Feel good stories from India

This morning one of my friends sent me this website, GoodNewsIndia after reading about it at Chakra's blog. Found it interesting.

It is maintained by a 63 year old man, DV Sridharan. Rediff has a good post about him.

The diary on the website was an interesting read. Truly Inspiring effort.

I subscribed to the e-mail alerts for new stories. I feel good already for linking it. :)

Bug-me-not

These guys can help you by-pass compulsory registration on websites.

NASA Exam a hoax?

In a bizarre twist to the Saurabh Singh story that I had written about (MSM (stands for Mainstream Media) also did), people are starting to doubt (via BBC) whether such an exam exists. They report that our President Kalam had never written such an exam nor did Kalpana Chawla. Rediff was the first to post the doubts about this exam.

Free Mojtaba and Arash day!

Check out these links,

Hidden Talent

I read this BBC article about an Indian village boy, Saurabh Singh topping the NASA ISD exam. ISD stands for International Scientist Discovery program. Impressive! Only two other Indians have cleared the exam. One was our President Abdul Kalam in 1960 (came in 7th) and other was Kalpana Chavla in 1988 (came in 21st).

It is talent like this and this that is being robbed by politicians who think people have given them a contract to rule.

Ringo

Been long since I posted. Here is one.

I got a Ringo request from one of my friends and I registered. In the past similar requests annoyed me. Ringo was a phone number and address book service, so didn't bother me much.




I wonder why Yahoo did not do this. They already maintain address books and it would have been very easy for them to enable this.

Ringo is run by Monster folks. I am not sure when it launched, but its features are very basic. Let me list the drawbacks,

1) No sorting: Atleast they could have sorted it alphabatically.
2) No categories
3) No export feature
4) No search: I cannot believe they could miss a search feature.

These are just a few. I e-mailed them with the above requests. I hope they read the e-mails.

My Feeds

I spent hours getting my blogline feeds setup up right. I have more than 100 feeds setup. Visit here if you care to look at or like to export the feeds.

Txt2Blog

So, I checked out CSFTxt and got some ideas. CSFTxt is a txt2blog posting website. Anyone with a SMS or e-mail access can post to this website.

Try this. Send an SMS or e-mail to fadereu.csftxt@blogger.com. You must instantly see your message on the website. Your name will not get posted. It is an anonymous posting. Check my message for example.

I thought this is great, this lets any number of people post live information from the ground to a website. It is not limited by the members of the blog any more.

So, I thought how about using this to tackle issues like corruption. What if people started posting information on persons accepting bribes, their name, company and address. A quick SMS at the Transport department office for example, about a corrupt official. Will it not get visibility? Citizen vigilante. Just a thought....

Not a surprise, the website is already getting spammed. Volunteers will have to come in to catch the spammers and spambots. It can be done.

Bloglines Update

I followed some advise and went back to check Bloglines. I found the problem was to do with all the blogs being in a sub-folder. So I moved all the blogs as "top-level" blogs and it started working. For now it's a truce. :)

Bigzoo alternative

Bigzoo had been serving us with good quality, cheap long distance service for the past few years. They have discontinued the service on January 31, 2005 giving economic reasons.

If you are one of those who use Bigzoo and are looking for a replacement/alternative, you can try OneSuite. The site looks pretty similar to Bigzoo, they have the same pinskip options. I guess both of them use the same backend software.

If you register using the following link, we both get 20 free mins.

https://www.onesuite.com/052217788/suitetreat

And thanks in advance if you do. :)

Ivan Noble

I woke up to this sad news. Ivan Noble, a BBC journalist, died of cancer, that he had been fighting for the last two years. He was writing an account of his brain tumor treatment in a tumor diary on the BBC website. His story is truly inspirational. He will live on in the hearts and minds of millions of readers like me. I feel like I have lost a close friend of mine.



In one post he writes about the tsunami,

"Everyone should have known the tsunami was coming. Next time they must. I do not know if science will uncover enough about my cancer to slide the dial just far enough for me. But we have the technology that could have warned millions about the quake. Next time people must be given a chance."

In his last post he writes,

"I will end with a plea. I still have no idea why I ended up with a cancer, but plenty of other cancer patients know what made them ill.

If two or three people stop smoking as a result of anything I have ever written then the one of them who would have got cancer will live and all my scribblings will have been worthwhile."

He also writes,

"I have not been defeated."

and he was not.

MSN Search

Microsoft has released its new search engine. Check out here. I think it looks kinda cool. The layout and looks have g-o-o-g-l-e written all over them. The have put more colors in. They have a desktop search tool too.

I MSNed myself and did not find me. They better index me fast or they are losing me. :)

They are in too late in the game. I am going to wait-and-see if they can catch up with Google.