Check out the greatdrivingchallenge.com - an ingenious way to use the internet to promote your brand. You can register as a couple too if you think you are upto this sort of thing. Me, I'm not much of a driver and would not get 12 days off if I were dead.
And this is definitely my favourite couple. Voting for them is mandated for Daily Humor readers.
Worry not, regular blogging shall commence post this weekend. Been overworked and overstressed, but I shall come back like a blogging phoenix. A bleenix even. Ok off to bed now. Good night bleeple.
And no, I wasn't paid my Mitsubishi for this post.
Thursday, June 25
Monday, June 15
T20 champions no more
Well, it had to happen. Dhoni's midas touch era finally seems to have come to an end. India hasn't even made the top 4 of this year's edition.
The most embarassing part of the loss was that all those times in the '80s and '90s where we couldn't win a test series abroad came back to haunt us. Short bowling made us look like scared little nincompoops as against the fearless young guns who won the title two years ago. Suresh Raina's backfoot bending sixers were fine in flat pitches with no real fast bowlers, but he was found wanting even in this form of the game where only one bouncer per over is allowed. Makes one wonder how he will manage in test cricket under trying conditions.
Another young talent, Ravindra Jadeja, found the situation too hot to handle and made a leisurely 25 from 35, outdoing even Dimitri Mascarenhas to claim the best test player award. Unfortunately, he's a T20 specialist. I really feel for Yuvraj Singh, MSD and Yusuf who did so well towards the end, especially the one handed straight six which was a gem of a shot. To tell you the truth though, this series has been a bummer from the beginning what with the weird match timings, Anil Kumble commentary, Harsha Bhogle's new rug and the male cheerleaders.
The only consolation for fans like me is that I can catch some sleep now that India won't feature in the tournament. And on that note, lurkers, good night.
The most embarassing part of the loss was that all those times in the '80s and '90s where we couldn't win a test series abroad came back to haunt us. Short bowling made us look like scared little nincompoops as against the fearless young guns who won the title two years ago. Suresh Raina's backfoot bending sixers were fine in flat pitches with no real fast bowlers, but he was found wanting even in this form of the game where only one bouncer per over is allowed. Makes one wonder how he will manage in test cricket under trying conditions.
Another young talent, Ravindra Jadeja, found the situation too hot to handle and made a leisurely 25 from 35, outdoing even Dimitri Mascarenhas to claim the best test player award. Unfortunately, he's a T20 specialist. I really feel for Yuvraj Singh, MSD and Yusuf who did so well towards the end, especially the one handed straight six which was a gem of a shot. To tell you the truth though, this series has been a bummer from the beginning what with the weird match timings, Anil Kumble commentary, Harsha Bhogle's new rug and the male cheerleaders.
The only consolation for fans like me is that I can catch some sleep now that India won't feature in the tournament. And on that note, lurkers, good night.
Wednesday, June 10
Indians reeling under a spate of racial attacks in Indian metros
After the recent racial attacks on Indians in Australia, Canada and never-never land, Indians are now being racially targeted in unexpected quarters - India's metros.
Earlier in the day, Chennai-ites were shocked to learn that Indians were flowing into Chennai like rasam in a plate of rice. One man, while self-immolating was heard shouting the slogan, "Who set me on fire" to the joy of the mob that had gathered around him. Upon hearing this, the Chief Minister immediately declared that babies born with non-Indian names would be given gold coins and made to cover up their nudity for this was a most non-Tamil state of being. At the time of going to press, a bill was being discussed to make curd rice the symbol of the Tamil movement.
In New Delhi, young boys teased young Indian girls, occasionally molesting or raping them in order to a lesson. Cops who stopped some of these offenders were immediately presented with a cellphone saying, "Lo baat kar lo". The code phrase led to a wide smile from the cops who immediately recognized the Dilli ka bandas and responded with, "Panchod." Later in the evening, Punjabis and Nepalis joined the Delhi-ites in a candle light vigil at the newly-rechristened Delhi Gate.
