do it. think it. blog it! ... a twisted world

With Identity Management, Federation etc being the buzzwords of this gen, I believed that having a strong open source federated identity platform to develop from would be a great gift. First it was Andre Durand with SourceID. and now, Steven Carmody, The "Mr. Shibboleth Of All" gave an introductory presentation on Shibboleth, an inter-institutional approach to federated authentication. Shibboleth targeted at the eduction sector is showcased on internet2. Mr. Carmody also pointed out that Shibboleth is poised for a real wide-scale adoption. NSF would be adopting Shibboleth for its fastlane service on July 30th as part of the United States Government's e-Authentication initiative. Shibboleth is Internet2's access control architecture which complements cas. Renee Woodten Frost, Internet2's Associate Director of Middleware and Security, provided an introduction to Shibboleth, during the Midwest Regional Conference. Then there's Guanxi, the JAVA implementation of the SAML Spec and complies with the Shibboleth Profile extensions developed as part of an Internet2 project. The next release os CAS may use Shibboleth. I shall be following developments on both CAS and Shibboleth. It would be nice if you folks contributed to information gathered on this topic by commenting on this post, as it would make aggregation of the subject matter easier. I shall keep you posted on this forefront as I keep learning more. Cheers for now. UPDATE: Please Read my post on Federated Security: A Shibboleth Approach

Geeks have one. So do hairy gay men and their admirers. Isn't it time bloggers have a code to describe themselves as well? (OK, so maybe not, but we charge forward nonetheless). Get your code here! a jsp port by Dav of some php code that was yet another fine web service brought to you by leather egg decoder by Jason DeFillippo Thanks to Lance Lavandowska for providing the code to make this page possible.

I have heard from all my fellow desi countrymen, family, friends... everybody that India would be an IT superpower in the next 5 to 10 years. Well, Who the HELL are we kidding ? Ourselves ?. I've heard that line for the last five years, and nothing much has changed since then. Yes, I bet that there would be a whole lot of preachers who would come by and explain at length what India has achieved in the last five years, and there's no denying that. But an IT superpower!!. I guess the term superpower needs to be redefined. Why are we tooting the IT superpower horn time and over? Is it because the number of IT folks in India superceed the number in the U.S. ??

Well, The number of Indian farmers superceed that of other countries too, SO why dont we proudly claim that our country would be the agricultural superpower? we could take over the worlds agricultural produce, we could take over the worlds cattle, we could take over world politics, stock markets, railways, taxicabs, 7-Eleven's, the alcohol industry, tobacco, imitation products, everything...

IF population and headcount/numbers is what makes one a superpower, India already IS one. I am not doing the "India Sucks" campaign here, but am ranting on the fact that we like to pat ourselves on our back. For what?? I read a article on "Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams" by Carol Fey a while back. It's so very true.

Would I like to see India emerge as a superpower? Absolutely !!, but the difference between reality and dreams is humongous. I believe that the whole IT Outsourcing deal has made some Indians so proud that they have hit the ceiling. Yes, Outsourcing is good, it's cool, it's great; BUT does being at the receiving end of the outsourcing ordeal make a country a superpower ?. I Wish...

Atanu Dey has posted a nice article on "India's IT Companies which did gain some heavy traction from the Indian community. Well, I guess Atanu had the bandwidth to take on the intelligent shots.

When I visited India around 2 months ago, I was not too shocked to see that in the So Called IT superpower organizations of TODAY; the management and control processes were pathetic and employees were exploited to the maximum possible extent. Not to forget the slick Indian IT guy with an accent. Working In India needs one to adapt to a cultural shift, I was told. Well, What I saw was that the work culture in India is based on mutual distrust. Computers with no disk drives, no usb ports, no CD rom/DVD drives, badge access IN and badge access OUT, all in the pretext of CMM Level 5 certification. Every employee had to account for the number of pens, pencils, paper sheets that they used !!!

I guess that's a culture to be proud of ?, and that sure makes us a superpower I guess ?

If ranting was all I wanted to do, I could go on and on...

