End of days? Hooey.

Big Bang fears drive Orissa people to temples

http://www.ibnlive.com/news/big-bang-fears-drive-orissa-people-to-temples/73261-11.html

Its almost hilarious what lengths people's belief in divinity will send them - its seems almost oxymoronic (oxymoronous? bah) , if you think about it - will the ensuing black hole swallow the gods themselves who are supposed to save us? Reminds me of all the garbage in the book "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown.

Reading through http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/09/09/2142259.shtml

Its actually scary though - the protons the 'mad' scientists are playing with at 0.999 C have enough energy to punch a hole through tons of concrete - why bother, I do not know, to discover what lies inside the very tiniest fabric of space-time - maybe its time we rename 'atom', considering that it seems simple enough to break it open.

Random hikes: Diablo

Some random hikes over the past couple of months:
Mount Diablo State Park
We went to the Livermore temple en route.

In front of the Livermore temple


Running down the trail from Mt Diablo to North Peak

Along one of the mount roads criss-crossing the trail

View off a cliff - spectacular view out into the Guadalupe mountains and East Bay.


Near Mt Olympia, on the way to North Peak.
Quaint little place - Praveen poses in front of SF Bay


The trek then winded through some dense foliage, before returning back to Mt Diablo.





A lot of the incline was at ~25-30 degrees - this is one of the easier slopes here:

Solid sarcasm

Been a while since I have posted anything:
xkcd's got some great doodles, really funny, biting sarcasm:
Click here for a sample!

Anime list

I just felt the need to list the anime I have watched so far.
In mostly chronological order of my watching it, starting in the year 2000:

Flame of Recca
Mysterious Play [Fushigi Yuugi]
You are under arrest!
Ninku
3x3 eyes
Rurouni Kenshin [Samurai-X] & Reminiscence
Inu Yasha
Get Backers
Vision of Escalflowne
Ghost in the Shell : Stand Alone Complex
Wolf's Rain
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Gundam SEED
Gundam SEED Destiny
Fullmetal Alchemist
Fate/Stay Night
Gundam Wing
Fullmetal Panic
Final Fantasy VII : Advent Children
Cowboy Bebop
Trigun
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Death note
Demoned Away [Higurashi no Naku karo ni]
Hellsing
Claymore
Ninja Scroll

http://www.animenfo.com/statistic/top.php?type=anime

My viewed list aint bad :-)

I plan to watch/finish:
Bleach
Avatar ( not an anime in the true sense....still fun )

I wanna be a farmer...

Looks like indian tax payers are gonna get screwed. Again.
I heard about the donation to farmers, many of whom are richer than 90% of the middle class...Read:
http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/muralidharswaminathan/1668/50436/upas-rs-60000-cr-insurance-for-polls.html

Half of all income tax revenue goes to this scheme...."I am for the farmer..." says the beloved Pa.Chi. I agree that the poor farmers in the downtrodden villages in rural andhra, or those committing or about to commit suicide should get their loans forgiven....but such a blanket donation to every farmer (Amitabh Bachchan's farmer too, btw..So is Deve Gowda) makes me really cringe.


Maybe I should have (or at least temporarily switched to) become a farmer. Looks like I would have made some easy money.

Microsofting kids...

From Slashdot:

"Microsoft is attempting to curry mind share with the 3-12 age bracket with their new event, the Source Fource, a series of developer-based action figures. Windows Vista Sensei, SQL Server Gal and some lame gender stereotypes presumably seek to rid the world of bearded, katana-wielding evil-doers. From the article: 'Between March 15th and April 15th 2007, the new super dudette will be offered and will be sent to developers who get their act together and attend at least two live MSDN Webcasts or two MSDN Virtual Labs, or one of each."


Argh.. more Microsoft madness. Maybe those are Voodoo dolls. And you can burn 'em.
Who knows...

Bay area randomness

Couple of old friends were visiting me, and we decided to see the bay area in an utterly random fashion - Wake up way past noon, and decide what could be accomodated in the remaining time before sunset. The outcome of that was that we ended up seeing a bunch of stuff we never intended to...LHS, Atomic and I shared credits for the [zero-]planning, and we ended up discussing all of this amidst some hectic PlayStation 2 gaming, generous doses of chocolate/maple syrup, waffles and Atomic's Pongal treatise...





We saw Stanford, of all places...There seems to be a general paranoia about out-of-state folks about seeing Stanford...I personally cannot find anything awesome about going all the way there to look at a bunch of buildings....Ah well...to each his own.







This was followed by a rather brief accident prone visit to half-moon bay....All we did was play ultimate, without any connotation to the word 'ultimate'...in freezing weather, and a rather stiff breeze, to complement my quite still-broken leg.













