Flavor of the season - Obama

Loved the mosaic/ collage below, that was made out of the first pages of newspapers from all over the world, after the historic victory. Courtesy - Obama News Mosaic. The size of the version I have uploaded here is around 5 MB while the higher resolution one is 58 MB big. Download it if you are a big-time Obama fan.

The one below is a laugh riot. My friend who came across this poster while traveling in a bus, wrote this and sent it out to us, since he could not get his camera out in time to capture the poster. The important thing to note about this poster is that this was created months before he actually became the President-elect !!

Difference a question mark can make

Rediff is one site which is going from bad to worse, day after day. When you look up the site, it literally takes a while for you to identify actual news articles & links, amidst the deluge of online ads scattered all over the real estate. They come up with intelligent ways to increase the hit rate for certain pages and the screen-shots below just goes on to show the cunning strategy behind the same.

On the home page, you have a link that says "Rajni to join Tussads", on seeing which anybody (both fans and the general reading public alike) would click just bcos of the fact that it would be a huge news if that were to happen. And then when you go to the actual page, a question mark pops up from nowhere at the end of the title of the article. Just goes to show to what length these guys go to drive traffic to their site. Got to give it to these guys, though, for being so clever and deceptive...

Cool YouTube video

One of the coolest & most innovative YouTube videos I have ever come across. I am sure some of you would have seen this one before. Still wanted to share this for the sake of folks who haven't seen this before. Look at the number of views for this video - a staggering 20 million+ views :)

Incidentally, this video is also featured in the iPhone commercial where it talks about being able to watch YouTube videos in the iPhone.

Cool Wedding Idea

Had been to the wedding of my friend over the weekend and came across this candy wrap that caught my eyes instantly. Inside this wrap was an ordinary Hershey's milk chocolate bar. But whatever was on both sides of the wrap was what captured my attention.

On the front of the wrap was a beautiful picture of the couple along with their names and the wedding date. The image below is how the back side of the wrap looked like. I just loved it. I especially loved the bar code section of the wrap where the wedding date has been printed in a bar code style.

So, folks who are planning a wedding anytime in the near future, can take a cue from this, if you like it. BTW, bcos of the unique date that was this past Saturday (07-07-07), it is believed that the number of weddings that had been planned on that day throughout the US was an unbelievable 65000 :) TIME magazine calls the day The Most popular Wedding day ever. Wow, that is something. No wonder, Tony Parker & Eva Longoria decided to tie the knot on the special day.

The new Rbk Run Easy commercial

Noticed this commercial doing the rounds from the beginning of this week on TV. What first got me curious about this commercial where popular athletes are shown running together in pairs was a pair of our Indian athletes. I was wondering who they were and why those 2 random guys were shown. And it was only reading this Rediff article today morning, did I realize that those 2 guys were actually Dravid and Dhoni. To my credit, I will have to say that the voice did sound very familiar when I watched the ad for the first time :)

This post, by the way, is not be part of my Most Favorite commercials series. But I wanted to post this one here, just bcos of the fact that this is for the first time that Indian cricketers have appeared along with international players in a commercial and also bcos I am sure there are many like me out there who could not figure out that it was Dravid and Dhoni who were featured in that ad.

Odd petal out?

If this is Odd man out,
then is this not Odd petal out?

The Tulip in the second picture is really amazing. This is the first time I am seeing a petal of 2 different colors in a single flower. Incredible, right?! These pictures were taken during our trip to the Tulip festival in Skagit Valley, Washington. Tim Russert says If its Sunday, its Meet the Press. But I say, If its April and if you are a desi in Seattle, its Trip to the Tulip Festival :) More pictures here. All these pictures were taken with my friend Amar's Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi SLR camera. So, any appreciation for the photos in the link may to go to him and his SLR.

Responsibility - What's your policy?

This Liberty Mutual commercial kind of takes off from the concept we saw in Pay It Forward. Loved this one the first time I watched it and thus thought of posting as part of my Most Favorite Commercials series.

Zip Codes and Pin Codes

I have always wondered what was the pattern based on which the zip codes here in the US and pin codes back in India were arrived at. And I have always wanted to blog about that bcos as far as these codes are concerned, there is a pattern which nobody could miss. Like here, all states on the west coast, for example, have their zip codes starting with a 9 whereas the ones in south east like Florida and Alabama have their zip codes start with a 3. Same is the case in India too where the Pin code for Delhi starts with a 1 whereas the pin code for our very own Tamil Nadu start with 6. So, I googled for that information and Wikipedia had all the details I wanted, both on the zip codes and the pin codes. So, here are some excerpts (basically the most interesting ones) from the Wiki entries:

ZIP codes are numbered with the first digit representing a certain group of U.S. states, the second and third digits together representing a region in that group (or perhaps a large city) and the fourth and fifth digits representing more specific areas, such as small towns or regions of that city. The main town in a region (if applicable) often gets the first ZIP codes for that region; afterward, the numerical order often follows the alphabetical order.

