My Little Princess

I have my wife to thank for this.

On the way back home from the local supermarket, she happened to see that there was this promotion happening at the mall. What they were offering was a complete makeover for kids. Complete with their favourite character's costume, make up, hairdo & a full offering of photo sizes.

So my baby dressed up as Cinderella! And she looked so pretty.

I get the photos in a couple of days. Can't wait to get my hands on them.

I have my Friends back!

And Google has made it! As you may remember quite well, I complained in my No "Friends" blog that Google Talk, when reinstalled, does not see my Friends list.

Well, true to the Google word, the list has magically reappeared! I have friends again.

What I am going to say next has got nothing to do with the Friends list, but I am going to say it anyways. Try out the new Google Desktop 2.0 Beta. It is really good, it collapses Google talk & Google Desktop search within the same space & gives you a neat sidebar (which you can hide) which houses al lot more apart from the Google stuff.

And this version of GDS also indexes your Gmail messages in case you want it to. So now you can read your mail, have ur chat and do a lot more from the same (hideable) sidebar. Cool, huh?

Who's Pink Floyd?

That's a question a collegue of mine asked me when we were driving down for a team meeting.

I don't think I can describe my expression when I heard that.

No "Friends"

I recently upgraded the hard disk on my notebook. That meant I had to go about installing all my applications all over again.

Luckily for me, I always keep my data & applications on seperate areas & so it's easy to destroy the OS & not lose the data.

The only surprise came from a Google product. I am not sure how many of you use Google Talk, but I must say it's a great IM tool which allows you to do Voice over IP. And the voice quality is quite good. So I am quite happy with the software.

But when I reinstalled the software, all my Friends were missing. Google Friends are the equivalents of MSN buddies or Yahoo contacts. The entire list of people who had joined my Friends network is gone.

I sent feedback to Google on this & am still awaiting their response. I hope they dont say my buddies are stored locally and that they cannot do anything about it. That would really be crappy.

Or maybe they'll just say "It's still in Beta, register your friends again".

Water, water, everywhere...

The recent floods in Mumbai, India & in New Orleans, USA brought out some startling facts. This is from a mail going around & since I dont know the person who has compiled this information, I cannot put a dedication here. Thanx Govind, for sending me the mail.

	New Orleans	Mumbai
Inches of rain	18	37.1
Population	484,674	12,622,500
Deaths within 48 hours	100	37
Number of people to be evacuated	Entire city (WOW)	10,000
Cases of looting & violence	Countless	None
Time taken for army to reach	48 hours	12 hours
Status 48 hours later	Still waiting for relief	Business as usual

I'm just wondering. Which country is the developed nation & which one is the emerging Third World country.

Kinda puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

Dumbledore's dead!

Now that "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" has been out for more than a month & half, I can say it out aloud. Dumbledore is dead! And for those who are annoyed at me saying it out aloud, they should be ashamed of not reading the book yet.

Since my shipment landed on the weekend, I have got a chance to get my books out & the one on top (since it was the last that went in) was the Potter book.

Now I have a hypothesis:

In the beginning of the book, when the new Minister for Magic meets with the Muggle Prime Minister, the PM screams "You're Wizards, you can solve anything with magic" and Fudge replies "The problem, Prime Minister, is the other side can do magic too".

Why am I telling you this? If Voldemort (Yeah, I'm not afraid to say his name out aloud :-) ) can split his soul into 7 Horcruxes to stay alive, who's to say Dumbledore cannot do the same?

Think about it. By all accounts from the book, Dumbledore should be around 100 years old. When Harry sees him in Tom Riddle's memory, he's already greying quite extensively. And that was 50 years before Harry came to Hogwarts.

Also Dumbledore should have been older to work with Nicholas Flamel (the guy who had the Philosopher's Stone) since he was supposed to be more than 300 years old.

Who's to say Dumbledore, in cahoots with Snape, staged his own death?

That's just a theory. I could be wrong (and most probably will be).

The second theory is: Snape killed Dumbledore (go away, you screaming people) on Dumbledore's instructions. Dumbledore sacrificed his life so that Snape can continue to be close to Voldemort & also help Harry to kill Voldemort.

And I think I know who R.A.B is. I think it's Regulus Black, Sirius' brother. He is mentioned in the "Order of the Phoenix" as being murdered either by Voldemort or on his orders. I think Voldemort killed him / had him killed because he destroyed one of his horcruxes.

What says you?

And I had already predicted (to a few friends) that Ron & Hermione would get together. But I have no proof to this prediction other than the fact that I "did" predict it!

So that's that.

Three shopping complexes and a house...

After that perversion of the famous title, I will quickly try and move your attention to the obviously different things that I want to say here.

We did the Holy Journey (called Teerath Yaatra in Hindi) to the three major shopping complexes here. We did Carrefour, Mustafa Center & IKEA. And lived to tell the tale.

Carrefour was for the basic stocking...stuff like kitchen napkins & what have you. Mustafa Center is a great boon to all the Indians here in Singapore. It stocks almost everything an Indian family would need to cook their food. And that too in an extremely convenient way (like grated coconuts, for example). And then there's IKEA.

A lot of people have failed (miserably, I might add) at describing how much IKEA has to offer. I believe I am going to fail in even greater proportions. That place is just teeming with great ideas & stuff that you see & go "Wow, that would go famously with...." So we bought loads of stuff, enough to qualify for the IKEA Friends clubs. Now we can go again and spend & hopefully get better prices (from the already fantastic prices) and a few other priveleges as well.

My daughter helped me build all the things that we bought at IKEA, so it was a great evening for both of us.

This move looks promising.