Finally, yesterday, my blog became ad-free. The look-and-feel is much better now, with that extra space at the top devoted to the page style.
Now, I want to see how I can put a picture within a post, rather than have only the picture in a posting.
How does one get on the inside track of someone else they know? To get the scoop. To be the buddy.
Does it involve give-and-take? I tell you something first and then you tell me? Or is it mostly the warmth, the charm, etc.? There are people who are instantly within the inner circle, but there are others who just don’t get through that sphere.
And the issue can get more complex if you involve not just person A to person B, but also person A, person B and person C. You see it all the time - friends, family, work, everywhere. Everyone trying to get into everyone else’s circles/spheres. Not all make it.
And when these persons interact on a regular basis, it could become critical for all to be in each other’s spheres or none to be. Or else…..
These replies do not sound scripted. I think these have come from the heart, in a very truthful manner.
Sachin like Formula 1 and would love to drive a Formula 1 car (Ferrari)! :-)
According to Cricinfo, Agarkar is all set to play for Middlesex for one month. Lord’s. The Mecca of cricket. Ajit’s only test century.
And Glenn McGrath as the bowler from the opposite end.
Only next to playing for India in the Asia Cup :-)
They were able to survive the last day and somehow manage a draw. To get a draw against these rampaging Aussies is a big deal. Especially after they put up such a huge score in the first innings. And especially after a collapse in the final innings from Sri Lanka.
Their lower middle order and the tail somehow survived some tough times at the end of a dark final session. Warne has equaled the world record for wickets, but Murali is going to win that race for sure.
Congratulations, Lanka. Now, please stay in that test match mode, because you are in India’s group for the Asia Cup :-)
Can’t wait. Though I must say I am not so excited about India facing the likes of UAE, Bangladesh and HK.
But looking ahead to the major series - Australia at home and South Africa at home, for tests, it is important to talk about the openers.
I understand that Sehwag turned into a decent opener despite being a middle order batsman. I am feeling bad for Chopra who has been conveniently pushed out of the squad with all the talk about Yuvi opening with Sehwag.
First of all, I have no problem with ‘middle order’ batsmen becoming openers. But talking about Yuvi as a test opener for the Indian national team without truly testing him in that position is unfair to him as well as Chopra. He is kinda set up for failure and Chopra is unnecessarily thrown out of the playing XI.
Of course, time will tell what the real deal is, but on paper, it does not make sense to shake the existing XI, except tweaking the bowling combination based on fitness as well as pitch conditions.
But Ganguly’s talk of Yuvraj being a ‘class act’ and one that ‘cannot be ignored’ is again a pointer to what I think is favoritism. ;-)
There is one more thing I forgot to mention - profile and sharing profile.
Another thing you can do is create your own profile (so others with similar interests may find you) and also, share it. Sharing a profile makes it visible if someone clicks on your Display Name.
When you log into blogger, you see the Dashboard. On there, you will see a link to Edit Profile.
Uncheck ‘Show my real name’ if you don’t want others to see your real name. They will only be able to see the Display Name.
Uncheck ‘Show my email address’ to make it invisible to others.
Show my blogs. This one is used to hide your blogs from others who see your profile. Of course, your blogs are always visible to users if they know the address. But let’s say you don’t want someone to see one of your blogs, if you have more than one. In that case, you can decide to ‘show’ only the ones that you want to show.
For example, you can have a personal blog for jotting down your thoughts and not make it public. In that case, just show the public blog and keep this personal blog hidden.
Photograph and Audio Clip will be empty for now. Once you move to advanced stage, you can start experimenting with those things.
From ‘General’ onwards, the more you put, the more you will match with others. I personally did not put the year of birth, so my age is not known.
Also, in the interests, movies, music, etc. sections, make sure you put the name of the movie, band, singer, etc. correctly and separated with commas. What this will enable is clicking on the name, so that you can find people with similar interests.
Hope this helps!
Came across an excellent article by Rohit Brijnath about brilliance and domination and how that is never boring.
Let me tell you my take on it. There is a certain part of me as a sports fan that wants to see some team dominate their opponents. There is another part of me though, that wants to create a contendor, and hopefully a rivalry. Two or three people (or teams) who are equally good in skills and talent and who could win on any given day, would be much better for me to follow, than one individual/team completely dominating all the time.
That’s why I did not like (and still don’t) Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls.
That’s why I am not liking the current state of Formula 1.
That’s why I truly did not like Steve Waugh’s Australian cricket team, and I do not like the Ricky Ponting’s current team.
That’s why I would not watch Sampras playing at Wimbledon.
