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... no longer being updated by me. Please use email to contact me for any issues related to this blog. My email address is santosh dot shankar at gmail dot com.

Very disappointing Superman Returns

I can honestly say I have never felt more letdown by a movie than this one! Bryan Singer, what have you done?

"It's the end of the World Cup as we know it...

...and I don't care?"

Ever since USA's 1 - 2 loss to Ghana yesterday, the TV news channels here seem to have reached an agreement to pretend there is no World Cup football going on anymore! If you watched any of them today, you would be led to believe that so devastated are the other teams by the "shock" exit of a team which ended up scoring only 1 goal in the tournament that they have decided to pack their bags and head home as well, effective ending the WC...until 2010!

Or alternately, Group E with USA, Ghana, Italy and Czech Republic was apparently the only group in this year's World Cup. Just for a lark, the organizers decided to have a group phase with only one group in it and named that group after the fifth letter in the alphabet. Yes, that makes much more sense.

Annoying WC coverage

A rant

So I am at work following the Germany - Costa Rica game online. Six goals are scored, two of them absolute crackers according to the text commentary at BBC. As soon as the game finishes I immediately head home to catch highlights and hopefully even a short post-match analysis. But, no! The first thing that the jackasses broadcasting the WC here want to talk about is the US soccer (no damn it, its football) team, its world cup performances historically, how they played in the last cup, their percentage of wins there, their star players, their opponents, their team colours, father's birthdays, pet peeves, favorite songs and every rot imaginable! This goes on for an atrocious half-hour right after the game before they finally condescend to show me 30 seconds of highlights from the Germany game!

Alright, I get it! No US men's national team does well at the international stage, not baseball, basketball, ice-hockey or any such thing. SO, ok, it is a reasonably big deal that they've made it here. And they are a pretty good team too, in my opinion, entertaining, good offence etc. But do you have to go on yapping about it? Their first game is on Monday, talk about it then or on Sunday night, not after every game, especially without showing highlights first!

Then there was today's England - Paraguay game on ABC. Being an England fan, I had gotten up reasonably early for a Saturday to watch it. About 15 - 20 mins before the game, I turn on the TV looking for the buildup, the singing of the anthems, the fans roaring in anticipation, the players in the tunnel, waiting to run on to the field. But, no! ABC, not being a regular sports broadcaster, would rather treat this match as an inconvenient intruder into its weekend TV shows. So, they start coverage only from the kickoff, not a second earlier! And to top it all, I was forced to watch the channel's fluffy early morning news show which covered, among other things, and I swear I'm not making this up, a donkey born on 6-6-6!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Are you friggin' kidding me?????

Mozilla, Wikipedia & Google: Changing the world...

...wide web (atleast)

Does anyone really use IE anymore? And does anyone really not "Google" something? And these days Google pretty much lands you in Wikipedia everytime, doesn't it?

Ok, I guess quite a few people still use IE but its mostly because they don't know what they are missing. Mozilla Firefox appears to be all about tabbed browsing but its actually more about some absolutely cracking extensions. Ever use IE and think, "Man, I wish they had this feature". Well, Firefox probably has that feature as an extension already. The moral is if you desparately want something it's highly likely that a few others do too and atleast one of them knows how to put that into code.

The list of must-have extensions grows (extends, you might say) by the day. Right now the ones I have, which I'd classify as must-have are:

1. Google Toolbar - Not just convenient to google something but also enables you to highlight occurances of each word in your search string in a webpage. Of course, this is also available in IE.

2. Ad-block - Blocks Ads ("Duh!") and allows you to specify your own ad filters (For example, you can say you want to block all ads from "adsever.com" or any of its numerous clones)

3. Tab Mix Plus - Probably the most ingenious extension here, one that truly harnesses the power of Firefox. With TMP, you can, among other things, reopen a tab you accidently closed and save a multi-tabbed session so that all tabs can be loaded if you are forced to exit and restart Firefox. Has saved me a lot of heartache!

4. NoScript - Enabled you to block all JavaScripts, those malicious pieces of code that chew up performance! Damn them all!

There are of course a ton of other nifty extensions but I'd recommend you don't overdo it and end up like this. And one Firefox feature which not many people seem to know is the ability to open a link in a new window/tab by middle-clicking on it (Oh, you knew that one already?)

But I said Mozilla didn't I, not just Firefox: the other Mozilla product I use is their email client Thunderbird. Fed up with the resource-hogging Outlook and the not-too-great Netscape email client, both of which like to start up in super-slo-mo, I switched last year to the light-weight Thunderbird. And it has not been a disappointment. While it doesn't offer any ground-breaking new features, it simplifies your life by posessing a very neat and clean interface and a built-in calendar. It also has a nice method to create "Search Folders" and a good Junk mail filter. Oh, it has its school of extensions too, but so far nothing extra-ordinary.

Whew, just realize that this write-up has gone on for too long. Will follow up later!