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?

packing for the trip

packing for a trip to anywhere- be it a long weekend at Gokarna, a longer trip to my hometown, or even for an international trip- is such a pain in the ass, especially if you are a obsesive compulsive packer like me.

 

i normally end up overpacking big-time every time, with quite a few backups, the usual just-in-case-it-rains-and-(all)-my-jeans-get-wet-at-the-same-time phobia, and some esoteric items that i might need when the sky falls on our heads.

i think i have inherited this trait from my mom, though without the normalizing ability to pack an elephant very neatly into an overnight bag.

to complicate matters i know that i am an obsessive packer, and so after lining up everything i go over a few iterations to find the balance between removing stuff so as to not appear too weird and adding stuff to satiate my compulsion... 

and then usually there is the nagging feeling that have left something out/behind... 

Smoking in public banned in India

The ban on smoking in public is to be implemented all over India starting tomorrow. Personally i welcome this move, as i hope it will help me quit, <fingers-crossed>.

However, on the numerous occasion this topic has come up for discussion: usually at the smoking corners where smokers have lately been starting off the conversation with a request for a light followed by a countdown statement 'XX days to go', there normally is one prevalent train of thought expressed by most people. 

"How will they catch me smoking on the premises of my company company <MNC/XYZ>?"

When we will have the mental shift to accept a law as it is instead of immediately trying to calculate the possibilities of breaking the law without getting caught and also factoring in the ability to get off the hook cheap (at most 50% of legally mandated fine) by bribing the said officer of law when actually caught? To them i always reply

"If I were not a smoker I would call the authorities and complain about you!"

To end, one of the very rare intelligent words from our Union health minister Ramadoss 

"This is a social movement. First there should be an increased awareness of the new law... This will improve voluntary compliance."

re-blog: new library in whitefield

my friend Guru recently blogged about a new library in whitefield which is very exciting news for a bibliophile like me.

i tried calling them and asking for some more info (as I am lazy enought to expect all info in the world to be available via interwebs/phones) but couldn't get through... so even though i have not been there myself, am blogging it so that the info is out there already :)

now what?

after leching at the apple iphone for the last six months, lusting after the new 3G and cheering the announcement that it will be release in india by both vodafone - it took some time for the prices that they are being retailed at to sink in and then on was a continuous stream of expletives ...

so, now that i am definitely not buying an i-frikking-expensive-phone, now what?
- a new high end phone (i dread to think of the comparison hunt between the almost-same nokias, samsungs and sony ericssons)
- or a low end kaam-chalau phone and an EeePC 1000H
suggestions people?

Bengaluru Bleeding

I just signed the petition on bengaluru bleeding.com .
You should sign up too if you think that citing rising crime and the police's inability to handle it should not and cannot be the basis of imposing abritrary bans- be it time of closure or type of entertainment allowed!

Live bands are what the next generation of artistes/rock bands will be from. Help them to be able to live their passion of music so that you may not have to depend forever on the intermittent appearance of international bands once or twice a year to get your music fix.

presenting ze new 'n' improved TT quick crossword

after discovering the telegragh india's online quick crossword i posted a bunch of request's in my last post on this topic. looks like someone on their dev team might have actually read it... or at least tried using it and came up with the same to-do list.

they've rolled out a new 'enhanced!' version sometime last week and it simply rocks...

some sexy features-

- much improved navigation, yes you don't have to keep pressing arrow keys!
- a cool feature of checking if you've gone wrong anywhere before submission
- nice correlation between the clues and its corresponding location on the grid... "no more i spy 24 down"kudos!

shameless plug department- did anyone NOT notice my name in the pic above as the 1st successful submitter for todays crossword? :)

Amateur Review- Mad about Money

We finally managed the Herculean effort of getting together a group of friends and also get passes (despite the near-fatalistic decision that the passes would ONLY be available at the TOI office at MG Road) to the play ‘Mad about Money’ a part of the Times Bangalore Festival 2008 offering.

The venue was the Good Shepherd Auditorium (on Museum Road) which seemed spanking new and pretty big (a board on the gate claimed seating for 110!). We reached there with half an hour to spare and were pleasantly surprised by the availability of ample free parking and the very orderly, patient queue of people waiting outside the audi.

The play started off around 15 minutes late (I hate the marketing/legal guy who came up with the “show time- 7 p.m. onwards” crap) with a sultry-voiced lady from TOI playing the MC and doing a great job of getting people laughing before the play with the evergreen Rs.10,000-hidden-under-your-chair-trick. And then without much ado started the much awaited play Mad About Money (a great preview available here)- a summary of which I quote below

Hasmukhbhai Mehta, the head of Reliable group of Industries, lives in a palatial house in Ghatkopar, with wife Sonal, son Ajit and daughter in law Preeti. He finds his son to be a wastrel and irresponsible, Preeti too nice and Sonal obsessed with cooking and feeding, thus driving him crazy.

