I casually(Yes, casually. I’m not one of those twitter addicts) logged in to see twitter down again.

I think these days they are more down than up.

I’ve been thinking for while whether or not post the pictures I take these days, as a new found hobby, to my blog. After this picture came out fine I decided that I should.

This is from 25 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco, CA. I took this picture on my way to the CostCo to get some groceries for the coming month. This building, as I came to know, houses a lot of government offices.

Like all normal users even I had a single email account to handle all my email. It had a lot of drawbacks once your start receiving thousands of emails from hundreds of different sources, some of them I’m sure many of you have already faced:

• Paranoid about deleting an email - No Recovery Options
• Storage Constraints
• Organizing
• Privacy - Separate Work and Family
• Spam

If you answered yes to at least one of the above reasons, read on. The advent of Gmail, you might say solves some of them problem like storage. But not even Gmail is perfect. So what I suggest is a 3 tier system bulletproof system to alleviate your email woes.

1. Personal Account: Create a new Gmail account and give E-mail address to only your closest friends and relatives. Lets call this PA@gmail.com
2. Your Current E-mail Account: This is the E-mail account you already have. This is for regular use and for work. Lets call this MA@gmail.com
3. Archive Account: Create another new Gmail account. Use this only when dubious a website asks for your E-mail. No where else. Lets call this AA@gmail.com

Now the Setup:

• Log in to PA@gmail.com and go to Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP. In Forwarding select "Forward a copy of incoming mail to" and fill in MA@gmail.com and keep the Gmail’s copy in the inbox.
• Now, Log in to MA@gmail.com and go to Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP. In Forwarding select "Forward a copy of incoming mail to" and fill in AA@gmail.com and keep the Gmail’s copy in the inbox.

The Setup will now look like this:

After this setup you only need to login to your current email account to access all your email. If you accidentally delete an email in either your personal email or work email you always go to your archive email AA@gmail.com and retrieve that important message. There is a lot less spam since it is eliminated in three tiers.

If you are really finicky about organizing you can create filters in you current Gmail account and filter email into their respective labels/folders and color code them. The "Better Gmail Firefox extension" from Gina Trapani of LifeHacker.com provides the folder like functionality that you see to the left. That and lots of other cool features that make Gmail even better.

Please tell me what other types of email setups you use to manage your email.

If you haven’t observed, Facebook style photo comments have arrived on Orkut. May be it has been there all along and I missed it or may be it just arrived silently. No blog post yet either on Orkut blog or the official Google blog.

This is the last block on your Orkut home page, just below the recent updates block. You have to go the image in question to post a comment as show below.

I can’t put my finger on it but there’s something really lame about this interface. Whatever happened to the Google’s favorite Ajax? Let me explain. One of my friends uploads a new image to their album. It shows up in our recent updates from friends. Now to post a comment I don’t want to go all the way to that specific picture in their album. I want to post a comment right here and right now!

[The things in red are meant for the technically inclined]

All those torrent downloads and Netflix DVD backups left me with almost no space on my laptop hard drive. For the record I currently have 80 movies on my hard drive. So at last I decided I should get external storage. I got a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 500GB Hard Drive for $100 and EAGLE ET-CSESU2-BK Aluminum 3.5" Black USB 2.0 External Enclosure for about $12 - The total setup was delivered to me in 3 days by Newegg.com and they work great. You can say that I would not need a 7200RPM drive with 32MB cache for external storage since the USB 2.0 speeds are no where near hard drive speeds. But still I see this as a future investment for my desktop.

You can see that with the total number of drive partitions I have I’m almost running out of alphabets. What if I had more drive partitions than the number of alphabets? I’ve never seen what Windows would do in that scenario. My current plan is triple a boot system with Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Future plans include a quad boot with Mac OS X Leopard. Mac on my Dell Vostro … Hmm.

Its a rat race. That’s what it is. I do not seem to get the point why Facebook needed a chat window for its already cluttered and lame looking interface. Google has chat. Microsoft has chat. So may be they thought lets get chat too.

The online friends functionality it shows was already available. And if you see a friend online you can always post a message on his wall. And he can reply back if he wants to, then and there. Its not like you need an entirely separate area for chat, some other area for posting walls and yet another area where you send messages. I mean wall posts are public and messages are private - I can understand them. But why in the name of god do you need chat?

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There was one blog the other day where I see people whining about no “folders” in Gmail in the comments. Gmail has labels. Why do you need folders? And what is the point of different webmail clients if they all look, feel and offer the same? If you cannot live without your “folders”, please DO NOT use Gmail. What I don’t need right now is Google doing something stupid and adding a chat interface as default to Orkut, just because Facebook has chat too.

I wanted to own a game pad/controller like forever. When I was a kid I had a thing for joysticks. I literally used to dream of owning one. But I neither had the time nor the resources needed to buy one. Later one when I used to game a lot, particularly the Need For Speed games, I really wanted a game pad so that racing could be more fun and less pain due to hours of keeping you fingers pressed on the keyboard. But India is one of the most expensive places to buy gadgets, even used ones. So I wanted to buy one as soon as I came to the United States. An Xbox 360 Controller was the obvious choice due to its great price/features score.

So I went on ebay to look for one. I had to go into a lot of research since I was divided between buying a wired and a wireless Xbox 360 controller. I came to know that the wireless one needed a receiver to work. And moreover it has a battery pack which has to recharged every now and then. So instead of buying all those thing I went in for the wired controller. And the deal I got was simply unbelievable. I got one for $11.49 which roughly translates to Rs.450 which is dirt cheap if you ask me. And the controller I got was in like-new condition. The real reason I bought the thing was to play the game I had my eyes on for a while now - Assassins Creed.

This is THE game of the year if you ask me. And not playing it without an Xbox 360 controller will take all the fun out of it. The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions were released in November 2007 and I’ve been drooling over their screenshots ever since waiting for the PC version which came out on April 9th 2008. The huge 6.5GB game is in my download queue now and I can’t wait to try it out.

One of my all time favorite torrent trackers - Demonoid.com is back online again. As you know from one of my blog posts, Demonoid was finally taken down in November 2007 after their intermittent service in the month of September that same year. All the old user accounts are working now(mine did) and the torrents are there and the tracker is up and running providing blazing speeds as usual. Their welcome back post from April 11th 2008 states that a new site admin’s here and that the site itself may be going online and offline over the next few weeks(Site Maintenance?). But whatever bro, we’re just happy that you are back.

A quick look at my Google Analytics page for my website just revealed an interesting fact. Over a period of 1 month the Sundays had the lowest traffic in any given week.

[Click on the Image to View in Higher Resolution]

The majority of the traffic is due to the page on Naruto, which is entertainment if you ask me. And one would expect that Sunday should be the day that generates the highest amount of traffic for such a topic. But the data is quite contrary to the popular belief. Before you guess as to which country is deciding this trend - Its United Stated of America which accounts for almost 50% of the traffic.

Service Pack 1 is out for Windows Vista today. I got it through windows update as a 67MB download since I kept doing all other updates as and when they were available. Here’s the link for the complete service pack download nearly 440MB.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 x86

As usual with all the windows service packs my windows installation did slow down a bit. But not as much as Windows XP Service Pack 2 used to do to my desktop. As you people might already know I’m using a pretty good laptop now. Just out of curiosity I did a rating check for my laptop and the numbers I got were pretty impressive considering that you need just 2.0 for acceptable Aero display. I got 3.4 overall score and lowest being the Aero thing.

I’ve got 4.3 for gaming graphics. Just so that you know what I’m doing right now with all the graphics display prowess of my laptop - I’m playing Half Life 2 and Counter Strike: Source.