Crazy Frog

I do not like frogs, in fact I hate frogs. When I heard a few months back that the song, Crazy Frog was a big hit in Europe, I thought to myself what's up with the Europeans, going nuts over a song about a frog. But that was until I heard it myself a few weeks back. And I've been hearing it ever since. Its a remix of an old tune - Axel F and quite catchy too. The video is pretty funny with a weird cartoon like frog doing ... well crazy things. You can watch the video here in Flash format (size: 8 MB) and listen to the MP3 here.

There have been controversies about the appearance of Crazy Frog. As far as I am concerned, it is after all an animal and you cannot expect it to wear a suit!

Content is king or why I won't spruce up my blog template

I started work as an apprentice web designer and subsequently moved to programming. I was obsessed with HTML and Javascript (even after starting to program in real languages) and built a website of my own. This website remained bereft of any meaningful content and for a long time, all it had was links to other sites that I used to visit. But I often used to change the look and feel of it - adding mouseOver effects to menus, writing cascading stylesheets, using dynamic HTML tags and adding the right keywords in the META tag to attract search engines. What I did not realize however, was that while this was all good to attract attention, there was no way of retaining the visitors or "eyeballs" because there was nothing worth seeing or reading in the site. I could not decide the theme of my site - was it to be personal or technical or a combination of both. After a while, I realized that no matter how flashy the presentation, the real thing was content. Content is king. I decided to discard my site as I did not know what to have in it.

Years later (in 2003 to be precise), I chanced upon Blogger and decided to create this blog. History tried to repeat itself as I was getting too much into choosing the templates and settings, and not paying attention to the theme or content. Somehow, I escaped taking that route. I decided the theme of this blog and spared the eye-candy. Very recently, I started using a blog reader client and realized that RSS and Atom do not shake hands with HTML on presentation. So, if you are looking at this blog through a browser and find its template mundane, you know the reason why.

Morally defeated by Katrina?

There has been a lot written about the way things are being handled after the Katrina hurricane. All I would want to say is this: why is it that a country that can liberate another country of 26,074,906 people struggling to provide relief to its own citizens in a state of 4,468,976 people? It is startling to hear that the United States has requested aid from the EU and NATO. Is this the same United States - "the land of dreams" where thousands want to live? See the link http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/04/katrina.world.aid/ for details and a complete list of countries that have offered to donate to the US. I was appalled to see poor countries such as Afghanistan offering aid to the US. Has Katrina brought the US down to its knees?

Nagesh Kukunoor's Iqbal - Music Review

After listening to Rabbi Shergill's "Bulla ki Jaana main Kaun" over a 100 times, I decided to buy a new album. I had heard the signature song "Aashayein" from "Iqbal" in the TV trailers and had liked it. So, I decided to check out all the songs through Raaga.com. The first song in the album is "Aashayein" sung by KK. I've recently taken a liking to KK's voice as it sounds very fresh. The song too is inspiring and very catchy. I had put the CD player on "Repeat" mode in the initial few times that I listened to this song. The next song that I liked was "Paani". This song has a few classical vocals by Suresh Wadkar but hardly any lyrics. "Maula" and "Tum Tana" sounded very nice too, they had a rock music like effect to them with some heavy vocals (especially "Maula"). These songs are not part of the movie and are just present in the CD. Shriram Iyer of Om - The Fusion Band has sung both the songs soulfully.

"Aankhon Mein Sapna" and "Mutthi Mein Aasman" were very listenable (some antaras were pretty catchy). "Khelenge Khelenge" is probably an important song in the movie, meant to serve as an inspiration and though it seems to convey the message, I was not too impressed with it.

Bottomline: Overall, I was impressed by the album and will recommend it in the Easy Listening category.