Services like Orkut, Facebook, MySpace even Ebay, Feedburner Feeds and other newsletters are known to literally flood inboxes every single day. This shit however cannot be termed as spam as more often than not, these are actually important. However, you still end up unsubscribing these notifications choking the very cause they were created for. The only solution to it is to manage these mails better. How do you do that? Here’s a tip.

I’ve always believed that Google Mail (gmail) is much better than Yahoo Mail. I’ve been using gmail ever since they had given out a few thousand accounts. One great feature of Gmail is ‘filters’. Though few people use filters, filters happen to be my backbone in managing all the shit those social networking sites drop in your inbox. Even fewer people know that a mail sent to <usename>+<something>@gmaiil.com will still be delivered to <username>@gmaiil.com For eg: angad619+orkut@gmaiil.com is the same as angad619@gmaiil.com! Try it out if you wish. (but send yourself an email not me. DUH!) So I suggest when you sign up at any site say Orkut, provide the email address <username>+orkut@gmaiil.com

How will that help? Here’s where Gmail’s filters come to the rescue. In my case, Orkut is gonna send all mails to angad619+orkut@gmaiil.com. So I know that the ‘To’ field of their mails has to be angad619+orkut… instead of plain simple angad619. Therefore I create a filter that has ‘angad619+orkut@gmaiil.com’ as it’s ‘To’ field. Further, I can add a label, say ‘orkut’, to it. Also tick the ‘Skip the inbox’ option.

Your inbox will never show mails from orkut again! However, they can be found under the label ‘orkut’. Tinker around a bit more and put mails from all other services under the filters. There you go. Breathe easy in a clutter free inbox!

However, some sites won’t allow you to have a ‘+’ symbol in your email address. Too bad the trick won’t work in that case. Also, social networking sites like MySpace and Orkut allow you to alter the email address of your existing profile, but Facebook doesn’t allow that. This trick can be used wherever you are asked to submit your email address.

Note: 1.In this post I’ve used gmaiil.com instead of gmail.com just for the heck of it. Just an attempt to get whatever security it can provide!
2.This trick can also be used to find out which service is giving out your email address to the baddies. Suppose xyz.com is a site that gives out free horoscoped and you decide to signup with the email <user>+xyz@gmail.com. The next day you receive span sent to ‘<user>+xyz’, you know who to catch hold of!

Super Note: This post is the first of the category ‘Tips n Tricks’. Expect many more in the near future. If you like this one, consider subscribing to my feeds or signing up for email notifications here:

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Creating slick looking banners is one of the tasks most novice site developers are forever bogged down with. I remember having created, modified, trashed and once again created new banners every few days. But if change is what beguiles you the most, creating every other banner from scratch every time may not be a good idea. Instead you might want to make use of plain text in really wacky fonts. UrbanFonts.com is one site I happened to come across and is definitely worth a mention. The site has thousands of mesmerizing fonts. You can download fonts and use em with your text editor but you don’t necessarily have to. For the purpose of creating banners, you could just punch in text and have images rendered for you in a flash! No downloads needed, no irritating download limits, no wait times at all. And the best part is - these fonts are absolutely free!!! The site has selflessness stamped all over it!!

These are some of my favorites:

Life as a Mumbai University engineering student is getting tough. The days are spent in attending endless hours of mind crunching but mostly boring lectures and the nights are spend in jotting down numerous assignments mindlessly. Do I get time to study? Probably just a couple of minutes every day. Do I get time for blogging? Heck, not at all!

So at times when I don’t get the time to come up with something creative, I would like to share some of the good posts I’ve come across in the recent past. They may be from blogs I regularly read, pages that I’ve stumbled across or even pages that some of this blog’s readers have suggested.

This page that I stumbled across deserves a special mention. Absolutely stunning wildlife photos! Here’s a sneak peek at some of these beauties. The entire collection can be viewed at http://www.younggalleryphoto.com/photography/brandt/brandt.html They are up for sale. So you could even buy them. Every pic is worth a photo frame on your wall!

All of these spectacular visuals and many more can be found at http://www.younggalleryphoto.com/photography/brandt/brandt.html

I’d like to keep this post short n sweet. Err actually not sweet at all. I’ll just let these pics do the talking.