As the tension spread, Kolkata was slow to react since it was on strike for no apparent reason. As a result of general excitement, it had to call off the strike in order to protest the vast numbers of Indians coming in from non-Bangladeshi borders. "This is not true, we are never racist", Mr Banerjee said without provocation. "We are too slow to be racists. We will come last.", he said and giggled with glee bordering on insanity. Upon further enquiring, it was understood that he had attempted a joke. Sourav Ganguly further fuelled outrage among his fans by revealing that the Fake IPL Player was indeed an Indian.
Mumbai-ites were appalled after learning that most of the people in the city were Indians and that they were a minimum in their maximum city. As a stop-gap measure, they renamed their IPL team to 'Mumbai Mumbai-ites'. Also on the edge of the sea, tourists were treated to a newly-lit Gateway of Mumbai. A pro-Mumbai political party burned down cabs, shops, slums, trains, babies and pictures of the numeral zero claiming that these were Indian influences they didn't need. "The Marathi man has been suffering indignity for too long now", said Mr Bhamurdekar as he packed his bags to leave office at 3 PM. "I've been working hard, but these bhaiyyas are ruining Mumbai", he wistfully added as he stared at Mrs Godbole.
The policemen around the country seem to be helpless as they claim that their organization has been infiltrated by Indians. We will keep bringing you news as it happens. Stay tuned.
(c) Paranoid Indian Media
Earlier in the day, Chennai-ites were shocked to learn that Indians were flowing into Chennai like rasam in a plate of rice. One man, while self-immolating was heard shouting the slogan, "Who set me on fire" to the joy of the mob that had gathered around him. Upon hearing this, the Chief Minister immediately declared that babies born with non-Indian names would be given gold coins and made to cover up their nudity for this was a most non-Tamil state of being. At the time of going to press, a bill was being discussed to make curd rice the symbol of the Tamil movement.
In New Delhi, young boys teased young Indian girls, occasionally molesting or raping them in order to a lesson. Cops who stopped some of these offenders were immediately presented with a cellphone saying, "Lo baat kar lo". The code phrase led to a wide smile from the cops who immediately recognized the Dilli ka bandas and responded with, "Panchod." Later in the evening, Punjabis and Nepalis joined the Delhi-ites in a candle light vigil at the newly-rechristened Delhi Gate.
As the tension spread, Kolkata was slow to react since it was on strike for no apparent reason. As a result of general excitement, it had to call off the strike in order to protest the vast numbers of Indians coming in from non-Bangladeshi borders. "This is not true, we are never racist", Mr Banerjee said without provocation. "We are too slow to be racists. We will come last.", he said and giggled with glee bordering on insanity. Upon further enquiring, it was understood that he had attempted a joke. Sourav Ganguly further fuelled outrage among his fans by revealing that the Fake IPL Player was indeed an Indian.
Mumbai-ites were appalled after learning that most of the people in the city were Indians and that they were a minimum in their maximum city. As a stop-gap measure, they renamed their IPL team to 'Mumbai Mumbai-ites'. Also on the edge of the sea, tourists were treated to a newly-lit Gateway of Mumbai. A pro-Mumbai political party burned down cabs, shops, slums, trains, babies and pictures of the numeral zero claiming that these were Indian influences they didn't need. "The Marathi man has been suffering indignity for too long now", said Mr Bhamurdekar as he packed his bags to leave office at 3 PM. "I've been working hard, but these bhaiyyas are ruining Mumbai", he wistfully added as he stared at Mrs Godbole.
The policemen around the country seem to be helpless as they claim that their organization has been infiltrated by Indians. We will keep bringing you news as it happens. Stay tuned.
(c) Paranoid Indian Media
Tuesday, June 9
My first Op-Ed is published
My first Op-Ed was published in the Indian express today. Do check it out and leave some comments. Constructive criticism welcome. :)
Microsoft’s much-touted search engine is here and it’s got a catchy, onomatopoeic name — Bing. It’s the closest thing to a Google challenger we’ve seen so far and yet, strategically, Bing isn’t taking Google head-on. At best, it hopes to take a bite out of Yahoo’s search market share. After years of failed attempts, one is relieved that the search category is finally being given serious thought by the folks at MS. A successful search product can also turbo-charge their online advertising platform adCenter, translating to revenue. A first look at Bing with its large background image and otherwise bare pages suggests that Microsoft has applied its ‘make it pretty and have an 80-million dollar marketing budget’ theory.