But I guess the simple message I want to put across with this post is : "Grow Up People, Stop bragging and show that the so claimed Intelligence that we have is real.". Guess time will tell a whole new story.

I had always wondered if one should maintain just one blog or several based on topics of interest. In the beginning, I believed that having just one blog and consolidating all your blogs into categories was good as it would make maintaining the blog easy. But then on pondering further, my beliefs deviated from their original juncture. Having just one blog may cause problems, as the blog host may have established policies that restrict a person from blogging on subjects that the blog host may find offensive. Well; "then have several blogs" was the thought that hit me. It sure may make blogging harder, but a whole lot safer. Blog hosts have policies, documented or not; they all claim to have them. I wonder why they are always hidden and popup only when they find subject material objectionable. nevertheless, I recommend one to have several blogs depended on the subject matter and the policies drawn around the blog hosts !! So, all said and done, I used to have a blog a long time ago that was torn down, ripped apart and gutted by a blogosphere mob who were not very technologically savvy but MAN !! they sure did know very the secret behing the google magic. I had posted excerpts of other blogs that I had found extremely interesting on my old Blog, and in some cases, the entire blog post itself. The ONE thing I didnt do, was pay any attributiontothe source : a honest mistake or preconceived evil plan? It's best if I didnt answer that!! Well in any case; the mob or rather self proclaimed makers of blogosphere justice found this to be extremely good material for launching an attack with the pretext of justice and freedom.( deja vu ) ...and so they did... I was battered and bruised and this hurt for a while, but then there were a lot more important things in life to be bothered about than a few smart (at least they thought that they were) bloggers. Well, I picked myself up slowly... wounded but not dead yet. I kept pondering on the most appropriate way and legal manner in which one could post excerpts of other blogs (or entire posts from other blogs) and then I stumbled on a rss aggregator. A neat and spiffy rss aggregator. Well, with this, one could post links to allother blogs of interest and the content of those blogs can be categorized and select posts could be extracted. attribution. Attribution was all it was about. So A rss aggregator is what I have now. I have direct feeds from all the blogs that I regularly read displayed and aggregated in ONE simple so called Blog ( or is it an aggregator ). Why dont you see it and tell ME !! So now I keep telling myself, and all those around me.. attribution, attribution, attribution. Thats all it takes.

When others make mistakes, We learn. There have been numberous blogging catastrophies in the most recent past. Here is my attempt to providing you those links so you could read and judge for yourselves. Some of these links are credible, and some are just links. You be the judge..for yourself

• Article by Kate Lorenz on CNN
• Papal Bulls list of bloggers who have been fired
• Washington Post article on Jessica Cutler who got fired; and then won a book contract
• InternetWeek on Joe Gordon getting fired from Waterstone's for blogging
• Journal Space
• Google 'Blogophobic.'

When organizations provided email address to their employees, it was considered to be ethical to use that email address for ONLY official purposes. However one could still retain personal email addresses at yahoo, google, hotmail etc... However, using ones personal email account during work hours for prolonged periods of time was considered unethical too... as that would constitute gobbling up corporate bandwidth.

Most companies that allow their employees to blog have Blog Guidelines and some dont. Its always helpful for one to find out about their own organizations Blog Guidelines from their managers or their Blog server administrator. This would enable one to be JOB SAFE if ever one finds any particular employee's blogging to be a sheer waste of corporate energy. A SAFE blogger would blog After Hours. But blogging during the day sometimes is not too bad either; as long as one knows his/her limits and makes up for the Blogging Time in some form or the other. We often hear the term Comp Time, very soon we shall soon hear our employers using the phrase "work harder and more in lieu of Blog Time"

For companies that do not have BLOG Guidelines I'd strongly suggest they DO establish blog guidelines, policies, procedures and "Next Practices.". This kind of leadership is not too hard to find, But one has to Identify the "leader" to establish these rules. The best way (from my perspective) to discover what works is to conduct public discussions and investigations around specific cases (of corporate bloggers).

