Non Creative Fiction

This blog is closed

2008-07-09T02:19:00.000-07:00

I'm not blogging here anymore. Havent posted a thing for years, still feedburner shows 7 regular subscribers. Wonder who they are....

I've started a new web comic:
Fly You Fools - An Indian web comic about life and it's irritations.

You can subscribe to the feed at:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/flyyoufools

See you there....

Fly You Fools - An Indian Webcomic about Life.

iPhone Spoof

2007-01-20T04:44:00.000-08:00

Link to Video

In Hyderabad...

2007-01-15T06:21:00.000-08:00

In Hyderabad, you dont fuck with the chickens...

from hpk

from gaurang

... the chickens fuck with you.

Innovation

2006-11-10T05:29:00.000-08:00

Innovation is the e-

Fakest shit ever

2006-11-10T01:19:00.000-08:00

The old radio show calling cheating husband/boyfreind trick, this time with fake Indian accents.

Link

"Wife" talks with a born-in-US accent and "husband" talks with a white-dude-imitating-Indians accent.

Husband's name is Raj but wifey calls him as Raj(sh) <- same pronunciation they apply to Taj Mahal's J part, which is impossible to write.

How hard is it to find fake Indian names??? It's always Raj isnt it... Wife's name is Jasmine!! What is this Alladin? Fuck it, but in 27 years of living in India, I aint never met any girl name JA(Z)MIN.

Why Macs suck

2006-10-27T05:30:00.000-07:00

Most excellent video about Macs and their suckiness.

Author of Dilbert

2006-10-25T08:20:00.000-07:00

Scott Adams lost his voice to somthing called Spasmodic Dysphonia, and manages to rewire his brain.

His blog post.

Gaaa!!

Shawshank Redeption Rap

2006-10-23T23:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.jibjab.com/great_sketch_experiment/video/shawshank

Nice.

Steve the man..

2006-10-22T02:08:00.000-07:00

What sound does your wallet make when you ~~are duped~~, invest in a Mac?

Link to Video

No time for nuts

2006-10-21T00:35:00.000-07:00

The Ice Age squirril (or whatever it is) returns and does some time travelling..

Scrat - No time for nuts
Uploaded by Juraya

Link to video

It starts early....

2006-10-18T22:05:00.000-07:00

Link to video

Forces of Evil

2006-10-12T02:47:00.000-07:00

Original photo by Gaurang on Flickr.

You've got comments!

2006-10-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

Google seems to have bought youtube for 1.6 billion dollars... so from now on we'll see Google ads on youtube pages, which isnt too bad since we were seeing Google ads on youtube for the last couple of months anyway.

1.6 billon dollars!! Goddam!! Back in the dark ages, Microsoft used to buy out companies which made cool OR competitive products (a very strict OR application here), now it's like if it's cool, Google will buy it, unless Yahoo buys it first, think Flickr (they were talking with Google too back then... MS also). So instead of buying youtube Microsoft actually made their own video sharing site, I think it's called SoapBox. Like MSN Spaces, it too is probably used by full time employees only.

So anyway, youtube is now GooTube, YAAY!

This is not about the buyout though, it's about the sheer amount of user submitted content on individual -popular- content. The whole point of sharing a video/photo/blog post is to get views, comments and feedback. That may well be the whole point of all these Web 2.0/Social/Rounded rectangle sites. To share: Give and Take.

Danah Boyd says:

On MySpace, comments provide a channel for feedback and not surprisingly, teens relish comments. Of course, getting a comment is not such a haphazard affair. Friends are _expected_ to comment as a sign of their affection.

Furthermore, a comment to a friend's profile or photo is intended to be reciprocated. It is also not uncommon to hear teens request comments from each other in other social settings or on the bulletin boards. In MySpace, comments are a form of cultural currency.

boyd, danah. 2006. "Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace." American Association for the Advancement of Science, St. Louis, MO. February 19. [Link]

Think comments on blogs, scrapping on orkut. And forget Teens! Everyone likes comments. We pimp and hawk our content for more views, more comments, more favs, more linkbacks... more popularity. These are the popularity currency of the second version of the Web.

That's right we DO pimp our content. "Hi, NICE blog post, I feel the same way about it, please check out my totally cool blog post about it, over here" "Hey y'all! Check out my new photos from the superbly awesome road trip over here, here and here."

We're looking for more views. More comments. And we're hoping other people would be going so crazy about our content they'll mail all their freinds about it, and we'll get more views. More comments.

All this is fairly obvious.. the only problem being most popular sites dont seem to have a mechanism of handling this feedback very effectivly. The Digital Inspiration Blog says the most popular YouTube video is this: Evolution of Dance.

It's been viewed about 33.7 million times. It's been faved by 85,000 people and there are 10,642 comments on it. Views and Favs can be handeled. It tells you this be popular. Very Popular. But how do you handle 10,000+ comments?? For that matter how do you handle 50 comments?

Earlier avtars of youtube used to show all comments in the same page as the video. As more and more people signed in and started commenting, later versions showed a few, and you could view all after clicking on an ajax powered link. Now they've just put in a separate page for ALL comments. Gets ridiculous though... >20 comments dont make sense at all. I just pulled the number out of the air.. it could even be less.

And most of the comments are same - "Cool stuff dude!", "Really nice video", "OMFG! I wish I could do that" etc etc. A large percentage would be spam "Check out this totally cool site", "Make money sitting on your ass at home and answering surveys!! I got 1,000 dollahs last week!! This is not fake!!" And the rest are racist comments "Only you fat american bastards would spend so much time on this crappy video! America sucks ass!!" etc etc..

And what's with the racism on the internet??? Is it that the new internet is putting content generated by the common man available to the comman man across the globe? Is that it? Is it the fact that after looking at USA through the telly, and all those beutifull people on the telly, the fact that every american on youtube/flickr seems to be way too fat is too much of a shock to non Americans?? What's with the anti American comments on youtube?

For that matter, what's with the anti Indian comments? I mean... they've been seeing a distorted view of India on TV since forever... and on the internet the most popular India related videos are just reinforcing the same thing. Bollywood spoofs, 70's C grade telugu movies, Dr Rajkumar singing a fucked up song in English... Terrible, terrible stuff that will kill even a pure bred Indian raised on a healthy diet of bollywood trash.

A recently popular India related video on the internet was some old south Indian movie (I'm assuming it's C grade or worse) song which is a copy of Micheal Jackson's thriller. Of course, the total movie budget was 1/10th the price of Micheal's latest nose job, so the costumes and makeup are horrendous. So is the music. So is the dance. Everything is terrible. It's something you watch and die laughing or of shame (whichever is first).

But this was too much of a India-Racist-Comment bait. Here's some comments..

THATS WHY FOREIGN PEOPLE ARE ON THIS PLANET FOR OUR ENTERTAINMENT PLEASURE
Can u fuckers be more ignorant?
faggots, please nuke India
Indians are officially the funniest people on the face of the planet. THe only thing that makes it funnier is that they all think they are awesome actors and dancers and take themselves soo seriously.
who the heck would pay to produce this thing? It totally made my top 10 most wierdest internet videos. Kalimar, mar, mar, mar, mar. Hehe, crazy indians with their curry and stuff.
JESUS VISHNU!! Go eat a cow dipped in rat sauce you fukin dotheads LOL!!!!
WTF These are the same people who answer you tech questions when your computer crashes

What's with the hatred dudes?? These arent the same people who answer the tech questions when your computer crashes... these are cheap ass actors (or at least NOW famous actors from their starting days) doing a cheap ass movie shown to a public that couldnt care less if the original song was thriller or if the zombie makeup is good quality or not. The tech question people are regular educated young people and they dont go dancing like crazy, taking themselves all serious and shit. Though they might be >>EATING<< curry, they might even be eating cows.. but not in rat sauce. [Here's the link to the video on break.com]

Coming back to the comments overload problem. Popular content does not just have comments... it becomes a discussion forum. Positive comments get mixed up with racist talk, positive criticism gets mixed up with viagra peddlers. Someone needs to fix this thing.

Websites, can we have something like a classification system? Sounds lame I know... a viagra pimp wont file his comments under MISC/Spam, but maybe some type of basic classification. Some better content management.... threads? Please can we have threads?? Someone replying to a comment from 10 scrolls up doesnt make any sense. Tagging anyone? That's so early 2006ish, but still...

And please please please.... No generic drupal interface. Free is the new ugly.

The Classics !!

2006-10-06T05:48:00.000-07:00

Some of the worst movies one can watch are in the imdb top 250. Here's a few I have suffered:

5. Casablanca

Was this the most cliched movie ever, or did the cliches evolve from this movie's popularity. Doesn't matter now. It's an hour of over acting and cliched misery.

12. One who flew over the cuckoo's nest

This movie could well be the prequel to The Shining. Jack N is not crazy but happens to be in a lunatic asylum and gets some women and booze in for the other inmates... one of which kills himself. Yawn.

19. Dr Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

Long title for the movie which is supposed to be the funniest movie of all times (By Americans). It's not funny. Peter Sellers is overextending himself by playing three roles.. and the sentence "Gentlemen you cant fight in here, this is the war room" is humorous, but NOT good enough to make it the funniest movie ever. And I know critics would be shaking their heads right now and saying I missed the subtleties of the cold war humor and multi layered sarcasm etc etc. Fuck all that, if I am not laughing during/after the movie then it aint funny.

21. Citizen Kane

It's at 21 here, but supposedly this is the best movie EVER. PERIOD. I'd say its the worst example of American propaganda. EVER. PERIOD. Citizen Kane is the worst movie! The soviets and Chinese used to have propaganda movies of soldiers and the youth of the country marching etc etc but Americans produce one-man's-struggle-against-the-rest-fucked-up-sagas. This is right up there with Atlas Shrugged, another piece of literature I hate.

64. The Shining

It's not a bad movie. Just that the novel was actually scary. Still I wouldn't say it's bad, just that it aint AS good.

103. Donnie Darko

Damn it's a dark movie. Weird, depressing dark.

108. The Great Dictator

Is it just me or do others also find Charlie Chaplin unfunny. Ok ok fine, look he's dressed as Hitler and playing football with a globe, yes yes very nice metaphor.....

127. Monty Python: Life of Brian

Supposedly the funniest movie ever made (according to the English). The monty python series were brilliant, genius and totally absurdly funny. Their movies are totally unfunny and just sad to watch all that talent being wasted.

And the good movies:

1. Godfather
An excellent movie. A more than excellent movie. I wouldn't say the best movie ever, but the most PERFECT MOVIE. That's different from the best.... it's just perfect.
(5 stars)

2. Shawshank Redemption

Not a bad movie, again the novel was better and if you have read the novel than that kills the suspense anyway. But still the movie manages to be interesting, even if you know the story. That's why its a good movie.
(3 and 1/2 stars)

3. Godfather 2

Umm.... it's also good. At least since the third part sucked so much.
(2 stars)

4. Lord of the Rings - Return of the King

All three LOTR were kick ass and can be watched over and over again. And I would've been watching them over and over again, but one mean bastard took my Director's Extended Edition 9 DVD set and hasn't returned yet.
(5 stars)

6. Schindler's List

Good movie... although Holocaust themes have started to be overused by now. But the way the movie is shot is brilliant. And it's black and white.
(4 stars)

9. Pulp Fiction

If Godfather is the perfect movie, the pulp fiction is the PERFECT WIERD MOVIE. It's been called the best movie ever too. Probably NOT by the same group who called Citizen Kane the best movie. This is a great movie.
(5 stars)

14. Lord of the Rings - Fellowship of the Ring

Same as 4.
(4 Stars)

Other great movies below 15:

17 The Usual Suspects ***
18 Cidade de Deus (City of Gods) ****
32 Fight Club *****

37 Apocalypse Now *****
45 American History X *****
63 Reservoir Dogs ****
65 Saving Private Ryan ****
66 Sin City *****
93 Kill Bill Vol 1 *****
100 Full Metal Jackets ****
105 Crash ****
106 Fargo ***
113 Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) - Anime ***
178 Trainspotting ****
193 The Big Lebowski *****
228 Lock, Stock and two smoking barrels ****

So, do people actually like watching movies like Citizen Kane, The Fountainhead and Three Colors ???? Or is it just cinematic snobbery to appear elite?

