chirag.patnaiks.in

Termespheres is the website of an artist who paints from the perspective of watching a scene on a reflective sphere...

This website has Theme Park Maps from different years and different countries. There's one from India as well...

exchange4media has a comment on DTH Future, one thing they seem to have completely forgotten is Digital Cable. Star's Cable venture (albeit through convoluted crossholdings) Hathway, is right now promoting digital cable. The service is being aggressively advertisedon the local cable channels. It uses a set top box and a smart card for access. I have tried to get in touch with the cable operator for this, but he is yet to respond on the timelines.

The PSP is actually cheaper in the grey market in India than in America. I walked into Palika Bazaar on Sat. One of the shops was willing to sell the PSP for just 10.5K (unnegotiated) (thats abt 240 US at current rates). He didn’t have any games or else I’d have snapped it up pronto… From Engadget…   You can’t reasonably be expected to wait until March for Sony to release the PlayStation Portable here in the States, can you? You’ll be gouged no matter what you do, but in order to help you out if you really, really need to have one right now, we’ve compiled a list of import stores and their current prices for the PlayStation Portable (though we suggest that you at least wait a few weeks for the hysteria to die down and for Sony to release a few more PSPs into the marketplace). We’ll update this list daily, and if you have know of any particular legitimate vendors not listed here, please let us know so we can include them. Curren...

I had occasion to clash with the author of this blog a few months back... He seems to have had a pet hate for The Times of India and by extension to me. Seems that this gent has now shut shop... I guess i could say I had the last laugh... Ha Ha Ha...

I'm heading back to delhi from Dehradun tomorrow after a forced vacation of three weeks.. I had some follow up surgery to be done. Whihc is now through. I only wonder if it was worth it. I guess we will know in a few months time...

Just finished wathcing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . It is a completely fab flick. Must watch...

This is priceless... Just give it time. One day not far away...

The next Blog button you see on top of this blog is clearly a webring. What I figure is that the frequency at which a certain blog appears as part of ring is in someway relate to the number of times you post. i.e. the more you post, the more your chances of turning up in the blogger webring.     I wonder if this conclusion is correct. Because every time I publish, someone new comes along some minutes later, with a reference of another blogspot site. and this is not a high traffic blog, so it makes u wonder...  

  I missed my chance to import an iPod this week and it seems that it was for the better only... I have two other options...   The Sony HD3. It is not only smaller than the iPod, but also with a longer battery life. It plays protected Artrac from the Sony Music Connect stores and mp3's. The Mp3's have a wrapper which prevents you from copying the mp3 files to other computers.   The PlayStation Portable. Strictly speaking not a mp3 player, but it looks like such a dream... and at 200 USD it's an absolute steal. I figure I can live with about a 1 gigs worth of music at a time (the memory stick for this is quite expensive though.   Will have to wait a bit though... By then Apple would have launched the next slim line of iPods... and that will make things really really difficult. :)   But Sony will be launching the HD3 sometime next year, so at least I'll be assured of support in India which is not available for any other player on the market.   Decisions, deci...

I was going through some old posts I made. About a year ago I commented on the news of Walmart entering the PC business that it was time for IBM to quit the (PC) business. Sure enough a year on, IBM has quit. I guess the B-school aducation was not all waste.. ha ha

It seems that a lot of ppl are wanting to know how odd and even are a pholoshpical illusion they keep dropping in to one of my posts

Neither... All this ensures that the open format mp3 will definitely survive for some more time to come... and Maybe MS will be the big winner. All this hoo haa about real networks files not being played on the iPod and Apple blocking them, reminds one of the format wars on in a related industry: Consumer Electronics. There too we are debating SACD vs DVD-A and HD-DVD vd BD-DVD. In that market, I'll ultimately buy a device which plays both the competing formats (if they survive the war). So I will buy a Pioneer that plays both DVD-A and SACD not a Sony which plays only SACD. the most compatible, either on the hardware end. if that is not available then I'll look to whichever format has more software (This has parallels in the Betamax story) And MS will be the big winner. Why? Because every manufacturer (Apple and Sony excepted) that makes Digital Audio Players supports Secure WMA. Soon enough (god only knows when) the numbers will tip in that direction. Moreover this ph...

someone was doing a search on google for Hero Honda Karizma, and that brought him/her to me . Apparntly someone else was looking for the Karizma Ad agency... (which is JWT)... other keywords that bring ppl here... marlinspike and av500

I popped ini to one of of the learning sites I'd done many many years, which I've abandoned since. The GuestBook has become a spam magnet for people promoting their own sites, porn et al. Obviously and attempt to manipulate google rankings...

