Am always amused and fascinated by Icons, during the days of Win 98, i change desktop icons, folder icons and app icons to my likings and sure they give you eye candy to the otherwise boring yellow folders and disk like mycomputer icons.

So if you want to pep up some more colour and fresh air into your comp, here is a site to download icons, they have a huge collection to choose from and am sure you wont get bored.

http://www.iconfinder.net/

Wind back a year and a half ago, my friend, lets call her “Sweth”, she sends me some of her blog posts to me to have a read, it was in Live journal and the site is blocked, so that was when she asked me do you use “Google Reader”, i said i have heard about it, but too lazy to set it up and add feeds.

As everything needs a slight spark and a push to start the ignition, here I am today with my Reader list after an year and a half, thats the first page I open and the first thing to do is to see if any posts out there in the friends section…. , its just midday and will finish the rest of the 90 feeds by evening…

Ohh ya the Tech stuff is a bit long…..

After my win 7 install, ohh ya am back with the same praise about win 7 (ok, i hear somebody shouting, stop this win 7 i’ve heard enuf), am not talking about win 7 here, its just that I happened to install the nVidia drivers and while searching for some image files in the windows folder, i stumbled upon a folder named nVidia 3D, quite intrigued, i opened it and saw some 3D images and nVidia wanted me to setup 3D viewing to view the images, i went through the setup process and presto i have 3D capability, i did not know this till now.

After this had NFS shift installed and i have 3D gaming, and looks fantastic, played a bit and liked it, so need to find time to play more of the 3D stuff , here are some sample pics, you might need this to view these in 3D

Make sure you have 3D glasses to view the images in 3D and here is how it works

No one is born happy…
but all of us are born with the ability to create happiness…,
So today, make other happy, Flash your sweetest smile…
HAVE A DAY FULL OF SMILES

Enjoy your Friday.

Happy

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windows7/default.aspx

Visual studio 2010 beta 2 has released and the itch to try what’s new has again cropped up, but how to do it without screwing up the OS and taking in all the hassle of reinstalling all the softwares and configuring the settings from scratch. This very thought has put be back from trying a lot of betas, but now with the help of Windows 7′s Virtual PC and Disk2Vhd tool, am planning to make an image of the win 7 OS currently on my PC and then run the same on a VM mode and try the beta one… How cool!

I will give this a try and post the results.

People have always taught us to see the bigger picture, but in the world of photography i always see a scene to be over whelming and its good to see a smaller picture in a bigger way, looking at a couple of my pictures and analysing some failure points, i have come to a point that, trying to get all what i see is not going to work.

I see a beautiful road, leading to a far off mountain and a nice sky and some colourful trees on the side with a horse grazing on the lush green lawn and more and more as this beautiful earth can provide, but take a picture of all this and it hardly fails to impress the viewer, the viewer is not transported back in space and time as and when the eyes saw it, the brain collected all this images layered them over the other and built a nice story that cant be expressed in a simple 2D photography.

So to make it simple, just show the road minus the mountain and the sky and lead the viewer into wanting more to see where that road might lead, make the viewer create an imagination, this kind of an image will work instead of the nig picture.

I need to make some adjustments to my style and moment of shooting, at the moment of natures show, i end up clicking all in one, i need to learn some creative subtraction in my future clicks.

Dictionary meaning : Unhappy about being away and longing for familiar things or persons

A Perfect fit for my mind state now, its Diwali today and its one of the very special days i could say, a day filled with emotions this year.

Diwali in my childhood days starts a month before with a plan, first starts the list of crackers to buy and my all time favorite was Kaliswari fireworks and i was a regular customer for years, the list is constantly updated and deleted to bring it within my budget of around 300 rupees, yes it was a pretty tight budget those days, so have to make the max use of it and be frugal in my choices of crackers. A weekend will be decided for the purchase, its like a festival day, get up in the morning and get ready and ride my bike or get a bus to the shop, there was only one shop from the manufacturer itself and it was a small shop in the busy streets of Parrys corner, juggling my way to get to the counter was an art and finally spelling out my order, to my disappointment some of the items would not be in stock, some my favorite ones, then the fight starts again, it used to be like a trading floor quickly deciding my replacement item and also making sure it fits into my budget, and finally all billed and waiting for the big brown packet was fun, have never felt so anxious and happy to wait for my crackers.

Diwali…. ok Deepavali in south terms starts a week before starting with bursting bijili crackers (small 2 inch size crackers) that come in a pack of 100, main fun is to burst them in the evening after finishing  school, holding them in hand, lighting them and timing the throw to make it burst mid air, and especially who can forget the fantastic smell of burst crackers and its fumes, woaahh i loved the smell..

The big day on deepavali starts very early for us lot, we were a group of 5 neighbors, my self, Gokul, Balaji, Ravi, Kumar and some of my cousins, we have a competition as to who opens the show, whos first to wake up and light the loudest cracker and wake up all others, then its bath time, all silently indoors finishing up the oil bath and getting ready with the new dress and then the fun with the crackers start from early morning and goes on till late in the night with all my friends and the fun part is our dads also get into their childhood mode and play with us.

Today am in a totally silent and foreign land talking to my Dad and he burst into emotions thinking of the old days and the fun, he just spoke to me for a couple of seconds and he couldn’t speak a word more, he was drowned in emotion and i could see tears rolling down his cheeks, haven’t seen him this way anytime and i knew how much he felt, and at that instant a tear rolled down my cheeks too, thats the power of love and emotions.

I love you dad and mom on this wonderful day of lights and love, i wish you are as happy as always, missing you a lot and will be with you very soon, keep watching

The Nostalgic moments still remains,
The smell of flowers,
The taste of sweets,
The sound of crackers, and
The fun of lighting them, and
The fantastic Smell of cracker fumes and burst crackers,
The dads becoming children again,
The vision of Light,
The feeling of satisfaction,
The joy of sharing,
The sense of togetherness,
The sumptuous feast,
The smiling faces all around,
The colorful new dresses, and
among all the loud noise, there remained peace,
tranquility and light everywhere
The festival of Deepavali,
The Nostalgic moments shall remain with thy for ever.

Had been debating with myself for a while on what to give, i have the tote bags and have invited a couple of friends too to the party, its going to be awkward to give an empty tote bag, i can imagine myself receiving an empty bag and desperately searching for what’s inside just to find nothing

So while idling at the sofa last night, my friend had got some ceramic cups to replace the old ones in our home, suddenly a small spark light my debating data cells inside the cabbage like thing inside my head and the search started and finalised today with an order for Windows 7 Theme mugs.

Here are some images of how the finished mug would look like, i have been a bit more creative these days

Click on the image to view the designs. (got all win7 wallpapers from Google image search).