Pramod Mahajan expired finally!! His brother shot him from point blank range! Quite unbelievable! The irony is that he himself had helped his brother in procuring the licence for the gun which finally became instrumental in his death!
After Rajiv Gandhi and Madhavrao Scindia, India lost one more promising and capable leader. He was a capable politician and had affected Maharashtra’s politics since quite some time.
My sympathies with his family.
We a bunch of few friends have started and launched a new Indian technology forum. Its called TechSpot. It has many sections and very active member set.
I am glad and proud to be a part of team techspot. Registration is for free. 
See you there.
My 13 year old nephew – Manan – has his birthday coming up soon. He is a topper in his school and has stood first in his class all throughout. As with all 13 year olds, he is very fond of emailing, computer games, etc. We were wondering what to gift him this year! He wanted Counter Strike. But we were not too keen on gifting a computer game. He will waste time one it. Additionally, we have already gifted him Need for Speed, Brian Lara Cricket and a USB Wheel on his previous birthdays.
One idea was a guitar. He has mentioned it many times over that he wants to start learning it in the coming summer vacation. He already plays keyboards, although he is still a newbie. But a guitar wasn’t sufficient! After all its a gift from so many of us! We needed to give him something more. Something that will excite him.
After much thinking, I came up with an different gift idea and all of us agreed it will excite him. The new gift is a website!! A blog!! 
I will soon register a domain for him and install Word Press for him. I am pretty sure he will enjoy blogging and the sheer idea of having his own website will make him proud. He will flaunt it in front of his friends and feel really good! He has won prizes for his writings earlier at inter-class and inter-school events so he should be a good blogger and a blog of an intelligent 13 year old will make for a good reading! I am now looking forward to it.
I have a habit of reading thru the user’s manual of all the stuff that I buy. So was the case with the Nokia N70. But I must say I was completely disappointed. The user’s manual sucks!! It looks like a very hurriedly written document with just the bare steps of operations in it.
For example, I couldn’t even find out the memory card that it supports. I find the bundled 64MB card insufficient. I want one with more capacity. Now which one should I take? I know it can take RS-DV-MMC. But can the phone work with 1GB or 512 MB cards? Will it become slow? Will it give errors? I don’t know 
because there’s no information on the subject in the user’s manual or on the Nokia’s site!
A manual is a document that gives complete information not just steps on writing SMS or making a call!! One can easily figure out such things on their own anyway! I can say that all that I have figured out so far has been because of my inquisitiveness with a little bit of help from the tutorials provided in the phone. The handset is great, but the user’s manual is below par!
Today morning, it was pretty cloudy and there were some non-seasonal showers!! That really got the temperature down a couple of degrees and the sweet smell of moist clay filled the environment. Showers are on even now when I am writing this.
My twin daughters, Mahi & Meha, saw the rains for the first time. Last year, they were not even a month old when monsoon started. No words can explain the amazing mixture of expressions on their innocent faces. The initial reaction was of a little fear, then surprise, amazement and finally joy. They got very excited when I streched their small hands out of the window and few drops fell on their little palms.
Today, I have so much to do that 24 hours look insufficient!! I took a break and blogged!
I had a holiday on Saturday and Sunday. But wanted to come to office on both the days. But I couldn’t come because Mahi wasn’t well. She is very fond of me and doesn’t go to anyone else when I am around. The heavy doses of medicine made her cranky and so I had to stay at home to look after her.
Now there is so much work to do and there’s so little time!
BTW, India won even the last one-day cricket match against Pakistan but the Indian juniors lost the u-19 world cup final to Pakistani juniors because of a spineless performance.
VSNL/Tata Indicom is going to dumps day by day. Earlier (a few years back), their whole database of users was sold and marketing calls started coming in. How do I know it was sold? Because the marketing caller had some info about me which was submitted only to VSNL while I took my first dial-up account.
Now they have started mailing their customers with clandestine adverts. 
I am not against advertising in their mails. Everyone tries to optimise their revenues. But they are trying to take people for a ride by covering it up as an informational mail. Here’s an example. This is the mail that I received yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »
Pepsi Cafe Chino – I liked the new ad! The Kick of Cola, the Kiss of Coffee! PepsiCo has launched a flavoured variant of their popular cola drink and relied on Prianka Chopra and Kareena Kapoor to take them through the summer season.
This ad remided me of Coca Cola Vanilla. Coke relied on the charishma 
of Vivek Oberoi and a stupid vackao packao ad to launch their new variant. No wonder Coke Vanilla was a flop product.
Due to a public holiday on 26th January, newspapers are not published . So there’s nothing to read in the morning. I miss my daily morning dose of news (Times Of India, Economic Times and Mumbai Mirror) Not reading newspapers makes me feel that the day has started on a wrong note. On top of it even Mid-Day didn’t come today
Additionally, the cable is also not working and therefore no news channels as well. I am completely starved of news! But net has come to me rescue to some extent
I yesterday read in the newspaper about two infant twin babies dying in Surat, Gujarat during the operation. Doctors tried to separate them. One of them had all limbs and the other had none! But they died during the operation. May they rest in peace.
The story made me recollect the early days of my wife’s pregnancy. When we came to know that she was carrying twins, the first thought that came to our minds was about the disaster called Siamese Twins! Life is so difficult for them and consequently for the rest of the family members. But doctor confirmed that they are in two separate sacks in the uterus and therefore can’t be Siamese. We had a big sigh of relief.
So far all the known operations to separate the Siamese Twins have failed. Hope they soon find out something for them so that they too can live a healthy and peaceful life.