In fact, in all of these cases, I would actually hope that a rank outsider would beat them.
I don’t follow much of football, so I will pass on Arsenal.
Mind you, it is not like I did not like them at all at any given point. I liked Jordan, Tiger and Schumacher as athletes. I loved to watch the Australian team playing awesome cricket, redefinig a lot of philosophies prevalent in cricket at the time. But once they start dominating for a while, they do make it less and less exciting for a lay sports follower like me.
True, the purists would say, like Brijnath says and like it is aruged on a blog, brilliance and domination is actually perfection on display. If you really really love the sport, you won’t mind domination as displayed my Schumacher, as displayed by Jordan and Tiger and the Aussie team.
But I don’t agree. I have seen enough of pure cricket. I have seen enough of pure driving. I have seen enough of buzzer-beater shots by Jordan. It is more exciting to see rivalries.
John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors.
Ivan Lendl, Stefan Edberg, Boris Becker.
Schumacher and Hakkinen.
Senna and Prost. Add Mansell, Lauda to the list.
Lakers and Celtics of the 80’s.
Yankees and Red Sox.
Michigan and Ohio State.
and so on.
Its rivalries that make the game more exciting from spectators' long term point of view.
Yes, it is cool to see a team or a players completely dominate the opponents once in a while. It has to happen otherwise we are encouraging mediocrity. But for the long term, it is good to see a change. Dynasties are good, but complete domination by a team in creating a dynasty is very bad for the sport.
At least that is my point. What’s yours?
Here is a copy of instructions I sent to my niece about how to start blogging. Useful for anyone starting off :-)
Go to www.blogger.com
Click on ‘create a blog’. If you have already created a blog, skip to step #1 in the next section
Create a username for your login to blogger. This username is something that will never be displayed anywhere. It is only for login purposes.
Choose a password
Display name is the name which will show up when you post a thought on your blog (posted by RPM, for example). It is also what shows up when you make a comment on someone else’s or your own blog.
Click next and choose a title for your blog.
Next, choose how your blog address will look like. Make it simple so people can remember the address. Once you choose the address, it will become your blog’s address as something.blogspot.com. If the address you want is not available you may have to try a few alternatives.
Clicking on next will show you a list of templates you can choose for your blog. Click on the magnifying glass next to the template to expand the view. There you’ll see how the template looks like. Once you like the template, choose it and click continue.
That’s it!
Of course, then you can go into the settings of your blog and customize it.
Go to www.blogger.com
Login with the username and password selected in #3 above.
Click on settings tab at the top.
You can enter a description for your blog.
You can also add your blog to the directory listings. What this does is makes the blog visible to a lot more people than it would normally. It is kind of putting an ad in the paper for your shop or something. If you want to stay low-profile, you can choose no. If you want to create a splash and have more and more unknown people read your thoughts, then choose yes.
Always keep pressing ‘Save settings’
Click on ‘publishing’ under ‘settings’. Ping weblogs.com is similar to #5, where it announces to a lot of people that your blog has been updated, when you do update it. Choose yes if you want the world to know that you have updated your blog, and no if you want to keep it subtle.
Choose ‘formatting’ under ‘settings’. It would be best to leave it at default.
Choose ‘comments’ under ‘settings’. If you want others to be able to comment on your thoughts, choose ‘show’.
Under ‘who can comment’, you can choose to let only registered users of blogger make comments. This means, when people want to make a comment, they will have to login to blogger. Anonymous comments will not be allowed. And that is not usually a good thing. So I would say ‘Anyone’. Of course, if you want to make it a truly closed blog, you can choose ‘only members of this blog’ in that option. This means, that you have to set up a list of members who can post to this blog. Only they can make comments to the blog. I had originally tried this but it was not a good option, because I wanted to make a splash and let others/unknowns also make comments. :-)
It would be nice to put an email address for notifications as and when someone posts a comment for you.
Leave the other tabs on default settings and go to the ‘members’ area. Here you can invite members if you want to make it a closed blog. Only people on this list will be able to make comments and even write posts.
That’s it. It’s that simple.
Gotham 2 off my Amazon Wish List
The domination of Michael Schumacher continues, but the good news for me in the British GP was Kimi’s P2! Go Kimi Raikkonen!
Sarah McLachlan vh1 Storytellers off my Amazon Wish List
Had a fun time with my wife yesterday. Woke up lazily and went for the eagerly awaited Spiderman 2. It was quite alright. I did not like the fact that they revealed the identity to so many people - the subway passengers, his best friend, his girl friend. How is he going to cope in the next version? Let’s see.
