Archive for June, 2007

A strange mix of souvenir and photography!

This shows what makeup and photoshop can achieve in the advertising industry. It is also a lesson in why you shouldn’t fall for the ad girl

No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted! This is called dove evolution.

Somebody decided to respond with Slob evolution! Enjoy!

1. Dogs have only ten vocal sounds, while cats have over one hundred vocal sounds!

2. The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

3. To “testify” was based on men in the Roman court swearing to a statement made by swearing on their testicles.

4. The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

5. The male gypsy moth can smell the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8 miles away!

6. It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

7. A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

8. Duelling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

9. The Ramses brand condom is named after the great pharaoh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.

10. Whenever a watch or a clock is displayed in movies/books, the time is 10:10.

According to YouGov poll (in which 2000 web users voted) following are the most hated words on the internet.

1. Folksonomy - Online classification system
2. Blogosphere - Blogging community
3. Blog - Online journals
4. Netiquette - Internet etiquette
5. Blook - A book based on a blog
6. Webinar - An online seminar
7. Vlog - A video blog
8. Social networking - Digg, Reddit etc. are some examples
9. Cookie - A text file used track user behavior in browsers
10. Wiki - Wikipedia is an example. A site which is collaborative in nature.

I think if they run a poll on most hated sentences, the top ones could be “all your base belongs to us” or “in soviet russia” etc. Also I wonder why the words like “WTF”, “n00b” or “LOL” doesn’t appear among top 10! In fact, this is the first time I came across “Folksonomy”. It also shows that a lot people are getting pi**ed off at the influence blogs have on internet.

This poll is not credible with just 2000 votes. To make some sense, a poll like this should have atleast 200,000 participants!

Here is a very funny example of advertising wars using hoardings. This one is from Mumbai, India. The top most hoarding (in hindi) says - “Please stop hoarding wars or else planes will crash on the hoardings!”

I happened to watch the Michael moore video “Sicko” which somebody had put up on Google Videos(It is now deleted). “Sicko” is Michael Moore at his best and you should never miss it (especially if you are an american).

Sicko is a documentary by Michael moore, which looks at american healthcare system. It is an open secret that american healthcare system is very expensive. So if you don’t have health insurance you are screwed. Moore uses the documentary medium to forcefully expose this fact and he has done an excellent job!

I am in India and I do have some experience of british healthcare system (NHS). Both are free and there are lot negative points about these systems. But when you compare them with the american system, they look very good! In India, you have a choice between government/private and charity hospitals and to me that is very important.

So why is this interesting to me if I am in India? Well, the problem is that we tend to copy many things from America. Also healthcare companies are getting powerful by day in India. Coupled with corruption, this may lead to a healthcare mafia worse than the american one.

Healthcare is fundamentally something which belongs to the government similar to police and fire department. Privatising it partially is ok, but full privatisation is a sure recipe for disaster.

Check out the following trailer of Sicko. Sicko is slated for release on 29th June 2007.

SiCKO is a comedy about 45 million people with no health care in the richest country on Earth.

1. Geeky T-shirts - This is the easiest way to let everyone know that you are a geek. There are lot designs available on the market. But my all time favorite is the one pictured here (localhost - there is no place like 127.0.0.1).

2. Watches for geeks - You can either go for an ordinary watch with a geeky look or if you are a hardcore geek, you can go for a watch which is difficult even for you to read! For example, Think Geek has a binary watch and you need to practise before you can easily read time!

3. Geeks love sensors - Geeks generally likes anything which measures something. So it is no wonder most of them will go for a device which has the maximum number of sensors. My favorite is the Casio pathfinder series. For example, PAW1300T features atomic time keeping, temparature, altimeter and barometers and yes, it does show time as well!
Another favorite of mine is the wireless weather station. This has the maximum number of readings sure to please any geek!

Where are can I get Geeky stuff?

Following are some of the sites where you can find cool geek stuff!