"The key to learning is not the medium nor the message, it is the quality of the dialog with your peers that really matters. More is learned on the playing fields and in discourse with peers than from the sage on the stage." Denham Grey

Here are a few tips that may help:

• Don't blog at work. Ever. "You could get in trouble for using company resources like an Internet connection to maintain your blog.... "
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a guide to help keep bloggers from being fired.
• John Foleys InternetWeek article on Who Owns Copyrights to Corporate Blogs

Your Comments ?

I received this email this PM; it really cracked me up, and thought that it was worth sharing...COSTELLO CALLS TO BUY A COMPUTER FROM ABBOTT..... You have to be old enough to remember Abbott and Costello, and too old to REALLY understand computers, to fully appreciate this. For those of us who sometimes get flustered by our computers, please read on. If Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were alive today, their famous sketch, "Who's on first?" might have turned out something like this:

ABBOTT: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you? COSTELLO: Thanks. I'm setting up an office in my den and I'm thinking about buying a computer. ABBOTT: Mac? COSTELLO: No, the name's Lou. ABBOTT: Your computer? COSTELLO: I don't own a computer. I want to buy one. ABBOTT: Mac? COSTELLO: I told you, my name's Lou. ABBOTT: What about Windows? COSTELLO: Why? Will it get stuffy in here? ABBOTT: Do you want a computer with Windows? COSTELLO: I don't know. What will I see when I look at the windows? ABBOTT: Wallpaper. COSTELLO: Never mind the windows. I need a computer and software. ABBOTT: Software for Windows? COSTELLO: No. On the computer! I need something I can use to write proposals, track expenses ad run my business. What do you have? ABBOTT: Office. COSTELLO: Yeah, for my office. Can you recommend anything? ABBOTT: I just did. COSTELLO: You just did what? ABBOTT: Recommend something. COSTELLO: You recommended something? ABBOTT: Yes. COSTELLO: For my office? ABBOTT: Yes. COSTELLO: OK, what did you recommend for my office? ABBOTT: Office. COSTELLO: Yes, for my office! ABBOTT: I recommend Office with Windows. COSTELLO: I already have an office with windows! OK, let's just say I'm sitting at my computerand I want to type a proposal. What do I need? ABBOTT: Word. COSTELLO: What word? ABBOTT: Word in Office. COSTELLO: The only word in office is office. ABBOTT: The Word in Office for Windows. COSTELLO: Which word in office for windows? ABBOTT: The Word you get when you click the blue "W". COSTELLO: I'm going to click your blue "w" if you don't start with some straight answers. OK, orget that. Can I watch movies on the Internet? ABBOTT: Yes, you want Real One. COSTELLO: Maybe a real one, maybe a cartoon. What I watch is none of your business. Just tell e what I need! ABBOTT: Real One COSTELLO: If it's a long movie, I also want to watch reels 2, 3 and 4. Can I watch them? ABBOTT: Of course. COSTELLO: Great! With what? ABBOTT: Real One. COSTELLO: OK, I'm at my computer and I want to watch a movie. What do I do? ABBOTT: You click the blue "1". COSTELLO: I click the blue one what? ABBOTT: The blue "1". COSTELLO: Is that different from the blue w? ABBOTT: The blue "1" is Real One and the blue "W" is Word. COSTELLO: What word? ABBOTT: The Word in Office for Windows. COSTELLO: But there are three words in "office for windows"! ABBOTT: No, just one. But it's the most popular Word in the world. COSTELLO: It is? ABBOTT: Yes, but to be fair, there aren't many other Words left. It pretty much wiped out all the other Words out there. COSTELLO: And that word is real one? ABBOTT: Real One has nothing to do with Word. Real One isn't even part of Office. COSTELLO: STOP! Don't start that again. What about financial bookkeeping? You have anything I an track my money with? ABBOTT: Money. COSTELLO: That's right. What do you have? ABBOTT: Money. COSTELLO: I need money to track my money? ABBOTT: It comes bundled with your computer. COSTELLO: What's bundled with my computer? ABBOTT: Money. COSTELLO: Money comes with my computer? ABBOTT: Yes. No extra charge. COSTELLO: I get a bundle of money with my computer? How much? ABBOTT: One copy. COSTELLO: Isn't it illegal to copy money? ABBOTT: Microsoft gave us a license to copy Money. COSTELLO: They can give you a license to copy money? ABBOTT: Why not? THEY OWN IT! (A few days later)

ABBOTT: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you? COSTELLO: How do I turn my computer off? ABBOTT: Click on "START."

