Truly immortal

Hi all,
We all have been using now Watsapp heavily, and this post merely is a dedication to the messages which we receive on Watsapp.
I am not meaning the numerous 'Check if your watsapp has been hacked' or 'Send it to 10 other people to receive blessings immediately'.

Madurai Karan for RK Nagar

Hi all,

Of late, continuing with the current scenario we hardly get a chance to stop laughing. Last time I remember we were all laughing our asses off was when Rahul Gandhi gave an interview to Arnab Goswami. After that , we have hardly got good (for a lack of a better word) comedians , be it in real life nor in movies. The leading comedians in all the major ‘woods’ of our state like Vivek, Vadivelu, Santhanam, Brahmanadam, Sunil , Abhishek Bachan, Kapil Sharma everybody went out of form. That was like a dull period in our history, where people did not have enough topics to laugh heartily at.

Nandri Hein !

Hi all,
India is a land of diversity. Diversity as the dictionary meaning says its a range of different things.
We have to believe in this, and if you do not believe in this, no matter what the reality is you will be called as Anti-national , and probably you will be asked to surrender your Aadhar card immediately.

Movies Part- 2 : 2016

Hi all,
Continuing from the previous one for the movies in 2016 which I liked, the below is the ones which I did not like.

Movies Part 1- 2016.

HI all,
As the curtain for 2016 is falling, with my free vacation time I thought I will watch all the movies which I missed during the year. And I realize that its been long time since I wrote anything about movies.
I saw quite a good number of Tamil Movies this year(as always) and liked some.
Here I revisit some of my favorite ones this year, in order of their release (courtesy Wikipedia).

Media Channels 101 with Kabali

Hi all,
I am a observer of things shown in the media which I can say actively in social media and less in electronic media and very less in print media. But if a media person has to give a introduction for me,
yours sincerely can be counted as a media analyst.
It is easy nowadays to become a political analyst particularly in Tamil Nadu, all one has to do is to start a Youtube channel and actively comment on whatever the Government or Opposition

Curious case of Vijay Mallya and Tamil Nadu

As we all know it is this time of the year where we have our appraisals. Employees have it in their office with their managers, Entrepreneurs will look at their progress for last year and chalk out the plan for future, and students have their grading examinations now.

All these happen yearly, one will definitely get used to it. But what comes after a well-defined interval is the elections, am not writing about the Cricket World Cup this time :).

In search for Life

Hi all,
It seems as though with hectic schedules, in our continuous search for something we miss on most of the things, at-least I feel so. It was all fine until I got up this morning and started wondering what is the entire fuzz about weekends. I just realized how things had changed dramatically from my childhood times to now.
Like myself, people who were born in the late 80s till early 90s called as Generation Y or Millenials would be able to related to that very much.

Thala Thalapathy Pongal

Hi all,

First things first, wish you all a happy new year. This post is strictly for audience who love watching movies. Last week , there was a clash in the box office in TamilNadu when two big stars clashed after 7 years. Both stars have lot of fans and when the news was there that both movies were targeting pongal release, it was already a huge news , that the fans started revisiting the history for their earlier clashes, and counting box office collections to decide who leads among the two. This no spoiler to the movies, as both the movies had storyline mixed among various Rajinikanth’s movies, anybody who says this is a spoiler, has never seen a Rajinikanth movie , and such a species would have never existed / will not exist  in India.

Conformity

Hi all,
This is a recent trend , which I have observed from my friends and friends of friends. It is obviously from the social networking media that I have figured out this.

The trend is to go out of normal and do something else. Be it in job or passion.
My views on this are more than complicated in this.
This is probably one of those grey area topics, where nobody could take a solid decision on it.

Tribute

Hi all,
Its been quite sometime since I scribbled something here, for the past one month I wanted to do it, but just got the time to do it now.
I would like to express my gratitude to you who has shaped my career, my life. You may ask me why suddenly now ?

Running now - Final Season !

Hi all,
Its March now, exam season everywhere! May be some of us have forgotten that its the same time when we wrote our board exams. I see anxious students in my locality, all buried deeply in their books. And I see that the parents are more anxious than them !
With the passing of exams, its not the students who are not getting grey hairs , but its the parents who are losing hairs !

Memory unplugged

Hello all,
I am noticing of late that we are quite occupied over the week, and all activities we want to do , we push it to the weekend. And when weekend comes we never materialize that, and it's always the case that it gets spilled over to the next weekend, and finally it happens over some random day, for which mathematically probability of such an occurrence would have been very very minimal.