Think Geek
Fractalspin
ZeStuff
KlearWear

It is possible to change the “registered to” information in Windows XP/Vista. This may be required if you typed in something nasty in these fields and then want to change it later. On my machine, registration information looks like the following. You can see this information by pressing Windows key along with break key (Win+break).

To change these values, you need to modify entries in Windows registry. Please be careful while making these changes as any mistake could render your machine unusable!

1. Open registry by typing “regedit” on command prompt.

2. Open folder “My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version”. You will see the following entries on the right side.

3. Double click on the entry to change and type in new values.

4. Close “regedit”. You should see the new values when you take the system properties again (Win+break).

I have a special attraction towards 3 column Wordpress themes. These themes are very efficient in making use of the screen space. Here are some of my favorite 3 column WordPress themes. Most of these themes are simple and elegant without too many images.

1.Cleaker 2.1 | Preview - This is a clean and pretty theme. It has a sophisticated look and you can easily customize the header logo. There is a widgetized version as well.

2. Prosense | Preview - This is dream come true for all the adsense based bloggers. Neat and professional look with built in adsense units. But don’t forget to change the publisher IDs There are various color variations available for this.

3. Blue Zinfandel 2.0 | Preview - This is a text heavy theme which simple and elegant. A two column version of this is also available.

4. Downtown Java theme | Preview - This is a different variation of Blue Zinfandel style. Content on the middle, a top navigation bar and a soothing color scheme are the things that makes this good.

5. Andreas theme | Preview - This probably qualifies as the most experimented 3 column theme. This blog is based on a variation of this theme. Simple, but very mechanical feel without any Web 2.0 look.

6. TypoXP reloaded | Preview- There are many variations of this simple and elegant 3 column theme. One advantage is that second and third columns can be merged if needed. Ideal for a text heavy blog. Remember, if you want uniqueness you will have to tweak it as it is a commonly used theme.

7. Qwilm theme | Preview - This is one of the most used 3 column themes. So use it if you are not very particular about your blog theme being unique. This can be used as a 4 column theme as well.

8. PlaintxtBlog theme | Preview - If you want your blog to be text centric, this is a good theme to use. But in order to be different, I suggest you to change the default color scheme.

9. Sosuechtig theme | Preview - I like this theme due to its uniqueness. Obviously you need to customize the header image. Clean theme with contrasting colors.

10. Digg 3 column | Preview - As the name says, this is a digg like theme. It has a smooth and Web 2.0 feel. It is also Widget ready.

Obviously I could have missed some great 3 column themes out there. What is your favorite?

When Office 2007 was initially released it had builtin “Save as PDF” option. But later it was removed from Office 2007 due to legal objection from Adobe. This is strange since other office products such as StarOffice and OpenOffice do have an “export to PDF” option.

Does this mean you have to buy Adobe Acrobat just to convert your office documents to PDF? Acrobat is much more than a document to PDF converter and it costs about $449 for a single user license. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t pay that much money just to convert my document to PDF!

Luckily Microsoft provides “Save as PDF” as a separate download. Download this addon (about 934KB) now as it may not be available in future. Note that like other products, you need to do a “genuine office” validation before download.

Another option to convert your word documents is to use online PDF conversion tools. PDF Online is one such tool which supports formats such as DOC, RTF, PPT, XLS etc. Remember, it is never a good idea to use this for confidential documents!

I recently came across NanoScan, an online antivirus by Panda Software. What makes this different from other online virus scanners is the ease of use and the speed with which scanning is completed. On my system it took about 10 seconds to download the scanning engine (an activex control) and another 40 seconds to scan the system.

According to their blog, the scanning software is merely 400K and can detect over 800,000 known malware samples! Now that would make it the fastest and smallest antivirus out there. Do give it a try, you have nothing to loose if it doesn’t find any virus!

Please note that NanoScan is only a detection tool, it cannot remove viruses. For that you will have to use other online antivirus tools such as ActiveScan or TrendMicro . Following diagram shows the NanoScan capabilities.