Colored Labels in Gmail

I always wanted my emails to be easily labeled, but not go thru' the folder hell. I extensively use Gmail and I wished for a long time to [easily identify] labeled emails instead of just starring them.

Well, my wish came true yesterday when Gmail added "colored labels" feature. Check it out. It looks nice and easy to use. But going thru' old emails (without using gmail filters) to label them is really a PITA.

Web 2.0 Bubble?

Another bubble? Found a very interesting and catchy video about this. Enjoy!

Idea Not Implemented

How many times you have thought of an idea and few months or years later you have seen almost the same idea get implemented (developed by someone else somewhere)?

Well, I'm seeing one right now. Few years back (somewhere in Jan-Feb of 2004), me and my friends SG and KM were juggling some thoughts on how to track bills & expenses between friends, as we were (and still are) spending money (lots of them) on food, shopping, movies etc together. Since we were staying separate, tracking all of these expenses were really a pain and moreover fighting with Excel to do this was even more frustrating. We decided to pull our programming hat and write a small application to accomplish this. Well, we are still writing one... :)

Meanwhile, a few smart programmers (who actually implement their idea) did a great job in tracking these expenses via an online application called BillMonk. Check out their website and it is awesome! I and my friends are regular users of BillMonk now.

I wish we had forced ourselves hard enough to transform that idea into an application.

Well, there is always another idea!

Earthquake

Today, late evening, I was taking a quick nap (lucky heh?). I woke up suddenly as my bed jolted and I felt as if my bedroom walls were closing in on me. For a second, I thought it was dream, but after few seconds, came to my senses and realized that it was an earthquake. Holyshit.

My second earthquake experience in US. Today's earthquake started at 8:00 pm with 5.6 magnitude and had its epiecenter at Alum Rock, California (15 miles from my place). It lasted for about 6-9 seconds.

Me and my roommate immediately rushed out of my apartment. We saw lot of people outside running. I tried calling some of my friends, but the network was either busy or completely cut-off. Sigh ;)

Anyways, there is nothing to worry about, no reported damage so far in the nearby area, other than few things falling off from the shelves. We will know the full damage tomorrow morning.

One of a kind experience! Another thing that you have to deal with living in the bay area. ;)

Technology Entertainment Design

I just saw "The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED" movie. Excellent! An insight into TED (Technology Entertainment Design), an annual event where an eclectic group of brilliant minds exchange bold and exciting ideas for the future.

I was amazed and thrilled to see so many useful ideas that would really help a lot of people around the globe. I'm ready to make a small change from my part!

Managing your Money

I've always wondered where most (hmm.. actually all) of the money from my paycheck vanishes. It looks like I'm getting paid, paying bills, debts, & loans - all virtually, expect for few times when I take some cash out to play poker and dine, I don't see much cash.

Do we ever get to see the money in real that we make in a month, like the old days? I remember my dad setting aside a monthly budget in all cash. Oh.. that smell of the new currency notes.. I simply love it. With most of the population catching up on plastic cards (as if that money on those cards were free), it might not be too late to see currencies world-wide in a museum. ;)

When coming to managing this hard earned money, there are very few softwares out there that does this job, not perfect though, but just enough to get by and give us a peek preview of what/where/how we play with our money. Quicken and Bank of America's (BOFA) Portfolio Management are the two that readily pop up on my mind. I have used Quicken before and I'm using BOFA regularly.

Recently, a new kid showed up in this block, named Mint. They call themselves the refreshing money management software. Well, I was fortunate enough to know about this startup thru' TechCrunch blog and I was one of the early beta testers. They won the TechCrunch40 $50,000 award.

They seemed to have nailed the application to give you the right personalization tool to manage and save money (for real!) for users who have no or limited computer knowledge, while excelling in giving a tool for computer geeks like me. I love their interface and their name (and their punch line - refreshing money management -- how true!). I don't want to give a lengthy lecture about what/how they do.. just skim thru' their website and you'll know what I'm taking about.

