Rohit Nair’s Blog

I just had to watch this movie, considering it had won 3 Oscars, but more because it was made by the Coen brothers. I loved Fargo and and liked the weird comedy,The Big Lebowski (although I don’t think it’s that great a movie). Well, this one’s a much more serious movie although it still has doses of the trademark Coen brothers’ twisted and dark humor. And it certainly isn’t one for the masses, its what many people here call an “award” movie. First of all its slow and has very few dialogues, and the ending is definitely not something a lot of people will like. Its a movie that’s open to interpretation and not one where the directors force a message on the viewers. The movie is set in Texas, close to the Mexican border and the accent can get a bit tough to follow. I had to rewind and listen to some of the dialogues again quite a few times. Among the actors,Javier Bardem probably deserves a mention for the character he plays, he’s perfect as the cold, ruthless killer,easily one of the more memorable villains of recent times. In the end,its a dark movie, there’s no happy ending, no ray of light. But if you are a fan of the Coen brothers, there’s nothing that should stop you from watching this. Here’s one of the funnier lines of the movie that’s often shown in the trailers as well.This is what one of the main characters says to his wife before leaving for the crime scene.

Llewelyn Moss: If I don’t come back, tell mother I love her.
Carla Jean Moss: Your mother’s dead, Llewelyn.
Llewelyn Moss: Well then I’ll tell her myself.

I think i’ll be watching the movie again,with subtitles ON.

If you are eager to lay your hands on the new beta version of Firefox 3 but don’t want it to erase your existing installation of Firefox (which has all those extensions and saved passwords and bookmarks that you painstakingly installed and saved up),well worry not! The guys at PortableApps have come up with a portable edition that installs itself without affecting the existing one. You can get the latest beta here. As expected,a lot of extensions and themes are not yet supported. And for those who can’t live without Firebug, there’s a beta version of it that works with Firefox 3 as well. Firefox 3 by the way, looks neater and does have an evident performance improvement. One new feature that you notice straight away is the auto completion when you type in a URL which searches even from your bookmarks. Some sites do crash the browser though, Yahoo! Mail being one of them. Hopefully all the bugs will be ironed out once the stable version is released.

Edit: Beta 5 is out. Yahoo! Mail doesn’t seem to crash the browser anymore.

Yup, the dream is over. Real Madrid have been dumped out of the Champions league and have failed to reach the quarter final stage for the fourth season running. Am I sad? Most definitely, but am I surprised? No. Schuster is coaching a team in the champions league for the first time and quite clearly,he isn’t ready for this big a club. And with the squad we had, winning the cup would be nothing short of a miracle.

Thanks to the reputation the club’s board has, Schuster has his work cut out. Win silverware and please the crowd, else start looking for another club.  Its quite evident in his tactics that he’s insecure and his main objective is to just last the season. Playing the likes of Ruud, Raul, Ramos, Casillas week in week out, not giving enough chances to the youngsters even against lesser opposition, totally ignoring the Castilla players, rushing players back from injury into the starting XI all just reinforce the fact that he was afraid to lose, afraid to take risks of any kind. And when some of our key players got injured or were unavailable, it just exposed our inexperienced bench. Soldado clearly cannot be expected to perform miracles in the last 5 minutes of a champions league match, not because he isn’t good enough but because he simply hasn’t played enough minutes this season.

Man,you just gotta love online ticket booking! Especially when the site gives you 10 free movie tickets apart from the obvious benefits. Cleartrip.com has this offer of giving 10 movie tickets redeemable at bookmyshow.com when you book tickets on Air Deccan for two. Sweet! Well,they last only for a month and you can redeem only two on a given day,so I decided to redeem them the next day itself and booked tickets for Mithya. bookmyshow.com is pretty neat, you can even chose your seats and I went for the ones with the best view,top row center.

Now to the movie, which is getting some nice reviews from the critics and rightly so. Its obviously not the typical Bollywood fare, but a quality film with a decent story, great acting and of course Rajat Kapoor as the director. Ranvir Shorey has really grabbed this rare opportunity as a lead in a movie with both hands and done a great job. He plays the role of a struggling actor who happens to be the look-alike of a gangster. The support cast of Naseeruddin Shah,Vinay Pathak and co ain’t too bad either. The movie starts off with a lot of humour but slowly the twists and turns start coming and the story takes over. The film probably wouldn’t do well at the box office and probably wouldn’t appeal to the masses either as was evident from the theater, the gold class was full while the silver class was more than half empty. I’d definitely recommend it though, its a good quality Hindi flick thats a welcome change.

Feels good to be back home after a long time. There seems to be a rock concert going on at Durbar Hall Ground,around 500 metres away from my house. I can listen to them playing “The Roadhouse Blues” from my room. Apparently its a concert for charity. Times surely are changing. Although I doubt if anyone is watching these guys perform.

Microsoft announces games for the Zune, can be developed by XNA Studio developers and probably will support wireless multiplayer gaming. Woohoo! Although the multiplayer feature isn’t going to help me much, as there are hardly any Zunes around here.

Saw the movie this weekend. Now I know why Al Pacino is considered to be one of the best actors of his generation.

For those who live in Mars, Ronaldo ruptured a tendon on his left knee and was stretchered off during Milan’s game against Livorno. I think its a recurrence of the injury he had all those years back, the only difference being that the earlier one happened on the right leg. The surgery happened yesterday and the general recovery period is 8-10 months. He’s still only 31 and there’s no reason he cannot be back on the football field. Finding a team to play shouldn’t be tough for him, its whether he wants to continue that matters. A legend like him deserves a better way to say goodbye to the beautiful game.

PS: A lot of n00bs think the injury is because of his lifestyle and he has self destructed his career and so on. Pure unadulterated crap. Actually an easy way to spot n00bs is just that, see what their opinion of Ronaldo is. They obviously have no clue what a legend the man is and just read into his lifestyle, his waistline etc.

Got my 2nd generation 80GB Zune last weekend, thanks a ton to Sony for getting it from the US. A few people have been asking me, why the Zune? Why not the iPod? Which company makes Zunes?

Most people here haven’t heard about the Zune mainly because its sold only in the US and since recently in Canada, unlike the iPod which is more of a global product. And the 2nd generation was released in October of 2007, so its quite a new product. Unlike the first generation, which became the butt of all mp3 player jokes, this one has been received well by most critics, some even stating it to be better than the iPod.

The main features I was looking for were
- Minimum 80GB
- Would be used to play videos as well
- Radio would be a plus,though not a necessity
- Should handle a decent number of file types
- Value for money

Had to do some research to narrow down on my selection. Wikipedia has a comparison chart that can be a great starting point. In the end, some of the options I had were the iPod( Touch and Classic), Zune, Archos 605 and a couple of others like the Cowon A3. The iPod touch has only 16GB and is way expensive, although it is a much more capable device. Between the Zune and the iPod, the Zune costs almost the same, has an FM tuner and has a 3.2″ screen compared to a 2.5″ for the iPod. The Archos 605 seems to be the favourite for many reviewers, but it costs 100$ more, is quite bulky and you need to pay extra for each plugin, even the web browser. But again, its almost in a different class of device, more closer to the iPod Touch. Plus I had read a lot of negative feedback about the Archos player especially regarding their customer care. Surely, an MS or Apple product would be more reliable and will have better support than say an Archos or a Cowon device. In the end, the cost plus the big screen made me select the Zune.

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Completed 6 months at Yahoo! this week. Had an All Hands yesterday, the 4th since I’ve joined. Its a good thing that each one was held at a different venue.