Make no mistake though; Bing is not a pig wearing lipstick. It scores highly on speed, features, usability and performance. Google itself has been forced to re-invent itself many times to retain its number one slot. In doing so, it has stood its ground in the face of competition from established search engines like Yahoo as well as innovative niche sites like Dogpile (meta-search), Clusty (categorising search) and even the recently hyped computing search engine Wolfram Alpha.
The heart of a search engine is its algorithm - the logic behind displaying search results in a particular order from a given set of keywords. Google’s ‘PageRank’ is stable and proven and it is this that will be the biggest mountain to climb for a tyro like Bing in the search space. Bing counters this by organising its results based on what other searchers found most relevant for a particular keyword. Whether this provides meaningful search results still remains to be seen, and will be the single largest factor that determines the rise or fall of Bing.
For regular web searches, the number of search results that Bing displays is considerably lower in comparison to Google, although you’re probably unlikely to notice the difference. For example, a search on ‘Sampras’ yielded 720,000 odd results — over a million less than Google’s count but still large enough for the average human being. Interestingly, Bing also plugs its own ‘related searches’ into the results page, and displayed results for ‘Sampras Blog’, ‘Sampras Movies’ and ‘Sampras Posters’ as well. Performance-wise, Bing fared excellently and unlike Google, it doesn’t really go out and show this off by displaying how many nanoseconds the search took.
There are other hits and misses for Bing. A glaring miss is the easy access that Bing currently provides to pornographic material. Admittedly, you do need to turn off the safe search option, but that is just a matter of three clicks. Also, Bing redirected my Indian computer to the UK version of the site. Currently the non-US sites are not nearly as good as the US version, so for now only the US version is worth really checking out. In terms of usability, Bing avoids the mouseclick like the plague. For web searches, a nice little preview feature lets a user see more content from the target page in addition to the regular ‘snippet’ without actually clicking the search result.
Bing’s image search replaces pagination with infinite scrolling. Essentially, this implies that every time you scroll to the bottom of the results page, new results are appended and the scroll bar is reset to somewhere in the middle. Video search is even better — you can preview the video simply by pointing your mouse at a thumbnail in the search result. This is a nifty little feature given how bandwidth is ceasing to be an issue in today’s YouTube age. There are also a number of other features such as instant answers, shopping and health related search features and a session history that is maintained without you having to login. While some of these are exciting, they are merely accessories to a search portal, not central features.
Bing doesn’t quite change the rules of the game just yet, but Google-centric small businesses in the area of search engine optimisation (SEO) will do well to stay on top of its developments. It is a great opportunity for these businesses to invest in some Bing-related SEO strategies at an early stage and learn the ropes in case Google loses some market share in the near future. Microsoft may integrate Bing into the next release of Internet Explorer and Windows in some way or the other. This means that even if Bing is a close match to Google, its market share could potentially explode.
En fin, it’s a close call, but I’d stick with Google for now for a single reason — PageRank. Microsoft has taken giant steps in the right direction to get people ‘Binging’, but as the recursive acronym itself suggests, Bing is not Google.
The writer is an IT services consultant and blogs at http://blog.rohandsa.com
Microsoft’s much-touted search engine is here and it’s got a catchy, onomatopoeic name — Bing. It’s the closest thing to a Google challenger we’ve seen so far and yet, strategically, Bing isn’t taking Google head-on. At best, it hopes to take a bite out of Yahoo’s search market share. After years of failed attempts, one is relieved that the search category is finally being given serious thought by the folks at MS. A successful search product can also turbo-charge their online advertising platform adCenter, translating to revenue. A first look at Bing with its large background image and otherwise bare pages suggests that Microsoft has applied its ‘make it pretty and have an 80-million dollar marketing budget’ theory.
Make no mistake though; Bing is not a pig wearing lipstick. It scores highly on speed, features, usability and performance. Google itself has been forced to re-invent itself many times to retain its number one slot. In doing so, it has stood its ground in the face of competition from established search engines like Yahoo as well as innovative niche sites like Dogpile (meta-search), Clusty (categorising search) and even the recently hyped computing search engine Wolfram Alpha.
