Quizzes and Soaps

Nowadays television is dominated so much by all the cable channels. In homes which have a cable connection, the scene is dominated by the latest movies, soaps and cricket. No one seems to watch DD any longer. I was thinking that DD has sort of become the channel for the rural areas where there isnt any cable connection.

But over the last few weeks, I have been surprised by the fare thats on the DD tamil channel. DD has indeed transformed itself with the channel sporting the same kind of soaps, movie trailers, new movie songs through the night and other such shows. At the same time, some of the fare on DD has been far better than what you can find on other channels. One simple concept that DD has leveraged a lot has been live telephone call in shows. Yes, you have these song request shows on various channels which have been banal, but DD is not doing just that. For example every sunday morning, 10 am, the live sports quiz has been a great hit. Today, as I was flipping channels, I could not find better fare on any other channel at 10 in the morning. At least none of it was as exciting as this one. Come to think of it, quizzes make interesting programming always, more so in today's age of the internet and information hungry population. But one finds so little of quizzing shows on TV. Today's kids grow up so much on the scheming mother in laws and corrupt politicians of the soaps and movies that their parents watch and the various cartoons shows. There watch so little of informative programming from discovery or the pathetically little informative programming like quiz shows. While quizzing seems to be in short supply, atleast other kinds of good programs like the ones on NGC or discovery are still very much around but when do the kids get to watch them, given the prime time is full of soaps and the scheming characters that they are so full of.

Coming back to the DD program, it was great fun for over an hour. Though I tried hard but could not get a line to call, just the thrill of quizzing elevated my sunday morning experience. One only wishes that there is more of such good fare at prime time. After this one, I switch channels and there is this program on another channel which was matching answers by Moms and their kids to find out which mom knows her kid best!!! One question went, "Which is your kid's favorite song?". For those who know tamil movie songs, the mom answered "Appadi podu" and the kid answered "Manmada Raasa"!!!

Havent we had enough of movies and soaps?

Alan Cox of Software

All linux lovers know Alan Cox. Especially the ones who have seen the kernel code. Alan Cox is wrapping up his MBA now !!

So how have the linux code guru's views changed and what effect has MBA had on him?

Check, http://www.pingwales.co.uk/software/cox-on-better-software.html

Interesting read.

RSS

I started using an RSS reader a week back. Its been something I have been wanting to do for a long time but never got the chance. The lack of internet access had been a deterrant. So when I finally got around to it, checked out a few readers and settled with RSS bandit for now. My first step was to try and find feeds of all the blogs and web content I browse nowadays. The blogs were pretty easy. Almost all of them had an atom or RSS feed. But the websites were the real surprise. Almost all of websites had an RSS feed buried somewhere. Rediff displayes them prominently while it took some searching to find RSS feeds for economic times. I still havent found ones for Business week and some other websites but I already have a clutch of them to start with.
The concept is pretty neat. The first thing I do now is start my feed reader and ask it to update all feeds. This ones saves a lot of time I must say. More than saving time, I now am back to following news the way I used to when I had time to spare. Besides, there is a neat feature in RSS bandit that finds new feeds in browsed pages. I already have some 35 feeds in my reader and managing them is becoming quite a task. Going forward, I guess I would really have to be judicious in adding feeds. This one is going to hog some bandwidth otherwise when updating feeds. I also wish I could get my google news alerts through my feedreader. Does google news have a search based feed? They clutter my inbox today and how I wish my RSS reader could only serve the search results. Sounds like a neat idea. Overall, I am becoming addicted.