Bored

Well my last post was how eventful my past few days have been including going to Kullu-Manali, watching numerous movies n all. And since then its been a complete turnaround. Past few days have been boring like hell.

Hardly had any work in office for past few days apart from reading few things here and there. And as reading is the least liked thing for me, its been amazingly boring time at office. Since morning 9am after the routine mail checking (though there's hardly any mail there, but still its a routine !!) i start thinking of the time to pass by, or for the next coffee break :), after that lunch, then another coffee break. Then finally the best time starting at 6-6:30pm when i can go and play TT !! Wow what a time i am having ! In all the time in between i am either browsing here n there reading few cricket articles, tech articles, numerous RSS feeds, checking online scores (if there's any match going on). This is just about all. Hardly get any forwards too, to pass my time either :) In between, sometimes luckily (!!) i get a few issues from the previous work and i happily do those ! But they are too minor to consume much of the time. This was all about the time @ office, the time other than office time hasn't been too interesting either. Haven't watched any movie for long, haven't watched many cricket/football matches, haven't blogged for long. I seriously wonder, God , wtf have i been doing all these days ? Anyhow here is another weekend ready to pass by with me doing nothing so i decided to blog to pass my time. It's as early as 10:32 am on Saturday, so i still have a long-2 weekend to pass by. So i plan to blog a few more posts. Few of them are which i have been wanting to write for long. They soon would be coming:

1. The Greatest ODI ever (Aus v/s SA)

2. India v/s England Test series.

As a cricket buff, i just couldn't imagine me not writing about the first one atleast !! If i have even more free time and the urge to write i might just put a blog post on Ricky Ponting !

Till then its me signing off.

Last Month

Well again i am writing after a pretty long gap. Sometimes i wonder what to write, sometimes i wonder when to write and sometimes WHY to write ? Last month or so has been pretty eventful for me. Love is in the air it seems. Not for me for sure, but i have seen 4-5 love marriages happening around me. Including of two of my classmates Rumit and Nidhi.

This was a pretty important occasion, with both bride and groom well known to us :). It turned out to be a great wedding night as well. Meeting all those old friends, dancing all the way in the baraat for over an hour or so. Few of us even danced to the DJ at the wedding place. Not many apart from a few of us batchmates were dancing, but who cared. We enjoyed it to the fullest. The wedding was pretty good as well, with all those rituals n all :).

The reception was to be held in Kullu. So we 3 of us (me, Gogia n Negi) planned to go to the reception. So we took Friday off from office, and went to Kullu-Manali trip + reception ceremony. An unexpected fog delayed our journey, and we missed few of their rituals, notably their folk dance. We had dhaam. Then on next day we went for Manali. For the first time in life i saw snow :), it was few kilometers ahead of Manali on our way to Solang Valley. We came back on Sunday night. All in all it was a pretty good journey, we had a lot of fun.

Apart from these weddings i have also seen a lot of movies in last month or so. The movie list includes-
1. Chronicles of Narnia.
2. Rang De Basanti
3. Zinda
4. Fun with Dick and Jane
5. BluffMaster
6. Taxi No. 9211
7. Final Destination 2
8. Crash

Only 2 of these movies i watched on PC, rest all were on the big screen :), and luckily for me most of these movies have been pretty good. With Zinda, RDB, Crash and Bluffmaster being very good. While Taxi No 9211 was good, so was Narnia (childish though !). Final Destination 2 would be a pretty exciting movie for one who hasn't watched the first part. But as i had watched the first part it was not too exciting. To me it was the same old story, just the way in which ppl got dead was changed :). Fun with Dick and Jane was pathetic, we went to see the movie, expecting it to be a typical Jim Carrey movie containing a lot of humour, be it idiotic. But it turned out to be lot more serious stuff, which we never intended to watch. But anyhow we had to bore it.

Zinda, RDB, BluffMaster and Taxi No 9211 are all part of this new born Hindi cinema, which is producing more and more good films these days

Apart from all this i watched Barcelona led by irresistible Ronaldinho beating Chelsea to reach the quarters of the Champions League. While defending champions Liverpool were shocked by Benfica. In other major results Arsenal shocked Real Madrid. For once Arsenal are performing well in the European Competition. AC Milan cruied past Bayern Munich. While Lyon, Juventus and Villareal were the other quarter finalists. For me its going to be one of the 3 - Barcelona, AC Milan and Lyon who is going to take away the trophy.

On the cricketing front, England led by Freddie Flintoff are giving Indians a tough fight, while the Aussies after being down 2-0 in the series against the South Africans (which included them being dismissed for 93 in 2nd match) have fought back to level the series 2-2. And as i write this they are 67 for none in 10 overs in the final ODI and looking good to take the series, though a lot is to be played still in this match. And if South Africans manage to lose this series after being 2-0 up, they will really wonder what will they need to do to beat this Aussie team. This surely was/is their best chance.

With this i signoff, till the lazy writer decides to write again :)

PS: This is the first post from my laptop :)

Random Thoughts

Writing after a long time, actually have been a tad busier and far more lazier. Anyhow here i am writing again :)

What a difference a few days or may a few minutes can make ? Really a lot, just a few days back i read Lebron James of Cleveland Cavaliers (NBA team) was booed at their home ground by the home fans !! And this was just a week after he was MVP (most valuable player) at the NBA-All Stars game. He followed that MVP performance by averaging over 35 points per match in next few games. Even in this game against Wizards he scored 26 points, but in second half he missed 8 consecutive shots from the open game and scored just 4 off 12 free throws. It was surely a performance which lead to his team's defeat. But did he really deserved booes at the end of the game ? It was a performance even he would be ashamed of, but this bad spell of few minutes turned the home fans' cheers into jeers for him.

This was from the sports field but doesn't the real world behaves in the same way as well. In reality too the world seems so unforgiving. People forget the good deeds pretty quickly especially when the you perform a blunder. Okay, it's other way round as well aka people forget your blunders quickly when you perform well. So what infers from here is that the world (the people around you) have short memories, so don't get affected by them at all. Don't get overjoyed at the praise/cheers and don't get disheartened by the jeers by the people around you. A line from Baz Luhmann's Sunscreen song supporting this -
"What ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either"

Few more life fundas from the same song, which i really like:

"Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts,
don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead,
sometimes you’re behind…the race is long,
and in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults;

if you succeed in doing this, tell me how."

Life would much more easier, if only one can follow all these advices. Am TRYING to follow these.

If anyone reading this blog hasn't heard this song, they can put a request here i can mail it :)

I think its enough for now. Will try to be bit more regular.

Windows "Live" review

So finally mez got some time to write this. Microsoft is going into internet services in a big way with their windows "live" platform. Very recently they've released beta of lot of their live services incl. Mail, messenger et al. I'll review each one of those one-by-one.

1. Windows Live Mail: Well, its interface looks really cool with all those drag n drop, *almost* outlook like looks, 2 gigs space (yes, finally they r on level terms with Y!, and GMail on mail space). But, the downside (atleast 4 now) is that it only works on IE6, surely not firefox, but surprisingly not even on IE7 beta 2, which are the only 2 browsers i have @ my office pc. So i haven't been able to use it much. But, on first looks it has a really easy to use interface. Just hoping that FF & IE 7 support comes soon enough, and so does the horizontal preview pane. Surprise is that on FF an error message comes "Firefox support coming soon", but on IE7 beta2 its a clear page :). Overall, its a great step forward in terms of mail interface. I wonder when is the so much talked about Yahoo ! Mail beta is coming, which was also supposed to have the similar outlook like interface, surely MS has beaten Y! on that with this live mail.

