iTelescope

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

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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…)

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…)

I was reading up on Google Wave when I noticed that another product was already available.

Celebrations for my job confirmation were not over yet. Last September, I threw a party for my paternal family and then took a break to save money for the other half of my family. It was high time as I was close to completing two years with L&T Infotech. So we took them out to Kongpoush - the flavor of Kashmir - at Goregaon. (continue reading…)

I had been on the lookout for a nice place offering buffet lunch & dinner for over a month now. On my way to work I came across this large banner opposite Matoshree club on JVLR offering a lunch buffet at Rs.199, ofcourse with a star (indicating taxes). So me and friends enquired the menu & decided to give it a try! (continue reading…)

I usually don’t spend money on vegetarian food, so I have never tried the much publicized Potato Wedges at McDonalds. But this time around, the advertisements got me in to trying Chicken McNuggets (that were part of my dinner tonight). (continue reading…)