Aseem’s Blog
Leap over the bounds…
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Happy Birthday to Me! |
This is Aseem… a little different than a few hours ago, 21 now! I dont really feel like old. But I know I am slowly getting there. When I was small my reference for being old was teens, got to the teens and then thought 20s should be fine to be called old enough. Now got to 21 and I can still feel a kid in me. Being old is yet so very far! And everytime I make it to what I felt was the age to call mature and responsible my reference changes. :P
Right from my days in KG to my 12th exams, I have never ever got a chance to celebrate my birthday. Everytime without fail my final exams for the academic year would coincide with my birthday :( . But am happy its not the same in engineering. Exams are a way ahead :) . So I can just have a nice time with family or hangout with some close frenz. Planning to do the same today :). Hmm… looks like a busy day too. Been receiving calls right from midnight and I have just lost count of all of them :p. Orkut scraps on a birthday are like a supernova explosion….. have loads to reply to! Also there is this most important match of the world cup for India today (in which India is not playing) Bermuda Vs Bangladesh. Indian team… I know you are good for nuts, so please dont waste more of our time, pray that Bangladesh(the deserving winners against you) win. And all those bookies please dont fix this match with Bangladesh. Let the Indian team be kicked out of World Cup today, that will be a perfect birthday gift for me.
So what am I gifting myself on this birthday? hehe… yea actually had plans to redesign this blog, but kinda got so busy with websites and college last few days that I just didnt get the time to. Fast forward another 2 weeks and I should be free to start working on a new blog design. Just one of those little ways to keep me up for blogging. Have been down all last month :(. Need to give it some life back.
Hey there my cellphone is ringing again… My first love my Nokia 3315. I call it N-3315! :P
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Xoom – Send money to India |
All my online transactions have been through Paypal. But disappointingly, everytime I decide to withdraw, it takes about 15-20 days for me to receive the cheque from Paypal, and another 10-15 days for the money to be deposited to my account as Citibank (Bank partnered with paypal for this) is not available in Goa.
This time, I wanted to withdraw some 1XXX USD from my paypal account. I logged in to paypal and realised that my monthly withdrawal limit showed 0.00 USD from 2,500.00 USD 8O. Uh! Now what was that! So immediately contacted paypal via email. Paypal popular at sucking customer support, I knew I will be made to wait for a week atleast to get a response. So I switched to Google about this issue. Found a post on DP. This limit has been imposed on all Verified Indian Paypal members while most of the accounts with 500.00 USD limit. Ofcourse I could not wait for the issue to be resolved as no one had any idea about it.
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Rising from the ashes… |
No fire… not charred… no ashes… but just getting back to life that I felt like lost all last month… out of the grave now and back to blogging. Last 30 days were full of Khatta-Meetha experiences. Some I don’t want to remember, some I can’t forget. But I am glad that this pretty long sabbatical from blogging is finally over… or rather partially maybe. Only time will unfold. Don’t know if I was off blogging because I was a little more busy than usual or it was that nothing came to my lazy head.
As JohnTP put it “Every blogger stops blogging once in a while…” in his post Do You Apologize to your readers for not blogging.
An apology has to fight the inner ego first, that no blogger would confess of having. But be a dedicated blog reader of a blog, and you will know how frustrating it is if you don’t see a new post when you log on to the site for more than a week. So here it is… battling my inner ego (If you thought I was too humble to have one. Your wrong, I do!) let me put it in the most modest way possible:
“I am really sorry for not blogging all last month”.
I can’t draw any good things out of this break… though my blog traffic has somehow increased and so has the Google Adsense earning (however meager it might be). Should have been the other way round eh?
Hmm… Anyways lets not get into the past now. The saffron skies tell me it’s a new fresh day, calling me out to fly… fly high into the boundless space (afterall I am Aseem - without boundaries). Just keeping my fingers crossed that I am not facing west…
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My valentine with cricket |
What better than spending all your day this valentine with your most loved sport! Was kinda holidaying last week…and on the top of the cake here comes a cricket match India Vs Sri Lanka @ Goa’s Fatorda stadium. Just the second one I have been to… and as expected it was pure fun! Howling and screaming slogans, obeying the Mexican waves, waving at cricketers who would field at the boundary line, posing with ppl wearing weird costumes just to catch the attention of the cameraman…yea it was all there!
