Bangalore loses IPL matches to bombs

In today's India, a bomb can go off anywhere. What makes IPL think Mumbai is safer than Bangalore. Were the Mumbai not the target of more attacks than any other city in India? Whole of India is a dangerous place to be - case in point Dantewada attacks. Will they move the matches out of India? Will it remain IPL then? This is a bad precedent and a step in the wrong direction. It is shows that we are scared of miscreants.

Perils of Thoughts

What is the link in Google Pages, Blogger, Orkut & Buzz? Apart from they all being Google owned sites; they fight for mindshare of individuals through web presence. They show the evolution of mediums to express one’s thoughts.

In good old days if you needed a web presence you needed a pursuing degree in computer science, to host a webpage on the university server and actually be able to create a webpage itself. Web space was costly and needed efficiency in HTML to create any web site at all. But that changed when free webhosting sites came into existence, e.g. http://www.angelfire.com/. This is where I made my first web site. The web hosting provider would give you certain amount of web space (5-10 MB) to create your web page(s), and you had to bear with the ads they put on your site to compensate for the free web-space. They also allowed direct upload from HTML editors like Microsoft FrontPage. That meant creating a webpage was comparatively easy for people who did not know HTML etc. But then, the whole concept of web hosting meant that the thoughts or ideas are organized, just like a book to make a meaningful website. http://www.googlepages.com/ caters to this market.

Then came blog. In the world of web two point owe – it is a contraction of the term ‘We-bLog’ – an online diary of (mostly) an individual. Later commercial organizations also picked-up the idea. This new concept meant that you do not have to arrange thoughts in any specific manner and let them flow as they came. Somehow they still meant that you mostly blog about a specific subject, and would consist at least a paragraph of text. http://www.blogger.com/ was the first site I think. Google later acquired blogger.

Come ‘on man you don’t expect to paragraphs from text frenzy people, who are in a hurry to go to hell so came http://www.twitter.com/. These days it creates trouble for Indian politicians and cricket administrators alike. While not creating havoc in the Indian Parliament, twitter allows for shorter messages to be published from anywhere you can access the web or by sending a SMS. I think Google is trying to cater to this market with their latest Google Buzz, but it is bit different anyway. For one – it intrudes into your mail box.

While blogs graduated to dumber tweets, social networking space was becoming a rage. There were many others but www.myspace.com was a pioneer in this field, and www.facebook.com bulldozed everything else in the developed countries. www.orkut.com is Google’s answer which was developed as an internal project and became hugely successful in Brazil and India. Now these social networking sites wanted a share of the users mind so they started ‘what’s in your mind?’ and ‘what are you up to?’

Isn’t that I was using twitter for, and before that blogger and before that angel-fire? Now when I come up with an idea that can change the world during my ‘power-nap-in-the-loo’ session, I ought to be confused where to express that. I don’t use websites now since they are passé. But luckily others are linked. When I put a message on my blogger it shows on face-book, orkut and buzz. If I press ‘Like’ on http://www.youtube.com/ while logged-in they show on twitter and face-book. When I comment something on twitter, it shows on www.linkedin.com. Gradually everything is getting linked, and more confusing.

PS: I could not think of a better title for the blog post.

PPS: my twitter handle is Sharma.Goutam, I blog at http://www.gomzyonline.com/ and it has a mirror on http://www.gomzyonline.blogspot.com/

A Trip to AMS

I visited AMS on the Good Friday. It warm when we began in Dordrecht but became very cold in the way. Once again in AMS it was quite good.

This picture is caused by my shivering hands due to the cold.

EY office in AMS. EY has a special place for me as I was associated for the longest period in any institution apart from primary school and college.

AMS royal palace. Not in use, apparently.

AMS central staion.

Finding Nemo any one?

Some of the houses can be very narrow. It seems in the heydays of AMS, land was very prime, and thus such narrow houses. I have seen some houses as narrow as one door.

This is a very famous bridge. It used to be lifted by hands in old days. Now motors do the work.


You can see some of the houses are not properly aligned and they are leaning on others.

At the Chez

I went to Chez on a warm (NL standards) Friday afternoon for lunch. Enjoyed the food, enjoyed the location and enjoyed the weather. This restaurant is located at a very picturesque location of Wieldrechtseweg, near the port.

In the lobby of Postillion Hotel Dordrecht

I stayed in Postillion Hotel, Dordrecht in a couple of visits to that place. I took some pictures and they are the cause of this post. The hotel is a nice place to stay, but the same can not be said about the food. The menu was short and did not change in 3 months. Luckily there is a Mc Donald’s adjacent to the hotel. Though virtually out of the town of Dordrecht, it is not really very far from the city center, and is barely 5 kilometers away.In the name of the facilities there is one pool table. You have televisions in every room and they give complementary water bottles in the room fridge, they also give coffee, tea and chocolate mix in the room to drink. Earlier they used to put a couple of soup packets as well but they did not during my 2nd visit. There is a pool table in the bar. Breakfast is complementary on the weekends, but the room charges make it up for them.

The above pictures were taken in April during my 2nd visit. Follwoing were taken in Jan'10 during my first visit. Also above pics were taken on a broken SE K790i while the follwoing pictures were taken on a new Nokia E 75. I missed the SE phones then.

A View from my Desk

February 2010 was one of the coldest during the history and due to that I was virtually imprisoned in my hotel room.



These pictures were taken ten days apart on Feb 1st and 11th.