Indian Premier League

Indian Premier League (IPL), a brainchild of BCCI or to be precise its vice-president Lalit Modi, is a Twenty20 league sanctioned by ICC. Eight franchise teams owned by business tycoons, Bollywood stars and media magnets feature in the league.

Each team will have a pool of 16 players, with a max of eight overseas players and a min of four U-22 players besides a min of four players from the catchment area as is fixed by the governing body. IPL franchises bought the best cricketers of the world thro' the players' auction held on Feb 20 in Mumbai. The franchises sans icon players - Chennai and Hyderabad - spent lavishly to net big fishes in the shape of Dhoni ($1.5m) and Symonds ($1.35m) respectively. Franchises bought players -Indian and international - of their liking from a pool of 77.

Each team will play seven others in the fray on home and away basis. The top four teams at the end of league stages will make it to semis' and bottom four will play classification ties. The inaugural event, involving 59 ties, will kick-off on Apr 18, when Mallaya-owned Bangalore Royal Challengers take on Kolkata owned by SRK at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore. The franchise teams will battle it out for 44 days for a US$3m prize money.

IPL, the billion-dollar first-of-its-kind in cricket, is loosly modelled after the mega sporting events English Premier League (EPL) a football league in UK and MLB (Baseball league in North America). However the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is: Will the much-hyped T20 league match EPL and MLB in magnitude or is this a gigantic bubble waiting to burst. Time alone will tell.

The teams that are going to take part in the inaugural IPL tournament are

• Mumbai Indians - Mukesh Ambani - Captained by Sachin Tendulkar
• Bangalore Royal Challengers - Vijay Malya - Captained by Rahul Dravid
• Chennai Super Kings - India Cements - Captained by MS Dhoni
• Delhi Daredevils - GMR Group - Captained by Virendra Sehwag
• Deccan Chargers - Deccan Chronicle - Captained by VVS Laxman
• Kolkata Knight Riders - Shah Rukh Khan/Juhi Chawla - Captained by Saurav Ganguly
• Kings XI Punjab - Preity Zinta/Ness Wadia - Captained by Yuvraj Singh
• Rajastan Royals - Emerging Media Group - Captained by Shane Warne

How to bell the CAT

Approach:
Treat each & every mock cat like a real CAT - with as much seriousness as you would treat CAT. This means that you will divide your time in doing the sections in a manner that you demonstrate your competence in all the sections so as to achieve the sectional cut-offs.

You are advised to distribute the total time available to you over various sections as per the "Test taking Strategies" session/note.

Easy questions:

A sure-shot way to conquer CAT or any other exam is to identify easy questions and doing these as fast as you can with good accuracy. The other important part is to leave most of the difficult questions so that in the given two and half hours, the number of questions that can be attempted, is maximized.

Scanning skills:

Scanning the paper to identify easy/difficult questions is an important skill that you will need to build, develop and hone with each mock CAT. A series of mock CAT tests, therefore, greatly helps in developing this ability.

Accuracy:

You should target at achieving an accuracy level of 70-80%, which means that out of every 20 questions attempted by you, at least 14 questions should be right.

Importance of Analysis:

A large number of successful students have confirmed that a "thorough analysis" of mock CAT papers was the most important ingredient in their preparation & their eventual success.

Are u depressed?

Well, obviously if you're really bad off you should really talk to a professional, but as long as you're not contemplating any ugly irreversible acts, here's something that might help.

Think of someone you know that seems pretty happy about life. How would you describe their attitude? Are they kidding themselves? Are they ignoring the ugly truth about life that's right in front of their eyes and pretending that some happy fantasy world that exists only in their heads is real? Well, guess what. That is exactly how every happy person in the world acts. And the really strange thing is that it's OK. Because the reason that you are unhappy is that you have constructed a fantasy world just as complete and just as removed from the "facts" as the Pollyanna imaginings that you so despise in those happy people.

Reality is in fact neither good nor bad, it is a very plastic inkblot sort of thing that can be bent and twisted in many directions depending on your beliefs. WHAT! you say? What about THE TRUTH? Well, that's a complicated question and it gets into the meaning of life bit that we haven't gotten to yet, but suffice it to say that what is REALLY going on is so strange, so complex, and so far beyond our everyday understanding, that it bears no relationship to what you think of as "reality", "truth", or "reason". Good and bad, happy and sad, these are notions that you are imposing on the world around you. But, more on that in part II of the Meaning of Life Page.

The answer to unhappiness is both liberating and infuriating, but here it is. Happiness doesn't depend on anything that has or has not happened in the past, nor does it depend on your future prospects (thank God, eh?). The simple fact is, in order to be happy:

YOU MUST DECIDE TO BE HAPPY

Yep. Isn't that aggravating? You can't blame it on anyone else, and no one else can do a thing for you. You've just got to decide to be happy, whether or not your logical mind thinks it is rational to be happy and whether or not your moral sense thinks you deserve to be happy. You absolutely will not be happy for any length of time until you decide to, and if you decide to, you can be happy in the face of the most miserable circumstances.