There was of course the traditional requirement to seek divine blessings...

We visited the Livermore [Food] Temple. Blessed were we to utilize insider information about the copious 'prasaadham' given to devotees at lunch. We even followed this up by a long drive+trek up Mt. Diablo.

Lol, indeed. Remember "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand?




Santa Cruz was a fun outing too, with the weird "Mystery Spot" thing, replete with a trip to the famous BoardWalk....We still couldnt figure out what was so amazing about the place though.






I should'nt forget to mention how seemingly mundane gatherings can turn rather engrossing.
Clubbing together with droves of ex-classmates eeking out a living in the bay area was certainly more fun than I expected it to be...








I even took them to see the center of my world [work, of course!] (and grab a couple of [free] espressos!)...




Considering my past ravings about Body Worlds(R) at Dallas, people just had to see the second edition on show then at San Jose Tech Center...We spent almost an entire Sunday evening seeing dead bodies suspended in weird angles, sometime to the point of nausea...



[I know people shall hate me forever for using this abbreviation....but what the hell.]





And of course no bay area pseudo-tourism is complete without a visit to ol' San Fran.


Incidentally, I also learnt the 'smelly' art of driving on sixty degree slopes on a dumb automatic [-With tire spin stinking up the road-]...

Hotel Kerala-fonia

I have heard great praise about this particular spoof of the Eagles' classic "Hotel California".

You probably need to know Tamil/Malayalam to really appreciate the quality of the spoof...I suggest listening to the original before the spoof, to get the awesomeness of the word replacement.

Big Bang Theory

I have become a big fan of this new series being aired on CBS.

The story revolves around two uber-nerd roommates [Leonard, Sheldon ]living across the hallway from a dumb blonde girl [Penny]. One of the roommates falls for the girl, whereas the other admonishes each of his efforts at wooing her as "statistically improbable".

Most of the dialogue is rather astutely worded, and quite hilarious, with the techy repartees all through slick with greased humor. Other characters include two other geeks [Howard, Rajesh] and a smarter-than-thou cool super-promiscuous female [Leslie].



Leslie is Leonard's lab mate, and secondary love interest. Leslie, Leonard, Howard, Rajesh and Sheldon, all hold PhDs in Physics.


Sheldon's famous board:



---
Sheldon: Someone touched my board....My equations!
[yells out] Leonard! Someone's tampered with my equations!!
Leonard: [waking up, dazed] Uh, what? Looks like that fixed the problem you were having.
Sheldon: Are you insane? Are you out of your mind? Oh! Hey! Look, that fixes the problem I was having!
Leslie: [walking in] You are welcome.
Sheldon: You did this?
Leslie: Yeah...I fixed it when I got up to get a glass of water. Well, now you can show that Quarks are asymptotically free at high energies. Pretty cool, huh?
Sheldon: Cool?! Cool? Who told you that you can touch my board?
Leslie: No one.
Sheldon: You don't see me coming to your house and touching your board.
Leslie: There are no incorrect equations on my board.
Sheldon: That is so....so...so...
Leslie: I gotta run. If you come up with an adjective, text me. [leaves]
Sheldon: Inconsiderate....thats the adjective...Inconsiderate. [texts Leslie]

You can see the above episode at http://www.seedownload.com/megavideo.php?id=PS74B9CM
[Episode 1x4]


---

The Halloween Party:


Raj goes as Thor, the almost-Indian, Norse god of thunder, Leonard goes as Frodo, the little dwarf [as he is addressed at the party], Penny as a cat, Howard goes as a very Peter-Panesque Robin hood. Sheldon goes, one should have guessed, as the Doppler Effect!

Leonard's been wooing Penny for six episodes now. Leonard runs out of Penny's Halloween party mad over her ex-boyfriend's presence. Penny comes over to Leonard's to apologize, when Penny suddenly kisses him.


Leonard: Are you sure you are not doing this just because of all the alcohol you just had?
Penny: You might be right. Leonard, you are so smart.[Penny pulls away from Leonard]
Leonard: [sarcastic] Yeah, I am a friggin' genius.
Penny: Why can't all guys be like you?
Leonard: If everyone were like me the human race wouldn't be able to survive.

--

The show's on hiatus now, thanks to the writers' strike. Dozens of shows have been affected since mid-November, with no end in sight. News is that CBS plans to continue Big Bang Theory next season, in case the strike doesn't end this before summer begins.

"Funky" Shankar

I have nothing against the music, except for the English portions, which are totally unnecessary.

Funky Shankar - The Journey Begins

This Funky Shankar is a Tamil guy raised in Singapore, singing about him being separated from his super-hot girlfriend...

I hope the girl in the song isn't his real-life girlfriend...that would be too much of an analogy with "Beauty and the Beast".

