An ode to a non-vegetarian octogenarian

Last evening, Krymsson and I
were strolling by
and what do we see?
A poor old man, looking forlorn and hungry

So we did what everyone would
we decided to get him some food,
we got some from a nearby restaurant
but when we got back, he was gone

We looked for him in the vicinity,
finally found him in an alley.
We said Grandpa, here is some Ghee Rice
He looked at us with some degree of surprise

In broken english said he
Thanks, no Ghee Rice for me
what I would like is some mutton
you see I am a Non-vegetarian.

Billboards

This is an interesting read, a little attuned towards the application we are building. :D (cant tell you more cos it is "if I tell u I will have to kill you" kind of stuff)

Some cool ideas are mentioned in the article, which is more of an overview for digital billboards. I expected to but did not see a mention of the Coca Cola billboard at Piccadily Circus.
The future of advertising however is not as simple as this article would suggest me thinks.

Font-astic!

I Love fonts

I so love Fonts! they amuse and delight me!! Only most times they are extremely expensive.

Here is a super place to get some really cool fonts for Free!

Is this it???

I encountered at first hand something extremely terrible, something that made my stomach churn.
This planet is not a good place to live in, this would be the right time to pack and leave. 'Mostly harmless' is NOT what we are.
I tremble when I think of what we have become, all this evolution to get to a society that seems so warped. sigh.

However, not wanting to end this post on a pessimistic note, here is something I liked...

	Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. - Dylan Thomas

More...

Paradox

A group of people gathered around at lunch today to watch a documentary titled "Paradox of choice: Why more is less".

I did not find the time to go watch the video, but decided to read up on paradoxes :) and I have come up with a treasure trove of info!!

You can find most of the popular one's here and on the wiki.

However the one that I found most weird, was the one derived from a short story called
"All you zombies" by Robert Heinlein, I found a nice little excerpt of it here .

Hoarding Boarding

I have had a lot of fun designing posters, flyers and similar sort of marketing collateral, what I had never done before, was design a hoarding.
However, the upcoming ThoughtWorks Master Class Series in Bangalore and Pune needs hoardings and I am having a super time designing them.
I have 3 hoardings to work on and each have their own challenges :D
I am using Photoshop 5.5 and Macromedia(now adobe) Freehand and Loving every bit of it!!

Travel Tag

So this is tag made out of a question that fink asked me, which I thought would make a decent post (yes, my muse seems to have taken a summer vacation)

"So if you could go anywhere in the world where would u choose to go?"

here are my 5 places

Any Country near the North Pole, to see the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis)

Machu Pichu - Peru

Great Barrier Reef - Scuba Diving

Venice - On a Gondola

Ladakh



and I tag
Fink, KC, SRK, Seemantini, Pal, Apurva, Gitanjali

Joy @ Work!!

A Ruby on Rails project gone live!
The system (a "next generation deigital entertainment system"as our client puts it) we have built for our client has gone live in a bar in NY :D
Much more fun work in store for us...
The more I work at this place the more I realise that the fun I derive from working here is not in the money, not in the work itself, but simply the people I work with. A concentration of amazing intellect and sense of humour at one place :)

Song in my Cerebrum!!

I realise that the cartoon channels have gone to the dogs (read pokemons), I see a lot of annoying pokemonesque series. Once upon a time, there was He-man and the Masters of the Universe, Spiderman, GI-Joe...real super fun.

Then more recently there have been the equally good: Samurai Jack, Sheep in the Big City, Johnny Bravo, Timon and Pumbaa.

However, now whenever I surf cartoon country, I see weird japanese animations with their almondish eyes (most annoying part of anime for me), sad state of affairs as far as I am concerned.

But from channel disney comes my song in head, I simply love this video...

wats the song?

Black Eyed Peas/Jack Johnson - Gone Going Gone
Dick Dale - Miserlou (the very heady [sic] pulp fiction number)
Elvis Presley - Can't help fallin in love
Sinatra's - Something Stupid

Oye wats the zhoke?

Its been a fun Friday!!
or let me put it this way its been a fun Friday!! (:P)
Standing in a very crowded TGIF. Those glasses are heavy damn!
Gate crashing a 'party' that turned out to be 5 people sitting around a TV, discussing India's chances of restricting Lanka from scoring 200. Escaping.
Barging into B77, at some ungodly hour and this time enjoying it!
Watching Lanka bend it and send it to India.

Learning's...
Gals can get the bar tenders attention no matter what the crowd!
Never gatecrash a 'party' with krymson and Miaow no matter what "sad innocent puppy face" they put up!

oh and wats the zhoke?....ask the Pankaaz!

300

The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;

Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.'
- A.E. Housman 'The Oracles'

300 Did not dissapoint, on the contrary not only did it meet my expectations, it surpassed them.
300 is a great effort, to actually make a movie out of such an intense comic is difficult, Zack Snyder does a great job of it.
With some great fight sequences, a gripping soundtrack (a mix of Gothic Classical and Heavy Metal) Lot of blood! Lot of Gore! Lot of Pride! Lot of Glory! 300 is a movie worth watching.

Iteration Zero!!

Family Day at the Park Fields, remember last family day where we had practised days in advance, with the guitars, the keyboards, the Harmonica and the voices.

This time round, we made up the band on the way there and decided to play! 3 Guitars, Marco and I formed the band - 'Iteration Zero'

Dooba Dooba (obviously), Oh Sanam, Pal, Comfotably Numb were the numbers we err belted out!
and on popular request, we did Roo Ba Roo (which turned out to be fun, since, i did not know the lyrics and was attempting to sing them off a tissue paper written in a hurry by Tomahawk!)

