Feed Readers

I use Bloglines as my RSS reader of choice and have used it as my only feed reader for almost two years now. Its simple and lets me read my subscriptions without getting in my way. BloglinesOff late, they seem to have upgraded the service with some fancy little changes to the feed tree on the left pane. They’ve also decreased the time for automatic updates so that you need’nt press the “r” hotkey to refresh your feed. I’d just like the font size on the left pane to increase a bit (back to what it was earlier). But anyway, I’m happy with these incremental improvements to my most visited site on the web.

On a related note, Google Reader has undergone some pretty interesting UI improvements. It looks a lot more like Bloglines now. The best part is the Gmail-like inbox view listing titles of the selected feed, although it appears a little sluggish with all the Ajax. It would be interesting to see where this is heading.

Erik Mongrain

Erik Mongrain

After having listened to the likes of Satriani and Vai for over five years, it was a refreshing change to hear Erik Mongrain (hat tip - Tariq). Erik has a rather unique style of strumming and tapping his original compositions on a guitar laid flat down, a technique believed to have been inspired by Michael Hedges. Erik draws his inspirations from the likes of Hendrix, Cobain and even Bach which motivated him to learn classical acoustics. Watch the following videos on YouTube, which I’m sure will speak volumes about him -

9/11: The Other Side

WTC burningIts been over 5 years since the “terrorist attack” on the World Trade Centre in New York. The US govt. was quick to point, without supporting evidence, the people/organization responsible for it.

The US govt had gone to war with 2 nations on the pretext of “war against terror”. First the war on Afghanistan to oust the ruling Taliban regime and find the Sept 11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden and then with Iraq claiming them to possess ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ which they miserably failed to locate. Osama had repeatedly denied his involvement in the attacks. But the US govt insisted and were successful in convincing its people and heads of other nations behind its rationale in going to war with Afghanistan and Iraq.

Loose Change (( The video is available as torrents online. You can also watch it on You Tube and Google video. Incase you want a copy, get in touch )) is a documentary that provides an alternative explanation of events during the September 11 attacks. Dylan Avery (( Watch the interview with Dylan Avery, Director - Loose Change )), one of the producers of the video, had originally been planning to make a fictional story about a possible conspiracy related to the attacks of 9/11. Avery claims that he began to believe that there was an actual cover up over the 9/11 attacks during research for this film, and that the genre switched to a documentary after discussing the events with his childhood friend Korey Rowe, a soldier who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and now one of the producers of that video.

One of the highlights of the video was analysing the fall of the twin towers. According to Physics911.net, had the fall been real, it would have resulted in pancaking effect leaving chunks of concrete on the ground below. But what was observed was fine pulverized concrete dust after the building collapsed in a virtual freefall. This is only possible in a controlled demolition, where each floor of a building is destroyed at just the moment the floor above is about to strike it. This method has indeed given near-freefall speed to demolitions of buildings all over the world in the past few decades (( Compare and contrast the results of controlled demolition and other forces. )). Now the question arises - who planted these detonators in the WTC? Was the plane hijacking a coverup for something more sinister than we were actually made to believe?

When I watched the video, I felt goosebumps all over my body. I knew something was amiss with the initial investigations when they claimed to have found the passport of one of the hijackers amidst the debris but failed to reveal the contents of the FDRs on the airplanes.

My uncle once made an interesting observation. He said, whenever the popularity ratings of Bush or Blair begins to hit a low, a terrorist plot will surprisingly surface from some part of the world. Take the recent transantlantic aircraft plot successfully foiled by British authorities, which would have otherwise resulted in “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”. Prior to the “plot”, its interesting to note that Blair’s rating was at a 12-year low. Small wonder, why the successful thwarting of the plot became such a media spectacle.

I dont blame Bush or Blair for all the unfortunate things thats happening in the world today. They are mere puppets in the hands of few, who are masterminding all of this. People for whom power and wealth is more than anything they can bargain and for whom this very power that they are after, will one day backlash.

BlogCamp After Effects?

Blogging for Business
Noticed this chap staring intently at this magazine while shopping at Landmark.

BlogCamp 2006

It was more than a 100 days ago, when a bunch of us got together to spend an evening reminiscent of the BarCamp days, the idea for BlogCamp was born. BlogCamp was intended to be a forum for any Tom, Dick and Harry to learn about blogging - the who’s, why’s and how’s. Initially there was skepticism on why we should have such a forum in the first place. But considering the fact that Chennai happens to be the Indian city with the largest number of bloggers amongst other things, we thought why not.

Then on, there was no looking back. We had meetings almost every weekend to discuss the progress. Things started picking up when interest started brewing amognst some corporate biggies in sponsoring the event. People poured in from all over the country to help organize the event. BlogCamp in some sense is an open source event with people helping in every little way they can and that something truly fantastic!

Ironically, my blog went down for the 2 days that BlogCamp was held due to server maintenance, which by the way was really pathetic. Instead of having to deal with it, I decided to use that as an opportunity to meet folks who had come down from all over the country. These included Dina, Peter, Neha, Jace, Om, Ravages, etc. It was fun catching up with Abhinav, Amit, Shyam, Sathish and a few others (whose names I dont know) from the BarCamp days.

Team BlogCamp
‘How do you feeel now?’ was all that we had to ask in the end.

Analysis of the event to follow. Stay tuned.

The End is where it all begins
If you've reached this far, I suggest you check the archives - there's a lot more to dig in there! Alternatively, if you'd like to get in touch, go here.