Geek Humor

In my quest to be recognized as one amongst them and get baptized as a Geek, I have been trying a lot of things to attain tech-nirvana. Besides reading tech blogs all day long, I have also been reading geeky comics for a while now. So for all you people who are also on my path (to salvation!), here is a list of geekiest comics in the increasing order of their geekiness from your fellow wanna-be.

1. Dilbert – This is like the first comic a noob is supposed to read, understand and appreciate. If you don’t know Dilbert, or you don’t find it funny then you can’t even start your journey. Of course, Dilbert is not techie, its just office humor, but yeah you start here. Period.
2. Joy-of-tech – Lets face it. Being a techie without knowing or appreciating Apple is like being an Indian and not knowing who is Gandhi. So this is where I fail miserably. I still don’t own a single Apple product, and I don’t think I am that fascinated by the iPad either. Joy-of-tech is like a comic strip for Apple fan-boys (err.. sorry, I meant Apple fan-girls) and you have to read it to be there!

    

   This is where it starts getting tougher. My success rate with understanding the comics listed now onwards is still not 100%. All three comics use “alt attribute” on the image to convey more information about the joke. I do however love most of them, and the ones that I don’t get I ask Google :) !

3. Abstruse Goose – This is quite geeky and at times you need to know what is happening around in the world, along with a bit of mathematics, statistics, cryptography and anything else an average geek is supposed to know and enjoy!

4. Geek & Poke – This comic was a chance discovery, but I really love it a lot. Also it is amongst the most regularly updated geeky comics I read, and is really funny!

    

5. xkcd – This comic had to make this list. It was a no brainer. However, it is the most geekiest comic on my list, cause I am still not upto the level to understand all the jokes that this comic has. But persistence pays off, and one day I shall be there :) !!  I especially love the warning at the bottom of the comic which goes - “this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).”

   

Re-connect

I participated in a Business plan competition recently and one of the “optional” requirements (never figured out what that really means!) were to make a “video” explaining the idea! Explaining tech concepts in a 3 minute video is never easy. My friend suggested that I should get inspired by the Common-craft videos and make one like them.

If you gals ;) have never seen a common-craft video before, I suggest that you see this video explaining Twitter now..

Making a similar video was more difficult than I expected it to be. To start with, I had to come up with a story line which was easy to understand and at the same time gave you an idea of what the business idea (product) is all about. I had named my idea as “Re-connect”. Then to narrate the story line I had to make all those card paper cut-outs as props. And finally I had to take help from someone to move those props into the video as I narrated the story.

The tools that I used were:

1. My hand-held digital camera a Fujifilm Finepix f100fd.
2. A Gorillapod to hold my camera steady in between shots. The Gorillapod is very useful for mounting the camera at awkward angles.
3. Windows movie maker for editing and combining all the small video clips that I had taken
4. Audacity to do some basic sound editing and have background music in the clip

The entire 3:17 minute video took more than 12 hours in the making. I think less than 4 hours of it were spent in actually shooting the video. Rest of it was spent drawing the cut-outs, fiddling with my software and then finally editing the video!

And why am I putting it on my blog you ask? Well, the video proved to be too long for most people and many people walked out on me while watching it. We are an entire population of people with the Attention Deficit Disorder (That’s my way of consoling myself that the video wasn’t really boring :D !! ) So now I am putting the video out here so that my hard work doesn’t go waste :) !!

And if you are wondering why my hands look so good, well err .. umm they are girly hands. The person who helped me doesn’t want me to reveal her name on the blog post but if you dig around enough you can find her name (Elementary my dear Watson ;) !). The voice definitely belongs to me (you can hear the distinct bray at times!). And the “Re-connect” logo was used with permission from this blog.

Hey gals!

So now Mark Shuttleworth lands up in a mess because he refers to programmers in general as "guys".And then he refers to naive Linux users as moms and grand moms rather than dads and grand dads :) !! Haha and the feminists around the world term him as a male chauvinist and he draws a lot of flak for a relatively harmless statement!

