Raman's Blog

There is a post in Mashable about Google Notebook users pleading through an online petition, a Facebook group, and a “Save Notebook” blog against the proposed withdrawal of its service. Since there are other alternatives I would rather let the Google notebook service rest in peace. There is a similar notebook service from Yahoo too. It is not that I am against Google. It is just that there are other viable services and we should not be entirely dependent on Google. But personally, deep in my mind, I wish (and pray) Google would keep up people's trust on its services and let the notebook service hold on to its life. They should just invent some kind of contextual or other forms of advertisement to keep it going.

This reminds me of the old Roman empire when people used to watch men kill each other in the colloseum. We can watch the RIAA trial live online and have the same sadistic pleasure. Maybe this could act as a deterrent to potential pirates and would infact prevent online thefts. But curiously RIAA opposed the broadcast and the judge aptly called the situation "curious". You can read the news item at http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/riaa-court-hear.html

I started a new blog about spirituality and not even 2 days passed before blogger blocked access to my blog. I have no clue why since it was a genuine blog with nice content (in my opinion of course). The reason it gave me is the following. Your blog is disabled. Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive. I just hope to get access to it back soon. At least I should have been given the option to backup my blog data after it was blocked so that my hours of effort doesn’t go wasted. Technorati Tags: Blogger , blogs

It is a tough job to babysit a baby or a toddler. Whenever I had to babysit my little niece who is only 6 months old now, I have found that she is mesmerised by the nursery rhymes videos on youtube. I had to search for the nursery rhymes every time I had to babysit her. Then I thought it is easier to keep the links safe in the form of a playlist and to play it next time rather than searching for the songs every time. I am sure that these songs stimulate learning and is a nice way to keep the kids entertained. These videos on the playlist below were not uploaded by me. I would like to thank them all who uploaded them to youtube and making my occasional babysitting work easier. Technorati Tags: nursery , rhymes , songs , kids

Everything that I thought of writing in this blog about why I chose Google Chrome and dumped firefox as my default browser is already there in CNET News ! Read the review written by Stephen Shankland. Individually, a few tenths of a second doesn't make much difference. But it adds up fast. I spend hours a day using the Web – browsing the web, uploading pictures, commenting on blogs etc. It is annoying to sit in front of a slow browser waiting for the page to load. Just like many drops make an ocean, a few seconds saved accumulates to a lot of productive time. You can watch an interview with Stephen Shankland of CNET below. Technorati Tags: google chrome , cnet

> Voxox is a new Skype+Digsby alternative. This service offers an integration of popular messenger clients, email notifications and internet telephone. What made me switch to voxox and dump digsby is the free telephone number with 2 hours of free credit that voxox offered. I have been a user of Grandcentral and Voxox can serve as a receiver to the Grandcentral calls. Since incoming calls to Voxox are free, it is a great combination with Grandcentral.

It was a sweet surprise when I decided to test my new windows vista’s speech recognition. I had already had not so good experience with windows XP’s inbuilt speech recognition and did not expect much from any of Microsoft’s speech systems. I was wondering if I have to shell out from my pocket to have some decent functioning speech recognition software like Dragon naturally  speaking. But after I tried my hands on Vista’s inbuilt speech recognition I did not have much to complaint about this free gift from Microsoft. Check out this nice video demonstration from YouTube. Technorati Tags: speech , vista

I came across this interesting read in Rxpg. It depicts the plight of an average Indian medico victimized by the current political apathy and policies.

"In this country of vast socio-economic disparities and inequities, it is unjust and misleading to define merit in an academic fashion. Should there not be a way by which `merit' is translated into actual relief for the millions of our people in rural and tribal areas?" Read more on "The Hindu" - India's Leading Newspaper Tags: reservation , OBC

Government of India has an online Grievance forum at http://darpg-grievance.nic.in/ You can use this tool to highlight the problems they faced while dealing with Government officials or departments Electricity board, Railways, BSNL, etc. I know many people might say that these things don't work in India. I am yet to experiment this resource yet as till now I haven't yet got a chance to complain. So use this grievance forum and educate others who don't know about this facility. This way we can at least raise our concerns instead of just talking about the “ System ” in India. Invite your friends to contribute for many such happenings . (The stock market benchmark Sensex today crossed the psychologically gratifying 19,000 points mark.) Tags: complaints , grievance , India , government