Mario’s World

In case anyone plans to use the Italian railways, better book well in advance. They use Windows and like to advertise their frequent system crashes on the displays around the reservation counters.

Yep, I’m back in town after a two week trip through Italy and France.

Have a lot to post about after I manage to clear a ton of unread email from my personal inbox.

The pic of the clock tower or rather tower of clocks was taken in Paris outside Saint Lazare. Looks cool.

Augmented Reality (AR) looks like a great new way to play games. Especially good for taking non-smoking breaks at the office. Just print-out the game board, lay it on a table and switch on your touch screen cell phones. I’d like to see some nice multi-player games with this technology. Should be fun… especially when the boss is not around.

Was at Fanar when we noticed this baby grand piano playing all on its own. Ghost? Invisible person?

Well looks like the little gadget to the bottom right of the piano was doing all the magic… an auto-play function. Pop in the dvd and let it rip!

A company in Taiwan has managed to build a huge exhibition center almost entirely from recycled plastic bottles. Check out the video.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a ridiculous idea …a job site with a classifieds section!!!

Can’t find a job? Why don’t you buy a wedding gown or a hummer instead.

This new section makes the site kinda “cheap” (for lack of a better word). Now potential employers will probably spend more time on the classifieds section, checking out great offers on second hand goods instead of looking for great resumes.

Bing has a new slideshow called the ABC’s of Travel. They have put together the top destination for each alphabet of the English letter. It’s a nice attempt and was interesting to know that Xi’an was the top destination starting with a X.

The only problem I could see was that cities and countries were mixed. Chicago was the top destination in C but India was the top destination in I. Nice that India got in the list, but hey, India is such a huge country with quite a few distinct tourist destinations … like Goa. They could have knocked off Greece and put Goa there.

And all the people from “God’s Own Country” will definitely want Kyoto moved off that list too.

I was all set to drop Row off today morning when the early morning sunshine suddenly disappeared! At 8am today it turned from a sunny blue sky to a dark dark midnight sky. My initial thought was “how did the ash cloud from Europe reach here!” It got a bit windy too. And by the time we got on the road some kind of freak shower storm began.

As usual all cars were driving with hazard lights on. A top speed of 60kmph seemed to be reasonable. And just like the previous freak storms, trees were falling, garbage and cats were flying around and lakes began to form in the open desert and on the roads. 2 hours later, everything was back to normal.

Amazingly, none of the FM channels had anything to say about this all morning. KTV channels didn’t bother. And those large public information systems placed across all the highways displayed a “Low Visibility” warning around 8.40am, 10 mins after the storm was over and the skies were bright blue again.

Project Cyan has a nice sequence of pics of the storm over Kuwait City.

Yep, that’s what this little cheese grater is called. French word for a grater?