US media goes gaga over 1-1 draw with England

Within minutes of the unexpected 1-1 draw with England, online media in the US flooded their front screen with pictures of the terrible goof by the English goalie and narrated the US "victory" as if it was all in the making. I tried to get screengrabs of few popular sites of the moment...

(Click to enlarge the images.)

World Cup 2010: Round 16 predictions

All the Group winners are the expected powerhouse in their own category. Except for Group G with Brazil and Portugal as FIFA World Rankings Top 10 teams, all other groups have one top-10 team from last year (sans Croatia). There are several high-powered matches I'm not going to miss -- such as today's England-USA, or Netherlands-Denmark, Brazil-Portugal, Spain-chile, even Italy-Paraguay. Since the top two in each group will move to Round 16, here's my prediction of who will move through: (Of course, you'll disagree!)


Group A
Mexico
Uruguay (France misses Zidane badly.)

Group B
Argentina (already ahead with 1-0 win over Nigeria)
South Korea (2-0 win over Greece is an impressive start)

Group C
England
USA (Unless Algeria does some miracle!)

Group D
Germany
Ghana (I'm betting on them this time.)

Group E
Netherlands
Cameroon (Just can't pick the Danes over them.)

Group F
Italy (Waka Waka Italia!)
Paraguay

Group G
Brazil (If anyone says they aren't going up to QF, it's blasphemy.)
Portugal

Group H
Spain
Chile


Round 16 rule: Group A winner plays Group B runner up, Group B winner plays Group A runner up, Group C winner vs. Group D runner up...and so on.

(A1) Mexico vs. (B2) South Korea

(B1) Argentina vs. (A2) Uruguay

(C1) England vs. (D2) Ghana

(D1) Germany vs. (C2) USA

(E1) Netherlands vs. (F2) Paraguay

(F1) Italy vs. (E2) Cameroon

(G1) Brazil vs. (H2) Chile

(H1) Spain vs. (G2) Portugal


More prediction to follow.....

Microsoft launches Office Web Apps

Finally, Microsoft throws the gauntlet to Google to launch its own browser-based popular Office applications. Until now Google enjoyed some dominance with its own version of Docs while also rolling out features through its Labs. Now Microsoft played a good catch-up with its own Office Web Apps prior to the launch of Office 2010 next week. Since Zoho isn't very popular yet and the open-source OpenOffice.org might take a while to jump in the cloud-computing wagon, Microsoft's latest roar would be heard loud and wide.

How can you access Office Web Apps?

You'll need an account with Windows Live to access the online suite. (Your Hotmail account works.) Once you are logged in, go to the link "Office" on top. You can use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote almost like the desktop version. You can try other products if you download the trial version.

I tried using all applications on both PC and Mac and tried it on IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome and didn't really notice any difference. It was a seamless experience, except when I tried to use on IE it wanted me to download Silverlight for better performance. I haven't opened an IE browser for more than a year now!

But I think the biggest bonus of this online experience is the 25GB free online storage space on SkyDrive. You can park your files, share, sync and also download them to a local drive. However, you still need to get online to edit documents. If only this generous space could be used for all-purpose no-size-limit upload/download files, it would be better than Dropbox or ADrive or any other free online cloud drive.

These Office Web Apps are a good start for Web-based computing if you have good connectivity. Perhaps, Microsoft could also add some features of Google Wave, such as simultaneous editing and play back. As of now, I am not complaining.

Nepali Comedy: छोरी को बिहे (Daughter's marriage)

A Nepali comedy by Shiva Hari Poudel and Niru Khadka. Video released after 50 days!