Arrest Warrant issued to you and me !

Hi all,
Well this might turn out to be my last blog post even. No one knows when one gets arrested for what.
And even you can get arrested as you have been reading my blog posts.

Okay, you still have the guts to read, and me too I still feel I can write.
Indian government law is mixed up, there are too much complicated and twisted , twisted enough for benefit of some. That some definitely does not include the common man, so no use for you and me.

Weekend ramblings..

Hello all,
Well I have been busy completely, and weekends now have become entirely time to doze off. Now that we have moved to a new house, we dont have anything literally in the new house when compared to the previous one, as the previous one was a fully furnished house.

Comparison

Hello all,

All our life we have been living comparing our life with someone else's . Comparison is both good and bad. Comparison can lead one to improve , and can make one feel depressed too. One should ideally compare one with oneself, it will lead to improvement rather than complaining after comparing with some one else.
The problem with us is, we compare to someone else whom we know , mostly to the person whom we hate.

Where do I end

Hi all,
I have been busy all days, something or the other keeps me occupied, mind you being busy doesn't mean that all things which I do is fruitful or productive, I do things which I like, and of course some things which I am forced to like :) and somethings of course which I hate but have to do no other go.

Year 1 Anniversary

Hi all,
There are somethings which everyone feels proud of. One such thing is getting a job, and this post is for such a reason.

Growing up with Potter !!

Hi all,
 There are certain good things which we like, we think it should remain forever, but all things have to come to an end.. So it did.. The last potter movie released yesterday, and to summarize it, it was just awesome.. I am a big fan of the Harry Potter series, and may be its the book which I started to read first I think.. My chilhood best pals will read novels stories, and I don know why I just couldn connect to it that time, and I wont read much also. The first thing while reading a book, which I used to see is the no of pages in it, the shorter the better is what I felt those days. If it was a big book, I wont touch it unless I have no other go, and during my school days, it was like my early stages of reading, ( even now I am not a avid reader, but when compared to now , that was very early, may be like Sachin's first ton while he his nearing his hundred'th now) so I wont understand that much, and the vocabulary will make me feel that this book is not meant for me. At that stage, I think almost all authors were like foreign authors, and very few may be Indian authors, and whose books never came into notice in all places. But somehow it was JKRowling who broke the jinx between me and foreign authors, and then I started noticing a few, even now I am a selective reader, but now due to abundance of Indian authors, I follow their blogs, books , newspaper columns regularly. It was JKR who made me to read, and it was Harry who cast me in his spell, which I never recovered from.

The series contains 7 books, as u all know, and when I started reading those I dont remember , but the series had definitely made an impact on me.The first book ' Harry Potter and Philosopher's stone' ,  was just fantastic and I started waiting for the next ones, though I never knew whether there was any sequel to it. It was my friend Nithin, who was my neighbor, gave me that book, and I started reading it whenever he was unavailable for playing.

I remember seeing the first movie, though that time I was not a big follower of English movies, the movie I felt it was good, as I knew the story before hand. Whenever you read a book, it should bring a picture to your brain, thats what the first movie did to me, and all the characters had a clear picture in my mind, though I had some after reading the first part. Then on, it was announced that second part of the movie will also come soon, so I decided to read the book before the movie releases, and I get the vcd of it.

Soon I started reading the second book,Chamber of Secrets again with the help of my friend Nithin who got that book from someone for me, and I was cast in its spell. The book was just awesome, and it was great, it started dealing with friendship, when in school , we were blossoming with friends..

It was that time, that I started following Cricket, and in the daily, 'The Hindu' column of Peter Roebuck was the one which I started following, though I wont understand it fully.The matches which I saw, those last over thriller matches which I enjoyed seeing, I wanted to read expert opinion on it,and the next day I will be waiting to get a grab on the last sheet of the paper, as the last sheet was the sports sheet in the paper. So I grew up along with it, slowly proceeded my reading from sports column to friday review, young world in saturday's.

So I  grew up with Harry , who made me read, who made me imagine, who made me understand. Then it was the third part, 'Prizoner of Azkaban' which again my friend gave me, made me crazy, that part had the best complications as far as i think, it had the concept of time turner, which made me read it again and again to understand it. So i started reading things repeatedly, and so harry had made me change the pages so fast, and had put me in a infinite loop to read from the first again and again, and the movie came, it was the best movie which I had seen during those days, as it had shown the concept of time turner very well, and it was the one which made me think, how a writing can make think of different possibilities, how it has the concept of OO programming, abstraction, telling only the essence, making the reader think how it was done, leading to different possibilities, and make the reader think than just understand it..


