Wii found!

I finally found Wii in a BestBuy on Jan 19. It was the very last one on and was actually sold to someone. The buyer didnt turn up before deadline and i got that. Sweet!

Wii Sports is very intuitive and even kids picked it up quick. I rented cars game. The accelerometers work as advertised. The wiimote is easy to use. Kids love it. The internet connection works. The games look great on plasma with crisp pictures. Sure BluRay/HD pictures will look even better, but this is DVD quality. Wii unit looks stylish and well designed. I got Classic and Nunchuk controllers.

So far so good!

My Expression Collection

Monday, January 15, 2007

My Expression Collection

This is the list of expressions that i collected moved from my old notes.

• Dont hide your light under a bushel
• Hang on to that thought, i'll be back
• He is not the choirboy/he is the poster boy/he is my evil twin
• Sing it sister cough it up old man
• oh brother!
• That place is a hell hole!
  
• Spiffy - stylish, smart, that neat!
• Cut to the chase
• If defeat is an orphan, success has a thousand fathers
• The tone rubbed me the wrong way
• Done in a cookie cutter manner
• Lets go through the whole drill once again
• You remember the drill
• I want this monkey off my back
• There is more to this than meets the eye
• Show him the ropes
• Learn the ropes
• Good cop/ Bad cop routine
• I was pouting for a long time
• They came out of the woodwork
• Set them up for success
• Hold that thought
• No fog/ Less fog (means more clear)
• Think on your feet
• Think out of box
• Walk the street
• Dont sit on ivory tower
• The best is the worst enemy of the good
• It was a one trick pony
• That gives a good segue for this next topic
• A day late and a dollar short

how can you have a "dignified execution"?

CNN reports: President Bush said Thursday that he wished Saddam Hussein's execution had "gone in a more dignified way."

Politicians say the darndest things. How can you have a dignified execution? we all lose our humanity when we execute a human being.

Eventhough i support death penality and strongly think that Saddam deserved to die, i also believe "Justice should not only be done but also appear to have been done". In the case of Saddam, sadly for the number of people he victimized, it did not "appear" like justice was done. It appeared more like revenge was taken.

ps3 review from cnn/cnet

This was a very well rounded review. Bottom line is this: PS3 hardware is much better than 360. It is a better value for money with built in BluRay player which seems to perform well. No great games that exploit PS3 fully at the moment but they will come soon. Sony design and the specs are very good. If you want bluray player now, this is cheaper at the moment than any other player available. If you can spend $600 PS3 is the one to go. But if you compare that with XBox 360 the price is not that bad. However, if you compare it with Wii at 250$ it is a lot of money to spend.

For myself with 2 small kids, wii is the one to get, if only i can find them in any store around here.

Booklist moved from my old blogs

Wednesday, May 07, 2003

Call # 629.2092 DUR
Author Weisberger, Bernard A., 1922-
Title The dream maker : William C. Durant, founder of General Motors / by Bernard A. Weisberger.

Call # 658.8 1999
Author Moore, Geoffrey A., 1946-
Title Crossing the chasm : marketing and selling high-tech products to mainstream customers / Geoffrey A. Moore ; with a foreward by Regis McKenna.

Fast Food Nation: Eric Schlosser

The Universe in a Nutshell Stephen Hawking

Theodore Rex : Edmund Morris (about thodore rosevelt)

What Einstein Didn't Know Robert Wolke

Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Stephen Ambrose

Stephen Ambrose books in mtnview library

Cosmology selections

Black holes and time warps : Einstein's outrageous legacy / Kip S. Thorne.

City of Mountain View Public Library

The nature of space and time / Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose

Black holes and baby universes and other essays / Stephen Hawking

The future of spacetime / Stephen W. Hawking ... [et al.] ; introduction by Richard Price.

Universe [videorecording] / Thirteen WNET; Uden Associates; David Filkin Enterprises co-production in association with BBC-TV.

Movie Review: Sholay

Rating: Thumbs Up!

Starring: Amitabh Bachan, Dharmendra, Hema Malini, Amjad Khan

Review:
The movie is a fairly faithful reproduction of spaghetti westerns from the leone-kurosawa pedigree. It has good tunes a couple of them built more on good guitar rhythms and less on a typical hindi movie orchestration of a thousand garish violins. It has good antihero characters and a tragic protogonist, a great villan who plays the part with flair and was given great scenes and great lines. The action scenes are wonderful, with a lot of energy and wholesomeness and without a lot of the empty calories of special effects .

At times the movie is a bit relaxed and perhaps that is inline with the pace of a typical western.
For those who like westerns, this is not a bad movie and if you are a film buff type, you may want to see this to complete your survey of westerns around the world.

But for bollywood enthusiasts, this is a must see, if you want to understand the history of hindi movie making and watch the evolution of the BigB, in particular.