NOTE You may find this post on several other blogs too. This is not a plagiarized post but a reproduction from an email I received.

A Friday occuring on the 13th day of any month is considered to be a day of bad luck in many superstitions around the globe. Similar superstitions exist in some other traditions. In Spain, for example, Tuesday the 13th takes the same role. The fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskavedekatriaphobia or paraskevidekatriaphobia, a specialized form of triskaidekaphobia, a phobia (fear) of the number thirteen. The origin of the Friday the 13th superstition has been linked to the fact there were 13 people at the last supper of Jesus, who was crucified on Good Friday, but it probably originated only in medieval times. It has also been linked to the fact that a lunisolar calendar must have 13 months in some years, while the solar Gregorian calendar and lunar Islamic calendar always have 12 months in a year. Another suggestion is that the belief originated in a Norse myth about twelve gods having a feast in Valhalla. The mischievous Loki gate-crashed the party as an uninvited 13th guest and arranged for Hod, the blind god of darkness, to shoot Baldur, the god of joy and gladness, with a mistletoe-tipped arrow. Baldur was killed and the Earth was plunged into darkness and mourning as a result. Some also say that the arrest of Jaques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, and 60 of his senior knights on Friday, October 13, 1307 by King Philip IV of France, is the origin of this superstition. That day thousands of Templars were arrested and subsequently tortured. They then 'confessed' and were executed. From that day on, Friday the 13th was considered by followers of the Templars as an evil and unlucky day. Strangely, there is evidence to suggest that Friday the 13th is actually unlucky for some. Psychologists have found that some people are especially likely to have accidents or fall ill on Friday the 13th. This has been attributed to such people feeling a heightened state of anxiety on that day. The Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina estimates that in the United States alone, $800 or $900 million is lost in business each Friday the 13th because some people will not travel or go to work. The date is also well-known in the motorcycle (biker) community: since 1981, motorcycle enthusiasts and vendors gather every Friday the 13th in Port Dover, Ontario, Canada. This tradition started on November 13, 1981 by Chris Simons as a gathering of approximately 25 friends. The event has grown substantially, with an estimated 100,000 people attending in August 2004, as well as music bands, vendors, a bike show, etc. In the Spanish-speaking world, it is Tuesday the 13th (as well as Tuesdays in general) that brings bad luck; a proverb runs En martes, ni te cases ni te embarques (on Tuesday, neither get married nor start a journey). SOURCE : Wikipedia

The one thing I have not heard folks rant about is Outsourcing Medicare. Seems like most of the people/folks affected in this outsourcing turnaround are people from an I.T. background. Most of the layoffs that have occured in the I.T arena have caused the numbers of jobless intelligent folks rise pretty high. But however, nobody talks and rans about Outsourcing Healthcare. Maybe there's a very good reason why !

"President Bush believes all Americans should have access to affordable, quality health care." source: GeorgeWBush.com

I read another article on the same topic on MSNBC. It's excerpt is as follows:
"Three months ago, Howard Staab learned that he suffered from a life-threatening heart condition and would have to undergo surgery at a cost of up to $200,000—an impossible sum for the 53-year-old carpenter from Durham, N.C., who has no health insurance….
Total bill: about $10,000, including roundtrip airfare and a planned side trip to the Taj Mahal."

It’s just way cheaper for one to fly to India for a heart surgery, than to do it at home in the US or Canada for that matter. Many US and Canadian doctors are "foreign", so you can say the odds are decent that if you did the surgery in the US or in Canada, your doctor might have been trained in India by that doctor. !!.

