second match against the West Indies by one run. It was a low-scoring match, which India should have won. I did not follow this one (unlike the first one, which was on a weekday, and I was at the office, with one browser window on cricinfo), so I don’t know exactly what happened. 198 was chasable, it seems.
Anyway, all good things must come to an end, and this was the end of a good streak. Hopefully, it is a good reality check to the team and they learn enough from this ‘mistake’ and improve in the next games.
I don’t like the Mavs, or even this guy’s antics on the court, but a lot of what he writes makes sense to me …
Here’s another interesting spin on why local newspapers and reporters are valuable in today’s day and age … someone’s got to do some analysis and stop simply ‘reporting’.
Whats the moral of the story ? Depth and differentiation beat speed and regurgitation.
But who was there at the end? Yea, the same Mohammad Kaif who was totally out of form for a long long time. He stayed till the end and ensured the win. And that is what brings the thought to my head that this India one day team smells so much like the Aussie team. Aussie out-of-form batsmen somehow choose the best times to strike form - match-winning innings, quick burst of wickets at the top of the innings, masterful spell in the middle, etc.
Kaif has been really short of runs of late. He was low on confidence and a lot of people, me included, were asking why is he still in the XI? He chose the moment right to come back to form - India needing a win to start the series strong, and even though they did not seem to be in trouble really, they still needed to have someone like him be there and keep one end held up, specially after Dravid departed.
In any case, the juggernaut rolls on. Knock on wood.
After months of waiting and resisting myself, I finally decided to subscribe to the Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription service. It is a neat concept, though not new (Real Rhapsody had it for a while) … but at 5 bucks a month, it trumps anything else in the market.
I never liked iTunes for music and I always have been a big fan of LaunchCast from Yahoo. The matching engine that Yahoo has built is pretty neat. In Launch, I almost never have to skip songs anymore.
And now, with YMU, the same is done with albums, artists and songs. The recommendations are quite cool and I have so many songs/albums already added to My Music. The bookmarking feature is cool - so now, anytime I have an internet connection, I can listen to any song on demand.
I have been traveling for too long now. Due to a lot of things going on at home, I would like to come back home and start working from home, or get a local project.
I think after my current project goes live (end of June or so), there is a chance I can stay home more. But it would be nicer to just stay at home and not have to fly :-(
Sorry for the work-related post. I don’t typically do that. But it is the top thing on my mind at the moment, so threw it out there.
A lot of bloggers put a notice before they go off on a break that they won’t be posting much … I am doing it post-break. I was off for the weekend with the wife on a nice, relaxing break to Mendocino/Fort Bragg along the California Coast.
The room we had, had a 180-degree unobstructed view of the Pacific Ocean and it was truly breathtaking. We saw the sunset and it was beautiful.
I took the Friday off and it truly was refreshing to have a long weekend. I feel refreshed today and at the same time, feel quite unenergetic to fly tomorrow. Ah well.
What a pathetic race it was. Boring from the start. Of course, it may partly be because I did not want such a runway race where Alonso, from the start, created enough margin to keep everyone else at bay. I would have liked a closer race, with perhaps some passing.
In the end, the most exciting part of the race for me was the start by Kimi - jumping up 4-5 spots to be #5 after the first corner was brilliant. But after that, status quo remained and JP’s spin made only one McLaren finish and therefore reduce any chances of closing the gap between the fronrunners.
Suddenly, Ferrari is within a DNF or two distance from the lead in the constructors' championship. I would race the drivers' championship is locked up at this point because Renault and particularly Alonso do not look like a team/driver who would push too hard to get more points if they think it is safer to lose position but get enough points to buffer their lead. Smart thinking, nothing wrong with it.
Congratulations to Alonso. Great race for him in front of his home crowd. With the passion that the Spaniards show for their champions, it was quite an amazing performance from Alonso to win it.
I have a question - can they make that database searchable (of course, through secure login) through phonecalls.google.com or something?
I kid here, but what the heck is going on? I am afraid to put more commentary about it, but it is just strange how one President is getting away with lying and bending/breaking laws and another was fried for years for something extremely personal in nature.
It’s that time of the year again where I have to rant … about customer service, or lack of it.
1. Symantec: Bought Internet Security 2006 with Turbo Tax and installed it mid-March. Mid-April, I realized that the Anti Spam product they have, did not contain all the addresses from my Outlook 2003 address book, so I deleted the address list in Anti Spam and tried to import the address book manually. No worky. After 2 or 3 hours of frustrating live chat with support, the ultimate resolution proposed to me was to uninstall and reinstall. I did not like it, but I did. Only to realize that the reinstall made my subscription expire in 1 day!!
