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Scanning slides

My father over the several decades of service had accumulated boxes upon boxes of slides from his many postings all over the country. He retired recently and was cleaning out the attic (so to speak) and he promptly dumped a trunk full of slides. I had an immediate thought. I should scan them and keep them digitally. Good Thought! only, I have several hundred slides. Who has the time. Next thought. Can I pay someone to do it for me. Sure enough, a quick internet search later, I found a slide scanning service called Slide Scanning Pros. prices are not too expensive at 26 cents a slide. There is a cheaper option at 18 cents, if you are willing to make corrections yourself. Which is a good idea, if you want to handle a specific set yourself.

Health coverage

I have been reading up on healthy living the past few days and running through the health sections of the big name news brands like New York Times , The Australian , Washington Post , and several others. While the coverage is pretty comprehensive. It always seems to be missing a personal touch. That’s when I ran across this health blog . The first post currently is on Insomnia remedy, something my brother and I desperately  need help with. The tips seem to be helpful, remains to be seen if they work. Health as a topic has a lot of coverage, but for some reason most dedicated websites try to be all and end all of health content and as a result mess up the whole affair.

New Recipes

I have had a fascination with cooking for quite a while. Even though I have never cooked on a day to day basis (that's handled by the maid). I still cook on the weekends. I was looking for new recipes to try and lucked across this health forum called Natural Medicine Talk. user contributed recipes for sure. But some interesting stuff. for e.g. Tomato/Dill Soup or Chickpea Salad . Otherwise an interesting forum to go through. Good tips by users on healthy eating and living. Some really knowledgeable people talking about things like advisability of taking vitamin supplements etc. Other sections on the site include Men’s Health, Women’s Health and several more.

Slumdog Cover Pages

Cover pages of prominent Indian newspapers covering Slumdog Millionaire’s Oscar win. Times of India – ho hum… Indian Express – Looks much better on paper Hindustan Times - Very nice... DNA – Yawn The Hindu – They know how to spell Conservative Mail Today Economic Times – I wonder why are they so excited

A few thousand feet above the clouds...

  Software is marvelous, This is an untouched picture After a little post processing... Not bad at all...

Stolen...

All the streetlights on the Sector 62 road... Stolen. India shining indeed.

Blast from the Past?

Spotted this poster on my morning jog... Blast from the past... and at yesterday's prices too...

The games finally begin...

Vodafone today fired the first shot in the upcoming iPhone race. Vodafone today is out with an ad in The Times of India which called for bookings from existing users by sending an sms with the word IPHONE to 56789. Obviously there are no details on pricing and availability et al. All indications are that the phone will be available sometime in October (probably in time for Diwali). Stay Tuned... Update: You could also now book online at http://www.vodafone.in/ Update: More iPhone India news here

PS3

I'm looking forward to picking up PlayStation 3 80 GB Metal Gear Solid 4 Pack . I just need to figure out someone to carry it back from the states...

US places India and 8 others in Priority Watch List

I ran across this article... It is surprising that how little we know about this here. This report is primarily driven by Private industry. This self same industry is calling for Canada's inclusion on this list of worst offenders... A Foreign office rep told the Canadian House of Commons "In regard to the watch list, Canada does not recognize the 301 watch list process. It basically lacks reliable and objective analysis. It's driven entirely by U.S. industry." The industry body that drives this report is IIPA. We would be well advised to also recall a statement by William Patry, a copyright expert and Google's copyright attorney. "the sheer arrogance and affront to the sovereignty of foreign governments by the IIPA's annual reports and effort to penalize those governments that do not toe the IIPA's line is breathtaking." It is best to ignore such ramblings and if push comes to shove, throw the ball back by linking demands for more access to the...

Canon Rocks

I had bought a Canon S1 IS (the first generation ultra zoom camera) way back in Mar of 2004 from Amazon. Four years later the LCD screen and EVF went on the blink. I was in denial for  a few months, when I finally handed it over to Canon India (through my cousin who works there).  She called a few days later to tell me that they can't fix the camera, but they will replace it with the latest generation Canon S5 IS . Awesome... This is customer service, not the usual bit of thievery , most companies in India Indulge in. I was out to lunch this sunday, so I took it out the camera to take some pics... Bougainvillea at the Defence Colony Market. This was in the Macro mode. I feel that the focus is a bit soft. I need to get the hang of the camera. A sign at the entrance of the garden A forlorn looking Fountain I plan to run the much famed CHDK custom firmware for  DIGIC II & III processors... The stuff you can add to the cameras functionality is mindbogg...

