IPL – Thoughts

So the IPL seems to have got more interesting off the field than on the field thanks to Lalit Modi.

And with all the betting and fixing allegations, I am afraid IPL may attain a similar status to WWE, that it is just entertainment and not to be taken seriously.

I hope with Sachin and Kumble taking field today for the semis, they put good cricket back into the spotlight. You cant have better ambassadors for the gentleman’s game.

With regards to the teams qualified for the semis, one common thing across all of them is that they have had all round contributions from everyone in the team and had different people who put their hands up at crucial moments during the league stages.

Mumbai seems to be the clear favorite at this stage mainly because they are strong in both batting and bowling. But Bangalore is also a very balanced side though I am still surprised someone as good as Cameron White is not in the playing XI. Deccan and Chennai have both had a very mixed tournament and have not been consistent enough in both batting and bowling. Chennai is very poor in the bowling department and I think that will hurt them.

My prediction is : Bangalore vs Deccan final (repeat of last year’s) and a Bangalore win.

And if this does not happen I blame it on Modi for fixing the results 🙂

Blog client for Mac

One of the reasons for my very long break from blogging has been the inability to find a good blog client once I moved to using a Mac.
In Windows, I loved using Live Writer (surprisingly one of the few MS products I love).

I am too lazy to open wordpress.com and then write a post from the admin interface, I would prefer an offline blog client and Live Writer seemed perfect.

And ever since moving to Mac, I have not been able to find a replacement
which is free.

After some searching, I am trying out ScribeFire which is a firefox plugin. Initial impressions seem to be good, and also since firefox is one app which I have open almost 100% of the time on my macbook, I hope that the frequency of my blogging increases 🙂

I am still searching for a desktop client (free) in Mac to replace Live Writer; if you have any suggestions, please add them in the comments.

Searching for a house for rent in Hyderabad – Few useful links

For the last one month I have been doing some serious house hunting
for renting a house and finally managed to book a house today!I thought I would share some links which I found to be very useful
during my search.

1) MagicBricks search
http://www.magicbricks.com/bricks/propertySearch.html?country=50&budgetMax=11…

2) CraigsList listings (surprisingly I found many good posts here, I
thought craigslist was popular only in US)
http://hyderabad.craigslist.co.in/apa/

3) Sulekha Twitter feed (subscribe to this using a feed reader, I have
used feedrinse to filter only rent related tweets)
http://www.feedrinse.com/services/rinse/?rinsedurl=0c4fa249f6f6ddb106c089a3ff…
http://twitter.com/adshyderabad – For the entire classifieds feed

4) FullHyd listings
http://poetry.fullhydblogs.com/classifieds/index.php?catid=14106

5) 99 Acres search (if the link below doesnt work, try some search and
then change the default sort order, this will change the URL to a
bookmarkable URL like below)
http://www.99acres.com/do/quicksearch/search?sid=UiB8IEFTIHwgUiB8IDQgIzUjfCAg…

6) Click.in listings
http://hyderabad.click.in/classifieds/real-estate/1/41/houses-flats-rent.html

7) Easy Tolet listings (almost all posts have pictures in this site)
http://easytolet.in/search_results.php?rstate=1&rcity=2&reside=&type=1&budget…

I found Sulekha twitter feed and magicbricks to be most useful and
also frequently updated.

Happy House Hunting 🙂

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Testing Posterous

Just setup an account in posterous.com and this is a test message to see if it is as easy as it sounds…

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FedEx derailed!

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!

My Firefox 3 extensions list

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

Single most useful addon for Firefox 3

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/

Now go Invisibile from Gtalk

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/

Movie Reviews from Google Search

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 🙂

Where are you Mr Coach?

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.