Went for lunch to my wife’s best place to eat - Fresh Choice. It is an all-you-can-eat salad bar, with a lot of other goodies like soups, breads, desserts, pasta, pizza, etc. Loved it.
Then we went to Fry’s to get some stuff returned. Watch my other post about clearing my Amazon wish list - she sensed it before I reminded her and got me some stuff from there for the anniversary! :-) Love you, sweety for reading my mind … fourth year in a row ;-)
Came home and changed and went to San Jose Center for Performing Arts for the touring production of The Producers, the amazingly popular Mel Brooks musical. It starred Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in the initial version on broadway. This one was quite well done too. I am not too much of a theater critic, but I enjoyed it a lot. It was quite funny and the music was quite upbeat too.
Then at 11pm, we had trouble finding a good restaurant which was open. That’s the problem of being the ‘burbs. We tried Mexican, Indian, Italian. No go. Finally, we ended up going to IHOP! Yea, baby. Belgian Banana Nut Waffle with whipped :-)
That was the end of the big day. Now, we begin the fifth year. All of the people who called for wishing us had a common question ‘when are you giving us the good news?’. The fifth year project could be generation of the ‘good news’. Right? As KB said, she is quite ready. I guess the whole world is waiting for me. Too much pressure :-)
Do not read anything into it. If we wait for one more year, I don’t think we’ll be liked by anyone in the family. Or people will start questioning our ‘health’ ;-)
The baby’s come home! No more probes. No more purple light. No more beeps around her.
Just home sweet home. She looks quite at peace. Well, at least the 30 minutes that I spent with her. Looks like she is getting used to the place. She did open her eyes and at least pretended to look at me once ;-)
Now, to get her settled in her new house.
Today, my wife and I are four years old! Wow. Four years. Didn’t realize how time has passed by. Four years of ups. Four years of downs. Four years of great time spent together. Four years of some of the best times of my life.
We’ve come a long way baby. Cheers to many many more years of fun times!
Oh yea, just in case you missed it on the right hand side under ‘Links’, here’s my Amazon Wish List ;-)
But their choice for World XI’s to face Australia had poor Dravid as wicketkeeper.
Also, VVS ended up being 12th man in the test team because Kallis is an all rounder. But Sehwag as a test opener? Wow!
Wonder what those guys were thinking??
Rudy T and Lakers have agreed to terms and a press conference may be called tomorrow to announce the new Lakers coach.
I am not too pumped up. But let’s see how the players merry-go-round ends up at the end.
Found a cool site - http://bayareafreefi.com. Lets you search for free hotspots in your area.
Nice.
Some law firm is suing Veritas CEO and CFO for ‘misguiding’ investors with earnings numbers that they were not able to meet.
Can you believe it? I would have made a ton on those dot com stocks with such lawsuits.
It is ‘guidance’, people. No one has seen the future. No one knows if a deal worth $10 million is going to come through before the end of the quarter or not. Such lawsuits may be a bad precedent.
Ganguly’s comment that it was a tough call between Agarkar and Nehra makes me think about what I said earlier.
I think he still has his favorites, and does back them more than the others (ex Powar and Karthik vs Bhajji), but he is man enough to come and justify most of his decisions.
I have never doubted him. I just have a stinky feeling that if you are not in his good books, he may not support you as much as he could.
Comments posted on my earlier post were all good, but don’t you guys think that there may be some truth in what I am trying to say?
BBC carried a piece in which JP said Ferrari may win all the remaining GP’s.
Has he thrown in the towel and accepted that 2004 is a no-win year? How could his team let him do that? Motivational issues?
JP, you need to be skillful mentally as well as behind the wheel. Sharpen the former and then think about taking out the leader of a race!
BBC SPORT - Cricket makes Asian Games
Maybe this could wake up IOC and maybe we’ll see cricket in the Olympics soon???
If Kobe goes to the Knicks and Shaq goes to Dallas, I will have no reason to watch the NBA next season.
BBC Sport had this item saying that Ralf is going to Toyota next season and that they have not decided who his team mate is going to be.
But the important point is BMW has no drivers, with JP going to McLaren next year. Wonder who is on their radar. Vill? DC? Hope it is the two of them, so that I can dismiss that team completely. While you are at it, make Damon Hill the manager of that team :-)
Meanwhile, it was a surprise for me to learn that Toyota has the second largest budget after Ferrari.
Wow…
ESPN.com - NCF - Mike Williams files for reinstatement with NCAA
Now, keeping fingers crossed so that he can be reinstated. It will be good for college football if he can come back to USC.
National Championship retained? Who knows. Don’t want to woof it ;-)
