I am Back!

I had been to Newyork for the long weekend and have been shifting apartments for past couple of days. Totally busy...

Things are back to normal now.. Hope you will see new things here..

Newyork NEWYORK

I am visiting Newyork for the first time this long weekend..

Any suggestions / things not to miss stuff, please let me know..

Favorite Movie quotes

My inspiration to start this post is 'The Bridges of Madison county' and it had some great ones. I wish to add all my favorites everytime here when I see one good.

The Bridges of Madison county

"The Old dreams were good dreams. They didn't work out, but I am glad I had them".
**--**
"The trouble being a Journalist too long is that you stop giving yourself permission to invent".
**--**
"No big deal. Whatever makes an artist to look like an artist to the world is just one feature I don't have".
**--**
"This kind of certainity comes but just once in your lifetime".
**--**
"I realized love won't obey our expectations. It's mystery is it is pure and absolute.
**--**
"Do what you have to, to be happy in this life.
There is so much beauty.
Go well, my children".
**--**

Weekend news

Something extra-ordinary happened this weekend. For me, the time stopped on the middle of Saturday afternoon and it never started again until now.

Reason, a movie. Name, The Bridges of Madison County.

It was so moving that I couldn't do anything for the past 2 days after seeing it.
Confession: I have never cried for a movie but I cried so hard for this one. I couldn't believe myself that I am crying. It was something outside of my intellectual reach (.. I donno what the hell does that mean ;-)..)..

Anyway, if you are planning to watch the movie expect some heart wrenching, soul touching stuff.. and the film is only for mature audiences. By that I mean, there are so many things that are unsaid in the film but viewers are expected to feel those... so watch it and you might get what I mean..

How to drive someone crazy? The 'Bank' answers

I have been in US for 11 months now and I don't have a credit card still.

Reason: 20% me; 80% C-H-A-S-E

Reasonably pissed off, I went to Bank of America to apply for a Secured credit card. They have a condition that a customer who is 'Resident alien' has to open a checking account in order to apply for a Secured credit card. Accepted. And I also deposited a amount into my checking which will act as a collateral and a credit limit for my Secured card.

All done, I got a mail last night. It says"We cannot process your request as you don't have a reasonable credit history...blah.. blah.. blah.. but you can apply for a Secured credit card. Please send us a check with amount equal to your credit limit and we will send your secured card in 30 days".

There goes another 2 weeks...

Update: I checked with the bank last weekend on this and they said I have to do nothing about it. It is just a protocol they follow even for those who applied for Secured credit card in first place. A complete no-sense protocol...

How to reach London from Chicago?

Go to maps.google.com
Click 'Get Directions'
On the left side text box, type 'Chicago'
On the right side text box, type 'London'
Press 'Enter'.

See Drive direction no. 19

Totally Hilarious, right? One more reason why I love Google.

Why Orkut?

You would know Orkut is a wonderful online application to keep in touch with your friends. The best and popular I believe we have for social networking.

Well.. I live in Chicago and there are lot of Indians out here and lot more in our apartment. Last week I was searching for my apartment name in Orkut and there you go.. there was a community for all the Desis in our apartment. Quite surprised, I went inside.. there were 74 members and they are there in Orkut for one year. Interested to know if there were any gatherings or social events between them I moved further more.. but to my despise I could see only some 6-7 messages between them for the whole year.. and couple of them were for selling utensils.. and stuff..

Do we really need Orkut for this?

Keep on the funny side...

Did you ever walk in a room and forget why you walked in?
I think that's how dogs spend their lives.

Weekend News

The thing we hear mostly on Monday is 'How was your weekend?".. Believe me, I want to make my weekend exciting every Friday and when Monday comes I don't have an answer that is exciting at all as it was planned..

Anyway, this weekend was quite OK.. I should say.. We had Looptopia on Friday night.. America's first overnight cultural and artistic experience.. Though they had many thing going on.. my stop was at Chicago Symphony centre. For the first hour, we had Divertimentos by Mozart performed by Civic orchestra of Chicago.. It was a string quartet and they played from a very good selection of Mozart.. On the next hour, it was a jazz quintet.. couldn't get to remember the performers.. but it was lovely.. and so was the night..

