Scheduled Downtime again!

YouTube is at it again!

Just a week after they had a scheduled downtime, YouTube is down again...in fact it just went down (Singapore time - 1641hrs).

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I find that highly amusing and a lot more unexpected for an entire site to go down for scheduled maintainence.

What I find more disappointing is that they have to go down for the second time in just over a week.

So they don't increase the chances?

A recent study done by Danish researchers suggests that using cell phones over many years does NOT increase your chances of getting cancer.

So, while you may get disturbed while on vacation or you might get startled when the phone set on vibrate mode suddenly goes off during a meeting or the battery might die in the middle of an important call, the good news is that the study suggests you can no longer blame your cell phone if you get cancer.

The researchers looked at phone records of people who have been using cell phones for as long as, take that, 21 years! And do you know what they found?

People who used cell phones for longer durations actually showed lower risk of cancer!

That should make some of the women I know quite happy...given the amount of time they spend on their respective cell phones! :-)

Unnecessary tagging

What YouTube has done for me personally is allowed me to watch a lot of the clips that I would not normally get to watch of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The reason I cannot watch his critically acclaimed and Emmy award winning show is because Comedy Central is NOT AVAILABLE here! And that sucks.

But what I can now do (since beggars can't be choosers...and. let's face it, I am a beggar...If you don't believe me, look at my bank balance) is search YouTube for Jon Stewart and watch all the snippets people have uploaded of The Daily Show. And it is certainly entertaining and Jon is an immensely funny guy.

Digression here: I highly recommend you watch Jon Stewart roast the hosts of CNN's later discontinued show "Crossfire" here

(You can also read the transcripts of the show here ... cause it's really funny)

But coming back to the point - or the post - I noticed that when I search for Jon Stewart, a lot of videos come up with the tags Jon and Stewart, sometimes even Daily Show, but have nothing to do with either Jon Stewart or The Daily Show. And that's one of the ways people are getting more of their videos being featured in more searches.

That's atrocious!

While that speaks volumes of the fact that Jon Stewart is such a heavily searched tag that people are prompted to do this kind of tagging, it is a serious nuisance to someone who wants honest results to searches.

And isn't YouTube a Google company now? In which case, shouldn't the by-now-omnipresent-and-by-far-most-used search engine be integrated with the Youtube infrastructure? Ok, so it takes time for an acquisition to fully get assimilated into an environment, but we are talking about Google here.

Anyways, I just hope people stop doing these pathetic things. It's just plain annoying.

Still at the top of the table

I stayed up really late to see this match, and I must say I enjoyed every bit of it.

ManU beat a really spirited Middlesborough (final score 2-1) to retain the top spot on the premiership table, now six points ahead of Chelsea (who have a match in hand...so essentially three points and a lot more in terms of goal difference ahead).

While the match started with Borrough putting a lot of pressure, ManU eventually started to impose themselves with some great passing and moves in the first half.

And then Christiano Ronaldo fell.

Literally fell.

Not to be read as "was felled".

As Ronaldo approached the goal, the goalkeeper made a sliding tackle where he did not have any contact with Ronaldo. But I still think that the intent was there and believe that the penalty decision was correct. Louis Saha burried the ghost of the penalty miss two weeks ago by calm putting the ball into the back of the net.

United one up.

Then came a fab goal from Borrough and then an even swifter response from United. Within 2 minutes of the equalizer, ManU was ahead again... A lead they would not relinquish for the rest of the match.

This season looks very very positive for United.

I just hope they make mincemeat of Benfica when they play at Old Trafford on Wednesday night to go through to the next stage of the Champions League.

Fingers crossed.

Meebo Deebo Doo

Of course, I couldn't say Yabba Dabba Doo, but you know what I mean :-)

I am talking about Meebo, a service which allows you to simply and easily see all your chat entities (yes, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, et al) on a single Web page. That too with a consolidated buddy list and a neat interface which allows you to chat with ur friends with the help of only a web browser.

From now on, if all you are interested in doing is chatting (and not want the ability to do VoIP) OR if your corporate network does not allow you to install chat tools or restricts the proxy on the corporate firewall, you can now use Meebo to chat away.

Cool, no?

People don't like to be questioned

Last night we went over to my wife's business partner's house for a barbeque, mainly to celebrate the beginning of the new business relationship. So all four partners and their spouses were there, with the inclusion of one of the partner's brother and his wife.

The ordeal began with trying to light the coal. As I had experienced during my vacation in India (where my buddy and I spent a lot of time trying to light coal so that we could enjoy a hookah), coal is extremely stubborn and takes it's own sweet time to get going. The starters that we had bought also turned out to be quite useless. So it took us a while to get the heat and start putting things on there so that we could eat.

Having sated our appetites, it was the time to cut the cake to celebrate the occasion and then speeches from the new business partners. As it turned out, there was a surprise in store for us.

The brother of this business partner, who was there as a guest to celebrate the occasion, decided to hijack the stage by going on a speech of his own. And the speech was about this project that he has been working on for a while which he wants my wife and her partners to collaborate with.

First of all, I think if he has a business proposition, he should do it on the business partners' time, not on the day of the celebration at a barbeque pit. Second, he should do his homework.

As usual, I played the part of the a$$ho1e who argued with everybody. But I did not argue just for the heck of it. I was really pissed off with this guy hijacking everybody's agenda. And then I started asking questions which he did not have answers for. Because of which, he promptly had a sulking expression on his face and refused to talk after a while.

If he was not prepared to be questioned on the soundness of the business plan, he shouldn't have brought up the subject in the first place. And I think people should do their research before they venture into making business decisions.

All in all, I realized that people who have been here for a while (more than 10 years) don't like to be questioned. And they have lost touch with reality.

I don't care.

Long live the liver...

It's confirmed...

As per the doctor, I have completely recovered from my Jaundice and my liver is functioning just fine. All of the measured results (except for GGT) were within the acceptable range. That, according to the doctor, is not something we need to worry about and just to be safe, we can check in 6 months.

So I am back to being a normal human being and therefore a normal diet.

Cheers!