Back

Santosh is back after his 3-week vacation.

Cone Conned

Pampered myself to an Amul TriCone. The fool that I was, I blindly believed its QP (Quoted Price) of Rs.20, though the MRP was only Rs.15. Exactly the same thing must have happened yesterday as well.

Who says dishonesty doesn’t pay? It pays big time.

Off

Andromeda is switching itself off all of a sudden right in the middle of work. It’s not the gradual shut down but a sudden off, like a TV being shut off.

Last night was the 4th or 5th time in 1.5 years that it happened. My guess is it’s the overheating that’s to blame. Each time the anomaly happened, Andromeda had been working for long hours and had become very hot. I guess AMD machines having a problem with overheating isn’t an entirely unfounded allegation.

The latest me

 

Since I don a new look every year, I thought it best to remind my readers of my present visage!

The Secret Vault

Remember a previous half-hearted effort to keep some posts secret that would be made public only in the distant future? Well, its time has finally come.

The probable date for lifting the veil is 1st Jan, 2040. A special category ‘secret’ will be used to identify my most intimate thoughts too inflammable for their times.

Jahnvee calls

Finally…after all those attempts! Wish I could join her for lunch. Jahnvee & Jay leave for London tonight. I hope to meet them soon.

Jahnvee’s in town!

I tried to call many times but could get through only once. And even that one call was disconnected midway. :(

Kind of Blue 50th Anniversary

It was precisely 50 years ago that Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, which went on to become the best selling Jazz album of all time. The world would never be the same again.

Side A or B

I don’t quite remember which side it was, but this was the first track on one of my all-time favorite cassettes. It’s the instrumental rendition of Gentle On My Mind by Boots Randolph. If I’m ever asked to name my Top 10 nostalgic tracks, this would be one of them.

Beware, the mp3 file is externally hosted and the editing is flawed.

Jammed

My head was jammed. Food was becoming a problem and I didn’t know the solution. Asha and I jammed last night (ideas being the instruments we played) to zero in on jam. Bought Kissan Mango Jam.

My Nano comment for NYTimes

Proud Pic

This photo, snapped by Ritam, found its way to the NYTimes. One day when I’m rich enough to splurge, I hope to buy this car…not only because it’s inexpensive but also because I’m indebted to the TATAs for everything.

For its price, the Nano looks incredibly cool. Ritam has been trumpeting since morning!

A friend’s blog

Blogs seldom mention me. And so when one does, I jump to the opportunity to mention the mentioning! Here goes.

Nano birth…

…as witnessed by Ritam tonight.

Angry

Damn you dubbawala & people of your ilk
It was too late even for butter milk

Food & Vibes

Dosa for lunch. Haldiram’s bhel, cakes and 2 chocolate bars for dinner. No matter how hard I resolve to remain off junk food, I’m hardly successful. What’s more, one of the straps of my slippers snapped and I had to walk home barefoot. To top it all, an innocuous tweet generated intensely cold vibes.

A movie we loved

Didi, Dad and I had watched this movie years ago on DD. One of the first shots was of a man on a galloping horse breaching security. The sentry fires a warning shot…and an innocent little bird falls from the sky! How we laughed!

I caught the flick today on Joost and couldn’t help thinking of our first TV.

Summing up the day

I am bored and ready to rue
What should I do I have no clue

Press misTrust of India

PTI should really get some people who know English. The following article appeared in today’s edition of the Times of India.

A youth was sentenced to life imprisonment for attacking a girl by throwing acid through one side love here. Additional Session Judge A B Mahajan declared this judgment yesterday.
The youth Arvind Ashok Sonar was news paper seller and fall in one side love with a girl.
The incident occurred on November 21, 2007 when Sonar came to know that marriage of the girl was fixed, then Sonar went to her apartment and thrown acid towards her.
After the incident Shahupuri police arrested him and file case against him.

I’m sure even the ‘news paper seller’ could write better! For the uninitiated, the Times of India has the widest circulation among all English-language broadsheets in the world.

Connected to the Free Internet Chess Server

The BabasChess interface is too complicated. I’ll have to spend some time before I begin to understand how this weird thing works.

This should look familiar to someone I know

View Larger Map
You can navigate through the photograph.

The changing face of communication

One of my first emails 11 years ago was to a friend seated right next to me. I had no one else's id to shoot a mail to. Id’s gradually trickled in and I soon had so many that I often couldn’t remember the faces behind them. The address book came to my rescue. Inboxes were fun, SPAM was a scourge though. I learned to live with the menace, it wasn’t easy. Reminiscence would often loom around those nostalgic years when my prayers to see an impregnated mailbox each time I logged in went unanswered. Personal letters had become a thing of the past.