2. Windows Live Messenger: The main look and feel of WLM 8.0 remains quite similar to the good ol' msn messenger, but it has few new features. To me, the best features added are the offline messages and invisible mode. Finally, yes after a long-2 wait i am able to send offline messages on WLM/MSN ! It seems, MS ppl have finally realised that *SOMETIMES* ppl do get *Offline* and few people might need to send them some message (not email) even on those times. Also the invisible login mode is a good addon, ofcourse its not as configurable as yahoo's stealth settings is, which even lets u configure specific modes for *specific people*.

WLM's interface is *quite* easy to use, though to some ppl it is way too colorful. MSN has always been pretty good in things like custom emoticons n all. Voice quality on WLM was quite good and without any jitters or delay, though there was an echo, that might be 'coz of some loose wire or something, will have to check out on that again. Newer services like Music Mix n all hardly worked for me, i guess 'coz these are currently not available in india :(. Overall WLM is surely a quite good upgrade to MSN 7.5.

It surely is the most feature rich IM out there. Though i believe if it had been a tad simpler in looks, it might have been even better, just like Gtalk. It actually has nothing, just like most Google things its main advantage lies in simplicity. I hope it becomes a tad simpler in looks, and yes one more thing i don't like about WLM is that you just can't display the display pic of only one person, either u display of all or none, there should be something in between :)

3. Windows Live Bookmarks: Well, no comments about this one. This simply allows you to store your bookmarks on the internet publicly, its a direct *inspiration* from del.icio.us.

4. Windows Live Contacts: This seems pretty exciting, it's bit more than the normal address book/ contact list. It will notify the person who has subscribed to ur contact info of any change u make in ur contact info. Seems pretty good, u no longer need to notify all the people about change in ur address/contact no et al manually. But, ofcourse u will have to make them subscribe to ur contact :)

5. Windows Live "live.com": This again is a straight *inspiration* from Google's personalized homepage. But it still has lots of problems, and is rightly labelled as "beta", in general there are lots of "Ooops !!", quite often the feeds don't work, though its getting better from the time i started using. Now it also shows inline images on the blogs, which looks gud. Another problem with the live.com is that sometimes it doesn't remember the placement of my feeds correctly ! It also doesn't work on IE7 beta 2. Still its a pretty good site and is my homepage :)

Ok, this is not in the "live" platform, but is the medium which most people will be using to access this, yes its IE7 beta 2

6. Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2: First of all, if i had to name this release then i would have named it IE 7.0 PRE-ALPHA !! Its such a buggy beta 2 that i can't imagine how would the alpha and beta 1 would have been :o ? Most of the sites i have visited works incorrectly in it, including microsoft's own - live mail, live.com, even yahoo mail looks strange most of the times in it, and for any site that it works for, it shows a strange character at the end of the line, i guess that's the "newline" character, but wth ? They have added UDN support in IE7 but i dont think that should have any effect on the text of the page ? or should it ? anyhow till now i haven't found any setting from where i can get rid of those special newline characters being displayed, will keep finding :). Even the resized popup windows are not displayed correctly, most of the content of resized popups is missing.

Now to some good things - It has a far better look then the traditional IE, the menu bar is gone, tabbed-browsing is there, RSS integration is there, session saver is there. The best thing for me is that most used features have a 1-2 click access, including RSS feed subscription, add to favorites, change homepage n all. Another good thing seems that one can have multiple home pages, though when i set more than one homepage, the IE crashed ! maybe that was because i had set google.com as one of the homepages :). One more good feature is the "zoom" thing, it has been missing for long, and this again has 1-click access ! It seems relatively more secure in the sense that by default it disables all activex plugins, and warns user about it. And most important thing it sucks far lesser memory than FF, but it seems IE too has memory leaks. Once i left both FF and IE open for about 2-3 days and i saw that IE is taking around 190MB memory while FF was taking around 250MB memory. So both eat memory big way, but for IE unlike FF, it surely wasn't noticeable in 3-4 hrs of usage. Another good thing, is that IE7 shows ClearType Font. After installing IE7 fonts of even the Outlook changes and it surely looks more smooth and clear.

To me it is surely more feature rich and easy to use than the vanilla Firefox (without installing all those fancy extensions), so to lot of users IE 7.0 will be a better alternative than Firefox. Ofcourse for nerds and geeks FF will remain the better browser because of the numerous extensions available. Which i guess IE can hardly catch. All this para ofcourse assumes that all the major bugs i listed above will be solved in the main IE 7.0 release :)


Just to sum it up, we users are surely in for some good times as we are getting better and better services for free :). A hearty thanks to Google for that.

I guess its more than enough, n btw mez pretty happy that i have wrote quite a part of this post on my cell-phone :)

Pet Peeves

Well i am writing this post coz i have been tagged by Zarine . This is the first time i've been involved with a tag :)
Anyway i tried writing 20 most annoying things for me. So here it is:

1. Lies and Liars !! Ok mez not a raja harishchandra myself, but i lie only when its absolutely necessary. I am really annoyed by people lying even at trivial things.
   
2. People not replying to messages/mails/calls.
3. WAITING, u can say mez a tad restless, but anyway waiting for someone is pretty annoying, especially when people arrive late for movies n we miss some part of it, also seeing "brb" on messenger is hell !
   
4. When my TT partner plays really bad at crucial/deciding points in match, like doing a service fault, playing a shot he shouldn't play et al. I have already lost the company doubles TT final coz of this. God i miss Poker at these times, im sure he would be my best doubles' partner :D
   
5. My boss coming after 6pm n saying "we have to do this today", "shall we discuss ..." !!
6. When some how magically my bro manages to get disturbed by my whispering on phone sitting in other room, my typing on keyboard, clicking of mouse, watching TV without volume !!
7. People completely overlooking my suggestions n !deas.
8. When bosses say - "You can do this parallely". Come on god has made us single tasking only. i don't run in multiple threads ! i can do only 1 thing at a time, if mez doing 1st thing i cant do second and vice-versa !
   
9. Woh log jo girgit ki tarah rang badalte hain, they behave differently with "some" people and completely different with "some other" people.
10. People who don't have any !dea what's going on in cricket field, which 2 teams are playing, and suddenly as they see someone seeing the score, start asking scores like they are the biggest cricket fans around !!
    
11. Few ex-cricketers (the so-called experts) who keep giving some of the most idiotic statements, which are eagerly published by media. Latest example - gavaskar sayin india shud play 3 openers, and agarkar was dropped coz he was not in chappell's "inner circle". sheer nonsense !
12. The flat batting tracks and one-sided series' in cricket, which is making cricket a complete bore.
13. Chain mails/messages n Spams. I can't believe how come people believe in those lines in chain mails - "if you send this to x no. of ppl, this will happen n all". AFAIK gals are the ones who believe in these very easily or atleast indulge in sending these chain mails.
    
14. People who like to show-off.
15. People who make jokes over others and get really pissed off when someone cracks a joke over them !
    
