Saturday, November 26, 2005

The disposable era

The other day the DSL router at home conked off and I had to call the phone company to fix it. The repair guy came, replaced the router and took the old one with him. Seeing this my mom asked me, "is he going to bring back the old one after fixing it?". I replied that he won't be fixing it, he just replaced it with a new one. My mom sounded pretty surprised about that and this set me thinking.


Are we now in an age where everything's disposable? If it doesn't work, just dump it and look for something new? Do we no longer want to "fix" it? This could be applicable to just about anything and not just DSL routers. Just a thought.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

In search of the multiverse

Last week I finished listening to Michael Crichton's Timeline. Its an old book but I read (actually listened to it via Audible) only now. The book explores the concept of multiverses - which are parallel universes ("almost similar" to the one we live in) and "travelling" to those universes at different points in time.

This concept of a multiverse sounds very interesting to me. A multiverse contains many other parellel universes which are almost similar (not identical but almost similar) to the one that we live in. So in each of these universes the events that take place are slightly different. E.g. in this universe I'm typing this blog post on a fine Sunday afternoon, and in another I could well be still asleep enjoying a weekend siesta.

Have you ever felt like a situation you were in was something you had experienced before? Its called deja vu but I think its actually an experience that is somehow made its way from another universe into ours - a quirk in the space time continuum or quantum foam gone awry. Do I sound like a quantum physicist? I guess not. :-)

Other books I listened to from Michael Crichton in the past few months are State of Fear, Airframe and Prey. All of them are well researched and make quite a few predictions that I believe will soon be reality - like many of the science fiction fantasies that are now a reality.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

PressDisplay

Check out PressDisplay.com - replicas of newspapers from around the world!


Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Flock!

This is absolutely cool (but still pretty unstable) software. Flock allows you to browse the web (I think it uses Mozilla/Firefox as the backend engine) and blog using the same application. I bet it does a lot more stuff but I haven't checked it out fully yet. You can get a beta release (beware: it may still have lots of bugs) from www.flock.com

PS: I'm posting this using Flock.

Cool links etc

Here are some cool sites I came across today.
 
Windows Live - this is Microsoft trying to get Windows and Office online. Read the news item here.
 
Nedwolf - Dozens of free software including desktop, portable and web-based.
 
Gada.be - brand new metasearch engine. The unique thing about this is that you can search by adding the keywords to the URL itself i.e. http://microsoft-live.gada.be searches for "microsoft live".
 
Thats it for today. Hope all of you had a great Diwali.

Test using Qumana blog editor

This is a test post using Qumana blog editor - let me see if it makes any sense using it rather than using the browser to post to my blog. You can check Qumana at www.qumana.com
 
 
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