By now, my blood was boiling. I did not expect that importing an address book is going to require an uninstall, a reinstall and now, another call with Tech Support. But I had to do it. So I went to Live Chat again and they said I need to reactivate the product! Even though I activated when I reinstalled (have to do it, otherwise I cannot get the latest definitions). More frustration. But again, patiently, I searched through my software and found the CD, so that I could enter the unending product code to activate it. Looked like it worked at the time.
Last night, same problem appeared again. Subscription expired notification. I had really no patience this time and thankfully I was not across the counter from the tech support person otherwise I would have hit them! So I went to Live Chat again and guess what, they asked me to re-activate it, and this time they asked me to take one extra step after re-activation - they asked me to go to Subscription status to check if the ‘servers’ recognized the status. Brilliant. Why then, didn’t the earlier support person tell me about this??? And then they comforted me by saying, next time something like that happens, just re-activate and make sure the subscription status shows the correct status!!!!
I just could not believe that such pathetic software could be written, such shameless service be provided and still the company could get away with it.
2. Vonage: I have been a Vonage customer since 2004 or something - a very long time. But I have never had a problem (not a HUGE one) till about 2 months ago. Not sure if there is any connection to their upcoming IPO, and if at all there is a connection, it should have been for the better. But no, it isn’t.
For some time now, I have been having trouble with voice mail. When someone calls me, they get a ring and it goes silent for 10 seconds or so and then switches to voice mail. As a result, they feel they have not connected and they do not leave a voice mail. It is not one or two calls, but at the same time, it is not ALL calls. Strange, but true.
So I called them a few weeks back and they reset some stuff on their side, claiming of course that it was not a system issue but a local issue. Oh well.
Two days back someone who tried to call me complained that they were not getting to voice mail at all! The phone rings apparently forever but does not go to voice mail. So I called tech support yesterday and they asked me to change some settings on my account, which I think were totally unexplainable (change VM setting to 30 seconds, save and then change it back to 15 seconds!!), and told me it will work from now on. Well, no. It does not work.
I don’t have the energy to call them again. I will wait for the weekend to get to that now.
3. Comcast cable internet: In the past couple of weeks, I noticed a strange slowdown in speeds, and since I have vonage, I started getting bad quality on phone calls. Then, it came to a point where the internet connection would just drop after a few minutes of being up. I had had it and I called tech support and they sent a tech to my place. He said the entire community was having a problem, and that he would put in a request for a network guy to come in and fix the issue. And that would take 2-3 days.
First of all, having the internet connection essentially down for 2 or 3 days is nonsense. Second of all, when I called comcast in a couple of days to check the status of the issue they said they cannot tell me because the tech is out and it is an ‘all day’ ticket. Which, from what I understood, means that they will not be able to track during the day, until the tech is done.
So I said, please let me know when it is done so that I don’t kill myself trying to set up a connection and such. Guess what the response was - ‘Sorry sir, we do not do call backs’!!!! What?? So I should keep trying through the day, wait on the phone and check status that way?? No freaking way!
After about 10 minutes of me blasting him on the phone, he said he would put in the notes to have someone call me with an update.
4 days on, and no update calls/voice mails/emails. My temper was quite high because I think this is a clear breakdown in the customer service engine. So I called comcast on Sunday and had a long conversation with them and the end result? 2 cases were created at comcast for someone to follow up on.
At least my internet connection is up. The call back has not happened for 3 days now.
4. Linksys routers: Oh my gosh, I am so tired writing this post, I almost cannot write about Linksys much. I will end it here, just saying that in a tech support call yesterday, I was told that I HAVE to upgrade to the newer routers. HAVE to? Come on!
For the record, I went there on a Monday night, 9.15pm show. Also, I did not expect anything spectacular in the movie. Basically, I went there with the bar set very very low.
And I must say, MI3 is not too bad. I liked it in most parts, and it seemed like an almost full house even at such an ‘odd’ time. There were great action sequences and a lot of motion in the movie. I had to keep my brain at home, of course, because if I tried to reason each and every move, I would be very agitated.
I don’t know why the Lakers haters are calling me and posting comments for me. If you saw my earlier post, I had the Lakers losing in the first round.
I was just happy that the Lakers made it to the playoffs this year. I did not expect that at all. I think it happened because of the 11-3 run at the end of the season and also because the other bubble teams imploded at the same time.
But the fact that Lakers took 3 games off Phoenix made the series more interesting and in fact brought more interest for me to follow them next year even more closely.
