Calvin and Hobbes

& while I am on the Calvin & Hobbes mood (taking a little break from my momentous workload..), here's another one that reminds me of the fun side of life...

So true!

Latest news...

Geneva for you

Clinton & Branson

Clinton was and still is a real cool dude... did you get a chance to see his Fox News interview in which he took this pro Bush fella left right and centre. I saw it on you tube...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaNIBFSMjb8.. has 3 parts - fantastic viewing... there are some comments from people criticising him, but imaging Bush being asked the same question... well actually may be even better to watch for different reasons!

What does Branson have to do with it... well he mentions in the interview about the Clinton Global Initiative where he gets commitments for global causes. Last yr he raised 2.5b$$, this year its 7.3 and counting... Of this 3b$$ comes from Richard Branson who has given away the profits from his Virgin travel companies for the next 10 yrs for research into alternative energy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5368602.stm
His logic is that he is still worth over $$6b, so he doesnt need more money.

Its heartening to see such attitude from those who can give to world causes...

A parade in town

For some unkown reason I was greeted by marching bands as I parked the car and walked to the office...

They were precceded by men in 18th century bayonets etc.

Ah ... a nice autumn morning in Geneva...

Mont Blanc from my house

The view of sun setting on Mont Blanc on the drive back from work on friday... as seem from my motorola...

The pic is a bit poor, next time will try & use a proper camera...

New Blog

Yup started it...

See http://moving-to-geneva.blogspot.com/

Hope to make a diary about moving to Geneva...

Internet TV

So you might notice my blog is slowly yet surely building a theme ... yes I have a new internet connection and am trying to find things to fill the void left by Sky now that I am in Geneva.

While I resisted the temptation to call the local satellite dish fellows to get a sky dish setup (which I suspect I will do eventually anyways), I have been looking at the internet tv options, P2PTV to be more specific.

P2P TV as the name suggests works by one both downloading and sharing the TV streams. I have tried the usual stuff .. TVants, P2Pstream, Sopcast etc. All of them are chinese and unfortunately all the sites in chinese. Transalate.google.com helps ... but only so much. For eg p2ptv software menu is in chinese as well ...

The top 2 recos from me are:
At no. 2 - www.tvants.com. The player connects to the TVANTS server and has around 800 channels including the star movies, AXN to CBS, Star Sports, ESPN. If you like football this is a boon - all the matches you can think of. Cricket unfortunately is not popular with the chinese... though I read that one of the pakistani guys is streaming one of the channels esp for the paki games...
Note: I am having some setup problems running this as I have upgraded my Windows media player to 11 but it works fine with 9/10.

At No1 is TVU player (www.viidoo.com). The interface is completely in English and the setup and running it is a breeze. It takes about 3/4 minutes t settle down (buffer, choose best bandwidth etc) but then you get near VHS quality video. Its got CNN, Star Sports, ESPN Asia, CBS, Fox, NBC, HBO & USA Network etc on it. I have been hooking laptop to the telly to watch it & its ok.

Looking forward, I am
1. Trying to use VideoLan player (the best freeware media player out there ... fantastic for downloaded movies, better quality than CPU hungry media/real players) to stream the same over the network to the telly rather than just hook my laptop to it... still trying to figure this out,

2. Find live Cricket on the net. Some channels promise (try to google for cricket) but dont deliver.

Will keep you posted if I find something.

Hindi Movies Online

Ok so this isnt exactly breaking news and at the end of the day is piracy... but hey its new for me and I do not have legal avenues to go see hindi movies in Geneva ... so am forced to download them ...

So where do I get them from ... well found a lot of sites which have pretty poor versions ... google video, You Tube (The next big thing on the net if you ask me - search for Frodo and see his romance with Sam ... funny) etc. There is even an Apna Tube ... a desi take on Youtube though it is dominated by sleazy movie clips and Cricket clips ...

I have ended up reverting to www.desitorrents.com and have found not only good new but old movies ... you register and then off you go. Am using Utorrent as my client and it is a breeze to set up. You may need to open some ports (port forwarding) if you have a firewall / ADSL router (I have a Dlink) ... but the hows can be easily found on Google or I can advise.

Good luck ...

VOIP calls galore

So I am on the VOIP bandwagon... with the move to Geneva and wife away to meet her folks (i.e. her mayaka), I have been looking at (cheap) ways to keep in touch... ok I admit it ... make free calls on the net. So the next thing to do is lookup new & emerging technologies and VOIP sounded like a good start.

Did I say free... well almost free. Well here is a low down...

History
I wont bore you with the reams of literature on the net on this ...
http://www.voipproducts.eu/ tells you of the history of how VOIP started, what is it about etc

The Daddy of VOIP - Betamax
http://www.voipproducts.eu/betamax tells you of the various avtars of the company called betamax which was & still is the biggest name in VOIP. I use 2 of their products - voipcheap & freecall - they are all equally good (same software / network) but have different sets of countries which are free to call. See www.voipcheap.com or www.freecall.com to see what i mean.
For eg the one i use (the above 2) have UK, US, Switzerland & Singapore free. For others like India you pay a certain charge.
For an addtional 5cents per call, they will connect any 2 numbers in the list of countries (including free ones) together. This is the option i use, i connect my swiss home landline number with UK / US / Sing no. (like i did today).
If you have relations say in India, they can use this to call you in UK/US landline.

Note: Betamax have introduced some restrictions of late which the site will tell you about (max 5 hrs in 7 days, 10Euros gets you 120 days of free calls after which you pay 1 cent a min unless you pay 10 euros which gives you another 120 days of free calls)

How does this compare with say Skype
http://www.voipproducts.eu/compare-voip/ gives 2 sets of comparasions - between the different betamay products and the other one is yahoo v/s skype v/s msn etc...

My reco:
For a pure pc to pc voice chat, google talk is by far THE best.
For pc to phone, either skype (expensive) or one of the betamax ones (I use voip cheap)
For video chat, i find yahoo etc ok equally good (or bad)

Have fun figuring it out, if you want a crash course, just ask.

PS: A big Thanks to my friend Kamil who got me started on this and still keeps me updated on the latest & best offers around.

PPS: If you are calling from UK, just dial (0870 794 4301) works just as well ... use a phone and pay the same as a national call to call most of the western world, Autralia & SE Asia. If you are on O2, its part of your free minutes.

Move to Geneva

& so I am in Geneva .. settling in fine ... or as fine as I can. Am thinking of starting another blog of all the things I worried about moving to Switzerland and how things worked out in the end ...

Do you like Animation

Both Safeenaz (my better half) and I love Japanese animation, esp the work of our favourite, Mr Miyazaki.

Introduced to his work by a recomendation of Jonathan Ross, we now have our own small collection of his main works.

Here surfing the net I found the link to a few interesting sites:

Conversations on Ghibli - dedicated to all the Studio Ghibli / Miyazaki fans...

AnimeMusicVideos.org - Has some fantastic music videos tributes to Miyazaki's work (need to register to see them).

Youtube - Just search for Mr Miyazaki & you can see some of the ones I am talking about...

Enjoy...

Hi All...

Hi Friends

Setting up a new blog to post all thats happening in and around my life...

Have alook around the blog.

For the more serious minded, take a peek at my other blog...
http://crm-insight.blogspot.com/

More coming shortly...

Ta,
Sameer