Just Curious

Questions just keep popping up in our minds and most of the obscure questions remain unanswered. But not any longer, because now therez a site which can satisfy your thirst of curiousity. Website's URL couldn't have been more intutive -

This is what they say about themselves:

justcurio.us is an anonymous question and answer system, open to anyone, with one simple rule: to ask a question, you must first answer someone else's question. Question yields answer yields question. Strangers helping strangers.

The questions can be about anything — the best Beatles album, your saddest moment, your worst fear, your biggest regret, your fondest childhood memory, the meaning of life, whether you should break up with your girlfriend, the best crepe place in Paris, the best cure for loneliness. Anything at all. This is our chance to lean on each other, to look to a stranger for help, to discover what other people think.

justcurio.us is entirely confidential, allowing anyone to ask and answer questions with complete anonymity.

So, what's on your mind? Somebody may have an answer to it!

Arpit.

Happy Birthday

27th September, a celebrated day! and as Iam desperate to say the two coveted words today,
I use the occassion of Google's 7th Birthday as a pawn to do it..

H A P P Y ...B I R T H D A Y .Honey !

Google opened its doors in September 1998, with a mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. To say that they have been successful would be an understatement, because they have been a revolution ever since. Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up the first Google data center in Larry’s dorm room at Stanford. Today, along with web search based on Larry and Sergey’s original Backrub search engine, they offer specialized search for everything from satellite images to academic papers, local business info to your own computer. Google Talk, Gmail, Google Earth are few more things added recently in Google's kitty. For a glance over Google's History, click here.

On their 7th birthday, google claims to have expanded its web search index that is 1,000 times the size of its original index, which makes Google more than 3 times larger than any other search engine. Pretty impressive, eh? For more info on this click here.

That should wrap it up for Google's Birthday feature and my desperation to speak out Happy Birthday in public! So guyz, what say.. letz go and hit it out at Google.

Cheers.

Lazy Geeks

Geeks and that too Lazy Geeks!, Can't you smell something?
These people have this inbuilt knack of coming up with crazy ideas and what could be more ingenious, than having your desktop computer in bed. Sure you could use your laptop, but where’s the fun in that? Plus apparently you get better posture with a full-on keyboard and monitor layout.
Not Impressed? Check out the pics..

One more..

Cheers.

"Bangalored"

"I got Bangalored"

This is one of the most wierdest phrase that I have come across in a long time. Bangalore, the IT face of India has been making waves across the world with the outsourcing business but coining a term after it, is kinda outrageous. Bangalored is a verb which recently got added in the dictionary! A person is said to be bangalored if he lost his job because the work got outsourced to Bangalore or any other city in India. Lot of people in US got bangalored that it became an issue during the US presidential election. Thats exactly when this word was coined.

Bangalore is cited in particular because of its reputation in the USA as a high-tech city, the Indian equivalent of Silicon Valley, that has benefited significantly from such outsourcing. There are even some websites which are selling T-Shirts with the slogan “Don’t Get Bangalored” as a way of telling people about the issue.

A place name becoming a verb: strange and very whacky. As an Indian, Iam not sure whether this is an achievment, that we are able to shake US economy or its derogatory to have one of our cities used in such negative sense world wide. Any comments?

12th September 2005

This day will be remembered in cricketing history as one of the most memorable day for English fans as England regained the coveted Ashes after almost 18 years. Ashes 2005 has been an incredible series where arguably in the end, the best side won. But Australia did not give up the Ashes in a whimper, they fought with great ferocity in every match but just coudn't match up with England's determination. Even Shane Warne's stupendous effort of 40 wickets in the series couldn't prevent the unforeseen slide in Australia's fortune. Pietersen's knock on the final day, Flintoff's audacity, Warne's mesmerizing spell's and Ricky Ponting becoming the first Australian Captain to lose ashes in nearly two decades will remain the highlights of this pulsating series.
Many see this as end of Aussie era, and with two of the greatest bowlers of all time, Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne about to retire, wounds of Ashes 2005 might take a long time to heal!

Iam not an ardent England fan, but I simply love to see Aussies lose and their losing an Ashes is simply a great feeling and it was about time their aura of supermacy was broken. Great work by Vaughan and Co., its time to celebrate!

Cheers.

Thatz me!

It seems my search is over! I have finally discovered myself, Iam:

Are you one of those who are still baffled about your identity? Well help is on its way, just click here

Arpit.

Google Zeitgeist

I confess, I love google and every now and then you will find a post relating to Google. Here's another one, about one of their service that I discovered of late known as Google Zeitgeist.
Google Zeitgeist compiles all the tidbits of information relating to searches made on Google to unravel search patterns, trends and often surprises. Here, you can find the most obscure search patterns such as most popular brunette search for the month or the most popular cities across the world.

This is what Google say about this service:

Pulling together interesting search trends and patterns requires Google’s human and computing power together. Search statistics are automatically generated based on the millions of searches conducted on Google over a given period of time - weekly, monthly, and annually. With some help from humans, and a pigeon or two when they have time, these statistics and trends make their way from the depths of Google's hard drives to become the Google Zeitgeist report.

We should note that in compiling the Zeitgeist, no individual searcher's information is available or accessible to us. What you see here is a cumulative snapshot of interesting queries people are asking – some over time, some within country domains, and some on Google.com – that perhaps reveal a bit of the human condition. We appreciate the contribution all Google users make to these fascinating bits of information.

Check out Google Zeitgeist for some interesting and novel search patterns!

Arpit.

Blog Day 2005

Shit Man! I missed Blog Day yesterday, and being an ardent blogger, I can tell you, its not a great feeling. Thanks to Enginerd and Prasoon, I came to know that 3108 (August 31) is celebrated as Blog Day, (for all the dolts who can't make it out why, just look at the pic closely) .

After this interesting thing came to my knowledge, I decided to use good ol Google to find more about it, and herez something which one might find amusing about,

3108 BLOG DAY

BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.With the goal in mind, on this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. In this way, all Blog web surfers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.

We need BlogDay because:

1. Information Overflow! The more Blogs there are, the less time Bloggers spend on reading new weblogs. Because of the overload of information, you miss a lot of good Blogs and Bloggers.

2. Its Fun!

So, comrades as per Blogger Instruction about today's posting, here are some of my recommendations (don't loathe me, if you don't like them ;):

• Maeda's Simplicity: John Maeda is a prof. at MIT Media Labs
• Pencil Revolution: Philosophy behind pencils
  
• Flickr Blog: For all photo maniacs
• MoronsGospel: People you can't miss out on this one, one hopless romantic flaunts all his emotions for his inamorata!! (ya, ya this is my blog ;))

Cheers!

Blogger Responds

Spamming had just recently begun to bother bloggers with automated systems adding comments to blogs (i got some too, in my previous post) to advertise their product/website. But blogger has responded by enabling Word Verification option which can be found on the Settings | Comments tab of the blog. This will help prevent many unwated comments since it takes a human being to read the word and pass this step.

Word Verification may seem as an unnecessary hassle, but as of now, it seems the only viable solution to save yourself from spamming.