I also heard that pretty recently a canadian gentleman who was on a waitlist for more than a year for a surgery, flew to India, had his surgery done in the best of hospitals from the country by the best of doctors and had an extremely comfortable stay during the entire trip and sure did have a successfull surgery and is now back in Canada in top shape !!!. The cost of the trip was less than what his family would have to incurr if he had the surgery in Canada even if the Canadian Government paid for it in full.. (a lot of the costs in canada for surgery are not directly related to the surgery, but nevertheless there ARE expenses).

So all said and done, I believe that (it may already have started) very soon, Medicare Outsourcing would be the next boom. And nobody is gonna rant about it. The very folks who rant about layoffs, joblessness, market downslide, economic downturm, quality, management styles, profitability etc (just because the jobless sector effected them directly) are not gonna bat an eyelid if they needed to go to India for a surgery themselves or for someone they are close to. It'd be better for them to do it in India right away as they can afford it rather than not do it because of deductibles, premiums, waitlists etc and loose someone thats near and dear. I dont believe that I would hear someone say :"I'd rather die here than go to India for a surgery"

It’s for some reason thought to be OK to make it so expensive you need a medicare plan. And it’s good to restrict medicare plans to the rich and famous. The fact remains that the US, Canada Included is considered a “first world” nation, yet one needs to fly to India to get surgery.

In a recent article published by PriceWaterhouseCoopers on Oursourcing and Profitability, it's pretty ironic that the participants from Tuomey Healthcare System, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Montefiore Medical Center, and Modern Healthcare. All pretty notable names in the Medicare Sector.

Daniel Templeton blogged this morning about Blogging Advice and quotes "It seems somehow wrong to try to make money by pushing your expertise about an open source code base." I personally dont see anything wrong with publishing some ads and making a earning on it. The definition of OpenSource does not mean no revenues... (at least from my perspective). I refuse to believe that theres no revenue from opensolaris, openoffice, openldap, java, or any sourceforge, java.net or any opensource project for that matter. Revenue always exists in some form or the other. May not be a direct pay for use, but there's always a revenue from it. It's peoples hard work that goes into creation of opensource software and hardwork translates to revenues in some form. There's a huge difference between Open Source, freeware, and shareware.

blogger.com the most popular blog site used to push ads themselves, They then changed their approach and removed their advertisements to enable their users to be able to run their own ads and earn a income. Matthew Haughey wrote about his experience in an essay called Blogging for Dollars in which he included four of his own hints.

Putting ads on your blog is pretty much the same routine as adding a hit counter, a quiz, a guestbook or any other blog add-on.

I run Targeted Google Ads on MY blog, and I dont see anything wrong with it. I dont get paid for blogging my thoughts, I do it because I like to share the thought and hope it helps someone; but in the process if I generate a wee bit of revenue from it, Why Not ?

On the Same subject: Biz Stone a fellow blogger who works on Blogger at Google wrote a review on the book Who Let the Blogs Out; which makes some pretty good reading too..

The Revolution Is Being Bloggerized !!
Brice Dunwoodie the co-founder of CMS wire writes "Not that there's anything wrong with this. In fact its all positive from what I see. "

All in all Blogs + AdSense = BlogSense
All said and done, I would have to disagree on Daniels comment on "ads as an indication of a lack of respect for the readers and medium".

Charlene Li, writes "Although Weblogs (blogs) are currently used by only a small number of online consumers, they've garnered a great deal of corporate attention because their readers and writers are highly influential. Forrester believes that blogging will grow in importance, and at a minimum, companies should monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their products and services. Companies that plan to create their own public blogs should already feel comfortable having a close, two-way relationship with users. In this document we recommend best practices, including a blogging code of ethics, and metrics that will show the impact of blogs on business goals." source : http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,35000,00.html

I was breaking my head over a methodology to come up with a unique identifier for storing entries in a LDAP server. Entries stored in the system could have been sourced from varied applicates and datasources, and the probability of entries having the same unique identifier as another entry sources from another system was very high. Initially I thought of using the conventional Social security Number, but then I learnt that SSN's were not unique. I also toggled thoughts between using sequential numbers, first, middle and last name combinations etc. After all the thought I wondered if others never encountered such issues when having to provision systems from varied sources and ensuring that all sources sent a unique identifier when performing the addition to the LDAP server?

