Support Wikipedia

Since I rely so much on Wikipedia for all the information I need or I provide, I guess it is my duty to contribute towards Wikimedia Foundation's Fundraising drive. If any one of you would like to donate, here is the link. Also watch the video, it is inspiring....

Excuses

I know I lost some of my very loyal readers thanks to my being lazy and not writing a blog for one whole month. So I thought I give the rest of you some genuine excuses for my delay in writing ;). Please understand! There are 6 reasons I can think of as to why I didn't write a blog:

1. My dog ate my blog (yikes, it rhymes!)
2. My car felt that I was neglecting her because I spent too much time with the computer. So we spent some "quality" time together.
3. My keyboard randomly put "l" while I was typing. "Slo thle blog thlat lI wlote clame lout llike thlis. lI knlow thlis slounds slupid blut thlats whlat hlappened. "
4. My horoscope said that I should not write more than 2 blogs in the month of September.
5. I was researching on the global warming problem and searching for alternate sources of energy.
6. And the ultimate ... I was helping Steorn to violate the law of conservation of energy :) !!

The 6th point needs more elaboration. There is actually a small company in Ireland named Steorn, which claims to have found a novel way of producing energy without consuming any. If proven true it will violate our fundamental foundations of thermodynamics :) !!! Yippee, time to go back to college again.

I hope this is not a hoax, but somehow it reminds me of one Mr. Ramar Pillai (sorry no Wiki entry for him :( !!) who claimed that he could produce gasoline from a "magic" herb that he found in some village in rural India. He actually took the country for a ride for a couple of months (including a few IIT professors) only to be later proven to be a hoax.

And I hope at least one of you believed the 6 reasons I gave above were responsible for me not writing a blog :) !!!

Hello?

Before I know it, its been one month since I last blabbered out here. The cereals put me into deep slumber and I only got up after I realized that I am three days away from the go-live of the biggest and longest Project of my life! Can't believe that I have spent 30 days doing nothing. Hmm, actually this time I managed to squeeze in a lot of things in these 30 odd days. So if you have insomnia and that sleeping pill isn't really taking you to your "happy place" ... read on...

3 things that I did in the last month

Kick-boxing:

I still can't believe that I tried my hand (and leg?) at kick-boxing. Well, the gym that I go to has got these classes for lazy bums like me to be motivated. So there used to be this amazing workout routine for 1 hour once a week in which the instructor would teach us to kick box and in doing so help us burn some calories. I attended quite a few of those sessions. It kinda helped me figure that there are many muscles in my body that I haven't used since the day that I was born. Also the jab, cross, hook, up routine kinda helped me hit the hell out of that imaginary pillow and release my pent up anger :) !! However the sad part of the class was that right since I started attending it, the room in which it was being conducted received irreparable structural damage (That reminds me, some one has asked me to no longer crack any "fat" jokes :) !!) because of heavy pounding and it has been stopped for ever :( !! So much for enthusiasm.

Bryan Adams:

I had the time of my life last Saturday. Bryan Adams had come down to the Greek Theater in Berkeley. Not only did I get to visit UC Berkeley (the University that I adore soo much!) but also I got to see Bryan Adams :) !!! Well its been quite a while since I have heard his songs. I was a big fan of his in my junior college days , but this time his show got me all nostalgic (signs of old age?) ... For a change I also figured that I remembered the lyrics of most of his songs :) !!

Astonishing as it might seem most of the crowd seemed to be 40+. All the young people were mostly Indians. Kinda shows that as far as music is concerned we are at least a decade behind the Americans in our choice of songs :) !! Anyways, I got to work out a lot (thats a good way of putting down the fact that I shouted at the top of my voice for 2 hours and jumped like crazy. That also reminds me, my doctor has asked me to be good to my knees, so I consciously jumped on my toes and not on my heels :) !!)

Geocaching:

I ain't gonna explain what geocaching is out here on my blog. So go read the wiki link that I have provided. But I sure would like to say that this sport has got me hooked. An aimless treasure hunt combined with a GPS can very well be interesting :) !! You will also find a photo of a "happy me" at the end of this blog; with a cache that I found!!

Bio-clock

Here is a question..

What do you do when you come home from work at 2:00 in the afternoon after having worked for more than 12 hours? If you are a sane person you sleep for 2 hours and get up refreshed and ready to rock. But if you are me, you eat a lot of cornflakes.

