Twitter gadget - IE 7 - Blogger = Not working

Just noticed that my twitter updates on Blogger are working fine on Firefox and Opera but not on IE7. IE7 just shows a link to my profile on Twitter but not the live updates.

On a side note, wishing everyone a Merry Christmas (http://xkcd.com/521/). That link is courtesy Vyshnavi. That just shows that I really need to catch up on my comics RSS feed.

My experiment with status message... *FAIL*

I tried an experiment with my Google Talk status reading "I'm in love!!". It was based on this post on kwippy.com that such IM statuses are good conversation starters and people who haven't been in touch over a long period may respond to such statuses. I had the status message on for nearly a couple of hours. My verdict of the experiment: FAIL.


I got one person pinging me asking what I was in love with. Duh! This makes me wonder if it is the experiment or is it just ME? As a side note, I thought no one reads this blog. A friend of mine told me a couple of weeks back that she decided to try out Twitter after reading my tweets in the blog.

2 Komodo dragons fighting

I happened to see a YouTube video of two Komodo dragons fighting that was sent to me by a friend.



Amazing. Reminds me of 2 Sumo wrestlers grappling. Remind me not to tangle with these animals, esp when they have a poisonous bite too.

The last instant

I've just been reading Seth Godin's post called "Waiting until the last hour". Pretty interesting notion on how our notion of time has been getting more accurate relatively. Soon, we'll start measuring time in an instant, giving it some new measurable value.

On a side note, I've started reading David Allen's "Getting Things Done". I've read a lot about the system and I am really looking forward to pick up some new stuff that will let me do more, and do it better. I've tried stuff like to-do lists, mind mapping and just randomly jotting things down with a pen and paper. The think that really hurt was that there wasn't much of a price difference from the US edition ($10.20/- in Amazon when I last checked) and what I bought at Landmark (Rs 453/-).

Also messing around with Auto Hot Key. Nifty tool for auto completes and creating keyboard short cuts. I've got a new new auto completes set up. Weird that I see only a Windows based utility, though it's released with GPL.

Awesome features in Airtel site

I just had the "pleasure" of using the Airtel website to pay my phone bills. It's not that I don't do this every month. I somehow don't like having ECS for any of my payments. It's been a pleasure using the site when I tried exploring the features available.

It's not just the whole look and feel, which was pretty nice to start with. There were a ton of features - from easy bill payment to looking up my bill plan. I was really blown away with setting the personal phone numbers and analyzing the total usage and the percentage of usage for personal and professional calls. It's not really hard to do, but it was really a nice thing that they did it. I would love it if they'd have graphs too.

I just found out that I spent nearly 20 hours last month on calling people. This doesn't include the calls that I receive. That's a *lot* of time on the phone. I really need to cut back on that.

No themes for Orkut outside India?

Weird that Orkut has no themes when viewed from office network. I am sure that Google thinks that the page is accessed from some place in US/EU and gives me the same, bland old Orkut theme when I access it from office. Pretty annoying when I expect to see my customized theme that is hardly readable normally. :(

Very interesting ad

Watched a very interesting ad on TV from Max New York Life Insurance.

Loved the part when the kid goes "bfffft" when dad says "Czechoslovakia". I had to get that spell checked once... LOL. A couple of things to note in the ad - Dads are more demanding from their kids, and kids today are much more intelligent (assuming this kid is representative of the normal kid nowadays) than what I was. Guess evolution sorta balances stuff in the end.

Broadband at last

I got a BSNL broadband connection today. Yaaay!! That is so cool. No more relying on the Reliance wi max which is good while it lasts. After being around for quite some time, Reliance has still not ironed out the DHCP server issues. There are times when it gets really difficult to get an IP address. Think of a critical issue at work that needs to be solved and you can't get online. Sucks!

No more cribbing about these issues. I now have BSNL broadband. Let's hope it works well. If not, I have one more sob story for the blog. I am writing this post on the BSNL connection actually. Speedtest.net gave it a 256kbps score. The Reliance one I guess was a little faster at 300kbps.

Movies I watched in the last 24 hours: The Holiday (now on HBO) and Velli thirai (saw most of it, need to finish).

Reading: Finished the Inuyasha manga series. Also the Tsuki no Shippo series. I should soon add a link to onemanga.com on the blog. The least that I can do.

Back!! Again!

I've decided to start blogging again.... again!! Some things that I noticed about the blog being that I have over a "thousand" impressions. Guess it must be google doing all the visiting, or friends just checking in to see if I have anything interesting to say. Like I ever did!! Another thing I've noticed is that I have this ad sense account attached to this blog alone that's made 55 cents in the past year or so. Thank god I don't have to pay to maintain this account. 

Currently reading Inuyasha at onemanga.com and Head First Design Patterns. Waiting eagerly for Conn Iggulden's next book on Genghis Khan - "Genghis - Lord of the Bows". And working on something very interesting at office. For folks who haven't been in touch with me, I now work for Amazon.com. And yeah, the book links point to Amazon. ;). And no, I don't make a cent from these links. Just that finding any book on the site is easy as I work on it all the time.