Walking Stick blues…

Posted on September 20, 2008 by Ankur

Just think of this, what is the probability of losing the ferrule(the�rubber knob at the base)�of my walking stick into a manhole with small circular holes just big enough to fit in the ferrule and the walking stick?

So here I was returning from breakfast, limping my way back to the hostel when I somehow managed to slip in a part of my walking stick into one of the 6-7 circular holes of this cement manhole cover! Before I could realize the implications, I pulled the stick out..and Lo behond it came out sans the ferrule!

Mortified, Petrified and stupified I went back to my room…attempting to find�a temporary fix to the problem. For this I also raised a question on Yahoo! Answers.

Current update is that I do have a temporary fix in place. Still looking for a better one.

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…and they all fall down!

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Ankur

The recent spur in declarations of US Finance majors like Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch has worsened the bourses across the globe. Probably this is not a great time to do MBA but we took a chill pill and joked about it..here are the ones we cooked up…for MBAs and otherwise

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A Finance MBA graduate for a job interview was asked about his summer job. He replied ‘Sir, I did my internship in the i-banking division of Merry Lynched…sorry to say but that company’s a part of history books!

Dude! Lets buy a brand…i wanna buy Lehman brand, I have the cash right here. Know what! I would start a restaurant with that name afterall this brand has recieved a lot of publicity last week. The menu would offer Freddie MacBurger, Merrill Fries and a bottle of Lehman 0 calories drink for free.�

There were days when i-banks like Lehman and Merrill looked to buy…and now are the days they look for buyers!�

Nobody wants to marry an i-banker now! Their firms are bust and their credit ratings are dust. Oops S&P ratings can be defective!

Though times are ahead…lets just wait and watch.

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GTalk forgets to refresh names!

Posted on September 12, 2008 by Ankur

This is not a new observation, plenty of the users have noticed this in GTalk but it deserves a post…aren’t we all marketing Google’s products by bashing them around as well?

Anyways, if you haven’t noticed GTalk adds new contacts as per their names given on Orkut, and to top it it never refreshes them. So some of my friends here who used to change their Orkut names as a means to reflect their status (many still don’t use the status option in Orkut). The end result, the old names+statuses never go away(even when the Orkut names have been updated) until I decide to rename the contacts.�

CAST away

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Ankur

Yep, 9/11 didn’t prove great for me either! Yesterday I slipped off the staircase, and today I paid the doctor a visit. The X-Ray didn’t come in my favor and have been diagnosed of a Jones Fracture. Needless to say I shall be out of action for atleast another 4 weeks…

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My Jones Fracture

This is my first fracture and I hate troubling others for my petty needs

Get Google Chrome-ified!

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Ankur

I am sure that plenty more bloggers have already posted their reviews of Google’s new web browser Chrome, many of them might be more technically erudite than me; but what the heck! Here’s my take on Google Chrome which I have been using since the last 14 hours now!

The striking observation on the first start of the browser would be the placement of Tabs on the top, there is no File Menu (hidden or otherwise) instead you have a file icon on the right side of the Address Bar.

The interface is uncluttered and sleek, and the browser opens in a jiffy quite faster than Internet Explorer 7.0 or Flock on my computer, which is very admirable.

Another great feature is that every tab exists as an individual process, so in case of an application crash (which IE seems to have often with Adobe Acrobat) only that tab dies and the rest are saved from annihilation.

There is no search tab �you do it only from the address bar, also I cannot figure out where to change my default search engine. Apart from this, this baby is loaded with all bells and whistles like Popup Blocker, Icognito tab (the browsing history is hidden in this case, something which we can notice in IE 8 BETA).

What it lacks is that most Advanced Options are so well tucked away that it can be a bit uncomfortable for seasoned users. It also has this constantly running process GoogleUpdate running in the background all the time, which seems utterly not critical to be running all the while.

I could also not see any support for add-ons the way Firefox does, hope its still on the cards.

Would I use it regularly? Well, I dont know…atleast till the honeymoon’s over. I do love the fact that this browser opens up in a split second.

The verdict is that Chrome shows a lot of promise, but then it doesn’t offer anything out of the world which would make you switch. Also, I am tired of Google’s perpetual BETA versions of services and software like Gmail(since 2004), Gtalk(2005) and now Chrome(2008)…what if they never cross the beta stage again?

You may download Chrome from�http://www.google.com/chrome