Life comes a full circle ...

For all those who wanted to know, we didn't make it to National Finals of the Imagine Cup this year.

Now, unfortunately (or fortunately) the BE Project that we guys were doing and our IC submission was one and the same thing (for the sake of our sanities) - so atleast we will be seeing this thing through (hopefully)

Our theme and ideas were kept somewhat hushed up (which feels kinda stupid now) but anyways, will be letting the cat out of the bag soon enough.

In other news, came back from an awesome two day picnic to Nagaon (which is about 8 odd kms from Alibaug) and it was awesome fun. Will be posting pictures of the trip soon.

Perhaps the last with the guys from college - everything went off nicely and everybody had loads of fun.

For starters, here are a couple of images that I took on the beach ...

Low tide at the Alibaug beach at sunset - small kid with his dad

A family of four moving towards the Alibaug fort which is accessible by foot during low tides

The Constant Gardener

I caught this movie recently, after a friend of mine "highly" recommended it to me ... and I'm glad that I caught it.

This is one more addition to African Centric movies - though this is of a different nature.
The last african centric movie that I had watched was Hotel Rwanda, which to be frank, was brilliant.

These movies paint a very sad picture of Africa, and honestly, even India, with the gzillion problems that we face everyday, seems like heaven compared to what some people out there go through.

Some parts of Africa, are really, really bad - which results in the more well to do countries treating them like expendable guinea pigs - a premise on which the Constant Gardener is based on.

I've heard that the promos of the movie are very misleading and you'll be better if you've missed them completely - and if you have not, don't go according to what they say.
But a movie very well worth watching for its underlying base.

BTW .. the movie has Rachel Weisz (Mummy, Runaway Jury) who is brilliant and won the best supporting actress for her role in the movie.
Also has Ralph Fiennes (Schlinders List, Maid in Manhattan, The Prince of Egypt) who is equally brilliant.

A definite watch.

My review on the film : Here

Gdrive ...

I was surprised to see a pretty big article in the Indian Express talking about Google's GDrive. For those of you who still haven't heard about it, GDrive is supposed to be google's entry into the online file sharing business.

This news however, was not supposed to be released to the public, but as the story goes, a presentation made by Google for its investors on GDrive, got placed on Google's investor site by mistake and was downloaded by many people and the news spread like wild fire - thanks to the blogger community.

The presentation, has since then, been taken off the site and Google has kept a "no comments" policy on the entire thing.

Anyways, the GDrive is to offer its users, unlimited file storage - including many different file formats.

I did some lookup and found out that GDrive was infact a product of a thrid party company which had created an app by which you could store files of a max size of 999 MB in your gmail account using their tool.
They even had the domain name (http://www.gdrive.com) registered with them.

The version 0.6 of the tool can be found at this site : http://www.puremango.co.uk/cm_gdrive_109.php

Now, the reason why I am posting this is that all this thing about gDrive and unlimited storage being awesome and all, does bring up the entire issue of privacy and security.

How many people will trust google with their files?

In recent events, the Bush administration had forced google into giving them (anonymous) data on user search patterns.
What if tomorrow (though this is very unlikely) they make them give them access to files and stuff? After all Google IS a U.S based company.

Google is slowly, but surely, growing bigger and bigger - and they are becoming for the internet, what microsoft is for the personal PCs today. Even as of now, Google is pretty respected - with millions of people trusting its search, email, Earth (Google Earth) and many other such services.
All it will take for all this to end is one teensy weensy mistake ...
For my sake and everyone else's, I hope that this never happens ...