List of plants i planted in South Bernardo Ave

Planted on June 4 2000:
Sonata Mix Cosmos
Alyssum (Lobularia maritima)
Petunia
French Marigold (Tagetes Patula)
Snapdragon (Liberty White)
Pot Mums (Dendranthema Grandiflorum)

Plants that i got in sep 2006

Sagina Subulata - irish moss premium ground cover; plant in part sun/part shade. regular water I bought it for planters and other places

Soleirolia Baby's Tears

Interesting reference in the movie: Sholay

I heard this interesting saying in (Bollywood movie) Sholay (and its meaning from: link)

If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad will go to the mountain

Meaning:
If someone won’t do this thing for me, I’ll do it for myself. The proverb can also be interpreted this way: we may find a way to make a difficult situation better if we simply think about the situation in different terms.

Desktop wikis

I settled on MoinMoin for my desktop wiki. This was the lightest of the solutions i investigated. The install was just an unzip and clicking on the app. This comes bundled with a webserver which is a bonus as you can put html pages.

I used this tool for converting my html page to moinmoin format. I havent found any interwiki converters. it will be nice if we have a common wiki markup language

I needed this as i want to start looking at most of the notes that i write as html pages browsable in a browser and that have the capability to interlink thru URLs. .txt files are not cutting it for me anymore. I want to browse my desktop and my files like i would browse a website. hopefully vista will bring those capabilities, including the integrated search abilities.

Booklist

migrating from old notes:

Author Weisberger, Bernard A., 1922-
Title The dream maker : William C. Durant, founder of General Motors / by Bernard A. Weisberger.
>>I havent read this yet but i did read the alfred sloan's biography which was terrific

Call # 658.8 1999
Author Moore, Geoffrey A., 1946-
Title Crossing the chasm : marketing and selling high-tech products to mainstream customers / Geoffrey A. Moore ; with a foreward by Regis McKenna.
>>Im reading this now

Fast Food Nation: Eric Schlosser

The Universe in a Nutshell Stephen Hawking

Theodore Rex : Edmund Morris (about thodore rosevelt)
>> This was a great book, although i listened to the audio book version

What Einstein Didn't Know Robert Wolke

Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Stephen Ambrose
>> this was a great book. I read it. describes the history of california and the integration of america through railroads.

Commandline completions in NT

For getting command line completions in the NT command line:

Copy the following to cmdline.reg and doubleclick it.

------------cut here---------

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor]

'CompletionChar'=dword:00000009

------------cut here---------

To enable autocompletion in ms command line

-----------------

Itunes tricks

Tricks on library consolidation: link1

ITLU:

Make iTunes rescan folders and remove missing files

This is a great tool. This is implemented using .NET and took a while to install as it pulled in .NET 2.0 as a dependency. But after that it seemed to work okay. I used it to remove the dead file links from itunes. It is a shame that itunes software doesnt provide this feature out of the box.

nvu

The install was just an unzip. nvu is the same as mozilla composer with all the fat of mozilla suite removed. Apparently the guy working on nvu is now the owner of mozilla composer. nvu is also documented in wikipedia in here

It works just fine. im going to uninstall amaya and use this instead.

HTML editor

Although not hugely powerful Netscape/Mozilla composer had always been adequate. But it is bloated as i do not want netscaper or mozilla browsers. Firefox is just fine for me. I tried Amaya and it is very crippled and not easy to use. It is more like ed for HTML not even vi. I came across nvu
Seems like it will do the trick. im going to try it.

Consolidating music files

I started using itunes for music file consolidation now. I used Media monkey before, but itunes, being the defacto standard for music playing, im switching over to itunes. It is also pretty efficient so far. I liked the file renaming feature of media monkey and it was fast software. But it was quirky. So is itunes. Its selection handling is wierd and not intuitive to windows users. perhaps it is intuitive to mac users.

For duplicate file finding there were several options. i used http://www.identicalfiles.com/Download.
I had also used dupfiles from funduc software, but identical files seem to be quick and has a nicer interfaces IMO.

After moving all my mp3s to my mega harddrive, i eliminated the dups and then i am going to use consolidate library option of itunes.

I have to do a similar consolidation of my photos at a later date.

Classical Music pieces from an article on zubin from indian american:

Classical Music pieces from an article on zubin from indian american:

Mahler II Symphony - Resurrection

Brahms: Academic Festival Overture - Zubin with LA philharmonic

Ravel's Bolero

Beethoven's Violin Concerto

Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring

Three Tenor's concert with Zubin

Sitar Concerto #2 with Ravishankar and London Philharmonic

On Beethoven's symphonies

On Beethoven's symphonies
(from: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?columnId=5477647)

Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125
one of the finest with Ode to Joy - a poem of Friedrich Schiller chorus in the symphony.
AKA choral symphony; runs to around 74 mins

Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93
classical in style

Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92
Performed to benefit soldiers

Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68
His full title was "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life." Beethoven publicly declared the
piece's "extramusical" purpose: an expression of nature.

Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67
- one of the greatest work of Beethoven

Symphony No. 4 in B Flat Major, Op. 60
More classical. Beethoven had a trend of keeping his even symphonies more classical in nature.

Symphony No. 3 in E Flat Major, Op. 55 - Eroica

Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 21

Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21
Beethoven's First Symphony, dedicated to Baron Gottfried Van Swieten, came at age 29.