I am back !!!

Back from the trip to UK. Had lot of fun, met my parents.....welcome break from work. Visited lot of places too....

Trip to UK

Been very busy last four days with work, packing for my trip to UK and other daily chores. Its tough juggling around with these things. Looking forward to the vacation. I will be seeing places in Glasgow and London.

Snow!!!

Yesterday the weather was really bad.....we had almost 6 inches of snow.....worst day in winter that I have seen in the last four years....It was really hard driving the car...it took me almost 15 minutes to drive home which is half a mile from my office....everyone was driving very slowly.....today morning the roads and driveways were being cleaned up....the weather prediction is for a sunny day....hope it will get better today.....the storm has apparently moved to the east coast....guess it is their turn to face the wrath...

Google Passion

A fan of google is so passionate about google that he named his son google.

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GC difficult questions raised

A friend of mine recently brought up his idea of applying for canadian immigration. His reason - GC in US will now take up 7-8 years to get processed. He has only 6 years on h1b and he is not sure if his current employer would sponsor a GC for him.....and even if he does he is not sure if he can stick with him for so long...these and many other innumerable questions are being faced by foreign nationals in US. Everyone facing these questions have to find an answer for one and only one question - where would they want to be in 8-10 years from now. Understandably, this question is not an easy one to answer as there are lot of variables involved. If one intends to settled down in US he/she needs a GC and complex questions follow. If one wishes to go back to their home country for good, several questions have to be answered such as - What kind of job ? Will I be able to maintain the same life style ? Will I be able to adjust to the social conditions after 7 or 8 years in US ?. The bottomline is there is no definite answer to this question. The key to this problem is to keep one's options open, which is easier said than done.

Quote

It is not what lies underneath but what I do that defines me ~Bruce Wayne

BCCI Website

BCCI is the richest cricketing body in the entire world. All national boards of cricketing nations including England, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh have caught up with Information Technology and have a website. Even though cricket is a religion in India, it is extremely unfortunate that Indian national board, BCCI does not have a website. It is high time that the officials stop fighting among themselves and do something about simple things like this which go on to make a huge difference to the game.....

Sleep Evasion !!!

Sleep has once agin evaded me yesterday.....It was 12:45 in the night and I was trying to sleep really hard but could not do, so was watching the basketball game between lakers and jazz...Lakers at one stage had a 14 point lead....but thanks to the late surge of jazz led from front by Deron Williams (originally of U of I) they almost won.....with 4/10th's of a second left jazz were leading 92-90....and kobe was fouled...Kobe put the two free throws in to make it 92-92 at the end of regulation......and the game went into overtime. Though kobe was fouled out during overtime, a three pointer from sasha vujacic with 20 seconds left made sure lakers won it....Honestly, I feel jazz should have won it....the foul drawn by kobe against Devin Brown with 0.4 seconds left was goof up by the officials....

My new home theater

Onkyo Home Theater HTS580

It is a 5.1 channel 600 watt system which I bought yesterday. It took about half hour to set up the system. The sound quality is fantastic. Initially, I thought of getting a sony 5.1 or 7.1 but after reading the CNET reviews and online customer reviews, I went for this one and I am completely satisfied with it.

Illini's sweet revenge

Dee Brown and Augustine helped Illini take a sweet revenge against North Carolina (68-64) in a tuesday night title rematch. Illini played well away from home to beat North Carolina convincingly. Brown was fantastic and at times looked like AI. This guy has got some potential. Augustine who unfortunately was fouled out in the 2005 championship game against North Carolina played to his potential to help 12th ranked Illini go past North Carolina. All in all it was a fun game to watch...

Firefox 1.5 released

I have been using firefox for the last 1 year and really love it. Firefox has released another version 1.5. I checked it out today it looks like the surfing speed is faster when compared to the previous versions. Other features include automatic updates, drag and drop the tabs and ctrl+shift+del to clear history info. That is really cool. Need to wait and see what the security reviews say about the new version. But, Firefox is centainly bringing the heat on Microsoft.

Pawar elected BCCI president

Sharad Pawar has been elected as the president of BCCI ending a 25 year strange hold of Dalmiya on the Indian cricket. The first thing the new president promised is professionalism and to bring the money out of the bank accounts to improve the infrastructure in India and sort out the legal issues in terms of the telecast rights being faced by BCCI. It would be really interesting to see how BCCI would now handle the Ganguly issue. As soon as the new president has taken over the richest cricketing body in the world, the first thing done was to fire three members from the selection panel who were supposedly backers of Ganguly and were instrumental in including him in the upcoming test series against Sri Lanka (this was done just before the promise of professinalism :-)). This I feel has put a big question mark on Ganguly's future. Will he be included in the first test ?? especially after the recent series where Yuvraj has shown his true potential....

Manjunath and Maniyappan

Manjunath and Maniyappan both from India have no relation whatsoever. Unfortunately, the only thing common between them is that both were killed for doing their jobs. Manjunath an IIM, Lucknow graduate was killed for closing down an IOC petrol pump for selling adulterated petrol. Maniyappan on the other hand was killed by Taliban in Afghanistan while he was working on a road construction project for BRO. It is sad that people are getting killed for doing their jobs.

Colts rout Steelers

Colts continued their winning streak making them the 11th ever team to reach 11-0 and first since 1998 Broncos. It certainly looks like they have the potential particularly after defeating the patriots, bengals and steelers in a span of 4 weeks to go all the way and take the place of 72 Dolphins.

Booby-Trapped ATM

Thieves have found a way to booby trap ATM's to get card information including the pin. According to PCMAG, the card slot in the ATM machine is fixed with an extra card reader. This combined with a hidden camera in the brochure holder will give them all the information they need.

For more on this: Click Here

Development tools for Java Platform

Sun is offering full licences of the Java Studio Creator 2004 and Java Studion Enterprise 8 for free. For all java lovers here is the link

http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javatools/free/

Reflections

This is my first attempt at blogging. After due thought I named it "Reflections" - thoughts and opinions resulting from careful consideration. As a principle, I will try not to be opinionated while posting my "Reflections" :-). My college forum/group, a private one in which I am an active member has inspired me to take up blogging and post my thoughts.