Read great books online!

I found a list of online e-books. Its awesome what books you can read here without a trip to the library...

Dwalin (in the list in the link above)is one of those 'legit' sites that I prefer.
It has mixed English and Russian literature, and has all the novels in text, so its easy to read, without the pixellation artifacts of pdfs.

Doublethink

Just began reading 1984 by Orwell...have been putting this in queue for a long long time....I love the whole concept of doublethink that he portrays in the book....one example:


"The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own
infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes."


Ingenious, eh? I love newspeak.

Which is heavier?

I did my monthly ablutions, and ended up doing my laundry today....Its always amazed me how heavy a month's load of clothes can be, and I began wondering which is heavier...the load of 'dirty' clothes you take to the washer, or the load of supposedly 'clean' clothes one brings back.

On the first pass, it seems obvious that the dirt, sweat and what not your clothes hold before you clean them off might imply that the load you take to the washer is heavier than what you carry back.

If you just look at the load you need to carry, though, you also know you are carrying more trapped 'air', between the threads, as well as the 'balooning' of the clothes.

Your clothes get oxidized a little each time you put them through the drier, adding a few electrons here and there each time, and its possible, nay probable, that you find the clothes heavier out of the drier than when they went in. Also, they are warmer, and from Einstein's "e equals m times c squared" implies that the raised thermal energy of the atoms in the 'clean' clothes might add some mass too...


But are these rather tiny molecular additions and bloated air in mass more than the few millilitres of sweat/dried salt on the clothes?? I dont know. I am gonna weigh them and find out someday :-)

Teen Spirit....Uncool!

In other news, it is weird how teen spirit was even created. Ol' Cobain style shit, had always left me wondering if it was all 'inspired' or just randomness at work.

Yeah, yeah....you are wondering now if I am plain stupid to slip all that shitty lyrics out at you, buy hey, in my boredom, I found the time to learn about what the song was all about, and how Cobain had misinterpreted the perfume 'Teen Spirit' for the [supposed] metaphor 'teen spirit'....surprising what boredom can feed you!

By the way, during my misadventures with the fracture, I learned that San Francisco downtown smells a lot like 'smells like teen spirit', too....especially if you stay out after midnight when the rather uncool crowd shows itself on the streets.
About that maybe sometime later!

Looking beyond the cast...

Aww, its actually gets cold here! Here I was, hoping that Northern Cali doesnt go below the 50s...

Six weeks having flown past that rather nice,warm, eventful twenty-ninth of October, the beauty of being twenty-two showed itself in the form of a tiny yet significant amount of growth hormone flowing down from my hypothalamus to assist the growth of 'new bone'....I was officially (i.e. by the KP orthopedic) declared fit to walk without support. Shows what mind[pituitary]-over-matter (and a general unscrupulous screw-y'all attitude) can achieve....I am gonna try skiing next time I break a bone. I promise.

Look at what I found in spam....

Someone was bored enough to type all of this and then send it in a mail with ye-old " bank-account-of-a-zillion-dollars-in-sierra-leone" pitch....reminds me of some vague memory of some phrase with finding a rose amidst thorns.....


1.. My husband and I divorced over religious differences. He thought he was God and I didn't.
2.. I don't suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it.
3.. Some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them.
4.. I used to have a handle on life, but it broke.
5.. Don't take life too seriously; No one gets out alive.
6.. You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me
7.. Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.
8.. Earth is the insane asylum for the universe.
9.. I'm not a complete idiot -- Some parts are just missing.
10.. Out of my mind. Back in five minutes.
11. NyQuil, the stuffy, sneezy, why-the-heck-is-the-room
-spinning medicine.
12.. God must love stupid people; He made so many.
13.. The gene pool could use a little chlorine.
14. Consciousness: That annoying time between naps.
15.. Ever stop to think, and forget to start again?
16.. Being "over the hill" is much better than being under it!
17. Wrinkled Was Not One of the Things I Wanted to Be When I Grew up.
18.. Procrastinate Now!
19.. I Have a Degree in Liberal Arts; Do You Want Fries With That?
20.. A hangover is the wrath of grapes.
21.. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance
22.. Stupidity is not a handicap. Park elsewhere!
23.. They call it PMS because Mad Cow Disease was already taken.
24.. He who dies with the most toys is nonetheless DEAD.
25. A picture is worth a thousand words, but it uses up three Thousand times the memory.
26.. Ham and eggs? A day's work for a chicken, a lifetime commitment for a pig.
27.. The trouble with life is there's no background music.
28.. The original point and click interface was a Smith & Wesson.
29.. I smile because I don't know what the heck is going on.


Peace. And love.

Rock Band!

I hate posting again in so short a while but this had to be said.

