New Year's eve

So here I am, sitting at home on New Year's eve, wondering what to do (pathetic???). I was thinking about New Year's eve in India. I did not party much in India (chamathu payyan), so my new year's eve revolved around my TV. This is the time for all the channels (movies, music, news, sports) to look back at the best/worst moments of the past year. I always watch the Top 10 Movies (hindi and tamil) of the year and try to count the number of movies that I've seen. This is just my second New year in U.S.A (I was in India for last new year). My first new year here was in Florida and we spent the night playing cards (we spent the entire Christmas hols playing cards and video games.....). I have nothing to do today. I don't feel like going out. So, I wanted to look back at 2008 and bore you all (yes, all 9 of you!!).

I was in India when 2008 dawned. It was great meeting up with all my friends. I even visited my sister in Tanzania last December. Spending 1 month with family again was really refreshing... but good times don't last. I came back to Florida on Jan 10th. I had to complete one more semester. I had a really good semester in the last semester without any pressure. I had a job offer, my prof paid my tuition and also paid me really well, great people in the lab at work (myself, Maapi, Dexiang and Sherry), it was fun!!

I graduated in May. We went on a trip to Miami after my graduation - 7 of us. It was one of the best trips ever. Miami, Keywest, Everglades etc... I can never forget all the arbitrary talk :) cricket on Miami beach and the night club in Miami.... I moved to Washington immediately after the trip, joined MSFT (dream come true - the best event of 2008) and bought my first car. I had money for the first time since I came to the U.S. Summer was lot of fun with the interns. We used to go out almost every weekend. After September the weather was really bad... it kept raining... that's when I found gold mine in Netflix and I was (am) addicted to it!! The rest of the year was uneventful - it was just me, my T.V, Netflix and XBox.

I had the opportunity to end the year with a bang. I spent Christmas in CA, with my FL friends. It was a good reunion. So, here I am, on new year's eve, blogging about 2008. I think this is one of my longest blogs - I don't like writing (or reading) long blogs. I'm sure most of you will just skim through this post, this is a post for me, something that I can read after a few years. Hopefully, this blog should be active for a few more years. That's it about 2008. Looking forward to a great 2009. Happy new year to you all!!!

Cobie Smulders

How I met your mother!

Twitter, IMDB and more

Recently, I came across a lot of articles online that mentioned Twitter. I wanted to find out what that is and so I joined Twitter. I expected to find something like StumbleUpon or Digg, but I was surprised when I found out that it is a website to update your status. Can you believe it? Just to update your status. It's something that you can do on your messenger, orkut or Facebook. So, I don't know what the hype is about.I'll find it out more about this service in the next couple of days.

On Twitter, you can follow someone (similar to adding friends on orkut or facebook) and subscribe to their status updates. Add me to your twitter and follow my updates. What do you call the act of updating your status? Twittering? Tweeting? God knows!! When I asked one of my friends about Twitter's purpose, she said that it is like a micro-blog. Now I have lot of places to express myself - status updates on messengers (I don't do that usually), status updates on orkut (No), Facebook (I do this a lot), blogging and now micro-blogging. I wanted to bring everything together. As the first step, I have added my Twitter feeds to my blog (second gadget on the left). This gadget kind of ties my micro-blogging with my actual blog.

I watch lots and lots of movies. When I was a grad student, I used to watch everything online. Now, I'm paying for each and every movie/T.V series that I watch and I'm proud of that. "Say NO to piracy!" :D When I watch a movie, I usually write a review on Flixster's Facebook app and rate it on IMDB. Now, I have added a feed from my IMDB page (first gadget on the left) to this blog so that it gets updated automatically when I rate a movie on IMDB. Unfortunately, the feed does not display my rating. I'm trying to find some way to display my ratings along with the movie names. When I looked at the source code of these gadgets I found that they are not too complicated. I might try to tweak an existing gadget or write a new gadget to do this. I still have to check if IMDB allows exporting the rating along with the movie name.

I have spent more than 3 hours exploring twitter, IMDB feeds and blogger gadgets. It's well past midnight now. Off to bed... zzzzzzZZZZZZZZZ

Sachin to Aamir: Buddy, what a body!

LOL..... Interesting article...


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After Hours has learnt that the two had some rounds of ‘secret meetings’ to share fitness tips before Sachin flew off to Chennai for the ongoing Test series against England..
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ROTFL :D

Click here for the full article!

Slumdog Millionaire

It's been a long time since I posted. It's not that I'm lazy. I don't find anything interesting to post. There are only 3 things that I'm doing these days.

Work - No. I can't blog about work. Blogging about MSFT or any other company in this industry will attract people only if it is going to be MSFT bashing. Since I'm NEVER gonna do that... I can't blog about my daily work.

Gaming on my 360 - Hmm.... I'm just a beginner here. I'll start blogging about games once I start playing a variety of games

Movies and TV Series - This is where I spend a major chunk of my time. I have blogged about few TV Series earlier. Since most of my blog readers are not in U.S (I know that 7 people read my blog regularly... lol.... :D and only 2 of them are in the U.S). So, this blog is about a movie I watched yesterday.

It was snowing in Redmond yesterday. We went to the Bellevue Botanical Garden at 5PM. The place was decorated for Christmas - it was really really good. They tried to make different interesting themes with lights. I'll upload few pics of that later. We were roaming there until 6.30. We then decided to go to the Bellevue Square. Since none of us had any plans for the evening we decided to catch a movie - Twilight. (Yeah, I know that its kinda girly movie, but I read the book and was curious to see how they adapted that for the big screen). When we were standing in the line, we met another friend who was there to watch Slumdog Millionaire. So, change of plans. We got the tickets fot Slumdog Millionaire instead. Here is my review of the movie from Flixster.

Amazing screenplay... One of my friends commented "The movie did not portray India properly and that it focussed on the dirty slums of India". Yes. That is where the story is set. Nothing wrong in focussing on the slums. When Americans make movies on/in India, they tend to exaggerate everything. People relate India to elephants and men in turban. The beauty of this movie is that nothing was exaggerated. Every single incident shown in the movie happens in India. Some of those incidents might be embarassing for us Indians (especially when we see the movie in America with an American crowd). But that's the truth and we have to accept it. Hats off to the director!!

Try to watch this movie if you get a chance. Last I checked, it was 201 on the IMDB top 250.