March 20, 2010

A few of my recent experiences!

Hi Guys,

It’s been long since I wrote ‘The First Week of summer’. It’s nice to meet you again through my words.
I was totally engaged in my college works, either writing assignments or drawing machine parts and assembling them in Solidworks. For the past week, I’ve been sleeping by midnight. The only entertainment in between these times was the IPL matches. But sadly, till now I’m not able to watch a full match. Apart from these things, I watched the movie ‘Sherlock Holmes’ yesterday.

A New Browser, A new Experience!
Last week, I downloaded the new Opera 10.5 browser. It was advertised as the World’s Fastest Browser. Earlier I’ve used Opera 9.27, but was not attracted by that. Apart from that I’ve used IE6, Safari browsers and I’m currently using IE8, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox 3.6.

Of these I’m not comfortable with IE8 as it crashes often. I use Google Chrome to check mails and Firefox for extended usage like reading, surfing. I’m most comfortable with Firefox, since it provides a large range of features (add-ons). So, I use Firefox for 90% of my browsing.

Initially I was not interested with the Opera browser. A few days back I used it in my college for surfing and found it impressive. So, I decided to download. In the Opera website, I found that it had some additional facilities like Opera Turbo, Unite and Link. It had independent widgets too.

Opera Turbo increases the speed of the website by a particular factor, normally 2X or 3X. In my short usage, I found that Google and Gmail loaded faster than Chrome or Firefox. But if there were lot of elements in the website, then there was difficulty. For instance, some of the widgets in my blog did not load.

There was lot of Opera Widgets in the website. Some were very useful. I downloaded two of those gadgets. One was the Google gadget that contained all the Google icons like Google, Blogger, Orkut, Gmail, etc. Another one was EBook Reader. A fantastic gadget for a book lover like me! It contains a lot of stored books. We can just download them and read them. I was able to find a lot of famous books like Sherlock Holmes (the complete series), some Augusta Christie Novels, Alice in Wonderland, Around the World in 80 days, etc. On the whole I liked the new Opera browser.

Are you a Gmail user? Then Read This
In the recent times, a lot of my friends have lost their Gmail IDs, i.e., they have been hacked. Also, many have received warnings from Gmail to change their password. Gmail has increased it security features. Particularly it has introduced mobile phone recovery. Incase if you forget your password, then Google will send a sms to you. Most of them who lost their IDs had forgotten the answers for recovery questions.

Frustrating Internet Connection
The Internet Speed has been so poor in my home for so long. Even I can manage with the speed, but the connection crashes so often. There was lot of problem from the day we got this connection. Complaints and enquiries don’t help a bit. Last week, mom made a complaint and we were assured we would get a better connection, but there is no improvement. I can’t believe that India’s largest broadband provider’s service is so poor. I’m dead sure that a private sector company will overtake it in a few days.

A lot of things didn’t go well for me this week. But whatever happens happens for a reason and life just goes on. Hope to have a very good week ahead.

Happy Reading!!!

March 6, 2010

The First Week of Summer!

Hi Guys,

I think my last post was a fortnight back. I thought of penning down a lot of things last Sunday, but I was out of time. I went to the movie ‘Vinnai Thandi Varuvaya’ in the morning and then I was engaged writing assignments the whole day.

Also the title of this post is ‘The First week of summer’. Last week was very hot and humid here, marking that the summer had begun. Let’s hope the summer is quite mild this year, though the chances are less due to Global Warming.

Sporting Actions
The 12th Hockey world cup is going on in Delhi from Feb 28. Though India is in very poor form these days, a lot was expected from them as it is our home ground. Our players played up to the expectations in the 1st match against Pakistan, beating them 4-1. Then in the 2nd match, Australia outplayed us 5-2. Against Spain, India played better, but they failed to convert the passes and penalty corners to goals. In the end again a 5-2 defeat. Today India played England. India dominated the scene, but as usual failed to score goals even in the last minute and lost 3-2 to give up the semi final hopes. At least they must win South Africa and fight for the 5th place.

It was great to see Sachin hit a double century in the Gwalior ODI against South Africa. I have been his fan from the days I started watching cricket. There are a lot of sporting events ahead this month. The much expected IPL III begins on March 12. There have been a lot of controversies around this event. To me, any of the 8 teams have a chance to win this event. I have been a great fan of F1 races, particularly Michael Schumacher. It’s great that he is back on track this year at the age of 41. But it is quite different to see him with the McLaren Team instead of the famous Ferrari. Let’s see how he drives in the Bahrain GP on March 14.
Events in the College
College is going on nice these days, despite the huge amount of politics happening. We had better performances in the interdepartmental culturals. We got 2nd place in the events like Skit, Vocal Solo (Siva Kumar) and theme dance. We also got the 3rd place in Western dance. There were lot of politics in the events that led to conflict and repetition of events like Folk and western dances. Finally the points were calculated based on the number of students and hence we missed the 1st place by a whisker.

The interdepartmental sports are also nearing the end. We were leading a few days before, but sadly we let it slip our hands. We can’t do a lot on that, mainly because having no girls in our department we can’t rely on the events conducted for girls. We expect compensation points based on the points we scored, but we are denied and hence Sports Shield has also become a dream. But our performance was far better than last year, both in cultural and sports.

The mood in the college is upbeat after the last semester results. Much has improved than the previous semester. Our college secured the University’s 2nd place in the overall pass percentage, missing the 1st by a mere 0.68%. Last time the difference was more than 20%.

I will keep updating about my activities.

Happy reading!!!