With identify theft hitting all year highs, most of us may not trust a third party software and give us our financial passwords (and thus our freedom) to them. But, hey, what's life without risk, I've given mine and its good to know that I'm doing more shopping recently, more than I thought of. I also came to know that I could save approximately $35 every month if I opt to make my own coffee instead of gobbling lot of Caramel Macchiatos from Starbucks. Now I know where my money is vanishing!! :)

One Click at a Time

Have you ever clicked on any of the ads (sponsored links) served in the Google results page?

Thinking of Google and searches, I could have easily made at least several thousand searches in the past few years (specifically with Google, few with MSN and Yahoo). But when I count how many times I've clicked on any of the ads... I remember is it 500, 100, 50, ... nope, just a mere 10.

I've always wondered how Google made so much money just out of delivering text ads, while for a guy who lives on Google searches (both at home and at work) doesn't click any of the ads served.

May be, millions and millions of people clicking thru' (at least once) is big enough to reach a hefty profit -- in billions. It may be the "one-click-at-a-time" policy working in full action. :) But how many of the clicks really benefit the advertiser?

Google and other major players charge advertisers based on pay-per-click (PPR), but how many of that clicks (or leads) that point to the advertiser's website is turned into a sales? That's questionable!

Well, until I figure this out, search and enjoy! For fun, trying googling your name.

PS: I've added "Google Ads" on this blog. And, no, I'm not trying to make millions out of these ads. :) It is just for fun!

Waves and Babes

For the Labor day long weekend, me and three of my friends decided to go to San Diego, as there was another gang (including my brother) coming down from Phoenix to escape the intensive heat. Well, we thought, why not join the group and cool it off with the nice waves and babes (yeah, babes!). That's exactly what we did.

Some interesting stuff (at least for us) that we did over the weekend:

• I tagged 130 mph (twice) in my friend SG's BMW for the first time -- posted speed limit is 65 mph. That adrenaline rush was simply awesome. Would love to try again. As a note, we didn't hurt anybody in this process and this was for pure fun. If I got caught in this process, I'd have gone straight to jail. Now I know, why they have speed limits. :)
• Did "Boogie Boarding" on the beach front. It was pure fun. Everyone should give it a try. We stayed almost 4 hours on the sea and finally caught three nice waves. That was more than enough for a first timer.
• We all got a nice (?!) tan and were shocked to see our faces in the restroom mirrors. :)
• Stayed all night long, hit some pubs on a street with nice ambiance and drank some decent beer.
• Spent at least 25 minutes on average to find a parking spot everytime we go out to San Diego beaches and/or pubs. That sucks! Finding a spot in Chennai was much better.
• Smoked "hookah" at a Hookah bar and talked our hearts out.
• Oh.. I forgot, did I mention cute babes everywhere, I mean "everywhere". San Diego is famous for nice weather and nice girls. We took it all-in. :)

As the saying goes in San Diego, "no beach is out of reach", the beaches, waves and the babes were all well connected and it was so nice to see 'em all. :)

Live in this moment

I got an email forwarded from my friend MK recently and I loved it. I thought let me share this with you all. Thanks MK.

A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign which said: "I am blind, please help". There were only a few coins in the hat. A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.

Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, "Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?". The man said, "I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way". What he had written was: "Today is a beautiful day and I cannot see it".

Do you think the first sign & the second sign were saying the same thing? Of course both signs told people the boy was blind. But the first sign simply said the boy was blind. The second sign told people they were so lucky that they were not blind. Should we be surprised that the second sign was more effective?

Moral of the story: Be thankful for what you have. Be creative. Be innovative. Think differently and positively. Invite the people towards good with wisdom. Live life with no excuse and love with no regrets. When life gives you a 100 reasons to cry, show life that you have 1000 reasons to smile. Face your past without regret. Handle your present with confidence. Prepare for the future without fear. Keep the faith and drop the fear. Don't believe your doubts and doubt your beliefs. Life is a mystery to solve not a problem to resolve. Life is wonderful if you know how to live!

How true! Most of us regret the past & worry about the future and conveniently forget to live the present -- this moment -- which is precious and won't happen again. Well, I'm giving my best to live in this moment.

I went to a "Art of Living" introductory class few weeks back and one of the key aspect they mentioned to be "happy in life" is to live in the present, as if that was easy...