Do your bit for the Indian Tiger:
1) Sign the NDTV petition. Head to NDTV and drop in your name and Email address
2) You can also send an SMS Tigeryour message to 56388

Help raise awareness. Do your bit. Else our next generation may never see the stripped beast ever again. Probably Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes’s Tony might be the only tiger our kids could relate to in the near future.

Think Hatke (think differently) may not sounds like your regular tag-line for a mobile service provider. But wait till you see the very first TV commercial by Virgin Mobile India. Looks like they made up this tag-line just for this commercial!

Just for my readers from outside India, here’s a translation:

Daughter: Dad, I’m not interested in guys!
Parents look at each other and blame the other for . . . . . you know what.
Mom to Dad: It’s all your fault. All-girls school was your idea.
Dad: Ya, but you could have let her mingle with other boys from our building.

Just then the phone rings. She puts down the phone rather grumpily. She tells her parents that it’s some guy from her class who’s invited her to Goa and that she’s not interested. Her parents suggest that she take more interest in boys and go out with them!

That brings a smirk to her face. Goa is on!!

Now that’s ‘Thinking Differently’!!!

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Useful Links:
Virgin Mobile India homepage
Virgin Mobile India Launch

For a company of any stature, a website can be a good asset to improve sales. For a blogger (like me), his blog or personal site can be his means to fame and even riches. The most important, and probably the most underestimated, aspect about getting more from your site is creating awareness about it. Plenty of tactics help raise awareness… Internet marketing, campaigns, ppc (pay-per-clicks) and the big daddy of them all – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Optimizing for search engines requires analyzing your website, studying your target audience identifying keywords etc. You could do that all by yourself or you could just hire the GURU – TheBigIdentityGuru. More famously known as BIG, thebigidentityguru.com is one of the best companies in the world of SEO. A good SEO company must be up to date with the functionality of all popular search engines and BIG is known to be one of the best in doing just that. BIG promises guaranteed inclusion in the top 10 search results on Google, Yahoo and other major search engines. With results like those, be sure your target client will come just to you.

As the official website states, BIG promises to:

A comprehensive web site analysis (goals assessment, target market profile, and surveys on industry status and past success) Assessment of your competition’s search engine positioning Keyword and popularity breakdown Search engine optimized copywriting File name, meta and body tag optimization Manual submissions to search engines and directories Comprehensive review and analysis of performance Complete maintenance and monitoring services Research on reciprocal link opportunities and implementation Online promotions for your website

Hire BIG and they’ll take care of SEO, internet marketing, directory submissions and other stuff so that you can concentrate on the real deal – making the perfect content for your site!

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If you want your website/product reviewed at AngadSodhi Dot Com, feel free to contact me through ReviewMe.com or send me a mail at angad619@gmail.com

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On a day which saw Bangalore boss Dr. Mallya’s purse lighten by Rs 20 Crores, figures were going bonkers. The iconic Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar earns 60 lakh a year from the BCCI for the regular cricket he plays. Consider that a benchmark? Yeah right. Now hear this. On Feb 20, the day players were auctioned off to various teams that would play a maximum of 44 matches over a span of 3 months as part of the IPL, the lowest bid Indian was Ramesh Powar at a price of 68 lakhs!

That’s the lowest. The highest is even crazier. With 6 crores in my wallet, I could buy a sea-side facing mansion on the Marine Drive, Mumbai and a Rolls-Royce Phantom on my porch. But no, Chennai team owner India Cements blew it just to buy dashing W’keeper-batsman M S Dhoni! Rs 6 Crores (USD 1,500,000) for a span of 3 months is insane to say the least. But its a cricket crazy country and no paycheck is crazy enough.

The surprise package was India’s 19 yr old quickie Ishant Sharma who was sold for a staggering USD 950,000. Relatively, at 400,000 US$ Australia’s Ricky ‘Punter’ Ponting was sold for peanuts (country full of peanuts, actually). While legendary spinners Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan were sold for Rs 1.8 Crore and Rs 2.4 Crore respectively, Harbhajan Singh takes home Rs 4.3 Crores!

