Off to Home

I shall be off for a brief vacation to my hometown for a few days. I’ll be back by the monday of next week i.e. 2nd of July. Though I do have access to the WWW from home, i dunno what is the state of moi PC over there…which has been lying unused for quite sometime! And there are no cyber-cafes in da vicinity of my home . But don’t worry…I will find out a way to circumvent these roadblocks……Cheers!

FIFA World Cup 2006 – Italy win a thriller

I know that I have not been writing about the goings-on at the Soceer World Cup as i used to do thelast fortight or so! But there is a reason for it…..when I started out penning the daily updates, I thought it would make for a nice read..but now the fizz has gone away somewhat and hence I thought it better to put an end to it and only write about the exciting outcomes.

And yesterday’s match was as exciting as any of them! Italy took on Australia in the round of 16 match and it was one helluva encounter. Australia were on a high after their sterling performance against Japan and their last-gasp efforts in clinching a draw against Croatia. Italy too were upbeat but were a striker short.The first half saw Italy squander many opportunities but so did Australia. The match took a decisive turn when Materazzi was sent off at the start of the second half and Australia pressed forward and tried to utilize their one-man-advantage. But Italy were staunch in their defense and parried out numerous attacks. When almost everyone was thinking that the match would go to Extra time, right at the fag end of injury time, Italy were awarded a controversial penalty kick after Neill brought down Grosso in the vicinity of the Australian goal. Francesco Totti scored from the spot kick and thousands of Aussies were heartbroken! Italy going on to win the match 1-0 and will meet Ukraine.

The second match of the day saw Ukraine outplay Switzerland 3-0 in a penalty shootout! In what was a disastrous shootout for the Swiss, they missed three chances while Ukraine took theirs! Ukraine will now meet Italy in the Quarter finals on Friday.

Canadian Grand Prix – Sunday Race

After scoring his fifth consecutive Pole position on saturday, Renault's Fernando Alonso won the Grand Prix Du Canada in a belligerent display of sublime racing. He won his 4th race on the trot and looks set to retain his Championship crown. In a race of attrition, which saw as many as 7 cars bite the dust, Alonso was initially troubled by Kimi Raikkonen for the lead.But once the McLaren of Kimi faced clutch problems which caused two botched-up pit-stops, Alonso won it comfortably. There was drama at the fag end of the race as Jacques Villeneuve crashed with 10 laps to go thus causing the Safety car to be deployed. And as all drivers huddled up behind Alonso, two back-markers separated him and Kimi with another three separating Kimi & Michael. Once racing resumed, Kimi and Michael managed to pass those backmarkers easily and we were in for a close duel between those two for the second place. In the end, Michael won it when Kimi spun off at the hairpin! So, for the second race in a row, Kimi was overtaken by Michael!

Fourth place went to Renault's Giancarlo Fisichella, who faced a drive-thru penalty for jumping the start, followed by Ferrari's Felipe Massa.Jarno Trulli took sixth place while Nick Hiedfeld & David Coulthard took the final point-scoring positions.

I could never watch the race uninterrupted as the Cable guy was having problems with some loose connexions causing intermittent signals! But when it finally stabilised, the race had entered the middle-stage when there was no drama! And with the circuit rapidly disintegrating, drivers had to come to terms with tyre grip and wear and one could see them twitching and turning at almost every corners! The next race on the calendar is at Indianapolis in a week's time and it remains to be seen how this year's race tuns out!

SPAM Comments

I think it is usual for most bloggers to find many comments to their posts, which contain only spam. Spam in the sense-unwanted referrals, links to websites which market stuff, p0rn0 messages and all kinda others. WordPress has an in-built Spam filter called Akismet, which regularly filters out such spam and keeps the comments section clean. In fact, I think I can safely assume that more the amount of spam that a blog attracts, the more popular it is

Well, the spam count on this blog has reached 200 jus' a few days ago And they were safely filtered out! So here's to Akismet for helping me keep my blog clean

Weekend Movie Watching IV

This seems to be becoming a habit for me! Writing about the weekend escapades i.e. For most working professionals, esp. for those in the IT/ITES industries, weekdays are like hell and weekends are the nirvana! It ain’t any different for me either. Weekends are reserved for fun & frolic and general lazying around…not to mention the various chores like washing/haircuts/manny-peddy etc! And oh yes! Movie watching