16. Power cuts, slow internet speed, slow responding PCs.
17. Man Utd coach Alex Ferguson not buying any good midfielder for last few seasons, which i firmly believe is urgently required to revive Man Utd.
18. Orkut, its donuts, its bugs.
19. Writing this list !!!
20. Did i said writing all this ??
    

That's it i guess. I guess i was pretty honest in writing those :). Now do i have to tag few ppl as well :o ? Ok i'll tag Sanjay and Phoenix . I wonder if they'll comply :D

Addendum:
Now to some of the big sporting sights of the week (wasn't this expected on my blog ??)

1. Kobe Bryant of LA Lakers scored a mind-blowing 81 points alone in a NBA match against Toronto Raptors. That's second most in the history of NBA !
Here's an article over it - link

An excerpt from the above article:
"You begin by telling yourself you've never seen anything like this. As the game wears on, you begin admitting to yourself that you'll never see anything like this again."

Yes, i am an AI fan (Allen Iverson) but still that was simply mindblowing from a player who has simply been mindblowing over the last few matches and is looking for his first MVP.

2. Well this one wasn't anywhere near to even the smallest achievement. But i am mentioning it coz this was simply a treat for my eyes ! In last VB series match between Aussies and SL, Michael Clarke played an awesome stroke which surely needs a mention on my blog.

"Muralidharan was bowling to Clarke, Clarke was looking to give him the charge, he put his front foot out of the crease trying to come down the track, seeing that Murali pitched the ball a tad shorter in length. Clarke was just TOO quick to realise that, the ball pitched just a bit outside off-stump and as any Murali off-spinner, it came back a long way into Clarke. But Clarke had the talent and quick reflexes to go to his backfoot immediately and the audacity to upper-cut the ball OVER the extra-cover fielder. This was simply a treat to watch. A young audacious batsman just dropped from the Test series taking on one of the best spinners ever in trying situation. For the record, Aussies lost the match in the end. "

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few

Techdirt:Banned Searches In Google And MSN
The above article points out a few search terms that seems to be banned by the search engines like Google and MSN. This is pretty interesting and annoying (?). After this, this is just another incident showing that soon its not going to be quite safer to use search! Most of the people (atleast people like me !) rely on searches like Google to reach anything. Most people think of the search engines as the dumb things, who will just reply to their queries and help them. But i guess, these days this is not true. These days search engines seems to be analysing our queries and deciding whether search terms are "GOOD" enough that the results cannot be misused. Ofcourse this is a pretty weak attempt to improve security. Search engines also seems to be keeping track/record of what query was used by which person, which might just be asked/used by various law authorities (as in the link above) to identify people. So in future beware of the search terms you are using. God forbids you, if you search for White House and "some weapon", and the very next day some attack happens on White House! You might just end up in jail ;). Ok this is a tad far-fetched, but still quite possible seeing the current trends.

Browsing down the chain of links in the first article i read a pretty interesting quote : "It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."



In this case, the "many" is Google's servers. The "few" is you. :)

Then browsing down the i get this link which points the current scenario's quote : "The needs of the few outweight the needs of the many". Its an interesting read :)

Happy searching then !!

Update: MSN update on the 2nd link -> here

Priya Get-together + Movie Review - Wedding Crashers

Last Saturday we (me, doc, vik, gogia, ranjan) met at priya as doc was leaving for his new job @ Microsoft, Hyderabad. So he was supposed to treat us :). Plus vik had came back from UIUC for his semester break. We had planned to watch "Wedding Crashers" - 11:30 show, and were supposed to meet @ 11 am. As always me, the punctual fella [ :D], got there on time, or rather a few minutes before time. Vik came @ around 11:15, and he decided to watch the movie too (earlier he wasn't going to). The doc/ranjan jodi as always came late. Even later then the show time !! Between those two its always a competition of who is going to come later ! Gogia would join later after the movie.

We finally entered the hall @ 11:40am, to my amazement priya's security check is pretty strict ! They even made me press the cellphone keys, just to check if its actually a cellphone :D. Gosh we lost another few minutes there, then we suddenly found doc disappearing somewhere ! As always he does some doc-esque things :), we finally got to our seats after missing around 10-15 minutes of movie. With late-latif friends like these, i've now got used to missing few minute of movie almost everytime now :) . Actually i can't remember when was the last time i watched a movie from start !

So finally we began watching - "Wedding Crashers". This movie is supposed to be the number 1 comedy movie of 2005. And hell it actually deserves that spot. Its really entertaining. Really funny all the way till the end. The movie is about two guys who crash weddings (even funerals in the end !). They look out for gals @ wedding and funerals for one-night stands. Wow, what a creative !dea. Reminds me of lots of hostel mates who used to crash weddings for free n good dinner. But, hell this was no where near fun as this movie !dea :). So all was well till these 2 guys decide to crash wedding of the daughter of a Presidential candidate. As always both of them were exceptionally brilliant in wooing their targets. The "Big-guy" Jeremi got to so-called "virgin" Gloria. While the other one, John needed some more time to move his story with Claire, forward. He gets a chance when Gloria forces his father to invite both of these to their family compound. Here we get to meet an amazingly weird family, with a gay-artist son, foul-speaking grandma, an unfaithful wife (in her words - "I've been married for 30 years, but have been loyal only 3 years !"), a rich-mean Claire's boyfriend, almost nymphomaniac Gloria. The story moves forward with some witty situations, Gloria the creator of most of 'em with her too bold sex moves (including a handjob @ the dinner table with whole family around !!). As expected their lies are revealed, but not before both the couples start to "love" each other. While Jeremi gets Gloria still, John *almost* loses Claire. He decides to continue his wedding crashing, but he literally crashes most of them. He even tries to crash a funeral, where he realises that how painful its to lose one's love (thoda sa senti stuff :) ) and runs to join the Jeremi and Gloria's wedding where he *almost* proposes Claire, who dumps his active bf for her love John ! And so the movie has an expected happy ending.

To sum it up, its a great movie, one of THE best movies i have seen for quite a long time. This gives weddings a totally new dimensions. Gosh, its a damn interesting profession, now mez ruing why am i a software engg, wedding crashing expertise would have been great !! (hehe just kidding) . I really liked few of the scenes/dialogues -

1. Scene1 - Jeremi trying to propose Gloria:
Jeremi - I think its time, we should take our relationship to next level. (thinking of marrying Gloria)
Gloria - Yes, i was thinking of the same. I think we should try with another girl, i really like Brazilian girls !!
Jeremi - I was thinking of something else, but yeah, ur !dea sounds great !!

pretty witty :)))

2. Scene2 - John proposing to Claire (this is a bit senti or witty, depends upon the way u look at it !)
John: I am NOT asking you to marry me, i am just asking you not to marry him (her bf), and give me a second chance !

Ok, so that was with the movie review. If you are reading this post and haven't seen the movie go and watch the movie.

After the movie, we 4 went to McDs, gogia joined us soon and vik left after giving me the headphones i had asked him to get for me. Did i told u they rock ? Then we had lunch at "Khwaja *" in midst of some routine job and future related talks. The lunch was more or less an average one. Then did some "bird-watching" around Priya and we all left for our home.

All in all a pretty good Saturday. Though this meet also signifies that one more of my friend is leaving to different place all-together. So now almost all of my friends have moved to far away places in Bangalore, Hyderabad and some foreign lands (illinois, kobe, pisa..)