Virtual Child

Hooray... Cookies and doughnuts for you all! At my work, we released the next version of our web-based product application today. It went "live" smoothly without any problem. That's a relief ... ;)

I still vividly remember how this product was six-seven years before and I'm amazed to see how it has changed over the years and the way I've helped it to become what it is now. Me and this product have come a long way together -- we both have learned a lot, experienced ups and downs, got matured along the way, made mistakes (and corrected them) and have grown.

I simply love this product, not just because I've spent all my work-time for the last six-seven years thinking about it, but mainly because it fueled my passion to create something worthwhile that people can use and benefit from. Apart from this, well, it also has fed me for all these years ... :)

Over the years, we at NetResults Corporation (in Palo Alto, California), have been trying different ways to refine and improve this product, attract more loyal customers and most importantly provide what customers really need -- and we are getting better at it every day. It really feels good when a product does what it claims to do and does in the best possible way, such that the customers are emotionally attached to the product (like iPod, iGoogle, Windows (except some occasional blue-screens), etc).

Along the line, I've become attached to this product. In some way, it is like raising a child. I've seen it as a child growing up into a healthy adult. It gives me immense pleasure to see that the adult is doing good now.. :) Hope to continue this way.

Well, now that I've some experience raising a virtual kid, do you think it would be easy to raise a real one (oh! I forgot, do I have to get married for that first?) heh?

Anyways, you can learn more about my child at www.NetResultsTracker.com.

Finding a Roommate

Finding a roommate is somewhat similar to finding a soulmate. ;) Need to handle so many ifs & buts and have to make so many compromises on-the-fly. But at the end, its worth it, you have a person that you can share a bit more and have a feeling that at least someone is at home when you step in after a tiresome day's work.

Well, if I get a girl roomie, she *might* become my soulmate. Why not huh? Keeping all this in mind, I posted an ad on http://www.sulekha.com/ few weeks back. Here it is:

Searching for a friend/roomie

Are you the one?

Here's my story (short version) in bullets:

-- I'm trying to find a new roomie any time starting August 1st (this year of course :)).

-- I live in a single bedroom/bath apartment at Heritage Park (E. Evelyn and Fair Oaks Ave intersection) in Sunnyvale (94086).

-- I furnished this apt 2 years earlier, as my mom was here for 6 months. I've kept it clean (& safe?) so far. Hope to keep it the same for few more years.. :)

-- I believe it is a great time for apartment owners, they control the rental market price, like in 2000's. :) So I'm paying $1150 per month now. It will go up more..

-- Heritage Park is close to Caltrain station - 8 minute walk, if you are healthy, may take 10-12 minutes if you had too many doughnuts for breakfast.. :).

-- Bus stops are at the intersection.

-- In total, your share of rent would be approximately $575 + ballpark $100 in utilities.

-- Apt complex has swimming pool (all 5 feet deep), so if you are learning the ropes, you'd have a great time.

-- It also has a nice 24 hour gym (who works out in the night anyways?).

-- That's about it, I can't write anything more about this apartment.

-- If you are uncomfortable sharing a single bedroom (or sleeping in the living area, if you wish), then.. we have to think of another way to work this out.

-- My friends and I hang out & have fun... late-night movies, poker, bar-hopping, sleeping, deep-spiritual discussion (just kidding!) and many more.. you could join us too...

-- It would be nice if I can find a Tamil-speaking roomie. As you see, I'm not good with English, and since I only know partial Hindi, I'm out of luck there too!

-- I'm a non-veggie, but generally don't cook meat at home, if that's a concern for you.

-- I don't smoke and I don't mind if you do, but it would be nice if you don't smoke inside the apartment.

-- I know asking for a female roommate is unthinkable (and I exactly know what you are thinking now!! wipe it off!!) but I can manage with one. You see.. I don't run around naked inside the apartment.. ;) BUT, but wait.. our females (who are searching for apts) are not bold enough.. so don't even worry about it ;)

Anyways, hope to meet a friend soon!

I received several responses to the ad, five or six from the guys and two from the brave girls. All of them conveniently left voicemails (well, may be, I was busy, for a change). (Un)fortunately, both the girls just wanted to stay only for a month (may be they want to give me a try first... just kidding!) as they were doing internship in the bay area. There goes another 2 prospective clients.. ;)

Finally, I wound up with my friend RM's nice friend VP, a movie fanatic.

