My sincere apologies for springing this change upon you all. Please do resubscribe.

We’ve had some fond memories attached—like videos of our kids growing up; recordings of our trips within Malaysia; our visit to Singapore; family excursions; celebrations and festivities while in India, and others.

Among the forgettable episodes, this MiniDV unit was indirectly responsible for killing our old Presario notebook. The miserable died a slow death, burning in its own CPU’s heat under the assault of power-hungry video capture.

The DCR-PC9E is a complicated piece of equipment—one that demands respect. I mean I’ve been under the hoods of VCRs of my time; to host all that circuitry and stuff miniature-packed into a tiny volume of 38 cubic-inches is nothing short of being ingenious.

Damn you, Sony.

Our group, XJBEI—a mailing list primarily, now has a permanent home. I signed on for a domain solution last month via Google Apps: Families and Groups standard edition. In addition to some collaborative tools like Google Docs, the domain provides our private group with a much desired identity online.

Being essentially a closed mailing list, a complementing website wasn’t really a requirement, so I didn’t sign on for a hosting solution. Creating a static homepage using Page Creator was too bland and almost useless as a static page. I tried mapping to our existing blog, but unfortunately domain mapping on Wordpress.com isn’t free. Blogger, however does allow domain mapping and it’s almost instant. I turned off Pages within Apps dashboard; and set xjbei.org under Blogger’s Settings→Your domain.

All that for $10 bucks. Not bad—considering a failed attempt to get it running as a paid sub-domain on homestead years ago for as high as $50.

For $10, you get all Google goodies, 200 email accounts (you can request for more, if you need for your group), a start page where you can custom plug group news (like the one we have, where a widget pulls feed items from our website updates). The best, of course, is having a collaborative environment for Documents, which I think is fantastic.

Google’s fool’s day doodle, to date, is the best yet. Happy fool’s day folks .

Such is the result of work overload.

..synchronized feeds couldn’t be updated while our server was down, and to make matters worse, FeedDemon kept displaying a “synchronization service unavailable” message every time it tried to connect - so not only could you not get new content, but you were also bombarded with error messages you could do nothing about.

Yes, that’s right. To continue receiving updates during the outage, I had to turn off the synchronization I had applied to on two of my regular folders. They remain turned-off for now. But, it looks like Newsgator is on it to avoid a recurrence of this problem.

In a nutshell, FeedDemon will attempt to detect when a connection failure is due to a problem with our server, and when this happens it will provide a simple way to temporarily disable synchronization so that synchronized feeds are retrieved from their source rather than through NewsGator.

The World is Mega Uber Bloody Flat: Not that I didn’t already believe I would be blown away by BarCampBangalore, but I had been told the same story time and time again that it was ‘cheap and plentiful labor’ that was coming out of India, and that the creative engineering efforts were happening in the Western world. Ha.

It’s not just that the conversations I took part in there were the same ones I took part in everywhere else. It’s not just that the ideas that are coming out of the India tech community are kickass. It’s not just that the innovators there are hungry and passionate to change the world through technology first and foremost. It’s not just that they have the advantage of a less inflated standard of living. It’s all of that and more.

While what appears was a great show, it seems to me that a whale of geeks have missed out on attending the BarCamp Bangalore event. I wonder why? Was it because of the apparent “heavy leaning” on exclusive internet and Web 2.0 related technologies pre-listed and showcased?

I am quite aware of some wonderful breakthroughs happening in the desktop, and more importantly in the hardware arena right in the heart of Bangalore. So what happened to the nerds from Cypress Semiconductors, Motorola, Microsoft India and Dhruva—the gaming company on which, Thomas Friedman spent two full chapters in his book?

Was Yahoo! premises that repulsive to be a host to people doing hi-tech geekery at these places? We will never know.