>> Aamir Khan’s got one.
>> Amitabh Bacchan’s got one, which ain’t working right now, strangely.
>> Karan Johar’s got one, I would have doubted it, if hadn’t seen it myself.
>> And you couldn’t have guessed it. Even Pooja Bedi has one.
>> I tried to find if Rakhi Sawant had one of her own, but couldn’t find any! {amazed!}

Well the way Indian celebrities are jumping on the blogging bandwagon, am pretty sure that soon, even Rakhi will get one of her own soon.. a blog.

I was delighted in a queer way when I recently found, and read, Abhinav Bindra’s Road to Beijing – his very own blog! It is not a celebrity blog, it is not created for publicity at all. He writes his heart out, like in his post about the day-after, for example. Strangely, I was not even searching for his blog when I stumbled on its link, on Google’s Blogs of Note list.

Explore -

• Aamir Khan’s blog – http://www.aamirkhan.com
• Amitabh Bacchan {Bachchan}’s blog – http://bigb.bigadda.com
• Karan Johar’s blog – http://www.mynameiskaran.com – A promo of  his next film “Dostana” to be available on his blog soon.. He’s such a tease. Oops, I meant his blog.
• Pooja Bedi’s blog – http://www.poojabediblogs.blogspot.com
• Does Rakhi Sawant have a blog?
• Abhinav Bindra on Wikipedia

PS: Had read that Shahrukh, Salman and Ajay Devgan also have their blogs, but couldn’t find ‘em. Will update the above list of Indian Celebrity Blog sites when I do.

Recently I transformed my desktop, which used to look like this -
<– to look like this –> [singlepic id="66" w="320" h="240" mode="" float="" ]
It has taken considerable amount of my time, and I’ll try to save you from doing the same. So lets get started! You will need the following -

Tip 1 # Get a Dock

A dock is the replacement for your Windows taskbar. It provides a hassle free access to the most used programs, while looking great. We’ll try to emulate the Mac OS X Dock.
There are a number of docks available -

• RocketDock
  • 6 MB
  • Free
  • ObjectDock Docklets: Supported (docklet: is a plugin for a Dock)
  • Stable, easy to setup and use
  • Skinnable
    
• Stardock ObjectDock
  • 12 MB
  • basic version is free, you can buy ObjectDock Plus for ~20$
  • ObjectDock Docklets: Natively supported
  • Feature rich, provides many bells and whistles
  • Skinnable
• MobyDock
  • 3.5 MB
  • free
    
  • ObjectDock Docklets: NOT sure, probably not supported
• Y’Z Dock(google for it)
• RK Launcher
  • 700 Kb (smallest footprint!)
  • Free
  • ObjectDock Docklets: NOT sure, probably not supported
• MakeUseOf Blog gives a better detailed roundup of the different Docks available in their post Docks – The 6 Best Friends of your Windows Taskbar.

I would recommend using RocketDock as it is pretty stable, free, and has a thriving community of enthusiasts creating skins and docklets (example: KK Menu etc) for it. I didn’t notice it affecting my system’s performance at all once loaded, and it also supports the Stacks Docklet.

Tip 2 # Get Stacks Docklet

Stacks will let you keep a neat dock, while boosting your productivity. Read more about stacks on Apple’s Mac OS X site or on Mac OS X Tips blog. To support similar functionality in our transformation, we’ll need the “Stacks Docklet”, you can get it either here or here. To use this docklet, unpack the file in the “Docklets” sub-folder inside either RocketDock or ObjectDock installation folder.

Tip 3 # Make Windows taskbar translucent

Transbar (~100kb size) – this is a tiny utility that will let you change the alpha setting for existing windows taskbar. That means you can make the taskbar just a bit transparent so that it can peacefully co-exist with your shiny new dock. You can also set the taskbar to autohide mode, so that it becomes totally non-obstrusive with the new setup.

There’s a saying in India which essentially means that “An idle brain is the house of devil“. Sitting idle at home is something that I truly dislike. So, to fight the boredom, I have been trying to find interesting stuff on the net. Following a thread of links, and a barrage of garbage, I have finally settled on to trying to create a Google Gadget or Orkut Plugin or a WordPress theme to consume most of my day.

Now, while doing all this ‘research’ I was amazed, yet again, to see that Google corp. is still launching so many products. New products, and yeah, they are already updating products that they already have, like Docs, Gmail, Picasa and Google Search. Man! they are throwing away goodies right (Lively), left (Gadgets) and center (Android). Man! I wonder how they are able to manage so much, so seamlessly. Yet keeping most of their products interoperable. Its as if they own the net.

Recently, Google has started giving some competition to Wikipedia (which happens to be one of my favourite places on the net) with their own Google Knol – “a unit of knowledge“. One major difference between the two is that Knol is not so open, the authors have to give their true names, get verified and all, unlike Wiki.

A quick look at World’s top 500 most visited sites (courtesy Alexa) points that they own around 20+ of the top 100 of these sites. Sometimes I am scared that they know a lot more about me than my closest friends do. What if some random Google Employee decides to keep a watch on some random internet surfers life. He’ll know what videos you watch, what goes on in your chats and emails about and with whom, you search queries and the sites you finally visit. If Google AdSense is setting a cookie on your PC (which they surely must be doing right now, I never checked though) they’ll also know which sites you have been visiting, even outside of Google searches. And yeah, that evil-maniac will also be able to see your private photos with your loved ones. Scary.. huh! And now, as Google Docs is catching on, and people are starting to migrate to the cloud, they he’ll also have access to your personal documents. {Gulp} “Don’t be Evil“, Google. Please.

Well, here are a few links if you want to -

• Google – Products list (Grossly inadequate)
• Google – Code of Conduct
• Wikipedia – Google Knol
• Wikipedia – List of Google Products