Surely the word ‘Mendis’ will strike fear among the players in the Indian dressing room and I, for one, wouldn’t want to be in their shoes now. The team has no clue to his ‘carrom’ ball release and succumbed to his bowling yet again. Indians put up a below par performance and scored a humble 146 runs in the first ODI. Sri lankans, whose batting is as good as their bowling licked up the Indian bowling attack with ease.

Murali and Mendis are still a mystery, waiting to be unravelled. I don’t know how long the players are going to take to attack them, but I sure wish that should happen soon. It is not a good sign for the players to surrender meekly to a puppet boy’s bowling.

Phelps scored yet another gold, taking his total tally of gold medals to 8, in the Beijing olympics 4×100 m relay and broke Mark spitz’s 36 year old record. Asked how he felt by breaking the record, he said “Records are meant to be broken, no matter how large it is and who set it”. How true…

Mark spitz congratulated phelps for the phenomenal achievement and urged many youngsters to give importance to swimming. Phelps is ‘THE MAN’ in swimming, just like Usain bolt is ‘THE MAN’ in athletics.

August 16th, 2008 is a memorable day for Jamaica. The Beijing Olympics found a gold medal  winner in 100 m final, and Jamaica can safely claim that a Jamaican named Usain Bolt is the fastest living homo sapien in this planet. As the name suggests, he ran like a lightning bolt shot from the sky and completed 100 meters in 9.69 seconds, followed by Trinidadian with 9.89 seconds. That is one huge lead! Asafa powell disappointed and Tyson gay never even made it to the finals.

So the better man is Usain bolt for another 4 years from now. Well, one needs to think about the plight of India and an Indian. When will an Indian step into 100 m final? I do hope it will happen by 2020 (According to our Honorable Ex-President Abdul Kalam).

Eclipse has always fascinated me. Nope, I am not talking about IBM’s Eclipse IDE. Its Solar and Lunar eclipse. Quick tip: During a Solar eclipse, we have a New moon and during a Lunar eclipse, we have a Full moon.

Now then, my question is, If moon isn’t a natural satellite and it get luminated by Sun, how come we have a Full moon on lunar eclipse?. Earth is completely in between Sun and the Moon and moon gets shadowed under earth’s umbra. How come there is a full moon? How come moon radiates light when there isn’t any source?

Here is a useful link I found while googling, and it contains a lot of information about the Earth, the Sun and the Moon:

The Earth, The Sun and The Moon

Another information is that next total lunar eclipse is going to occur on December, 2010.

When Batman begins was released way back in 2005, I wasn’t interested in watching the movie. Reason 1, Quite frankly, I never liked batman. I always thought ‘The guy is so loaded with weaponry and still he can jump, fly and do all the superhuman-ish stuff? FTW!’. Reason 2, I got some negative reviews about wasting your money on a movie that you are not going to understand unless you see it twice. Marc, however, had a different opinion and asked me to see Batman begins before seeing ‘The Dark Knight’.  Trust me, it worked.

You see, the batman franchisee was falling apart. With lame episodes in Star World (Batman and Robin with all the “BHAM.. WHAM.. BOOM” texts on the screen.. Yeach! However, Warner brothers did a great thing by giving the script to Chris nolan. A man who is known to make excellent scripts and a knack for direction. It is after quite some time(a lot of time) I’m watching the movie, but sure I’m not disappointed. I’m looking forward to watch ‘The Dark Knight’ at Sathyam soon.

I saw it coming and I felt it bigtime. I sat before my computer for long hours after a long time to solve a freaking problem. The problem statement is very simple. Install eclipse, use its update feature to download Websphere Community edition plugin and run your fugging JSP page. There, sweet and short. Sounds easy, but it turned out to be a pain in the ass.

Like Elmer Fudd of Looney tunes, “I twied and I twied again and again”… Only to be let down by the machine in college. I got fired up when I found that Java 1.6 isn’t good enough for the WASCE and downgraded it to Java 1.5. Lo and Behold! IBM WASCE installed without a hitch and I was able to execute the JSP page very well. The only thing left to be done is adding JSP code.

It all narrows down to one sentence. Man conquers machine yet again. Hell yeah!

Football is always a simple game. No confusions, fuss, rules etc. Simple tactic. Guide the ball with your foot, score a goal by outwitting the opposition. That was the case with the second semifinal match. Spain simply pounded the Russians 3-0 to make it to the final. However, Germany couldn’t win as effectively as Spain, with Turkey having effectively scored equalizers for goals by Bastian Schweinsteiger and Miroslav Klose, and the match was heading towards extra time. But Germany managed to oust Turkey out of the tournament, thanks to last minute goal from Philip Lahm

Results:

Germany bt Turkey 3-2
Spain bt Russia 3-0

Final : Germany vs Spain and it is going to be one rocking thriller!

1. Shocker # 1 - England - Failing to qualify for Euro 2008
2. Shocker # 2 - Italy - Humbled by Netherlands 3-0 (What happened to Gigi Buffon?!)
3. Shocker # 3 - France - Les Bleus beaten black and blue
4. Shocker # 4 - Portugal - Making exit after not so good beginning
5. Shocker # 5 - Italy and Netherlands crashing out at quarter finals

This cup has been an event with twists and turns.

Semi finals

1. Turkey vs Germany
2. Russia vs Spain

Boy, this game is getting better and better!