Man of the Series - 'The Pitch'?

       The recently concluded India-SA series was an interesting one and in the end I think the team better suited to the conditions won. India had some good spinners and a couple of batsmen who could play spinners better than their counterparts. SA on the other hand, did pretty well and should be pleased with the lessons they learnt on playing quality spinners on spinner friendly tracks. 

       One thing that was discussed a lot, was the quality of the pitches used for the series, especially the one in Nagpur. One of the key arguments against the pitch was that it was turning square right from day one of the test. While this in itself is not a problem, the fact that both teams did not manage a score in excess of 220 was seen as a consequence of it. I believe any pitch that exaggerates the effort of the bowler in a helpful way, while still being consistent, should be deemed a good pitch. For example,

TRIP TO LIVERMORE

    On a sunny afternoon a few weeks back, I decided to take a friend of mine for a joy plane ride around 2 pm. We were initially planning on a standard bay tour, taking off from Palo Alto and flying over the Colosseum and Bay Bridge over to the Golden Gate, and returning via Half Moon Bay. Unfortunately, there was a TFR over the SF bay and so we decided to fly in and around the South Bay area. We took off with a customary left dumbarton departure with the hope of getting to half moon bay and back before the late afternoon clouds cover the coast. As we neared the crystal springs lake, I began to realize that flying into Half Moon Bay might be a risky option, given the rate at which the clouds were closing in. So yet again, we had to change plans and this time I decided to transition over to Livermore after hovering a couple of minutes over Stanford. Catching a glimpse of the Cardinals and Buffaloes game in the Stanford Stadium (there was a TFR for a 3 mile radius around the Stanford Stadium as well), we headed over towards the Dumbarton

GRIPES WITH GOOGLE READER

    I have been a loyal Google Reader user for quite sometime but there have been some nagging usability issues that either I have been unable to work around or are simply not addressed by the reader.     

    One of the issues is to do with a count for the starred items. I know that I can get this information from the trends tab but would be nice to be able to see it right beside the items (as is the case for other news items and subscriptions). Also, some more freedom in terms of different ways the items can be viewed would really help. For example, I generally follow the pattern of briefly glancing through news items in the day (or week for that matter) and read them in the night (or weekends). For this, I really need to be able to sort the starred items in the reverse chronological order, else it almost seems like I am watching a news version of the movie Memento with all the events happening in reverse. I know that I could just browse all the way to the bottom and start reading in the reverse order but, am sure, any normal blog reader would

MY EXPERIMENTS WITH THE PALM PIXI PLUS 

    Just finished setting up my new palm pixi plus and it works like a charm. I did have some trouble getting it to work with an ATT prepaid sim initially. For some reason it was failing at the profile creation stage. I was all set to tread on the tried and tested path of installing the WebOS sdk and using devicetools.jar to bypass activation as suggested by many helpful souls, but out of some whim, I just tried using the profile credentials I had created while buying a different HP product a while back, and it just started working! I was  then able to set it up for working on the wifi only mode without the cellular data plan (which was the whole point anyway