Grenada, Golf, Gogol, Google – from GR
Apr. 2, 2007 by ravishan
I was one of the millions of cricket fans who were devastated by the early exit of India from the World Cup Cricket 2007. And then a pretty embarassing loss for UConn women handed to them by LSU… It has not been a good couple of weeks. But, I have to move on. At least my country of birth, Sri Lanka, moved to the next round in the World Cup and are looking good. Several of my buddies and I are off to Grenada to watch World Cup from Apr 14- 21. We had to buy these tickets early and we took our best guess that India will be playing there… But nothing we can do now, but to watch the others play.
I was getting ready for my upcoming trip to Grenada, so I made a call to Cingular to see how to make sure my cell phone would work there. After 15 minutes, I was unable to convince them that Grenada is an independent nation. The person at the other end kept insisting that it must be part of another country. I gave up and hung up the phone…. I need to figure out how to do this some other way…
My friends and I went to Portland West for 9 holes of golf on saturday. It was not bad for a first outing. Please do not ask me about my scores!!!
This weekend Nalini and I decided that we needed a break from constant weekend socializing. So, we skipped going to a house concert on Saturday (which was apparently very good) and watched an old Tamil comedy on TV. It was hilarious.
We went and saw the movie “Namesake” on Sunday. It is a really well made movie based on an award winning book by the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri. Jhumpa visited the Wesleyan Writing Program in late March and gave a talk on March 28th in CFA Cinema. It was very well attended and they had to turn away many people because of lack of seating. Thanks to some inside scoop, we were there very early and got to hear an excellent performance by Jhumpa. She was very modest, humble and pretty straightforward when answering questions.
Vivek game me the book as a gift when the book came out. I am not much of a fiction reader, so he is very careful on what to buy for me. I was not able to put the book down and finished it in record time. The story is about an Indian academic coming to the USA in the 70’s with his wife, the transition from a vibrant and chaotic life to one that is lonely, and the struggles of assimilation in a foreign land. I was very moved by the book because people like us who went through similar experiences could see our own experiences described in the earlier parts of the book.
The crux of the story is actually about the identity crisis their son goes through. The father names the boy Gogol, after his favorite Russian author. In addition to being an Indian, which brings its own problems in High school and other places, he has to deal with a name like Gogol. And the book describes the struggle this young man has to go through dealing with all these “crises” and what happens as he matures. Very well done and we really enjoyed the movie.
Since I had some time on Saturday, I was looking around and found some pretty interesting technologies that tie into Google Calendar. Whereas there is pretty good integration between GMail and GCalendar, one cannot say the same about Google notes, to-do application and the rest of the software. So, I discovered Remember the Milk . As you can tell, this is a pretty cool app that helps you manage a task list, with the usual task related fields and notes fields. Most importantly it ties into GCalendar. When installed, it adds a task icon in the calendar. You can manage the tasks either on the remember the milk site or right from GCalendar. And yes, you need to share your Google Password with the remember the milk site…
And then I found Jott. It is yet another cool tool. For now it is free. It is a voice to text transcription service. So, you call a number that is given to you upon registration, leave a message and a few minutes later it is converted to text (with pretty good accuracy) and sent as an email with a link to listen to the message also (in case the transcription didn’t go well). It is pretty good. If I leave messages carefully, the transcribed text will appear in a format so Google will ask if this is a meeting that I want to add to my calendar… Pretty cool… I am sure there is an Apple solution to this!
I also found sopcast.com where I can watch live cricket for free. Sopcast also has a ton of other sports and movies and a whole bunch of other things… But I have time only for cricket!!!