Category: Blog

Thanks to Prateek (The Elite Kammandos Fame) for this … 🙂

For a long time, comments were powered by .

Starting today, I would use the comment feature on blogger.com only. I would loose some precious comments but as they say “You win some, you loose some”…

If asked who are Gourmangi Singh, Samir Naik and Habibour Rahman, I am sure 90% people would not know. However if asked who are Van Rooney, Ronaldo and Kahn, people would blurt out names of these players, their clubs, their families and a host of things about these people. By the way the three people talked about earlier are few of the names from the Indian football Team.

Football World Cup is around the corner. In fact it started yesterday. Everyone from Sports Television to Business Channels to Hotels, Clubs and may be the ever essential Kirana Store people are on to cash the worldcup fever. And all that in India. India is ranked 118 in FIFA rankings and have had no chance of reaching the World Cup, however there are people who would love to be seen associated with Football.

Ask them about Hockey, they wont even know that Hockey is the national game of India. Ask them about kabbaddi, they wont know what exactly is the world. And after a few months, ask them about football, they wont know that either. Once every four years, entire nation is engulfed in the football fever. They might not know the history of the game, the rules and other important things but they are watching every game as if it was a matter of life and death for them.

I agree Kolkata crowd is most knowledgeable, educated and sophisticated in India. But having a MahaMritunjaya for Brazil is just out of my comprehension. If things could go right by just a maha mritunjaya, I would have mastered the art long time back. And I want to ask them when was the last time they even thought about problems in India, leave alone having a mahamritunjaya.

Finally I would want to analyze the reasons for the method behind the madness. Why everyone goes crazy about the world cup when it aint affecting their lives in any damn way possible !!!!

Its been long time since I posted a Yahoo conversation …

aligaliali (6/7/2006 12:56:42 AM): hi
Self_1 (6/7/2006 12:56:49 AM): hello
aligaliali (6/7/2006 12:56:57 AM): hi
Self_1 (6/7/2006 12:57:02 AM): hello
aligaliali (6/7/2006 12:57:12 AM): r u male ?
Self_1 (6/7/2006 12:57:17 AM): yes
aligaliali (6/7/2006 12:57:24 AM): oki sory bay
Self_1 (6/7/2006 12:57:28 AM): bye

And that was what I heard last from him !!!!

I wonder what he/she/it was upto 😀 and needless to say … I found this funny !!!!

It looks like a plot right out of a Jeffery Archer or a John Grisham novel.

A very fast emerging country. A very enigmatic and popular leader. An important man in the opposition party of the democracy. Equal number of followers and mudslingers. Some people claim that the leader was corrupt and took bribes in tunes of millions of rupees.

One fine day his own brother shoots him thrice from point blank in broad day light. The leader, fighter he is, grapples with life and death for 12 days in hospital before succumbing to bullet wounds. The brother says he was used as a discarded toilet paper by the leader.

A month later, the only son of the slain leader is brought into the hospital. The servants claim that the son complained of breathing problems after a late night party at his house. Preliminary investigations reveal the case of food poisoning, alcohol consumption and drug (cocaine) abuse. Along with the son, the secretary of the slain leader is also reported DOA (Dead on Arrival).

Servants report three unidentified youths in the home, brought in by the recently killed secretary without any authorization and security checks. The autopsy of the secretary reveals poison in the gut. Police recover white powder on dead secretary, ill son and the house. The staff cleared the crime scene by “cleaning” the bottles, glasses and vomit.

The son, like the father is in the hospital, on life support system, fighting away the ultimate truth. The cops are waiting to question the son.

(to be contd …)

The leader in here is late Mr. Pramod Mahajan. The son is Rahul Mahajan. The dead secretary is Vivek Moitra. It is reported that he was supposed to visit Assam to complete the last rites of his late father.

For a long time, Mr. Warren Buffett held the post of the best long time investor. His investing philosphy is simple. He would identify a company that he thinks would do well in future, make sure that the managers running the company are good and invest heavily in them. Finally he would wait and wait and wait … Over a period of time (he is still waiting) his investment would sit there, multiply under the ever increasing compound interest.