Then I got my hands on the fourth, 'Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire' , which was just awesome, and started getting darker, as the villain Dark Lord was rising in his power, and the war was on from the first chapter literally. So it was a brilliant book, probably the best book which I read that time, which had dark elements in it, and again it made me think a lot, imagine a lot. I was a bit mature that time, i still remember those days, where I used to think how she had written such a book, that too a sequel , having small small things which forms the plot, and has hints of it from the first book wherever possible.

Till this Fourth part, I was behind time, and it was from the fifth part that I was in synch with the release dates of the book, I was in my tenth grade during that time, and I had ordered the fifth book 'Harry Potter and Order of Phoenix'   in a shop in Chennai, the first book which I bought on the series, but due to some issues, it was delayed to get delivered. The book releases in July usually,my friend Nithin was in twelfth grade that time, and we both share birthday in the same July month. So his friend gave him fifth book, as a bday gift , and he gave me it for a week during my birthday week, and this was the first time I had a strict deadline to finish off, and the book was the biggest among the books till that date. And as expected, I completed reading that fifth book within a week, and the book was just awesome, and some of the crucial characters started to die, and it became dark darker darkest as it proceeded..
My first Harry Potter movie was the fifth one, in Coimbatore on my birthday, in Carnatic theater. It was just great, though the movie was okay, and the book was loads better than the movie.

Then again in 2005, july ,  "harry potter and Half blood prince' was scheduled to release, my dad didn agree to buy it, as I was in twelfth grade, so he though I wont get the book and read that instead of my academics, but the electronic age made me overrule my dad, I had got an ebook pdf of it, and dad went crazy at this thought, not just cos i will read that, but the whole thought of reading book in computers, made him go berserk. So to compromise my parents, I said just a day, i will read it, but that day I shouldn have any disturbance, and parents agreed probably thinking that I cant complete reading in a day, and I wont read in one day in system, but I proved them wrong, read the book in one day, and the book was just awesome, and I never felt like I will get a proper sleep without completing it. My parents went crazy, and this became one of  the reasons for my specs, my eye problem started in its severity, and as expected dad went crazy more. :P

During July 2007, when I was in my second year, the last book 'Deathly hallows' released, and again ebook was the one which I got, and now I had company in my college. So I got a couple of frens with me, and that time none of us had laptops, so me and my frens got the ebook by sat evening thru mail, and sunday morning we all were in queue in lab, before the lab assistant came, and she was surprised to the core to find people in lab on sunday morning ! And we completed the book on the same day, sitting there from morning to evening having a very strict deadline, as labs will close by 6pm.
And yesterday, it was the last movie, the first movie which I saw in 3d in Bangalore, it was just awesome, and the movie ,based on the 7th part, came in two halves, which I appreciate,considering the plot, though the previous ones too should have come like that, at least the best they had kept till the last, and the last part was just awesome..My bday celebration couldn have been much better in bangalore !!

Growing up with Potter, has been just great, and it was potter, who has made me read more, and imagine more and may be this blog too.. If at all u need a time pass, potter series will be a nice one to start with for beginners who like to read..

Bye till nex,

Hello World ! Mail for you

Hi all,
We live in digital era, and computers have become integral part of our life, more like a basic necessity for us. Of all things, Internet has become the most sought by people and really a very good invention by mankind. E-Mails have become the mode of communication, nobody bothers to send inland letters or post cards now, its all either email or a phone call. Internet can give you that too, mails voice calls, video calls etc. Even this blogging is a by-product of Internet, facebook, google all are big because they rule the internet. Gmail has become one of the most commonly used mail service throughout the world, and I still wonder why did they make the mail service free, when they began it. There are many service providers who give mail facility, but Gmail stands out. I am a fan of Google just like anyone else, and by the way to make things clear I love Microsoft too, not that I am biased, but Google looks much cooler in terms of their services in this mail scenario.
Gmail is not just another mail service, which provides mail facility, it has its own chat facility, through which we can send SMS’es, make voice calls, video calls even free of cost. This post is for some cool things I like about Gmail and may be one or two might be new to you even. I am not a good person in stats, so I have no idea about number of Gmail users, nor its history, this post is only about the features in Gmail.
Subject Line
The important thing in mails is the subject line which many of us miss while sending mails, Google pops up with a dialog box to tell you that you have the subject line empty, this may irritate you, but for people who use outlook for official purposes, know the importance of subject lines, and Outlook doesn’t pop you with that dialog box.