Test Player of 2005

Here Harsha discusses over the player of the year. He discusses names of 4 players, all of them were amazing this year. I will start with Warne -

1. Shane Keith "Warney" - Had an extordinary year with the ball, gave his heart out in Ashes with both bat n ball. Finished the year with record 96 wkts and 416 runs (quite good for a bowler). He became first bowler to take 600 wkts in tests and broke Dennis Lillee's record for highest number of wkts in a year.

2. Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff - Proved himself to be THE best allrounder at the moment. Almost single handedly won Ashes for England. Finished the year with 709 runs and 68 wkts. Performed with amazing consistency and with a never-tiring approach.

3. Ricky "Punter" Ponting - Inspite of all the questions raised over his captaincy, especially after losing Ashes, he remains THE most prolific batsmen of the year in both the Tests and ODIs. One of 3 (i guess) batsman to achieve that feat. Scored 2nd highest runs ever in a calendar year - 1543. Hit 6 centuries, scored runs against all teams, in all countries (ok not India). Has now scored 27 centuries. And the rate at which he is scoring runs, im sure he will surpass Sachin's century record in less than 2 years !!

4. "Sir" Brian Charles Lara - Had an amazing year again. Broke Border's record for highest Test runs. scored 1110 runs in the year in just 9 tests. Became the 2nd highest double century hitter. Scored 5 centuries in the year, n surprisingly no halfcentury !! Has now scored 32 test hundreds, another one who is seriously threatening Sachin's record of 35 centuries. im sure he will do this in this year itself !

These were the 4 players harsha discussed, plus he named 2 other players because of some non-cricketing reasons, i won't get into that :). Instead i would add 1 more player who i think deserves to be atleast nominated :) , he is Inzamam.

5. Inzi - Scored 1000 runs in just 8 tests. Turned the Pakistani team on his own. Starting with that amazing 180+ in his 100th test to draw the series against India. He carried on and had an even amazing series against the Ashes victors England. He scored 2 hundreds in 2nd Test, scored 97 in 3rd. Scored pretty consistently at really crucial times in both forms of the game.

Its pretty tough for me to select between these coz all the top 4 had an amazing run, add to this the fact that Warney is my all time favorite player, Lara is my favorite batsman, Flintoff is my favorite allrounder (quite obvious) and Ponting one of the batsman i love to watch. It becomes EVEN more difficult.

Anyway personally i would select Shane Warne as the Test Player of the year 2005, simply coz of his outstanding performances throught the year. His ability to perform at his best inspite of all those controversies and family troubles. And ofcourse because of some personal bias :D

Welcome 2006 and Bye Bye 2005

Another year has gone by, and i have gone a year more older :D than the last time. I will try to look back at some big moments of 2005.

On the personal front -

1. I switched job. Yes finally i moved on to....
2. I started blogging :)
3. Lot of friends moving away to places farther away from the NCR.
4. Ya i got my new cellphone !
5. I got my home PC upgraded, and got an upgraded office PC as well ('coz of company switch) :)
6. I got a broadband connection at home.

So in all life's has been quite a bit better this year for me. Hopefully it gets even better in 2006. Key is to remain happy :)

Mez a sport fanatic, so will surely look at the 10 biggest moments in sports in 2005 for me.

1. Liverpool winning the Champions League. They came back from 0-3 down at half-time against Milan, to complete THE GREATEST comebacks of all times in the European finals. It was arguably THE greatest finale ever played. Ironically, Shevchenko, the man who won it for Milan in penalties 2 years ago, the European player of the year, missed the last penalty to hand over the trophy to Liverpool.

2. England regain Ashes by beating Aussies 2-1. If Liverpool v/s Milan was THE greatest football finale ever played, this one was THE greatest Test series ever played. Both team fought hard and tough. And after a series of enthralling, close and nail biting encounters England beat Aussies 2-1 after being 0-1 down. Warne with 40 wkts and over 250 runs was the star, while Flintoff was THE power behind this unbelievable achievement for England with both bat and ball. Lee too fought hard for Australia.

3. Brian Charles Lara beat the Border's record for most number of Test runs with his brilliant 226 at Adelaide against Aussies.

4. Sachin Tendulkar scored the record 35th century to beat Sunil Gavaskar's record for 34 centuries in Tests.

5. Shane Warne became the first bowler to reach 600 wkts, and he had a remarkable year which saw him picking up record 96 wkts in the calendar year, breaking his country-mate Dennis Lillee's record.

6. Alonso became the youngest ever F1 champion, and Schumi could only manage 1 victory !

7. Federer continued to reign supreme in tennis , with occassional losses, notably to Safin in Australian Open semis, and to Nalbandian in Master's final (his first final loss in 20 finals).

8. Ganguly's reign finally ended, and Rahul Dravid is the new captain. Along with Greg Chappell he is taking Indian team to new heights.

9. Chelsea win the English Premier League after 50 years.

10. Ronaldinho leds Barcelona to win the Spanish La Liga.


Some of the sports person who really made their mark in 2005-


1. Michael Hussey - An average of over 150 in ODIs, backed up by 90+ average in Tests, with some of the most memorable centuries/innings you have ever seen played with tail and team has their backs to wall. This guy has been awesome, he has been the debutant of the year, getting chance to wear the baggy green only at the age of 30 after scoring tons of runs in domestic cricket, he has literally snatched a position in the Aussie lineup with the sheer weight of his runs.

2. Ronaldinho - World Player of the Year 2004, 2005. European Player of the Year 2005. Need i say more ? Words just don't describe him. Just go and watch this magician play and you will forget everyone else.

3. Shane Keith Warne - 96 wkts in the calendar year, 40 wkts in the Ashes, gave his everything in the Ashes by not only taking wickets but by also scoring crucial runs. This old war-horse never seem to get tired. Neither his breakoff with his wife, nor all those scandals can make this guy under-perform. A sheer genius, an all time LEGEND, a sheer magician, who has made me (and millions of others) watch cricket just to see his magic with the ball. He remains my biggest idol ever.

4. Andrew Freddie Flintoff - He's one guy who showed that Aussies are beatable, but that needs someone to take everything out of himself. He gave it his everything, seems to have never ending sources of energy. Has been THE man behind all the english success.

5. Frank Lampard - This Chelsea, England player has risen leaps and bounds under Jose Mourinho. He is not only one of the most prolific scorers in English football but has become one of the best midfielders alongside Ronaldinho.

Rest- Some of the other players who made it rich in 2005 are - Ricky Ponting (most runs in 2005 in both Tests and ODIs), Inzamam (has shown amazing consistency), MS Dhoni (remarkable first year), Irfan Pathan, Justin Kemp, Dravid, Symonds, Bravo, Brett Lee, KP, Fernando Alonso, Raikkonen, Federer, Rafael Nadal, Nalbandian plus a few more maybe.


Some of the players who lost big time in 2005 are-

1. Saurav Ganguly (quite obvious choice, but he deserved nothing less than what he actually got !!)

2. Michael Clarke (lost his test place, a tad unlucky maybe)

3. Gillespie, Martyn, Hayden and Kasprowicz (lost their places in various Aussie sides due to Ashes loss)


I guess its more than enough.

