Category Archives: Uncategorized

Catching up…Trip to the Bay Area

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It’s been a while since I blogged… Mostly since I’ve been busy at work getting Beta 2 Tech Refresh out the door. Over the long weekend, we did a short, but fun trip the Bay area and Napa Valley.

We spent Day 1 in San Francisco, hanging around and Fisherman’s Wharf and did a cruise to Alcatraz that evening. Key memories include a lunch of Dim Sum at the busy  Gold Mountain restaurant:

Gold Mountain

Funky street performers at Fisherman’s Wharf:

Street Performer

and the beautiful sunset-time cruise to Alcatraz Island:

Sunset at Alcatraz

 Day 2, we drove to Napa Valley – up and down Highway 29, visiting about half a dozen wineries from the small and quaint Cosentino

Entrance to cosentino

to the mega vineyards, wineshop and picnic spot of V Sattui:

V Sattui's wine shop

As expected, we were exhausted at the end of the day and couldn’t stand to see another bottle of wine!

Later that night, we met up with Karthik, AP & Ishwar at Berkeley before heading back to our hotel downtown.

We spent day 3 finishing up the other must-see spots in SF including the Golden Gate bridge and Twin peaks:

Us at the Golden Gate

 

As always, photos are at Flickr:

San Francisco: http://www.flickr.com/photos/umeshunni/sets/72157594271385261/

Napa Valley: http://www.flickr.com/photos/umeshunni/sets/72157594271416195/

and my favorite photo from this trip:

Vineyard

User generated ads

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Kiss 106.1, the radio station we usually listen on our way to work everyday recently ran a contest for the best commercial that user’s could come up with. Now, I had heard of contests for the best slogan or the best punch-line before, but this is the first time I’ve heard of anyone holding a user-submitted-commercial contest.

What makes this contest really unique is the fact that you submit entries by uploading your entry to YouTube and tagging it with “kiss 1061 commercial contest“.

So, has Web 2.0 finally hit mainstream?

Is user-generated-content really the future? Or is this just a result of Kiss 106.1 cutting their ad budget by an order of magnitude.

Philosophical questions aside, here’s the winning entry:

 

 

All other entries are at http://www.jackieandbender.com/KISSTV3.htm. Most are pretty lame!

Snakes on a Plane !!

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There are movies, there are B-movies and then there’s Snakes on a Plane! Well, at least that’s the impression I had  of Snakes on a Plane before I went to see it today.

But, I was pleasantly surprised today and this movie was waay better than I expected. It kept me on the edge of my seat most of the time in spite of the razor thin plot, stereotypical characters and predictable ending. The movie never felt like it was 116 minutes long and had scene after scene of decent CGI snakes, heart pounding action and not-as-cheesy-as-you-might-expect dialogs. This is certainly going to become a B-movie classic like Attack of the Killer Tomatos.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it yet – go watch it! Don’t wait for the DVD – shell out the $8 or Rs 50 or whatever it costs you to watch this movie. And,

Some geek trivia from the movie:

* The snooty Brit guy was carrying a macbook pro.

* The Desi girl was credited in the movie as the ‘iPod girl’ though she was actually listening to a Dell Mp3 player.

* What’s with the wacky ‘gun and pressurized cabin’ physics? I can see how the cabin gets decompressed if there was a hole in the cabin wall, but how will a hole in the cockpit door cause the cabin pressure to drop enough for the plane’s frame to rip away?

PS: If you hadn’t heard of this movie before this, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_on_a_Plane#History

LinkMania: Seth Godin and a trip to Pakistan

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Two unrelated but insteresting links i ran into today:

Seth Godin , the author of All Marketers are Liars, gave a pretty good talk to Googlers a couple of months back. I finally had a chance to watch it this week. Here it is… http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294

Via the India Uncut blog, I came across this blog post by Leo M about his travels through Pakistan: http://positivelylowbrow.blogspot.com/2006/08/disclaimer-this-is-far-from-perfect.html

Windows Live Writer

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Wow – it sounds like someone heard my private rants on the state of blogging tools. The blogosphere is awash with the news that Windows Live Writer Beta was released today. I’ve just downloaded it and it less than 2 minutes managed to set it up to publish to my blog. It’s surprisingly lightweight and responsive, even on my aging Tablet PC.

I’m not going to review it in any detail since it’s been praised and bashed all over the web, but i get the feeling I’ll have to break the ‘No-betas’ rule on my home laptop for this one.

