It was one of the best game of tennis I have seen in the recent years. Federer chasing his 6th consecutive title, would be hugely disappointed with the tight finish but the game was all about Nadal and how he managed to be mentally stronger than the Swiss.

Nadal played at the same level throughout the match, retrieving anything that Federer sent and serving those into the body serves pretty well, but what he did the best was to unsettle Federer and make him commit mistakes. Federer had to go for that extra angle in his winners as Nadal would chase down almost anything, many points had to be won by two or three winners from Federer.

While Federer’s forehand was majestic today, the backhand really let him down at crucial stages, it was strange to see so many uncharacteristic errors from him, but then he just could not play his natural free flowing tennis against Nadal.

Throughout the match, most of Federer’s service games were a stroll in the park, they got over within a minute thanks to some great serves from the Swiss, and whenever he was in slight trouble, Federer used his big serve very effectively to put Nadal out of the game. By contrast, almost all of Nadal’s service games were tight, he did not have the big serve, but served intelligently, esp on his second serves to hold on to his serves, I think Federer had like 15 breakpoints but managed to convert just one!!

In the end it was just a matter of who would crack up first; after that marvelous fourth set tiebreak I thought the 5th set would be a very easy one for Federer, I felt Nadal would not be able to control his emotions and play normally after making a complete mess of an easy chance to win the match in that tiebreak. He had a couple of match points as well, but the way Federer fought back, it was easily the best of Federer in this match – that backhand pass he played when he was matchpoint down was out of the world.

Kudos to Nadal for not being mentally strong, especially after the fourth set and play some extraordinary shots to break Federer and then hold his nerve to finish it with his serve.

Federer would need some time to recover from this defeat, but I am sure this will only push him to take his game to the next level(if there is one!) the next time the both meet.

By the way, there was also a cricket match happening in the subcontinent and India lost another final, no surprises there!

Application: Firefox 3.0 (2008052906)
Operating System: WINNT (x86-msvc)

• Add Bookmark Here ² 3.0.20080604
• Add to Search Bar 1.7
• Clippings 3.0
• Context Search 0.4.3
• Cooliris Previews 2.6.4
• Extension List Dumper 1.14.1 –> this is what I used to get this list
• Facebook Toolbar 1.2.1
• FastYub! 2.1.4
• feedly 1.0b1
• Firefox Showcase 0.9.4.8
• FireGestures 1.1.2
• FoxClocks 2.3.14
• Google Gears 0.3.24.0
• Greasemonkey 0.8.20080609.0
• IE Tab 1.5.20080310
• iMacros for Firefox 6.0.5.4
• Image Zoom 0.3.1
• keyconfig 20080611
• Linky 2.7.1
• Locationbar² 1.0.1
• meebo 1.1
• Menu Editor 1.2.6
• More Tools Menu 1.1
• MySocial 24×7 Bar 0.5
• Password Exporter 1.1
• PDF Download 1.0.1.2
• PicLens 1.7.0.3459
• Remember The Milk for Gmail 1.0.1
• ReminderFox 1.7.2
• SearchBox Sync 1.2
• Secure Login 0.9.2.3
• Shareaholic 1.4.1
• SmartSearch 3.10
• Tab Mix Plus 0.3.6.1.080416
• Table2Clipboard 0.1.1
• TableTools 0.24
• Taboo 0.1.6
• TagSifter 3.0
• TwitterBar 1.0
• URL Link 2.02.2
• View Cookies 1.7
• Web Developer 1.1.6

I have been fiddling with various addons for firefox 3, but found Feedly to be the most awesome.

It is basically a start page/feed reader, but looks much much better than iGoogle or even Google Reader!

I have not yet tried all the features, but the UI is very good; it has a newspaper kind of interface, but it also has so many keyboard shortcuts like the Google Reader.

For most of the blogs, it shows the comments as well on the same page.

And the coolest thing is it is directly linked to Google Reader, so you need not subscribe to all your feeds again.

Give it a try, I am sure you will find it engaging.

Link: http://www.feedly.com/

Google has released a new labs edition of Google Talk. It looks very similar to the talk gadget and the gmail chat interface, with support for tabs, setting the status to invisible, etc. This is a very welcome release as I was never comfortable with chatting within the browser and the desktop Google talk was not frequently updated like the chat interface.

This can be downloaded from : http://www.google.com/talk/labsedition/

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