A few hours ago Steven Bink posted on his website that Windows Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 build 5299 for Windows xp SP2 was leaked on the world wide web quoting this from jcxp.net.

There's a new thing that Microsoft is trying to do with this build; that is disallow installation of IE7 if their copy of Windows fails the Windows Genuine Advantage Validation. I don't know how much successful will it be as there's a patch already available on jcxp.net for the current build. And something tells me so will be the case when the Public Preview is released next month.

If a 30+ guy with another mail passenger tries to avoid paying toll on an inter-state toll bridge by shadowing another bike it's cheap! But a young guy around 20 with his girlfriend on the back does it; that's smart? I don't get it.

There is a popular opinion among people (regardless of where they live) that life in a metropolitan city is indifferent of what goes in it's surroundings. The number and frequency of someone stopping over to help out or at least offer some form of assistance is higher in a county/town than a metropolis; say New York. For example; rarely would someone stop on the Brooklyn bridge to help out a person whose car may have broken down…

I was born and raised in a small town less than a 100 km from New Delhi. And I've been living in New Delhi for 7 years now. And though I am rather ashamed to say that I've also picked up the indifference trait for quite some time now. On my way to work I cross an inter-state toll bridge between New Delhi and it's south-eastern neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh. This Monday I saw a bus broke down and a huge pack of it's stranded passengers standing looking for a way to reach their destinations. Not that I had a passenger on the back of my bike, I could have stopped and offered ride to at least one person. And although I also knew that there might be a possibility that a co-worker could also be among those helpless bunch of people, I didn't stop. Imagine how sorry I felt when I came to learn that she was in fact standing there helplessly until a guy with more decency than me helped her cross the bridge. God, I hate myself for that! I hope I get rid of this indifference quirkiness and be able to exhibit some improvement the next time there is such an instance.

Microsoft has just updated the Windows Vista website. The website hosts a detailed break down of some of the major features announced to date, and also some less well publicized ones. If you notice you will see "The Orb" on the bottom of the left navigation menu. The Orb is the new start button visible since build 5259 predominently seen on the more popular build 5270 aka December CTP. So I guess; this means I was right when I cited my opinion on why KoL was asked to take down VistaXP. See my blog post (The Death of VistaXP) on Dec. 14th for more. Looking back at time Luna was first introduced in late January / early February, that's about 6 months before the August 24th RTM announcement. So if Microsoft has to deliver Windows Vista in September/October; our lesson from history teaches us that the Vista UI is feature locked by now.

So things are back to normal as I finally have a new box (a P4 3GHz HT processor, intel 915 motherboard with 1GB RAM and ATi RADEON x550 GFx card) but that’s not what I’m going to talk about.

I just read Reflections on 2005 by Raj Shekhar and was left awe inspired. Now let me tell you something, I'm not a guy who gets impressed fairly easily. But man that’s a year lived well indeed. Though this has been so inspiring, at some level it has made me angry over myself and makes me ponder over how I could have done things better, do things that I could have done but didn’t.

So this is what I intend to do …

1. Ask myself the “Top Thirteen End-of-the-Year Questions” by Kevin Eikenberry.
2. Have a 2 level list of New Year Resolutions: 1st overtly ambitious 2nd more practical.
3. Better Manage my time, and everything else.