I am not kidding. Its 4:00 PM now and for the last two hours I have been eating cornflakes. This is the third bowl of cereals that I am munching on, as I write this blog (hear the crunch, munch, crunch?). I have this stupid thing called bio-clock of my stomach, and it always yearns to eat the same kinda food at a particular time of the day. I somehow missed my regular dose of cereals in the morning today, and the only thing I can think of is cornflakes. I tried to get some sleep now, but I had a bad dream in which a giant Steve Jobs, in his trademark black turtle neck t-shirt was pouring huge flakes on me from a big box. And he was laughing aloud like a typical Hindi movie bad-guy (muha-ha-ha-ha-ha!). I was trying hard to survive ( watching a lot of Hollywood movies has told me that when anything falls on you, if you can't dodge it like Neo, then duck and cover thyself). I guess he too figured out what I was doing and then poured a lot of milk on me. Finally I startled and got over that dream. I do not know the significance of Steve Jobs in that dream, but I bet if you read Sigmund Freud he will have a rather esoteric explanation.

Anyways, now I am trying to save myself , by finishing off all the cereals that I have at home. Sorry for the worthless blabbering, but some how I guess cornflakes make me high :) !!

Goodnight. Sweet Dreams. Burp ...

Random rambling

I start my blog with nothing in mind, no topic to write about. Lets see how long I can stretch this one before I sign off :) !!

Its a boring Saturday evening, saw a couple of movies since morning, made lunch and have been lazying around in the house. Have been listening to Yanni now and like always feeling very very nostalgic. Yanni first happened to me at a very good point of time in my life. I distinctly remember listening to Yanni for the first time way back in 1993. Those were the days, in my tweens :) !!! School was fun, homework wasn't hard, life was all about listening to what your parents say to you, listening to your teachers, playing in the evenings and generally being merry. No responsibilities, no thoughts of future to nag you. No jobs, no salaries, no taxes, no bills. Satellite television was just introduced in India, and movies were still a novelty.

Eating out was actually something that I looked forward to :) !! Not that my mom did not make amazing food, but it was always that my parents would take me out for dinner on the evening of my last exam. It became a conditioned reflex. Eating out was equal to being happy, kinda like Pavlov's dog :) !! (I desist eating out now, but somehow now I can't avoid it either!).

There was no Wikipedia then. Any technical question I had, it always had to be my dad who answered. So from how car engines work, to Newton's laws of motions, it was dad who answered. My mom was everything else for me, from Maths to History to Geography to languages and ofcourse grammar. I still fondly remember the English grammar exercises that she took :) !! When my stupid questions got progressively difficult to answer, my parents took the wise decision to get me an Encyclopedia (The Dorling Kindersley Science Encylopedia). It was amongst my most prized possessions then!! I devoured the book. Sunday afternoons were no longer boring. The book laid the foundations for making me a wanna be geek :) !!

Badminton and table tennis were my favorite games then. Evening time was all about playing. Rain or shine, I had to go out to play. I remember distinctly, the last lectures in school were always spent waiting for the school bell to ring. No students wore watches, so we would have no clue when the lecture would end. Yet all we were really bothered about was the sound of the bell ringing.

Summer vacations were all play and no work. Never worried about getting tanned, no sunscreen lotion :P !! Get up in the morning eat breakfast, disappear, reappear at lunch disappear again, come again in the evening to show your mom that you still exist :) !! When TV happened later in life, a part of time was spent watching cartoons, and a funny serial called Giant Robo. I can't imagine I actually enjoyed such a show considering that the special effects are well, ahem .. not so special :) !! I happened to fish out the intro video on youtube, and here it is for your viewing pleasure:



Nostalgia always gets me writing. When I get low, I can write pages together, which apparently make no sense to the reader. On second thoughts, my engineering papers were also pages making no sense. I guess thats a personality trait then, and not a mood thing :) !!!

Love..

Have been listening to Dido since morning. Off late she has become one of my most favorite artists of all time. I simply love her melancholic song "White Flag". Now that none of my posts have ever spoken remotely about love (except my undying affection for my car of course ;) !!), I thought I get all sentimental and pour my heart out on this one. So without further ado (I bet this is the most overused cliché of all times!), let me present you five of my favorite (read "depressing" .. heart break songs!)

• 1 - Solitude - Black Sabbath

No song I have ever heard can ever depress me to the core like this one! Considering that it comes from a rock band like "Black Sabbath" really shows that everyone cries in a heart break :) !! You can read the lyrics here (sorry no Wikipedia links for lyrics :) !!)

• 2 - That's why (you go away) - Michael Learns to Rock

This song made me buy the entire CD (not that I repent), but it sure is all sentimental. Sure to cause a involuntary tear out of your eye if you pay attention to the lyrics.

