Deals2buy

Online retailers in the US are famous for giving good "deals" regularly.  And there are many websites which summarize these deals on one page.   The one I use is deals2buy.com.  They have a good list of deals on various products/services and continuously update them as and when required.

The link is:  http://www.deals2buy.com/

An Apple a day ..

A very interesting read that I came across : How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong. It discusses in depth, with many examples, Apple's (and thus Steve Job's) selling strategy for their products. The question of openness and partnerships with distributors is discussed in depth. Even though Apple did everything wrong (from the viewpoint of selling strategy), they still have been able to attract helluva lot of attention for their products. Some of the anecdotes described are unbelievable to read.

Highly recommended read.

Media Library

I have added a new blog for any media content that I find interesting on the web (videos, photographs etc).

Link: My Media Library

What is this about ?

What should I write about after this long hiatus ? That I am lying half asleep at 2:30 am wondering why I haven't updated by blog for such a long time ? That I was just reading through all my previous posts and feeling those wonderful yet painful pangs of nostalgia ? Or that I just took a complete week off sacing out ? Will my sinthanaigals continue .... ? Such an ironic question isn't it ?

PS: Just avoided a 1 year anniversary of no blogs :D

We are Virginia Tech !

I am putting down some of my thoughts here regarding the unfortunate incident at Virginia Tech. As a Hokie myself, I am very sad for what happened. These may appear like ramblings to you ... please bear with me.

Monday was a sad day in the history of any educational institution. Such maniacal massacre is not what a place of learning and education should witness. More than the number of people affected, I was struck senseless by the manner in which they were affected and the inexplicable rage of the killer.

We, as Indians, have lost two of our fellow countrymen in Monday's massacre. Prof. G.V. Loganathan was called the "Master of measurements" and the "Father of Fluids" by some of his students in one of the facebook sites. I have always felt that a professor is worth much more than his/her life - he/she is worth the lives of all the students who have learnt something or have got inspiration from him/her. Minal Panchal, even though I didnt know her personally very well, was a very sweet person with a smile on her face always. I had observed her to be a reticent but fun loving person. As a student, I cant imagine what she should have gone through in the final moments of her life. I pray to the Almighty to bless their souls and keep them close with Him. Oh God .. please give their families the necessary mental strength and support to tide through these difficult times.


I know that these incidents are not something which can be explained by any mortal. Its something which is so deeply psychological that it can never be prevented. The media has been talking about how this incident could have been avoided - my own personal opinion is that this incident could never have been avoided with any sort of security measures/checks in place. One of the sites I was browsing had explained that there are different ways by which our thoughts can be kept to ourselves and not expressed outside. I believe, in this case, that the killer had been very thorough in his preparations and was very much determined to make his mission succeed. If only his determination had been funnelled into more constructive means ....

I am at a loss with relating to the killer on his motives for the executions he has performed. I have never considered VT to be a place where there is a huge economic disparity between the students. Its not a place where one observes any glaring difference in lifestyles.

I have not taken any pictures of the tragedy or the aftermaths out of respect for all the individuals affected by the incident in any form. I agree that the world needs to know what has happened and how. But the media is already doing their job (to the point of being obtrusive even). I feel that people would like to keep such moments close at heart and its not something for publicity.

As they say : "Time is the best healer". As time passes on, we will come to terms with what has happened and continue our life's journey. As Nikki Giovanni said : "We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning." But the human spirit is something which is unstoppable. Even in the face of any adversity, it will continue its journey and do everything it can to prevail itself upon the face of the planet !

"We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and
through all our sadness ... We will prevail. We will prevail. We will
prevail. WE ARE VIRGINIA TECH !!"

I would like to sincerely request all of you reading this post to put in their comments and views on what has happened. It will be of great help to know of others feelings and share our views.

Sequoia View

Came across this pseudo useful tool called SequoiaView as part of the Information Visualization class. Its a file explorer that allows you to "visualize" the hard disk in terms of the size and types of files.







Well .. the above image is how my hard disk "looks" like. I feel this tool useful in situations when you want to free up free space and want to find out the biggest chunks. The first time I used it, I freed up close to 2 GB in my hard disk of unused files ! Now, thats something !! But of course, it cant replace explorer. Its more like a supplementary "nice-to-have" thing. (One bad thing which I hate about this tool is its huge startup and refresh time where it scanning the whole hard drive.

PS : BTW, the orangish and grey files displayed above are AVI and video files while the green ones are MP3. Now you know what kind of files I have in my hard disk ;)

Up and running !

Ok ppl .. The zillionth webpage is up ! I've been wanting to put up this website for myself for a looong time. Finally got the motivation to get this done a few weeks ago. With enough motivation and zeal backing me up (along with my poor HTML skills), I fished out a decent looking open source template. A few decent mods later, I had what I felt was a simple looking yet elegant template.



Next step - the harder one - was to collect the 'material' to put up. I was absolutely clueless ! I started looking around in friend's websites and came up with some standard stuff about myself. (There is nothing much to say about me !). With many HTML and CSS editings later on, I decided that enough was enough and decided to launch version one dot oh of my site. I feel all ye people reading until this point would not mind taking another 2 minutes to go through my website also ! Leave me your valuable comments/suggestions.

Check it out at http://www.cs.vt.edu/~cnganesh. Also aliased at http://people.cs.vt.edu/~cnganesh

Chilling out at ATL ...

Well .. Yours truly reporting from Atlanta from my sister's place. Having a nice time with my periammai, akka, athimber and my two nephews. :) My periappa, anna, manni and another nephew are coming tomorrow. Now thats a lot of family members !!

Having great home cooked delicious food after a rather loong time. Not that we are bad cooks. But the experience of relaxing at home and having home food is always different !

Watched Varalaaru yesterday. Nothing great in the movie except Asin. :) (I interestingly noted today that Asin hails from Kerala - her tamil is pretty much spotless !) Songs weren't too good I felt.