Happy Independence Day

From: Gopinath Sundharam
To: All Indians
Cc: All non-Indians... :)
Date: 15-Aug-2007 12:00:00
Subject: Happy Independence Day!

<message>
Happy Independence Day !!!

Thinking... what should I do today and tomorrow (?!) to make India (and the world) a better place to live? Hmm.. my mind answers: change within yourself first.. you can think about changing the world later!

How true?!
</message>

Lightning Fast from Cingular

"Lightning Fast from Cingular AT&T" -- wish I could say this with pride. I've been a loyal customer of Sprint for a very loooong time. My first phone and provider in US was with Sprint. I liked the phone and the service! Nothing to complain, so I sticked with them. Back then, Verizon was the only real competitor for Sprint and so Sprint was sailing easily. Even when I switched phones and even when I had some wierd/stupid customer service experiences, I retained the service.

AT&T, Cingular (back then it was not acquired by AT&T, later Cingular got AT&T phone service, then AT&T got Cingular back.. some high-tech politics and crap) came into picture and within few years, put a big dent in Sprint and Verizon customer base. That's when the problem started with Sprint. Their customer service and renewal plans became really, I mean really, crappy. I was just waiting for my service period to end.

The day it was over (late this Feb), I promptly switched to Cingular in anticipation of getting the cool "iPhone", as it would work only with Cingular (for now). Got myself a new Motorola Razr v3. Cool and nice piece of hardware. Love it.

Oh.. coming to the "lightning fast" section.. yesterday I called up my friend RM around 8 pm to plan for dinner and left a voicemail. He too has Motorola phone and Cingular service. Since he didn't return my call for a long time, I confronted him (for fun) asking for an explanation. He fired back saying that he didn't get any missed call or voicemail from me. I promised him to show my "dialed calls" list, but forgot and went home.

Today morning, 7:30 am, RM's bedroom, his phone rings, and for a change he wakes up quickly, all pissed off, and he has a voicemail. Alas, it was mine -- the one I sent yesterday. Way to go Cingular, it only took 12 hours for it to reach him.

My another friend SG was joking yesterday at dinner that RM would get my message tomorrow morning. He has seen it happen several times for him.

What kind of network does AT&T and Cingular have? Lesson learned: don't rely on voicemails too much, as you don't know when you are going to get it. :)

I haven't had this problem with voicemails (even once) with Sprint. I enabled bluetooth in my phone recently and that's a whole new story to tell. Above all, I didn't get iPhone yet bcoz it is too damn costly and the wireless network (using EDGE) sucks! Waiting for Service Pack 1. :)

Well, I wonder how the phone services in India are...

Facebook's Home Page

Facebook's home page source code has been revealed at http://facebooksecrets.blogspot.com/. I don't know why someone would do this, apart from getting a day's worth of fame and plenty of hits to the blog and to proclaim they have the power to do it.

At least, the code looks simpler. :)

My Poker Story

All I can see right now is playing cards in my mind. Am I dreaming now? May be.. hmm.. its 3:30 am, I just came from yet-another poker night-out from my friend KM's place nearby. I'm reminiscing some of the bad beats and few good hands, I played tonight.

I was introduced to this game by my colleague few years back. First time we played, it was just fun. Since I was learning the ropes, I had no pressure in performing well. :) The game had no stakes what-so-ever, no seriousness, just fun between friends and familes. The wives (of my friends) thought guys shouldn't spend money on gambling, so it was just play-money. Funny though, whenever a spouse's money got over, they borrowed some from their counter-parts. It was a never ending game.

After few months, I and my friends (who were singles) started playing, learning, making mistakes, fighting over the rules (and immediately googling it to find the right answers) and got slowly mesmerized into the game.

We started playing every friday night, sometimes even saturday nights, even in the daytime. All we think about in the weekend was poker. We graduated from 1 dollar game to 5 dollars pretty soon. Example: if 5 players played, we all would play for 25 (5 * 5) dollars. First place would get 20 dollars and the second would get back his/her money.

