Yet another Sunday

Having decided that Twitter's 140 character limit is not enough, here goes...

The story so far...

* Woke up late.
* Did a bit of spring-cleaning.
* Had Luchi for breakfast.

And more to come...

* Chingri Maach for lunch.

* Tinker with my phone and get CyanogenMod9 or AOKP installed. Had updated to ICS on Friday and have had apps+phone crash a couple of dozen times since then.

* Get some reading done.

* Watch the Euro Cup 2012 finals.

bacon ipsum :)

Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet andouille beef ribs sausage ham venison. Cow chuck fatback boudin, strip steak sirloin meatloaf ground round spare ribs meatball andouille turkey bresaola pork belly beef ribs. Beef swine turkey drumstick cow, meatball rump short loin jerky chuck. Short loin pork belly bacon corned beef headcheese strip steak, t-bone pastrami. Pork loin pancetta short ribs, sirloin pork boudin bresaola rump corned beef tenderloin biltong t-bone headcheese bacon. Fatback shank tri-tip venison biltong, beef ribs corned beef ribeye spare ribs tail shankle hamburger pig pork turkey. Flank shoulder biltong, cow pancetta salami tri-tip pork pork loin sausage tongue ham hock meatball short loin.
...

more yummy ipsum at http://baconipsum.com/

ok tata bye-bye to the noughties!

The noughties were a decade of the best years of my life, spent at college, post-grad and then a long stint at SAP ending the last few days at a new company. Will most probably keep looking back at these years for the rest of my life.
I was lucky to be a part of the huge change in the last decade in India- the amazing growth (both breadth and depth) in opportunities with people carving out their own fields/professions and thriving at it through hard work: from making designer baubles, catering, tech start-ups, freelancing and of course old ones like scamming the country out of its tax money.

The decade's defining moments/memories on the Indian stage were the Science and Tech achievements of  Chandrayaan-1's trip to the moon, the obscene-but-legal rise in wealth of certain gentlemen such as Mukesh Ambani and Azim Premji, the rise in usage and fall in tariffs of mobile telecommunications in India (all but phasing out the ubiquitous yellow STD booths) and some disastrous and sad ones such as the Mumbai terror attacks and the rising lethal face of Maoist/Naxalites in large parts of India killing people, security forces, commerce and development.

Hope the next 10 years are as prosperous for india. Hope the prosperity is more inclusive. Hope Pakistan also comes out of it's radicalism-military ping-pong and shares in the prosperity of the region.

[Theatre] MPTF review - "One On One" by Rage Productions

One of our best Bangalorean Sundays in a long time started at Koshy's for lunch with a chicken steak cooked to perfection, followed on to Blossom's and was crowned by great theatre at Jnana Jyothi Auditorium featuring “One on One” by Rage Productions, Mumbai .

We were a bit leery when we saw the programme mention ten plays of ten minutes each, thinking that might be too many and too short. But were blown away by what great stories can be weaved in those ten minute slices: ranging from some great comic pieces- poking fun at babu-dom, airline food and even the funny side of terrorism- to a dark homophobic tale and even a literally dark (thanks to a lighting/power failure) and beautifully poignant story of an Indian widow coming back to life sexually.
Almost every story highlighted something peculiarly Indian that we laughed, cringed and clapped at.

The acting star of the day was surprisingly not amongst the big names like Rajit Kapur or Shernaz Patel but rather the young and very talented Anand Tiwari, who changed costumes and personalities every 30 minutes to blow away our minds with versatility.

Techno-Soccer

After the very controversial refereeing errors at the Argentina-Mexico and the Germany-England quarter final matches of the 2010 Football world cup, if FIFA does bow to media pressure and think about introducing technology to assist the referee and linesmen they should definitely not do it during the world cup. There is nothing like a high stakes failure to kill technological advantages as computers have never been allowed anywhere near the same leeway as humans have.

The best way to introduce the new tech would be first at a 2^nd or 1^st division league game and if passing muster then at a series of international friendly fixtures (and no, there this no such thing as a friendly fixture between say Brazil-Argentina or England-Germany) and pending some time to get the glitches out of the tech and the human operators enough time to get used to it, maybe at the next world cup.

PS- Even though I am an avid Argentina supporter I'd say that Tevez's offside goal was the worse faux pas as it really killed hot-blooded Mexico's pretty decent chances. IMHO England, except Gerrard, were never there against a much livelier Germany.

Audiobooks from MP3 files

After having owned and ipod (classic, 80 gig, 5^th gen) for 2+ years and listened to innumerable adverts for Audible.com on "This Week in Tech" I had decided that it was time to try out and audiobook and see if the experience was any good. However, the audiobook I had with me was a simple MP3 format and I never figured out how to convert it into an audiobook till recently.

Before I jump into a step-by-step tutorial why is an 'audiobook' better than a simple 'mp3'-

1. The audiobook files appear under a separate menu section in your ipod instead of amongst the gazillions songs in your music library.
   
2. Once marked as Audiobook the ipod remembers where you stopped listening to and replays from there the next time.
   
3. And for those who find the pace of the audiobook much, much slower than their reading speed- one can speed up or slow down the audiobook file. They do it in such a way that the reader doesn't seem to have ODed on helium or transmogrified into chipmunks*. On the speed note- I've also heard that there exists some research that listening to this faster version results in higher comprehension, but as I haven't had a look at that report myself I'm not sure if they did any correlation analysis with audiobook-listening-while-driving concentration.**
   

So, how we do that?

1. Add the MP3 to your iTunes library
   
2. Right-click on the selected track/tracks and select "Get Info" from the menu

   
   

3. Choose the "Options" tab and set the "Media Kind" to "Audiobook" and also enable "Remember playback position" and "Skip when shuffling".
   

   
   

* It keeps the audio at the same pitch. It does sound slightly weird though, at least on my ipod and I couldn't get used to it especially for dramatic reading of fiction.
** Note no hyperlink- which means I heard of the study from someone over lunch and couldn't google it successfully.

plants@home anyone?

I was riding the usual 10.30 AM BMTC Volvo to work watching a TED video about living in a biosphere and started thinking that it's high time I started nurturing something environment friendly.

Then I remembered an older TED video that I had found fascinating. This one (4.04 minutes long)was about indoor plants and came with the tagline

With only three varieties of plants, we can “grow our own fresh air” indoors, to keep us healthy.

Now that's what I need to get ahold of this weekend. Anyone in Bangalore know a nursery (preferably near Koramangala) where I can get these?

death knell of the FDFS?

Almost everyone I know has at one time or the other (but primarily during college) bunked office/school/college with friends to watch that great (er, well marketed) movie on the "First Day First Show".

Even though I am not that big a fan of watching movies in the theatres, I myself have bunked college during my engineering days in order to watch quite a few movies including Matrix and DCH at the old Swagat theatre in Jayanagar. An essential part of the charm of the FDFS was to 'volunteer' a lucky few who, fortified with magic potion beforehand, would stand in the long serpentine queues in order to book the tickets 2 days in advance.

Last week there was a new phenomenon in the Bangalore movie calendar with Ghajini which released on 25th of December, that in itself is somewhat nonconformist to the Friday release tradition, and was screened in multiplexes across Bangalore in what was termed as a "Paid Premiere" show on the 24th of December. With each multiplex screening Ghajini on multiple if not all screens it seemed successful enough a ploy(?) to be used by other big banner releases in the future.

So, does that sound the first toll in the death knell of the idea of the FDFS?