Myself, on Holi day

Everybody in our office played holi on Wednesday. It was fun.. We couldn't work the whole day.
Although we were informed the previous day, I didn't bother to wear proper wear to celebrate holi with colours. Well, to be frank, I never let anybody apply colour on me all these years. I mean I never played holi at all.. :-) I know that sounds weird. My colleages were surprised to hear this too.
When I entered the office, I noticed that some people were already 'coulourful'. I didn't want to spoil my clothes & thought I would resist people who try to put colour on me.. But believe me, no one, not even one person was spared in our office. Everybody did multiple rounds to all the desks & made sure they put colours on all our faces, hair & even clothes.
In the evening, there were some snacks arranged on the occassion of Holi. But people who went to get snacks were greeted with more colours. I washed my face & hair almost 4 times that day (thinking that the colour smearing ceremony was over). But everytime, they put more colours on me. Luckily my clothes weren't much coloured.. All in all, a different experience for me.

Flexible Computer Keyboard

Have a look at this:
Flexible Computer Keyboard

The "Super Kool Keyboard", as they call it, seems to be very flexible. They even claim that it is virtually indestructible. Supposedly, you can wash the keyboard & roll it up. It is also supposed to be durable & soft..

I remember my keyboard at home. It's over 5 years since my dad bought me that computer. I stopped cleaning the keyboard over 4 years ago. The once white keyboard is now brown with dust. But still, all the keys are working properly & the keyboard is in good condition. I've used my computer to play a lot of games, which means I have put my keyboard into a lot of stress test. But yet, my old keyboard is still strong. They keys are still soft & responsive. And in over 5 years, I have never spilt anything on my keyboard.

The USP of "Super Kool Keyboard" is that you can spill anything on your keyboard & wash it up. But as I have already told, in the past 5 years, I haven't spilt anything on my keyboard. So, spilling something is a rare occurance. Next point is cleaning the keyboard. Well, cleanliness is a matter of personal discretion. One of my friends, never bothered to clean his bike. There used to be 2-3 inches of dirt/mud on his bike most of the time.

The ability of rolling up the keyboard could be quite useful. In the future, such keyboards could be supplied along with PDAs or even mobile phones, so that you can spread out a large full size keyboard & connect it to your device. You can roll it up & carry it in your pocket in other times.

Coming to the price, it costs $40, which is just less than about Rs.2000. This is more than 2 times the cost of an ordinary keyboard. (Infact, you can get a good keyboard for less than Rs.500). So, unless the price comes down a bit, I don't see a lot of people buying it.

My verdict: Just another one of "interesting" gadgets. Not very useful though. If you are very cleanliness-concious & would like to wash your keyboard often, this is for you. Or if you work in environment where dust or water/moisture is inevitable, this will be useful. One good thing is that you can roll it up & carry where ever you go.

Personally, I think its a total waste of money. I don't know why I'm wasting time writing about this. Maybe just to fill up the blog with something..

Chat

Chat is evolving.. Older days of using messengers are out of fashion now. Most messengers are bulky & come with too many unwanted features. A classic example is yahoo messenger.

Google Talk revolutionised this market. This is one tool that impressed me a lot.. It's simple interface, ease of use, light weight, crystal clear voice chat (even over dial up connections), everything about it seems perfect.

Now, it seems that chat has evolved once more. And yes, it's Google again. Have a look at this: Chat in Gmail.
You can now chat from within the browser. Yahoo had this feature (web chat) for a long time. But if you ever used it, you'll know how paethetic it was. Text chats from within GMail is so cool. Not only is it light weight, simple & easy to use, it's very intuitive. I can vouch that it's going to be as good as GMail itself.

Google is redefining most of the tools. Recently I came across Goobuntu, which is the new OS being developed by Google. It uses Linux kernel & is based on the Ubuntu distribution. I can 't wait for it to be released.

"See-through" lenses

Have a look at the link below:

IR Pass Filters & Infrared Lens for Sony NightShot. Panasonic NightView KAYA Lens

KAYA optics have developed Infrared lenses which can see-through objects. The images from their experiments show how they can see through clothing. Not only that, the 2nd experiment, amazed me. Permanent ink is spilt on a document. The text in the ink spilt area is impossible to read then. But using this lens, the writing is clearly legible through the ink.

I wonder what will happen if such lens are introduced in the market.

No post for a long time

A few weeks ago, I wrote a long post. I was also installing some software at the same time. And the installer rebooted my system closing everything. The post that I composed for almost an hour was lost. Just like that! After that, I lost my enthusiasm in blogging.

Don't you feel the posts we start to create must be saved (as draft) automatically every minute or two? GMail already has this feature. You start composing the mail & the content is saved every minute or so, so that even if your browser crashes or you lose your internet connection, your composition will be stored as Drafts. Blogger.com should come up with a similar feature... After all, blogger is owned by google itself..