Travelogue

Since the last few days I have been trying out various ways to get video content over the internet including watching episodes of heroes off NBC, TVU for news and other stuff. But the service that takes the cake is Joost from the founders of Kazaa and Skype. Though I agree the content is limited but the technology is amazing( P2PTV - Peer to Peer TV). The video playback is flawless the interface is one of the slickest interfaces I have ever seen.

It has a complete widget system which already has plugins for google talk/jabber , blogging support for livejournal/blogspot/wordpress , live chat rooms per channel etc. Their ad delivery is nice and doesn't intrude much on your viewing experience. They are also setting up content partnerships with a lot of big media powerhouses and I think we should see a lot of new content on it in the near future as it moves out of beta. Overall with internet pipes becoming bigger and bigger I see cable tv becoming redundant. Already with the increasing availability of online content my inclination to pay comcast 40+$ for cable is decreasing. I think Joost has a lot of potential and I won't be surprised if it takes off like Skype and manages to corner the online TV market.

I would be following Joost closely and other online tv sites. The question remains who will buy joost! or will it remain independent and take on the Cable TV monopolies. Also I wonder if this replaces regular cable for a significant number of people what will happen to the internet access rates.

I have always been a bit of a movie buff and wanted to watch a lot of the old movies. Especially the amol palekar ones old movies of amitabh, dharmendra etc... Imagine my joy when I found that I could watch movies online for free!!! and all legit!...

http://rajshri.com one of the largest movie houses in India makes around 140 movies available online for free viewing especially the old ones. The encoding quality isnt great 512kbps but it serves the purpose. At least I get to watch these old movies. Most of these movies are pretty hard to find even in stores and here they are all available for free!!...Some of these cost only a couple of dollars to download and own.

I think this is a brilliant move by rajshri.com to monetize their old content. They make money off the advertisements on these old movies and if anyone wants a movie really badly well they can just download it for a few $.

Check it out not only do they have their movies online but also songs from most of their movies and music videos as well. Over the last few weeks I have been discovering a lot of online movie content and I must say I am impressed at the rate at which the adoption of internet tv is progressing now. I think we can expect cable to be redundant for most people within a few years provided internet can be kept open the way it is now and not made into a QOS based payment structure the way some of the telecom companies in US want it to be.

In the meanwhile, lights out and its time to catch up on some old timeless classics like Abhimaan, Amar Akbar Anthony,Chitchor, Bombay to Goa,Padosan,Ankhiyon ke Jharokhon se,Anupma,Khilona,Bhoot Bangla,Kalicharan, all old rajesh khanna movies including aradhna etc, kashmir ki kali,barsaat ki ek raat,.

P.S: A Lot of the old indian tv serials are available too including malgudi days/fauji and others!!

It also seems Saavn is making movies available online for buying/viewing using google video. Check out http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%22saavn%22

The low quality video is free to watch but you can buy daypasses etc to watch the high quality video stream on google video.

Well thats how it starts...I was just looking on nbc to see what I could watch now that we have finished watching first season of heroes. This serial somehow seemed interesting and I thought why not give it a shot. As it happens the series is pretty interesting. The setting is that of an Irish family in new york type area with a backdrop of organized crime and tussles between the irish mafia and the italian mafia groups.

The focus of the series is around 4 brothers Tommy ( the do gooder and the man with a good heart), Kevin ( good younger brother who listens but is a very bad gambler), Jimmy(the not so good guy and will stop at nothing to get what he *thinks* he deserves ), shawn( the baby kid brother of the family). The story is told like a narrative by a person who hangs out with the brothers and is being interrogated by the police.

The series has a slightly dark theme and shows how the four brothers slowly get pulled into the world of organized crime one step at a time. What makes the series really nice to watch is the way they have shown how tommy who has had nothing to do with crime ends up slowly doing all the things he doesn't want to just because he tries to protect and help his brothers and others around him. The series has a good streak of humour and can be rather funny at times.

Overall it will be interesting to see what direction this series takes. If you like reading mario puzo then I recommend you watch this series it will keep you hooked.

We watched the fireworks display at SF on July 4th. Personally I somehow didnt find it as exciting as I thought it would be. It was nice to watch and provided a good oppurtunity to click a few snaps. I uploaded a few and here they are!

I can't believe it that its already been a year since we got married! Its been one fun year with lots of good stuff , lots of travel and loads and loads of fun. We saw mauritius/london and moved to the US all in one year! I quit yahoo only to join yahoo back ! We never thought our first wedding anniversary will be in a place so far from our family! After much racking on what to do during our anniversary we decided we wanted to spend it in a nice place. We had been thinking of making a trip to Yosemite since we got to the bay area and this seemed like a perfect time to make the trip and luckily we managed to get a tented lodging in curry village.

Yosemite is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. The drive to Yosemite was just wonderful almost 60-70 miles of hill driving at various speeds. The drive though is mostly safe when compared to similar drives to hill stations in north India. Yosemite is so scenic that one really needs to spend a lot of time in there to appreciate the place. We had less than two days to see as much as we can. We reached on friday afternoon had lunch at some nameless restaurant along the way which was rather crappy!. We checked into our tents and just quickly dumped our stuff and moved out to see Yosemite.


A view of the hills from the Yosemite valley

First order of business though was to dump everything in the bear locker, Aruna was so paranoid that a bear will come that she won't even let me keep even water bottle in the tent(though i did manage to get her to agree to that towards the evening). We hiked our way to see Vernal falls which was like a mile from curry village ( a lodging resort in Yosemite). Best part there is free transport inside the Valley area which runs like every 10 minutes and you can just use that to see the Yosemite valley. The hike to the the bridge from where vernal fall is visible was about a mile and about 2.2 miles to the fall. We decided to just walk to the bridge given our fitness levels:).