During my MBA I realized that all textbook authors make it a point to label all third party references to people as women. So if a sentence goes "And if the manager wanted a report, she could ..blah blah" or “Your customer is important. You cant let her walk away that easily… blah blah”. The point is, every single person in textbooks these days is a woman just so that the author is not labeled a sexist.

Now, I bet most of ya folks have the habit of referring to everyone as "Hey guys!" in general, even when you don't specifically mean them to be "guys" (as in men!). However, I have resolved that from now on, I shall start my emails with "Hey gals" even if there is not a single trace of a gal in the group :) !! This is in addition to my earlier resolution that everything I possess shall be of the feminine gender.

Lip-syncing idiot

I have discovered that I love to sing along with the music that I listen to. Earlier in my life however I have also figured that I have been blessed with a voice that can make a donkey’s braying sound more melodious (for people who haven’t ever heard a donkey bray or heard me sing (I pity you!) .. here is a YouTube video for you!)

So to not subject people around me to the atrocity of listening to me bray, I have learnt to lip-sync to the songs that I love to sing along, at times putting in all the emotions to add effect :) !! So if its a love song, my face goes all animated and if its a metal song I play the air guitar and head bang :) !! The kid in the video gets all animated about AC/DC’s TNT …

The last decade of my life, these antics were limited to the places that I heard music to – in my shower, in my room, and most of the times in my beloved car. But times have changed and the only place where I get to listen to music now is in the friendly MRT. That reminds me, the trains over here don’t swing as much as our local trains in India do. So people can stand close to each other without holding onto the handles (which means no smelling armpits :) !!).

The problem of being all animated and lip-syncing in the MRT is that people not only stare at me, but at times in crowded MRTs, I get extra space to perform my antics. Haha, I bet most of them consider me to be a special child. Not that I am complaining ….

Geek Pornography

Disclaimer:The blog remains PG-13 in 2010!! So before you roll your eyes and go complaining to your mom, read on!

pornography [pawr-nog-ruh-fee] (noun) – The graphic, detailed, often gratuitous depiction of something.

This blog-post is education for the non and the wanna-be geeks amongst us. Over the period of several years of reading blogs online I have realized that there are two specific types of videos that geeks seem to derive pleasure out of. I finally decided to classify them out here just so that next time when I am “caught” watching YouTube videos, you realize that I am just satisfying my carnal instincts :)

1) Unboxing ritual – Unboxing is like slowly undressing (strip teasing?) a gadget from its packing (box). The more elegantly you do it, the more amazing it looks. This ritual is good for people who don’t get to use the latest gadget till it enters its second or third generation (people like me! I still ogle the iPhone!) To borrow a quote from a website that explains this routine more explicitly “It's stuff that you're lusting over – you can't have it, but you want it.” And for people who can’t get enough of it, there is a whole website dedicated to see unboxing all day and all night!!

Here is a gallery of the new Nook being unboxed. And a video for your viewing pleasure:

And here is a funny unboxing that Samsung put together for its Omnia i900

2) Teardown – Teardown is the art of opening up a gadget right down to the basic components that it is made of, so that (this is very important) you can put it back again and start using it! Well I have done this since I was 2. But the main part of doing a proper teardown is – you should be able to put it back again in mint condition so that you can actually “use” the tore down device again in your life! The first teardown that I did was that of my dad’s Sharp pocket calculator, and I could still see the broken keys in my room drawer a couple of years down the line, cause I had literally “torn” it down! People interested in doing a tear down at the minimum should go and buy a set of precision screwdrivers and a swiss knife right now. Without it you can’t really do anything!

Here is an amazing photo of a Canon S500 completely tore down. You can read step by step instructions here.

