of cats and dags

I went for a couple of movies over the past week. The first one was Knocked Up and the other one, Ocean’s Thirteen.

I kinda liked Knocked Up. It had everything you could ask for from your average summer romantic comedy. The chance encounters of the boy and girl. The stark contrasts in their respective lifestyles. The comic timing and the goofs. The innocent naughtiness of Seth Rogen. The confused cuteness of (Grey’s Anatomy’s) Katherine Heigl. Some funny moments interspersed with stoned clownish looking people who had ‘pink eyes’ from inhaling too much fart particles. And the satisfyingly happy conclusion. I liked it because it reminded me a bit about Nine Months, but not too much that I would start complaining about the similarities. I was smiling when I came out of the hall, just as I would have after watching much of the romantic comedies that I liked.

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I have trashed some of the annoying elements of social networks, and mildly joked about Orkut in an earlier post. Of course, whether the ‘humour’ actually came through is entirely up to the readers. But these days I have seen stuff going on in social networks that are genuinely exciting.

In fact I should be saying social network. (Emphasis on the singular)

Facebook is making great strides in becoming a much more useful place for people. Yes, the social network can actually be a place where time can be spent productively. Recently Facebook launched the ‘Marketplace’ that allowed members of local networks to sell second hand stuff. More like Craigslist. The Texas A&M network posted on campus job openings on Marketplace.

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This one cracked me up a bit.

A few weeks back Stephen Colbert made his own Korean R&B music video after being stung by the fact that Korean R&B singer Rain pipped him to the number one spot in Time magazine’s online poll of the most influential people of 2007.

The first clip showed his music video.

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I saw a spike in my site stats today. Not that the spike was particularly steep. But the stat whore that I can be on occasions, I casually looked at my search engine terms for the day:

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Much joy appeared at finally seeing people coming to the site with search terms that actually led to relevant content here. So will that mean more Search Engine Optimized post titles (which also translates to trite unimaginative titles)? I hope not.

Yes I admit I have been guilty of baiting search engines for the title, but trust me, there has been reasonable amount of research going into this post. So keep reading.

The best part of internet these days is the sheer wealth of streaming media that is available in video form. The popularity of sites like Youtube, DailyMotion and many more such sites is not just due to being able to upload your home made videos. It is the ease of being able to watch copyright material such as cricket, football clips, TV shows and movies. While such acts by the users are not going unnoticed by the MPAA who are trying their best to bring down Youtube and sports associations such as the English Premier League have slapped lawsuits against Youtube for allowing people to upload clips. (As an aside, I wrote a post earlier on the consequences of the EPL’s lawsuit against Youtube.)

But those things aside, there is still some time to go before the law manages to catch up with these ‘illegal’ activities. I doubt if they will manage to completely clamp down on them because they still haven’t been able to stop Bit-torrent sites entirely.

The TV shows and movies that are present in these video streaming sites are not very easily accessible by simple use of the search bar. But when one wants to watch them there are other sites that index your favorite TV shows, and link to them episode wise. Some of which we’ll talk about here.

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When Scoble gave that now famous interview about managing his 622 feeds a day, he mentioned that one of the few disadvantages of Google Reader was the lack of an offline reading facility.

It now appears that biggies like Google actually listen to comments of A-list bloggers like him. Although I doubt they might have come up with the offline add-on so soon.

Anyway Google Reader feeds can now be read offline. So, for those highly addicted RSS-readers going on long trips here’s the solution. Google Reader requires you to select the Offlines option in their feed menu and prompts you to install a GadgetGears Firefox add-on. Once done installing, you have to restart the browser to be able to start downloading the feeds.

For further details go ahead and read the tutorial.

I’m furiously hunting for Wordpress themes these days. You see, I tire quickly - kinda explains why I’ve been shifting from one blog service to another. So a theme change seems like the next thing to do.

I love the current K2 theme. Gives good freedom of customization and all. But as I said, I want a change and I am looking for a nice enough theme.

So readers, (the few of you) kindly help me out here. I am looking for a two column layout that is wide. Meaning, I want my content to occupy at least 90-95% of the width of this page as against the current one which at best occupies 75%. I also want support for inline asides. I know K2 can be customized and all, but I am looking for a much more pleasing looking theme.

So suggestions are welcome.

Update: And yes, I have looked up Smashing magazine’s 83 beautiful Wordpress themes and many more such sites. The most impressive of them was this Fall Season theme

(This post comes with a reader warning in that it is really long and rambling. So beware! Other than that, on the title, see Indian Summer for the exact definition, although its context here is tweaked to suit a decent heading)

This post was long time coming. It is the obligatory post for a blogger who has spent a year in another place. Actually bloggers always look upon occasions or milestones as ideas for a new post. Idea droughts can happen to bloggers. Even the prolific ones who read 1000+ feeds a day. But this post is about me, just like many other posts in this blog, although I have been rather generous of late discussing real world issues. My purpose is to actually throw a little light on the experiences of a desi (grad student) in a foreign land - more specifically the US. These may be viewed by some other desi’s looking to come stateside during the next few months, as tips or stuff to expect etc etc. However, what one shouldn’t be expecting would be “tricks to get admission in You-Yes with 100% fully fundings (sic)” So there you go. Hope that’s clear.

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