That’s when IM and IRC happened. I would find more people chatting with acquaintances using instant messengers like ICQ or with strangers using the then-ubiquitous mIRC than browsing the web. A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location) was the de-facto way to initiate chat with strangers. ICQ was a craze amongst geeks. I somehow managed to crack ICQ and even made friends with a Hong-Kong teen, though my contact list remained mostly blank since most of my friends preferred to stay with Yahoo! or MSN Messenger.

Skype came along and all of a sudden you could voice chat with hitherto unheard-of clarity. Bandwidth had grown substantially and a lucky few even managed to squeeze in a video chat. Blogs entered the arena and changed the landscape forever. Everyone blogged, substance was very limited though. Some folks even won book contracts while others fought social injustice. Chinese dissidents found a new way to leak China’s heavily guarded secrets, Iranians began breaking the shackles of an ultra-conservative society, atheists discovered they weren’t as isolated as initially thought and one brave Iraqi gentleman even gave first hand reports of the US invasion of Iraq during the 2nd Gulf War to defeat local government propaganda. Even Indian politicians used it as a way to reach out to subjects they had long forsaken.

Finally came the explosion of social networks like Orkut and Facebook. Personal emails were too much of an ask and people started preferring posting little broadcasts to those who cared enough to listen. Itinerary plans, daily gossips, lunch menus, pictures and videos were shared with elan. Multiple social networks began to compete against each other for traffic and many people had to open accounts in more than one. Aggregators like FriendFeed and MyBlogLog came to the rescue of the despairing end user. Tweets became so loud, NASA personified rovers through them.

How dramatically have things changed over the last decade!

After Dark

Power cuts are frequent nowadays and my only saving grace in the dark is Pallavi, my kid neighbor. She barges topless into my room each time there is a load-shedding and probes every nook and corner to unearth anything that fancies her imagination.

Exceedingly proud of her miniature crockery set, she imported some plates and cups into my room yesterday and we pretended to have a tea party. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

2 pleasant emails

I uttered an OH!!!! when I checked my inbox this morning.

• Jhumur had replied! An anecdotal presumption was corrected: she had an arranged marriage.
• Geoff Clark from Microsoft enquired if all was well with my Windows Calendar. I’m staggered he’s still pursuing the issue after so many months. Thanks, Geoff!

Concerned Agencies or Agencies Concerned

Why for Pete’s sake do we constantly have to corrupt English by infusing our own interpretations to the world’s most enriched language? I think it’s high time I gave up reading Indian newsmagazines and newspapers completely. They’re worthless.

Briefly Uneasy

The shorts I’m currently wearing are so tight around my waist, my legs have gone limp for lack of blood supply. I’ve been waiting for almost a year for the elastic to slacken, but it seems to be in no mood to relent. My growing flab isn’t helping either.

Compare this with my Rupa briefs whose elastic is so dysfunctional, they would have surely slipped all the way down had it not been for the trousers I wear over them. I had no choice but to retire Rupa long ago.

Well Groomed!

Clicked in Jamshedpur, this is my favorite snap. As usual, I had an upset tummy. You can see it writ large on my face!

Thanks to Didi for the reclick.

School Friends

I got chatting with Anjan this evening and he told me about Lekha, the adorable mother-figure of our class in Gulmohur High School. I was elated to learn that she’s in Sharjah and that she and Anjan occasionally correspond via email. Email seems like a dinosaur (I’m ashamed of this admission!) in the age of social networking. Apparently, sites like Orkut are banned there –Islamic ideology at work, I presume. I’m waiting eagerly for a reply from her.

Next in line was news about Jhumur!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yes, those extraneous exclamation marks reiterate how special she once was to me (not the other way around, mind you!), the first terrestrial object I found as interesting as the celestial ones! I owe my interest in homo-sapiens to her. According to my informant, this bong babe fell in love with someone during her college days in New Delhi. They soon tied the knot (the guy was in IT, I’m told) and moved to…London, of all places!

Nice to catch up.

C Day!

I’m so happy for Asha!
I hope this is just a baby step to an odyssey of a million miles!

Asha on a shooting spree

Asha has bought the SONY Cyber-shot DSC-S950 @ £117 for C-Day. I did some research (‘research’ seems an overkill here!) that threw rather amusing results.

• Launched in Feb in UK. US launch seems imminent.
• Amazon UK Price:  £117. Amazon US Price: $130. This seems very strange if you consider the exchange rate.
• This product is already available in India! A vendor on Ebay India sells it cheaper than in UK! There’s even free shipping and a 2GB memory card.
• Since the product is factory-fresh, I couldn’t find it on Flickr Camera Finder. No reviews anywhere.
• Google Products UK is a great way to salvage money. Asha could have saved at least £17.

It’s important that you heed its advice!

This is an important audio tutorial from the BBC. I’m sure it’ll be useful for the many folks who’ve forgotten or never learnt basic English grammar. If the audio is confusing, commit the post heading to memory!

I didn’t know

The creators of Twitter are the very ones who were behind Blogger! This is amazing stuff! You can watch a recent Twitter presentation at TED.