Dhoni's Banana on eBay

Following is a piece of online commentary from cricinfo.com during the 1st innings (36th over) of India Vs. Sri Lanka (4th ODI):

A tired Dhoni is down on the ground and is eating a banana. He hands over the banana skin to Ojha who might or might not sell it on ebay.

35.6 Muralitharan to Raina, SIX, There comes the big hit. Almost expected. He cleared the front foot and slog-swept Murali over deep midwicket boundary. The runs are flowing here for the Indians. What can Mahela do?

Good (geeky -?) sense of humor .. :)

Russia Georgia Conflict and energy markets

How does the conflict between Georgia and Russia affect energy markets?

The conflict is now phasing from military to diplomatic stage. The conflict broke out on 7 August when Georgia launched an assault to wrest back control of the Moscow-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia, triggering a counter-offensive by Russian troops who advanced beyond South Ossetia into Georgia's heartland.

Following crisis talks in Brussels, Nato's 26 foreign ministers said in a joint statement that they could not have normal relations with Russia as long as Moscow had troops in Georgia.

"The Alliance is considering seriously the implications of Russia's actions for the Nato-Russia relationship," the statement said, read out by Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. "We have determined that we cannot continue with business as usual."

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Nato of bias and of trying to save the "criminal regime" in Tbilisi. Russia has dismissed a warning by Nato that normal relations are impossible while its troops remain inside Georgia.

How will it affect the prospects of Central Asian energy producing countries for independent export strategies? Europe will have to pay attention to Russia for the foreseeable future. They are highly dependent on energy pipelines for oil and natural gas. It will be interesting to see if these current problems make a difference in the energy sphere.

"Recent escalation in military engagement between Russia and Georgia poses a threat to certain key oil and gas pipelines which transit Georgia," the International Energy Agency said.

Is Russia's incursion into Georgia an initiation of what will become the slow process of reclaiming the former Soviet Union?

Welcome to the Stock Market!

This is one of the nice forward I have ever received:

Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for Rs10. The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.

The man bought thousands at Rs10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at Rs20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to Rs25 and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at Rs50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at Rs35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell it to him for Rs50." The villagers squeezed
up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys.

Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!!!

Welcome to the "Stock" Market!!

-----
Learn how to invest and make profits from investing in stock market. Play for free in Virtual Stock Market.

Yahoo! is Buzzing!

Buzz, Yahoo’s Digg-like effort to utilize User Generated Content and determine most popular news and other stories is open for everyone (with a Yahoo! account). There is no more need of invitation and anyone (with a Yahoo! account) can submit his/her story.

The buzz can be about anything - a great story on a major news site, an extraordinary bit from an obscure site, an intriguing video, or a fantastic blog that shouldn't be missed.

The most attractive catch in Yahoo!'s Digg (read:Buzz) is that Yahoo! promotes most buzzed headline stories on the home page of Yahoo! gives them a huge traffic boost.

Stories with most Buzz may be published on the Yahoo! home page - you can impact what millions will see on Yahoo!.

Google AdSense Account Disabled

So, my AdSense account got disabled after this email:

from: Google AdSense
date: Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 11:01 PM
Hello MITANSHU GARG,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we've decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions we've taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information by visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153&hl=en_US.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

This mail is a mixed mail. On one side, I will not get "any"thing from AdSense, but I will be relieved of checking AdSense statistics, and optimizing website for AdSense. But, a big pain is to remove all AdSense codes from the websites including this blog. Since, +ve aspects are much more than the loss of that revenue, I chose not to appeal for the re-instating my account.

(Google) AdSense is currently giving blank space everywhere. It would have been very good on its part had it just collapsed the blank space. In that case, I wouldn't have to edit everywhere I have kept the code.

I don't know whether I will ever sign up for AdSense again in my life, but as of now, GoodBye AdSense!

Cuil - is it ?

Cuil has failed to meet its expectations of a "Google-killer". May be you have indexed 121,617,892,992 web pages, but you need to search them too and provide relevant results to your user.

Although, the hype has helped Cuil in climbing alexa traffic ranks and Google PageRank. Currently, Cuil has a Google PageRank 4.

Some statistics from http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/cuil.com :

Traffic Rank:
1 Week Average: 646

Traffic Rank in some countries:

Germany: 1156
Turkey: 1659
UK: 1803
Australia: 1825
US: 1888
India: 3540
Pakistan: 4790

Although, the website does not have a meta-description, no meta-keywords, no entry in Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ directory, still a PageRank of 4 is a nice thing.



Cuil is learning very slowly. Now Cuil can search for Cuil. However, most of the problems as reported on TechCrunch still exists.

Paul Buchheit posted this message on FriendFeed:

“Maybe Cuil isn’t supposed to be good. They must know that the results are bad, but they launched anyway. Maybe they aren’t trying to build a full search engine, but just want to demo their crawling+indexing technology with the expectation that someone will buy the company and plug in better ranking.”
. . .
—Where “someone” = MSFT, who has already shown that they are willing to pay a lot for non-functional search engines. - Paul Buchheit

Update (Aug 06): Cuil now has an alexa traffic rank of 5456

No more sign-ups for Google Page Creator

Google Page Creator has stopped accepting new users.

We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs.

If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year.