Weekend, Athadu and a Birthday!!!

Come weekend and Indianmasti were back in action with a Desi movie in Chinatown Cinema. The flavour of the week was Telugu.

The 'gang' had decided to accompany our 'Golti'(GB's as we TB's/MB's prefer to call them) friend Praveen to the movie. For reasons inexplicable i decided to join the 'gang' though i dont understand a single word of Telugu. Not the brightest of decisions that i have taken. But i have been happy to dismiss it away as one of my 'moments' of stupidity. We all have 'em.
Anyways we did have our share of fun.

The entire hall was filled with GB's. GB's chattering away in Telugu. GB's hooting for Mahesh Babu. GB's whistling away for Trisha. GB's laughing away at Telugu Jokes. GB's taking sly glances at the opposite sex. GB's eating spicy 'molaga bhajji's'. Man, it was a full house.

In the end, we had great fun and Babu!!! movie chaala bagundhi.
Athadu had rocked!!!

Birthday parties seem to get people's blood boiling. I suspect some even managed to do a few extra sit ups that day in preparation for the evening.
Subbu took charge of the evening, preparing a smashing dinner. Despite it being a working day the next day People came, we cut a cake and they kicked ass. We'll go anywhere to kick ass!!! Wont we?? It was a smashing evening. Thanks guys!!

And meanwhile, I managed to turn a year older. Sigh!!

Google Launches Google Talk

Google followed up its launch of the Google Desktop with the Google Talk, Googles IM Client.

This much talked about IM client as expected supports the popular Jabber IM Standard and can exchange messages with other clients supporting the standard XMPP Protocol like Trillian, GAIM, iChat, Adium, and Psi. Google says it will soon support MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.

Though they claim that Google Talk will work across Firewalls, I havent been successful as yet in getting it to work across the firewall at my office. :(

Google Talk looks lean and mean. Its clean, with no unnecessary graphics or ads. It looks all set to take on MSN, Yahoo and anybody else.

So guys check it out!!!

Google Desktop !!!!

Google today launched Google Desktop Search with a new componenet "The Google Sidebar"!!!

Ofcourse, it has replaced the "Desktop Sidebar" software that i have been using. Not a change thats going to last for long though or so it seems...

It has a new sidebar component which apparently is inspired by Windows Vista. The sidebar lets you check stock prices, weather, news, snaps et al. It also comes with a plug-in that allows you to check your mail straight from your outlook inbox.

The downside being that the user has very few options or preferences that he can set. I havent been able to categories and view my feeds according to sites. I dont seem to have an option of not checking my outlook mailbox without turning off the "display mail" feature entirely. And ofcourse i can see the weather/stock quotes only in the US of A.

At the end of the day, MS and Google can have their wars, but i think people will continue to use more useful applications like "Desktop Sidebar" that i've been using.

Weekend Alas!!

From complete joblessness to a maximum workload, the shift happened smoothly, silently and extremely swiftly, inflicting a killer blow on all my plans, time and everything else.

So Friday was indeed very welcome, with prospects of an AZAADI night at Inflation, an indian disc. But ofcourse it took quite a while before i realised that my plans had been changed. Some issues that cropped up in our testing kept us at work till 2 AM on Saturday.
Things were just as good on Saturday, with me ending up in a theatre in the evening watching "Mangal Pandey".

The movie by no stretch of imagination seemed like a product of 15 years of research and 2 years of production. Aamir khan's splendid acting albeit the movie had little or nothing to offer. It was good in patches, but definitely did not deliver as expected. I probably raised the bar a bit too high. AR Rehman has done a good job as usual, but the songs were mostly unnecessary in the context of the movie and definitely got their timing wrong. So all in all, yet another movie where the less said the better.

Things showed no signs of improvement on Sunday, with me spending a good portion of my time in the office.

On the bright side, we did manage to get ourselves tickets for the AR Rehman show in Rod Laver Arena in September.

Zopa

"Zopa is a term taken from business theory. It stands for Zone of Possible Agreement and is the overlap between one person’s bottom line (the lowest they’re prepared to get for something) and another person’s top line (the most they’re prepared to give for something). It’s the way people negotiate all sorts of stuff - buying a car, getting a mortgage - even a teenager negotiating with parents about staying out late. If there’s no Zopa, there’s no deal. " - Thats what the Site has to offer in terms of explaining the term Zopa.

Its an idea thats very much in tune with whats happening around us. Its a revolutionary concept which aims at making some of the most basic purposes served by banks redundant.

Here's what they say about themselves :

" Here's the way the world works (and it must be right because it's been like this for hundreds of years...)

People who have spare money give it to a bank. Banks then do whatever they like with it. Some of it they lend to people who need to borrow. Some of it they give to their shareholders. Some of it they gamble on the price of tin, or the dollar going down, or whether there'll be floods in Asia. Banks make lots of money from all this, a fraction of which they give back to their customers.

Zopa though lets people who have spare money to lend it directly to people, like them, who want to borrow it. No bank in the middle, no huge overheads, no unethical investments.

To minimise any risk, the money each lender puts in is spread amongst at least 50 borrowers (and likewise each borrower gets their money from a number of different lenders).

Zopa is, therefore, for people who want to be a part of something new. Who want to join a community of like-minded individuals and lend to them and borrow from them in a trusting but secure way.

Zopa is for people who are looking for a better rate of return. Zopa’s interest rates aren’t squeezed by middlemen (the banks) because there are no middlemen - that’s the Zopa idea.

Zopa is for creditworthy people who earn money in new ways, in ways that banks don’t always recognise. People who are self employed, people who have peaks and troughs to their income, people who would be invisible to a bank’s credit rating system but are seen and validated by Zopa’s."

iSkoot brings Skype to your cellphone

With Skype making its code available to other SPs to provide services over skype, the possibilities of services that can be delivered are many. This has pushed Skype onto a new frontier : Mobile phones.

With a $10 a year software rental charges, iSkoot is offering long distance calls to any Skype user for nothing more than the cost of local air time to dial up from your mobile to your broadband connected home computer.

The idea is similar to making a call through your company's conference bridge or VOIP line or a normal calling card. Just that you'll need to dial into your own computer rather than the conference bridge number or calling card number.

The iSkoot founder, Jacob Guedalia, said his vision was to ''enable the individual to become his own long-distance carrier" by routing calls over a home or office computer connection, instead of AT&T or Sprint.

More worries for telecom companies!!!