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A fire raged through a 19th century cathedral Friday, collapsing the main cupola atop the stately church in Russia's former Imperial capital and sending clerics scurrying to save treasured icons.

Another cultural icon lost forever. If not the ravages of war, autocratic dictators, or calamities more natural, there's always human error. Well, atleast it wasn't terrorism.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the great russian author of masterpieces such as The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment and a host of others was married in this very church. Fortunately, the full force of the russian fire fighting machinery including helicopters were thrown against the event - and hopefully, it will one day be reconstructed back to its original glory.

Its funny how I never seem to have more than a few musings on this site.

A lot of events have occurred, and for those of you in the know, I've already ranted on them on private blogs. My comments and views on the Indian Blog Banning debates are available at the BloggersCollective group at google - Here. These involve some heated debates exchanged over email with a bunch of people who are in India right now. It has been (and remains) the most famous forum for people to get together and exchange ideas on what the government's doing wrong.

Of course, I need to re-devise the category system on this site to better accomodate the wider variety of entries which I find are now popping up. Oh well, in a while, maybe. Yeah, "real soon now"!

Was just reading an amusing article on a little known site called DNA India. Its all about the dance bars in Mumbai, one of the most popular attractions in the city where alcohol is served by women gyrating to fast paced music. A place, I guess, mostly frequented by people who enjoy that sort of stuff. Maybe 90% of the entire legally-drinking-male-population of the city? :)

Rice gets cooked over Nuke fire

That made for some very interesting headliness, I must say. The calcutta telegraph looks like one of the few papers in India which can actually come up with catchy yet completely relevant lines like that. Which is more than what I can say for the Times of India, apparently with India's largest daily readership. Blah.

The article, here deals with the senate hearing which Rice had to undergo today, regarding the Bush administration's support of the nuclear deal with India. If what I read has even an inkling of the truth, it only goes to reinforce my belief that politicians all around the world are of the same ilk. I won't go into graphic details about what ilk exactly, but ...

Wow.

The 42 hours I spent in New York on the eve of 2006 have been one of my most exhilirating experiences yet! I'm still not sure where to start talking about them! My initial plans were to go to Times Square with some friends, and hang out there till the ball dropped - and we were ready to brave anything - Snow, Slush, Rain, subzero temperatures - the works! What happened next was something which movies are made of - *Literally!!

Normally, anyone who wants to be at Times Square when the ball drops (and wants a good view), gets there at about 2 or 3 pm to reserve a place at the center - yes, it does mean standing at one spot without food, water or a toilet for 9-10 hours.. Post 9/11 security practices are paranoidal! Of course, daft as we are, this was exactly what we intended to do.

Happy Halloween all!

Cool eh? ;)

ILUG-D Bangalore Meet

Well, since there seems to be a prett good response for the Bangalore meet of the Linux Users Group - Delhi (Bangalore chapter ;), here are a list of possible venues. The dates could be fixed up for the first or second week of march..

You can all leave comments stating any possible venues/dates/times. I'm sure we ought to be able to come to some conclusion within a week or so.

Venues:

Brigade Road/MG Road (Any place)
Forum

I would preferably go for Brigade Road, since its the centre of the city, and people can travel to it relatively easily.. Also, most of the people who are coming to the meet as of now (And whom i know :) stay/work near Brigade/MG.

Found this on news.com. Amazing stuff. Its all about how people using Via motherboards have used some of their more compact boards to make computers within objects of everyday usage.

Here