SlideShare just announced The World’s Best Presentation Contest 2008. Its really simple – upload your presentation about almost everything, enter it into the contest and win! Prizes are way cooler than the last time – Macbook Air, Amazon Kindle, iPods etc. C’mon guys the time is now.

PS: Kudos to Arun for amazing design and artwork, Swamy and Sugandha for amazing engineering work.

This is big news for me – SlideShare secured $3M funding, mainly from Venrock and few angel investors. We’ve bootstrapped till now, and this is the first major money that we have picked up from investors. It has been an exciting journey so far, and is just getting better now.

I am taking this moment out to thank all SlideShare users who have justified the use case for sharing presentations online. This is for you guys! We promise to continuously make SlideShare more and more useful to you.

Here’s the “Meet Henry” style annoucement:

Here is some coverage of the event across the web:
Techcrunch: SlideShare Secures $3M for Embeddable Presentations
Mashable: SlideShare Gets $3M for Online Presentations
News.com: Can SlideShare make PowerPoint sharing interesting?

Its really frustrating to be DDOSed. Heard that. Read that. Now, experienced that. SlideShare is fighting the DDOS of worst kind, apparently sponsored by the Chinese. It has been going on now for about a week now, and is showing no signs of stopping. Damn!

Here’s some coverage on Techcrunch explaining the turn of events and the reasons behind the DDOS. More coverage from Webyantra.

And now my response to the attackers: Fuck you. We’ll fight you, and we’ll overcome you.

Yea, my bro needs it to plug it with his XBox 360 and watch DVDs, my mom needs it for clearer, better TV experience and I need it for … umm … dunno!

Anyway, so its happening. I’m evaluating 26″ LCD TVs these days. I always knew there is one for me around the corner, but this is happening a bit sooner than I anticipated. I’ve zeroed-in on two models – Sony KLV-26V300A and LG 26LC7D, and am not too sure which one to buy. LG seems to be beating Sony on technical front but Sony’s brand name is unbeatable. What do you guys think? Help me out yaar…

    

Bingo. Someone has started to make sense. Loic Le Meur from Seesmic writes in this blog post on how he feels the need to aggregate his and his network’s activity at one place and that place to be his blog. Thats exactly what the world needs, IMHO. Probably its time to write a FriendFeed blog plugin or something which can put all activity on my blog. I feel that your blog or your OpenID page, should be your starting point on the web – a node where your social network starts.

Related article on Techcrunch: FriendFeed, The Centralized Me, and Data Portability

So, after long research, my brother finally decided to settle down for XBox 360. Yes, he’s been hounding me to get him a gaming console or upgrade the video card in his PC. I usually like specialization, and hence, agreed to get him a gaming console. I think that this move will make him play better, faster games with hardware suited to play games. Makes sense. I also think that this will enable him to use his computer for something other than gaming. Makes double sense. So, thats how it stands – he’ll have his XBox 360 soon.

Now, what made me write this post. This article over here – http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/2008/03/27/consoles-to-die-out-in-the-next-5-to-10-years/

Suddenly realized how cool it would be if the cable TV provider starts to provide games on TV on _watever_ business model. Sure death for gaming consoles.

Hehe. I had a laugh riot while reading this – http://daringfireball.net/2008/03/kahney_jackass

I had high hopes. FriendFeed looked like a great service. Great idea, simple and clean UI – works for me. But only until I had desire of embedding my friends’ feeds on my blog. I imagined it would have been awesome if I could parse ATOMized RSS from FriendFeeds and show on sidebar. But FriendFeed refused to play. Its not serving up RSS to my code. Sucks.

Update: Heard that FriendFeed API is coming. Cool. Looking forward to it. Hope it gives me RSS.

Update 2: Got a reply from FriendFeed giving me the correct URL to get embed code. Pinned up the widget on the sidebar. What do I need now? I want to customize this widget since its too big and the blue theme does not suit my blog. Anyone hearing?

Hey I’m back to my blogging ways after a l-o-n-g pause. So, here I start ranting again. Eh.

And, no better way to start by this: I am leaving for a trip to the holy shrine of Mata Vaishno Devi in Jammu tonight. Will be back by Monday. Train’s a bit delayed, so will probably catch some sleep at home. News is that I’ll be hitting sub-zero temperatures there. So, planning to pack-up myself well. Last time I went there was about 7 years ago in summers of 2001 alongwith my school mates. That was an awesome trip. This one should be even more fun since its c-hh-old.

Welcome back home girls and boys!