As you all know, @hnprashanth and myself recently launched sk1d.com, a “personal” URL shortening service. What most of you do not know is the real story behind sk1d.com.

As URL shortening got more and more competitive after the explosion of micro-blogging service Twitter, we depended more on more on Tr.im, one of the leading URL shorteners that also offered statistics. Early Monday morning though, Tr.im closed down service. This was all fine and dandy. There are other services like 3.ly, u.nu, and bit.ly (with statistics). The only problem was, Prashanth was using Tr.im as sort of a URL shortener + bookmark service to keep tab of links he shared and liked, in spite of me repeatedly telling him not to. With Tr.im closed down, his collection of links is, well, dead. Lesson learnt.

After all the taunts and teasing, he was looking for a new bookmark service. Delicious was my obvious first suggestion, followed by a tongue-in-cheek comment about setting up a URL shortener on our server. But, he actually took it up as a suggestion and in a few minutes (~10 minutes to be precise), with the help of urlShort (open source URL shortener), I created sk1d.com.

Sk1d.com wasn’t even supposed to be launched to the public. It was sort of supposed to be our little repository of links. I was supposed to password-protect the site too, but one little tweet and to our surprise, people actually started using the service (and liking it too).

We pretty much realise that the service will mostly be used by our friends, but that’s fine with us. Sk1d.com wasn’t even intended for public release, let alone financial gains or traffic. It also means that without the burden on the server, sk1d.com will probably by all means, live longer.

Wanna Try It?

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A bucket list! Aha! Something that I wanted to pen down since watching The Bucket List way back in 2008. So without further ado, here is my wild list of stuff that I want to do before I die, (in no particular order):

1. Be the CEO of my own company. (current status: in the works already)
2. Live far away from the city. Probably a nice little village on the outskirts of Bangalore.
3. Splurge on all the latest gadgets I can lay my crappy hands on, just once. (technology jumps a mile each month, so no point splurging over and over)
4. Build a sound-proof room. (for various naughty reasons)
5. Drive at 200+kmph, with the windows down and my head out, doggy style. lol
6. Bungee jump. (lets keep it realistic, I doubt I’ll ever be jumping out of an airplane)
7. Create something (anything) that I would have usually bought from a store instead.
8. Get a damn tattoo. Even a small one will do.
9. Attend Rock in Rio \m/.
10. And while I’m there, visit “Christ the Redeemer” and perhaps Peru (Machu Picchu :D.
11. Slap a wild bull on its arse, TWICE! (like in the movie Wild Hogs)
12. Eat a live squid. (yes, people actually do this!)
13. Break a guy’s nose. (oh c’mon, you’ve seen it so many times in the movies. Just once I would love to do it! Volunteers anyone?)
14. Try and watch all Star Wars movies in a day. (Wow, there’s _actually_ another nut like me. And thanks to him for the image for this post.)
15. Add some more stuff to this list.

Stuff that should have been on the list, a.k.a. the ones that I’ve already completed:

1. Paintball. (yay! never expected it to come to Bangalore _ever_. Read here.)
2. Get stoned. (disclaimer: if you’re family, this never happened!!)
3. Get involved in a street fight. (if you know me well, then you know that this just _had_ to have happened to me)
4. Smash an electronic gadget (preferably a mobile phone) to pieces. (props to my friend C.S., who wanted a reason to buy a new mobile phone.)

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Was stumbling Wikipedia when I came across the Pan-American Highway. It’s been officially recognized as the world’s longest motorable road, spanning an insane 25,000 kilometers!

I did the math, and in the end, if you use a car with a 15kmpl average mileage, you’ll require about 1666 litres of petrol, and around Rs. 83,000 for the cost of petrol (w/o taking wear and tear into consideration). Anyone up for a road trip?

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Tweetups in Bangalore have been getting not only better, but more common. This edition of Bangalore Tweetup, hash tagged #paintballtweetup, was organized in less than a couple of days, but it was loads of fun. The venue – Indian Paintball League (ironically called IPL), located off Sarjapura Road. …click here to read more

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Lately I’ve been finding myself manually converting PNG files to JPEGs. It can get quite tedious and frankly, boring. I downloaded a couple of apps that could automate the process, but each of them had their quirks. They would either watermark the finished image or limit me to trying them out for a finite number of days. I had to resort to manually editing them using MS Paint, and then saving them as JPEG files. The quality was bad, all thanks to the disastrous MS Paint. So I set out to find a way to convert them using Photoshop. What I ended up was writing my own Action for Photoshop CS2. …click here to read more

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