The heart of a search engine is its algorithm - the logic behind displaying search results in a particular order from a given set of keywords. Google’s ‘PageRank’ is stable and proven and it is this that will be the biggest mountain to climb for a tyro like Bing in the search space. Bing counters this by organising its results based on what other searchers found most relevant for a particular keyword. Whether this provides meaningful search results still remains to be seen, and will be the single largest factor that determines the rise or fall of Bing.
For regular web searches, the number of search results that Bing displays is considerably lower in comparison to Google, although you’re probably unlikely to notice the difference. For example, a search on ‘Sampras’ yielded 720,000 odd results — over a million less than Google’s count but still large enough for the average human being. Interestingly, Bing also plugs its own ‘related searches’ into the results page, and displayed results for ‘Sampras Blog’, ‘Sampras Movies’ and ‘Sampras Posters’ as well. Performance-wise, Bing fared excellently and unlike Google, it doesn’t really go out and show this off by displaying how many nanoseconds the search took.
There are other hits and misses for Bing. A glaring miss is the easy access that Bing currently provides to pornographic material. Admittedly, you do need to turn off the safe search option, but that is just a matter of three clicks. Also, Bing redirected my Indian computer to the UK version of the site. Currently the non-US sites are not nearly as good as the US version, so for now only the US version is worth really checking out. In terms of usability, Bing avoids the mouseclick like the plague. For web searches, a nice little preview feature lets a user see more content from the target page in addition to the regular ‘snippet’ without actually clicking the search result.
Bing’s image search replaces pagination with infinite scrolling. Essentially, this implies that every time you scroll to the bottom of the results page, new results are appended and the scroll bar is reset to somewhere in the middle. Video search is even better — you can preview the video simply by pointing your mouse at a thumbnail in the search result. This is a nifty little feature given how bandwidth is ceasing to be an issue in today’s YouTube age. There are also a number of other features such as instant answers, shopping and health related search features and a session history that is maintained without you having to login. While some of these are exciting, they are merely accessories to a search portal, not central features.
Bing doesn’t quite change the rules of the game just yet, but Google-centric small businesses in the area of search engine optimisation (SEO) will do well to stay on top of its developments. It is a great opportunity for these businesses to invest in some Bing-related SEO strategies at an early stage and learn the ropes in case Google loses some market share in the near future. Microsoft may integrate Bing into the next release of Internet Explorer and Windows in some way or the other. This means that even if Bing is a close match to Google, its market share could potentially explode.
En fin, it’s a close call, but I’d stick with Google for now for a single reason — PageRank. Microsoft has taken giant steps in the right direction to get people ‘Binging’, but as the recursive acronym itself suggests, Bing is not Google.
The writer is an IT services consultant and blogs at http://blog.rohandsa.com
Sunday, June 7
Daily Humor at a new URL
All right, all you crazy fans of mine who can't enough of me, please take note of a change of address for Daily Humor. The blog will now reside at:
Please update your bookmarks accordingly.
RSS feeds will continue to work as normal for Feedproxy feeds. For other feeds (Atom etc.), please replace "http://daily-humor.blogspot.com" with "http://blog.rohandsa.com".
The old URL will still work, of course, but it will tell you that my site isn't checked for spam and suchlike. Don't believe it - my site is clean. I wash it everday.
Tenjewberrymud.
Please update your bookmarks accordingly.
RSS feeds will continue to work as normal for Feedproxy feeds. For other feeds (Atom etc.), please replace "http://daily-humor.blogspot.com" with "http://blog.rohandsa.com".
The old URL will still work, of course, but it will tell you that my site isn't checked for spam and suchlike. Don't believe it - my site is clean. I wash it everday.
Tenjewberrymud.
The ageless Leander Paes
While India began their T20 title defence under the spotlight with much fanfare, at the same time an ageless Indian performer won yet another title in one of the most competitive sports on earth.
Congratulations Leander Paes on your fifth Slam.
Congratulations Leander Paes on your fifth Slam.
Tuesday, June 2
RamaRaju Surgical Cotton
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