But I guess very soon there would be a new long term investor .. ME (Mr. Buffett is still waiting with his stocks). I wanted to be someone who would invest for a short period, turn inventory and make quick buck. I wanted to buy stocks, make intra-day trades mostly or hold on for atmost a week and cash in. But looking at the current movements in the Indian stock market, I am bound to become a long term investor. I simply can not sell they reach the levels I bought them at. This is indeed a bad investing philosphy considering that I might end up with a lot more loss than if I had had a stop-loss figure and exited in time.

Discliamer:
I hold Mr. Buffett in vey high regard and I wish someday I could get even 1% of what he is today. This post is just to indicate that Indian Stock Markets are very very volatile at this moment.

P.S.: I want to go and work for him some day … 🙂

If someone is interested in reading about Charlie Munger (he is the low-profile partner of Mr. Buffett) … here are a few interesting links …
Link 1 | Link 2 | Link 3

CAPTCHA aka “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart” is awesome. It helps people (rather website owners) filter out real, lame and unsuspicious users from automated bots. The concept is very simple. They display a word, obscure it with putting some graphic effects, adding lines, dots etc. and then display it at the authentication point on a website. They assume that machines a.k.a. bots won’t be able to read it and a human would be able to. To authnticate yourself, you need to read and decipher whats on it and enter your credentials.

I would agree to disagree here. Its ok that you skem the thing so bad that a machine can not read it but sometimes (more often than not), its obscured so bad that I have hard times reading it. I have to refresh the page 5-6 times to get a comprehensible image and proceed. May be I am a machine, may be I am a bot and may be its about time I got my eyesight checked?

There are arguments both in the favour and against the technology and since I hate CAPTCHA, I would tend to favour the ones against it 😉

A detailed discription can be found on Captcha and Wikipedia.

One of the good things about Yahoo is the Yahoo Games service. You can login there and play a large number of games online with real people for free. Ever since I learnt Poker, I have been playing it online at Yahoo.

The results have been dissappointing. I have played about 50 rounds there and have won just one. May be I am a bad player, may be its difficult, my be I dont understand the game and the dynamics, may be I have an IQ of 33, may be I should go back to good old Teen Pattee…

Anyways the problem with playing online remains the fact that you can not see other people and guess what they are trying to do. A lot of people would have bluff written all over their faces when they would lie (something like the Top Secret files marked as CONFIDENTIAL in bold and capitals). This should be a good practise in knowing when to fold, when to bet and stuff. I would also know about the odds and ends of the game and hope to learn the game some day … !

Ever since I heard that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are poker players, I wanted to learn this game. I downloaded a few eBooks, went to a few online tutorials but it didn’t help.

Finally on my trek to Yanker Pass, I finally learnt the Art of Poker. Yes the “Art of Poker”. According to a friend, the best thing about the game is the mathematical completeness. Further the returns can not exceed the amount you are ready to risk makes the game perfect.

I have heard a few stories about poker being the game for the salesmen, here I am, entering the game … 😀

Nah, not the classic telvision reel F.r.i.e.n.d.s but my real life friends. For the past two days, I have caught up with a lot of friends my schools and colleges.

And now I know what they mean when they talk about the past and reliving history. Do I yearn to go back in those days …

One of my favorite games is MineSweeper. About five minutes ago, I sweeped the mine area in the beginner mode in 5 seconds. Its a new record for me, the previous one being 7 seconds 🙂

Too bad, I could not take a screenshot…

I sent out this email to about 200 people…

Hi,

You are recieving this email because you have added me as a friend.

I am conducting an experiment. I request a simple favour from all you guys.

If you were told to guess the number of characters in my password (am giving a hint that my password for all webservices is same), what would it be? Please send in your answers to septemberthe22nd@gmail.com because it would be difficult to compile data in here. It would also be helpful if you could give a reasoning for the same.

For example a sample reply could be 8 and why 8? becuase all the websites ask for atleast 8 characters in the password)

Thanks a lot.

Regards,
Saurabh Garg

Once I recieve the replies, I would give out more details on the nature of the experiment, result and the further details about it.