My player's fav songs

today I just put my IRiver on shuffle mode and the first 10 songs that it picked were:

1. Hunting High & Low - a-ha : This is my these days favourite song, earlier I used to rate this song as one of a-ha's not so great songs but after paying attention to its lyrics I guess I've been wrong all these years.
2. Always on my mind - Pet Shop Boys: I've very fond memories of this song, perhaps this being the very first english song that I loved when I started listening to english music way back in late 80s.
3. Hysteria - Def Leppard: I really like the guitar riff in the song and Elliott's husky voice.
4. Scarborough Fair - Simon & Garfunkel: Amazing ending bit: "generals order their soldiers to kill & to fight for the cause they've long ago forgotten...", do I need to say more?
5. I Remember Mary - Bad Boys Blue: Used to like this song once, pretty techno types..
6. Carrie - Europe: Another one abt which I've pretty fond memories, imo this is Europe's best number by far, even better than "Final Countdown".
7. Strangers of the heart - Heart: Heart at their best, Heart is def. one of the best female rock bands of all times in my book.
8. Private Universe - Crowded House: If you haven't heard this song, you are missing something."it's a tight squeeze but I won't let go..."
9. You & Me - Modern Talking: nice romantic number, recommended for any 80s lover.
10. Brown Eyed Girl - Van Morrison: nice fun song with cool guitaring.

Surprised that my player didn't find Moody Blues good enough, not even a single song by them in the first 20 song that it has played so far....

difficult choice?

Sometimes in life we come across a stage where we have to choose between two paths and we see walls in front of both of them!
Beyond one wall we see (what we see might not be what is reality) a world that we want to live in & beyond the other we see a world which doesnt really matter to us...So which one would you rather break your head against?

the power of rss/atom

few days back I'd posted about various online rss aggregators that I use or have used, today just stumbled upon one more: Netvibes, have to admit that it's the best one that I've come across till date! They have nice integration with GMail and surprisingly even have Hindi as one of the languages. I generally use rss aggregators to get all the news that I'm interested in at one central place, below is the (partial) list of feeds that I have on my start.com page, feeds that I would recommend most:
1) Endgadget: News about latest gadgets and gizmos.
2) BBC Front Page
3) Boing Boing
4) Slashdot: News for the nerds, one of my favorites!
5) Daily Dilbert: I always liked Dilbert comics.
6) Quote of the Day
7) Some feeds from rediff.com to get local news.
8) Eric Gunnerson's C# Compendium
9) Google blog
10) Yahoo! search blog
11) Weather news
12) "How To" of the day
some blog feeds from my friends and family members + lotsa more...

DRM and Sony (suck)

For guys who are preachers of buying only "legal" music (including me) here's an interesting story about the DRM (Digital Rights Management) gone way too far, Sony-BMG have been marketing "Digitally Protected" CDs which restrict the number of times the CD can be ripped (ability to convert into mp3s or other digital format), though the fact that a CD is digitally protected is made evident on the jewel case, what they don't tell you is that putting the CD into the drive would also install a root-kit (a special kinda malware which uses some cloaking technique to hide itself from being listed in tools like task-explorer and windows explorer), not going into the nuances of what does that mean for the end-user it basically is one of the crappiest thing that could be done to a customer (if you are really interested in the nuances, check this link).
This particular action by Sony has made me lose all respect that I once had for Sony as being the "nice" company & from now on will definitely think twice before going for a Sony product!
Also, I feel DRM in it's current form itself has lot to improve on, if I am paying for some music I should be able to play it on all the devices that I have including my CD Player, computer(s), pocket pc, portable player and whereever else I want to play it as long as I am not illegally distributing it to others. Think about it this way the guys who use P2P clients to download music don't have any restrictions on copying the files around and generally get a much better bitrate (read audio quality) whereas people who use iTunes or any other DRM protected website to download music legally or pay for these new "Digitally-protected" CDs end up having to deal with all these restrictions. So to me it looks like the RIAA itself wants the music lover to use the P2P clients and other pirated way of getting music rather than going the legal channel and having malware installed on the system which can't even be removed!

growing old

just today discovered a grey hair on my head which reminded me that I am 27 years (nearly 28) old and still clueless about where life is headed!