An Actor called Tom Hanks

Had a chance to watch the movie Philadelphia today. Wow! what a movie. Great movie. Have you ever watched 'Castaway', 'Philadelphia' or 'Forrest Gump'? Then you must be a fan of Tom Hanks. No one can deny the excellent piece of acting this actor performs. One of the best actors of this era.

Be it the physique that is required or voice or style or expression, this actor has a great passion towards exhibiting the best. He totally gets involved with the role. Very dedicated. The Oscar winner for best acting was nominated for five times and won twice - once for Philadelphia and once for Forrest Gump.

The punching dialogs that he delivered in most of the movies stay ringing always - "Mama told me to run" or "I made it" or "Every problem has a solution"

Great actor!

Artificial Intelligence

Had a chance to finish watching the movie today. The movie starts with a nice topic at a faster pace just for few min (may be I should say few hours as the movie itself is so long :-( ) But as the movie goes along, it drags so much (indeed, as the movie spans more than 2000 years). Spielberg could have ended the movie an hour ago, unnecessarily pulling it. At some point of time, the movie turns from an adult movie to a child movie. He must have got totally lost on what could be done.

I know well that we want robots to think but we don't want them to dominate. If this had been the message tried to be conveyed, he could have told much easier.

On an interesting note, I don't know how the David robot could survive for 2000 years. Do we have (or expect) batteries that last for 2000 years? Give me a break!

Thank God I watched it on a video! I am not sure if I would have sat in the theater for so long.

Web Services

I have been taking a training on J2EE and the instructor was kind enough to spend an additional hour to brief me about the latest buzz word - Web Services. He gave a quick overview about this and did a demo (writing actual code) for using a Web Service already available and to develop a Web Service all using Apache's AXIS.

Wow! how quick is it to develop one. I recall the olden days when I used to write applications in RMI trying to cram the classes and methods and interfaces. With AXIS, you create the code in no time. Everything in Web Services revolves around the WSDL file (WSDL stands for Web Services Development Language) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

Very interesting to learn!

Trivia: Have you ever noticed the login info on eBay - Sign-in using .NET. This is Web Service given by Microsoft Passport

Love with shredder

After reading so many sad stories about Identity Theft (do you know? Identity Theft is the No. 1 crime in US now), I thought I will also buy a shredder. Walmart sells it for under $15 for a decent one. Mine was $14 one with a basket that takes up to 5 sheets and shredds into 3 mm width pieces. Ever since I bought I was fancy of shredding lot of letters I get apart from the pre-approved credit cards. These included Win a Million Dollar coupons too (See, I am not greedy :-)

Now I understand what a pleasure it is to shred. Last week news says that over 20,000 documents were shredded by an INS official that includes visa, green card and other immigration applications.

May be someone else is as fancy as I!

Boy, its Microsoft

Frustrated with the long day and week, I thought of checking out careers elsewhere available, I thought 'why not Microsoft'. I go to www.microsoft.com and click careers and oops! I get a 'page not found'.

What a frustration! I never expected this from Microsoft. Although hotmail and msn were down for couple of days last year owing to some hack, Microsoft website itself not showing up the links was something not expected. FYI, I am a fond lover of Microsoft, its OS and my favorite is hotmail.

I recall what Bill Gates said in one of the recent seminars on what is his dream in Microsoft - to build a more stable computer! May be we should add, 'we need a better and connected internet too' :-)

BLOGs

This has been the buzz word off late. Saw my colleague writing this in his homepage (davisfamilyonline) When I was talking to my brother, he was mentioning about an article on how to write a BLOG. Pretty cool one. Believe it, it has become so popular that there are couple of books on this. Just search in my favorite search engine Google with the word BLOG and see for yourself how many websites talk about this.

So did I think, why not try this.