The birth of Krishna

What recently started out to be one of those forwarded jokes got me thinking much more seriously about the birth of Krishna, one of the reincarnations of God in Hindu mythology.

The story goes something like this. Kansa was a cruel king and at one point he heard a prediction that his sister’s 8th child will grow up and kill him. And so, to prevent this, he throws his sister Devki and her husband Vasudev into the dungeons where they live, and procreate for many  years. But each child that is born is put to death by Kansa until the 8th child, who they manage to smuggle out of the prison.

In the joke that I was reading, a small boy questions this asking why Kansa but his sister and her husband in the same cell. Makes sense, all he needed to do was put them in separate cells! In fact, if the husband was not going to cause any trouble all he had to do was put his sister in prison.

Secondly, even if he did put them in the same cell, why did he kill the first 7 babies? The prediction stated that the 8th child would be the problem – that’s the only one he needed to eliminate. If he was smart, he wouldn’t even have needed to imprison his sister, just keep her family close and watch her. And when the 8th child is born, abduct just that one.

IE7 and Genuine Advantage

Normally I wouldn’t be caught dead with such company but, in the interest of being fair, I decided to install IE7 and give it a spin.

M$ needs you to run and pass the genuine advantage check before you can install IE7; that is great news for Firefox, Opera, etc. Face it, with the recent stories about how many Windows cheaters WGA has caught, even if the numbers don’t add up, we know that there are a LOT of people out there using illegal copies of Windows. And by locking those people out of IE7, M$ has done the other browsers a big favor. Way to go, dumbass.

Maybe it is true, maybe the decline of M$ has begun.

Adieu Google Reader

I used Google Reader all of this week, but it seems that its the black sheep of the Google family.

Sure, nice clean interface, but very frustrating. First, I didn’t really understand how it ranks the reading list in Auto mode. I suspect that if I read a couple of posts from a source that I would not normally pay too much attention to, it seems to up that feed’s rank. Yeah? I donno.

Next, I imported a large opml file thinking that I will quickly prune it once all the feeds are imported. Er, no. Have to remove subscriptions one at a time.

Also, no folders, but it does have labels. So I guess its the GMail philosophy? But the implementation is real poor. I can label individual posts and\or entire feeds. I think this means that if I label a bunch of feeds one thing, then I can use that label as a folder. I think that works, but all quite un intuitive. BTW, I love the GMail way of using labels for email. Moving along.

Of course, as most of you probably know, there is no way to quickly catch up by marking all as read. You have to read each item or use a slow greasemonkey script. Though I did love the Google Reader Mousewheel Always Marks As Read script which lets you scroll-wheel over the reading list and marks the items as read as they scroll by. I’m almost tempted to stay with Google Reader just to watch this script in action. Almost.

Finally, what up with managing your subscriptions and what the reader pulls into your reading list. Days after I deleted certain subscription, it kept bringing in items from these subscriptions. I suspect that the reverse will also be true, it will take a while before it starts to pull in stuff from new subscriptions. Eh?

One does not like bad mouth a member of and otherwise righteous and outstanding family, but alas. Maybe Google Reader is the Cinderella of this story, the Fairy God-Engineer will appear and maybe fix everything and we can all live happily ever after. Until then I will be dating the ugly sisters, BlogLines and\or ReBlog

 

50000GB Disks!

Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston
claims to have developed a layer of protein made from genetically
altered, light-sensitive microbe proteins which could store up to 50K
GB or 50 terabytes…

When they do finally bring this technology to market, Windows will still barely fir on one of these disks!

But wow! Everything, EVERYTHING and a complete digital version of you on a single disk!

India bans blogsites

India bloggers angry at net ban

The Indian government is up to its old tricks again, whenever something happends, they want to control the flow of information rather than let it flow freely. If you think banning blog sites is bad, check this out! They also shut down the cellular networks immediately after the attacks so as to ensure that no one passed out any news of this. That way, they decide what the rest of the world finds learns of these events.

BBC has listed a few of the links that they have banned, go ahead and enjoy

Canadian is the new Polish!

Evacuation – Show me the green stuff

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: Email from Beirut: “They are finally getting everything together today, but they dropped a little surprise: they are going to be billing us for giving us emergency transport to Cyprus, and then basically dropping us off on our own to get commercial flights back to the US.”

Incredible! Fucking incredible! Time was when a government would look after its citizens and try to get them out of harms way when on foreign soil. Everyone knows that if you are out of your country and need help, you go to your country’s embassy.

But now they charge you to evacuate you! So what if you say, you ain’t paying? Do they leave you there? Or do they evacuate you anyway and then hand over your outstanding debt to a debt collection agency; maybe it even goes on your credit report.

And what if you can afford more – is there a 1st class evacuation service; business class and coach? Do you board in order of how much more you can pay. And if seating is limited, can they auction the evacuation service.

This is proably because they have outsourced even this to contractors. If this is true, its really sad.

Religion of peace?

Armed gang seal market and murder 60 shoppers By James Hider in Baghdad

GUNMEN in Iraq’s “Triangle of Death” sealed off a crowded market south of Baghdad yesterday and slaughtered almost 60 men, women and children, spraying the crowd with machinegun fire, grenades and mortars, security officials said.

Not to say that other religions are any more peaceful or better, but really don’t want to hear that crap about Islam being a “peaceful religion” anymore. I cannot recall a single incident which would even remotely hint at it being a peaceful religion. On the contrary, its proably one of the few religions where they openly preach violence and non-tolerance.

And if you say that its a few people that are giving the whole religion a bad name, well, that’s an aweful lot of “few people”.

Just my 2 cents anyway.

Is a scam audible?

So, I think I will get me an audiobook, and start to browse the Audible website. I find a audio book that seems interesting and start to look at their membership plans. If I signup today, I can get the book free. And they have various book-credits plans as well as the basic no-book-credit plan. If I decide not to join, this is what I can expect:

Fair enough. But since they mentioned a “saving” over “retail price” I decided to check out what Amazon is selling this for. It turns out that they are partners and I am being redirect to Audible from Amazon:

Okay, lets check that out. Look at the price I can get if I don’t join Audible but instead buy from Amazon!

No obligations or anything! While its cool what a little price hunting and cross-checking will get you and I love the way the internet is the great equalizer and all, its sad that Audible doesn’t just offer me the same price directly. Sure its a promotional offer for new customers, but I really hate that kind of a deal! New customers are wooed but old customers are given the shaft!

Multiplayer Asteroids

Sweet!!! I still play asteriods, its my #1 game on the Nintendo mini, and they just kicked it up a notch!

Multiplayer Asteroids – Today’s Time Waster: “Filed under: Fun, Games, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Time-WastersWhat do you get when you take Asteroids, add a bunch of other players, and, er, take out the asteroids? Multiplayer Asteroids. It’s an extremely fast-paced and addicting Flash space shooter that takes its aesthetic cues from the classic arcade rock-blaster and adds a dozen or more players from around the world. The controls will be familiar to Asteroids players: Left and right rotate your ship, up and down move you forward and backward, and the space bar fires. You can also press enter to get a text box to broadcast messages to other players, and you can pick up power-ups to boost your health or weaponry. The game can be different depending on how many players they are: With three or four players there’s a little more strategy involved than when there’s 10 players, in which case the screen is a blizzard of projectiles. This is a game that’s hard to stop playing.

[Via Waxy.org]