YuviSense: Codin Kid

Raymond Chen makes a list of things that various nations are proud of.

India?

From the I’ll-never-fail-you-when-you-need-a-laugh Mona:

From here.

This one bailed me out today, and I think it’ll help me a lot Thanks Maryam, and good luck with your baby!

As WLM disconnects every time I try to send this URL through it, here it is for anyone wanting to add me on Facebook and I follow Rob’s policy on adding friends.

Is funny, but a bit scary as well. Where is humanity going? There would have been wars about it, if not for that we are getting a bit lazy of late to go about warring with each other over trivial issues.

In case you are wondering, what he writes is damn true as well. And, don’t ask me whose Fan I am: I swear no allegiance

Lightning Strikes Everyday: Rajinikanth: The Phenomena

P.S: Hawkeye is one of the most funny, insightful, stylish blogger on earth. Violent Acres doesn’t even come close (At least for me). One of the first blogs I encountered, and one of the best blogs around. Subscribe, if you haven’t.

Video sharing streaming site (like UStream.tv) using Silverlight, meaning you’ll get higher quality video and better responsiveness. Yay! (P.S: I’ve grown used to seeing the phrase Video sharing so much that I wrote “Video Streaming” when I really meant “Video Sharing”. Thanks to Steve for correctin me!)

Steve Clayton: Signup for the LiveStation Beta

Go Read this. The next step in the evolution of the browser. Salivating.

Tim Sneath : Programming HTML with C#

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We all hate those forwards that somehow make it into our inbox via the obnoxious relative or friend who has just got an email account. Most of mine just go to the trash, but when I saw the forward below forwarded(?) to me by this cool guy with this cool title above, I had to open it. I wasn’t disappointed to the least, and you too probably won’t be. If I had to highlight all the cool bits, then the whole thing would’ve been a tad too gaudy, so just read it for yourself

My name is Billy Evans. I am a very sick little boy. My mother is typing this for me, because I can’t. She is crying. The reason she is so sad is because I’m so sick. I was born without a body. It doesn’t hurt, except when I try to breathe.

The doctors gave me an artificial body. It is a burlap bag filled with leaves. The doctors said that was the best they could do on account of us having no money or Insurance.

I would like to have a body transplant, but we need more money. Mommy doesn’t work because she said nobody hires crying people. I said, ” Don’t cry, Mommy”, and she hugged my burlap bag. Mommy always gives me hugs, even though she’s allergic to burlap and it makes her sneeze and chafes her real bad.

I hope you will help me. You can help me if you forward this email to everyone you know. Forward it to people you don’t know, the too. Dr. Johansen said that for every person you forward this email to, Bill Gates will team up with AOL and send a nickel to NASA. With that funding, NASA will collect prayers from school children all over America and have the astronauts take them up into space so that the angels can hear them better. Then they will come back to earth and go to the Pope, and he will take up a collection in church and send all the money to the doctors. The doctors could help me get better then. Maybe one day I will be able to play baseball. Right now I can only be third base. Every time you forward this letter, the astronauts can take more prayers to the angels and my dream will be closer to coming true. Please help me. Mommy is so sad and and I want a body. I don’t want my leaves to rot before I turn 10.

If you don’t forward this email, that’s okay. Mommy says you’re a mean and heartless bastard who doesn’t care about a poor little boy with only a head. She says that if you don’t stew in the raw pit of your own guilt-ridden stomach, she hopes you die a long slow, horrible death and then burn forever in hell. What kind of cruel person are you that you can’t take five freakin’ minutes to forward this to all your friends so that they can feel guilt and shame about ignoring a poor, bodiless nine-year-old boy?

Please help me.

I try to be happy, but it’s hard. I wish I had a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty that wouldn’t chew on me and try to bury its turds in the leaves of my burlap body. I wish that very much.

Thank You,
Billy “Smiles” Evans

P.S. Who wrote this? Bloddy hillarious parody. No images of the burleap bag though. And I do know a few friends who might as well actually fall for this!