So after all the brain racking I came up with a probable neat way of ensuring that the numbers were unique using JNI!!. I wrote a simple "C" API that concatenated the MAC address of the machine with the EPOC timestamp and the time since last reboot in nanoseconds. This have me a 16 bit number that was unique to the nanosecond. Well, I have a unique identifier now, But how could I use it was my next hurdle.

After a little more pondering (googling and discussing approach methodologies with friends), I realized that with JNI available, life of bridging the gap between java and native code was made much simpler.

I used the tutorial written by Beth Sterns to build my JNI Interface. So if any of you out there ponder on how to use and build JNI interfaces, I'd recommend the Beth Sterns Tutorial anyday !!!. It sure did make my life easy, and I bet it would do the same to yours too..

There also is a MAC OS Runtime for thos MAC geeks.

"Note that the ability to load dynamic libraries is subject to approval by the current security manager. When working with native methods, you must load dynamic libraries. Some applets may not be able to use native methods because the browser or viewer they are running in restricts the ability to load dynamic libraries. See Security Restrictions for information about the security restrictions placed on applets. "

This is a nice little reminder to all those who graduated in 95'; you are now 10 years older. Remember when your lecturer would come by the classroom and brag about their most intelligent student who sat on the same chair as you did 10 years ago? Remember when you probably would have had your first drink and smoke? Remember when you probably were in a habit of falling in love with every second girl you saw? Remember the time you were grounded for not coming back home at night? Remember when you probably may have done it in a wild place?YUP ! that was 10 years ago

However....

• ...i was 10 years younger
• ...college student Marc Andreessen posted the first Web browser. Later went on to being the Co-Founder of Netscape Communications
• ...Pierre Omidyar started eBay 10 years ago so his girlfriend could have a way to trade Pez dispensers.
• ...The Cowboys stole headlines in 1994 by repeating as Super Bowl champs, making what followed even harder to fathom.
• ...A test firing of what it called the "most energetic short-wave excimer laser" was reported by the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• ...A draft agreement to construct and maintain the first fiber optic undersea cable to span the Pacific Ocean was approved.

A search on googlism for the term "10 years ago" resulted in... emm.. thats interesting... a nice twist to what google would do. Didnt that line just remind you of..... do what jesus would do ??

• ...10 years ago is now
• ...10 years ago is not the woman that the aloha inn has helped me to become today 10 years ago is laughable at best 10
• ...years ago is now attractive 10 years ago is
• ...10 years ago is not the woman that the aloha inn has helped me to become today
• ...10 years ago is laughable at best
• ...10 years ago is answered
• ...10 years ago is the abundance of move
• ...10 years ago is considered fairly average or passe now
• ...10 years ago is tidal wave ii
• ...10 years ago is now attractive
• ...10 years ago is the same reason they're moving here now
• ...10 years ago is that each person can go on line and find the information
• ...10 years ago is now starting to become more widely recognised
• ...10 years ago is 7692
• ...10 years ago is that the effectiveness of the
• ...10 years ago is when my mom had breast cancer and needed a massectomy
• ...10 years ago is a very long time and well worth recording
• ...10 years ago is still important
• ...10 years ago is now helping others
• ...10 years ago is that
• ...10 years ago is just unbearable
• ...10 years ago is not necessarily
• ...10 years ago is not necessarily important now?
• ...10 years ago is still there
• ...10 years ago is that they have provided sceptics like me with our
• ...10 years ago is not the same as it was before
• ...10 years ago is 23 years old now and took back all her quilting tools
• ...10 years ago is an old sail
• ...10 years ago is now considered high
• ...10 years ago is catching on at a rapid pace as witnessed by the swelling ranks of amateur genealogists using the new tools of the
• ...10 years ago is disregarded
• ...10 years ago is now empty
• ...10 years ago is enjoying a great social life
• ...10 years ago is now leading the way in developing student skills in the
• ...10 years ago is the internet
• ...10 years ago is
• ...10 years ago is probably the same sales engineer with whom you will work when your
• ...10 years ago is still available for development
• ...10 years ago is actually quite impressive to say
• ...10 years ago is considered antiquity
• ...10 years ago is now gone
• ...10 years ago is on the order of many magnitudes
• ...10 years ago is a tribute to his understanding of the unique
• ...10 years ago is an assistant vice
• ...10 years ago is an official campus club once again
• ...10 years ago is within $200
• ...10 years ago is typical
• ...10 years ago is a small shop in czestochowa
• ...10 years ago is a firm foundation and an impetus for the province to advance forward
• ...10 years ago is like asking someone to define love
• ...10 years ago is stronger than ever
• ...10 years ago is worse off in birmingham and someone who bought their house
• ...10 years ago is ancient history and nothing that today's practitioner needs to know about
• ...10 years ago is now relieving pain in patients
• ...10 years ago is no longer there
• ...10 years ago is considerable in cost terms
• ...10 years ago is a classically refurbished farmhouse on 6 acres

