Muted Melodies

A cool tip I found out by accident, I usually read reviews for a movie before I start watching it, and I typed “movie:illusionist” today in my Google search bar and wow, it returned me all the reviews for the movie with an aggregate rating as well, it shows all reviews for the movie and ratings alongside, I find this as the easiest way to look at all the reviews for a movie. I never knew about this movie: operator in google before.

All u need to do is type “movie:<moviename>” in ur google search box

Surprising that I have not seen a single report mentioning the Indian Coach, Gary kirsten. He was supposed to be in Australia as a consultant, before the tour started and there has been no news since. I am not even sure where he is right now. Wondering how the media did not get his opinion on this Sydney test imbroglio.

Good, the ICC did the right thing by removing Bucknor from the next match. When there is a very serious complaint lodged by a team against him, it is only fair to not have him officiate again in the next match itself.

So many things have been happening over the last 2 days, the cricket has been forgotten, it is sad that the match won’t be remembered for that splendid innings from Laxman and a masterclass from Sachin… and also that gritty innings from Anil Kumble at the end.

Looks like the tour is not going to be cancelled as the ICC has removed Bucknor and also Bhajji’s ban is now in appeal. So it is very important that India plays the tour game at Canberra and try out Sehwag/Pathan and give another chance to Yuvraj and Dhoni to capture their form.

And interestingly, Bucknor is gonna be replaced by Billy Bowden, who was blamed by the Aussies for the Ashes loss.

I have been kind of addicted to this site for sometime now. Basically a word power game which donates 20 grains of rice for each correct guess.

You will definitely improve your vocabulary - they have a very good collection of questions - and also it will help in reducing hunger, albeit in a small measure.

Link: FreeRice.com

Another year, another test, same result….

When will Bucknor retire? He has caused more trouble for India than the Aussies.

Today Symonds was 100% out, the nick was very clear and loud, but he chose to ignore it, and we all know this is not the first time he has done this against us.

I had the most stupid new year moment just a while ago.

I got this movie, Inside Man from my friend and had very little idea about the movie, I just thought of playing it for a while to see if I like it…

And when I started the movie, I heard the Chaiya Chaiya song’s opening!!! I was so freaked out, my initial thought was that I had some youtube video open or one of those stupid ads has popped up in my browser… I paused the movie and there was silence!

So it was actually coming from the movie only. The second thought was that AR Rahman has lifted this song from this soundtrack(I had no idea when this movie was released at that time.) But then after a few seconds I could hear the exact hindi lyrics!!

Now I was completely confused, there had to be an explanation, my friend played a prank on me by giving the wrong movie or he mistakenly recorded something over this movie. Then I thought there may be two audio tracks and Windows Media Player is mixing them both(I have had this problem with multi-language audio track dvds in WMP), so I promptly switched to VLC player, but saw only one track and it was Chaiya Chaiya again….

And finally I thought I had enough and wanted to find out whatever this is… And no wonder, Wikipedia came to my rescue riteaway…

Well, that was a short post to kickstart the blog in 2008 Have got to complete the movie now, Happy New Year to you all

Wanted to sign off 2007 with this amazing video, which I have not been able to resist since yesterday evening.

Saw this ad on TV and then immediately searched in youtube to find the full version. Excellent concept! And the music is also good.

I had a lots of plans for the weekend, to catch up on work, do some shopping, get my clothes washed,etc.. but did not manage to do a single thing as I got a bunch of movies from my friend

Here goes the list of movies…

• Amores Perros - Imdb
  • Very good movie, from the director of Babel, but a Mexican flick, so it was tough to watch the whole movie with subtitles on.
  • The plot is very similar to Yuva, the whole movie revolves around one incident and how it affected many lives.
• Identity - Imdb
  • Excellent thriller, lots of twists in the plot, and also starring John Cusack, one of my favorites.
  • Don’t read any review/spoilers before watching the movie.
• My Best Friend’s Wedding - Imdb
  • No need to tell, I am an out and out Romantic Comedy fan, enjoyed it to the core.
• October Sky - Imdb
  • Nice feel good movie, about a bunch of school guys launching a rocket, against all odds. The emotional drama between the father and son is very well portrayed.
  • Small Trivia, the movie is an adaptation of the book named ‘Rocket Boys’ and was not named the same to attract movie-goers of all age groups; incidentally October Sky is an anagram of Rocket Boys

I just downloaded the Beta 2 of Firefox 3. And I am pretty impressed

Some of the key features I found to be very useful in FF 3:

• Tagging for bookmarks
• Integrated History and Bookmark search from the address bar
• A quick find search box in the Manage Passwords panel. - This is very very useful if you are trying to search for a password.
• A new smart Bookmarks folder that has most visited and recently visited pages.
• A button to open ‘Manage addons’ from Firefox Options panel. - I many often go to the Options panel instead of Addons, so this is helpful

But still, I am not able to find most extensions to be compatible with FF3 and that is the main reason I am not migrating to FF3 and just trying to get familiar with the new features.

And the coolest thing is that FF3 comes in Portable edition, so you can just download the portable version from here, and then download it to some other folder like D:\Firefox3\ and run that exe instead of your normal Firefox exe whenever you want to work on FF3. None  of your settings in Firefox 2 are affected because of this and you are safe to return back to browsing in Firefox 2.

Bonjour à tous

Je suis l’apprentissage du français

That wasn’t spam, just some French I have been learning today…

Learning a new language has become so easy thanks to Google

Just add en2fr@bot.talk.google.com to your GTalk friends list and you get your French master

Substitute fr to any other language, the gtalk blog talks about all supported languages here.

Happy learning…