I enjoyed singing by the pool! but what I enjoyed even more, was doing(learning) the Salsa by the pool as the sun set :)

Beautiful indeed.

Mahabalipuram

After a super game of scrabble, We decided to take a friend out for his Happy Budday treat :P

Sitting in 13th floor on feb 24th the trip was planned.
Tickets were booked, and off we went on the first of March, to Mahabalipuram.

Since we did not get place at the TTDC hotel, we had to turn to an Auto guy, who took us to 'Laxmi Lodge'
Initially sceptical abt the place, we were surprised to see a resort by the sea, with its own swimming pool and a nice big A/C room, wich gave way to a nice lil lecture that the manager of the resort gave us

"Husband wife, one room, ok
Brother Sister, one room, ok
Lovers, one room, ok (stifled lafs)
4 guys 1 girl, one room, Not ok!
police coming problem happenin"

ROFL, we did convince him though that all was well.

Mahabalipuram is a quaint little town (GOD! I have so wanted to use this phrase), with some brilliant 7th century architecture (in form of awe-inspiring monolithic temples) and a beautiful but surprisingly empty beach.
The best way to see the town is to hire cycles. The interesting thing is that the town is over run by firangs.

Here are a few glimpses

Oh btw we eventually did get along well with the manager, who asked me to "comin with girlfriend next time , get discount " lol

and we solved the mystery of the strange cloud covering the full moon when we realised it was a complete lunar eclipse.
Beautiful.

Reading

I am 50 pages in and this is already building up in true Terry Pratchett style. Have not seen Death recently, hope this novel features it somewhere (also looking out for CMOT Dibbler, Death of Rats tee hee hee)

Listening to

Haseeno ne bulaya galey se bhi lagaya
bahut samajhaya yehi na samjha
bahut bhola hai bechara
na jaane kis pe aayega

Hemant kumar is a singer one needs getting used to before one can start enjoying his songs, a little unconventional singing style but nevertheless an effective one :)

Watching

Pamela Anderson provides her errr vocal talents to the animated character of Erotica Jones, Stripper by night Crime Fighter by later night.
Pamela Andersons talents lie elsewhere. If one were to ignore her irritating voice, there are some positives, such as the funny criminals, her imbecile chief. But one feels Stan Lee could have done a better job.

IMDB rates this TV series at 9.5 out of 10, which is impressive. the first 30 mins of women screeching at the top of their voices, random ppl crying and some of the worst acting I have ever seen on screen was like running fingernails across the blackboard of my very soul.
I will give it another go, only because imdb rates it so high

Bah!

A sudden whim makes me want to play scrabble online, to go pit my wits against some unknown opponents, maybe. So I do what a sane person would do; which is to google for sites that allow me to play scrabble online.
I get a list, out of which I decide that Scrabulous is the one I am looking for.

First I am taken to a page that is an usablility nightmare. it declares in the faintest of print "Experience pure joy everytime" (err... right!)
I ignore this.
I register.
I am asked "May we have a photograph and a 70-80 word description please?"
I provide the photo and a one line description.
Next day I get a mail, why are you not playing? are you facing any problems?
(well I will play when I want to...) i ignore the mail

To my photo and description mail, I get a response
I quote this is how the mail begins
"umm can you try a little harder, with the description?"

Yeah dude I can try a little harder, but I want to play scrabble, not describe myself.
I would register onto a matrimonial website if i wanted to put in a photo and description!

I am waiting for a response on tht one.

grrrr this place easily tops my list of the shitty sites

Go Swarm!

This is an interesting place, I confess that it held my interest (an almost voyeuristic one) for no longer than 10 mins, but still interesting enough to blog about. so Swarm

Movies…

Some of the ok ones like…

- The Big White
- The Notorious Bettie Page

- Someone to watch over

- Road Trip
- Borat Movie (this one was good in parts)

Some of the super ones

- Euro Trip: good good good :D

- Southpark – Bigger, Longer and Uncut: Lol , nice one :D
“What wud Brian Boitano do if he was here today?
He wud make a plan and follow thru
thts wht brian boitano wud do!”

- Finding Neverland: Awesome with a capital A! Johnny Depp is of course GOD, and Kate Winslet has me impressed with “Eternal Sunshine…” but this movie is out of the world.

- Butch Cassidy and the sundance kid: from one of the most romantic scenes ever filmed (“raindrops..”) to a brilliant last shot, this movie is worth a watch especially if you like westerns

- Motorcycle Diaries: Loved it(Reminded me a lil bit of swades). This one is just my kind of movie! Watch it for the travel, for the people, for the wonderful writing. If you enjoy aimless travel, you will enjoy this movie.
“How can I feel nostalgia for a world I have never seen”

A 4 day weekend full of fighter jets, copters, paratroopers (thx to the aero show), Cricket, Scrabble, Taking up a mission to help buy the 'perfect' ladies belt (bah!). Shopping for Pashmina shawls for a friend who is getting married.

The wedding attended, a Bundh missed and an impromptu 12 kilometre walk taken :)

In all a very nice weekend.

God’s own country

I am back from Kerala, the land of Mohan lal, Mamooty, Karimeen (Black Fish), Kappa (Tapioca), Kall (Toddy), Putta, kadal, Idi Appam, Boiled Rice, Back Waters, Houseboats, Indonesian Print lungis, Communism, Tea Estates, Spices, Boat Races, Temple Elephants, Kathakali and Kalaripayattu.

What we did:

Stayed on a Houseboat on the backwaters for a day and a night (from Allepey to Kumarakom), a most amazing experience!

Travelled to Munnar, a hill-station covered with lush green forests and thousands of acres of tea estates.

The People

The Water

The Land

The Flora

The errr…. Fauna

That’s all folks!!