 

Finally, before I end this blog-post I would like to announce that Gadget blending is NOT a type of geek pornography. It is more like an abuse, and it really bleeds our hearts. There are millions of us out there who are hungry without a Digital SLR and then you go and mercilessly blend those gadgets? I call for immediate boycott of this ruthless atrocity. It has caused me (and I bet a lot of other people) restless nights and serious mental problems ;)

Here is a video of the Olympus camera devices being blended. Warning, it is highly graphical and I would not recommend seeing if you have heart problems ;) !!

So coming back to my original topic … I haven’t exactly figured out what makes unboxing and teardown so interesting. But well, err.. umm to put it bluntly, unboxing is pretty damn exciting. And I would like to thank all of you (especially my friends who take me along to buy new tech stuff!) for having given me that pleasure so often :) !!

End of a decade!

So we all are one day away from celebrating a decade of existence in the 21st century. I still vividly remember 2000. (When you start remembering what you had done 10 years ago, like you did it yesterday it just means one thing – you are old with a Capital ‘O’). The Y2K bug was the talk of the town. Apocalypse was predicted. The world as we knew it, was gonna end. Huh! Nothing happened.

2000 was the year I got my first computer (Ok, technically it was bought for my sister, but I guess I messed around with it more than she did!). And I still remember the specs – A Pentium II 350 MHz (I wasn’t an AMD fan boy then), 32MB SD RAM, a SiS Graphics card with 2 MB on board memory, Creative Sound Blaster 16 bit ISA Soundcard, Creative Infra 32x CD-ROM Drive, a 4.3 GB Seagate HDD, 15” CRT monitor and Windows 98. Thumb drives did not exist then. We had to use floppy discs to transfer data :) !! I had not seen the internet and I did not own a mobile phone! I can’t believe its been a decade already. 10 years of playing with computers. TV was my only source of entertainment other than playing (real games that involved physical activity :) !! outside!)

Anyway before I give you all further dose of my nostalgia, on this day, I hope you reflect on what you have achieved (or not) in the last 10 years. I hope you all have a great 2010! Thank you for being with me all this while :) !!

Ants for breakfast

So I have been having ants dipped in warm milk as breakfast for a while. Before you jump to conclusions, let me explain. I kinda forgot to close my packet of cornflakes properly one day, and in no time I had an ant colony infestation.

Being from the land of the great Gandhi, I tried to be nice and left the packet open for a while to let the ants get out non-violently. I also displayed a small protest-signboard which read “Please leave my breakfast! Thank you for your cooperation.” But to my utter dismay, that just got more of their relatives in. Now I had more ants to deal with.

My mom has this habit of seeing the National Geographic channel while eating lunch or dinner. So while we are busy eating scrambled egg, a big ugly snake is happily munching away on frog eggs on the television (I had the wicked idea of putting the image right here in my blog, but then I figured it might be disturbing for some people. So here is the link for people who are interested :) !! Have you noticed that frog eggs look like pearl tapioca ;) ).

I have gotten so used to seeing other species feasting on something gross while I am eating, that I guess I wouldn’t mind sitting across the table while a bunch of hyenas feast on a dead deer. I have also grown immune to seeing dead insects (yeah that includes cockroaches) in my food (thanks to have regularly eaten canteen food in India and abroad) that they have stopped bothering me as well.

All in all, this is my daily routine now -

1. Warm the milk for 2.5 minutes in the microwave
2. Open the box of cornflakes and pour the cornflakes along with the ants into the warm milk
3. Merrily watch the ants die of burns the instant they land in the milk
4. Have breakfast
5. Burp!

Ok. I am not that carnivorous. I have discovered that ant corpses float on milk. So you can use the spoon and sieve them out without having to actually eat them. But I hope you get the idea :) !!

Update: I can’t believe this post of mine would have generated so much controversy. Its supposed to be a joke! I do not eat ants, neither do I watch them die. The blog post was a fragment of my imagination when I saw ants entering my cornflakes box!

