THE Y-AXIS by Rajesh Kumar

While the cricket fans of India and Pakistan are smarting over early exits of their national teams , here is a suggestion to BCCI and PCB to utilize an excellent opportunity ahead of us. Forget the ICC WC 2007. Organize a quickfire India Pakistan ODI series in parallel! Yes!! Hold five matches in India and five in Pakistan. Why does this make sense: 1. Cricket fans in the subcontinent would not just be happy, but delighted. Nothing generates more fun than India Pak cricketing encounters. 2. The advertisers would have a mighty good alternate option . Nothing generates more money than India Pak cricketing encounters. 3. Matches would happen in IST & PST . Late night would be reserved for encounters of the other kind! 4. For BCCI and PCB, there is tons of (more) money to be made .ICC would realize the power of the cricket fans inthe subcontinent. Its TRPs and ad revenues would dip sharply and BCCI and PCB would have their chance to settle scores with ICC. ICC would accept any barga...

Very few people can dream big. Even fewer can pursue those dreams to reality. A visionary, a technocrat and a project manager par-excellence rolled into one is Abdul Kalam for us.President A.P.J Abdul Kalam is one such distinguished person who has proved that dreams can be chased to reality by hard work. No wonder President Kalam is such a popular president. How popular, read on. Few days before MS Subbulakshmi died, President Kalam visited her at her house in Chennai. It was evening post work hour and due to President Kalam's visit, the Police had stopped traffic. I was heading home and found myself in a jam at Kottur bridge connecting Turnbulls road with Gandhi Mandam road. We were curious why the traffic is standstill and people including myself felt frustrated. Frustrated till the policeman on duty uttered the word 'Kalam'. It was a different story that point onwards. People switched off the engines, locked their cars and stood on the road median, just to get a glimpse ...

Never before in the history of ICC World Cup tournaments have so much emotions been generated at such an early stage of the tournament. The early rounds are supposed to be easy for the fancied teams and it is assumed that the 'minnows' will walk out at the end of this stage.Not really this time. Pakistan, a former winner of Cricket World Cup is thrown out this early(though technically they have one more match with Zimbabwe left), India, another former champion facing a prospect of the same having lost to neighbours Bangladesh, and saddest of them all, Bob Woolmer, a cricketing legend lost, perhaps to stress and sadness. To add to it, there is already a captain, Inzamaam, who has already announced his intention to step aside and possibly even retire. Are we expecting too much of a magic from our national teams? Are we forgetting that our teams are made of human beings, and we all have our days? There is a sad picture in today's Hindu about Dhoni's under-construction hou...

I recently moved this blog to my own domain.Bloggers using Blogspot and considering migrating to their own domain may like to read the impact analysis . Blogger does a beautiful job of forwarding to new domain so do not worry about broken links. Feed path has changed though existing subscribers were not affected, old feed path works too. Adsense disorientation: 'Public Service' ads started showing right after migration.Adsense must crawl this site again for the ads to be more content contextual.Hmmm. Google Analytics , partly disoriented, it kept recording the visits but the site overlay view does not work. Maybe this needs to reconfigured and old URL dropped. The price : You loose all historical data for all you care. Else, keep the old and new data as two different sites inside your analytics account. Google Sitemaps - Again becomes 'unverified' , when new meta tag is inserted, says Google is yet to crawl. Do worry about Google juice . Think about Technorati , Blo...

Next time you are making a call to your family and colleagues in US from another country, watch out for the Daylight Saving Time, which comes in early this year. To reduce consumption of energy and to increase consumption of natural light, Daylight saving time in US in 2007 and beyond would come in three weeks early compared to 2006. This year it comes in effect on March 11, and ends on Nov 4, which adds up to an additional one month. The travel and hospitality industry is widely affected by this change since it they now have to reprogram their systems, a la Y2K style though no major glitches are expected, since there was a fairly long notice of this impending change. It also affects your calendars and in your laptops and desktops, which are programmed to work as per the old system.Microsoft has released an update to make the neccessary corrections to the calendar as well as setup a helpline to aid customers requiring support. The updates can be installed in easy steps from here . If y...

I noticed this yesterday.I have so far believed that Google bots index permalinks of websites and blogs, but this time it seem to have indexed the Blog label itself.Clearly, this seems to be bug where the spider has assumed a label to be a post.Pretty curious indeed. Read: MY VIEW:'THE GOOGLE STORY' BY DAVID A. VISE Google

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Solution architect who succeeded Bil Gates for that position, did something on 27 Feb 2007 that leading executives of Microsoft are not known to do- acknowledge the succcess of business rivals. He acknowledged that Google's success with its advertising model was a "wake-up call within Microsoft". Many within Microsoft would possibly consider such an acknowledgement as nothing short of sacrilege but it clearly shows the yeah-they-got-it-right-we-didn't thought process in Microsoft's top management quarters. They possibly acknowledged it silently by allowing you to choose your own search engine such as Google and ASK in IE 7.0 i search box rather than force MSN/Live search on you. Another interesting development is his comment about the success of MS Office as having withstood the onslaught of the likes of Zoho and Google Docs saying they 'compromised functionality'. Not sure if he was asked on the declining marketshare of In...

ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 is all set to begin on March 11th in the Caribbean Islands with the opening ceremony. Nine Caribbean countries have come together to host this tournament. Infact the practice matches would get going from 5th March itself and there are 16 such practice matches in all, four per day on successive days. This World Cup, there are 16 teams participating and just in case you would like to refresh, they are as follows: Group A: The mighty Aussies , equally mighty SA , and not so mighty Scotland and the Netherlands Group B: Sri Lanka , India , Bangladesh & Bermuda (yes, Bermuda, it is a speck in the Atlantic, spot it if you can) Group C: New Zealand , England , Kenya & Canada Group D: Pakistan , West Indies , Zimbabwe & Ireland . No guesses, Group A & C appear very tough groups. The tournament itself is in four stages: Stage 1: Group Stage (Teams within the groups play each other, once). This stage kicks off on 13th March with a WI at Pak match....