This is a good topic. Krishna Menon is doigna series of articles titled as The Search for Love: A Marketer's Perspective (Part 1) He rambles a bit though. Let see how this series evolves...

This was my first Diwali in Delhi outside the canttonment area. Normally I head back home to Dehradun, this time I didn't think it worth my while to actually brave the Diwali rush in the trains to head to Dehradun and instead stay in Delhi and visit some friends. Just as the evening started... I stepped out and immediately retreated into my house in horror at the assault on the senses this celebration is. Why? My Eyes are burning and my ears are itching and I have a sore throat from the smoke in the air. If I didn't know better, from the sound track I'd have thought that it is a war zone. Till yesterday afternoon I used to think that all the anti-cracker activists were nuts... Today as Diwali is being celebrated(?) I'm a convert. Ban crackers. and ban them pronto. I used the video mode in my digital camera to capture some video. The camera can capture video at full DVCam resolution 640x480 at 30fps, but it looks as if it has been captured from a low qu...

blogsnow has a neat feature. If you link to any imdb title it crawls your site as part of the index. Thereby becoming a virtual review site for the title outside the IMDB system...

News Corp has warned ad agencies to get serious about increasing print share of the advertising pie or risk losing comissions to the tune of $150 million dollars (between the News Corp and the Fairfax group of newspapers) The Australian Story and a related story from Sydney Morning Herald

Of all the absurdities in this world. this has to be the weirdest. In a world where it is accepted that Dogs chase cats. A Dog is charged with chasing a cat . What aloony worl dwe live in...

Wired recently ran a story on free iPods being given away. i.e. one of the ads iPod ads actually works. Too bad I'm not eligible... tch tch...

The Summaries of Presentations of the Wan conference: Beyond the Printed Word

Interesting Viewpoint... It's the End of Classifieds as We Know Them Must check out, how our plan for the future compares with this...

Digital Deliverance has More Thoughts on U.S. Circulation Declines I left the this comment on the post: The newsapper in the current form may be a losing proposition as a trend, but while this is true right now in more developed markets like America, in countries like India where TV News is in it's (relative) infancy and the internet is restricted to the urban elite, Newspapers continue to be a powerful medium at least in the near term. Of course, it goes without saying that we need to reinvent the concept of newspapers. "Minority Report" style newspapers will be something really cool. The technology for them will be available in not more than 5 years. But for them to happen, newspaper publishers need to move on from the ink on paper mentality to news, especially when technology allows us to break news real time, sometimes even faster than TV. Right now online divisions are hostage to the print news teams. So we have a long time to go. Done rightly, t...

Wish the story was as cool cool as the title... Apple to iPod owners: "Eat shit and die"

In a piece here McGee comments on the potential of blogs to do bring about huge changes in the nature of market nature...

I was really looking forward to the u2 Ipod, but having a look at it yesterday, made me drop it from the consideration set pronto. matte black woul dhav elooked good. the glossy black and ferrari red click whel, just don't cut it. with my CD collection running into hundreds. iPod mini has too little space to be of practical use... the 60G iPod is obscenely priced at $600 US. this rules that out. So now the toss up is between the 40 Gig iPod 4G and the 40 Gig iPod Photo. What does the Photo version have that the 4G doesn't? Colour Screen Photo Viewer Carrying Case 25% more playback time -8 mins skip protection TV out +.2 ounces in weight AV Cable The Official case alone retails for 20 USD. If they'd added the remote. the new Photo bundle would dhave been a fabulous deal at 500 USD.. they could have evn dropped the case and kept the remote, even then would have been a good deal... but right now, I just can't justify the extra 100 USD for above features. Now tha...

Cute, I wish I had a Hayabusa alone... never mind the trike   Yes, a high-speed motorcycle for three, and that's not only three people, but also three wheels ! Nick Dagostino converted his Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle into a trike, but not a conventional trike. The two rear wheels are behind each other (in-line) instead of next to each other. This way he can still use the Hayabusa's aerodynamics to obtain many speeding tickets. On top of the three wheels, he also fitted an electronic camera in the rear and a 5" TV monitor into the tank. Now, he has place to put two pillion passengers behind him on the motorcycle. Unconventional ? Yes ! Pretty ? Yes Click here to read more about it .  ( Bikernet.com via Jalopnik  & Bikes in the Fast Lane )

I've finally settled on the iPod as the the mp3 player I'm going to buy. There is a special edition co-brnaded along with U2. That is the one I'm going to pick up. Right now I'm wondering what to put on the two personalisation tags behind the iPod

The brothel creeper is worth a few laughs.. most enjoyed by single males, than anyone else... :) Of all the sexual perversions, monogamy is the most unnatural.

