Venkatarangan TNC

Starbucks closing shops

2008-07-23T13:11:19Z

If you are following US Business news you would have read about Starbucks closing over 600 of their stores around USA. I am wondering on what took them so long to do it. For instance every time I visit Seattle (their headquarters) I am puzzled on how come Starbucks have nearly half-a-dozen stores in the downtown area around WA State convention Center. Aand all of them in walking distance to one another. In one of the streets for every block they have a Starbucks store. Naturally each of their store...(read more)

The Bank Job

2008-07-20T19:13:57Z

While returning from the USA in my flight I saw this movie " The Bank Job ". The Bank Job is supposed to be a true life story of a bank robbery that took place in London in 1971. The robbery was allegedly plotted by UK's secret police to cover up a prominent member of British Royal Family. It involved thieves digging a tunnel below a shop into a near-by bank, get into its vault and rob it. After finding millions of pounds in the vault they also discover lot of dirty secrets - and realize...(read more)

Great way mall & "Hellboy II"

2008-07-18T19:51:36Z

After spending few hours in San Jose Tech Museum I took the local VTA bus 180 to travel to the Great way mall. I was not sure on the direction of the bus to take, their call centre was unhelpful answering my query, then I asked one of the bus driver who guided me to take the bus going in the"Fremont BART" direction. After Seattle Bay Area seems to have a decent public transport system, which made me like this US city a bit. There is nothing exceptional about the mall other than it is big...(read more)

San Jose Tech Museum and "The Alps"

2008-07-18T19:23:28Z

I was in San Jose area and had the whole day to spend before my return flight (Jet Airways from SFO to BOM) in the evening. So I started the day with my friend dropping me in San Jose Tech Museum. First I went to see the IMAX movie " The Alps " which had breath taking views and an emotional story - an expert climber had been wanting to climb the "Eiger" mountain in the Alps which had killed his father 40 years back . Then I went to see the exhibits, which included a Silicon IC...(read more)

USB Chargers in Southwest gates

2008-07-16T21:27:01Z

This time while travelling within the USA, I selected to fly with Southwest Airlines. Most other airlines especially in the USA are using the Oil price rise as a good excuse to cut all the "services" they are offering to customers and deteriorating in every aspect. Southwest seems to be using this great risk as a clear opportunity to differentiate itself as a provider of great service. You might ask what great service, I could list the following: On time arrival and departure Courteous...(read more)

Microsoft Surface

2008-07-15T21:18:11Z

I had written earlier about Microsoft Surface , but today I got a chance to play with it in person for sometime. I am in Redmond, WA this week and was visiting one of the Microsoft offices where they had kept a Surface computer for demo. Surface is one cool technology that you got to use for getting a good feel. It definitely has great potential of changing the way we interact with computers. Share this post: email it! | del.icio.us! | digg it! | newsVine!...(read more)

Visual disk space usage - WinDirStat

2008-07-15T18:04:49Z

Even if you have a hard disk with hundreds of GBs, you will run out of space soon. At that time you want to see what is taking most of the space. Using Windows Explorer and going to each folder is a time consuming job. Several years back I got introduced to a tool called " Tree Size " that displays chart like bars against each folder so that you can easily see the usage. Today I found a free tool to do the same thing better - WinDirStat . Apart from bars, it displays a beautiful squarisish...(read more)

Casino Royale (1967 film)

2008-07-15T05:23:32Z

I was in our US office today and at the end of the day I had few hours to kill and a few Mbps of Internet pipe. So I made the best use - watch some videos in Hulu.com . For those of you who are outside USA, Hulu is promoted by NBC and News Corp media houses, that has only legal videos and tons of it - including popular TV shows like "The Simpsons" & "The Office". These are supported by naturally advertisements. While browsing I came across this movie " Casino Royale ...(read more)

In Spite of the Gods by Edward Luce

2008-07-12T02:20:39Z

The other day in a dinner conversation the topic was on how India has a nation has grown in spite of everything - Corruption, Inefficient bureaucracy and all the differences. That's when this book came up " In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce ". I bought the book immediately and I finished reading it during my travel now. The book is an excellent work done by Mr.Edward Luce, who is a journalist with Financial Times. During his various assignments he...(read more)

Vista expiring problem

2008-07-11T05:02:40Z

Few weeks back I had a strange problem, my Vista installation kept saying it is going to expire in 11 days. If you see the above image of the Control Panel-Systems says Windows is Activated . So I was puzzled, how can something that is activated can expire. Strangely the same error kept coming in few other machines in our office. After several hours with Microsoft PSS on phone, they diagnosed the issue in my machine to be a time-bombed SP1. Since I was in the beta program of SP1, I had downloaded...(read more)

Bheemaa

2008-07-07T05:00:27Z

The next movie I watched on flight was Vikram's Bheema . This movie got delayed for over 3 years & in the period Vikram didn't act in any other movie. The story was usual and very ordinary. It is about a gangster and gang wars - we have seen enough of this in Tamil movies. The only difference is that everyone gets killed in the climax - Hero, Heroine, both the Gang Leaders (Prakash Raj, Raghuvaran) and Thailavasal Vijay. If you can please skip watching this movie, a low-point in Vikram...(read more)

10,000 BC

2008-07-07T03:55:49Z

On my Jet Airways flight from Mumbai to SFO I saw this movie 10,000 BC . It is a fictitious story of how a Hero from a small tribe fights against a large civilization (resembling Egypt Pyramid days). After a sustained chase he wins over them, get his people and his love released. The settings, costume, fighting's have been taken well. At times in the movie you feel a little bored and the story is overall unbelievable. Share this post: email it! | del.icio.us! | digg it! | newsVine!...(read more)

Throwing old code away

2008-07-04T10:57:14Z

Following Microsoft's retiring of Windows XP on 30th June, there has been lot of talk on the Internet on how Windows XP is better Windows Vista. I love Windows Vista and I have been using it from Beta days. I will never even dream of going back to XP. Why?. The UAC prompts are certainly annoying, needs to be turned off for a "Developer" machine which is what I did in my Work PC. I have it ON in my Home PC and Laptop and it works great in both machines. It gives me confidence that no...(read more)

My USA 1999 Photos

2008-07-03T17:07:37Z

Last weekend while doing some room cleaning, I came across an old photo album (you remember those chemically processed photos from photo studios). It was the photographs of my first USA trip in 1999. I selected few of them and uploaded it to my online album. You can see me "younger" than today and without spectacles :-). (Below) With Actress Ramba in Frankfurt Airport (1999) (Below) With Actor Vijay in Frankfurt Airport (1999) (Top) In 1999 in New York with World Trade Center (Twin Towers...(read more)

Silverlight - Search Engine Friendly by Design

2008-07-03T14:49:57Z

Last few days there has been buzz around Adobe's announcement of collaboration with Google and Yahoo! to improve the ability of search engines to index Flash files better - which are normally .SWF binary files. Instead of coming with open XML based file formats Adobe has chosen to offer an "optimised" (basically a server component) version of Flash Player that sits on a search engine's server and checks for Flash at the same time as HTML. Compare this with Microsoft's Silverlight...(read more)