Feed update

2006-10-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

Just a note: If you're subscribed, please make sure the feed is coming from Feedburner.. Few reasons... Blogger's atom feed doesnt seem to be coping too well with Windows Live Writer and all these photos come scattered all over the place.

And the second, more important reason: Feedburner's got some feed stats. It massages my vast ego to see that my subcription is into double figures now. It's only a matter of time now that I bring in the Google ads and then it's Goodbye 9-to-5 naukri.

Here's the URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/saad

Tourists

2006-10-01T13:08:00.000-07:00

Now what?

2006-09-28T08:14:00.000-07:00

Mutton Eaters

2006-09-26T01:56:00.000-07:00

"Mutton-eaters cant play garba", says this article in Hindustan Times.

The Shiv Sena has warned Muslim youth not to participate in festivities — particularly the dancing — during the nine days of Navratri.

“We may allow Muslims as onlookers, but on the dance floor, strictly not. That is forbidden in Hindu custom,” declared a statement in the party mouthpiece Saamna on Monday.

“How can you allow mutton-eating youth inside a temple during such a holy period?” he told HT, when asked to explain the logic of the ban.

*Sigh* If only these people would leave their mutton chomping habits for a measly 9 days, they might be eligible for a most excellent time dancing round and round all night.

-- from willem velthoven

But they just cant leave their mutton alone. The SS didn't say anything about chicken though. Colonel Sanders will be pleased... or KFC outlets in Mumbai might get ransacked every year during Navratri.

Another cool quote from the news article actually made me laugh out loud... it said:

“This is not the party’s stand, it is Jaiswal’s individual opinion,” Saamna executive editor and Member of Parliament Sanjay Raut said in Mumbai. “We are not against all Muslims, only against those who don’t love India and obey the laws of the country.”

LOL! Yeah let's not let those who don't love India, partake in this most excellent all night dance extravaganza. Those mutton eating, India hating, commie scum.

-- from hpk

Garba was a big deal back in NID. You'd have non-Gujratis practicing for weeks and every night there'll be people from other institutes (IIM etc) coming in. Supposedly NID garba is famous there, for the same reason the non-dancing NIDians end up on the lawns there. The reason being, women:

-- from ratri

-- from amrita b

And all were welcome. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis (Yes there WERE Buddhists and Parsis). In fact I remember one notice from the administration saying, Please consider the fact that outsiders come during these ceremonies, so please dress and behave accordingly and do not smoke.

Nowhere else could you find a bald headed, pierced face girl dressed in a backless choli and traditional gujrati dress smoking weed and talking filth. Too much of a cultural shock for non-NIDians.

Technorati Tags: garba - nid - gujarat

Got Dignity?

2006-09-25T02:02:00.000-07:00

Some would say this is a terrible, some will say they're terrific. Behold the Business Bib for people who work from their home.

What the web cam will see

What anyone else in the room will see

How it'll look being used by normal people
(i.e. who dont look as good as the sculpted model above)

-- from businessbib

Liberty

2006-09-21T08:54:00.000-07:00

Apologies to "Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, KG, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCIE, GCVO, DSO, PC", known to his friends as Dickie. [1], Edwina [2] and Prime Minister Nehru.

Photo by the Master of the "Decisive Moment" - H.C.B.

If you're going to San Francisco...

2006-09-19T03:55:00.000-07:00

.. Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you're going to San Francisco
You're gonna meet some gentle people there

For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people with flowers in their hair

Gentle people and extra long Stretch-Limo-SUVs stuck on the curvy roads.

[Original Article]

Musically possessed child prodigies

2006-09-18T11:48:00.000-07:00

He may be still wetting his bed but he can play a mean beat on the drums

[Link to youtube]

And this other kid MOST certainly wets his bed, but he can also, most certainly move his ass on the dance floor.

[Link to youtube]

Holy Crap !! What the hell are his parents feeding him? Milk and Speed?? Baby food sprinkeled with Ecstacy powder???? Satan's milk????? I wouldnt want to be near him when he's grown up... I wouldnt want to be near him NOW.

.com shadi

2006-09-18T02:17:00.000-07:00

From this post by AlooTechie

An 18-year-old Muslim girl who fell in love with a Hindu boy on internet has fled her home in Britain against her parents' wishes and married him in India.

Link to original news article

Nice story and it had been 1999 it would've made the newspapers but such things are common now.

Reminds me of another such internet wedding. This guy I knew met some girl from Iraq on the net. They talked regularly and I guess fell in love. So one this the guy leaves for Iraq without telling anyone from his family and went underground for a few months. No mail, no call no nothing.

Apparantly he had gone to talk to her parents and get married. Few months later he shows up back in Delhi, unmarried and rejected. Life had no meaning for him... for some time... then one day the girl arrives unannounced and ready to get married (against parents' wishes). They get married... and all is well for some time.... till her parents show up unannounced!

They threaten, police is called in and it's an international diplomatic incident. Then all is resolved and parents go back to Iraq, scorned.

Then all is well for some time. Then the girl goes back to Iraq to visit parents and convince them to get unscorned. She probably succeeded because she comes back with 75,00,000 rs as a gift from daddy. They buy a house and live happily ever after.

The next day, the rest of his gang get their computers hooked up, and take to searching and chatting with NRI women full time.

The vast global shave controversy

2006-09-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

Edit: There's some problem with the feed and it's only publishing a part of the post. Visit the blog for the whole thing.

It all started with a google ad about Gillette Fusion. The latest ~~razor~~, nay, "Shaving System" comes with not just 5 blades on the front, but two "trimming blades" on the back. The brings up the total to 7! Now anyone who buys this and still feels he's not being taken for a ride needs to reduce the number of blades to ONE, and slit his throat with it.

Let's go back to the beginings of the conspiracy. You'll excuse the spelling mistakes and the lack of hyperlinks to support every little detail, the links will be provided at the bottom.

Our great-grandfathers, when they woke up in the morning used to hack away at their man hairs with a straight razor.

These were also called the Cut Throat Razor.. for self explanatory reasons. But to paraphrase Douglas Adams, "In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri."

They did the job well. Needed to be sharpened on those leather strip things and came in handy for self protection in countries where the Second Amendment didnt apply. You can still buy these razors in some places, your local grocery uncle shop does not stock it though. Or you can buy this very fine example of a gentlemans' accesory from classicshaving.com for only 400 dollars American. That's right, 20 thousand rupees Indian.... do I hear a few throats being cut?

But no matter how manly our forefathers were, nobody likes to get their throats cut early in the morning, and Mr Gillette invented the safety razor, to ensure that the men of the day can live with uncut throats and actually end up being forefathers, instead of being... DEAD.

Now here's where the conspiracy starts. The thing that makes a safety razor different from a cut-throat is not only is the razor shielded from the skin (only the edge is out), but you can change the blades when the old one dies out. You dont have to sharpen the damn thing before shaving.

A good business model also. The old cut throat once sold, remains sold. The company doesnt get any more sales from a buyer. Now in a safety razor, you get to sell the razor, then there's a constant demand of blades. Good business for Mr Gillette, good convinience for the shaver.

And for some time, everything was well in the world.

But how long can a good thing stay good... and pretty soon saying that even safety razors werent safe enough, we have those twin blade cartridge systems with both blades facing the same side.

They ruled for some time... with the disposable razors as an added convinience. For the price of a old fashioned blade, you can have a one piece disposable plastic razor. Sounds convinient, except for the terrible quality of blade, the extremly terrible quality of the plastic and the fact that this puny little block of plastic doesnt feel as deadly... as manly.... as solid as the old fashioned full metal safety razors.

This was probably the dark age of razors... and people of my age probably started with these as their first razor. First shave with these plastic babies and many male adolescents would have been asking God, WHY?? Why this curse on the male fraternity?? Why must we endure such pain and skin burn and cut pimples??

But things were to get better... as the smart people at the Global Gillette company had a few more innovations in this most excellent morning-hair-cutting-actuvity. This might, or might not, be related to the fact that the even smarter people at the Global Gillette's Sales Division has realised that the sales of their disposables had plateued and like everyone else in the world, they too are money worshipping whoremongerers.

Then came the Gillette Sensor! A brilliant design with twin blades mounted on springs that would easily glide over any uneven outgrowth on your face. Less cuts for sure, and they say a closer shave. I will now repeat this phrase, please pay attention, it will be repeated at every new invention from Gillette. The sensor "shaving system" gives you less cuts and "a closer shave".

Spring loaded blades = Good invention
Results in closer shave = WTF! HOW?

It sold out! Everyone bought one. I bought one. It was nice. The only problem being blades were expensive. One blade was more than a hundred rupees, dont remember the exact price. And yes, none of these "Shaving Systems" are backward compatible, so if you were suckered into buying an expensive dual blade "shaving system" your spring mounted super expensive blades wont fit into that. Suffer, sucker.

So when the Sensor sales platued out on Gillete, they came out with another invention. The Sensor Excel! Bravo... the same spring mounted dual blade system, but with a strip of "MICROFINS" at the bottom, which suposedly raised the hair to get a..... you got it, "closer shave". Shaving is getting closer and closer by the minute now, blades however keep increasing in price.

Similar situation with the sales again, and BEHOLD!!! THE MACH3!

Not only was it spring mounted for a "close shave", it had *gasp* three blades! And not only did it have "microfins" for a "close shave", it had a strip of goo on the top which will moisturise your skin and do all kinds of things like fade out when the blade is gone (or sales plateu again).

So even if your blade is working fine but the strip fades out... throw the blade and buy a new set of expensive blades. I assume the blades are made out of steel? What dies first... steel or goo? Hmm.... I remember the ad for this... some fighter plane going around and a voice over saying "YOU take one stroke, it takes three" then some dude with a face that looks like its been waxed with boiling hot wax is there with a smirk on his face and a woman lovingly caressing his freshly "close shaved and auto-moiseturised" cheeks.

All in all this was a good "shaving system". The head swiveled, which was suposedly a feature, but I never got used to it. The only thing being, blades were too damn expensive! Around 350 for a pack of 2 blades. Remember it's not just a pack of two blades, it's - 6 blades, 6 springs, 2 moisturising goo strips and around 8-10 microfins. That's a lot of stuff for 350 rupees. One should be gratefull.

After some time they released the Mach 3 Turbo, which was the same shit in a new bottle, but had ONE more microfin. That's right, just ONE more microfin. And I bought it too. I bought all of their shit except Mach 3 Venus Divine, which was meant for women, or extremly sensitive men.