Haw Haw Haw... An Oregon man found a group of U.S. Air Force men at his door, warning him to keep his television turned off or face a $10,000 fine. It seems Chris van Rossman's Toshiba—something like this MW24FM1 model with the built-in DVD and VCR—had been broadcasting on an international distress frequency, which was picked up by a satellite and noticed by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center in Virginia. Toshiba claims to have never heard of the problem before, but is going to get van Rossman a new TV. Something like this happened to me when I was 19 and passed out, knocking my bong into the stereo, accidentally sending out the international distress signal for "fire." ( Thanks, Alan! ) Television signal prompts Air Force search [Canada] Related... [ Gizmodo ]

This has potential... I wonder what the range of th ese things are... Tired of blaring TV sets at shops, bars and waiting rooms? A new universal remote called the TV-B-Gone lets users turn off virtually any set. A trial run in the streets of San Francisco shows the device to be quite effective. By Steven Bodzin. Related... [ Wired News ]

Today is a good day... [ Gizmodo ]

Another one for the Wish List... Even though I am of the persuasion that portable video players should be as small as possible, even I can't deny that the DVX-POD 7010 is a nice looking beast—and I'd not just saying that because it looks like a distended iPod. A native 720 by 486 widescreen resolution is seriously hard to hate on, especially if the unit has the horsepower to decode video with that resolution (or higher). There had been talk about the manufacturer MobiNote bringing over the DVX-POD when it was announced earlier this year but something hit a snag, obviously. Now another company called Ama (ah-ma) will be bringing the DVX-POD to the US for $599 for the 20GB unit (I can only expect a larger model at some point in the future). Since size is one of the main things I dislike about most of the current PVP and PMCs, I figure if you're going to have to carry around a bag to hold your player in, you might as well get the biggest, nicest screen possible. [ Gizmod...

Woo Hoo.. Another thing on my that should be on my Wish List The first flying motorcycle . Well, not really a motorcycle, it's more like a trike (or the Carver { link }). It's called the PALV , which stands for P ersonal A ir and L and V ehicle. The "motorcycle" is a slim, aerodynamic, 3 wheel unit, with the agility of a motorcycle. The rotor and propeller are folded away and can be unfolded to fly under 4,000 feet (1,500 meter). The unit runs on conventional petrol and has the amazing speed of 200 kph, both on land and in the air. It does not take off vertically, since unlike a helicopter, this vehicle is a gyrocopter. This means it can take off and land on very short strips of land. And if the engine fails, you can still 'glide' it using the auto-gyroscopic effect to safety. The engine itself generates 70 decibels of "noise", which is much more quieter than any other flying vehicle. The vehicle is still in concept stage, but Spark...

New Buzzword doing the round. Podcasting... damn I must really get that HDD music player soon... You've just learned about blogs and wikis. Now you need to know the latest buzzword - podcasting, the process of sending audio content directly to an iPod or other MP3 player. Googling "podcasting" got 15-20 hits a month ago. On October 8 it gave you 13,000 hits. Today, one week later you get 66,000 hits. Now that's what I call a buzzword. Steve Rubel has a good roundup for PR people. Wired Related... [ Media Culpa ]

This is something I want.. Way cool Wearable Display [MitsubishiElectric] [ Gizmodo ]

Move over iRiver, Apple, Creative... AV500 is the media device I want to buy...

Google Desktop Search is absolutely cool... light and fast. I've usd indexing services in the past liek Sleuth Hound Pro and others. but nothign beats this... and this is still in beta. Wow!

Star Trek debuted 38 years ago this day... and till date remains one of my favourite Sci Fi series along with Stargate. Stargate SG-1 recently entered it's 8th season... I managed to get hold of some of the episodes, though I haven't seenany yet. Stargate also had a spinoff series called Stargate Atlantis. which also started a couple of months back. Yours truly has all the episodes of that as well... :) Again yet to see all of them. So much Stargate, so little time...

Here's n outsourcing idea to beat all ideas... Get all the American & Eurpoean planes here... Paint them and send them back. I'm sure the savings will be worth the trip and back. Infact they could even rotate the planes in such a manner thatthe to and fro pre and post painting can carry passengers, thereby saving even more cost.

Just finished watching The Butterfly Effect . Totally cool... Inspite of the lead review on IMDB, I quite liked it. Somewhat like Paycheck . Only it doesn't pretend to use technology, and this one is working backwards. If Only I could Change the World

it seems that gmail is now handing out a lot more invites than before. I got six of them, I invited 3 people and the number jumped back to six invites again. hmmm I wonder how the invite thingy works...