For a change, we decided on a telugu flick and homed on the Venkatesh-Aarthi Agarwal starrer Nuvvu Naaku Nacchav.An endearing love story with sublime melodies and quite a heady dose of humour & melodrama, it is an eminently watchable movie. From a simple love story to a complex one….Gangster was next on our list. Starring Emraan Hashmi and newcomers Shiney Ahuja and Kangana Ranaut, this was another movie from the Bhatt camp which had great music, gripping storyline and some good performances. A story of a man on the run from justice and how he reconciles with his lover while turning over a new leaf, it had some good performances from Shiney & Kangana. And know what? This was the first Emraan Hashmi movie that I saw !!! Music was its highpoint,even though the tunes were ‘lifts’ from other compositions!

Sunday was the day when we caught up the three Harry Potter movies being aired on Pogo! Though the movies are for children & teens, they’re quite fun to watch. And them being the Hindi versions, makes it all the more exciting! I was LOL hearing the names of the houses or even the spells being cast in hindi! Imagine Gryffindor as Garud-dwar or Slytherin as Naag-Shakti All the while, the movie-watching was intersped with the Soccer World Cup and the Formula 1 Race…so that’s the reason we could watch only a handful of’em!

Blogged with Flock

Canadian Grand Prix – Saturday Qualifying

The Formula One races resumed after a fortnight's break and this time, it headed out into the Americas. This weekend sees the Canadian Grand Prix, followed by Indianapolis a week later. Saturday Qualifying saw Fernando Alonso take the Pole position at the Gilles Villeneuve circuit. McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen had the second fastest time until a minute into the last session but it was overhauled by Alonso's teammate Giancarlo Fisichella at the last possible moment! It made an all-Renault front row. Kimi will start 3rd with -surprise surprise- Jarno Trulli in the Toyota alongside him. Ferrari's Michael Schumacher was on 5th with Nico Rosberg on 6th, Juan Pablo Montoya 7th and Jenson Button 8th. It was Alonso's fifth-successive pole position and I won't be surprised if he converts it into a race victory!!!

EDIT: I accidentally saved this post as a draft; Instead of posting it

Opera 9 Released

Though it was out a few days back, I downloaded it jus' today! Opera 9, the much hyped and talked-about browser has finally been released after what seemed like eons being in Beta .The latest version has some new features like BitTorrent support, Widgets capabilities,thumbnails-of-tabs, enhanced security features and other enhancements.See all of the features here.

I haven't tried out the BitTorrent feature yet but the thumbnails-of-tabs is quite a nifty- though a wee bit annoying – feature! It shows the thumbnail of the webpage when the mouse is paused on the tab! Maybe useful for some…but annoying to many! The browser also seemed to load webpages much faster than its previous versions and is far more lighter on the CPU as compared to the other two browsers I use – Firefox & Flock. With four tabs open, Firefox consumed almost double the CPU as Opera But Opera doesn't offer the sheer customisibility as Firefox…but thatz another story! For the record, this post is made through Opera 9.0

Useful Info: TechCrunch | CNET Review | TheRegister |

Of Restarts & Reboots

Yesterday might have been the first time that I have rebooted my machine thsi many times within a short span of an hour or so! Sounds crazy all right but couldn't help it!

First it was the turn of Adobe Professional fetching its updates. I had version 7.0.5 and had put off getting the updates for versions 7.0.7 and 7.0.8 until yesterday. The download was about 30MB thereabouts but what was inane was that each of the three update files was downloaded and installed separately It was what one would call an 'incremental update'!!! Second in line was my in-house anti-virus scanner's updates to be downloaded and installed. This involved around three reboots as there was a Scan Engine-upgrade involved as well. And as if it had 'sensed' all of this updating going on, Windows decided to run the Microsoft Update utility and downloaded some 'Critical' updates as it quite so often calls its 'Plugs' for various leaks found out by Security companies the world around!

Within a period of an hour, I think I must'ave rebooted my machine almost a dozen times!But at the end of it all, I could heave a sense of relief as all the updating was over and done with