Not to be outdone, the competition had already launced Quattro 4, which had, YOU GUESSED IT, four blades. All in the noble cause of a "closer shave". At this point there was a public outcry about a razor "Arms Race" with Gillette and Wilkinson trying to outblade each other and The Onion came out with a article (link below) about Gillette's CEO saying, Fuck it, we're making a 5 blade razor. Little did they know Gillette also subscribed to The Onion's RSS feed.

They released the Gillette Fusion with 5 blades. Fusion it's called... Fusion of WHAT??? Five blades?? Here's the marketting blah about it:

'the combination of adding more blades and narrowing the inter-blade span creates a “Shaving Surface” that distributes the shaving force across the blades, resulting in significantly less irritation and more comfort'

A shaving surface you say! The sheer force of 5 blades running across your face will create a force field (Bernoulii's principal perhaps?) for the distribution of "shaving force" !! Just shoot me already! At this point I realised they will never give up until we end up with something like this:

Camps

2006-09-13T05:38:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Gaping Void.

If you cant laugh at others, who can you laugh at.

In other unrelated news... I open up a magazine - Living Digital and the article about Barcamp Delhi has 4 photos, 2 of which were "liberated" from my Flickr account. No credit, no nothing, definitly no money. They were crappy photos anyway.. but this magazine is interesting.

This and this photo taken

Instead of the usual naked centerspread of a fine lady, they have a centerspread of a fine lady with an ipod or some other mp3 player.

Nice! Being geeks and dorks, tech people can drool over the ipod, while the rest of the world can feast eyes on the fine lady.

Whatever...

2006-09-10T21:34:00.000-07:00

Finally found this baby..... it was like the New Media anthem back in NID

[Link]

Brilliant in it's simplicity and rawness...

India in Simpsons

2006-09-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

Found this on the internet... havent seen Simpsons for a few years...

simpsons bollywod song
Uploaded by sheerine

[Link to Video]

Ah... dont you love being stereotyped like that. Hey white boy, quit joining your hands and moving your head like that.

But I like this other video - The Singhsons

The Singhsons
Uploaded by afewerk

[Link to video]

Hmm.... Maggie's reading "Arranged Marriages for 3 year olds " .... Hmm... the Arranged + Child marriage combo again.. Well WHAT OF IT!! Of course 3 year olds will be arrange marriaged! You cant have 3 year olds being Love Marriaged! They be kids.. cant make such choices. That be why we Indians marry our 3 year olds... also dowry less for 3 year old. Only 3 cows.

Row over tables

2006-09-10T05:13:00.000-07:00

Design spotter spots a great example of minimalist design.

It comes with the usual Design Bull about inspiration and affordance.

I wanted to design a piece with personality and character, something for the free-spirited individual, not the generic masses.

Yes. Free spirited individual and the curve. Yes, we see the relationship. Although I'm not saying it's bad. It's not. It's a fine piece of furniture and has the potential of being a conversation piece in itself. Covered with other cool stuff in your living room, it'll be a great addition to your IKEA stuffed living space.

Like the designer said, it's not for the masses. I wouldn't use this table to put everyday stuff on it. Sure, there's the extra room, but those curved ends kind of make me feel insecure that my stuff will fall off.

-- from MarionQuaggatuggu

Now having a "regular" table (like the one above), doesnt give you that feeling because it has clearly marked out edges. So even though both the tables may have the same surface area, and you can stack the same about of stuff on both, you feel more safe using the regular one. It's called visceral design.

And it's not just about straight edged tables. It's about horizontally flat tables. Would you feel anxiety putting stuff on a round table? Look at the photo below... I dont think you will. Would you put your computer monitor on a rectangular or flat table? You might, ok the round one will be awkward when you're sitting, but you wont have the same anxiety as when you use the curved table from the top.

-- from Pantalon

Why? I'd say because fundamentally the idea of a table is to keep things from falling down. When I put something on a table I expect it to stay there. Consider a smooth surface table with a slope and no barrier on the sloping end. Causes anxiety.

Of course, since a regular table is safe, it's used everywhere and that's why it's called "regular", which also means boring, or at least not something you'd want as a centerpiece.

I'd say Furniture design is probably the most important design discipline. It has the most relevance to the majority of human population (at least the ones who can afford a chair). Good graphic design is important, but graphics talk to our mind. We see a good graphic and feel good. But an uncomfortable chair, is quite literally, a pain in the ass.

A lot of famous designers have been furniture designers... or so I've heard, the only one I know of is Charles Eames and his Wife Ray Eames, who designed the famous Eames Louge Chair (below), and published The India Report which was cruicial for the establishment of the National Institute of Design.

Inviting? You betcha!! Sexy? Relaxing?? All of the above. It's called Affordance, you look at something and you know exactly how to use it, because it's form is self explanatory. You want to sit your ass in this, put your head on the head rest, lean back a little and put your feet up on the ottoman, drink beer and watch porn. Or maybe not.

Look at this other example:

Reminds you of a govenment office, complete with pan chewing babus and slow squeeking cieling fans, doesnt it? But it happens to be a design breakthrough of it's time. No back support and using the material's own tensile properties. [Wikipedia]

A cantilever chair has no back legs, relying for support on the tensile properties of the material from which it is made (originally steel tubing). This famous form was pioneered by several people, but was officially designed by the Dutch designer Mart Stam in 1926, and remains an important example of 20th century design.

Another designer of Cantilever chair design was Hungarian designer Marcel Breuer who was experimenting with new designs with steel tubing.

So anyway, why am I going on and on about chairs and tables? Because I'm trying to relate furniture design with software design. Not the technical s/w design, but Interaction Design of a software.

Think about it. The most amount of time spent in a day for most of us is with Furniture.... and you guessed it, Software. Sitting on a chair, using a computer...... ring a bell?

So while furniture design has got better over the ages, software still is a pain in the ass. Well to be fair, lots of software. How does anxiety level of a user affect software design? In many ways... Consider this, as I'm writing all this and copy pasting the HTML for the images I've been saving the draft after every change. Blogger does it automatically too, but I dont trust my net connection. There's anxiety.

Ok that was a weak example. And I ran out of time also... but the point is made. I'll be trying to link furniture and software design in furthere posts... right now I gotta go and my back hurts from this chair :P

Compassionate Designers

2006-09-08T01:02:00.000-07:00

The Logic + Emotion blog has a post about creating compassinate designers. Four steps:

1. Get out of the office
Put down that design magazine and boxes+arrows article. Go out into the real world. Watch. Listen. Observe.

2. Talk to someone
Talk to the people you are designing for. Chances are you won’t be able to relate to them at first. When you get to this point—then you know you’re doing something right.
3. Eat, Sleep, Dream Curiosity
Be curious. Be very curious. Don’t know how? Find yourself a five-year-old, and hang out with them for a while. Then ask the same questions they do.

4. Do what they do
Are you designing for stay-at-home moms? Take the day off and go to a park. Hover around schools during drop off time. Walk a mile in their shoes. Better yet, just walk with them.

In other news, two Flickr people met and got engaged....

When animals attack on TV !

2006-09-07T22:04:00.000-07:00

Lizard jumps on a news anchor/tv host... [Link]

Cockroach runs up a weatherman's leg [Link]

The lizard one is hilarious!!

Soul satisfying good fun for the family

2006-09-07T07:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a small little game about shooting teletubbies. With a pistol or rifle, or go close and use a chainsaw. Good fun for hours.

[Previous post about Teletubbies]

PC Users are gay

2006-09-06T03:31:00.000-07:00

By Nickstarr on Flickr

... or maybe crossdressers? Or probably what this ad is trying to show is MAC got a hot date, while the PC geek got a cross dresser or something.

What's with these bastards anyway? Every few months they'll come up with a new reason to hate Apple. What's the point bastards, whats the point? Fine, a mac comes with all the cool shit pre-installed, but fuckers, all these ads are for dissing Windows and NOT the PC platform. So if windows sucks so much ass, why release bootcamp? Why let that piece of shit software run on a cool mac?

But obviously people would still buy macs, cause people are mindless cattle. OOo look I have a mac, I can DO STUFF because all the cool shit is preinstalled. I will open the box, take the mac out and make a cool movie RIgHT NOW! Within seconds!! Oooo. I'll get a good overall warm feeling by using my mac, which will make me forget for some time that I have a teeny weeny shwang.

Fucking designers and artsy people....

by Hugh on Gaping Void

Gravity Vs Cars and Fat People

2006-09-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

Two video:

First's a Game trailer (?) about a 1000 cars running around a city. Excellent and fun to watch, although the background song - Moby - Flower is pretty dated. Wonder what'll happen to my teeny weeny centrino powered laptop if I try rendering a thousand cars in 3D T&L

Watch the video here

Second video is a fat kid with her mom strapped to some amusement park ride. Gravity manages to catch her within second, but her 3rd or 4th chin saves the day. Mom happens to be a lunatic maniac who's laughing like she's possessed and has absolutly no idea that the overwieght fruit of her loins is hanging on for dear life by her chins. Gravity hates fat people.

Watch the video here. Or use the embedded playa:

The miracle tree

2006-08-31T07:37:00.000-07:00

I got reports coming in, that a tree fell down near Jama Masjid and it’s oozing out sweet water. So everyone’s going there to take a sip from this most auspicious miracle.

At the same time airlines started banning liquids, Gods in India started liking it and we had several liquid based miracles.

First the water around Mahim beach turned sweet. And it probably stayed sweet for 10 mins, after which tons of sewage from all over Bombay got dumped in it. But a little shit never scares the Mumbaikars, what with their city spirit and all, and they nevertheless proceeded to drink and wallow in their own faeces. And the faeces of their neighbors.

Then Gods started drinking milk again, but some didn’t and it caused much sadness and anger. Then in one huge miracle, the Thar desert got turned into a lake. Imagine some poor bastard tourist who came all the way to Jaiselmer to ride over the sand dunes on a camel…. He’s probably standing ass deep in the mud.

And now the tree is spewing forth miraculous water and we have medical experts on the TV saying such water is most excellent for Arthritis and stuff. You know what’s also good for arthritis? Arthritis medicine.

Water in a tree!! What a miracle !! It’s almost as if the tree had roots going deep underground and sucking up water from the already water laden soil, since it be rainy season and everything.

We got sweet water coming from trees and the ocean, but our colas are full of pesticides. What would really be a miracle is if you opened your kitchen tap and got clean drinkable water. That would be a miracle. Drinking faeces is just stupid.

Found this link to another similar miracle.

Lucille Pope's red oak tree has gurgled water for about three months, and experts can't seem to get to the root of the problem.
....
....
Lucille Pope has started to wonder if the water has special properties. Her insurance agent dabbed drops of the water on a spider bite and the welt went away, she said.
...
...
"I just want to know if it is a healing tree or blessed water," she said. "That's God's water. Nobody knows but God."

God is talking to us humans, and His medium this time around is water.

The inmates are running the asylum

2006-08-31T07:10:00.000-07:00

Got the following job requirement in a mailing list. Opening for a Usability Professional. Wont be naming the company in the hope that if in the distant future I happen to be sitting on the other end of the interview table…….. anyway....

It says thus:

Candidate should have 2 to 7 yrs relevant experience.
Should be good in web interaction designing and execution.
Expert in Adobe, Macromedia and other tools and languages required to develop Interfaces.
Should possess good knowledge about Usability, Information Architecture and Online Branding.
Excellent communication skills.