If you ever needed an excuse to eat chocolate... this is it...

I finally got some Gmail invites in my inbox. One wonders how to get rid of them... Hmmm!

I heard an ad on Launchcast, which i've been listening quite often... and in one ad, there is this ad where a girl poses a question that odd and even are a philospohical illusion... So a google search later I end up at Odd and even: philosophical illusion . It seems there were some other people who had the same thought as me... :)

Monster has this piece on Resignation Day...

Olympics ha ha

Waitress says Hooters restaurant promised her a Toyota%2C gave her a toy Yoda hee hee

I just got the XP service pack on my system... and messnger stops working... :( ----- Update It is working now... I gues it had nothing to do with the service pack.

It seems that the Next blog is some sort of a webring for blogspot hosted pages. I guess more traffic should be more than welcome...

Blogger Blogspot pages now have a nav bar . This replaces the advertising that was there on blogspot pages. all I can say is ick. is there a way out of this? nope and that's that.

For better or for worse, I've launched another blog called TV Tuner . It is looking mainly at some prime time TV, attempting to spot some worthwhile TV viewing in the mess of channels that we currently recieve on our TV sets. Right now I'm restricting myself to the English Movies and general entertainment Channels. i.e. HBO, AXN, Star Movies, Star World, Zee English and Zee MGM. and no others. There may be more people who may join in to contribute to this blog a little later. Log on and enjoy the ride while hoping that the ride lasts long... really long ;)

You can see that I'm totally vella... I found another online game in pre beta... It's called Dark Throne and I like it teensy weensy bit more than The Game Never Ending . And if any of you need an invite into the beta of GNE. leave a comment...

As Hima pointed out there is Google in Bihari , a little bit of research shows Google in Bengali , Hindi , Oriya

MSN Web Messenger is neat. A frien of mine pointed this out coz the company firewall wouldn't let him access the MSN messenger from his mac machine...

iPod vs. The Cassette even mor ha ha ha ha

Google Punjabi Ha Ha Ha

I think the only thing Google has left to do is create a messenger service. how owuld it be supported is another question altogether though...

I worte to support to remove the ad on my other blog and voila. they agreed. No Ad

I have yet another invite for The Game never Ending... Hmmm Now to get rid of it...

My company has declared a 5 day week from today. So now I get two days to kill on on the weekend... hmmm. I think I should plan to buy the DVD player as soon as possible. I have one on my laptop, but the screen size is no fun. I'll maybe pick up a cheap sony two speaker DVD/Tuner combo. but Sony stuff in India is damned expensive...

What the... You are Blogging my view... The first time i heard the term “Blogging”, the first thing that came to mind was two men in Kerela on a Gogonet tree and one saying to the other, “You are blogging my view”. However, now this means something totally different to me. Blogging my view, now means that after reading your blog, my views are changing. How many of us are actually willing to let go of our opinions and accept new ones as we just read or heard something different from the views we so strongly believed in all this while. This is like writing a personal diary for everyone to read. I always thought about those who write a diary. I thought those were the people so desperate that someone picks up their diary and reads it and saves them. It was a cry for help for those poor recluses and introverts. And then they made this rule, thou shall not read a personal diary. This obviously attracted more people to their diaries. So am i turning into a hopeless recluse?? I hope not. I d...

I'm back in Delhi. Yay! and I brought the rains... double yay!

I got an invite for Game Never Ending . I'd signed up for this months ago. Now to see what it can do...

I was thinking of starting a blog with a theme. TV Program reviews perhaps, English Channels. I can't bear to watch the Star Plus crap anyway...

Google Ad Sense wrote back to my crib, saying we apologise blah blah and here is your account to make billions and billions of dollars, oops rupees. Mua hahaha. Anyway the ads are not running as of now. maybe in 48 hours as claimed by the faq

The reason I commented on the lack of ads on Blogspot, was because Google denied an adsense account, reason given was that this URL was duplicate submisssion. Considering that I only created the url a few days back, it is somewhat absurd...

As you can see, when you look at the top of Marlinspike - Knot Untangler There are no ads on this blogspot page. I know some people who registered only a couple of months ago, who do have ads on the blogspot pages...

I've been telling my guys at office for months now, but they didn't think it was a big thing. This Blogging from Boston article explores legitimacy accorded to bloggers at the Democratic nation Convention happeing in the US currently...

:((( We were to have a class reunion. and yahoo groups was the preferred communication medium... oh welll I guess it is back to cell phones :)  

Self Pic, was trying to play around with the picin Photo Studio... Still some time to go before I master this 

A Google Search on chirag reveals that my blog is the fourth on the list. the only problem is that I've changed the URL to blogspot. So one wonders as to how the google algorithm will place me now.