P.P.S: A bit of ill health and school’s keeping Engadget Analysis Part 2 from hitting the tubes. You’ll find it online within the next few days though.

Awesome read.

Cool, ‘coz this is where I am. Read the hilarious article, made even more hilarious if you are Tamil. The sad thing is, this is actually quite accurate

Gene Weingarten - Hack for Hire - washingtonpost.com

Finally, this reporter determined that Dr. Haminahamina was actually speaking another language altogether, and was apparently making some very good jokes. One of them sounded something like, “Ellam koo vena kam!” It killed.

The “Ella koo vena kam” is actually “Ellarukkum Vanakkam”, which means “Good Day to Everyone”. The article’s a killer

Link via the fantastic India Uncut (A must read for everyone. They should keep printouts of this in the Indian Parliaments).

Part 2 of Engadget Link analysis coming soon…

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My Engadget analysis was a huge hit: Huger than I had thought. Besides lots of links from lots of cool bloggers, it also got on to the frontpage of Digg (Thanks No.1 to Rob for submitting it (He also gets Thanks No.0 for actually making the analysis possible)), and heck even TechMeme!

All this is very cool. It was useful to a lot of people. That is also very cool. What was NOT cool, was what happened after that.

This, was what the visitors were getting. Even Technorati saw fit to rename my blog to “Website Suspended”

After some time with the support folks, I was able to get my most crucial stuff (the charts and the database) away from that host (yes, I had backups of the charts, but they were in the Word document itself, and reupdating everything would be a PITA). I could understand their position: My hosting is damn cheap (around $70 for 2 years is cheap, ain’t it?). Their server seems to have crashed 3 times in around 20 minutes when I had hit the Digg frontpage. They had to pull down my site inorder to keep their other sites going.

Digg user Steve tried to help me by offering me some space on his server, but we were unable to get it up and running. A lot of people offered to help too. Thanks!

Then, Rob woke up, and in a few hours my blog was up and running in one of his servers (So this is Thanks No.2 to Rob!). But before the site was up, I was down ;)

Overall, getting dugg and seeing my blog going down had an emotional effect on me. Even though I knew it won’t survive a Digg, much less Digg, Techmeme, Scoble, Calcanias and a host of others at the same time. But still, it was a sad and somber few hours for me from the time when my site went down and Rob(this time the super-hero) came up. Thanks for all those who helped!

Now that the site is back to normal, blogging would resume soon. I might not be able to do a link analysis of Engadget, because I sold it to Ryan Block for $300(not yet sealed, so if it goes awry, you’ll get link analysis). But, I’m open to suggestions as to what to do next: Analysis of a particular author? A particular category? Or, a more drilldown analysis of the categories? Comments welcome!

And yes, I did email Calacanis. Haven’t heard back yet. Guess he’s busy with his product launch and the D conference.

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.2 a few days ago and thought I didn’t break anything. Rob, however, pointed out that I broke something(as usual): I broke my comments. Thankfully, without having to get me to tear out a lot of hair so as to why the heck on earth I was getting duplicate primary key fields in the database, Rob also pointed me tothis articlee to fix it. Works like a charm.

So, if you’ve tried to leave a comment over the past few days, I’m sorry for the abusive page containing obscure words that you encountered. It should be fixed now.

So, well, uhm, Thanks Rob!

Alfred Thompson says(with a kickass story) we should comment our code. I know. We all know. I also know I haven’t been doing it. Sigh. I remember the number of times I had to go back to Scoble’s StatBot code to have a look at a bug that I solved in a weird way that propped up again in Engadget’s StatBot code. A comment here or there would have helped me a lot. Hopefully, I’ll have more comments in Engadget’s StatBot.
This is why I am still calling myself a wannabe geek…

Ars Technica has the scantily available details here. I haven’t hit by a virus in all the years I’ve been using Windows, and I don’t think I will. Remember, common sense is the best antivirus ever.

Also, remember, all people are Retarded, in some way or the other.