Happy New Year 2006 to all of you :)

Firefox Extensions

I hate Firefox, but i still use it ! I simply hate Firefox for the amount of RAM it eats up. It simply sucks. I have never seen any software program eating up that much amount of memory. It simply keeps sucking up memory like a vampire sucks blood from human body. On my office machine i've seen FF eating up more than 450 MB of memory. Damn it, after every few hours i have to close it, sometimes i have to kill firefox.exe as well so that i can restart the FF. It sucks in most java sites, sites which refresh quite often, it sucks in some flash sites, but still im using it.

I love its tabbed-browsing, ya ya Opera has that too but it has ads :). One more thing i simply like about Firefox is some of its extensions. Some of them are really great. I will list some of my favorites here:

1. Tab Mix Plus - This is easily the best possible extension you can find. It provides every almost every feature you would ever require relating to tabbed browsing including the session restore. Its simply awesome, though its newer version had an annoying bug - If you upgrade from tab mix plus previous version, it will restore every tab twice !! But in a fresh install of newer version this works fine. Rating : 5/5

2. Dictionary Tooltip - This is a pretty cool extension for illiterates like me, who have to check the dictionary every few minutes while reading on web. You can configure which dictionary site you want to use and you simply have to double-click the word, you want meaning off and you will see the meaning in a pop-up ! Really cool. Rating : 4.5/5

3. Performancing - This is extension which i have started using just 3-4 days ago. This one lets you blog easily ! This sits in statusbar as a simple notepad-esque icon. You click it, it opens a split window where you can type (paste) your blog entry and in one-click it will post that entry to your blogging site be it blogger, wordpress et al.. Really cool. I used this for the last post and am going to use this only from now on, though i wish it had the option of changing the font of posts too (or had default font as my favorite Verdana ;) ). It also lets you blog a link by a simply click. Rating : 4/5

4. IE TabView - This is a cool extension, which on a single click lets you change the rendering engine from Geeko (Firefox) to IE's rendering engine. Pretty useful for sites that doesn't open well in Firefox. You simply click on the firefox icon in the status bar, it will open the same page in IE. It seems a bit slow and buggy sometimes, but is pretty useful. Rating : 3.5/5

5. Paste and Go - Small and Sweet is the word which describes this extension. It just combines your two tasks "Paste" and "Go" into a single task. Very cool. Rating : 3.5/5

6. Adblock - This one is pretty good too, it lets you block almost every ad on a webpage. Simply right-click any ad/frame and just click Adblock ! Cool. It also lets you use wildcard characters. I have started using this more extensively at home, especially since when i saw my broadband MB download meter going up like a delhi's auto-rickshaw meter. I use this sometimes in office too, especially when some scantily-dressed babes suddenly appears even on harmless sites (ya that's news, mail sites et al only and none of what you perverts are thinking) - i don't want to get blamed without doing anything :D. Rating : 3.5/5

7. Search Status - This is another simple extension i have started using since this week only. It shows the Google's page rank and Alexa's (?) page rank for a webpage. A good feature is that it also shows the Related Links to that webpage ! Can be pretty useful when you need to visit some similar sites. Rating : 3/5

8. FlashGot - This is also a good extension it integrates your download manager with the Firefox. Especially useful for larger download files, where you need to download using download manager only and might require pausing and all. Rating : 2.5/5

These are some of my favorite FF extensions. IE 7 is going to be released soon, with tabbed browsing, RSS support, so-called improved security. I wonder if i would switch to IE, mainly because some of these extensions will be absent ! Maybe some of them will be there, maybe i will switch to IE or atleast use it a bit more. But for now i am hooked to Firefox.

Rumour of the week - Microsoft buying Opera !!

Man this would be something, it would be a big setback for Firefox, because even the greatest of IE critics and FF fans regards Opera as the best browswe available with most of FF features *INSPIRED* from Opera. But i don't think MS are yet so desperate especially after they have put in so much of effort in bringing up IE 7. They cant simply dump all the hard and good work done by their employees and use something new suddenly.

Btw Merry Chrismas to all :)

Nirvana

Now i have a broadband connection at home. So now after waiting for so long, i am having an ultimate PC experience ! Now i've got pretty fast PCs with a fast internet connection both at office and home. What else u need in life ? It's simply nirvana !

My Office PC configuration reads : P IV 3.2 GHz with HT, 1 Gig DDR RAM, 160 Gigs HDD, 17' inch TFT, Win XP SP2, 4.26 Mbps downlink (which gives above 30kbps download speed all the time)

My Home PC configuration reads: P IV 2.8 GHz with HT, 256 MB DDR RAM, 40 Gigs HDD, 14' inch monitor, Win XP SP2, 256 Kbps mtnl broadband (which thus far has given around 30kbps download speed)

Ya my home pc config looks pretty inferior, but its ok i can bear with it for the timebeing ;) All n all its an ultimate experience, with Win XP booting so fast supported by a high end processor and RAM, it takes less than a minute between switching on the power button and seeing my desktop with every damn thing loaded completely :)

Cost of MTNL broadband : Rs 199
Cost of 1 Gig DDR RAM: Rs 4600
Inner Happiness with all this fast digital world: PRICELESS

Ok ok this sounds a typical software engineer whose life completely revolves around computers ? Hell yeah, if i hadn't been, then i wouldn't have been writing this blog post at midnight inspite of having to wakeup early to get back to office, just to sit in front of the 17' inch TFT !

Anyway enough for now !

Happy !

This last week has had some happy moments for me. I will list them down now :)

1. I finally got a broadband connection at home (Yes finally !!). It seems like ages i have been wanting this, but now finally i have got a MTNL broadband @ home.
2. Saurav Ganguly DROPPED from the Indian team.
3. Shane Warne becomes the highest wicket taker in a calendar year surpassing Dennis Lillee.
4. Man Utd are back to goal scoring ways with 2 big victories (4-0 against Wigan and 2-0 against Aston Villa)
5. India won the test match againt SL.

Amidst all these happy news there was a real sad moment , which i expected to be listed at the top of the above listed happy news !!

Meanwhile Champions League knockout draws have been announced. They are as below:

Bayern - Milan 21/02 08/03
Benfica - Liverpool 21/02 08/03
Real Madrid - Arsenal 21/02 08/03
PSV - Lyon 21/02 08/03
Chelsea - Barcelona 22/02 07/03
Rangers - Villarreal 22/02 07/03
Bremen - Juventus 22/02 07/03
Ajax - Internazionale 22/02 14/03

And astnoishingly for the 2nd year running Champions League will see arguably the 2 best teams in Europe fighting in the 2nd round itself ! Yes, Barca and Chelsea are scheduled to meet in 2nd round again. I can't believe this !! After 2 amazing matches last year, we are again in for some footballing treat with 2 best midfielders Ronaldinho and Lampard taking the centrestage. Apart from this fixture, there are 2 other tough fixtures for me. One is Bayern v/s Milan and the other is Real Madrid v/s Arsenal. So pretty exciting matches in prospect, this is going to be an exciting Feb n March !