Hmm…. Adobe, Macromedia and other languages to “DEVELOP” the interface. Hmmm….

Also should know about usability, IA and online branding? How about the much coveted ability of being able to suck a golf ball through a garden hose?

The inmates are running the asylum.

Cool card trick and youtube's traffic

2006-08-30T10:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a cool card trick video..

[Link]

If you check the stats on this video, the views are around 1854276! What is that.... ? One million eithe fifty four thousand two hundred seventy six? There are 3,852 comments and it's been favorited 7689 times!

Where does youtube manages to get such traffic???? Television has problem managing such viewership. Imaging this 2 min video on TV trying to get such reach.

I've managed to get a measly 1,605 views on my most popular Flickr photo, the highest favs are 863 and highest comments are 57. DAMN!

Flickr Geotags and disappointment

2006-08-29T23:42:00.000-07:00

So anyway, there was lots of talk about Flickr integrating Geotagging with their photos. Before yesterday, there were several greasemonkey scripts as well as similar mashups with Yahoo and Google maps. (aint providing links, do your own googling).

So anyway, Flickr enables geotagging. Yaay! More things to play with and you can look at other people’s photos from the same location/neighborhood. More Flickr goodness.

So anyway, I fire up Flickr organizr to geotag my photos and New Delhi is actually a triangle with thick yellow lines!

Great! Thank you Flickr for simplifying my world thus. My 50k+ photos which are on Flickr were shot in within the confines of these 3 lines, 13.8 million people live within that triangle and there’s thousands of excellent places for taking photos. So do I dump my 50k photos in one lump around the center of the triangle?

This is it! Enough US centric design already! Goddamit! If the news channels are to be believed all the terrorists are downloading Google maps and secure areas and all kinds of shit and I, a paying Flickr customer cant geotag which street I took the photo from? Are there only 3 roads in Delhi?

Why don’t we have detailed street maps for Indian cities? Why is it that Google ad sense can “sense” I’m from India and show me ICICI home loan ads, but fucking registration forms always start the STATE field with ALABAMA? Fuck Alabama, are you showing the ICICI home loan ad to some guy from Alabama? Obviously not! All the “sensing” goes into selling.

Incredible Big Bangs

2006-08-14T02:08:00.000-07:00

Dozens of nuclear explotions synched to a white zombie soundtrack. Video here, requires Quicktime 6.

Traffic Jams and Road Rage

2006-08-10T01:52:00.000-07:00

Was stuck in traffic for hours on end so whipped out camera and took some photos.

There was a bus next to me which was overcrowded and had like 10-15 people hanging from the door. Not much use since the bus didnt move at all because of the traffic... still some guy was trying to find his 10 inch worth of foot space. Ended in a brawl right there on the road.

I'm not saying it's bad... This one was good and entertaining. When you're stuck in traffic and can manage half a kilometer in four hours, distractions like these are needed.

[Link to video if the player doesnt work]

Stoopid kids...

2006-07-30T02:51:00.000-07:00

This is by far the most "what the fuck were they thinking" video.. [link]

Bunch of kids trying to super accelerate a merry go round with a scooter.
Hope no one died or anything, would've loved to see more though... and in slow motion.. towards the end you can see them half hanging out of the cage before reaching escape velocity... and is it just me or is one of the girls being ejected perpendicularly...

Mac Ad Parody

2006-07-12T07:58:00.000-07:00

Found this great parody on youtube. The original Mac vs PC ads over here. Goddam arrogant and stupid ads if you ask me...

Hi I'm an apple, I can make movies and stuff.

NO shit? And we morons were using our PCs for only boring stuff like spreadsheets and what not. You know how many PCs I can buy for the price of 1 MACBOOK PRO????

Indians Know How to Get Down!

2006-07-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

From Google Video: "Heres some footage of how real indians get down. This was taken at a resort in india. A company was holding a party at this place and so i caught some indians getting funky to a dorky DJ's tunes." [Link]

Most excellent! Guess the corporate dress code policy extends to pool parties also... few are wearing trousers in the pool and the really adventurous guys are wearing Bermudas... which might not have been so bad if their gut wasnt hanging till their knees :P

And is it just me, or are the women wearing night suits? LOL I think i just had my daily dose of watching half naked guys dancing with each other next to a pool :P

Crazy Japanese Show

2006-06-16T02:14:00.000-07:00

Hilarious video... dont go to sleep in Japan.

Office Photo Shoot

2006-06-12T06:57:00.000-07:00

We had a photo opportunity in the office... got everyone's portrait, shot on a white background and converted to high key black and white pictures. Gonna get them printed on large size and put them up on a wall.

Here's the full set on Flickr. [View as Slideshow]

Coke and Mentos

2006-06-05T23:36:00.000-07:00

Most excellent video. Apparantly if you drop some mentos in a bottle of coke, it makes a great fountain. Bunch of people recreating the Bellagio fountains with coke and mentos...

[Watch the video here] (Quicktime)

After you're done, watch this other video about this other girl putting that urban legend to rest.

Explanation of the phenomenon...

As you probably know, soda pop is basically sugar (or diet sweetener), flavoring, water and preservatives. The thing that makes soda bubbly is invisible carbon dioxide gas, which is pumped into bottles at the bottling factory using tons of pressure. Until you open the bottle and pour a glass of soda, the gas mostly stays suspended in the liquid and cannot expand to form more bubbles, which gases naturally do. But there's more...

Dog Food

2006-05-24T06:12:00.000-07:00

Originally uploaded by loupiote.

Wondering what that is..... ??

It's dog Lungs and Head. Here's a set on Flickr with photos documenting the whole process of cooking dog, from being singed (edit: skinning) to disembowling to cooking to serving..

We were planning to go eat dog one day in China, but the plan never did materialize.. there was this one Korean restaurant that was famous for dog. Apparantly dog meat is a COOLING MEAT....

Eat This!

2006-05-24T00:50:00.000-07:00

Bunch of hungry bears chased and ate a monkey in a Dutch zoo... Wonder what they were feeding those poor bastards that they actually had to hunt for their own food..

[Yahoo News]

Got bored of the processed chicken or something? Apparantly there were visitors around when this happened... they got their money's worth for sure.

Ignoring attempts by keepers to distract it, the bear climbed onto a horizontal pole, and, standing stretched on two legs, "used its sharp canines to pull the macaque, which was shrieking and resisting, from its perch."

There was this other video somewhere about a bunch of chimps eating a baby chimp.

Poor animals in the Delhi zoo are in a worse conditions. Poachers and zoo keepers and everything... time after time, some poor tiger wakes up one morning and finds out he's been killed and skinned during the night.

The talk show with Bouncers...

2006-05-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

I love Jerry Springer's. If anything, TV is supposed to inform and entertain. The "inform" part's gone down the toilet because of the news channels (30-40 and counting). The number of news channels is like the space meter on GMail login screen...

Over 35.566 news channels (and counting) of free in your face news so you'll never need to read the newspaper, or form your own opinion.

Save those grey cells.. you aint getting any younger. But since getting reporters into places outside the 4 metros means all kinds of pains like equipment and people, they usually focus on the shit happening in the 4 major cities. Make that 2 major cities - Delhi, Bombay... what was the last time anything great happened in Chennai or Calcutta... and when did it influence us in Delhi. In fact, fuck bombay too. If it's happening in Delhi (close to the studio is better), then it's worth showing. For the rest of India, there's Google news and the internet. Blogs are good.... read off blogs and even start your own New Blog. CNN IBN does blogs. They're so cool.. CITIZEN JOURNALISM is the way to go! Get off it Assholes! If I wanted to do my own journalism why am I giving my precious eye ball time to your advertisments?

Hire some people, get some camera gear and go look for newses. And can we have some educated people in front of the camera please... who can PRONOUNCE correctly in HINDI at least... Sure the ex-criminal in-the-street-news-anchor can connect to the "masses" but FUCK! what happened to those good old days when people on TV were supposed to be good looking? Real life is full of ugly people... TV is alternate reality... we're supposed to look at good looking people and then feel sad that we're so ugly. Forget being shallow... look at news anchors... look at aaj tak news anchors... if u met these sad asses on a DTC bus u wouldnt look twice in their direction and suddenly we're supposed to take their word as to what's happening in the country?
Fuck you bearded bastard, get someone good looking... people pay more attention to good looking people it's a fact. Look at US presidents... believe WANT to believe a good looking person... Now George W isnt all that good looking.. but what were the options? John Kerry's face looked like a shriveled dead puppy.. who'd vote for him? Who'd believe anything he said. Fuck Kerry!

Coming back to pronounciations... LOOK. It's TV, it's not newspapers.... when you're on tv we have to suffer the misery of looking at your ugly mug.. should our ears also suffer? There are courses out there which help improve your talking skills... at least learn the difference between the hindi equivalent of Z and J . THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT ALPHABETS FOR A REASON. Aaz tak, sabse tej. FUCKERS!!!! Learn to pronounce Z or DIE!

Anyway... rant went off from the topic. The topic being... Jerry Springer! I love that show... well to be honest, I dont watch it, for the simple reasons a. We dont get it here, b. I dont watch TV and c. Apart from the fights I'm sure it sucks ass.

I'm talking about fights though. What is America's problem? Solve this shit at home people... your girlfrend's going around with 5 other guy and maybe 2 girls and the only place you found to sort out this issue is on national TV with all the white trash, poor black and out of job losers watching? I'm sure all the fights are staged anwyay, but it makes good fun. Fun part being the orchestrating up to the fight part...

And again the bouncers. They jump in pretty quick to stop the fight. Usually after the first 2 punches are thrown. It s a good thing... no use having a full fledged fight going on the studio... several reasons... biggest one being we've seen so many movies that we expect real life fights to be like that. The truth however is that nearly everyone has NEVER been in a hand to hand fight at all. Everybody thinks they can hold their own in a fight and sure they know a few tricks.... but fact is... MOST MEN HAVE NEVER BEEN IN A FIST FIGHT. And no one can have a sustained fight anyway... usually one punch or one kick and fight's over... that's the cruicial point where the bouncers come in and save the day (and grace).

Women fighting is different... that get more response from the audience, and usually lasts longer. Cause at least one woman's got some other woman's hair firmly in her grasp with no intention of letting go easily. Cat fights are so much cooler... usually starts with slapping and ends in hair pulling and all fun things...

So anyway, I wish we had an Indian equivalent of Jerry. We can get so many people in it... they bring in the KKK... we can have some RSS toughies on one side and get some maulana folks, they can battle it out on TV. Beat the shit out of each other.... we'll have more viewership than KBC and saas bahu soaps combined. And it's good fun.. how can people watch those soap operas! Huge ugly women with face painted with latex and huge bindis and evreyone's talking to each other while facing the camera, while cunning editing (called slow motion) strecthes on tea drinking scene to 2 episodes.

Anyway, so I vote for having an Indian version of Jerry Springers. We have a series called The Big Fight anyway, we'll call this the Real Big Fight. And we'll have bouncers.

A most excellent collection of Jerry Springer's Fight scenes (Bad language and some nudity alert)
MAD TV's spoof on FIGHT LIKE A GIRL CLUB. Also excellent.

Old Vs New

2006-04-24T03:24:00.000-07:00

Learning to skate
Originally uploaded by Saad..

Pic got 1st prize for Mini Challange at Sony Talk Forum at DPReview.

