Shanker Balan

Got my Facebook vanity URL!!!

2009-06-14T12:24:03Z

http://www.facebook.com/shanker.balan

Mirrored from shankerbalan.net.

French Open 2009

2009-05-24T06:46:57Z

The French Open 2009 begins today. /me hopes for a Nadal/Federer final and may the best man win!

Mirrored from shankerbalan.net.

Samsung LN46A550P1

2009-03-15T12:25:01Z

Something to fill up the entertainment room….

Samsung LN46A550P1

Mirrored from shankerbalan.net.

tracklistings.net no more?

2009-03-01T08:24:15Z

tracklistings.net used to be a very well organized site for BBC Radio1 Essential Mix Series and John Digweed Transitions tracklistings.

Seems to have become a domain squat portal filled with ads now. Sucks!

Mirrored from shankerbalan.net.

Television Is Starting To Look Good Again

2009-01-14T07:10:13Z

After what I would call 2008 a very boring year for television, 2009 is starting to look very promising…

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from shankerbalan.net.

Moving To Wordpress

2009-01-04T09:58:14Z

The other day Shreyas was telling me about how he was part of moving Radioverve and Mundu website over to WordPress. shankerbalan.net was due for an overhaul and I decided to go with Wordpress to replace the goo I had running there currently.

So over the last 2 days, I moved everything over to Wordpress 2.7 + plugins. Imported all my Live Journal entries, had Mark Symonds (my hosting provider) create new subdomains and put in custom 404s, categorized the mediawiki entries… everything is mostly done now.

It took me quite a while to redo the Mediawiki pretty url configuration because I broke it during the move and didnt have a backup of LocalSettings.php and .htaccess. Most of today was spent unbreaking mediawiki and mod_rewrite. Well, its fixed now and multiple backups made for all config files!

The next big item is to unify the theme across coppermine, wordpress and mediawiki.

Homepage Project Plan
MediaWiki And Pretty URLs

(PS: I hope the JournalPress plugin publishes this post to both my LJ accounts)

Mirrored from shankerbalan.net.

Yahoo Cab Lunch

2008-12-28T06:37:33Z

Once upon a time, the Mathikera/New BEL road YBS cab was fun and happening. But now, with the more people per route and people moving to other locations, we are not able to catch up outside Yahoo as much as we did before.

Penchal got off his butt and arranged for a lunch over at his place with the yummiest Andhra veggie spread ever...

http://shankerbalan.net/coppermine/thumbnails.php?album=37

Tennis

2008-12-10T18:29:54Z

After 8 long years, I played tennis. Twice in 2 days!!!

Shreyas and I are tennis buddies now. Both of us have taken "tennis only" memberships at the RMV club (Dollars Colony) which is very close to my home. The plan is to practice atleast thrice a week in the evenings. Shreyas works close by so the court location is convenient for him too.

Court movement, strokes and stamina are non existent at this time. I think it would take atleast a 2 weeks full time to get halfway decent with the game.

Looking forward to the weekend now! :)

Steve Porter At Ruby Skye

2008-09-21T18:44:17Z

Went for this and now plan to go to this. I am going to be sober for DeadMau5 cause I cant remember a darn thing about last nights party :)

So I did make it to the Deadmau5 set but got to the club very late. Was almost 2310 by the time we got there and were greeting by a long Q outside. Took another 35 minutes to get in. Deadmau5 started only by midnight so it was ok.

The set was particularly very good. The rock/break/electro change of pace before Daft Punk's harder better faster stronger (Deadmau5 Edit) was probably the best part of the show. The boring part of the show is that most of the tracks are Deadmau5 productions (because youve already heard it so many times).

Oh, I didnt book tickets in advance when I had the chance, ended up paying 40$ instead of the pre show rate of 25$. I could kick myself for being lazy. And I seem to have deleted the event pics off the memory card and iPhoto (Doh).

This should be my last weekend in California. Looking forward to an equally happening weekend in HK this week.