How to hurt your brand?!!

So an international ice-cream brand decided to open its stores in India. It also decided that it will segment itself as “premium” ice-cream brand from a foreign country. Hmm, well that sells, so far so good. Seeing the success of my neighborhood Mc Donald’s over the amazing Udupi Restaurant, I must say it would work. And in their teaser campaign they say “Exclusive preview for International Travelers” and “Access restricted only to holders of international passports”.

That my dear is a sure public relations disaster in India. Its like putting your own foot along with the rest of your body into your own mouth! I can only pity the marketing genius who came up with that idea. I think in any Marketing 101 course in India the first thing that should be taught is – never discriminate in India based on location, language, religion, nationality, sex, age, color, pets, cars, clothes, spectacles, mobile phones or anything that can be remotely thought to hurt our sentiments :) !!

I can’t imagine how they are gonna recover from this. It will be interesting to see how the company tries to apologize and cover this thing up. Will make a good marketing disaster case study in B-schools all around the world.

This also reminds me of a famous designer’s rumored comment “If I knew that blacks and Asians were going to wear my clothes, I would have never designed them”. To verify whether it was correct, I looked this thing upon Snopes, and apparently it is false.

And then today, in the world of YouTube, you can verify whatever you want .. so here is the video which lays to rest all speculations about it..

I don’t know what took him 10 years to come on her show and confess that. His publicist should have tried to cover this up like a decade ago. Cause when I had heard it way back in 2000, my young impressionable mind resolved to never use the brand ever in my life (Unlike some other very expensive designer brands, this particular brand potentially has people like me in their target market). Now, that I bet was the resolve of many other impressionable minds like me. Well, frankly speaking, I don’t think we really make a big market to actually affect the sales of such big brands. But still its a disaster I must say.

Wasabi

Have been feasting on a lot of sushi in my life lately and I thought I dedicate a blog post to the wonder herb “Wasabi”. Being an Indian used to eating Medu Vada (Vadai for the Singaporeans) dipped in a bowl full of coriander chutney, I had to specially adapt to eating a tiny morsel of wasabi elegantly stirred in soy sauce considering that wasabi can be easily mistook for the yummy chutney. However, that is where the similarity ends.

Three of my friends I bet can still recall the horror of gulping down a mouthful of wasabi in the friendly neighborhood Benihana only to be snickered at by the helpful waiters while they were crying and grasping for breath. Wasabi is something that can easily give you the feeling of seeing stars in front of your eyes, and I have experienced it many times when I eagerly dip sushi in the soy sauce only to later realize that I hadn’t stirred the wasabi that well.

For me, sushi has been an acquired taste. I couldn’t stand the taste of seaweed for a long while but now somehow I have started liking the odd taste that it got. I still however haven’t graduated to eating raw fish and sashimi. So I guess some of you veteran sushi eaters still look down upon me :)

Update (01/19/2010): I came across this website that has made a nice info graphic for people to eat sushi the “right” way. May be this might help you in your quest to eat sushi the next time around….

Christmas Songs

Singapore has already started celebrating the arrival of Christmas for close to a month now. The streets have been decorated, the malls are having fake snow-falls, Christmas trees and East-Asian Santas every where (I bet most sport a six-pack below that pillow they stuff over their stomach) and the atmosphere generally is festive and happy. So I have been trying to get into the “happy” mood lately by listening to Christmas songs :) !!

Christmas songs always give me that “holiday” feeling even though I don’t really have a vacation in sight. Anyways, I have been digging through my Christmas songs collection and came across the song “Santa Baby” as covered by various artists. I think this is one song that I have heard covered by most number of people (of course after Unchained Melody, which I have lost count of number of cover versions it has!). My favorite rendition is the one done by Kylie Minogue. She makes it more naughty than the others (yeah and that was my opinion even before I saw the video!). So here are the lyrics and here is the song for your listening pleasure…