Attachments

The most common thing in mails is attachments, which everybody is aware of. But the interesting part is that Google offers us a better solution for it than just plain attachment service. Google not only checks on the subject line, but checks on the attachment part too, if we have text like ‘ find the attachment’ or ‘I have attached’ or some more similar text patterns it pops you up with a dialog box, if u had not attached anything in the mail. That’s really a cool thing to do, to serve its customer better. Also to be mentioned that not all patterns are matched but at least some are. ( Yahoo, another popular mail service doesn’t give you this.)

Most of us would click on the ‘Attach a file’ to attach files, but that’s not at all required, all we need is a drag and drop that will do it !! Probably, this came after Google wave came I suppose.




Recipients

Another important thing which I noticed recently is the auto suggest option coming up while composing mails, if we don’t use a distribution list or contact group, we add the recipient mail ID’s manually, and most of the times its sent to more than one, and we end up missing some or other. So now if you want to send mail to that set of people, whom you haven grouped in a list or group, if we just enter one mail id, automatically Google suggests you with other names, which you can just click to add. Cool isn’t it ? Google autosuggest is not just for searches, its used in Gmails even !!

Dots in mail id’s
Aye! This is the most common misconception, we think that having dots in our email IDs will help us to find a unused ID soon, and this is not true !! Even i thought the same, and I have a '.' in my mail id, send a mail to ur id without dot '.' in it, or even with any dots in ur id, for example mine is abc.def@gmail.com, u can send a mail to abcdef@gmail.com or a.b.c.def@gmail.com or any such pattern , it will always be delivered.. This feature is not in Yahoo.

Title bar change..

This is another interesting feature I came up on, most of the times we will have more tabs in our browser, and it has its width reduced to it. And standard Gmail inbox will have the title has Gmail - Priority Inbox (n)- abc@gmail.com or Gmail - Inbox (n) - abc@gmail.com ,the former being the case of Priority Inbox, the later the usual inbox. So if at all we get new mails , wont it be nice if we have it in the title bar itself, we need not go to the page to check whether mail has come. That feature is also there, display like Priority Inbox (n) -abc@gmail.com or Inbox(n) - abc@gmail.com , is possible through another labs feature in Gmail called, Title Tweaks.

Mouse Gestures

Most often we get mails which are more than one screen long, and most likely we have to scroll either up or down to find the next/previous button, in that case, wont it be good if we have an option in mouse to move back or front, Gmail gives us that. All we have to do is press the right button in the mouse, and move either left or right to move to the previous or next message. This feature is enabled through another labs setting, Mouse Gesture.

Undo a message sent

This is another important feature, which GMail has given us, if we didnt finish the mail properly, or forgot to put something, if we can decide that within seconds of pressing send , we can cancel it. Either we can stop sending, thats a standard feature, if the mail is being sent. If the mail is sent, and we want to revoke it, we can do it, now within 30 seconds, the reciever will never get the mail nor the notification that this mail has been revoked or something like that. But as of now the time frame is only 30 seconds. This feature can be invoked by a labs feature called Undo Send.

Google Map for address

Most of the times we have to send address to our friends to meet them, if we want to give them directions , we give them the directions through google maps link. But again the reciever has to open the link to check, and most of the cases in Google maps, we dont search with door numbers etc. But in mails, we send the address with door nos etc. So Gmail allows you to enable maps for the address you have mentioned in the mail, through another lab setting called Enabled Maps. As of now this feature is available only to address in US, and not in India.





SHVA

   Ever wondered what does SHVA mean ? Its not a typo of some other word (or my name:D). Have you ever noticed it while seeing your inbox ??? Hmmm, ok enough of making your grey cells thinking, it will be there in the address bar, as soon as we login , it will remain the same always, its definitely not the session parameter,which will change everytime we login. So wat does it mean ??? There is no official word on it, but as far i google'ed it means, Should Have Valid Authentication.

May be there are more features in Gmail, but these I felt are very nice and much cooler than the normal inbox. So if you want to understand what all Labs is about, Google Labs is the first place to be in.

Bye till nex,

P.S: This post is dedicated to all the people in Google, for their work to make this world cooler, and helping me to blog :)