Anyway, my picks for the second round:
San Antonio over Dallas Clippers over Phoenix (if Lakers can take 3, Clippers will win it in 5!)
Nets over Miami Detroit over Cleveland
I would love Cleveland to beat Detroit even at the risk of getting LeBron more hype. I think I can ignore that hype but not Detroit’s :-)
And of course, I am rooting for the Clippers now. I do not want Raja Bell to have any more fun at the expense of Kobe.
Can you imagine Raja Bell is given a hero’s welcome in Phoenix after he floored Kobe on National TV???? Pathetic state of affairs. I hated the guy when he played for Dallas and I still hate him.
Brilliant racing by Michael Schumacher gave him a comfortable win over Fernando Alonso in the European GP. That run by Schumacher when Alonso pitted for the second time was amazing, and that is the typical Schumacher that we all know - going flat out when he needs to, and making the other team pay for their strategic mistake. Of course, Ferrari pit crew also needed to make a clean, fast stop and they did. Classic stuff.
So Michael Schumacher, and not Kimi, is the biggest threat to Alonso in the championship hunt, looks like. But at the same time, since Alonso does not lose too many points per GP, he is going to be extremely tough to beat. The other drivers will need a couple of DNF’s from him in order to make this championship exciting.
I am sorry, but McLaren Mercedes are not competitive at all. What is the point of having fast drivers when the car is not reliable? First of all, they were not able to qualify higher than P6 and then as JPM was making a charge towards the end, he lost his car and Kimi just couldn’t push hard enough to pass Massa.
Has Kimi lost motivation since he may not be at McLaren next year? Has he signed a deal already?
It is going to be an interesting start tomorrow … Alonso and Schumacher at the front will make for an exciting first corner. This is going to be the moment of truth for Ferrari who claim that they are as competitive as the Renault cars.
I am a big fan of smartwater. So this week, before going from the airport to the office in San Diego, I stopped by Whole Foods (my new favorite place to shop!) and bought a few 1-liter bottles of smartwater.
As I started finishing the water, I started collecting the plastic bottles. Neither the office where I work nor the hotel where I stay, has recycle containers (shame!), so I asked my co-worker if he had recycle containers at home where he could put those bottles. He said he would gladly take it and give it to his son, who made $25 over the weekend recycling plastic and glass bottles. I said I was happy for his son, and then, I don’t know why but I said that I hoped he was also doing it for the planet.
What my co-worker told me after that shocked me. He said, no, his son was the son of a capitalist and he was doing it only for the money! Unbelievable. First of all, I was hoping that he at least said for courtesy that his son knew about how recycling helps the planet, and more importantly, what troubled me is why he equated capitalism with being environment-unfriendly.
Now, just so that I don’t get into a political debate at work, I gave up the topic. But I at least made him aware that I cared for the environment.
So today, as I was leaving, I gave him a couple of bottles, and told him jokingly that it was my contribution to his son’s chewing gum expenses. Only this time, my boss was in the office and he agreed with my co-worker and in fact brought up George Carlin’s comments about caring a rat’s ass about the environment because ‘maybe that is how it was meant to be’!!! And once again, the comment from the co-worker was ‘Spoken like a true capitalist, and how it warms my heart’.
I am scared that if most of America thinks that being capitalist means you have a right to destroy the environment, then we are not going to get anywhere. Who will explain to these nuts that there IS something called Environment-friendly capitalistic companies??
I am going to write to him a friendly email. He and I work well together, so it won’t be a ‘debate’ as such - just a friendly discussion :-)
I recently found out that Heist on NBC was on hiatus (or perhaps cancelled). This is yet another cancelled show which was building up a story in each episode towards a final goal (Reunion was the other). Why do network execs cancel such shows and annoy their loyal viewers? I don’t know what the plan is for Heist and I agree I liked Reunion build up better than Heist’s, but I did watch Heist and I wanted to know how they were planning to pull off the big one. I don’t think I am going to find out how.
On the other hand, So You Think You Can Dance is back and Skating With Celebrities went all the way. Trading Spouses had multiple seasons and Bachelor/Bachelorette ran forever.
I am almost beginning to think America cannot handle intellectual/meaningful shows. America wants to see how other people behave and ridicule themselves on television. Cheap, senseles, meaningless drama enacted as reality TV is basically the order of the day, and frankly, I am losing interest in watching any television now.
Of course, there are saving graces like The Office, ER and Scrubs. But I understand even Scrubs is on the bubble. I won’t be surprised if it gets canned.
I wonder if CBS' Innertube type of experiments will cater to smarter Americans who are interested in some of the “non-mainstream” shows?
