TimepassTown.com was the website I had created when I was fresh out of high school. With the aim of coming up with a better way to pass time on the Internet, TpT (as we fondly called it) evolved in three iterations into a community-based literary showcase. People would submit poetry, stories, weblog posts, and other interesting content covering a myriad of topics.

It's probably some planetary alignment thing, I guess. Hope work troubles go away soon.

First you had NetscapeOne. Then came SunOne. Then RealOne. And now, ladies and gentlemen, some idiotic marketing department in my favourite PDA company has decided to rename the outfit to PalmOne! This is WAY too ridiculous! Like someone on /. said - it sounds
like a suggestion: "Hey look! look at those abandoned PDAs lying around! You think we should Palm one!?"

Google buys Pyra! This is major. Ev, Jason and the gang rollerblading in the GooglePlex... hmm.

Everyone seems to be wondering why this happened - as in, what use is a content hosting service to a search company?
A lot of people are saying that there's going to be a "Blogs" tab now, beside the News and other tabs. Some people are also wondering if Blogspot sites will get a better pagerank.

But why buy Pyra? Why not just get 20 people to build Blogger in a month? Here's what I think: It's all about the data™. In Page and Brin's paper - The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - the base assumption was that the WWW is a huge interlinked connection of information. And you know what's incredibly funny? The Blogosphere is just that - a small scale WWW.

I'm conducting the quiz at my college's computer fest, and I needed a simple way to store all those questions, so that I could edit them etc. And guess what I used? DBX!! It's simple and small, and we wont need to install it(since DBX doesn't need to be) on the PC in college. Also, since the data is stored in XML, I'm directly writing all my questions in <question> tags in my text editor... It's quite fast, and has made the process much easier. It's a nice feeling when you find a good use for your own creat

Played two straight games of n-ball today. I won the first game, tied the second. Sadly there's one new rule: The winner has to treat every one to a coke. n-ball is one hilarious game, but it's extremely tiring - I can't move at all, after today's matches.

Anyway, I'm just too tired now to type anything at all. Too much work on the idya front. I guess I've got too many things to handle at one time. I'll be off for 2-3 days now, since the parents and I are going to Gurgaon for the extended weekend. I wonder whether I will be able spend 3 days without a computer.

There were 4 of us playing our class's official sport, Hand-Squash today. After a few games, we got bored of it, and I thus invented n-ball.

It's basically an n-sided Football game, played with a tennis ball, the same one we use in Hand-Squash. The rules for n-ball are simple:

1) Every player has a goal that he has to defend.
2) For every ball hit into a player's goal, his points increase.
3) Whoever concedes 5 goals is eliminated from the game.

The rules were short and simple, but the match turned out to be a long, extremely fun game. Since it was a knockout game, everyone had to survive by protecting his/her goal. But if you just stood there trying to protect yourself, you could'nt attack other's goals. We had 4 people, so each player could shoot to 1 of 3 opponent goals. Like all survivor shows, we formed an alliance against one person and tried to get him out. But trust was a dangerous thing , as the person you trust could end up scoring in your goal!

55 years ago, on this day, a country was reborn. Like the Phoenix, it rose again, from the ashes of 300 years of British rule, with a dream. A dream that hundreds of thousands of Freedom Fighters gave up their lives for. A dream to make India the Golden Bird that it once used to be.

It's been more than half a century now.

We have a population of over one Billion. Out of the 10 lakh lepers in the entire world, 5 lakh are Indians.

Every year, lakhs of innocent people are killed in acts of Communalism and Terrorism. So many reports of cast injustices and inhumanity dot the newspapers that you'd think it was a trend. Illiteracy, Backwardness. And to top it all, Bureaucracy and Corruption - parasites that have managed to infest and take control of the so called "leaders of our country".