Just two more days…I wish I could make these two days fly by.

Kobe Bryant’s criminal case was shockingly dropped and so his $136 million contract with the Lakers is now safe. Also, he does not have to go to prison for life and anything he says now will not be used against him in any future cases. The prosecution cannot file any more charges against him.

Sweet deal for him. How much did it cost, Kobe?

Ganguly’s captaincy is suddenly under the microscope. People are saying various things about what he is doing and what he is not and what he should be.

Suddenly, because India has started losing, everyone wants to fix everything and the first thing that they think of is his captaincy and his place in the team.

When you win, everyone will ignore your faults, but when you lose, those same faults will become your biggest weaknesses.

Finally! Some peace of mind. No more endless ads about ‘The Games’ everywhere. No more hip hip hoorahs!

Yessss! They are over! Thank you … moving on to NFL and College Football :-)

Or at least, I could not find one. I placed an order yesterday and I wanted to talk to someone about the estimated ship date of the item, and realized that there was no number listed! After clicking through a lot of pages, I realized, that all I could do was send an email to customer service, which I did send last night already. Have not heard from them yet.

I think for such a large site, with potentially naive customers, there needs to be a phone number so that they can talk. Or at least online chat.

Saw Father of the Pride - was funny in places, but I don’t think it will survive in prime time.

Scrubs was quite funny, as usual, though Heather Graham was wasted there. She was neither funny nor sarcastic. Hopefully her character will develop in the upcoming episodes.

Cingular is in the process of completing the acquisition of ATT Wireless. I am current ATT subscriber, but with their older, ‘TDMA’ service. I want to migrate to GSM and get my wife an ATT GSM phone so that we can talk for free because of unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes that are a feature of service plans nowadays.

ATT and Cingular have opened their networks for free roaming, so at home, I have seen some ATT GSM phones display ‘Cingular’. Now, the interesting thing is that if it displays ‘Cingular’ on the caller’s phone or the receiver’s phone it is not counted as mobile-to-mobile! It comes out of normal minutes, unless of course it is night/weekend.

I think that is just not acceptable. If they have opened up the networks, which lets me use Cingular’s network for free roaming, I think it should be counted in the mobile-to-mobile minutes. No?

Can’t believe summer is almost over! Not that I have to go back to school or anything. I am just dreading the times when it will be dark by 5pm! I love it when it is day light even at 8pm and I don’t want it to change :-)

We are going to New Orleans on Sat and be back on Mon. Completely unplanned trip as far as what we want to do there. Basically, relax there. Hopefully it won’t be too hot at this time of the year over there.

Of course, I did not see the Indian innings, nor have I read anything about how they collapsed, but in the first Natwest series' first ODI, they are all out for 170, and England are 68-2, seemingly coasting to an easy win.

Harmison got a hat-trick. But that is not a big deal. The big deal is that Sehwag failed again, and there were no partnerships!

Well, I think Kaif and Gavaskar had some sort of partnership, but it was too late by then. Gangs, Lax and Dravid are in a miserable slump, one way or the other - bad luck or whatever. And that is just purely unfortunate for India.

Of course, Sachin is injured, which is also unfortunate.

Now, Balaji struck twice and a catch was just missed and lbw off a slower ball turned down. Balaji has come back strongly after a bad Asia Cup series. Who else will step up?

They now have season 1 vs season 2. I think except for one or two guys from season 1, most of season 2 is definitely funnier than season 1.

Rediff.com had a thing about Republicans saying they will hike H-1B quota with some security conditions satisfied.

Is it vote-getting gimmick? Is there potentially more backlash than vote gain for the Republicans?

“QB Ryan Hart leads what may be Rutgers' best offense ever.”

Rutgers fans must be pumped about this season’s football team….

So much for his comeback and his mental toughness. He actually said that he was never going back to Wimbledon because he cannot cope with the variable bounce!

He is not coming back, people. He will win here and there, but he will never be a champion. Still not mentally tough.

At the moment, it is just not responding to me :-(

I still have not got my calendar situation corrected. Basically I do not get any reminders - no meeting reminders, no task reminders. I am so helpless without reminders. Just goes to show how dependent I am on technology. It is sad. But true.
And it also shows how slow the Helpdesk is over here. Finally today, someone emailed me asking me to do something which I had done 1 week before I finally contacted the Helpdesk. It is damn frustrating, to see how slow these guys are. The person who contacted me is apparently a ‘senior Exchange tech’. I wish that I could shortcut my way to a real tech. If there is one.