The thing that I felt missed in Looptopia was the Clarinet concert played by a Turkish player in Chicago cultural centre.. It was so crowded that I couldn't get in.. and a theatre event.. 365 Days/365 plays.

Saturday.. I don't remember doing something except for watching Mike Todd's "Around the world in 80 days".. a 1956 Oscar winner.. a nice movie.. bit adventurous.. and one more thing happened today.. Dakota Fanning.. I still couldn't take her out of my head.. such was the devastation.. (maybe I'll brief in a separate post..)..

Sunday.. day of washing.. library.. in the evening had a chance to hear a guitar concert by Zagreb Guitar Quartet.. a young croatian team.. they played pieces from Bach and other classical stuff. It was terrific. They had a wonderful synchoronization and their sound was good too. Came back and watched Manhattan.. Woody Allen's classic.. the next thing I saw was my bed.. and slept.

Do you mind telling yours?

Spider

Last week, my manager sent a mail to the whole of our group.. and the mail went like "anybody want to see my pet spider? then stop over..."

I donno if pet is allowed in our office or not but I thought maybe in a bag.. bit skeptical I went to his desk and asked about it. To my surprise he opened the window and showed a real spider with 'spidy' net outside his glass window.. I thought 'Uh.. thatz it?'.. but he was so happy about it.. he even named it 'Charlotte' based on the movie 'Charlotte's Web'..

You know.. the samething happened to me a week before.. even I got a spider outside my apartment window.. only some 30 floors above my boss's.. but I didn't feel a thing.. opened the window.. saw the spider.. yelled at the apartment management.. closed the window..

So when he was telling about his.. I thought of mine and myself..

mm... sometimes even spiders teach us a lesson..

Dakota Fanning all the way...

I came across this video where Dakota Fanning was the guest in David Letterman's late night show.. and I couldn't believe myself.. she was only 9 yrs old when this interview was taken.. but look how smart she is... just terrific..

What can a hoarding do?

Advertise something...

Yes.. but it can also tilt a building and collapse it.

See what happened in Surat, India...

I was cute. I am not cute at all

I was walking down to home last evening and I saw this ad in one of the CTA bus stop.

"AT ONE - I WAS CUTE
AT TWENTY ONE - I AM NOT CUTE AT ALL"

and this was the tag-line I believe they had... "(so) Better make it right when it happens the first time"..

I think it was an ad for a camcorder but it makes sense to lot of things in our life as well.

We have so much joy left in this world.. but I feel we fail way short in communicating it. If you think you will make someone happy atleast for this moment.. (hey! you are thinking.. thatz good..).. you are making this world a lot better.

You proabably would know what do to... but here are some thoughts from 2 great people (.. one of the last century and one of the business gurus) to this post.

1. "Do it as if it is your last day." - Gandhi
2. "Get out. Speak up. There are so many interesting people out there". - Tom Peters

The Message

I completed watching 'The Message' last night (.. the movie is around 3 hrs long and it took me couple of days to complete it..).

The story is about the birth of Islam and what the religion is all about. It also let you feel why Mecca is so significant in their life. I am not a muslim but I am quite impressed by the film.

Well.. this post is a different story. When I was seeing the movie, I got a thought like why the world didn't see any new religion that changed the world for more than a thousand years.

Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam all formed in this world more than a thousand years ago. But nothing new after that.

Has all the ideologies that we care in this world has already been taken care by these religions?

or.. (this I believe).. Have we become so intellectual that we don't believe there is a world outside of what all our sciences can reach?... or maybe will there be a new religion in couple of years or couple of hundred years?..

What do you think?

Pathetic!

I couldn't believe myself.

Until now, all my blogs had a setting to receive comments only from 'Registered' users. Thatz the most pathetic setting in a blog I could imagine and I never knew I had it myself. I assumed Blogger would allow everyone to add 'Comments' by default.

Blogger betrayed me.

Yahoo! Mail

Business Week in its current issue has listed 'Top 25 companies' which are good at Innovations. And guess what? Yahoo! is not there. Quite rightly so. Though Yahoo! was one of the first companies that popularized the e-mail communication, I believe they have become quite stagnant in the recent years and they didn't do anything about it.