We always encouraged and allowed new players into our circle, as we thought we could squeeze some money from them. But most of the time, it turned out that the new-comers won more money... we concluded it was "beginner's luck". :) If a new-comer won the first time, we somehow pull him/her the next time we play and we make sure we get the money out from him/her. Most of them fall for it the second time. Well, you know, we had to maintain our poker status.. so we did it!

The problem started when we hit the casinos. Playing poker in casinos are completely different than at home-games -- you tend to lose more money quickly and frequently. We were the little fishes, wandering around not knowing what to do, playing all stupid hands, while the sharks were eating us alive. Above it all, you are literally sucked into the game after a while and are completely addicted. I realized what addiction meant, literally. I believe its worse than smoking cigarettes or drinking.

First time poker-in-a-casino was with my dear friend MS in LA. We had fun and made some money... (that's a whole different story marked exclusively for another post). Back at my home town, myself, two of my friends, KM and SG hit the nearby bay-101 casino. While we won some days, we mostly lost. You can catch us there most of the weekends. We have managed to pull lot of all-nighters, start around 11 pm friday night and play till 10 or 11 am the next day and of course sleep the whole day and get up at 7 pm and hit the casino again. :)

Only when I recognized how my hard-earned (really?) money was vanishing from my bank account, I decided to put a stop to this. I completely stopped going to the casino now, while KM is still hitting it and making some decent money now-a-days.

But, we are still playing poker at home, now its a 20 dollar buy-in. It has gone up from 1 to 20 in 2 years -- not bad... huh?

You can see different sides of the person when they are in the poker table. As the famous poker mantra goes: "There are no friends at a poker table". It is not just about making little money (well, it wouldn't hurt to have some extra cash, say 40 or 60 dollars poker-money in your pocket), but winning against your friends, playing with their mind, teasing and taking advantage of their weaknesses in the table, understanding how they treat money, how far are they willing to spend another 20 dollars to play, how pissed they get when they have a bad-beat -- all of these are fun.

Well, my conclusion of poker game is that, yes, while I agree that poker is a skill game, you *still* need a little bit of tiny luck to get you thru'.

Yes, poker is a funny game, but I have fun playing it with my friends. At the end, that's all it matters, having fun for 4-5 hours, not thinking about any of your worries or your responsibilities and being into the game fully. In a way, that is like meditating for straight 4-5 hours. It might be a stretch, but it is true.

Playing poker is meditation. How funny, well, poker is still a funny game. :)

P.S: This is just a glimpse of all the poker fun we had for the past 2 years, while there are more stories to tell, this post has become very lengthy (at least according to my standards), so I'll stop here now. More on poker to come later.

Feeds

For a long time I was really fedup with bookmarking (using Google Bookmarks) all the cool blog feeds I read (some daily and some weekly) and scanning for new updates everytime I want to read something new. Not bcoz there weren't any tools to aggregate my feeds, I was plain simple lazy.

Fast forward to current day and I finally took the time and started playing with Google Reader. Wow! It works. Period. It easily organizes all my feeds into a readable format and the interface rocks. Even though there are few glitches that I found (one for example: there is no easy way to mark a single post in a feed as unread), I liked it mostly. I'll be using it regularly (from my office of course!)

Netvibes.com is another aggregration and personalization tool which handles all kind of popular emails out there and blog feeds (RSS) and other small free gadgets. Check it out, it is cool, but I personally feel the site is more like Microsoft's Live platform, too fast at sometimes (you wonder what really happened) and too slow at startup (may be it is my laptop.. time to upgrade/buy new one?)

Anyways, need to see who wins the race.. Google Reader or Netvibes.

Sani Peyarchi

What is it? It is the transition of the planet Saturn into a new position in the astrological chart. That's all I know. Google it and you can learn more about it... ;) I'm not sure whether I should believe in Sani Peyarchi and its so-called profound effects as mentioned by the astrologers (and by astrology). The "new physics" states that each and every object (matter) in the universe has some effect on everything else in the universe and emphasizes the fact that we all are well-connected, even when we are far apart (like Saturn being far away from Earth).

Looks like I'm leaning more towards believing in this transition. Anyways, if it brings more good to the people, so be it.

P.S. Mine is mithuna raasi. :)

Check out your transition effects at: http://astrology.raajayogam.com/sani_peyarchi/