And one night, after a heavy squabble with the family, Hasmukhbhai passes away. But his ghost lingers on to control his family from the other world! Before his demise, he has drawn out a will by which his family will lead a frugal life until Ajit turns forty-five.

As the Mehta family reconcile to their fate, in walks Kiran Jhaveri, the will’s trustee and Hasmukhbhai’s mistress, who has to stay and manage the family and the business...

The first act started with a pretty witty introduction of the plot context and characterization via longish asides narrated by Hasmukhbhai ( played by the amazing Amar Talwar). But the pace of the play built up very slowly with reams and reams of dialogue (with a few gems like "We are just middle class people, but with lots of money" thrown in) spewn to enact in excruciating details the miseries of Hasmukhhhai’s life due to the various quirks of his family.

However, the post interval second act, significantly spiced up with the entry of Kiran Jhaveri (played by the looking-great-in-business-suit+tight-pants Suchitra Pillai ), was where Dattani's plot excelled with crisp dialogues and a surgically neat closure of the various threads of the plot.

All in all- very watchable thanks to superb acting from the cast but the script leaving it short of a standing ovation.

The Telegraph Quick Crossword

thanks to the great guys at the telegraph website i regained a much coveted daily pleasure of mine- the telegraph quick crossword- which was part of the brekky ritual at the dining table back home with the morning's first cuppa in one hand and a pencil in the other.


today's crossword (click on the image above) was a nice way to start off on the old habit again. not too hard but with a couple of clues that you just can't seem to crack, leaving you coming back at it...

hope you guys enjoy it too and do let me know if you get the answers on 5a, 8a, 5d and 7d. ;)

ps- in case the folks developing this app read this- thanks a bunch!!! and only one request- please improve the navigation/interaction. i hated to keep on pressing right/down arrow keys to enter the words letter by letter.
PPS/UPDATE- Guys, please add an option to be able to see the answers after submission (either immediately for a crossword.. or at worst next day). A big part of the crossword experience is to see the answers later and learn!!

catch me if you can...

someone help me catch up with the internet... i now have around a hundred tabs open across 3 firefox instances on my two laptops and a desktop!!

and a gazillion 'to-read' delicious bookmarks and to-do notes too...

disturbingly good

was flipping (or is it clicking) though a blog "Emancipation of Eve" suggested by a friend when i came across these lines that struck a disturbingly discordant chord some-bluddy-where...

I am a product of you.
Amoral, illegal, me

The zygote of hard-working parents
The dreams, dreamt within social constraints
The first steps taken in infancy
Pronouncing the A, B, C and D of Democracy.

I am a product of you.
Stubborn, sinful, me

read the rest here.

what's up doc

it seems that it has been 2008 for quite some time now, and it's just february! signs of old age>?

spent the first 15 days working my ass off at office so that i could go for my annual 18 -day [ya i know, you are allowed to turn green] vacation in Calcutta...

and then came the vacation...
the first week was pretty heavy-duty partying and socializing. yet another of my school mate (Vij) got married and quite a few of our school gang from james were in town, so just the best excuse to drink and catch up...
the second week was as radically different. it kept alternately drizzling and raining and so i spent most of the week with a book in one hand and a variety of hot drinks in the other.
the third week started off with my birthday, which i spent with my family after 9 years... was different in a nice way
of course the thrid week was most spent in wrapping up, packing, shopping, the 'times kolkata festival' and saying good-bye
by the way, if you're ever flying indigo i'd suggest you pay the extra 100 bbucks they charge for the emergency exits. even though the leg space is more there, the fact that they charge extra means that almost no one buys those tickets, and so you have 3 seats to stretch your butt on.

since coming back i realized that 1) bangalore sucks and 2) i miss calcutta.

hope the rest of the year goes uphill from here...

p.s.- despite microsoft (word's ) disapprovals i am tending more and more to keep typing in small case since i saw jerry yang's email . let me know whether you like it or should i actuall listen to my english teacher.

tata indicom datacards

Just in case you were wondering, yes this is another rant.

My laptop comes with a Tata Indicom datacard.

In the age of Indian pseudo broadband (my Airtel broadband account is 348 Kbps), and American web-sites that take broadband pretty much as granted- I tried and I cried to read email on Gmail account. It was even slower than my VPN!

Fuck Tata Indicom and double-fuck Gmail's cantankerous uber cool email interface which gets into cardiac arrest on vacillating and shit-slow network availability.