• 3 - White Flag - Dido

The most sarcastic heart break song I have ever heard. I like it very much, and you have to see the video to see Dido's expressions on this one. Lyrics here

• 4 - All out of Love - Air Supply

I have a history associated with Air Supply. Its a funny anecdote that I have to share. Around my 15th b'day Air Supply had toured India. Since, I was a kid there was no chance that my parents would allow me to go for a concert. So there I was ranting how much I wished to see them. Finally, my sister decided that she would surprise me with a Air Supply audio cassette (yes, there were no CDs then .. I hadn't seen Windows too, so forget the Internet ...) for my birthday. The sweet sister that she is, she went to the only English music shop that we had in our vicinity, and lo behold, she forgot the name of the artist. She just remembered that they "supplied" something. So there she was in a shop looking for all kinds of supplies. I remember she telling me that she searched for "Oxygen Supply" and "Water Supply" in vain :) . All said and done, I did get the cassette in the end and it is still amongst my most prized possessions !!!
Lyrics here

• 5 - Smile - Michael Jackson
  

This is a relatively unknown song by Michael Jackson. I found it in his "History" album. I think this is a cover that he did for a original by some one else. I have always liked him for the complete entertainer that he was. I feel bad for what has happened to him now. Lyrics



So that was my take at the songs that can put me completely down in the dumps for no reason at all. I know I didn't mention many famous senti-songs by Bryan Adams, Lionel Ritchie, Steve Wonder etc. Well, they are so common place now that I don't feel low any longer listening to them.

If you guys have actually gone through all the songs, cheer up ... this is just a blog :) !! Until we meet again...

Holy Cow!

Sorry folks! This blog has been in draft state for more than 2 weeks. I keep it any longer and I bet I will forget I ever did that! So here it comes (as it existed in my draft)...

This weekend I finally did something fun. A few of us drove up North along the Pacific and visited a couple of State Parks and beaches. Thought I write it down so that all you guys get jealous of what I did :) !!

Like all excursions that I plan, I usually visit the place before hand on Google Earth. This helps me to know what to look for when I finally reach my destination. Also if you use the community tagging layer in Google earth, you actually discover a lot of interesting information about that place, stuff that you wont find in travel books..

Anyways, we *planned* to start at 7:30 AM in the morning and like all other plans of ours, were still @ home 8:15 AM. However, a 45 minute delay is good by all standards and we hit the road immediately after that. The drive up north is pretty treacherous and I gave my roomie the pleasure of driving on Highway 1. So he happily drove the car while I generally did the task of being a good co-passenger: skip songs which he likes but I don't, karaoke with the rest of the songs, fiddle around with all the controls that I can find in the car and generally annoy him to the core. Yupp, I also like to open up the map and trace the road on which we are driving. This act of mine also drives my roomie nuts, cause I keep on telling which road is going to intersect us next :) !! All this helps him not to fall asleep (not that he does!) and generally raises his temperature. Once he is red hot, I break an egg on his head and have scrambled eggs for breakfast!! I know, I know, enough of my foolish jokes!

So the first stop was a beach (Dillon Beach). The problem with the beaches that I have visited along the coast of California is that the water is pretty cold, and if that was not enough, there is always a chilly wind blowing. So even if you have the urge to jump into the water, the moment you do you are frozen like a ice cube. Then you need to sit in your car and thaw yourself for a while before you can start doing anything again. We did hang around there for a while, with several unsuccessful attempts of getting "used" to the water in vain. Finally, we did what we can do best. Fool around in front of the camera, take photos with the beach in the background (been there done that!). Life is all about orkut now. Every photo taken is critically examined to study its feasibility as a profile photo on orkut!

Anyways, from Dillon beach we headed north to Bodega Bay. Nothing I can write about what we did there. To describe 2 hours in one sentence, we further froze to death. We further got tanned. Yupp, forgot to mention, even though it is cold everywhere, the sun tans you all the while. Hehe, a million years from now when a very fat fossil of mine will be found somewhere, all the scientists will be discussing.. "People in Northern California were fat, they toiled in the sun to make their living, and always wore warm clothes." They will put me in a class of idiots who wore warm clothes when the sun was shining bright and would call us "fatowarmoclothwearus" (or something ending in a "us" .. I hope you got my point).

My geography teacher had told me that the norther I go from the equator, the colder it be comes. So we decided to go further North. (Ok, well that was a joke .. we decided to go further north from Bodega bay to see Fort Ross (a former Russian settlement from the 19th Century)).