My probable winners:
Milan, Liverpool, Real Madrid, Lyon, Barca, Villarreal, Juventus, Inter

In the End

It starts with one thing
I don't know why
It doesn't even matter how hard you try keep that in mind
I designed this rhyme
To explain in due time
All I know
Time is a valuable thing
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
Watch it count down to the end of the day
The clock ticks life away
It's so unreal
Didn't look out below
Watch the time go right out the window
Trying to hold on, but didn't even know
Wasted it all just to watch you go
I kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart
What it meant to me will eventually be a memory of a time when

I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn't even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn't even matter

You don't win silver. You lose gold
-- Nike Ad

High and low

I will start with a high. After quite a while a breathtaking and pulsating cricket match took place, though I missed that game completely, except for a few glimpses of the live scores on Cricinfo. Aussies started the game as an overwhelming favorite over the Kiwis after thrashing them by 147 runs in the previous match.

Aussies lost Gilchrist early, then Katich and Ponting steadied the Aussie innings, but both of them were out in quick succession. Brad Hodge soon followed them into the pavilion. It brought together 2 of the amazing Aussie talents, Andrew Symonds and Michael Clarke, both of whom are fighting for a place in the Test team to regain that elusive Baggy Green cap again. Both of them built a decent partnership with some watchful cricket to start off. But as Symonds reached his 50 off 70 deliveries things started getting difficult for the Kiwis. He somehow seemed to have developed some kind of hatred with the white cricket ball and he started hammering it all over the ground and stadium. His 2^nd fifty came of just 39 balls and if this wasn’t enough his 3^rd fifty came of a mere 16 balls! His innings finally came to an end in the 50^th over when he was bowled by Vettori for 156. But by then he had hit 11 fours and 8 sixes. 6 of those sixes were in a spell of 3 overs which costed Kiwis 61 runs. He hoisted Cairns for a hat-trick of sixes. This was simply one of THE most brutal knocks one could ever see. It reminded of the similar innings of 141no Symonds played at the 2003 World Cup against Pakistan. This innings once again proved that today’s ODI cricket is simply ruled by the sheer power of the likes of Symonds’, Dhonis, Afridis, Gilchrists, Kemps, Gayle’s et al. Somewhere in between you get a sheer quality or classy knock by Laras (rare in ODI’s these days), Dravids, Sachins, Pontings. Aussies finished with a huge score of 322 off their 50 overs with Clarke unbeaten on 82.

Kiwis started their innings with no one expecting them to give a fight, especially against the likes of Lee who balled splendidly in the last match to take 3/5 in 6 overs. But Kiwis too have their share of big hitters. Vincent started bravely taking on the pace of Lee and swing of Bracken. He blasted 71 off just 49 balls. But then the 2 newbie’s of Aussies cricket - Lewis and Clark too the centre stage reducing Kiwis for 156 for 5. Kiwis always have had a long batting lineup and this was to their rescue today. With Cairns, Oram and Mccullum always kept them in hunt, inspite of the asking rate reaching above 10 in last 10 overs. In the end Kiwis needed 24 runs off 2 overs. Lee bowled one of his most forgetful over of his life, giving away 18 runs including a waist high full-toss (no-ball) which went for four, plus some other bad deliveries. This meant that debutant and super-sub Lewis had to bowl the final over with Kiwis needing only 6 runs! But boy, didn’t he keep his nerves! Even the likes of Mcgrath will be proud of that over. This over was more than supported by an outstanding piece of fielding by Michael Clarke (who is doing his every bit possible to get back into the Test side, since being dropped from the Test side – he scored a double hundred in only state match, played 2 good knocks in both matches, picked up 2 outstanding catches in first match and now this run out) who threw the ball from the cover-point region to score a direct hit at the non-striker’s end to seal the match for the Aussies. In the end Aussies clinched the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy by winnings this thriller by 2 runs.

The moments like this fielding by Clarke, are simply the moments of brilliance or what I can also call magic which truly separates the GOOD and GREAT players/team. There’s a pretty thin line which distinguishes the GREAT team from the GOOD teams, in these crunch situations. The biggest example is the NBA matches, where in almost every match the point difference is just about 3-4 baskets or less, but still the BEST teams aided by GREAT players manages to produce those moments of magic quite often enough to stay on TOP.

Now to the low part, well m pretty disappointed to lose in the quarters of the singles TT tournament. Wish I could produce some of those moments of brilliance/magic often enough.

Back to Ground Zero

After the Ashes victory English Team must have been on cloud nine. But they have been brought to ground very painfully by the Pakistan team who just beat them 2-0 in the 3 test series. The series started with high-flying England fresh from their 2-1 Ashes victory over Australia in a confident mood to continue their unbeaten series run of over a year.

They were shown a preview of what lied in store for them in future with a series of batting collapses in the tour matches. But they started the test well led by the irrepressible Freddie Flintoff who again bowled his heart out to take some really crucial wickets, supported by some decent first innings batting performance they were on their way to another Test victory with a target of just 180 odd runs. But a miserable batting performance under some good bowling led by Shoaib Akhtar, Sami and Kaneria left them 0-1 down in the series where they SHOULD have been 1-0 up! Since then they were always doing the catching up. Good batting performance by Pieterson in both innings and Flintoff in 2nd innings helped them manage a draw in 2nd Test. While in 3rd test they squandered a 100+ runs first wkt partnership to get bowled out cheaply for 280 odd runs batting first. After that Pakistan simply made a run-riot. After losing 2-3 quick wkts M Yousuf (aka Yousuf Youhana) along with Kamran Akmal and the big Inzi led Pakistan to a gigantic score of 630 odd runs and at this time the best result possible for England was a draw. Ian Bell and Collingwood hung on for a big partnership but once Collingwood fell, England lost last 8 wkts in 43 runs to Shoaib and Kaneria to lose by an innings and 100 runs.

This big Pakistan series victory for me was marked by some inspirational batting by Inzamam and a reinvented Shoaib Akhtar. Not only Shoaib performed admirably well in his bowling (bowling with a lot of consistency throughout, mixing slower ones, yorkers et al) but his new found approach in batting was exceptional. Before this series he was looked as a tailender who can throw his bat a bit, but in this series he hung on for some match turning partnerships with Inzi in 2nd test and Yousuf in 3rd test. With both bat and ball he was simply great. This again proves that you need to give ur players some shock by dropping them, so that they don't become complacent. Yousuf too played quite well after a forgettable first test.

This surely will shut those mouths that were starting to say that England is the new number 1 team. Aussies haven't been the number team for so many years for nothing. They have build this position over a long period of time, not just overnight beating 1 or 2 teams. England are a pretty good team, but they still lack a bit of grittiness in the middle order. Collingwood and Bell did well in this test. But Pieterson and Flintoff are expected to do a bit more with the bat. In bowling it was pretty tough for the pacers on these unresponsive pitches, Flintoff bowled his heart out but still it wasn't enough. England desperately needs a quality spinner to take wickets on sub-continent tracks. They have an Indian tour coming up and neither Giles nor Udal (seeing by his no. of wickets in this series) seems not good enough to dislodge the in-form batting lineup of Dravid, Laxman, Sehwag, Sachin and Yuvraj (I hope he plays over Ganguly).

Let’s see how the England team gets over this huge loss. But a good team always bounces back so I expect English players will show some character and bounce back.

PS: Finally i got to play my first match in my on-going TT tournament, which turned out to be too easy with me winning by 21-1, 21-15. Now me into 3rd round of singles tournament, with a few tougher ties lying in front of me :)

Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone.