Happy deciding.

Violence in our society

There is one thing that makes people feel enough rage to commit violence, and that is a feeling of powerlessness. If people feel that they have no control over their destiny and environment, if they feel that they cannot act effectively, then they can reach a point where they believe that nothing short of violence can change their situation.

Acting effectively requires you to influence other people and to control your environment. To influence other people, they must respect you and be willing to listen to what you have to say. To control your environment, you must understand it, have the skills to affect it, and be permitted to act on it.

It should be clear that these conditions are not met very often in our society. Many people in our society are alienated from one another and have few opportunities to exert any real influence on one another. Many poor and uneducated people do not have any control over their environment whatsoever.

However, powerlessness is not the only ingredient in violence. The real question is not why people are violent, but why so many men are violent. Although women are just as capable of violence as men, crime statistics show that it is not women who are turning our urban environments into war zones.

Both men and women must abide by certain expectations. Even though people have few instincts and all of our adult behavior is learned, we labor under the misconception that men and women are biologically destined to behave completely differently. Women are supposed to be yielding, they are not expected to forcefully express their own wants and needs. Men are supposed to be dominant and commanding, and are regarded as weak if they express any tendencies to yield or to behave in a "feminine" way.

As psychologists have discovered, however, the most mentally healthy people express emotional and behavioral characteristics traditionally assigned to both sexes. The fully functioning human can be either forceful or gentle, commanding or submissive, strong or yielding, as the situation requires. Unfortunately, the acceptable range of emotions for men is rather narrow, and what happens is that men must express all of their emotional energy through the few emotions available to them. This leads to rather exaggerated expressions of strength and virility.

Now, couple this self-image men have of strength and domination with the feelings of powerlessness rife in our society, and you have a recipe for disaster. Men must express their exaggerated sense of dominance, but they are rendered impotent by their inability to act with any effectiveness. To these men, violence seems to be the only way to affect their environment.

This will continue to be a problem until men are raised differently.

Page Rank

Google PageRank (PR) is a measure from 0 -10 of how important Google thinks a webpage is. In Google's eyes a web page with a PageRank of 10/10 is very important and a web page with a PageRank of 0/10 is not very important. If you have the Google toolbar installed on your browser then it will automatically tell you the PageRank of any webpage you are looking at, if you do not have one then you can check PageRank by visiting the following website.

• PageRank Checking Tool

Generally websites with higher PageRank will get better rankings in Google's search results. Google takes into consideration many things when it is calculating PageRank, the most important factor is the amount of quality incoming links a webpage has. Generally the more quality links a webpage has, the higher the PageRank will be, therefore you can increase PageRank by gaining more quality links.

PageRank updates about once every three months. People have come up with ways of trying to predict what your PageRank is likely to be at the next update and although no one can tell for sure the guys at Iwebtool have come up with a pretty good prediction tool.

• PageRank Predictor

This tool does not always get it right, and it is mainly for entertainment purposes only. However if you work hard at link building you will see your predicted PageRank increase and when the next update comes you should see your PageRank increase.

For a more in-depth analysis of PageRank, please read Phil Cravens article PageRank Explained.

Justice

It is an illusion. A myth. A fairy tale. Life really isn't fair. The question is, why do you think it's supposed to be? Who started that idea? Job? The people who tried to put a good face on beating people up by inventing the Queensbury Rules? We don't know.

Justice sounds like a good idea because it sort of equalizes the pain. I get hurt, so you get hurt in return. Well there's more ocean than land, more roaches than roach motels, and more salesmen than prophets. Things just aren't meant to be equal. Suffering and happiness are not weights in some cosmic Martha Stewart food scale, their relative proportion is completely unpredictable, just get over it.

Here's the deal. Tragedy may be unequal, but it isn't random. Yes, there is a meaning, we're giving a bit away early here. Bad things usually happen to forcefully slap us out of whatever stupor we are in at the time. We are supposed to start questioning our beliefs. We are supposed to figure out what is and what is not important to us. People usually don't change unless they feel sufficient pain to overcome their natural resistance to change. Change takes energy. Nothing energizes like tragedy. What suffering is usually supposed to encourage us to do is figure out how to avoid suffering in the future. Find out what happy people do and imitate them. This is not rocket science.

If tragedy seems random and cruel now, it isn't. You're just not wanting to look at the facts. What facts those are exactly will be addressed in the Meaning of Life Part II.

Of course, if people don't get the hint and continue to imitate deer staring into the headlights of destiny, well, that's their lookout. Do not get mad at God/the universe/insert your cosmic principle here. Do what you're supposed to do, pick your ass up off the ground and try again. Nobody likes a crybaby.

You can't get out of it by going limp and giving up. That usually makes it worse. Athletes must tolerate a certain level of pain to reach their goals. You are no different.