Go Firefox

2006-04-24T02:31:00.000-07:00

Kalyan Varma discovers a anti-microsoft bus somewhere...

[More ...]

Indian Crossroad Video

2006-04-22T05:14:00.000-07:00

There's this video on Youtube that got boingboinged. It's a 2 min clip of some intersection with no traffic lights in Hyderabad or something. The boingboing post says stuff like someoen should make a music video or something, and LOOK at that car and that car...

I watched the whole thing at it's like the most boring thing ever. But check out the comments... it's become a racist fight now. Go check ALL the comments on the video.. they're hilarious

omg why are all of you so ignorant?!?! this is about TWO MINUTES on the road and they narrowly avoided a dozen crashes. you fucktards are stupid. think about it...if thats how daily driving is im sure they have waaaaaaaaaaaaay more accidents. in china theres a shitload of accidents too cause people dunno how to drive there either. idiot. "no wrecks" psh give it a whole 24 hours i bet someones camel got run over.

Watch the video:

Lizards and other pests...

2006-04-19T05:36:00.000-07:00

LiZZy
Originally uploaded by lil aNNa.

Lifehacker has a post about introducing lizards in your home to take care of cockroaches and mosquitoes.

Unfortunatly our Indian lizards and mosquitoes have an already established mutual accord of live and let live.

Bastards are all over the place :(

Eat This!

2006-04-10T23:37:00.000-07:00

chicken biceps
Originally uploaded by gaurang.

Gaurang clicked this insanely funny signboard....

Behold! The KungFu chicken with a human hand implant thingy...

Injured

2006-03-17T08:18:00.000-08:00

Injured
Originally uploaded by Saad..

Ek titali

2006-03-13T13:46:00.000-08:00

Found the good old Doordarshan ditty on youtube. Sure to bring back memories for us first generation TV kids.

Chuck Norris IS Web 2.0

2006-03-01T02:06:00.000-08:00

For those who dont know who Chuck Norris is, go here.
For those who dont know what Web 2.0 is, go here.

For those who WANT to know how they might be related, read on...
p.s. It might also help if you know what a Roundhouse Kick is all about. (They're all related)

For those who havent read the original Chuck Norris jokes, here's the list.

Chuck Norris drinks napalm to quell his heartburn.
Chuck Norris' roundhouse kick is so powerful, it can be seen from outer space by the naked eye.
Chuck Norris uses ribbed condoms inside out, so he gets the pleasure.
etc etc...

For those who havent read the Chuck Norris Web 2.0 jokes, here's the list.

Flickr gave Chuck Norris a funny look. Now you know why it needs a massage.
Chuck Norris showers with AJAX but no water.

Humour doesnt get nerdier than this.

LOGO2.0 part I

2006-02-24T23:44:00.000-08:00

LOGO2.0 part I
Originally uploaded by Stabilo Boss.

Logos of Web 2.0 companies...

Found on Flickr

Kaun Banega Crorepati...

2006-02-22T22:53:00.000-08:00

Earlier the crazy maulana from Meerut offered Rs 51 crore to waste the blaspheming Danish cartoonist, now the Hindu personal law board is offering 51 crore to waste MF Hussein for painting naked goddesses. There's a side bounty of 11 lacks for those who just want to chop off his hands.

Price hasnt been set for individual fingers yet...

This has the making of a great gameshow... people can send in hit requests by SMS (or if you have Hutch, call 1-800-WASTE-HIM and say KILL). Then the targets can come on the stage and do a little song/dance sequence and say if you want to waste me, sms this and that. There will be 3 judges and an audience poll also.

The winner gets wasted on national TV with proper stage lighting etc. One lucky winner from the SMS campaign gets to pull the trigger.

[Gawker has an interesting post]

Memory lane...

2006-02-16T00:48:00.000-08:00

Anyone remember those 5 inch floppies? The one's which had 1.2 MB storage and the naked magenetic medium thingy?

I remember buying them for 30-50 rs... Maxell floppies were supposed to be good. Those were reliable floppies if u took care of them. Unlike their 1.44 mb succesors.

Anyone remember those write protection tabs? Small stickers that came with the box... Such a cool hardware piece.

[Wikipedia image]

V-Day forced marrieges

2006-02-15T00:42:00.000-08:00

Got the link from Sepia Mutiny. [Read the story]

In a cool attempt at reverse psychology...

Hindu rightwing activists in Jharkhand claimed to have married off five romancing couples on Valentine's Day Tuesday, saying they were celebrating the day even though it was against Indian culture.

Way to go ABVP people. Two couples who disagreed were made to tie raakhi. Woohoo!! Excellent.. although there wasnt any archies gallery burning etc, since they probably pay hafta to these organisations to ensure peace.

No one seems to be beaten... but must have been a fucking aggravating incident. Some self proclaimed fuckers making you do shit which you dont want to do (or at least not on their orders) or making your girlfreind tie a raakhi.. fucking invasion of privacy. Isnt ABVP supposed to be a student union or something...

What about such romancing couples on 15th Feb? I'm sure there's a bunch of people getting personal in the gardens right now, but why arent the moral cops checkin them today?

People... dont go out on V-day.. the rest of the year you can do whatever you want, wherever you want (unless u live in meerut) it's just during this phase these morons start foaming at the mouth, howling at the moon, and complaining about indian sabhyata.

Which brings us to the point of Gay couples (actually it doesnt bring us, I just want to talk about that). What about gay couples at Valentine's day... they have it easy dont they. Two guys sitting in a park.. . no one gives a flying fuck. Two girls sitting.. cool. Girls holding hands is fine.. hell, even guys holding hands is fine in India. As long as they dont start tounging, no one cares. Take yer lover to a stroll in the park, fancy dinner, do whatever... aint fair, aint fair.

I wonder if the ABVP/RSS/SHIV SENA people would force marry a gay couple on V-day.. that'll be some progressive thinking for these sexually starved medivial morons.

P.S. And here's a hilarious post by the Renegade of Junk: Tired of masturbating, BJP youths take to the streets.

Old places, wierd people, good photos

2006-02-13T08:29:00.000-08:00

Some of the best people photos I've shot have been shot at old monuments in Delhi. For unknown reasons... but maybe these places attract wierd people who are setteled in the compounds, maybe people are less concious of a camera, maybe there's nice light in these areas and maybe the different atmosphere (architecture/surroundings) make the photo more interesting... or maybe a little bit of all of them.

Anyway, as I said, some of the best photos I've shot have been shot at old monuments in Delhi.

This lady was seemed to be living in Humayun's tomb complex. More or less setteled along with another woman. Didnt have time to compose a proper shot, just took this at a half crouch... she was just begining to form a WTF Expression. Got this hanging on my wall.

These two were around Qutub minar. It's fun to take photos of people sleeping or taking photos... they're not bothered/conscious about you pointing the camera at them, and they're not staring at the camera with a dumb expression.

This guy was semi-residing in Firozshah Tugqlaq's tomb in the Hauz Khas complex. He had his undies and stuff drying on the other side of the room, and was sitting and smoking next to the king's grave. Again, got some good light on this, although clothes got ruined because of squating/leaning against cheap plaster.

Burn that rag !!

2006-02-03T01:54:00.000-08:00

[From the Hindu]

Chennai, Feb. 2 (PTI): Nearly 150 copies of the Indian edition of a London based magazine 'Maxim' have been seized from various shops in the city, in connection with a complaint lodged by South Indian film actress Kushboo, a top police official said today.
City Police Commissioner R Nataraj, told newsmen here that further investigations into the complaint was on.
On January 30, the actress had submitted a petition to the Nataraj, pleading for action against the magazine, for publishing an 'immodest' picture of hers in its latest edition.

Good going.. Only 150 copies? From ALL OF CHENNAI? And that too one month after the magazine's been in the stands. I remember buying this one long time back. Useless late action or what.

[Background]

A long time in the past.... In China

2006-02-02T06:07:00.000-08:00

defineOne year ago... in good old China I was analysing Engrish poetry found on biscuit packets.

In case you missed the ealier posts, Biscuit packets here have "poetry" on it. In English.... here's how they probably do it.

Get a text file of all words in a dictinary.
Write a program to fetch random words from it.
Make a paragraph. Print it on the pack.

Some previous examples of poetry: Here and Here

So today bought another packet which said THUS:

We like the new taste. we need the quality and we ned the best food. here you will find what you want. need cool taste. you are the new man. cool. not forget, special taste. how delicious can not forget. speacial taste. Return the true flavour.
Apart from the YOU ARE THE NEW MAN thing.. it's ok.. makes vague sense. But what's with the manly biscuits thing? Is this some kinda viagra biscuit? Do you feel like a new man after eating them?

I dont know.. i feel the same still....

....

Hey wait, I see a WOMAN.... there.... i'll be back.. wait here... ..

(leaves desk and runs after the woman. Drooling)

Aah.. those were the days...

Road rage cards

2006-02-02T05:47:00.000-08:00

Road rage's never been easier. Forget getting out of the car and exchanging blows or cuss words. Just flip through the easy-to-find message and flash it to the offending driver.

[Link]

Messages are categorized, so they're easy to find. The reserve side is the flipped version of the same message, so the guy in front can read it in the rear view mirror. Brilliant information design!

Messages are available in 2 versions: 1. Totally rude with cuss words, and 2. Just rude "for..", as the site says, "those with slightly smaller balls".

A brilliant product, I must say, specially for one commuting daily from Delhi to Gurgaon with those call center qualises (?? qualisi ??) trying to get that one crucial extra inch of the (non existant) highway. If only someone comes up with a haryanvi version of it.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta

2006-02-01T22:22:00.000-08:00

Internet Explorer 7 beta is out. Get it here.

The killer features are: Tabbed browsing, RSS feeds, More security, the usual popup blockers and something called the "Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool Thingy" !! With such a cool name it's bound to win back the millions who migrated to firefox. Firefox may have tabbed browsing and rss and security and what not, but it dont have no MWMSRT.

Observe the gradient of colors. The setup app is a riot of colors and large icons of tick marks and credit cards with locks on it. Even the next/back buttons are redesigned.

Coming to the user experience part, the interface's clean.. most of the buttons (which were never used anyway) are gone. There's no edit this page in notepad button anymore. Interface's clean and looks like firefox with an aqua skin.

The GO button is an arrow and it transforms into the refresh button. Next and previous are where they're supposed to be. Favorites is upfront with a PLUS sign which is ADD to favs.

One cool feature (which means as-yet-unseen-in-firefox) is the thumnailing of the open tabs. Which shows a snapshot of all the pages in different tabs. One bad thing is until a page is done loading it shows as a blank page in thumbnail view. You cant surf in thumbnails, clicking anywhere reverts to normal view. Actually, there IS a plugin for firefox that does this, but I havent used it yet. It shows thumbnails on mouseover on tabs.

This thing is probably on the same lines as the stacking windows in 3D for Windows Vista. Cool things which probably wont be used much because MS designers cant get it out of there heads that PEOPLE DONT HAVE 20 WINDOWS OPEN AT THE SAME TIME. Hope I'm wrong, I like the 3D stacking thingy, and I'll probably use it quite a lot (for 10-15 days) when I get Vista.

One thing I liked about IE7 was the RSS experience. It has a add feed button which lights up if the site you're visiting has a feed. The subscribed feeds go next to the favs, but the reading experience is like a new page with the IE rss control panel over it. The background's a nice grey gradient like thingy.