Generally when a man and his missus are out shopping, the wife is seen poking elbows into her man’s ribs trying to scale down expenses. But the missus we are talking of is Gauri Khan, wife of Shah Rukh Khan who makes sure whatever he does is large. Together that ended up spending 24.1 crores, but have sunk their teeth deep into a very strong side. The Kolkata side will be my team to look out for!

Sourav Ganguly (Ind) Ishant Sharma (Ind) Chris Gayle (WI) Brendon McCullum (NZ) David Hussey (Aus) Shoaib Akhtar (Pak) Murali Karthik (Ind) Ricky Ponting (Aus) Ajit Agarkar (Ind) Umar Gul (Pak) Tatenda Taibu (Zim)

Rs 4.3 cr Rs 3.8 cr Rs 3.2 cr Rs 2.8 cr Rs 2.5 cr Rs 1.7 cr Rs 1.7 cr Rs 1.6 cr Rs 1.4 cr Rs 60 lakhs Rs 50 lakhs

In an attempt to buy precious manpower, 8 teams bid for 78 players for a whopping Rs 128 Crores (USD 32,000,000). All my childhood I wrote in my Geography papers that manpower in India was cheap. No wonder I always got low marks in Geography!!

Did the Father of the Nation actually utter “Hey Ram” before he fell to assassin Nathuram Godse’s bullets exactly 60 years ago?Well, a new book Mahatma Gandhi: Bramhacharya Ke Prayog (Mahatma Gandhi: Experiment with celibacy) does not seem to think so. Its author Dayashankar Shukla ‘Sagar’, a journalist with a well-known Hindi daily in Lucknow, questions the widely held belief and contends that the Mahatma’s granddaughter Manu only heard him utter: “Hey Ra…”.He goes on to claim that Godse had also said Gandhi had uttered “aah..” and not “Hey Ram” when he shot him on January 30, 1948.

The author dwells in detail about the “experiments” by Gandhi with bramhacharya (celibacy) and says these and the controversies arising from them had “an effect on Gandhi’s views on the freedom struggle”.

“With his experiments on celibacy, Gandhi had opened a new front in addition to the objective of freedom which was unnecessary,” the book says.

The book, published by Vani Prakashan, is to be released by senior journalist and Gandhian thinker Prabhash Joshi at the International Book Fair in New Delhi on February 7.

SOURCE: Press Trust Of India

Did Gandhiji actually not utter ‘Hey Ram’?? Well, how does it matter at all!! What an issue this has been blown into! Do we only respect him only because he remembered the Lord just after he was shot at? Is that the only reason there’s a photo of Gandhiji on every single note of currency ever printed in India?

We all respect Gandhiji because he taught not just India, but the whole world the power of satyagraha. Every kid in India is told tales of Gandhiji’s discipline, honesty, how he single handedly won independence for us.

For me, it doesn’t matter even if these claims, made by someone just trying to get famous, are true. The ‘Father of the Nation’ will always live in our hearts no matter what!

CAST: Jason Lee (David Seville), David Cross (Ian Hawk) and Cameron Richardson (Claire).
WITH THE VOICES OF: Justin Long (Alvin), Matthew Gray Gubler (Simon) and Jesse McCartney (Theodore).

I’m a computer engineer in the making and hence, animated movies are really my kind of movies. 300, Shrek, Ice Age… I loved em all. Alvin and the Chipmunks promised to fit the bill, but then it simply didn’t.

Three chipmunks join a not-so-successful song writer. Do the chipmunks talk? “well, our lips are moving and words are coming out!”, as Alvin puts it. Let alone talk, they sing their way to glory.

Problems come. Problems go. Everything is rosy in the end. How lame! How predictable! I dunno if I slept through a part of the movie, but Alvin is no way superior to his fellow chipmunks. I would rather have called the movie “And the Chipmunks (Alvin included)”!!!

But then not everything’s bad. The chipmunks are really cute. The animation is enthralling. They sing well. Their lips are in sync with what they speak. Hats off to that!

AngadSodhi Dot Com Rating: 6.5/10

Conclusion: Really good animation but lacks a gripping story. For those who don’t know anything about the cartoon series (me for e.g.), the movie seems lackluster.