I joined Insen, Whiplash, and Stewie, as stand-in vocals in Rock Band on Stewie's new Xbox 360... When Stewie was out bonding with his bro, Whiplash stepped into Stewie's role as drummer, leaving me to do the vocals....I did a fair job on about half my songs and sucked on the rest....I was thrust straight into medium difficulty, in my defense, without any idea of the tone or lyrics of the songs.

I agree that the drums are really hard, I could'nt get a beat going until my second song, but the guitar was ok....I look forward to my next jam session with them, and hope that we can find a second guitar somewhere to play bass with (the only position left open for poor me).

A happy side-effect from the jamming session was that I got a whole new bunch of awesome rock music to listen to, courtesy ye ol' bittorent...

I highly recommend the following songs from RB:

Queens of the Stone Age - Go with the Flow
The Killers - When you were young
Radiohead - Creep
Soundgarden - Black hole sun
Foo fighters - Learn to fly
Iron Maiden - Run to the hills
Weezer - Say it aint so


Cheerio.

Break a leg, por favor...

Well, yeah, its been a long hiatus from writing in general....my life's shifted into a different gear with work and stuff...I live in California now....need to work only about 10 hours a day ( a great drop from the heydays of graduate school )... I own a car, live by myself in a fancy little studio in a posh area, can actually afford to buy random electronic junk...Random sleep times, random lifestyle, and even more random friends, all ensconced in a happy secluded life living alone....ah!

Like all good things, all that blissful randomness came to screeching halt during a rather tumultuous [past] two months.... a rather weird accident to fracture the fibula on my left leg into two rather uncool pieces...Living alone then proved to be an arduous mental and physical task... with concerned parents calling all the time to make sure I was fine, and me having to limp around to do everything from throwing trash to driving myself to work [ oh, by the way, my claim to fame has changed to the rather insane masochistic act of driving yourself to the hospital with a broken leg... autographs available on Plaster of Paris material only].


I promised myself I would not let myself fall to gloom due to the pain, and did everything from climb stairs without crutches three days after the accident, go to a birthday party, watch about a dozen movies, jaywalk across an expressway, get five strikes bowling with a single shoe, lift foosball tables, survived an earthquake, play table tennis...I probably did more stuff than when I had two full legs to walk on!

Bacchus normal form

Awesome....I actually remember everything I said about 1 hour ago to a bunch of people who I knew well...It is rather weird that I actually had to outwardly pretend that I was totally 'out of it' to get to know some people better...lime juice and water has that effect on me! No one realized that it was lime and water all the time, and thought I was 'out as light' [ note all comments reporting otherwise shall be despatched to the trash can expeditiously ]...took my abuse and refused to give anything back to me...poor Raghu had to tolerate me asking him to ask him to keep his mouth open. I don't think he opened it though > (did he ?)

A few had to tolerate my verbal tirades, being tightly lipped about what cannot be said, and bunch of other friends allowed me to know what I wanted to know. Unfortunately, it was necessary ;-) Weird eh, that acting inebriated gets you people's compassion instantly, though I still could not get all the answers one often looks for. Damn it, that no one was 'knocked'....would have been a 'good will hunting' time, had people been less tight lipped...as a good friend Vizwaz acting such is definitely more fun :-)

Some people actually knew what state I was in ...I was surprised that the poor little Long Island Ice Teas had lost their effect on me, and were reduced, as Sumeet put it, to regular Ice Tea. From where I picked up this surprising tolerance, to get home, and then play counter-strike for an hour, call everyone to confirm that they got home just fine due to the time of the night, is just underscored by a 'lol'!

Always wanted to name something Bacchus Normal Form ( since I heard of the whole BNF thing), and this moment in time is suitable enough. Reminds me of Kurt Cobain's death for some reason... the whole choking-on-puke thing is rather weird eh ? Especially after lime juice and water???

Keerti's bday

Amidst all the post H1-B trauma, we managed to do some stuff for Keerti's birthday, friday and saturday nights. Yes, its the first time I went to more than one 'party' for a birthday.

The first one just had the usual butt-kicking and cake...the second one had a huge assortment of junta from the CS dept.......you could have called it the good ol' motley crew....

For the first time , I was at a party with people from Pakistan, Mexico and Burma...not exactly 'international' , but its a big leap forward from the usual hum-ho stuff. Sumeet actually got some champagne, to celebrate the silver jubilee of Keerti's existence as an individual...

I on the other hand, am much younger, and never fail to remind elderly people (>=25yrs) of that fact ;-)


And yeah, listen to the awesome OST "I'm Shipping up to Boston" by Dropkick Murphys, from 'The Departed'...(this btw plays on top of this page, if you havent disabled plugins @!#!@$$!! ).

You can also listen to it on imeem