The panel let's your sort according to date/author etc and the search box is a nice addition. Like the RSS experience. For now I'm sticking to my Bloglines feeds though.

So... it's nice. Most of the changes were long overdue anyway. I dont think any firefox guy is gonna shift anytime soon. The new FF has drag and drop tabs, which is quite addictive... and IE7 is fine.. for sites which still dont support Firefox (Like Citibank and my Intranet).

So download the new IE7Beta... take back the web from Firefox who took the web back from IE. And use the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool Thingy freely... just make sure it doesnt remove windows itself.

Take the elevator in your left hand...

2006-01-24T07:48:00.000-08:00

2006-jan 086
Originally uploaded by veji.

A phallic symbol doing a pumpkin might not be the best signage system there is...

Tianemen Kiss

2006-01-15T05:45:00.000-08:00

TianAnMenKiss1
Originally uploaded by kennethinshanghai.

Photo got BoingBoinged. Got two three more on Flickr.

One comment said:

Mao say tounge

Monalisa Smile...

2005-12-16T00:43:00.000-08:00

Breaking News : Scientists finally figured out why Monalisa was smiling.. analysed the painting on some software (probably cutting edge) and used the software to map facial expression to feelings etc etc bla bla and in the end finally found out why she was smiling.

After 500 years the mystery is solved.

She was Smiling.... because... SHE WAS HAPPY

[link]

In another shocking revealation of OBVIOUSNESS, the bbc published another totally unthinkable news recently:

[Click for large size]

NO SHIT!!

And here's Monalisa after one week in the US

Hiroshima Photos

2005-11-29T20:47:00.000-08:00

Over here. Some guy's Dad's pics. Nice. Ok.

Doin it

2005-11-26T09:21:00.000-08:00

just do it
Originally uploaded by mzsatish.

Incredible Indian Designer

2005-11-16T00:17:00.000-08:00

The National Portal of India

It should be changed to - (Every possible color you might encounter when u visit India).com

I shall not comment on the arrangement or composition or color scheme or information architecture on this page. It hurts my eyes just to look at it.My neurons hurt.

Now that NIC seems to have hired a "designer" can someone please fix the Indian Railways site. Its becoming really hard to find content from all the citibank ads.

One song wonders

2005-11-15T22:58:00.000-08:00

AIR FM, the worst thing to have happened to radio has a "Western Music Karyakram" in the morning, they call it matchless music hour cause u cant hear this shit any other place. Its matchless.

Anyway, today the theme was ONE HIT WONDERS. Artists who got one hit song before falling into oblivion. From the 90s.

Some of the songs they played were

1. Whats up - 4 Non Blondes
2. What is love - Haddaway
3. Please dont go - Some one i dont remember (one hit wonder right)

Reached office before the 4th thankfully. Thought i'll add a few of mine:

The top slot should for sure go to Macarena.. started as a catchy song which got repeated a billion times, and for the billionth and one time didnt sound so cool anymore. There was the video, the steps... then got "borrowed" for a few hindi movie songs... at one point there was one CD with 9-10 different remixes of the song. How sick can it get..

Another would be Ice Ice baby... yeah we all rememebr the song.. but who was Vanilla Ice and what's he been smoking lately.. gone.... no one regrets. Baba Sehgal managed a "borrowing" here.

Anyone remember INFORMER the song?? Catchy tune, fast lyrics which no one could follow. So everyone just sang informer over and over. Came and went. Resting in peace. Sung by "The Artist Known as Snow for One Song"

Ever heard of Right Said Fred? NO? They sang I'm too sexy. Again was popular back when it wasnt cool to say the S word. Easy to follow lyrics, hence popular again. Thankfully that bunch of bald bastards witht the shaved chests dont sing anymore, of if they are, nobody aint listenin.

WHO LET THE DOGS OUT!! Doesnt matter anymore, the dogs are back in.. let the sleeping dogs lie... Sung by Baha Men, whoever they were. Hope theyre doin well in their new profession.
Would I lie to you Baby? Sang Charles and Eddie before goin back wherever they sprang from.. Song used to be cool

I'm Blue doo doo da da da whatthefuckever! Eiffel 65 was the name.. probably for the 65 days of fame they got. Resting in peace now, highly irritating song.

Anyone remember Cotton Eye Joe?? Rednex. Thank you.. please stay under the radar.

Mambo Number Faaaaive! Ok so Lou Bega had a bunch of popular songs, let's file it under one Album hits then.

I'm sure there's a million more..

Waiter, there's an ant in my eye..

2005-11-15T22:12:00.000-08:00

[From here]

>> snip snip

A woman receiving treatment for diabetes at a state-run hospital in eastern India lost one of her eyes after ants nibbled away at it, officials said on Tuesday.

The patient recovering from a post-surgery infection shrieked for help as the ants attacked her on Sunday night, but nurses told her it was normal to feel pain from the infection.

On Monday, the patient's family saw a gaping hole with swarming ants in it when they lifted the bandage on her left eye.

>> snip snip

Wierdest shit. Doctors arent the only danger anymore.. the article says dogs and cats regularly share patients' beds in the state run hospitals. But ANTS?? Oooo Those fucking ants...

The doc says:

"It's not uncommon for ants to attack diabetic patients. We have set up a committee to investigate the unfortunate incident," hospital superintendent A. Adhikary said.

What's the committee gonna do? Arrest and interogate the culprits?? Some third degree to the ant:

"Speak up you little bastard or I pull out a leg! And there's 8 legs still remaining, so we could be here aaaaaaaaaaawl night."

Way to go Nurse.. it's normal to feel pain when fucking ants are digging a hole through your eyeball.. Somebody feed these fuckers!

[From here]

Asian

2005-11-13T09:18:00.000-08:00

Asian
Originally uploaded by Gemale.

Flickr gets wierder and wierder everyday...

Excellent photographs

2005-11-04T07:28:00.000-08:00

Some really amazing photographs of India. By Evren Sahin on Flickr.

[Link]
[List of India related groups on Flickr]

Doesn't come with the car :P

2005-10-26T10:42:00.000-07:00

Doesn't come with the car :P
Originally uploaded by Giorgios.

Observe the photographers on the right. They all shooting the car probably...

Do you...?

2005-10-26T00:32:00.000-07:00

Do you...?
Originally uploaded by Coffee Latte Break.

Flickeritis

2005-10-25T02:25:00.000-07:00

flickritis (flik-er-i-tis): an inflammation of the photo-blog. [Link]

It's a group on Flickr, made for the sole reason to become the biggest group, and to be deleted when that happens. Nothing is forbidden, post whatever, no matter how many times. A good difference from FlickrCentral.

One good thing happening on Flickritis is a story. A thread got started and everyone adds six words to the story. It's upto 2500 replies till now. And the story keeps getting crazier and crazier

The Story:

lets make a story...post six words... and thats it and let someone else post six more...but you can always add more later ok here it is ....six words on my part: ( add six words to this!!) and keep it going!!

Once upon a time the old...

hag let loose a loud yell ...

and gave birth to her twins!

One was evil. The other good.

The evil one said "get naked"

the good one said "trust me"!

I will not hurt you but

only if you let me taste

that ice cream you've got there.

Read it all here...

Gut feeling

2005-10-24T22:56:00.000-07:00

What were they thinking anyway.. Swedish train runs on biogas, uses cow entrails to produce methane.

....
Still bubbling and burping, and carpeting you with an acrid stench, came the organs and the fat and the guts. Enough, from one cow, to get you about 4km (2.5 miles) on the train
....

[Link]

Now Delhi boasts of the biggest CNG run bus service. And there's an overabundance of cows on the road anyway. Can the government put the 2 and 2 together..

Probably not, this being the cow belt and everything. Ok another way: Catch the cows, many cows. Get them to pull the train. Cow happy, train moving, ticket prices go down. New idea for metro maybe.

It said they can get 4kms from one cow. That's good milage..

Monopolise THIS !

2005-10-24T22:36:00.000-07:00

Apple sued over defective iPod Nanos, Google sued over Digital Indexing rights, then Prez Kalam expresing concern over Google Earth.

The big boys are getting their ass kicked and everyone's forgotten about Microsoft's monopolistic plans. Great. They're under the radar now.. the nail that stands out the most gets hammered first.

Digital Fortress - And why real toilet paper is better.

2005-08-27T02:35:00.000-07:00

Another waste of eyesight... I spent last night reading this. What a waste of rainforests and ink.

Da Vinci Code was ok, but only because it was a little different and some (much controversial) historical references. Then I read Angels and Demons which had nearly the same plot as DVC. I mean, both have the same guy (the brilliant and dashing whats-his-name), in both he gets his sleep disturbed because some guy's croaked with a symbol on his ass.. gimme a fukken break! Couldnt the stories start a little different? WTF!

Then it's off to a tour of entire europe while assasins follow u. And in one total stroke of (unorginal) genius the assasin is of the Hashshashin variety. (Applause) The illuminati.. freemasons... jesus's lovechild... gimme a break.

Fine, Digital Fortress is about cryptography. Another term which the average person doesnt know jackshit about, hence, a fertile ground for weaving a halfbaked story. But since literary wisdom says that no horse is too dead to beat, we have the BRILLIANT AND BEUTIFULL leggy Ms SOMEONE, the only female cryptographer in the NSA and the ONLY-MAN-SHE-EVER-LOVED Mr SOMEPROFFESSOR. All through the story they're on different sides of the atlantic and there's no sex scene. Which is ok, the rest of the novel is fucked anyway..

Rule no. 1 for Movies/Tech books

If there's a huge computer (multiple stories) it WILL burn out in the end. Explosivly. Now i havent seen computers melting down because of heat, but I dont think supercomputer which overheat will explode in the way they're depicted. Apparantly the cooling freon mixed with oxygen and generated a huge fireball. The fact the freon is an inert gas is obviously not important. Hell liquid nitrogen will burn if it can add one page to the story.

Rule no 2

Huge computers which gets locked by hacker/virus/alien/in-general-bad-guy will have to switched off manually. The switch is always located in dark basements with flickering lights. The person who goes to switch it off manually WILL die of an accident, killed by the bad guy or eaten by dinosaurs (assuming there ARE dinosaurs in the plot).

Good thing regular comps have a Control Alt Del feature, i wouldnt like to go to my dinosaur infested basement evrey 5 mins. I run windows.

Rule 3

Female mathmaticians/nuclear scientists are beutifull. Its a prerequisite for nuclear science colleges. Brilliance is directly propotional to beuaty and inversly propotional to dress size.

They also manage to find time for self defence lessons, but that usually doesnt help and its up to some other GUY in the story to get her out of shit city. Also, self defence usually involves a well placed kick in the groin region of the adversary.

This quite unlike real life, doesnt incapacitate the attacker, but only makes him squirm for 5 seconds, before he comes back with a vengenance.

Enough rules. Back to specific suckiness of Digital Fortress. The NSA's the perfect organizaion for this. Since noone known what it does, it could do anything. No one known anything abotu crytogrphy too, so say ANY shit and ppl belive.

