Apurv

This years Ranji finals was one of the best cricket matches seen in recent times in India. The biggest credit for making this match happen must go to Mr Nagraj the curator of Gangothri glades. The pitch was one of the best ones ever seen in recent times in India. The BCCI could do well to either move the Kotla WC matches to this ground. They wont because the stadium can hold only 8k ppl. They could do better to make Mr Nagraj the head curator to overlook WC pitch preparations.

This is one of the worst articles I have ever read
http://news.rediff.com/column/2009/dec/18/an-avoidable-mess-over-telangana.htm

The writer does not know much about any of the topics she is discussing. She is simply presenting her point of view as though it is the epitome of correctness. Most of the new states she mentions are being fought for not on ethnic or liguistic basis. Telanaga people and Andhra people are of the same ethnicity and speak the same language. Same with Vidharba. The issues is that of political neglect and marginalization.

Cant wait to watch Avatar on Thursday.

Current Mood: excited

Got myself a Sony Walkman NWZ Z202 in a case of on the spur of the moment buying. I believe its going to be more convenient using it while cycling. I tried using ipod, but the wires get entangled all over the place. It could be quite irritating especially while climbing. This piece is convenient as it sits tightly on the ears.

I now need to get back to regular cycling.

PS - The manual says, this should not be used while cycling. I dont know why else any one would buy this. My guess is that only runners and cyclist might end up buying it as it does not have many features one would get with a normal music player

Was looking around for a good document management system for a few days now. Downloaded and installed Knowledge Tree today. Quite an impressive product. It has been smooth sailing so far. Will do some testing to see if the product breaks over the next couple of days.
Wanted to get back to doing some coding. Dloading eclipse today. Need to revisit programming (have not done since passing out)

Karmic Koala releases today. Cant wait to upgrade!

My new colleague and I were having a discussion of Windoze v/s Linux today. Hez seems like a windoze junkie. In the middle of the talk, Windows XP on my laptop suddenly crashed. Tried repairing it using the repair CD, but the cd refused to recognize my hard drive. Kubuntu was running fine meaning there was no hardware problem. The windoze admin saw the blue screen and said hardware failure. It took me a good 30 mins to convince him that there was no hardware failure and he needed to re-install windoze. The sad part is that I need to resintall kubuntu and all the wonderful stuff I had installed on it.Its a company policy to have only one partition per machine. I used Wubi to install Kubuntu on the same Windows NTFS partition. Now that the partition has been formatted, Kubuntu is also gone.

Current Mood: aggravated

I completed the cyclothon yesterday. I rode the amateur ride. The distance of the ride was reduced to 36 km due to some reason. The race was supposed to start from BIEC on Tumku road at 845.
I woke up at 6:00 AM. Had a lil bit of broken wheat Pulav. Filled my hydration pack with water and bottle with electral solution. Started from home at 7AM. I had got my cycle serviced on Sat. I asked the service chap to increase my handle height to make it on part with a 19" frame bike. My first ride was from home to BIEC which was abt 16kms or so. I covered it in about 50mins. Met up with Ragi in the parking area. I had asked the dood to get some bananas as he was getting his car. Ragi forgot. I was already hungry. The race started at about 9. My batch was given the green signal at abt 915. My initial plan was to stick with Ragi. After about a couple of kms I got into my rythm and went ahead of Ragi. Kept company with Ajay for the next 15 kms. The pace was quite steady. Apart from the hunger I felt quite good. I though I could get some food at the first aid station. The aid station had only water (of which I had plenty). Ajay on his road racer went past me just before the half way mark. The second half of the ride was pretty lonely. Towards the end my calfs were slightly cramping up. Took in a few gulps of electral and rode standing for a while. That relaxed my calfs and I made it to the finish easily. Ajay said he finished it in 1 hr 32 mins. I could see him till the finish. This would mean that I finished 2-4 mins behind him. Had a couple of bananas provided as after ride refreshment. Took rest for a while. Met up with Ragi, said my byes and then rode back home. The ride back home took almost 2 hrs coz of the traffic. In fact I took the same time as a car while returning.

Some interesting incidents:
1) An old man (must be 70+) had a banner on his back saying 'I am not old. Old age is ways 15 years older than my current age'. He finished may be a couple of mins behind me. A big salute to his spirit.
2) One chap was on a colorfully decorated Atlas Goldline. Ragi said that chap overtook him. That chap caught up with me and finished about 30 seconds ahead of me. His climbing on single speed roadster was just amazing. Lot of participants were cheering him.
3) Services participants had almost 0% body fat. They were peadalling their single speed bikes quite easily. They were playing Antaskshari as they rode.
4) One chap whom I spoke with ( name Mithun) while riding back home told me that he had come to blore from Kolkata just for the race. He asked me to show him the way to Yeshwantpur railway station as he had to catch the Yeshwantpur-Howrah express. Big salute to his passion.

I was happy as I made my ride completely green. I rode my cycle from home to the race and back. There were around 500-1000 cars at the location, and that was a big sore spot for the event.

Current Mood: enthralled

Rahul Dravid seems so uncomfortable when playing with the Indian ODI team. I am sure this is because of the way he is treated. I haven't understood this youth Mantra from the start. The best 11 players irrespective of age should represent India. Nobody should be taken in the team future value perspective. They should be taken into the team only after they have proved their value. I don't think Suresh Raina and Yusuf Pathan have wat it takes to perform well. Rahul Dravid is any day a better choice over them. One more thing I think is terribly wrong with this Indian team is their greed and over ambition. Cricketing career is a marathon and not a 50 mts indoor dash. There are only so many games that a player's body and mind can take. Players need to assess which games are important for them and volunteer to rest for some tournaments. IPL career can be resurrected post retirement also. But once the body and mind become weak, once cannot play test and ODIs.
One more thing to Mr Gill. T20 is also not a sport. It is complete capitalist entertainment.

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=671355&sec=europe&cc=4716

This comming from Abramovich and Berlusconi is a bloody joke. Now that they dont have much money to spend, they wanna prevent others from doing what they did.

I personally believe Platini is a self obsessed ego-maniac. He wants to limit how much each club spends. We'll most clubs are companies whose stake holders decide how much to spend. If the stake holders think that the money spent would not be worth it they wouldnt spend it. Most of the transfer money is pocketed by the clubs and not by the players, so I dont understand how this would hurt clubs.
Not curbing monetary limits would help smaller clubs pocket more money for their players and would help create more competition. This would have impacts outside of the UEFA zone too.

Football is run like the personal fiefdom of Blatter and Platini.