This year I decided to stay in on Dec 31st. It was actually a good decision, because the wife and I spent some time together alone and since it was a long weekend, we were able to wake up relatively early and get some house work done the next day.
But since we were home on the 31st, we had not much to do in the night besides flip channels and one thing is for sure - the programs on TV were quite pathetic. None of the channels had any good stuff going on and though I was not expecting much, it was still quite bad.
Conan was good, and I like this style of hosting his show. But then again, Conan was not on at midnight, where most of the channels focus their attention for viewership.
I loved that QB Tate of Iowa. Have not had a chance to watch any Iowa games this year and did not follow the team at all. But what a throw at the end and what a good catch to win the game in dying moments!
Besides I loved it that LSU lost. Did not matter who won as much :-)
Locally. But the company has a sorta shut down too, so there’s hardly anyone around. Which I like because that way, I can concentrate on work and not be bothered by other people on speakerphone all the time.
Hope these two days go by quickly and another long weekend comes up! :-)
Getting good deals on hotels in Vegas is now almost like their casinos - a matter of luck. When we planned the trip, Tropicana came out to be the cheapest and that’s where we stayed for three nights. But it was not the best of the places. In fact, the first night, we realized that our rooms were getting heated like a furnace! The A/C did not work!
So we got our room changed, and we got a nice room for the next two nights, but the carpet had big blobs of stains all over, and in general, the place looked quite old. Our thinking was that they are banking on their location to have people come there and stay irrespective of the conditions.
On the other hand, for the last night, we were at Flamingo, and the room was excellent (carpet stains seem to be a norm in these hotels). The hotel seemed to be much more well-managed than Tropicana was, even though for some reason we did not think that would be the case, what with Flamingo being an ‘old’ hotel.
But for me, I liked Tropicana simply because it had $5 blackjack whereas the Flamingo did not :-)
I had decided that I will not be checking email or using the internet during the vacation. And I was pretty fine with that. Except that we had no idea how to get to our hotel in Sedona from Vegas. So we went to the business center in the hotel and got the directions, but I also noticed that there was an internet access terminal.
I was tempted and so I used it. But what was unnerving was that as soon as I swiped my card, it did not read it and asked me to swipe another card. I swiped the same credit card again and it showed the rest of my information on the screen, like name and last 4 of my card! I was shocked. But now that I had gone ahead with the access, I had no option but to hope that it was because it read the name from the credit card strip :-(
Also, another shocking thing was that there was no way to clear cookies and crap, so when I went to gmail.com, it opened up the previous user’s gmail account! Goodness! I was so uncomfortable that I just randomly surfed around till the time was over and just crossed my fingers that none of my information was available to the next person.
Something’s gotta be done about standards for such devices that get installed at public places. Standards about security, about refreshing cache, cookies, etc. after logging out. I saw the flip side of such public internet terminals in India, with i-way chain of internet cybercafes which I used a bit in Gujarat. Those terminals were all well set up, where you could not do anything ‘administrative’ and also, the cache and cookies would get cleared at log out automatically, thereby avoiding all personal information from being stored.
About time these vendors woke up and get their act together.
Went to Vegas (including Hoover Dam), Sedona/Flagstaff and Grand Canyon over the past 6 days. Drove from here to there and onwards, and back. It was a lot of driving, but fun nonetheless. As they say, it is the company that matters.
I was prepared for a pretty cold time, but thankfully, it was bearable all the way. It only started raining when we were heading out of Vegas on our way back. That traffic on I-15 near Vegas was terrible, but once we got out of the Vegas area, we were quite ok.
Oh yea, I confirmed the saying ‘The House always wins’. I was up in roulette as well as in Blackjack but lost it all ultimately. Never mind. Had a lot of fun in general.
I will try to put some nice pics of Grand Canyon in panoramic view both before and after the fog/snow. Hope they come out well.
Went casually to Amazon.com and realized that they are accepting donations for relief efforts through Red Cross for the tsunami victims in Asia. I have made my contribution. Please make yours too at Amazon.com or wherever else.
Besides the fact that it is from Microsoft and it looks a little too busy for a blog, I like MSN Spaces - spaces.msn.com. I am not sure if I will switch to it yet. It is in beta right now. And we all know that Microsoft releases are beta till version 3.x! :-)
But so far, so good for them. Will keep trying to see when I can adopt it.
One good thing there is that you can make your ‘space’ private so entry is by invitation only.
Not only is this holiday season, but also birthday season. The wife’s and mine are only two days apart right in the middle of the holiday season. Kinda makes it easy for us - gifting is all one-purpose, resolutions are all jump started (no waiting for New Year), and we usually go out with friends and family only on one day.
And that’s because I am not a big birthday guy. I care less about “the day” and would rather let it slip by than celebrate it. Of course, it different with ladies in general and what ends up happening is that in celebrating the wife’s birthday, the spillover takes care of mine!
But anyway, this whole period gets over too soon and the holidays get over too quickly for my liking! And the next holiday is too far away :-(
Red Bull Racing has chosen him as their driver for next year. I am not thrilled about DC, but more relieved about Red Bull racing. Otherwise it would have been yet another racing team with no budget and no driver and would end up shutting down.