IT SUCKS! Some japanese cryptogrpher's made the unbreakable code and hell breaks loose.. the beutfiull heroine gets called to office on a saturday and her boyfreind (the only man she evre loved) gets sent to europe on a wild goose chase to find the ONE code.. then he runs from clue to clue in the quest of the one ring and the ring has an incriptoin to unlock the super code. But its not in elvish though. Its in latin :p

Anyway.. the europe part of the story is totally unbelivable.... too many coincideces just to get the story going... its amateurish. I know its tough to write a novel, but there have been a million better ones. Just everything seems to happen to the poor bastard (the only man she loved), then theres a auto-shooting sequence on the airport. Theres the ubiquitous assasin following the dude killing everyone he has the misfortune of meeting. Unneccisary murders.. just for the sake of showing (writing) blood. Insane plot.

The author manages to pad out the story nicely with unneeded references for everything... half the novel is probably explnations of cryptography or computer speak. Misses no opportunity to display how much he learned from other sources. Even manages to mention why a computer bug is called a bug.

Another sign of a fucked plot. Every small nuance mentioned in this "explanatory" way will have relevance. IN the begining theres the mention of the code system used by caesar and sure enough u have the thing being used in the end.

Pretty sad.

Another trend in dan brown novels. The GOOD guy is the bad guy. the person who calls in the leads is the bad. There's another HIDDEN IDENTITY PERSON who is dealing with the bad guys and controlling the assasins, that too is the guy who called in the leads. It all comes out in the end, but if u have ANY imagination u know after reading 1 chapter who'll do what.

Anotehr D.B. trait. Every one has illegitimate children who are revealed in the end. In angels and demons it was the Pope who had a son, in da vinci code he went a step higher and Jesus had children, in digital fortress, a bad japanese business man discovers the crytogrpaher is his son. SUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKSSSSSSSSSSSSSS !!!!!

Then again japanese businessmen in movies/novels. I've never been there. But they're all serious faced people in blue business suits who talk about honor and nothing else. Everythign is honor this honor that, and in between there's a lot of "face saving" then theres some more honor talk and then it's off to the sushi bar with a blond silicon queen (the american poor family girl stuck with kinky japanese bosses). They're all racist and u wont find a japanese woman in the place of business. Half the japanese are named Tanaka san. If there HAPPENS to be a japanese business woman, she'll probably be American born (or half american) and will be against japanese and 8 out of 10, she'll be played by Lucy Liu.

Then there's the boring over predictable end. THe virus takes down the firewalls for the NSA supercomputers, and theres this long line hackers waiting.. all this is visually depicted on screens and the computer geeks are using terms like Sharks int eh water, Hyenas waiting outside... sick sick sick. The depiction of computer geeks/terminology in hollywood/novels is sick. The firewall "shield" disintegrates in a very video game like fashion.. slowly with a countdown...

"Shields are 50% down" WTF?

And finally the thing that turns my stomach is the final breaking the code.. imagine this, a room full of NSA. Top minds in the country (which obviously means the world right?) and the puzzle they have to solve is

The prime differece between the elements used in Hiroshima and nagasaki bombs.

And the hint is its a numerical value. Now what do these geniuses do? THey search the fucking internet for this!! Gimme a break PLEASE i cant suspend reality to this level just to read a book! Even i knew the answer as soon as i read this line and the fucking geniuses coudlnt figure it out!! This is beyond bizarre. Its a very very very very bad attempt at lenghtning the end for another suspense filled ending!!

Numerical difference between ELEMENTS

The genious are surfing the net (and that too on NETSCAPE!! THE HORROR!) and discussing about what elements could the ridle mean. And the lead guy figures out the answer (the only man she evre loved, who at this moment has been shot by the assasin, then stunned by soldiers, and has spent the entire day running around dodging bullet). This great man figures out the answer while the director of NSA and a team of comp experts battle out the sharks!!

It just makes u wanna throw this book down the toilet! This one sucks.. it sucks sucks sucks.. why bother. I am never gonna read another dan brown... same goes for Micheal Crichton. State of fear? Gimme a break.. the anti-kyoto-protocol propoganda is fine, but where's the story kenneth? Shooting rockets to create rainstorms!! But of course.....

And its not just me who doesnt like this trash. Here's 22,000 people who agree.

Thus spake the screaming monkey:

My advice: If someone gave it to u and u have time to kill, fine, read it. But Dont spend money on it. Buy real toilet paper instead.

Cool paintjob on a fiat

2005-08-25T23:42:00.000-07:00

omkarafront
Originally uploaded by artraj.

Mate a movie...

2005-08-25T08:24:00.000-07:00

Theres a good contest on Worth1000.com.. its about mixing 2 movies.

U get the idea.. [Over here]

Cawfee

2005-08-23T06:38:00.000-07:00

I shall now delve into the mysteries of making the perfect cup of coffee. You'd imagine if you're paying 40 bucks for a cup of coffee at Barista u'd get somethign good. Unfortunatly the mix-masters at these places are just doing their job, which happens to be, pouring coffee for customers. They are NOT coffee lovers, they're robots trying to pull the perfect shot of espresso...

There were 2 baristas which made excellent coffees, one is in Shivaji Park, Mumbai and the second was on CG Road in Ahmedabad, unfortunatly the Ahmedabad one got demolished for some reason.

The image on the right is all that remains of the joint. Dont know about the shivaji park one, probably its still there. I just went there ONCE....

And for all the machines that they have, u'd think there'll be SOME consistency among the different branches of Baristas all over India. Unfortunatly, there isnt, except that most suck. My suggestion: Fire the staff, invest in an army of automatic coffee machines.

Now these bad boys (on the left) can make an excellent cup of coffee, and there's no shame in using an automatic. The benefit is it makes the perfect cup everytime. There's no room for human error, (unless you manage to fuck up the beans) and is ideal for a joint like Barista. Where HUMAN INTERVENTION does not add to the product, it just fucks it up.

This baby grinds the beans, tamps them, shoots out espresso, then foamed milk/hot chocalate for cappucino/mocha repectivly. Operator has to make sure the beans and water is loaded. That's it. Not like barista where they keep this Grinder in your face just to show how serious they are about coffee (SEE WE HAVE BEANS!). Then they get the grounds and tamp it non seriously. Then just plug it in the machine and out comes half-ass espresso, which they further ruin by adding badly foamed milk etc. Sometimes, u get MALAI in the cappucino !! THE HORROR !!!

Anyway, enough of Barista rants. Here's how to make a great cup of coffee at home, for cheap, using indeginously procured raw material.

Recipe for making South Indian coffee in North India
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you're a coffee lover and have the misfortune of living in North India.. well, join the club. It's awfull up here. Anyway, eversince the Honorable Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company, aka, Cafe Coffee Day started enchroching upon barista's territory, the struggle has been easier.

Not that I'm promoting CCD over Barista, both suck, what with their trashy stale food and overtly loud yuppy customers and snobbish waiters (Sir, do u know americano is a black coffee?). The reason is coffee day has better ground beans for sale than the barista pack. Also, CCD Arabica pack costs half of the barista trash.

Anyway.. onto the recipe.

Ok... first u need coffee powder and a filter. Two options there, the Arabica pack is for 50 bucks (100g) and another option is Dark Forest for 100 bucks. Dark forest is a good blend, good aroma, finely ground powder, makes for a good wake up drink in the morning. But lacks the strength of the plain old Arabica. Experiment and decide.

Note: CCD sells two other blends called Charge and somethign-else. Both suck, they're Coffee and Chickory blends. Ignore them. Buy the 100% arabica thingy.

You also need this ingenious south indian filter coffee device thing. Its a two part container with the top one having holes in the bottom. You put ground coffee, then comes the tricky part. You have to tamp the grounds. What it means is compress the grounds with a seive press that comes along with the filter. This step cannot be overemphasised. It can ruin a perfectly good shot. There's no specific instructions, only experience and a rabid dedication towards perfection will tell. Heres what the experts have to say:

This is a small art-form in itself, with espresso fanatics going to great lengths to achieve the perfect puck, and prevent the pitfall of uneven extraction that occurs with uneven compression of the coffee. It is not unusual for the tamping process to involve several steps, including compression with different tamps, at different pressures. A small set of scales is useful to quantify the pressure used for each tamp. Increasing the tamping pressure will increase the brew time of a shot of espresso, and thus increase the extraction from the coffee, resulting in a stronger shot.

Dont be so rabid that u buy a bunch of scales to mesure the pressure. Just do this: Put the beans, then press lightly (almost tap) the sieve on the beans once, then rotate the sieve and tap again, rotate and tap. Repeat till u do ONE whole circle, this will make sure the coffee is spread evenly. A very important point to note at this stage is that the filter should be straight, dont hold it in a slanting position. The grounds would be tilted to one side, whcih means sucky espresso.

Once u;re done with the tapping, press it firmly. U should feel the grounds compressing. Do it too much and it'll take hours for the water to seep through, do it too little, and u'll get weak ass espresso. Experiment. We'll discuss ways to check for strength later.

Now quantities. For one cup of coffee, the ideal amount of beans would be 3 heaped teaspoons. If you're making a mug, then go for 4. If you want to bring a corpse back to life, use 5. Four is ideal, trust me.

Now water. Water and coffee ratio is another thing which can fuck up a good espresso. From now on we'll talk in cups (not mugs, and I dont know the volume in mililiters or !GASP! ounces).

Remember, what we're making right now is espresso, or decoction if u please. We'll dilute it with water later on. So, for now heat 1/2 cup water in the microwave for 1 min on high. It shouldnt boil, use whatever time, but half cup of water should be heated, but not boiled. No bubbles. Use clean water.. not mineral water, not tap water. Clean filtered water. Aquaguard is great.

Back to the "now-tamped" filter. Place the sieve on the coffee and leave it there. Now place one finger on the sieve and pour the 1/2 cup hot water over the grounds. The reason for folding the sieve is that sometimes it starts floating. Which is wrong.

Self Check: If you tamped the coffee properly the water will remain slightly clear. There will be a few undisolved beans floating, and it gets discolored, but the whole thing is still clear. Thats a sign u got the tamping right. It could also mean u tamped it too hard and the grounds are as hard as concrete.

Now put the cover on, and leave it. Make sure the top part of the filter is straight. Just out of curiosity, lift the top part and see if coffee is dripping, this may take some time. In the meantime do somethign constructive, fetch the coffee mate and sugar.

Welcome back, your decoction is ready. Observe the top portion on the right. There's a minimum of coffee powder over the seive, thats a good sign. It means the tamp was good. Now observe the left container and drool some. Look at the thickness of the soup, the color, the consistency, the way the world reflects from the surface of a freshly brewed coffee :p~

Ok. Now we pour this in a clean cup. Ideally it should be around 1/4th of the cup.

Now we shall observe it like a wine connoisseur. Now's the time when we check if everything went according to plan. Take a spoon and get some of that liquid out. Swirl it around in the spoon. You're looking for consistency and color. The ideal shot should be thick enough to bulge from the corner (check left image) and leave a fine coating of oil on the spoon surface. Shake it around and check the oil. The image on the right is a magnification of the left one, shows the edge of the liquid.

Observe the gradient made by the oils sticking to the spoon surface. If it's thick and dark in color, it means u done good. Pat yourself on the back, and lets get to the next step.

Boil water. The espresso we got is 1/4, so boil the rest 3/4. Usually 2 min in the microwave is good enough. While that is boiling, add sugar (1tsp) and leave it. Wait for the water to boil.

Pour the boiling water, stir it. Now add nestle coffee mate... keep adding... till its thick, but not overtly milky. Again, experiment. Start from less and add till its not too acidic. Should be just-enough-acidic or its no fun.