It is pretty sad by the fact that they had all the chance in world in changing the experience Users can have when they use their e-mail software, but they fell terribly short of it. I haven't seen any changes in their e-mail software until sometime ago when they introduced a beta software which again made me feel like using 'Outlook'. Isn't there anything new they can think of?

Well.. the reason why I started writing this post is for a different reason altogether. My sister sent me her engagement photos thru Yahoo! mail. At first, I thought of downloading all the files to my hard disk. But I had no option to do it.

They should all the photos as thumbnail and they had a link saying 'View' next to it. I thought clicking that will actually get me to see the picture in Full size. Guess what? It went to a different page saying 'No virus detected'.. 'Download attachment'.. Why would a company such big as this write a software so dumb and it is pretty obvious..

The story doesn't end there. They don't have one but two softwares to manage photos. 1. Yahoo! photos and 2. flickr. But when I searched the page for the first time, I couldn't find a link to save all my photos into something. Obviously, I was skimming around the page. Then there it was.. a link at the bottom of the page in very small letters to save all your photos in Yahoo!. I don't blame them very much on this but if you give a service to the users why not let them know about it in a bit more obvious way then hiding it somewhere..

I believe they have in pipeline to integrate Yahoo! photos and flickr. If not, they are wasting so much money in managing two softwares and they are restricting people from getting a good 'photo' experience and it is very cruel.

Here is a thought. I don't think Microsoft can do a bigger change in Yahoo! if it is to buy it. I don't see anything interesting that might come up in the partnership. Instead, if Google is to buy Yahoo!, then that is a big change. People has to do in what they are good at and merging / selling should also happen in the same idea.. atleast I believe so.

Any comments?

Production Support

I came home with an idea of sleeping early.. somehow I was feeling so tired in office.. (I can't remember if I have moved any mountains in the past of couple of weeks.. but I was feeling that much tired..)..

but.. bang.. I got a Production support call.. and there goes my idea.. hmm..

Life is wonderfully pathetic sometimes..

Bank of America and Museums

Bank of America cardholders get a special previleage for Free museum admissions in the month of May 2007.

Please find the details in this link...
http://www.bankofamericapromotions.com/museums/

It requires a Photo ID and a Bank of America credit card or ATM card or Check card or MBNA credit card.. sounds like a great deal..

P.S. I am myself applying for a Bank of America debit and credit card today.. but this offer is not available in Chicago.. so no gain for me.. wish you get one..

Technorati Tags: bank of america, free museum, admissions

Life in US

My sister is getting engaged tomorrow and I just spoke to her..

man.. being in US for the last 10 months, I believe this is most wonderful thing I am missing in my life.. being there when my only sister is getting engaged.. the choice was mine... but.. but...





Technorati Tags: desi life, desi in US

Mother's Day and Marketing

For the past couple of days, I see a small boutique shop being setup inside our office that sells cards and other fashionable stuffs to impress your Mother on Mother's day (05/13/07).

It is scheduled for 2 days and a women in late 20's was taking care of it. She had a total of around 30-40 items to sell in that 2 days and in an office were some 500 people are working, it is no big a deal. But in quite a few momentous pass I made across that shop seems to me to believe that no one cared about a small shop that was in existence there and she didn't care about to make people to come to her shop atleast for a visit. She was just scribbling in a notebook all along.

Why would someone care to setup a shop inside an office just to scribble something on a notepad? why would anyone pay for that? I couldn't understand. I wish I had talked to her and gave her my two cents about the whole setup. This post is just about what I would have said.

1. You can't expect people to see your 8" x 11" hoarding that you place where people are needed to take special interest to see the hoarding.
2. If you want them to take interest in your hoarding, make it big and make it colorful. Just 2 blant colors (with one being white) doesn't help you to market your product.
3. Just don't sit there waiting for people to come to see your shop. Get up and just let people know that you are there. Watching people passby doesn't help anyway here.
4. Give some surprises. Have a spinwheel or pick from a lot game or anything that is interesting. People love fun and advertising should be fun too. It reaches people far more quickly than anything. Give people fun.

I started writing this couple of days ago but couldn't post it as I would have liked to. The reason. We call it DUPES in our world. But I couldn't give you a reason why I didn't reach out to her to tell her of what I thought. Maybe I couldn't still break the barriers I have over myself.. and maybe next time.. I will..