Geographically, many of the lowest ZIP codes are in the New England region, since these begin with '0'. The numbers increase southward along the East Coast, such as 02115 (Boston), 10036 (New York City), 19103 (Philadelphia), 20008 (Washington, D.C.), 30303 (Atlanta) and 33130 (Miami). From there, the numbers increase heading westward and northward. For example, 40202 is in Louisville, 50309 in Des Moines, Iowa, 60601 in Chicago, 75201 in Dallas, 80202 in Denver, 94111 in San Francisco, 98101 in Seattle, and 99950 in Ketchikan, Alaska.

0 = Connecticut (CT), Massachusetts (MA), Maine (ME), New Hampshire (NH), New Jersey (NJ), Puerto Rico (PR), Rhode Island (RI), Vermont (VT), Virgin Islands (VI), APO Europe (AE), FPO Europe (AE)
1 = Delaware (DE), New York (NY), Pennsylvania (PA)
2 = District of Columbia (DC), Maryland (MD), North Carolina (NC), South Carolina (SC), Virginia (VA), West Virginia (WV)
3 = Alabama (AL), Florida (FL), Georgia (GA), Mississippi (MS), Tennessee (TN), APO Americas (AA), FPO Americas (AA)
4 = Indiana (IN), Kentucky (KY), Michigan (MI), Ohio (OH)
5 = Iowa (IA), Minnesota (MN), Montana (MT), North Dakota (ND), South Dakota (SD), Wisconsin (WI)
6 = Illinois (IL), Kansas (KS), Missouri (MO), Nebraska (NE)
7 = Arkansas (AR), Louisiana (LA), Oklahoma (OK), Texas (TX)
8 = Arizona (AZ), Colorado (CO), Idaho (ID), New Mexico (NM), Nevada (NV), Utah (UT), Wyoming (WY)
9 = Alaska (AK), American Samoa (AS), California (CA), Guam (GU), Hawaii (HI), Northern Mariana Islands (MP), Oregon (OR), Washington (WA), APO Pacific (AP), FPO Pacific (AP)

And the following are the excerpts from the Wiki entry on Pin code:

There are 8 PIN regions in India. The first digit of the PIN code indicates the region in which a given post office falls in. The second digit indicates the sub-region, and the third digit indicates the sorting district within the region. The final three digits are assigned to individual post offices.

The 8 PIN regions cover the Indian states and union territories as:

1 - Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Chandigarh
2 - Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand
3 - Rajasthan, Gujarat, Daman and Diu, Dadra & Nagar Haveli
4 - Chattisgarh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Goa
5 - Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Yanam (district of Pondicherry)
6 - Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry (except Yanam), Lakshadweep
7 - West Bengal, Orissa, Assam, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya, Andaman & Nicobar Islands
8 - Bihar, Jharkhand

For trivia lovers, ZIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan and PIN stands for Postal Index Number. Now, when somebody asks you the reasoning behind the zipcodes in the US and pin codes in India, you know where to go (No, not the Wiki entries but this post :))

The Apple iPhone commerial

I am sure everyone of us have our own list of favorite TV commercials and since my list of most favorite TV commercials is a pretty long one, I have always wanted to blog about them. So, thought of posting one personal favorite of mine once atleast every 2 weeks. (It has become so much more easy to post such commercials bcos of sites like YouTube from where you can simply embed the videos in the blog) And what better ad to start with than this latest one by Apple. I have always loved their ads (from their iPod nano ads to the recent PC vs Mac series). But the one that was premiered on Oscar night for the upcoming iPhone is easily one of their best. So, here it goes the first in the series of my most favorite commercials.





This is a commercial most of you in the US would have seen bcos it is being aired very frequently now-a-days. And BTW, there are uncofirmed rumors that the iPhone might actually end up costing less - 299$ for a 4 GB phone and 399$ for the 8 GB version. The site where I read the information explained that the reasoning behind this decision was bcos of the fact when people were asked in a survery whether they would buy an iPhone for 500$, not even 1 in 10 responded positively. If the price is indeed cut, it would be great news. Lets see.

Cool read(s)

Got nothing worthwhile to write. So, thought of posting couple of interesting articles I came across today.

The game's most bizarre injuries

This article in Cricinfo about the weirdest injury stories of cricketers is a good one. Some of the 'interesting' injuries include Jimmy Adams cutting the tendons of his right hand while trying to slice through a bread (making him miss an entire tour) and Chris Lewis practicing in the sunny Caribbean weather without a hat, after shaving his head. Read on...

Why is U.S. always last in line for new phones?

This MSNBC article explores the reasons behind why the phones we get to use here in the US are anything but path-breaking. Of all the reasons he lists, the one that stood out to me was this - the widespread progress of the PC evolution over here whereas in the countries where the latest & greatest cellphones are introduced, the spread of the PC culture has generally been slow, when compared to the US.

This is beautiful

The above is the photo of a couple who were buried 5000 - 6000 years ago, embracing each other. Archaeologists in Italy discovered these remains recently and the Yahoo news article I read about this, aptly called this as eternal embrace. How true...

Second Coming - Nike's new commercial

I have always wanted to do such a post, embedding a YouTube video. And this commercial captured my attention the very first I saw it and I thought of starting with this one (I didn't use YouTube though - for YouTube users, the video can be seen here). Nike's commercials are always cool and this one is a good proof of the same. All the NBA superstars come together in this well-conceived ad, with my personal favorite Kobe standing in the middle of the lot. Nike has a good wallpaper that you can download here.