Deepanjan Nag's Magnum Opus

The accompanying TechCrunch article. This is sheer nostalgia! I remember coming cross mentions of 2 websites in an Indian IT magazine bought by Sebastian when he was staying with us for a few days in Pune. Yodlee.com was decidedly useful and I found its credentials impeccable. Over the years, this service invented by a bunch of Indians in the US has steadily acquired customers (though mostly through 3rd parties like Mint.com) and become the indisputable leader in financial account aggregation. Blogger.com , however, sounded very interesting but rather useless. I couldn’t understand what the ‘archive’ was supposed to do, why one wouldn’t prefer the ‘conventional’ way of publishing to the ‘blogging’ way and what blogging was supposed to achieve anyway. To put it flatly…I didn’t quite get it. But I liked its very geeky publishing tool, sort of made me feel ultra important as I waited impatiently each time I clicked on Publish to post something even as trivial as a 1-liner. I st...

Based on a true story , this movie moved me to tears. Love is timeless.

Hama Star 63 & Galileoscope finally come together!

Our free wine glass finally arrives! Originally uploaded by deepanjannag Our first free wine glass finally arrived yesterday. The wait was so long, I had actually given up hope. We'll probably use it for aromatic candles.

Hama Star 63 My very first tripod arrived today and I’m all agog! Ever since I flew from India last year, the skies have been a bit of a disappointment. Gone are the crystal-clear tropical skies and welcome to a perennial shroud that has rendered my astronomical refractor vestigial. Still, I was nursing a hope that the clouds could be somehow wished away and then my Galileoscope would help me peer into the larger satellites of Jupiter or the magnificent rings of Saturn. The arrival of my tripod now makes me fully equipped for a night of bliss! My calendar shows me the phases of the moon and weather forecast. My RSS reader tells what to expect in the night sky, Stellarium twins the sky on my computer, my iPod stocks Miles Davis and Liszt to accompany me in my heavenly solitude and my wife stuffs the wardrobe with clothes to keep me toasted in the English chill. I must be living a charmed life! The Hama Star 63 is really tall, it’s actually taller than me when fully extended –...

The Question My Reply: An organization protests Mother Teresa being honored with a US postal stamp and you hit back with a belligerent punchline. 'Protesting' and 'attacking' are the same thing to you? Even a mere dissident voice is construed as an attack on faith? Might I ask what's your Tolerance Quotient? Well, I have seen enough religious tolerance all over the world and was wondering just how well the atheists measure up against your camp's exemplary track record. If Hitler's anti-Semitism and Islamic fundamentalism are anything to go by, atheists have at least the right to voice their opinion and peacefully protest without outraging the likes of you. Wouldn't you agree? By the way, I'm a very proud atheist from India.

...it doesn’t even respond to the template editor properly! The constant tinkering over the past several years has piled up so much of spaghetti code that I shudder to think of a new template. Starting from scratch is probably not even an option anymore.

This might be useful in keeping the semicolon from going extinct. Give it a try!

I remember the fateful day we had Internet access from home for the 1st time. The fact registered rather late since I was shaken by a rather nasty experience . Accessing the Net from home in UK has proven to be a major challenge, strangely enough. Our staple source for now is the 3G network but I’m not much of a fan of 3 , our eponymously christened wireless provider. We have a cap of 5GB per month…which is fair enough. What’s not so fair is the completely unreliable metering that comes with it. I just can’t imagine how sloppy can these people get in calibrating Internet usage. Is it really that much of a challenge? A remedy to this weird problem is Networx , a free bandwidth monitoring and usage reporting tool. I’ve been using it for a few months now and the statistical feedback it provides is a godsend.

…that according to this page, my blog is more popular than any one else’s from Jamshedpur! I hope I can resume posting full-length articles soon.