Dubai Open Tennis Championships 2008

Before I say anything else, I would like to thank the lord, my wife, parents and Barclays for making sure I and the best players in the Sony Ericsson WTA tour could exist within 15 metres of each other while they grunt away to glory. The atmosphere is chilled out fun… there is pizza, burger, nachos and beer available at the pubs next door to the stadium and you can watch while you eat and drink. What more can a mere mortal from over-crowded/rowdy/barely-legal-to-drink-in-pubs/badly-behaved-shoving-pushing-crowds Delhi want in life… My friends tell me that these privileges would be worth a fortune in many countries and to think that tickets are prices from AED 30 to AED 150-200 for the whole tournament here. I’m happy about being in Dubai!!

Yesterday I saw the matches between Dementieva and Schnyder and Mirza/Schiavone and Kuznetsova/Mauresmo…

The best part is that while watching tennis you feel so close to the players… the court is small and the seating area is even smaller if your last experience has been watching cricket at Eden Gardens. Hopefully I’ll be going again today to watch singles matches involving Sania and well as Sharapova. It’s time to make amends for the mistakes I committed yesterday – had forgotten to take my camera along.  Should put up a couple of the best pictures here soon…. Maybe I’ll get Sania to pose for me 😉

Playing with my SmartPhone

I have had a Dopod 818 Pro for some time now, maybe 9 months or so, and the experience has been average with a lot of good stuff fighting for supremacy with a lot of performance issues. Anyway, that’s not what I’m making this post about. My original phone looked like this:

It is a phone originally made by HTC (HTC Prophet), and sold under many different names like the Dopod 818 pro, i-mate JAMin, Dopod 830 etc. More details on the same can be found in the link wiki here

And one of the new phones from the same company, HTC, is the HTC touch incorporating Windows Mobile 6 and TouchFLO, which basically makes these Windows based phones operate a lot like the iPhone. The positive side is that these phones have a lot many features that the iPhone does not have yet, like OUTLOOK and Hotmail sync and 3.5G browsing which can make a huge difference for a lot of people.

What I have been able to do, using some guides from the wiki earlier linked, as well as brilliant threads on how to upgrade the firmware and software on your existing Windows based smartphones here and here, is to convert my old phone into the latest, newest technology. Anyone attempting, please note that they should go to the WIKI first and find out exactly what model they are using. Of course, one is responsible for their own actions and the results thereof. Finally, my old phone behaves exactly like the video below. Whew, WOW. And I am adding some more brilliant apps to it now. Like Yahoo Go! 2.0

Though the Video is made by someone else, Check it out:

Mercedes ad featuring the competition between Alonso and Hamilton

Nice piece of work from Mercedes using the hype around the competition between Hamilton and Alonso.

Damn, these guys are doing well right now. I wish Ferrari would first just get their reliability sorted out. Seems to me that Raikonnen has a thing like Montoya… their cars just keep breaking down!!!