Just the other day I was reading an article on wired. This article discusses an interesting scenario. The title is named "Who's afraid of Google? Everyone", it’s an interesting article, it points out that Google is coming out with newer services everyday and is doing almost everything these days.

"It seems no one is safe: Google is doing Wi-Fi; Google is searching inside books; Google has a plan for ecommerce"

Yes its quite true, off late Google has been launching newer and newer services almost every other day latest ones being Google Analytics, Wi-Fi in San Francisco, Google Click-a-call, AdSense for bloggers, Google Base, Google Print et al. It further says that "In less than a decade, Google has gone from guerrilla startup to 800-pound gorilla". Pretty true they have become giants in just about a decade; they are a brand who almost everyone blindly believes in. That's one of the reasons they find themselves at $430 :) It says that with all these services in vary diverse areas it is taking on some of THE biggest industry giants head-on including Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Comcast, Verizon et al. And so far they are doing it pretty good; they have now got the market reputation to go further and further and take on all these. Most of the Google ideas have been very revolutionary and have been a boon for the end-user. But is their something to be afraid of for us?

Here's an excerpt from a discussion on Slashdot pointing out to an interesting view:

"Is it a good thing "to organize the world's information”?

It seems I'm one of the few people not excited about this idea. I fear that in the future privacy will be luxury item that very few can afford.

One SF novel I read introduced me to very interesting idea - if everything networked and you can access virtually any kind of information about the only reliable way to have privacy is to drown it in a see of misinformation and irrelevant information. Anything distinctive about you becomes a disadvantage - you can be identified by it and tracked down. So everyone will want to conform and be a Bill Smith from a large city working for large company...

A lot of information out there gets recorded about every individual person - shopping habits, library books, income, medical history, debt, family, education, political affiliations, phone calls history, traffic violations... Only right now most of this information is unorganized and not readily networked, so you can't come up with inexpensive and fast way to retrieve it. On other hand if Google achieves its goal...

You think monopolizing OS is bad? How about monopolizing access to information? How about monopolizing not letting others access your private information? It just might happen.

Google's behavior so far has been so brilliant and successful that they almost appear like aliens from a superior culture. Predicting their next move seems nearly impossible"

Well quite true that with Google and their AdSense combining in almost all of their services from Gmail, GTalk, Blogger, Analytics, Personalized Home Page, Search they have almost all of your information from mail to chat-conversations to blogging topics (or areas of interest) to your visitors (analytics) to reading habits (personalized page) to your searching habits and what not. At one end this is such a great thing that you have only relevant ads but on the other hand this also means that Google has almost all the information about you! Its just needs better organization and some thoughtful search terms to show anyone's private information? Of course it’s not as easy as I made it sound, but this surely is possible especially with the increasingly number of ways being published to retrieve some private information using Google search only.

This was just an interesting view over the current services revolution taking place.

Enough till next time I guess, meanwhile enjoy this it’s a fictional look at the future :)

Update: I guess everyone is thinking the same these days !!

Lara kya Mara

This post is dedicated to Sir Brian Charles Lara who just surpassed Allan Border's record of 11,174 runs in Test Matches. Now Brian Lara is THE leading run-scorer in the test history. He did this in only his 119th test match as opposed to Border who scored these runs in 156 test matches. A pull to fine-leg of the bowling off his tormentor Glenn Mcgrath took Lara to his 214th run in the innings and 11,175th run in his test career. He was finally dismissed for 226. His current tally after first innings at Adielade Oval stands at 11, 187 runs (121 tests). Top 10 records he has on his name in his high-profile career in first class cricket are:

1. Highest run getter in test history. (11, 187 run)
2. Highest individual score in one innings in test matches. (400no against England @ Antigua)
3. Highest individual score in first-class matches (501no for Warwickshire)
4. Only player to break the highest individual score record twice. (Broke Sir Gary Sobers record of 365 with his 375 @ Antigua. Then broke Hayden's record of 380 with his 400no @ Antigua again)
5. Highest runs scored in a single over in Test matches. (28 run [4 fours, 2 sixes] against Robin Pieterson of SA)
6. Scorer of 2nd best innings of the century rated by Wisden. (153no while chasing 308 runs to take his team to victory by 1 wkt against Aus, 1999)
7. 31 Test centuries (behind only Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar and Steven Waugh)
8. 8 double centuries (behind only Sir Don Bradman's 12)
9. 2 triple centuries (equal to Sir Don Bradman's record)
10. Highest runs in a Test match in losing cause (351 [221+130] against SL)

He is 36 now, but he looks good enough to break a few more records before he decides to retire. Inspite of all the criticism, playing in a weak and almost always losing team he has been performing admirably well all throughout his career with a few lean patches in between. He has never been the most consistent player around, but has always been the scorer of big innings'. He still remains the best batsman currently playing cricket for me and surely one of THE GREATEST of all times. His unique batting style of a high back-lift, those typically Caribbean cover drives, magical cuts and pulls, nimble footwork against the spinners, sweeps and his dancing down the wicked has always been a treat to watch and is one of THE FEW batsman anyone would love to watch when in full flow.

Playing for a very weak team has meant that some of his greatest innings have come for a losing cause or are some of very fighting innings when team is in pretty tough position. I will pick 5 of my favorite test innings played by Lara:

1. 153 no against Aus, 1999 (this one was simply a genius)
2. 277 against Aus, 1992-93 at Sydney (this one was his maiden test century, and on of the greatest innings played ever, infact Lara himself rates this innings as his best. He infact has named his daughter "Sydney" because of this!!)
3. 221 and 130 against SL (these were in very spin friendly conditions against Murlidharan)
4. 226 against Aus @ Adeilade in current match (Inspite of all the bad umpiring decisions and criticism of being completely out of form he arose to the occasion to score another big double hundred in what is most probably his last test match in Australia)
5. 375 against England @ Antigua (he broke Sir Gary Sobers' record with this score)

With this i sign off with the message "HAIL LARA"

Just to add something on Indian cricket:

"Thank You the Kolkatta fans for making a game of Ind v/s SA at Eden Gardens feel like an away game for Indian team by jeering players like Dravid, Sachin and Coach Greg Chappell and applauding the South Africans. Slogans like 'Dravid hai hai' for THE BEST INDIAN PLAYER by far for last few years and of course the current captain, "Ganguly dada, Chappell gadha" for the Indian coach and "Sachin hai hai" have again shown your preferences of Ganguly over the Team India"

This Ind-SA series has been completely dismal, with the team winning toss winning the match. The mantra has been simple, win the toss, field first, dismiss the team for a paltry total when the ball is swinging a bit in first innings, and then chase the small total easily. I hope just to level things India should won the toss in last match to level the series 2-2.

"Allrounder" Ganguly included in Test squad

Disclaimer: If the person reading this is by chance a bengali or a die-hard Ganguly fan then he/she can stop reading right now. The following text is completely my view or rather a view of CRICKET FAN.

Nov 22, 2005 - Rahul Dravid is selected as the captain of the Indian team and chairman of selectors Kiran More states that it is very hard for Ganguly in current form to get into the Indian team.

Nov 23, 2005 - Saurav Ganguly is *magically* selected in the Indian team for the first test against SriLanka. This time our chairman of selector Kiran More states that - "Ganguly has been chosen as a BOWLING ALLROUNDER, this will allow us to have 6 - 7 bowlers, this will give team more flexibility. He has been chosen as a BOWLING ALLROUNDER, no as a BATTING ALLROUNDER. He hasn't been selected because of any EXTERNAL PRESSURE".