Yes Yes, We succumbed to it too... We preordered from Borders for an instore pickup. At around 5 I went picked up a band that determined how back will be in the queue at midnight when the store starts selling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I didnt tell me wife that I had already picked it up and kept telling her that we will go tomorrow to get it but she kept insisting on going to borders to check with them on the preorder status. Here I was struggling to keep it as a surprise at midnight to just ask her to come along and here she was insistent on going to borders. Finally realizing its a losing battle I told her about the band. She was soo excited that till we went to borders at 11:45 she was talking only about the book.

And what a mess the place was with people with orange bands before us we ended up having to wait in a haphazardly formed queue for over 2 hours before we could get our copy of potter. There were a few people dressed in all sorts of potter stuff like one guy wearing a mask/cloak like a deatheater, Kids running around with Quiddich T-Shirt, a woman dressed like a witch with the pointy hat.

Finally when we got home I soundly crashed within half an hour as my wife wants to read it first. I am not as fond of potter and I already have Steven Erikson's Reaper's Gale at the moment:). I will try to sneak a few looks when she sleeps. I wonder who dies:) No spoilers though please!

Its been 5+ yrs since I started reading this series. I started strangely enough with the third book in the series when I was in germany. I used to have these long 2 day weekends all alone with nothing to do and weekday evenings when I used to either watch MTV or CNN ( the only two english channels on tv). At this time I would goto bookshops and look for the fattest book available in fantasy and pick it up.

That is how I ended up picking up Memories of Ice by Steven Erikson and what a book it turned out to be. That book was just astounding and I had to read more from this author! Slowly over the next couple of months managed to get Gardens of the Moon(book 1) and Deadhouse gates (book 2) when I got back to India.

Since then Steven Erikson has been my favourite author trumping Tolkein etc. Where every fantasy author till date has tried to ape Tolkein in some way with Elves/dwarves and a do-gooder hero and an all evil Enemy, Erikson follows a completly different track. His characters are not easily slotted as good/bad. Most of the characters are in the grey area and the scope of the novels is just crazy. The timeline spans over 300,000 yrs+ with characters that are immortal(Ascendants), gods who have died, gods who walk amongst us, Undeads and above all the Bridgeburners.

The Bridgeburners are an elite Marine force of the Malazan Empire and most of the characters are just amazing. Erikson's humour is best described as satirical. Since Erikson himself is an anthropologist and archaeologist by training his settings are described in such detail that it makes Tolkein's world creation small. The other part which I love about the Malazan Series is the fact that magic has been treated very differently. Magic is bound into a hierarchy of what are called different aspects eg, light,darkness,shadow etc. At the top is chaotic magic, then magic of dragons (Starvald Demelain), then elemental forces(Elder Warrens as they are called) like light,darkness(Kurald Galain),shadow (Kurald Emurhlan),fire (Tellan), Ice ( Omtose phellack ) -Elder Warrens and finally the more refined magic like denur(healing),mockra(illusion) and others.

I would highly recommend this series to anyone who has the stomach for a bit of gore but wants to explore High Fantasy and move beyond the Tolkein wannabe novels. There is one other author who has taken a step away from tolkein style namely Scott. R. Baker. But I will reserve a review of his books for later!.

Read further for review of Reaper's Gale (some spoilers).

Almost everyone knows or has heard about adsense (google's self serve model for publishers) and not many have heard about yahoo's self serve model YPN (Yahoo publisher network) i.e http://publisher.yahoo.com. I had been wanting to try out how keyword/contextual advertising works when integrated with blogs. Does it really make any money for the publisher ??

As a result I applied for an adsense as well as a ypn a/c and thought of trying out both of them. Now I have integrated both into my homepage, I am using google ads for the front page and yahoo for each of other pages. I will probably switch them around dynamically if I can figure out the stupid javascript code to do so! Should be trivial I am just feeling lazy:) As of today google ads has made me hmm 0.35$! not bad I would say for its been on my website less than a week. Though what I don't understand is what/who clicked the ad or was it purely based on impressions!

Anyway the idea is if the ads can generate enough money to pay for this hosting I would be happy:).

After a slow read of over a week I managed to finish Harry Potter Book 7 today. I must say it was a slow read, it didn't hold my interest for most of the book like almost upto page 500+ and also over the years my expectation of fantasy fiction has exceeded J.K.Rowling's imagination. Not to belittle potter but its just that this kind of fantasy fiction somehow doesn't excite me much beyond the idea of imagining casting spells!.

I guess there is a huge audience of people who like reading potter and are still tied to the Tolkein's version of fantasy where everyone is either good or bad. After reading other author's like Steven Erikson/Scott R. Bakker/Glen Cook I feel that there is a lot more that fantasy fiction can offer than just these quaint notions of good and bad. I think going forward we will see tolkein's influence on fantasy diminish and probably be more popular among the younger people (<15yrs age). I also sincerly hope that this happens cause I am just sick of reading tolkein variants. Steven Erikson has breathed a new life into fantasy literature and I hope the trend continues with people trying to explore different aspects of fantasy literature than just Elves/Dwarves/Gnomes/Orcs etc.

Now that I have made a full list of my books ( though I recently added 3 more to this collection 2 of each have been reviewed already here ) I would like to slowly starting up reviews on some of them. I would leave technical books out for now and just concentrate on writing up reviews on fiction books. Most techie books I buy I end up leaving it in the middle, there are very few tech books in recent times that I have read cover to cover.

Here is a review of a series that has been one of my all time favourite- Isaac Asimov's Foundation