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Whosoever ignoble person found the combination with Ctrl key, he must have gone through lot of pain in his life. So he thought of making others realize that. My fingers are almost dead with pain after Ctrl C, Ctrl V and most importantly Ctrl F. It also shows the lack of far sightedness in key board designers who thought the search-copy-paste would be less frequently used than the alphabet keys and thus decided to save keys by not dedicating separate keys. Some good soul came up with Function keys, but seldom are they used.

I am waiting for keyboard-less, completely voice operated computers.

Not a word more, fingers are dead.

Bhatt for appearing in Border. I do not know if you gained anything from that, but I won a bet of Rs.100 with my friend

I have been an email freak, by choice or by no-choice. It had a setback during college days, when Yahoo! decided to stop free POP access. Also , I tore my hairs when Hotmail deleted all my mails after a brief inaction or when the size limit of the mailbox and the attach size seemed to bother.

All sorrows were put to end by Gmail, which gave not only ample space but also great features like free pop and auto forward!

“Internet is going to be reduced to just emailing. There is no better use of Internet anyways and this is all hype”, so predicted or rather, affirmed one of our lecturers few years ago. If anything, I knew he was wrong.

A post about emailing is complete out-of-date, it is not about that. I am too ignorant to speak about the great features of Internet of which email is just a part. Yet, the irony of my situation results in the post (and its title).

Whatever you wish, so shall you get.

Some time back, I felt the need of posting to my blog via email. I knew it was possible as there is an option in Wordpress administration, and tried to use it. Any mail sent to the secret address, will be posted to the blog.

First, there are some shortcomings in the original wp-mail. We can not post under a particular category(the main reason why I have shifted to Wordpress), some time zone related issues, and formatting issues. But all these are already cured by some of the users-developers and some workaround is in place.

Second I used Gmail, but there was problem. Gmail has secure POP port and wp-mail uses normal POP. But wait, many fellows have already faced the problem and whats more, one good person has even posted a solution for it. But with that too I faced issue (related to_imap() call), for which too there was already a solution posted there itself. Somehow I could not implement it, as I don’t have control over the server side upgrade.
So now I wanted a email account with free POP access, hotpop comes to my rescue.

Third, a cron job has to be run on the server. There are scripts and plugin available for this too. But again, I had to do something on server side on which I don’t have control. But wait, there is a simple and great plugin that will do the job for me. Though this uses the original wp-mail(and thus the shortcomings), it is the only available option for me.
There is no issue of date problem as this periodically (configurable to once in 15min,30min,hourly etc) fetches the mails and posts it. It should not be difficult to fix the categorization issue.(Hope someone who reads this post does it for me )

So there, I can post via email with the combination of Wordpress,WP-Cron plugin and Hotpop.

Now, how about getting to read the blogs via inbox ?

If the blog owners themselves provided a way to subscribe to their blog via email then there is no problem. To do that there are lot of available options. But all blogs do not give me that option.

Again I just had to know what I had to look for. People have already faced the need and some good soul might have provided a solution as well. A simple search for RSS to email threw up the results.(Just for the kicks, a search for email to RSS also throws up results)

There are some scri pts developed for the
purpose. I can not go with that.

So I looked for some services. There are 3-4 very good possibilities. I will just highlight why I chose few, ahead of others.

Bot a blog, Rmail, RSSFwd and Feednation.

Rmail and bot a blog are wonderful services. Bot a blog supports atom feed given by Blogspot but I am not sure if they support Live journal and other types of blogs.
Bot a blog, I guess, mails the update of the blog immediately.
Rmail is an hourly update. But few drawbacks are that it would send only
the latest update in the previous hour. Also there would be a separate mail for each of the feed. I am not sure of the support for the atom and livejournal feeds.
Update: It supports.

But one important factor that made me not to go for these is that, they would only send a part of the blog and then there is a link to for the full post.
Well, as a blog owner even I am fond of my blog hits, but I can’t use the internet and that is why I am going through the whole exercise.

For just an update, Bloglines is a great tool any day. But, for blog owners and those who are not aware of the existence of/using Bloglines(intention behind the creation), Rmail is an useful service.

RSSFwd is based on Ruby on rails, and is a neat service. It has support for Atom too. Periodically the updates would be sent. Among the drawbacks, an
email per update would result in mail flood if I have subscribed to frequently updated blogs. Also, filtering would have been easier if the from address were only one.

