A bushel of tech news and a pesto chicken sandwich

The highlight of today (apart from the slight dip in the DOW) was a pesto chicken sandwich with French bread at Jaqbo's (which incidentally is just a couple of blocks away from my house). This was my first time there: it's a favourite of Mandeep's. The spices blended to provide me an almost Indian flavour -- like several chicken curry preparations back home. There were enough interesting little bits of news today: America Online decided that to scale back efforts to make its "popular" instant messaging system work with rivals, saying the task has proven too difficult and expensive; In his own guarded way, Bill Gates acknowledged the damp squib that .NET turned out to be: "In some respects we're further ahead than we expected. In some respects we haven't made as much progress as we expected", he said. Please feel free to interpret that as you wish. The cherry on today's cake was the rather interesting photograph the New York Times captured of brand new Indian President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, who was sworn in today. The photograph is a cross between the exorcist of the Ramsay brothers B-horror flicks and Rajnikant on a fitness trip. Now we know who could play the Prez in a restrained manner, when they decide (if ever) to do a biopic.