iTelescope

Prasad: I know quite a few avid writers in my friend circle who are lazy enough to run their own blog. I am going to keep the stage open at prasadgupte.com for sharing their wisdom, and to benefit them from provoked skill-set retrospection & motivation to start writing more. What’s a better start than to have one of the sweetest women in my life write on Women’s Day? Over to you Aru!

It’s the centennial anniversary of  International Women’s day and though it would be just another day down here, a lot of changed already and improving each year. The battle of sexes is never-ending, but women today are much more ambitious, open to challenges and reaching new heights.  And all this, thanks to the empowerment struggle by ‘us’ & the support extended by men; they are not so cruel after all, they just get insecure sometimes

Although I don’t much happening in town, I’m expecting fun at the ‘Lavasa Women’s Day Drive’ on the eve of women’s day. With a long drive, live performances, makeovers & lots of goodies, it’s going to be one hell of an experience! I really wish I could join them, may be next year. As we struggle to create awareness by airing ‘Balika Vadhu’ as prime-time entertainment (fiction is thankfully better uglier reality prevalent in some parts of our society), the world elsewhere has seen several interesting initiatives (continue reading…)

PNP Maritime Schedule

Ferries (catamarans) are operated by a couple of companies from Gateway of India (Bhau-cha Dhakka) Mumbai to Mandwa jetty near Alibag. The fare is usually inclusive of the bus ride from Mandwa to Alibag city-centre/bus stand. This is perhaps the fastest way to reach Alibag, and then Murud - especially if you are in South Mumbai. Got a picture of PNP’s schedule - thought it could be of use! (continue reading…)

Wishing fellow Indians a happy Republic day! Just checked out the new version of Mile Sur Mera Tumhara today: 2 x 8 min videos… huh! And not that exciting! Check out the new ‘Phir Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’: Part 1 | Part 2. Some immediate comments:

• All pure instrumental portions are fantastic: Rahman, Anousha Shankar, tabla, Sivamani, Jazz, …
• Great focus on renewable energy: Solar water heaters and aggregators in the background a couple of times
• S-E-L (Shankar-Eshan-Loy) are great towards the end of their part
• The old-age home (supposedly) & Kashmir parts are very sweet
• Old is Gold: Original music has been tampered too much. Preferred the older Punjabi & Bengali parts (Is Shaan saying send me ‘SMS’?)
• There seems to be no one besides movie stars in this…
• Amitabh Bachchan has been made to sound wierd; he should’ve only been asked to read out the lines
• A bit of over-acting from actors down-under
• No Value Add: The Lux couple, Sonu Nigam, Shahid, Ranbir (in pajamas), Karan Johar
• Salman, Deepika short of clothes
• First 14 mins were great, and then SRK arrives with his silly hand gestures  as if he’s going to jerk of the whole world by closing his fist Just compare it to Aamir’s part
• Thanks for paying homage to the military at the end

Notable comments from elsewhere:

• why to ruin the good memories with bad bollywood experimentation. It is like comparing SHOLAY with RGV KI AAG
• This “SUR” has become “BESUR” because of bollywood
• Seriously, half of the people in this video didn’t deserve to be there

(continue reading…)

Just uploaded the photos taken during the Maghi Ganesh Utsav 2010 at Nandgaon, Murud-Janjira. This festival is celebrated each year around January-end for which the entire Gupte-Chitnis family comes together at their family temple.

Thanks to Chibu (Pratik Gupte) for the excellent coverage of the event with his phone. If you have any pictures to share, pl email them to me at gupte.prasad+utsav2010@gmail.com

After a fortnight with my new Nokia E71, I realized that there is a lot of feature addition possible with basic features. Despite of the E71 being feature rich, it has a great number of issues with basic functionality. If you know Pareto’s Law, these issues are in the 20% of all applications, which are used 80% of the time. I have listed down these issues in my ‘After a week with my new Nokia E71′ post, have a look. Here are a few suggested/missing features… (continue reading…)

A new cell-phone had been on the top of my wishlist ever since I had full-filled the wish to have a website. I have been evaluating phones forever, but for over a year now, the intention has been to buy one Last Diwali I had haunted for HTC Touch, a PDA that I had decided on buying. Unfortunately, it wasn’t readily available anywhere. At one store, I had seen the new Nokia E66 and E71 that made me rethink on Symbian phones. From that time to now, I had been saving money for a E71 that I finally got last Sunday. Here’s a quick review… (continue reading…)

Can you think of any brand for leather shoes? An Indian with ‘need-based’ shopping habits won’t be able to think beyond Bata. But from my experience with Bata products over the last couple of years, I think it is high time we start looking for other brands. Here is my story of a 1500 rs pair of shoes that lasted less than 6 months - and I didn’t play football with them! (continue reading…)

Nature aborts vacuum

Today is a day in my life when I have taken a very tough call: something that is likely to shape my future. I have resigned from my post at L&T Infotech and decided to move on. L&T has been my first employer, and as always, the first cut is the deepest. The couple of things that can make you feel better in such parting is that ‘nature aborts vacuum’ and that ‘the organization is always bigger than the employee’. (continue reading…)

I was going a Sun white-paper on Open Source technologies for Web applications; Sun was soft-marketing the Glass fishframework. My take from it was LifeRay, an open source portal technology. I never really of a Java-based portal other than Alfresco, and this is something so close to Sun. I created a demo site for myself to test the feature set. (continue reading…)

I had heard Steve mention Microsoft’s interest in the search arena, but he hadn’t said too much - not even revealed the name! Soon I heard that Yahoo Search had given way to Bing, and Microsoft was making money from it. Today I spared some time to get my hands on to Microsoft’s newest product, the Bing decision engine to check if claims are true. (continue reading…)