Moved To Yahoo Hosting

I have moved my blog to Yahoo Hosting. Please redirect your browsers and feeds to http://www.aakashchauhan.com

Y!M 8

With the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger 8 beta, Yahoo has once again proved they have most innovative and useful ideas about instant messaging. Major feature of this release as already reported on so many other sites is third party plug-ins. Just to give one example, I installed amazon's plug-in and now I can see amazon wish-list of all 150 contacts of mine just by selecting their name. Such a time saver when buying gift for someone. I do not know any other messenger that comes close to Y!M in terms of useful features, stealth settings, offline messages, VOIP, .. all in one. I have been using Windows Live Messenger 8 Beta as well but Yahoo just beats everything.

Most of my friends use Trilliansince that saves you time from using 4-5 different IM provides like Yahoo, MSN, AIM etc. But then you can't use specific features of any one provider. It would be really nice if I can use all my accounts like AIM, MSN from Yahoo Messenger. Is that too much to ask?

 Update: Actually MSN Live is working on interoperability with Y!M. Will Yahoo follow same?

Office 12

Downloaded and installed Office 2007 Beta 2. Most visible feature is completely redesigned user interface. File menu replaced by office logo. Instead of vertical drop down menus, menu opens horizontal. Default extension for new file (in 2007 format) has an extra "X" for e.g. instead of .doc it is .docx. User interface is very intuitive and I liked it in general. Most annoying thing so far is it takes 2 clicks to open, close and save a document. I plan to use it for my day to day use so will post my experience in detail later.

Elephant can dance

Interesting article about fast growing India Economy in Time Magazine's current issue. Here is CNN's spin on it.

                                               

 This story in Time about Ratan Tata and Tata Conglomerate makes you salute the company and Tatas. 

       "Tata Sons, the holding company that manages the group, is 65.8% owned by 11 charitable trusts, which spent $379.2 million on social causes in 2003-04 alone."

TODO List

Well this is not exactly a todo list of daily work related things. It is more about fun things that I want to do. For e.g. skydiving. Some of the items in this list may make you feel like what jungle do I come from. But here is the list,

1) Skydiving

2) Level 4 & 5 white water rafting

3) Kayaking

4) Sailing

5) Paintball fight

6) F1 at Indianapolis

7) Bumpercar racing

8) Snorkeling

9) Fishing .. Yeah really never done that

Well this will surely be a running list. I will also keep posting updates about any strikes.

Google News RSS Feeds Problem

Google news is great. But I don't go to actual website to satisfy my news quest, rather I use their RSS feeds. These feeds work very nice for their standard pages like "World", "Business", "Tech" etc. But when you use feeds for custom news search, it SUCKS, especially for company specific search. Every-time there is a new source that reports same story it adds a new link to that story next time you refresh the feed. So rather then smartly grouping same news related links, it actually adds new entries for news source updated since last time. Sure this may be result of the nature of RSS feeds itself, but yahoo finance seems more mature in this matter. Google financealso gathers company specific news neatly but then they don't have RSS for that. Also I was unable to find link for feedback to google on either news or finance site. Google are you listening?

Google Toolbar 3 Rocks

I installed Google Toolbar Beta 3 for IE. Now I am moving to Philadelphia this weekend on permanent basis, and was looking for housing in nearby areas of my office. The Autolink feature was really really helpful while finding apartments, as it was just one click to find distance and direction from my office. Saved lot of time. SpellCheck is also useful. I use Firefox for majority of my work and let’s hope that these features get ported to Firefox very soon. Everything looked fine except that it never remembered my origin address (its still beta…) and so I had to copy paste it all the times.

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Press Display

Read your local newspaper as it is published in paper print scanned to PDF. Not all newspapers are there but still worth trying. Check out here on PressDisplay.

New Version Of IE

Microsoft announced about new version of Internet Explorer, IE7 for WIN XP today. First beta will be released this summer. Interesting time ahead as they compete with Firefox, we consumers will be the winner by getting hand on more innovative products

Outsourcing Surgery to India

While I was in India this December I knew that many NRIs (Non Resident Indians) were also there to get their medical operations done for cheap compared to western countries like U.K. or USA. This fascinating article in the March, 2005 issue of Bloomberg Markets Magazine talks about India’s new frontier in outsourcing. Agreed that India should address its domestic needs for better healthcare first but,
”Charging foreigners more than Indians is one way hospitals can make money to treat the poor….”
First read here