The Lonesome Road

Well, it’s been a fun first thanksgiving for me. What did I do - laze! And believe me - I was thankful for every minute of it.

The fun part of the holiday was seeing the number of deals that sprang up over the weekend. It’s something that is not normally seen back home. All the major sites I surf for hardware stuff were slow or non-operational (CircuitCity, BestBuy, etc). But it was great to see the type of deals that were available for the holidays. I also got to see my first “Black Friday” deal list. I have also been informed that the monday after Thanksgiving is known as Cyber Monday as most of the online retailers offer major deals on the day. Here’s to capitalism!

I was looking forward to good deals on an external hard drive and more memory for my laptop. Things did not work out as planned, so now I am looking forward to the great Christmas sale. And if you can believe the advertisements on the television - it’s going to be a blast. But then I make it a point to disbelieve most of the stuff on TV - and on deals on a general principle. Point in case, this story about BestBuy

In other news, I was missing good old hindi music. The type that plays back home 24×7 from the radio. So, I decided to do a little searching on Shoutcast and was rewarded with three online radio stations that play good old hindi music. Awesome stuff it is. For those of you interested,here are the stations :

a) Madhur Sangeet
b) Arrhythmia
c) Masti Radio

The first two stations are primarily old hindi. The third one mixes it up a little, mixing old and new songs.

Also, I ran across a list of the “Best Windows Programs”. To be honest, I had not heard of a few of the software on the list - and plan to try them out. Oddly enough, this list counts WindowsXP as an element on its list. Go figure.

One more story of interest floating around is about the XBOX 360. I don’t know where MS plans to go with this device. First of all, it’s losing $126 on each piece sold. Around 15% of the boxes sold are crashing - primarily due to over heating. Slashdot is even carrying a story where a gamer claims he got his 360 running for a whopping 7 hours by lifting the power supply off the ground using a string! To top it all off, there is an article on Ars Technica that says that the DVD drive on the 360 is not the ideal replacement for your home entertainment system. The only benefit that they seem to have is the head start of a year before the PS3 challenges them. I wonder where the console wars will go from here on.

Until next time - Happy holidays!