Disable Overlay Advertisement on IBNLive.com

IBNLive.com is a great news website for India. Just one problem - they have this irritating overlay advertisement every time you visit the homepage. Besides, while you check the individual stories, and go back to the homepage, the advertisement comes up again. It's irritating because you should either wait a few seconds before the advertisement auto-closes, or click the close button (which changes position every once in a while).

I wrote a greasemonkey script that disables this advertisement once and for all on the IBNLive.com homepage. It's located here.

If your firefox does not have the greasemonkey ad-on, install that first. If you don't use firefox, see why you should. If you don't know what firefox is, you should go out more often.

Room available in Kendriya Vihar, Gachibowli

One of my roommates discovered that he had spent a long time of his life in Gachibowli, so he decided to shift to Kondapur. Kondapur's not too far away, but I sure need a replacement for him in my aptt now.

Our aptt is a 3 BHK in Kendriya Vihar Phase II, Gachibowli. The place is great. It's clean, no-noise, water 24 hrs, electricity almost 24 hrs, gated community, safe, secure. The place is a 4-min bike-ride from Microsoft, Infosys campus and a 10-min bike-ride from Hi-tech City. A lot of guys and gals from Microsoft and Infosys stay in this aptt.

The room has 2 windows and wooden cupboards. We have a BSNL 256 kbps broadband internet available over wifi. Also, a fridge, well-equipped kitchen and washing machine are at disposal. All this for a room at Rs 3950 p.m. (including maintenance charges).

If you are interested, or you know someone who is interested, leave a note here, or mail me at: nirnimesh-(at)-gmail.com

Google Reader & What I Should be Reading

"Web as a Social platform" You've all heard it, might have even seen it in action.

I realized the power of a social web when I was thinking about my blog reading habits. There was a time when I'd painfully populate my Google Reader's subscriptions. Depending on how ambitious or slacking I was, it'd either drown my reading-list with hundreds of blog posts, a bit too many to handle, or drought it with scanty ones so I'd have to look out for news websites in askance for more. I could never figure out the right set of feeds to subscribe to - the same feed that'd report something as interesting as an iphone launch would sometimes also report something as worthless as Amitabh Bachhan being down with flu. How did this problem get solved? Enter the social web.

What I did was simple. Discounting the bare minimal set of blog feeds that I did have to subscribe myself to keep my Krebs cycle working (say, Slashdot), I left all the others for the people in my friends list to read and share. I began with reading stuff that ALL my friends would share and then cut it down to hide the ones that felt like abusing the 'share' feature. Now I'm down to a much smaller list of friends whose shared blogs I read. The most awesome part now is that what I read has already been screened once by someone whose judgement I tend to agree with. The end result: I'm pretty happy with my reading list these days. I realize that I hardly ever miss something I'd really want to read about and at the same time, I don't get swamped with excess of them either.

It's intimidating how easily a seemingly tough problem of "figuring out what I want to read" could be made more tractable by a social web, even though I myself did not have a clear judgement of what I really wanted.