Also, the laptop I got from work, was dead. As they took it for re-imaging, they realized that the motherboard was busted. And it has been a while since they’ve had it and I have had no response yet from the Helpdesk folks, except that ‘The Dell tech is coming tomorrow’. Well, yippey-dee-do-dah! Call me when it’s done, and it better be soon!

I remember that song from school. It was just a great song. Those were the times when we were not too exposed to ‘Western’ music because of lack of TV and radio stations. We took what we got, and maybe went to the local videostore and rented some ‘American Music Video’ tapes. They always play her other songs here in the US, but not this one. And on some random radio station, they played this song, so I thought I’d post some lyrics and see if anyone remembered it :-)

Great words.

Those of you who depend on the links on the right to get to PPOV’s blog, please note that I have updated her new address this morning.

Sorry I did not realize it earlier. For some strange reason, the older one still exists, but is just stale. Strange.

All those who have those links, please go to your templates and change them :-(

Who are you? No fun putting Anon comments. Come on. Out with it.

Michael Schumacher ‘lost’ … for the first time this season, he completed a race and did not end up with P1. :-)

He finished second after being #6 at one point. Which is awesome. Of course, there were three safety car stoppages.

But the better thing in this race was that Kimi won! Kimi won! Yippey!

Kimi deserves more points than he has got this year, and I hope he can get some confidence closing out this season so that he can start the next one well.

Had some family over for dinner last night - and since there were two sisters involved, decided to make it Rakhi day one day in advance. It was fun - to have everyone over, relaxed.

It was the baby’s first trip out of the house, non-medical and non-temple. She slept through the entire evening, though :-)

One other sister was out of town - she went to Davis, so it was not really a complete Rakhi day. We’ll probably do it once more, later.

Uh-oh. And there is something on Cricinfo saying that they may choose Dinesh Mongia. What luck for that guy! :-)

So they came out with a win. Not bad, and not a bad win either. It was a surprisingly tougher opponent that most expected, so coming out of DC with a 1-0 record is absolutely fine.

But there are so many things wrong with the team today - the offensive line is not even close to the strength of the last year. So many times people forget that Leinart had so much success last year because he got so much time to think and then make his moves. Yesterday, the VA Tech defense was able to penetrate so easily, so many times.

The receivers are not even close to last year’s killer duo of Mike Williams and Keary Colbert. I think with all the hype surrounding MW, Keary Colbert’s role was kinda muted out, but believe me, his catches and critical moves at tough times were as important, if not more than, MW’s. We will miss him a lot.

Rushing was not up to the mark. Again, that goes back somewhat to the offensive line, which was not able to make enough holes to make good rushing possible.

But it’s all good. Pete Carroll has said that there has been a lot of things he has seen, where USC can improve and the good thing is that we have 2 weeks to prepare for Colorado State, and it will be a home game.

So on to the next one. 1-0 sounds good - though I must say, those guys from the SEC and everywhere else will love to see USC drop to #2 after the first round of games. Does not matter to me. It is Orange Bowl that matters more - not the intermediate rankings.

The touch down we scored, was off a turnover. I mean, its great that we had an interception which was converted, but Leinart has still not settled down and he is throwing hard or overthrowing, and the receivers are tentative.

The defense is solid, but there too, the offensive line at VA Tech is calming down and making it more and more easy for their QB to make plays.

Their QB I must say, is quite composed.

7-3 for the Trojans, somewhere at the beginning of the 2nd qtr.

Lactose free and normal milk - I was confused and had the normal milk. And paid the price :-(

Two days back, for two days in a row, I had normal 2% milk without realizing it.

The after effects were there for me to feel. I did realize later that what was happening to me was not typical, because at least of late, when I have been having lactose-free milk, there has been no real after effects.

But those two times were killer. I will put up the picture of the two boxes - one lactose-free and one regular 2%, and you’ll see that there is really no visual difference. I just picked up the normal milk without realizing it.

And paid the price.

And confirmed that I am definitely, positively lactose intolerant.


And that sucks.