PA Flooding
Some of pictures I took during yesterday’s flooding here in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. Conshohocken railway station,
Office Buildings …
You can find more photos here.
Trillian Equivalent for Phones and Credit Cards
Last week’s buzz about interoperable instant messaging software made me think why there is no such effort for phones and credit cards. With all the gizmos like ipod, multiple cell phones and digital cameras techies may have to start wearing tools belt. Luckily there have been efforts for putting music player, camera and credit card in to cell phones. But I do not see any major efforts to combine all your phone numbers to one device. Most of the people these days have at least two cell phones, work & home. To start with it would be really helpful to have one device for multiple cell phone numbers. Later your Landline / VOIP numbers can be combined to same device. There are call forwarding facilities but there is no true integration in this manner. I personally think this combined cell phone would be in greater demand then those claimed “ipod killer” cell phones. Similarly combine all my debit and credit cards in one. Even though that would make my wallet lighter, I will not complain about it 
There have been a big push towards unified messaging lately and I hope my wish gets integrated in that.
Update: Cell phone as guide and as game controller
Worldcup Soccer Live Online
Catch all live action online on espn at http://espn360.com Feed is deferred by about 30 seconds.
3D User Interface
BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype A very neat video on YouTube about 3D UI.
Originally spotted it here
Y!M 8
With the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger 8 beta, Yahoo has once again proved they have most innovative and useful ideas about instant messaging. Major feature of this release as already reported on so many other sites is third party plug-ins. Just to give one example, I installed amazon's plug-in and now I can see amazon wish-list of all 150 contacts of mine just by selecting their name. Such a time saver when buying gift for someone. I do not know any other messenger that comes close to Y!M in terms of useful features, stealth settings, offline messages, VOIP, .. all in one. I have been using Windows Live Messenger 8 Beta as well but Yahoo just beats everything.
Most of my friends use Trilliansince that saves you time from using 4-5 different IM provides like Yahoo, MSN, AIM etc. But then you can't use specific features of any one provider. It would be really nice if I can use all my accounts like AIM, MSN from Yahoo Messenger. Is that too much to ask?
Update: Actually MSN Live is working on interoperability with Y!M. Will Yahoo follow same?
Office 12
Downloaded and installed Office 2007 Beta 2. Most visible feature is completely redesigned user interface. File menu replaced by office logo. Instead of vertical drop down menus, menu opens horizontal. Default extension for new file (in 2007 format) has an extra "X" for e.g. instead of .doc it is .docx. User interface is very intuitive and I liked it in general. Most annoying thing so far is it takes 2 clicks to open, close and save a document. I plan to use it for my day to day use so will post my experience in detail later.
Elephant can dance
Interesting article about fast growing India Economy in Time Magazine's current issue. Here is CNN's spin on it.
This story in Time about Ratan Tata and Tata Conglomerate makes you salute the company and Tatas.
"Tata Sons, the holding company that manages the group, is 65.8% owned by 11 charitable trusts, which spent $379.2 million on social causes in 2003-04 alone."
TODO List
Well this is not exactly a todo list of daily work related things. It is more about fun things that I want to do. For e.g. skydiving. Some of the items in this list may make you feel like what jungle do I come from. But here is the list,
1) Skydiving
2) Level 4 & 5 white water rafting
3) Kayaking
4) Sailing
5) Paintball fight
6) F1 at Indianapolis
8) Snorkeling
9) Fishing .. Yeah really never done that 
Well this will surely be a running list. I will also keep posting updates about any strikes.
Google News RSS Feeds Problem
Google news is great. But I don't go to actual website to satisfy my news quest, rather I use their RSS feeds. These feeds work very nice for their standard pages like "World", "Business", "Tech" etc. But when you use feeds for custom news search, it SUCKS, especially for company specific search. Every-time there is a new source that reports same story it adds a new link to that story next time you refresh the feed. So rather then smartly grouping same news related links, it actually adds new entries for news source updated since last time. Sure this may be result of the nature of RSS feeds itself, but yahoo finance seems more mature in this matter. Google financealso gathers company specific news neatly but then they don't have RSS for that. Also I was unable to find link for feedback to google on either news or finance site. Google are you listening?
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