As for the injustice of loved ones getting killed, etc., that has its own purpose. Don't ask unanswerable questions about other people; you've got enough to worry about with your own situation. If you get tragically killed, then you'll understand. Until then, forget it.

We have been criticized about the callous nature of this page. For people who have recently lost family members, etc., this little diatribe can sting. However, the message is still true even for them. Life is very unfair, but like chemotherapy, it does the job.

Switch: Sound Conversion Software

Switch audio file conversion software is a sound file format converter for Windows or Mac. You can convert audio files from many different file formats into mp3, wav or wma files such as wav to mp3, mp3 to wav, wma to mp3 and much more. This audio file converter is easy to use. Just add the files you want to convert, select the output format, and then click convert.

Switch is not a simply mp3 converter, it is the most comprehensive and stable audio file converter around. With Switch you can convert your sound files into the formats you need to compress for storage, create ringtones, add to a presentation, listen on your portable device and much more. In fact, the possibilities are endless using this powerful audio converter.

CLICK HERE to download this software

Supported File Formats

Converts a variety of audio file formats to mp3 or wav such as:

wav, mp3, mp2, mpga,

m4a, ogg, avi, mid

flac, aac, wma, dct,

au, aiff, ogg, raw,

msv, dvf, vox, cda,

atrac, gsm, dss, sri

shn, dss, msv, wmv

Try this out. This software rocks.

National Do Not Call registry (NDNC)

Disturbance from your mobile service provider? Wanna avoid getting unwarranted telemarketing calls? Here is the way to do that.
There is something called as National Do Not Call Registry(NDNC) set up by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India(TRAI). Subscribers who do not want to recieve unsolicited calls can register over here. Once you register, it takes 45 days to process your request. This is totally free of cost. If you continue receiving these calls even after the deadline of 45 days, you can file a complaint with TRAI, which in turn will penalise the service provider.

The NDNC Registry will be a data base having the list of all telephone numbers of the subscribers who do not want to receive UCC.After the establishment of NDNC registry, Telephone subscriber (Landline or mobile) who does not wish to receive UCC, can register their telephone number with their telecom service provider for inclusion in the NDNC. Telecom Service Provider shall upload the telephone number to the NDNC within 45 days of receipt. The Telemarketer will have to verify their calling telephone numbers list with the NDNC registry before making a call. To discourage the telemarketers who make calls to the numbers registered in Do Not Call List, a provision has been made whereby Rs.500/ - shall be payable by the telemarketer to the service provider for every first unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) and Rs.1000/- shall be payable for subsequent UCC. There is a provision for disconnection of the telemarketer telephone number / telecom resource if the UCC is sent even after levy of Rs.500/- & Rs.1000/- tariff. In case of non-compliance to the Telecom Unsolicited Commercial Communications Regulations, 2007, the Service Provider is also liable to pay an amount by way of financial disincentive, not exceeding Rs.5000/- for first non-compliance of the regulation and in case of second or subsequent such non-compliance, an amount not exceeding Rs.20,000/- for each such non-compliance.

Radio Revolution

Radio industry in India is set for a big boom in the coming years. Many private FM stations are getting launched everyday in almost all the big cities of our country. Many years back before TV was invented, radio was the only source of entertainment. But when TV came into existence, the FM, which comprises of frequency band from 87 to 108 MHz, lost its popularity . There were only maximum of 2 FM stations in big cities, that too run by the Govt. of India.

But things have changed these days. Private FM stations have taken over and are ruling the air waves. Advertising slots are queing up and the advertisers do not mind shelling out a few extra pounds for a slot in a popular FM station that too in prime time. These stations get somewhere close to 1500-2000 bucks for a 20 sec slot in prime time. The number of people who listen to FM are increasing day by day and are catching up with the ones who watch TV. As Radio recievers have become cheaper(you can get a FM reciever for as low as Rs.50), even a common man can afford it.

These FM stations attract listeners by including interactive programmes wherein the listener can speak with the RJ and ask for a song to be played for him/her. Because of this radio revolution, the demand for RJs has gone up. RJ ing has become a popular profession these days, but RJing is not an easy job. It requires some special skills such as good oratory, voice modulation etc. RJs are paid handsomely and as a result many youngsters are attracted into this field.

As far as Chennai is concerned, there are total of 9 stations(7 private and 2 Govt.) which play non-stop music for 24 hours. There is stiff competition among these stations and they mainly target the youth section of the listeners comprising the age group of 15 to 30. Almost all the stations start with spiritual music in the morning followed by an rather soft breakfast time programmes. The tempo of the songs played increases slowly as the day progresses. They also conduct various SMS contests to attract many ppl. Some stations conduct mapping survey among the ppl of a particular city about the kind of music they like to hear at a particular time. So, is this the beginning of what we can say as a "Radio Revolution"??

Happy New Year

Wish u all a very happy and a prosperous new year 2008. May all your wishes come true and you reach a great height in your life.