Happy Onam 2008

2008-09-12T09:45:36Z

Apparently, flights on 9/11 to the US is going very cheap and I was lucky enough to get into one of those to travel to Santa Clara, CA. The flight was very turbulant which meant that something exciting kept happening every couple of hours or so which even the Wine could not help me with.

So here I am finaly in Santa Clara for my first Onam out of India. Friday's goal is to find a Mallu place for an Onam Sadhya. Waking up at 2AM in the morning should help me get a head start. :)

Happy onam everybody!!! Wonder whats on TV! :-\

Bandish Projekt

2008-08-02T05:42:32Z

Saw these guys at Fuga last night. Soundz of the Asian Underground. w00t!

Most of the crowed didnt get it but WTF.

Infected Mushrooms Touring India

2008-08-02T04:24:27Z

Live set at Palace Grounds on 6th Nov 2008. W00t!

http://www.infected.co.il/futureCitySkin/

National Do Not Call Registry

2008-07-30T10:17:50Z

So I added my number as instructed at http://ndncregistry.gov.in/ndncregistry/index.jsp and promptly received back a "The DND service is already active for your Vodafone mobile number". Ohkay, so I dont recall adding it in the first place.

But this does not seem to be so in real life. What gives?

Star Wars in 3D

2008-07-26T15:40:53Z

Perfect weekend news.

http://bitstream.soundandvisionmag.com/blog/2008/07/star-wars-3d.html

Lost: A Theory on Time Travel

2008-05-01T13:27:39Z

Lost reading for the long weekend - http://www.timelooptheory.com/the_timeline.htm

'Wanderlust' in 3-D

2008-04-21T07:40:26Z

Bjork's videos are always cool. The new one even more so.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2008/04/bjork_wanderlust_3d_video

Happy Vishu

2008-04-14T13:02:39Z

Vishu special http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasathanthram on Asianet today. I reached home early to catch this movie. Apparantly, its the biggest hit in malayalam cinema. I dont expect it to be anything like the old Sathyan Anthikad stuff, but should be better than the recent mallu fare.

Saw Katha parayumpol at PVR last evening, pretty Ok stuff from Sreenivasan. He usually does something more satirical.

Knight Rider returns?

2008-02-19T08:51:25Z

Knight Rider 2008 anyone?

http://www.newtorrents.info/torrent/36901/Knight.Rider.2008.Pilot.720p.HDTV.X264-DIMENSION.html

DJ Tiesto Missed Bangalore

2008-02-17T16:37:23Z

Thanks to the brilliant ban on dancing, Bangalore missed out on DJ Tiesto. Suxor.

http://www.submerge.in/bulletin/showthread.php?t=4370

Consolidating IM contact lists

2008-02-13T10:31:53Z

My IM group called "Ex-$employer" just grew 10x today.

Daily Mallu Movies on Kiran TV

2008-01-22T14:07:59Z

Kiran TV seems to be running Malayalam movies everyday at around 1930 IST. Whee! :)

Getting burnt quick...

2008-01-11T15:45:14Z

Lately, I have been getting completely burnt out after my oncall shifts. Oncall is for a week where for 8 hours I am the primary contact for everything that goes wrong at work. There have been periods when I have for weeks been doing this sort of thing without feeling pooped out. But not lately.

I have had two red bulls today and am still feeling tired. Lack of Oxygen maybe? Hmm...

Doctor Who

2008-01-09T15:33:31Z

Once in a while a fun sci-fi series comes this way... this time its a very old cult classic called Doctor Who. BBC Entertainment, 2030 IST.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who

Saw II

2008-01-05T08:13:15Z

Saw II played on Star Movies last night, not anywhere as gripping as the first one. For once I slept off by 2230 just by watching the Telly.

shankerbalan @ 2008-01-05T13:40:00

2008-01-05T08:11:00Z

Nice little new year's eve live mix from The Crystal Method from Ruby Skye, San Francisco . Went there twice when I visited Snv earlier this year - fantastic sound.

http://www.newmixes.com/crystal_method-live_at_ruby_skye_nye-sat-01-01-2008.html