Blog - Mahesh.net

Today, I got a brand spanking new Nintendo Wii. Its an early First Anniversary gift from Chitra. I am looking forward to going home and unpacking and setting up the Wii. Chitra would never let my play on the old XBox and I had to give it away. But the Wii is so revolutionary that even she is looking forward to playing with the Wii. Its the perfect family gaming console.

Everyone hates TV Commercials. They are mostly dull, humorless and ineffective. Companies like TiVo and open-source projects like MythTV, owe their success to the inherent desire of the couch potato to skip ads and just be able to watch the real programming. But every once in a while, ad agencies come out with some very creative ads that make you sit up and notice. Here are two such examples

I was at Grand Canyon this past weekend and snapped this picture of a big commercial jet, being accompanied by four fighter jets (they are barely visible in the picture). I could think of only two things - the plane was hijacked and hence was being pursued, or it was Air Force One, hence the fighter jets. Since there was nothing in the news about the first scenario, I am inclined to say, I snapped a picture of Air Force One.

During the July weekend Chitra and I went white water rafting close to Lake Tahoe. We were joined by Shalini and Prem. I have been river rafting 3 times before but I still love the excitement and adrenalin rush from river rafting. We just got the pictures from the trip and I have uploaded them here: Rafting Pictures.

If you haven't noticed I am using the all new PicasaWeb - Picasa's new web component. Its a cool and extremely easy way to upload pictures and captions from your PC. (its still in an invite-only mode, so if you want to try it, let me know)

I am have been trying for the past week or two to come up with a new color scheme and design for this website. While on it, I thought of trying to dig up some old sites that I had written. I remember publishing my first page way back in 1997 when all I had was just Shell access to the Net and an old 386 Notebook with a grayscale display. No fancy browser and no way to see the colors I was using. Later I did a complete site for my engineering college (VCET) and the first inter-collegiate cultural event we organised at VCET. Next came the websites I built on my personal space at WPI and also the ISO site that I co-authored. Finally comes the present site.

Using Google I was able to dig up these:

(from: http://www.travelingtiger.com/tiensblog/2006/05/beached-suv-limo.html)

Today is June 21st. If anybody has realized that in the Northern hemisphere, today is going to be the longest day of the year - the Summer solstice. For me growing up in India, it didn't mean much. But here in the US, its the offical start of summer. And I've been looking forward to summer this year especially after a unusually long and wet winter.

Can anybody guess whats in the center of this picture?

Continue here to find out

Last nite, Chitra and I went to see 'Strings'. They were playing in Oakland as part of their 'Zinda Tour'. I've been listening to Strings ever since their first video 'Sar Kiye Yeh Pahar' released way back in the early 90s. Back then they were just a bunch of teens. After a long hiatus they came back in 2000 and released Duur, which had a reworked version of 'Sar Kiye'. Even Chitra loves their music. So when we got an invite from Prem to go to the concert, we jumped on it. Even though the auditorium where they played sucked, the band was still great to listen to. After they played some of their hits, they started doing covers of mainstream songs like 'Koi Kahe' from Dil Chahta Hai, 'Jaanu Meri Jaan' from Shaan and then songs from other artists like Ali Haider's 'Purani Jeans', Saagarika's version of 'Disco Deewane' and a few others. I enjoyed it, but would've preferred if they had sung more of their own songs.

But the best part of the nite was when the band invited everyone up close to the stage for the final set of songs. We were up in cheapest section and had no access to the stage area. But I sneaked in with Chitra to the floor level and we wriggled up all the way to the front. We had a great time for the last 15-20 mins of the concert. I snapped this picture using a cellphone camera.

If you are wondering who "Hemulal Yadav" is and why am I writing about him, its because he is the reason behind my first contribution to Wikipedia - the vast online free encyclopedia. After Google, Wikipedia is my next big resource for information on anything under the sun. And now it includes a teeny-weeny contribution from me.

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