Though we missed so much Dhoni’s big hits… and a high scoring game but the cricket fever was pumped up all day. I missed nothing, it was just a perfect Valentine’s Day!
What did you do on your Valentine’s day?
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Irritating SMS beeps |
While an SMS beep would infill excitement in you with the thought of your near and dear ones trying to get in touch with you, for me its getting increasingly irritating now. Thanks to the tonnes of messages Idea Cellular sends me all day. Idea Dhamaka…. Gadi jeeto, Sona jeeto… Ek lakh rupaye jeeto… Bollywood quiz… Number collect karo…uh! Can I tell them that I am not interested in making quick money like this? (Or may be lose balance quickly with every call for such offer charged a minimum 6rs!).
All my family members have Idea connection… so imagine how much irritating its getting for all of us.
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10 most funny car commercials |
Was browsing my friend Maltesh’s blog and found an amusing Porsche commercial video. Certainly my best of this pack. In a few moments after watching the video, I was crazily youtubing and hooked to watching more and more car commercials on youtube. After running down about 50 odd ones… here are my Top 10 videos :)
10. The irresistible VIOS – You will want one
A really funny car commercial. So the next time you see a VIOS… just beware!
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Welcome changes on Orkut.com |
Its been a long journey for Orkut and orkuters. Orkut has grown to be a popular networking service worldwide with about 12.95% of its users in India in the last 3 years of its net presence.
Google has constantly strived to maintain and augment the quality and value of Orkut, often integrating it with some other services in its pack.
Google has already integrated Google Talk into Orkut. Often when you login, a list of friends online on GTalk appears in the sidebar. It wont take time for Google Talk to be the most popular chat client with this addon. The only glitch in it is, you cannot integrate your Google Talk id into it until you have configured it with orkut.com. You have to register a new one. :(
Also while visiting profiles, showing mutual friends list was a welcome change. Replying back instantly to any scrap without visiting the scrapbook of the person who scrapped you saves so much time. Earlier while scrapping back one would tend to follow scraps to newer profiles. Ok now saves a lot of time! :lol:
While the above features have been around for quite some time now, Google is integrating new and interesting features into Orkut.
NEW FEATURES:
Google Video/Youtube: You can now add your favourite videos from Youtube or Google Video (both services owned by Google) into your orkut profile. As India is becoming broadband ready, this add-on will certainly pick up fast amongst the Indian Orkut users.
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Review: Aapkavideo.com – A desi video sharing service |
This is a paid review of the product: www.aapkavideo.com
Now does that mean I have been paid to write nice and sweet lines about Aapka Video??? Certainly Not! This is completely an unbiased review and only reflects my evaluation of this free online video sharing service. Keep reading to know of how I rate this service.
Aapkavideo.com is in its beta stage right now and been the talk of the Indian cyber space for about 2 months now. Log on to their website and the first thing that will please your eyes is the clean and simple interface. Simplicity does not pause here. Right from creating an account to uploading videos you don’t have too many things to bother about. However when I tried to view the videos in Firefox, they just refused to play. So I had to use IE. Guess, this should be fixed once the site is out of its beta period.
So isn’t this just a desi version of Youtube? Hmm… YouTube has been insanely successful, and I don’t see a reason why something as remarkable as Aapka Video should not. Infact this is one of the best Indian Video Sharing Services I have seen around. A prominent feature on the site is their “Specials” - a series of videos related to a hot topic in news, sports or bollywood, is certainly a unique idea. Infact, the very next moment when Sachin Tendulkar scored an unbeaten 100 against West Indies, his 41st century in ODIs, Aapka Video was quickly up with a special on his most prized hundreds.
However their USP is a quality collection of the latest desi videos. All videos that matter to India and Indians. Be it bollywood videos, hot stories that have hit the news, cricket, videos from the Indian television screen, and every content that is true to being Indian. In fact I could not resist myself clicking on every next video that popped up in their similar videos section.Users can not only share multiple videos with their near and dear ones but also upload their own videos in all types of video formats like .wmv, .mpeg, .mpg, .avi, .mpe, .mov, .movie, .mpe, .mpeg, .mpg, .qt, .mpv2, .mp2v, .mpe, .asf, .asx, .avi ,.wm, .wmx , .3gp , .mp4, .rm etc with filesize of upto 100MB. That’s what their tagline says “Director Ban Jao”.