Imagine! videos for Pangea Day

This is awesome... I ran across this today at PressTalk . Very nice... Sends a tingle down your spine... This is part of the Imagine! series of videos for Pangea Day on May 10... The others: Japan sings for Turkey! France Sings for USA Australia sings for Lebanon Read more here... See Pangea's YouTube channel here

itimes.com

So... it finally launches... Nearly, a year after I quit Indiatimes, the social networking (the specs of which was one of the things (along with Indiatimes Mail ) on my plate) platform has finally gone live. It took a year of work on the PeopleAggregator platform to finally reach an acceptable state of launch, and as is fashionable these days, it is in Beta. Is it too little too late? In a world dominated by Facebook, Myspace and Orkut (dominating different geographies), this is the most obvious question... After all sites like Rediff Iland did not gain much traction either, and lets not forget numerous sites like yaari.com, which have fallen by the wayside... Another catch all Social Network, hohum. The answer. Depends. Depends on whether, the product will remain a social network in the mould of Facebook or will evolve to something more. The potential exists to do much more, ofcourse... The direction it will take totally depends on the team handling the product. No one from...

Social Networking for Grown-Ups...

So much is said about social networks and how catch all social networks are all the rage right now. But look back a few years and you see all a landscape littered with yesterday's stars. Friendster Hi5 and to some extent Orkut (Some may argue that Orkut is alive and kicking in India, but I beg to differ. Orkut isn't hip any mre, which means that over time it will slide into nothingness. After all which woman, wants 100 friend requests from absolute strangers) And not to mention that the hundreds of new social networks that pop up every other day. Clearly a gold rush is on. The acquisition of Desimartini by HT 's Firefly eVenture is a symptom of this gold rush. With the reported difficulties of Google & MS to monetise their respective ad properties of MySpace and Facebook, it is clear that we have seen all the hypergrowth we had to see, It will grow, there are after all several billion people on this planet but not necessarily to the po...

Gadget Blogs

Since I'm planning to buy a PS3 and some other stuff, I've been frequenting a lot of gadget blogs. Engadget Gizmodo Crave

More Comics

I refuse to call Comics as Graphic Novels. It's just trying to be snooty. Thus said, I'm thinking of adding a few more comics to my collection... Absolute Sandman Vol I Absolute Sandman Vol II Absolute Sandman Vol III Absolute Kingdom Come Bone Sigh! another huge credit card bill... And I'm not the first one to think that calling comics as graphics novels is snooty... Some in the comics community have objected to the term "graphic novel" on the grounds that it is unnecessary, or that its usage has been corrupted bycommercial interests. Writer Alan Moore believes: “ It's a marketing term. I mean, it was one that I never had any sympathy with. The term 'comic' does just as well for me. ... The problem is that 'graphic novel' just came to mean 'expensive comic book' and so what you'd get is people like DC Comics or Marvel comics — because 'graphic novels' were getting some attention, they'd stick six issues of whatever wor...

So, who makes the money?

Just this morning , for no particular reason, I typed in www.orissa.in and this is what I see... For a regular internet user, there is nothing strange here. Another squatter, who got in early in the game and is now raking in the cash, by putting up a parking page with ads on one of the many millions of URL's (Ain't Google Adsense wonderful). Since in the overall scheme of things Orissa figures pretty much at the bottom of the heap, I wonder if it is only Orissa or are the other domains also being squatted on... www.uttarpradesh.in Yup. So A quick lookup on who, what, where and we get the registrant as (drumroll...) the Government of India. Registrant Name:Government of India Registrant Organization:RESERVED NAME Registrant Street1:ERNET India, 6 CGO Complex, Lodi Road Registrant Street2:New Delhi Registrant City:New Delhi Registrant Postal Code:110003 Registrant Country:IN Registrant Phone:+91.1124361895 Registrant FAX:+91.1124362924 Registrant Email: So far so good. Wisely ...