More races and adequate teams next year. At least something to look forward to in the Spring.
I guess because I don’t see them playing, I am not sure if they are truly that good.
Beating West Indies at home 5-0 is not a big deal.
And this South African team that they beat is very very young.
Still, a win is a win and that is one difference I have seen in this team. They are quite younger on a average than the earlier England teams, and they want to win.
I think they may be good, but till they win the Ashes or play India and win, they won’t be ‘great’ in my books :-)
But as usual, there were some players who made great impressions against this Indian attack. Pathan has been improving series after series. Hope he does not get overbowled and get injured.
True to the expectations, it was actually a record-making, stats-packing series for the Indians. Sachin got another double century and ended up with a series average of 284, and also equalled Sunny Gavaskar as the highest number of centuries in test cricket (34). Kumble became the highest wicket taker for India in tests. Pathan took 18 wickets in 2 test matches!
And of course, Ganguly got 2 wins ‘away’. I know it is Bangaldesh, but when he retires, no one is going to discount Bangladesh. They will just look at his win-loss and home-away records.
I seriously did not think that he would win it. I was surprised, and pleasantly so, that he won it. Of course, I did not want Jason White to win it, but would not have been surprised if he did. There was so much hype about him being only the second person to win it twice.
Anyway, one National Championship, another one in waiting, Heisman trophy, numbers better than the previous QB, who was also the Heisman winner…what more should Leinart be playing for? Why would he come back?
I think he will go if he knows he is going to be top-10 pick. And I think he could be.
Good luck to him! Even if he comes back, it would be great.
I can’t believe the season is over. Just one more game and that’s it for many months!
Saturdays were cool, with all the hoopla surrounding USC.
Now that Norm Chow is staying back, I hope Leinart leaves for the NFL so Norm Chow gets at least one year with the new QB and he can get him ready for prime time. Because I am certain that next year, there will be some college that will be able to afford him and he will leave.
Not the jetlag, that I was somehow able to beat. But the post-India illness. You end up eating so much there that it results in cold and cough and if you are unlucky, fever and body ache either there itself or just as you land here.
This time I tried to undereat just to avoid it, and I thought I did, because when I landed I was fine. But just the second day after coming back, I was down with flu-like symptoms.
Luckily, I carry the herbal medicines with me on my project, and they work so nicely for me. I was able to somehow pull myself through to Friday and had the weekend to relax and rest up.
I did just that, and was ok on Sunday afternoon when we had some guests over for lunch.
Will have to try something new next time I go there.
Yes, I am back. But I was not away because I was lazy. Just did not want to write for part of the time, and did not get a chance to, the other part.
As soon as I got back from India, I was asked to report to work. The next day! So I did not get a chance to relax at all, plus there was enough crap going on at work that I had to focus on it.
But I did not want to write for some reason. Just decided that it was not worth it. A part of me said to hell with it, why should I write and so I just plain gave up.
But things have changed a bit, as has my thought process. So look out for a bunch of posts from me.
The Indian cricket team was threatened with death before they went to Bangladesh. The Bangladesh govt. is obviously asking to ignore the threat. I don’t believe we should ignore it. The Islamist terrorists there are quite insane and given the bad history between India and yet another neighbor, it may be wiser not to go.
But the bottomline is that Dalmiya has a lot of obligations with the Bangladesh cricket board officials and has ensured that we not only go there, but with security lesser than what we had for the Pakistani tour.
My hope is that our team comes back safe and sound, now that it has been forced to go there despite the threats.
Does Texas deserve to be BCS #4? I personally don’t think so. I think Cal has done enough to be in the Rose Bowl. The only team they lost to, and came very very close to beating, is #1 USC.
Their problems are twofold:
1. They did not run up the scores, especially towards the end and especially against Southern Miss.
2. They did not kiss up to coaches and did not have brothers who would vote for their team (reference to Texas coach’s brother who votes in the ESPN poll).
Coach Tedford’s extension is only a silver lining and people who make decisions about rankings and such (read: BCS committee) should make at least the final coaches poll identified by coach, just like AP does it for its writers.
We need some transparency in this whole mess we call college football rankings.
Not only were they the AP National Champions last year, but they go from the pre-season to the end of the season as #1 in the country. It was an incredibly tough ask, given that starting from VA Tech, it was tough all the way.
No, they did not make ordinary teams look good - they got quality opposition all the time, and in every game, USC had everything to lose, and the other team had nothing to lose.
Given that kind of pressure, I was almost hoping for an early season loss so that they drop off the #1 spot and lose some of the pressure. But that did not happen and rightfully, USC ended at #1.
Now, there is the all-important, cracker-of-a-game USC vs Oklahoma. I hope it lives up to its billing of #1 vs #2. And of course, fingers crossed for that one too ;-)
It was a tougher than expected game, but given that it was the traditional rivalry, and that it was at the Rose Bowl and not at the Coliseum, it was a good victory.
Reggie Bush’s two runs was classical. But the problem is that his excellent performance slows down Matt Leinart’s race for the Heisman :-(