Reviews:

ZDNet: Writer is Microsoft’s first Live killer app

Om Malik: Windows Live Writer, Write On!

Seattle PI: Assessing Windows Live Writer

Paul Kedrowski: Windows Live Writer … Huh?

Update:

Wow – Windows Live Writer is the top search on technorati today:

Perfomancing Firefox

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I've started using Word 2007 Beta as my main blogging client, but I also wanted a light weight blogging tool on my no-Betas-allowed laptop. I tried out BlogJet for a couple of weeks till it's trial expired and then concluded that it wasn't really worth the 30 bucks. Not that it crashing a couple of times and eating my blog posts has anything to do with it. I've been trying to get my hands on w.bloggar, but their website's been down for weeks (doesn't anyone in the blogosphere care?). So a quick web search later, I settled on a lightweight firefox extension that seems pretty popular.

Introducing… Perfomancing Firefox. It seems to have all the basic features: support for multiple blogging services, a rich text and HTML editors, technorati tagging, pings etc. It's got a handful of bells and whistles – support for directly bookmarking a post to del.icio.us (why?), image upload and so on. I guess this will do for any quick and dirty posts that I would have used post-by-email for before I moved to CS2.1.
The only weird thing about performancing (other than its name) is the fact that it, by default, splits your Firefox browser window into two and takes up the bottom half. Like I said earlier, it's main use-case is probably the quick and dirty blog post on something you saw while browsing some other site.

Some recent restaurants…

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I’ve been too busy to write up reviews of every restaurant I’ve been to lately, so I thought I’d write up a quick note on each of them:
1. Benihana’s:- 1200 5th Ave, Seattle, WA Japanese Hibachi Grill. Food was ok. Ambience was pretty good. They seem to have a long list of celebrity clientele looking at the photos at their door. We weren’t really amused by the ‘shrimp the fly’ and other tricks that the cook had on display. Worth a visit.
2. Pogacha: 120 NW Gilman Blvd, Issaquah, WA. “Northwest Cuisine with an Adriatic Flair”: Hmmm… yeah whatever.. Decent food and ambience. Small portions.. the prime card discount made it worth it, though.
3. Wild Ginger: 1401 3rd Ave, Seattle, WA.  Upscale Pan-asian place. Excellent service, decent food. The waiter spent over 10 minutes with us going over the menu… considering we had to wait 30 minutes for a table, that was bearable.

My Blog is moving…

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I totally hate doing this… but I guess this is the way it’s meant to be 🙂

I’m moving my blog from its current home on MSN (nee Windows Live) Spaces to its new home on my own server at blog.umeshunni.com. It took a bit of work over the past couple of weekends, but I’ve finally got it up and running with the latest build of Community Server (CS 2.1) with a bunch of customizations thrown in.

I was wondering what to do about all the existing posts I had on the Spaces blog… should I just let them die? Should I user Community Server’s blog mirroring feature to move everything over? Should I write some code to move them over?

I didn’t want to let them die because I had some good stuff in there and I’d hate for all that stuff to just disappear into the sands tubes of the internet never to be seen again.

Blog mirroring seemed simple enough but I knew I wanted to tweak some of the older posts to take advantage of the more liberal formatting options I had with CS.

It’s too late at night to write new code and again, I wanted some flexibility with what was going into the new blog.

Soo…. I fired up Word 2007, set up my Windows Live Space and my Community Server blog as my blog accounts and clicked on ‘Open existing’. This gave me a list of all the entries I had in the WL space. I clicked on each one, set the account to my CS blog and clicked on Publish as Draft. This published the entry into Community Server. Now all I had to do was to open the entry in the CS blog editor, make the required formatting and tag changes, set the old publish time and re-publish the entry.

A little more involved than blog mirroring or using the MetaWebLog API, but this way I had full control over each entry that was moved over and didn’t have to resort to copying HTML by hand.

Since CS doesn’t support publish-by-email, I guess I’ll be using Word for blogging from now on.

My domain is up and running!

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My domain and website are finally up and running. It's hosted at a free private hosting service and the website itself is just a couple of handwritten asp.net scripts that take my MSN spaces and Flickr RSS feeds and render them on the same page. I've just signed up for google adsense and analytics to get an idea of what the traffic to the site's gonna be like.
Ideas/Thoughts on how to make the site better? Add comments here or send me mail at my domainname@domainname.com.
Check it out: http://www.umeshunni.com/