Heres wishing You all a Very Happy CLASS OF '95 be Proud

The Bloggies 2005 awards are out!! "The Bloggiesâ„¢ are a set of 30 publicly-chosen awards given to weblog writers and those related to weblogs. This is the fifth ceremony, with previous winners listed on their respective sites: 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. Everyone's invited to take part in the awarding process, so read below to find out how you can nominate and vote for your favorite blogs!"

Some blogs that never ever caught my attention, and some that I had never heard of are showcased here. In a sense it's a good thing as I guess, it's time for me to explore the blogosphere.

All said and done, what I like best about the Bloggies 2005 awards is that it led me to a link called blog.ELEMENTS. This very closely represents the periodic table and has 115 blogs that are rotated in some sequense. Similarly web.ELEMENTS is also a periodic table of various components of the World Wide Web arranged in a extremely interesting sequence. Something fun to read through and get impressed with.

PS:The Bloggies 2005 awards very interesting and tempting prizes. It sure outbeats my prize for blog.CONTEST

I am a Sushi lover myself and was googling around for good sushi places. At the same time I had my other browser window open and was googling my way to finding good USB drives. And a typo (I happened to type in the word "sushi" and USB in the same search window) led me to Michiko Osada's blog. I am not sure how she found this, But it sure was funny.... Nope.. actually it was very spiffy. She introduced me to this cute product. It is a Sushi-shaped USB Memory stick.

The product information page was in Japanese and I, not being a super-multi lingual person could not read the description on the page.. Maybe someone who's multi lingual could help translate that page for me. You can visit the site and see the products yourself!

• Product Information URL: http://www.solidalliance.com/press/press.html#1018 (in japanese)
• Michiko Osada's blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/michiko/archive/2004/10/19/244927.aspx
• Product Information via SushiDisk's US Reseller URL: http://www.dynamism.com/sushidisk/pricing.shtml (in english).

So aint that a cute interesting thing ?? Well, I wanna have Tuna with 1GB!! Now I’m wondering how Osada-san found them........perhaps her strong love for Sushi (like mine) compelled her to search for THE SUSHI that could quantify her appetite.... and she landed on the Silicon-Sushi-Bubble.

So anyway, As I was browsing through the English Reseller website for SushuSisk, I also came across iDuck, another cute USB drive shaped like a duck. Cool Stuff.

Ever since Microsoft was founded almost 30 years ago, the company has taken on practically every other competitor on a headon collision course and barely lost a fight. This article on fortune.com has a neat description on how he's done in those wars and in his current mission against Google.

Also read fortune.com's article on Gates vs Google.

And for some wierd reason I feel like ranting about this !!! But would I dare to take Microsoft on HeadOn ??

hey !!! some risks in life are worth the trouble. This would not be the first time I had a 1-ON-1 and lost . One of the reason's i'm sticking around this blogosphere even though I have been bruised, battered, branded and made to bleed by the ("Blogosphere Mafia :: "U" Know who I'm Talking About") is to see what happens next.

So. Blogosphere..... I'm Back... and this time no nicknames or aliases...