Feednation is also good with all the control panel options where one can configure the frequency of emails, grouping of feeds etc. It can be used like a Bloglines account on the net as well as configured to be sent as email updates. The user interface is still improving. Other drawback is the support for Blogspot,LiveJournal and other blogs (like Bloglines provides). One good thing about Feednation, apart from the flexibility to schedule the updates/mails is that, it serves all the feeds in single mail.

And for the conversion of other kind of feeds (Atom), and any update capturing, RSS feed can be created using many tools of which I use Feedburner.

What’s more, they both send me the complete posts (unless the blog owners have restricted it, in which case what can I say other than that, it is their loss that, forget the hits, their posts will not even, at least, be read, by me )

So with the combination of Feednation(or
RSSFwd),Feedburner I can now read the blogs from my Inbox(auto forwarded from Gmail).

Oh, well , I did enjoy this one. I was disappointed by yesterday’s war, but this pulled my spirits up.

Never having watched the cartoon also helped. Few special effects, little romance, some fun. Kid stuff, but there was some progress and events, in the sense that I can sit and narrate it as a bedtime story.

Usually I do not enjoy those silly magical stuff, not because I deceive myself that I have grown beyond that age, but primarily because I am not used to, in terms of neither cartoon series/comics nor books and secondly logic falls short of expectations. No surprises, in other words.

On the other hand, I am happy that I can enjoy both Fantastic 4 and Before Sunrise with the same comfort and ease.
Many people I know are skewed to particular tastes and that restriction assists them with logic to spurn the other kinds. Two other ingredients that would falsely make one give a bad verdict arepreconceived notion and expectations.

Ps: Looks like I am watching too many movies giving some pretext or the other. Wish, a certain fear or something else pulls me out of this inactivity and engages me in a more meaningful pastime.

Unclear CD blurred the intentions behind creation of this movie. Looked like a mix of ET and Id4, but lacked a story,flow. I feel, I can watch scenes in any order. Chaos in the city, run run run.

The scene in the basement is particularly gripping.

Technically, this might be very advanced compared to Id4 or Jurassic Park, considering the advancements in the equipments used and in the technology. But something else is required, isn’t it ?

Or did I do a mistake of watching on small screen ?

Sometimes we start in one direction in search of a thing. We go far. Having come this far we would not mind to search a bit more, just in the hope of finding it. Exhausted and the thoughts of returning empty hand & the long return journey would stop us from returning. We remember the quote “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were tosuccess when they gave up.” by Thomas Edison

In a totally different direction, the search would have ended in just two steps.

Without knowing much background of the movie, I saw this one, actually due to unavailability of tickets to War of the worlds.Being unexpected often helps ! It was quite fun. The film is no masterpiece, but is better than many below average ones. It lacks a certain punch, a story line. Happy-go-lucky events, a warm music, little humour, some action, picturesque water (river) and deserts - wow, wish I could be a part of a fairy tale like that

This week was marked with many useful email conversations. It was good to find one or the other person ready(free) to listen, ready(free) to reply !
And the topics themselves were of diverse interests. I absorbed more in some and could put down my views in others. Important point was the conversations hardly digressed and were meaningful unlike the earlier occassions when I was being dragged into heading-nowhere-stupid-conversations.

If friends are meeting after a long time, there will be enough to speak
about the updates and changes. But if the two persons speak daily,
There has to be some external input for their conversation.
Or
They need to share some common tastes (Connectivity)

I had a company with whom the conversation used to end as soon as it had
begun. His life, spent staying in a room, had no added attractions.

Input ? :We were not mean people so that we could “discuss people” (as in
the saying “Mean people discuss people, average people discuss events and
great people discuss ideas”) or because we had no common friends and he was
too disinterested to listen to my friends’ details. We did not discuss work.
He did not read newspaper, nor watched TV or browsed net. No wants, no
opinions, no complaints.

Taste? :Simple things which used to amaze me did not even make him curious.
My talk about internet, movies, songs, even philosophy did not evoke any
response. His talk usually began and ended with the summary of
sleeping-jogging as in : I slept for 8 hours, I jogged 6 rounds..Or
I am feeling sleepy now.It is ok, but daily ?? Politics which was
the only yes for him was a no for me. Cricket discussions couldn’t last
longer than, well, now-famous Ganguly’s batting duration.

Some talks repeated before we realized that. I used to bring some topic or
matter to continue conversation, but it used to be met with cold as in -
Dravid defending-blocking with a straight bat, calmly and killing the speed
of the ball from a pacer, bluntly. If anything, I learnt
compulsorily, from him, to cut-off the conversations. To
create (uncomfortable) silence.

