Crazy And Geek!

I came across a site - Gadgets 4 all. Really wacky geek items offered for sale had caught my eye. Though the products listed may not be for everybody’s liking, it does make for a good read. I have listed the ones that have caught my attention.

USB Aircraft Mouse: This mouse is as the name suggests shaped like an aircraft and comes in different colors.

USB Golf Mouse: The entire package includes a mouse with golf ball texture, a golf course mouse pad, a golf club, a golf ball and a flag. Care for a putt anyone?

USB T-shirt Mouse:  Remotely resembles a T-shirt.

 

The Fever Of Maillot Jaune

When the festival ended last year, it left me craving for more. It was a festival of team-spirit, embodying the spirit of sacrifice. Eight men riding on their magnificent machines, with one aim: their team leader finishing first. Eight men, with no regard to their placing or ranking in the race, working as a team to make sure the team leader finishes first and more importantly safely without crashing. Eight men, who are willing to push themselves to such an extent for the team that they find themselves being eliminated from the race. And not to forget, they need to ride through the pain barrier, covering almost 200 – 300 kilometers every day, for 20 days. They need to face their own demons in the process, their own personal battles, discovering a new limit to which they need to push and go beyond. A unique festival, which silently speaks of blood, sweat and tears; literally. At the end of the festival, each rider has his own sordid tale to tell for generations to come, but nothing comes to close to this one single phrase “I was a part of the team that had won.” Around 190 riders, 19 teams with 9 men in each team, it was truly a festival of sport itself.

A festival called “ Tour de France.”

With merely hours left as I write this post for the Tour de France – 2008 to begin, another epic in the making, of which I am sure.

It’s a majestic sight to behold. Around 200 cyclists bunched up close, almost touching wheels, yet, riding at speeds of 30-40 miles per hour; it seems these cyclists are out to enjoy the sunshine. Of course, it requires exceptional bike handling skills to ride in a bunch so close to each other. But when they crank it up, the entire ‘peloton’ (the whole bunch of riders which contains the leader) often gets stretched into a straight line 2-3 kilometers long, moving over 60 miles per hour.

The Tour de France started in 1903 and is the world's largest cycle race. The first Tour de France was designed as a publicity stunt for the French sports newspaper L’Auto, a race that was for the most gutsy and tough of professional cyclists of the time. In all, 54 men have shared 87 Tour de France wins between them, riding thousands of kilometers in search of their holy grail, the yellow jersey, also known as the Maillot Jaune. It’s called the yellow jersey because the pages of the newspaper, L'Auto is yellow.

It is a 23-day, 21-stage bicycle road race usually run over more than 3,500 kilometers. The race consists of 20 to 22 teams with nine riders each. The route traces a circuit around most areas of France, and often passes into neighboring countries. The race is broken into stages from one town to another, each of which is an individual race. The time taken to complete each stage is added to a cumulative total for each rider, to decide the outright winner at the end of the Tour.

The 2008 Tour de France is set to begin on July 5th, running until July 27th, 2008.

Image Source: BBC, SMH.com

Flash Files Can Be Googled Too!

Now this should be music to the ears of those who own sites which are flash based. All this while, those who had opted for flash templates for their websites or blogs had no way to make their content searchable using the search engines.

Of course, I had come across a different breed, who were actually proud that their content was immune from all those search spiders crawling the net, indexing whatever they could come across. The reason was that their sites were purely flash based. They felt supreme, their power to hide information from the ubiquitous, the all powerful search bots or spiders; more like “Neo: The One.” (Not all of them were big fans of the movie though)

Come to think of it, it gives me goose bumps. Search engines are getting more powerful as time passes by. They are almost at a point (at least Google is) where you put some piece of information out on the net and they find it (and index it). The naysayers were right after all. There is no such thing as “privacy.”

Enough of me rambling; let me come back to the topic. Adobe is said to be canoodling with Google and Yahoo to make content from flash files/applications available to search engines. I never imagined that files with “.swf” extension will be returned in a search result. Well I guess there is always a time for “first time.”

But there is a catch here. Not all content from a flash file can be made available for search. Images and videos are still out of bounds from those niggly web crawlers. So if the flash files contain images or videos, they will not be recognized by the spiders.

As of today, Google has already implemented this feature with Yahoo set to follow. With regard to other search engines/vendors, Adobe says that it is willing to tie up with them. Also look out for new set of tools from Adobe to help flash site builders to optimize search results, which will be available shortly.