Some of my friends had come with the hopes that it would be a palace like Hawa Mahal in Jaipur, India. Well, it wasn't anywhere close to that, but I liked it anyways. It looked cute small and well managed. And if luck would have it, a "Cultural Heritage Day" was being celebrated on the same day that we visited the park! Lo behold, I had never seen soo many Russians in my life. My knowledge of Russian girls was limited to Anna Kurnikova and Maria Sharapova and I must confess, they do are perfect representatives of a majority of their population :) !! Finally, after a long and tiring day, I saw my roomie smile and his eyes glitter with inner happiness. We did spend a long time in the fort staring at the architectural wonder that it was (mind you!). But then we couldn't stay long because the park was to close within an hour of our arrival.

Our drive back home was sad and the setting sun on the right accentuated our mood. However, I finally managed to come across cows on the road!! Imagine, Highway 1, had actually cows sitting on and around the highway!! Haha, finally I can prove to everyone, that India is not the only country that is soo complacent about animals on road. The cow was soo nice, she turned around for me to take a perfect picture of her, even though our car had already crossed her. She also asked me to post her snap on the internet. She also wanted me to register her for a social networking website, but I think that would be too inhuman to do (pun intended). So that's the subject of my title. And this post is dedicated to her... If you have reached till here, thanks for reading my post :) !! I bet this is one of my longest posts ever.

Night in the city

Gotta confess, I love the look of San Francisco at night. However tired or sleepy I may be, driving down to San Francisco, is always a different experience for me.

I always have the same set routine. Drive down to Pier 39, walk to the breezy wharf. Then drive up north over the Golden Gate bridge to the Lonely Sailor Vista Point and view the city in all its glory. From here, you can see the Alcatraz, Angel Islands, Bay Bridge, Golden Gate bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts, Coit Tower and of course the breath taking San Francisco skyline at night. The cold breeze blowing over the bay adds to the chill and the enigma of the entire moment. Since I always go late at night, there are very few people (read tourists) to spoil the mood. The Golden Gate looks magnificent like always. There is something about the bridge that attracts me, no matter how many times I see or drive over it. May be because its the most known landmark of the United States after the Statue of Liberty or may be just because I always feel how the prisoners must have felt when they got a glimpse of the Golden Gate from Alcatraz every night. Imagine how the guys in there must be feeling. Less than a geographical mile to freedom, yet soo impossible to achieve!

After that stop I drive down south and always go over the Crooked street. Not only the street, but the portions of Lombard St approaching it are amongst the most adrenaline pumping drives I have ever had :) !! Its enough to get you back to your senses even if you are a wee-bit sleepy. I love driving over it at night, cause (like you guessed right!) the 5 minute drive takes around an hour and a half (thanks to the tourist-traffic) during the day! Also the steep drops look a lot more scary at night....

Finally, the last stop somehow always is the Coit Tower, before I head back home. The Coit tower gives me a view of the Piers which I love a lot. You can actually see all the piers on the Embarcadero from there. Also I can see the Crooked street from there and admire the road that I just drove over!!

That was my idea of a romantic evening with my car. Of course on my way back, a coffee break somewhere, adds to the charm :) !!

Fat Friends?

This article that I read on the Internet recently has got me all thinking. The gist of the article is "Having fat friends makes you fat". Obesity is like a virus which spreads!! Hua.. can't believe? Read the article here.

Well its funny, but statistically two of my best friends in India gained a lot of weight since they became my friends. I was born fat, so I can't really blame anyone for making me one.

This means, I have a new business plan to make money. I am gonna advertise to all those underweight malnourished people out there (Paris Hilton, Naomi Richie included..) to be friends with me and see the results (in 6 weeks?) Hehe, I could make television commercials featuring my real life friends starring "before" and "after" :) !! Maan sometimes making money is soo easy :) !! I wonder, if I had not spent my time writing silly code and making boring spreadsheets I would have been a millionaire by now, using my ideas :P !!

I initially got the link to this article on Slashdot. I like the name of that site. If I have to ask someone to go to that site on the phone this is how it sounds like: "http..colon..colon..slash..slash..slashdot..dot..org". Its one of those uber geek sites. And before you jump to any conclusion, I ain't a geek (yet), I am just amongst those millions of wannabes. Geekdom is far away for me.

And finally, since my blog is rated PG-13 by me, I won't get into the details of this article, but I strongly suggest you all to give it a read :) !!

First Anniversary?

Hey, did you realize I just completed more than a year of scribbling my thoughts online? Whoa!! Thats an achievement, pat pat pat :) !! Not that I have been regular, but believe it or not, I have written 50 articles :), gained 8 pounds, slept more than 2900 hours, shaved more than 300 times and have made 4 dedicated readers in the 365 days!!