I pondered how can there be nothing to talk between two people who do not
have problems.

Now I fear I am heading towards the same life. With only work as my
companion and rest of the routine life spent in my room, cut off from the
TV,Net,News I will not wonder if I don’t blog for a long while:
No input, no output.

Solving Sudoku, a Japanese mind game / puzzle, has been one of my routine activities. It is a 9 x 9 matrix where some of the positions are filled. One has to fill in the remaining positions so that there are 1-9 digits in each row, coloumn and in each 9 non-overlapping matrices.
The simplicity of rules makes this puzzle attractive and complication of solving makes this addictive. The best part I feel, it does not require pre-knowledge like in the case of crosswords. There would be an uniquesolution to every game. 10 minutes of interest is guaranteed everyday. I usually fill it in the hotel during the breakfast inspite of the disappointment of the waiter, who thinks I take longer to finish. If it is unfinished, it would be finished in bus and the moment I lift my head from the paper, it would be my alighting stop.

It is being carried by most of the daily newspapers. Nowadays, as the filled positions are more, it has become too simple and can be solved without guessing at any instant of time. I think for this case a program can be written easily to solve the puzzle. But for certain puzzles, a guess was required and if the guess was wrong, there was no way to now immediately. Infact once, just when very few positions were left I realised a guess (that was made in the very beginning) was incorrect and whole puzzle has to be reworked on the line of other guess. For such cases, I feel, it would be challenging to write a program to solve it.

It was pending since a long time. Finally, we went there, had good fun
and good food. Few pictures are here.

A Ram Gopal Varma direction. First time Big B under RGV’s camera. Bachan Father-Son Duo. Expectations are obviously high and results in house-full sunday morning show.
It can be said with conviction that the expectations are met, but alas they are not exceeded. No one is to blame, you wanted RGV’s take on underwold, mafia world, you wanted to see Big B and AB in an impression leaving act, you get it.
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Some people have installed a “NOT gate” or “INVERTER” in their mind.
Whatever you say, they would oppose it and reply in negative. I have
carefully studied to see if that has got anything to do with attitude. No it
does not. They simply negate.

I say black they say white. I say right, they say wrong. I say old they say
new.

..
..
..
I don’t accept defeat. I seldom forget.
The next time I get a chance, I say white. They say black He he he!!

When I first saw this in Indian Blogosphere, I just felt like going into hiding! I realised that I would put up a sorry figure if I attempt to pick up the meme, and I mailed about it to few book-enthusiasts like Pradeep.

Now that I am formally tagged, let me come out -

Total number of books I own :
Even if I turn the whole bookshelf upside down, the maximum count would be
100. Bookshelf has more things other than books I borrow books quite often, and book lenders have a tough time to get their books returned, because I would not return until I finish reading them I am also very irregular about reading, sometimes I dont keep the book down till I finish, but some other times, the gap between reads is so much that I often repeat the same pages!!

The last book bought?:
Papillon by Henri Charrière

The last book you read?
Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

Books I am currently reading:
The Last Frontier by Alistair MacLean

Books that mean a lot to me:
When bad things happen to good people (Harold S. Kushner)- This book answered my many questions.
A brief history of time - Stephen W. Hawking.
Mahapalayana - Translation of Papillon by K P Poornachandra Tejaswi.
Adventure - K P Poornachandra Tejaswi- Transalation of Three singles to Adventure by Gerald Durrell. I would say a must read for those interested in animals and their beautiful world, behaviour.

Tagging people :
I don’t think many are left to be tagged. Please let me know once you post.
People I know :
Chaitra (Hope you have some time to spare apart from reading books )
Sripathi Kamath (See now you have a reason to start a blog)
Vedanth (Looking forward for your tag…)
Naveen B K
Guruprasad Pandit(I know ur blog is mainly about treks, but just incase you are interested..)
Ramya
Sriram
Praveen P K
Praveen G K

People I know by their blogs:
(I am not sure if you have already posted about this.)
Sumanth
Arunima
Dilip
The Optimist
Magix-n-Curses
Dream Vendor
Dreaming Vampire
Vikram

And any other person reading this post!

Story is based on the novel by a famous novelist, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay. Movie from the table of Vidhu Vinod Chopra under the direction of Pradeep Sarkar will have mixed expectations. One, we have always appreciated Vidhu Vinod Chopra, second Pradeep Sarkar is a new name.
Intelligent promos increase your curiosity. The cast too includes a newcomer.
Rest assured, you will be atleast happy if not delighted !
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