Lazy Ubuntu geek uses his Linux desktop as a baby rocker!

baby rocker

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The EAMCET exam medical topper was today denied admission into medical college because he is 15 days underage!

According to Deccan Chronicle,

The Eamcet medical topper, Mr A. Sairam, was denied a MBBS seat by the NTR University of Health Sciences because he was 15 days below the qualifying age of 17 years. Mr Sairam was, as per the date on his SSC certificate, 16 years 11 months and 16 days old on December 31, the Eamcet cut-off date.

As per norms, Eamcet officials should have rejected his application. They considered it on “humanitarian grounds” after requests from his parents. On July 17, his father, Mr Ankam Anjura, a farmer from Venkatampet village of Nalgonda, approached the Chief Minister’s Office for help. Mr Prabhakar Reddy, special secretary, directed Mrs Lakshmi Par-thasaradhi, principal secretary, higher education, to issue a GO relaxing age norm for Mr Sairam. She issued the GO on July 18.

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Starbucks is offering a free pastry on the morning of July 21st, from opening to 10:30am. Well, its not *totally free*, you have to buy coffee and they’ll give you the pastry free.

All you have to do is get there between opening and 10:30 am (or until they run out, whichever is earlier) and either show them the coupon or show it on their cell phones when they place the order. Read More.

In other unrelated news, Starbucks is opening a new bunch of stores – not tagged with the “Starbucks” name – that sell liquor along with coffee. There will be no logo, no sign, nothing. Just the local neighborhood name. Hope they rake in a little extra $$ and lower the prices of their coffee.

Toor daal prices jumped to Rs. 100 per kilogram in Tamil Nadu. It was Rs. 62 last month and is expected to jump by another Rs 20 a kilo in the next few months.

I wonder what the average people over there will eat with these kind of ridiculous prices. The government has to do something about this.

Read more at Deccan Chronicle.

The king of pop is dead, long live the king.

This is one of my favourite songs – “I’ll be there” in Acapella.

Kavya Shivashankar won the 82nd National Spelling Bee 2008 in Washington, DC, a few minutes ago. It was a very good show.The last word she said was “Laodicean“.

This was her fourth appearance in the bee. I liked the way she wrote the word on her palm with her finger before spelling it out aloud.

Kavya Shivshankar wins the Spelling Bee

Kavya spelling out a word

In this AP article,

Kavya was making her fourth appearance at the bee, having finishing 10th, eighth and fourth over the last three years. She enjoys playing the violin, bicycling, swimming and learning Indian classical dance, and her role model is Nupur Lala, the 1999 champion featured in the documentary “Spellbound.”

Read more.

On a related note, it is also the seventh time in the last decade that American kids of Indian origin have won the title. Previous winners include Nupur Lala (1999), George Thampy (2000), Pratyush Buddiga (2002), Sai Gunturi (2003), Anurag Kashyap (2005) and Sameer Mishra (2008). The first American of Indian origin to win the Bee was Balu Natarajan, followed by Rageshree Ramachandran in 1987.

Amitabh Bachchan voted. And he’s showing his voting finger. No, he’s not giving anyone the finger.

Amitabh shows his voting finger

Oracle acquired Sun today for a stock price of $9.50 per share in cash.

The transaction was made for $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net including Sun’s cash and debt.

Hopefully this acquisition goes in the positive direction. I’ve had issues with BEA WebLogic support after BEA was taken over by Oracle. Their support team is virtually non-existent now. WebLogic versions are barely being upgraded.

Looks like Oracle’s press release page has already been slashdotted.

Content Server Request Failed

Server is too busy to handle request.

Via Slashdot.

Colorado State says IE more secure than Firefox and other Mozilla browsers on its website. Their site is built on .NET and trying to submit feedback in the feedback section throws up a bunch of .NET debugging code. Anyway, this article made my day! Read more.

Today’s Award goes to these geniuses.

And this from another email, source is supposed to be an Economics professor in Georgia.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this.

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. Read more.