Now that the camera is out of the way, I was thinking of getting myself a new hard disk mp3 player. This is a dream device iRiver PMP 120   Or this iRiver H 320 They have the advantage of being able to interface with my camera and download pics directly. Can Play MP3 (duh!), Ogg, WMA, Show pictures stored and the first one also plays video.

Some More pictures here . This time of the house 

This is a stitched panorama of the view outside my dad's house in dehradoon. it spans a full 270 degrees...  

I have a new Feed URL at http://chiragpatnaik.blospot.com/atom.xml

Have been trying to migrate from my previous host to Blogspot... A lot of bother... :(

The url of my Blog has changed to http://chiragpatnaik.blogspot.com/ See you there...

Not very flattering I agree... The lighting was bad. I haven't shaved in a few days. The mushtache has to go. I was in hospital for a month. u get the idea ... ;)

I Put up some more pictures here ... they aren't labeled yet.

This is the first pic that I'm uploading from my brand new Canon S1. Many more on the way once I get to Delhi. Bandwidth in Doon is so darned expensive...

Gmail may still be in beta, but Hacks for it are already up and running... Viva Gmail. The best thing since email itself... :)

Neowin forums has a story that hotmail is to upgrade space. 250 MB for free users and 2 GB for paid users. Of course I would still not use it because of the tons of spam that pours into hotmail accounts

Fujifilm FinePix S7000 is yet another alternative. Only this is 150 dollars more.. thought there is a 100 dollar rebate going with this. picture quality is said to be supect.. so I'm wary of this one...

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ10S is another alternative camera that can be considered... only problem is the 100 dollar plus on the price tag... definitely not affordable

I'm going to be buying a digital camera soon... I've finally settled on the Canon Powershot S1 IS . Mainly selected because of the huge Zoom (10X) and the image stabilisation system on the camera... Am Also buying a Sandisk 256 Mb Compact flash Card . and a couple of sets of 2200 NiMH PowerEx batteries and a Maha Charger to power the entire rig...

I hired an air conditioner for the season... that leaves the tv, cable gas connection and a fridge

I Moved houses today. Happiness! My own place finally... Now all I need is an air conditioner, tv, cable and a fridge...

I'm moving Homes yet again... From South Delhi, I'm back to East Delhi. In Karkardooma to be precise. This will be the 5th place in 8 months... Not bad if you ask me. Hopefully I'll stick around this place for at least six months or so.

I'm House hunting yet again... East Delhi or NOIDA perhaps

test

I dropped out of sight again...

Moving using nothing at all.

Harvard is starting a student porn magazine called H - Bomb. India has a long long way to go... it'd seem...

Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One! Whatever will they think of next...

New Scientist reports on Smart Cell phone Antennas, which have Autonomous software agents which can talk to neighbouring antennas and do load balancing... This is goign into to testing during the Athens Olympics

Pickled dragon mystery

Missile Art

Talk about the unbelievable... Headbanging Blind Mole Rat uses sonar to find its way

In an Economist feature The World In 2004 A story on the Smart Dust revolution. Alun Andersen, the Editor in Chief comments that for decades we have considered progress to be packing of more and more transistors on less and less silicon... Progress he argues is, things like the coming smart dust revolution. Smart dust or more accurately networked intelligenece to do hazaar things like do remote surveliiance for the military. or the use of RFID in supermarkets... enabling tracking of merchandise and a fully automated staff less supermakret... For almost 40 years we have all been subscribing to a simple dogma about the growth of the information age: progress means making more and more computing power available at lower and lower prices. Back in 1965 Gordon Moore laid out his famous law that the number of components that could be squeezed on to a silicon chip would double every year or two. Now everybody can buy a laptop computer with the computing power that entire nations wer...

Don't want to register for to read or use a website visit bugmenot.com via Digital Deliverance

Talk about crazy inventions... Matsushita has developed an Intelligent screwdriver . It can be pre-programmed. As one readerd somments on the quoted post. it is more a luxury item than a practical tool... an even better quote... My Sears el-cheapo 14V screwdriver is a fair bit damn more intelligent than that one, I'd bet... ... It's powered by my finger, which has a pretty straight pipe to my brain. Beat that, Matsushita. :)

After th ePorn weblog, we now have porn search engine Booble.com

I think this Magnetic Cup Holder is worth having...

Subterrane - How to build an H-Bomb

eBay item 2976980274 is selling a presidential election vote... So Much for democracy...