Wtf ! they consider us a complete !diot or what ? just a day before u said its tough for Ganguly in current form to get in the team, the next day u r selecting him in the team and u dont even know what to call him ? a "bowling allrounder" or a "batting allrounder". whatever be he surely is none of those f**king options. A guy who has been playing international cricket for over 8 years and has never been considered remotely as an allrounder (except for that purple patch way back in Toronto), has been selected in his final days as an allrounder, when he cant score a single run in the whole Duleep Trophy Final ? Are you really f**king serious ? You think we would simply believe this ? Does this even remotely sounds true ? Surely not !

Coming to some realistic reasons behind this selection. 4th ODI b/w Ind-SA is to be played in Eden Gardens, Kolkatta which happens to be the home of their "maharaj" ganguly !! And as ganguly has not been chosen in the indian ODI team, these kolkatta people are THREATENING that they won't allow the match to happen if GANGULY IS NOT SELECTED in the team ? wtf, and these f**king people call themselves cricket fans ? They can't see indian playing well and winning ? Infact they dont care a damn about wtf india does, they just care about their f**king "maharaj". I might just be sounding too anti-bengali, but this remains a BITTER TRUTH, that all bengalis simply adore their state players, they dont care a damn about the country, and how country is performing. They will always believe that their state player is the best ! I think in inter-state matches you can think so, but while coming to international scene you have to GROW UP, and believe in the reality and believe what is the best for the country ! I am yet to meet a bengali who doesn't have Ganguly as his favorite cricketer ! Is this a coincidence ? hell no !! surely not ! They are the most biased people i have ever seen. And the best or rather the worst part is they have the guts and courage to openly say in front of the camera that THEY WON'T LET THE MATCH HAPPEN if ganguly is not selected !! This is democracy for you, few people proving right in front of the media that they are above the law or rather THE LAW in bengal ? Well their threats have worked out and ganguly is selected in the team as a fucking allrounder !! Infact the team had to be selected after Ind-SA series get over but the selection had been preponed. Kolkatta already has a pretty bad past record be it World Cup Semis against SL in '96 or against Pakistan 2-3 years back, infact if i believe right they are among the black-listed venues of ICC, where if the crowd trouble happen once more they will be permanently disallowed to host any game. But do those ppl care a damn about it ? no !! Its the INDIA whose image will be tarnished coz of it and that's none of their matter !

Now to its implications, his selection directly means that both Yuvraj and Kaif will have to sit out of the team. Inspite of the fact that Kaif was the best indian batsmen on Zimbabwe tour and has a far better recent record than Ganguly. On the other hand Yuvraj has been on top of his form off late, scoring a great half-century against SL, and following it up with a classy century against SA in the first ODI, that too when Indians were in dire straits. But all those performances have come to nought as the "Bengali Threat" prevailed over sanity. Another person to suffer because of Ganguly's selection is Zaheer Khan, he took 23 wkts in 3 Duleep Trophy matches including 9 wkts in the final to lead his team to victory. Irony, it seems that it was Zaheer Khan who dismissed Ganguly for NOUGHT in both the innings of the Duleep Trophy final, and its him who has to sit out of the team while the "bowling/batting allrounder" Ganguly, who couldn't score a run against him has been selected !!

Morpheus rightly said "Fate it seems is not without a sense of irony"

Just the time when Indian team's future was looking pretty bright the selectors have made this decision. I am keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that as this Eden Gardens' match is over selectors or maybe Dravid-Chappel take a U-turn to either drop him or atleast not chose him in the first eleven :). That would surely be the best solution now !

Cricinfo's Dileep Premachandran states on this -> Driven by sentiment
An extract from the above article: "Given that he's no Jonty Rhodes in the field, we can safely assume that Ganguly wasn't selected for 12th-man duty. But by saying that he was selected as a batting allrounder, Kiran More has only ensured that his panel will be the butt of most cricketing jokes for some time to come. Ganguly has taken 25 wickets in his 84 Tests, and prior to taking two in two matches against South Africa last year, his last wicket had been way back in 2001, when he finished with figures of 2 for 69 at Kandy. To tag him an allrounder is almost as farcical as considering Mike Tyson a heavyweight contender."

End of Federer's streak

After 24 consecutive final victories finally the King Federer lost a tennis tournament finale. It is more than 2 years when he lost a final. His last loss dates back to Oct 2003. And after 35 consecutive wins he faced a loss this year. This record simply speaks of the dominance this man has had over the tennis arena for past 2 years. I am actually short of adjectives for him, he simply has been awesome. A never before dominance over the top ten players. He has very rarely lost to a player in top ten. And in finals he has simple thrown away his opponents. Though this year in few of finals he has lost a set or two but he has been way ahead of his opponents. If i remember correct this was his 3rd loss in 85 matches this year. Simply amazing.

This Master's Cup, the season ending tournament was looking to be a cakewalk for federer, as most of the players (only top 8 players play in this tournament) had withdrawn from it namely Rafael Nadal, Hewitt, Roddick, Safin, Agassi ! Nor that these players have great record against Federer, but atleast people HOPE that atleast they CAN beat him SOMETIME !! To start of the tournamen federer was rusty with all 3 of his round-robin matches going to decider set. But in the semis he simply CRUSHED the french open champion Gaudio 6-0, 6-0 ! It was a scoreline showing similar to a top player beating some unknown player...certainly not how you beat a top 10 player ! Everything was looking ominous for Nalbandian, all odds were against him in finale again Federer. He fought hard in first 2 sets but lost both of them in tie-breaks including the first one by a very unlucky net point for federer (which they call CHAMPION's LUCK !). He hung on and broke Federer twice to take the 3rd set 6-2. Suddenly the federer started fading, the fatigue (or maybe some injury) had him. He could barely move and had to call the trainer. Nalbandian took 9 consecutive games to lead 4-0 in the decider set after winning the 4th by 6-1. But at this point Nalbandian's eagerness/excitement to finish the match and Federer's mental toughness came into picture. Nalbandian regularly started missing the whitelines by a whisker and Federer kept his cool to break him twice and get level at 4-4 ! Federer broke Nalbandian for 3rd time in the set to server for the match at 6-5 !! It was looking like game over for Nalbandian and 24 matches winning streak of federer seemed pretty likely to be increased to 25 ! But seeing the cup, he had almost won slipping out Nalbandian forced his way back to break federer to take the set into tiebreak and then taking the tiebreak to end the Federer's winning streak of 24 finales in over 4 hrs and 30 min. This was simply a GREAT result for Nalbandian and atleast somebody showed that Federer can be beaten (be it was fatigue/injury or Nalbandian). :)

Few other big sports news:
1. Ronaldinho scored a brace to lead Barca for a THRASHING of real madrid at their home !!
2. ROY KEANE quits Man Utd.
3. Man Utd, Chelsea win and Arsenal narrowly beats Wigan to end their unbeaten run.
4. Milan lose to Fiorentina 1-3 to give Juve a 5 points lead !
5. India levels series against SA.

Well i am pretty excited coz a TT tournament is coming up at my workplace. Hoping for the best :)