One thing that impressed me was that the video streaming was really neat and fast. You can also view the videos in a larger size at the click of a button. While tags, category listings and search can be used to discover new interesting videos.
SUGGESTIONS:
- Videos on Aapkavideo.com can be marked as offensive if the content is inappropriate. Presently, this feature can be accessed even if you are not logged in. Just a suggestion to them, that this feature be available to only registered users.
- Also they should incorporate some rating system for the videos.
With broadband penetration in India pacing up, this service seems to be just bang on to be launched and grow bigtime. I have already got addicted to viewing videos on AapkaVideo.com. And now its your turn…
Rating: 4/5
Please visit Funny Commercials for many more interesting funny commercials, funny ads and funny videos.
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Bravo India! Bravo! |
What an innings! Marvelous batting performance from India today. Bravo to India and no Bravo to West Indies ;) (I dont think though that he would have changed the equation).
I skipped college for some work and a meeting while just didnt realise that the match today wsnt a Day and Nighter. Luckily happened to put my TV set on and saw India paving away to a 300+ score with a flashy batting performance. I postponed my meeting to afternoon.. something in me told that there were fire crackers right ahead in the innings. Missed Sourav Ganguly’s batting again…but his solid 68 certainly set the right mood today.
Everything was like in order for India. Every batsman chipped in with what was expected of him. Be it Robin Uthappa, Ganguly, Dravid(with a 78 runs knock), Sachin or Dhoni, nothing went wrong for India today, and I hope it never does… they have got a pretty much balanced batting line-up now. Just loved to see Dhoni rock the Windies bowling attack with his wristy sixers that helped India get an impressive 107 of the last 10 overs. But the most exciting part was Sachin’s thrilling 100(of 76 balls). He was on 89 and with the last 5 balls to go, if you were praying anything else than for his tonne, you must be kidding me!
Lets see howz the bowling performance from India. I hope Irfan Pathan is back in form today. Though the track is supposed to be flat and not much a help for the bowlers, you still dont have an excuse. Atleast the Windies dont when they have given away a whooping 341 to India. Supposed to be the highest score against the West Indies by any team till date.
Don’t want to put the cart before the horse, but India is certainly on the right track to being a contender for the forth coming world cup. Their batting is just BANG ON!
UPDATE: Yippee! India bowl out the Windies for 181 and clinch a 3-1 series win!
N.B.: This post has got kicking one of my older posts. If you too want to join the debate of who will take away the world cup (India or Australia)… click here: http://www.aseemn.org/posts/yellow-yellow-dirty-fellow/
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Sudden rise in patriotism |
Aug’06 - 17
Sep’06 - 25
Oct’06 - 34
Nov’06 - 52
Dec’06 - 36
Jan’07 - 123
Wondering what these figures are for? Hmm… These are the total number of searches containing the keyword “patriotism” searched in different search engines that led to my blog. The above given are the monthly search stats. All credit to the post REVIVING PATRIOTISM IN INDIA.
About 70% of the searches were for the search term “patriotism in india”, for which my blog post stands 2nd in Google. Ok guys me not on a boasting session here.
The interesting thing I noted was, that there was a mastodonic increase in the total number of searches in Jan…123!!! Anything rings for you? Yes… 26th of Jan! Most of the searches might have been by those who were to present a speech or an article observing the Republic Day. Hehe… I remember my school days when I used to net search on such topics to outscore over the other competitors, usually fellow speakers at elocution competitions.
But patriotism should come out of your own heart than through search results in Google. Having said this I am happy that I could convey my thoughts to a few more people. I hope that some politicians also have taken a few tips out of the post ;)
Today I had been to my college for the flag hoisting. Ironically my observation of an online spur in patriotism(lol!) dsnt really apply in this case. In a college strength of about 1400 students, I couldnt even count 25 of them :(. I can only hope that the rest did some good use of their time rather than catching some more sleep.
Anyways…
Wish you all a very Happy Republic Day!!!
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