Why coffee mate and no milk? Well.. cause milk tends to congeal and get a skin is as disgusting as finding roaches in your cup, and anyway its a bad form to drink espresso with milk. Foamed milk for cappucino or lattes is fine, this one goes better with coffee mate. Trust me.

So what next?? DRINK IT !!

Congratulations you have the best coffee available in the north. Of course, if you're in bangalore etc all you have to do is walk out, get that strecth variety kaapi they serve in small metal glasses for 2 bucks. Thats the best commercially available coffee in India. Cheap and strong. They use milk, but they mix it well.. For personal use, there's coffee mate.

So there you have it folks, the perfect recipe for the perfect cup.

Movies to watch: Coffee and Ciggeretes:

"Coffee and Cigarettes" features an incredible cast of movie stars (including Steve Buscemi, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, Roberto Begnini), hipsters (such as Ms. Renee French from New York), and musicians (Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, GZA and RZA.) There are eleven short films, all of them shot in black and white, with recurring elements of coffee and cigarettes and overhead shots of the crowded tables. Some of the episodes flat out don't work at all, but most of them do. From one scene to the next, you never know what to expect, and that's thrilling. [Link]

A brilliant movie, shot in beutifull black and white, every frame is as composed as a still photograph. Watch it for its artistic brilliance, if not for the coffee/ciggy part.

Pinup girls

2005-08-23T01:36:00.000-07:00

A pin-up girl is a woman whose physical attractiveness would entice one to place a picture of her on a wall. Such photos often appear on calendars, which are meant to be pinned up anyway. Later, posters of “pin-up girls” were mass produced.

Many “pin ups” were photographs of celebrities who were considered sex symbols. One of the most popular early pin-up girls was Betty Grable. Her poster was ubiquitous in the lockers of GIs during World War II. Others pin-ups were artwork, often depicting idealized versions of what some thought particularly a beautiful or attractive woman should look like.
[Wikipedia]

Then there's Rita Hayworth, of the Shawshank Redemption fame

Doris Day and Bunny Yeager

Veronica Lake and Jane "whatswithdaexpression" Russel

And of course, Marilyn Monroe

Coming soon: Nose Art from World War II bomber planes.

Painfull lightning strike..

2005-08-22T00:27:00.000-07:00

lets get strike by lightning (are they sure?)
Originally uploaded by Valleia.

*OUCH*

I wan a museum

2005-08-21T06:43:00.000-07:00

-- from lil

Some photos from the National Science Museum, Tokyo. The exhibit on the left is a tree of life, lighted panels on the floor show connections among species. The exhibit on the right has these screens which have the info about the animals (in different languages) and videos of the animals in their own surroundings etc etc

Overall.. an interesting museum I'm sure. Obviously there are far more interesting ones in the world, but we seem to specialize in making the best YOU ARE NOT WELCOME museums in the world. Forget the upkeep of the artifacts, forget the "welcome to the morgue" smell. Start from the sullen guards. Its not my fault that you're placed in this boring job, in fact they hardly have anythign to complain about. Its a cushy job, and unlike their other brethren who are out on the street upholding they law, these guards just sit and do nothing. The least they can do is be polite to anyone who decides to grace the museum with his/her presence. Guard rant some other time....

Anyway, we need cool museums. We need exhibits that are interesting. Not just informative in a "Garfield's Tree Channel" way, but exhibits which suck in the guest. I want all encompasing, all experiential, interactive immersive spaces. I want total immerision.. And I want freindly, attentive, knowledable people to staff our museums. People who dont get paid even if they fuck around and NOT help people... and can we have people who know something? Its a fuckin museum, people are expected to ask question and the staff that populates most museums doesnt know their elbows from their assholes.

And stuff the WHO WILL FUND THIS EXORBINANT INTERACTIVE MONSTROSITY? Hell I dont know, if they can finance vitrified tiles to be put on garbage dumps (and the garbage dumped outside) they can scrape up some dough for my cool museum.

Another thing... I want hands on museums.. people should be allowed to touch the exbhibits. Not like, every time a viewer comes back u have a whole army of people yelling DO NOT TOUCH YOU BARBARIAN, git yer filthy hands off my museum. Wont do.

And the reverse too... people.. public.. when u're in a museum that DOES allow touching, be a little respectfull. This aint yer fucking drawing room u inconsiderate basards. Repect other people's stuff. Do not spit in corners, do not piss on the walls.

And those who write their and their significant others' names on monuments are the lowest form of scum there is. They should be castrated with the same instrument they defaced the monument with, then they should be hung upside down, naked, at the door of the same monument as a warning to other would-be scum. Like the good old days.........

Gimme a break.... Raj Loves Anjali. Well the chances are Anjali never heard of raj, cause Raj is a puny-pricked basatrd who never had to balls to talk to Anjali, and all he COULD do was chisel this shit on some monument. Might have been that Anjali chiseled it, in which case, She's a Bitch.

back to museums.... how cool is this:

-- from lil

A parasol garden on the roof, they open up when someone is near, and close when the person moves away. I love interactive shite.

All the pictures are taken by Lil on Flickr. Click here for a slideshow of her museum pics

Nerdy geeky jokes..

2005-08-21T01:46:00.000-07:00

Two strings walk into a bar. The first says, "Bartender, bring me a beer."
"Sure thing, string," says the bartender.
The second string says, "I'd a like a beer too.*#50Dlkoe@#4->koid4oib 098ad#)@s@kiu opid)(@g8LD3=_#@0...", spewing gibberish until he falls down unconscious.
The first string pipes up, "Excuse my friend, he's not null-terminated."

---

A 32-year-old Haitian male walks into a bar.

He presents with ankylosing spodyarthirits and a duck under his arm. He tells the bartender, "My serum alkaline phospatase is elevated with .05 mg/L of meperidine in my plasma and I bet $100 my duck can shit into a shotglass ten feet away."

The bartender says, "Is this just an ordinary duck who has not been administered a dose of Baclofen or Cyclobenzaprine?"

The Haitian says "Well, lumbar puncture has been performed and revealed gram-negative cocci and decreased leukocytes, but other than that, it's an ordinary duck."

"You got a bet if I can perform a rectal biopsy and independent bloodwork."

"Of course."

The bartender puts a shotglass on the bar about seven feet away indicating either excessive confidence or a partial loss of visual acuity. The duck passes a reddish, gelatinous-looking stool right onto the bar and nowhere near the shotglass. The bartender laughs and says, "Either you're the dumbest ankylosing Haitian I ever met or you're suffering from cerebral hemorrhage."

The Haitian, without increase in BP, pulls out a hundred dollar bill and says, "I may be a dumb ankylosing Haitian, but I just bet those first-year interns in the corner 500 bucks a piece I could get my duck to shit all over your bar and you'd laugh about it."

The duck is most likely suffering a deficiency of:

A. Ceftriaxone
B. Erythromycin
C. Methicillin
D. Tetracycline
E. Vancomycin

------

Q: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: A fish.

----

An Indian chief had three wives, each of whom was pregnant. The first gave birth to a boy. The chief was so elated he built her a teepee made of deer hide. A few days later, the second gave birth, also to a boy. The chief was very happy. He built her a teepee made of antelope hide. The third wife gave birth a few days later, but the chief kept the details a secret. He built this one a two-story teepee, made out of a hippopotamus hide. He challenged the tribe to guess what had occurred. Many tried, unsuccessfully. Finally, one young brave declared that the third wife had given birth to twin boys. "Correct," said the chief. "How did you figure it out?" The warrior answered, "It's elementary. The value of the squaw of the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides."

----

3 statisticians are out bowhunting. They spot a deer. The first one shoots, and his arrow lands 3 feet to the right of the deer. The second one shoots, and his arrow lands 3 feet to the left of the deer. The third one says, "We got him!"

----

Mrs. Noah Webster walked into her bedroom to find her husband in bed with his mistress. "Noah," she cried, "I'm surprised!"

"No," he replied calmly. "You are shocked. I am surprised."

----

Our 4 legged reptilian freinds...

2005-08-20T08:05:00.000-07:00

The ever present ubiquitous Indian House Lizard. They're in our bedrooms, they accompy us to the bathroom, they're hiding behind the closet door, they're in your kitchen, in the dining room, they're crawling over your utensils, they're scampering away among your desk stuff.. to put it mildly, they are FUCKING everywhere!

Goddam them to hell the TOP reason why i hate summers is not the 50 degree C temperatures but because these spawns of satan rise up form their hibernation and start running around the house!

Sure supposedly they're more scared of us then we are of them, they say. Sure, they're puny and we're bigger, they say. The point being... they evolved without human intervention didnt they? I mean.. fuckin reptiles came before mammels didnt they? Well go live in the fucking wilderness then. It's been sitting on my door for 2 hours and not moving although i'm shouting, stamping and waving things at it. This usually worked with most lizards till now but this particular one is either:

1. Blind and Deaf
2. Got more balls than the rest of them combined.. or more likely,
3. Havent faced the consequences yet, of pissing off the speciy at the top of the food chain.

Now I'm all FOR peacefull coexistence with animals, mosquitoes are no problem, all creatures of God need food to eat and if some mosquito is sucking a little blood, no harm done. It's all a risk... But these fuckers.. NO they're different..

Look at it...

It's smiling!! They arent natural.. they're just snake with legs!! What with the forked tongue and all.. they're poisounous.. and they talk! O YES LIZARDS TALK.. they make a loud cliking noise. And if u make the same noise, they talk to you. (Not in English you wierdo). Snakes wouldnt do that, they just wanna kill u.

But these slithering, slimy bastards... kill em all.. a final solution. Well, keep a few for research or whatevre, propogation of the speciy or whatever, take em out from my home please.

When a person is taking a dump in the loo, the most important thought on his mind shouldnt be "is there a lizard under the sink". No sir.. i think it's the so called DOCILE nature of these house lizards that people arent as strict about them. i mean, if they hissed and attacked evreyone in sight, ppl would feel different. BUT NO! 90% of the human population who doesnt suffer from severe lizard phoebia are indifferent about this menace.

They dont understand.. ugh.. its not that they're ugly (which they are), its that... they're.. ugh.. slimy and slithery... and u konw... they scamper around.. ugh..

Was googling about getting rid of lizards... and guess what the ppl are saying.. they say.. dont get rid of them, let mother nature be.. lizards help in controlling your pesticide intake becuse they eat the insects.

Whatever logic that was... well fuck mother nature, mother nature ends at the doorstep of my room.. inside aint a jungle.

Another solutoin was to get a cat.

A C...A...T......

Here's some info on lizard phobias: From here:

Onset of fear started in childhood in 118 (94.4%) and 3 (2.38%) in adulthood. 32 people exactly remembered the triggering incidence. Family history of similar fear was present in 49 (38.9%) and absent in 77 (61.11%).
Lizard was the most commonly feared in 74 (58.75%) followed by cockroaches in 64 (50.79%) and rats in 34 (26.98%)

That's true, i've been shit scard of lizards for ever... family history too....

Screaming was present in 110 (87.3%), avoidance in 63 (50.7%), help seeking in 61 (48.41%), panic reaction in 34 (26.9%) and others like immobilization in 3 (2.38%)

Well I've never screamed.. at least not OUT LOUD, but i YELP in my head, if thats a consolation. And never been immobilized, except like rightnow when it's FUCKING sittign right on the door!!

28% felt the fear was excessive or unreasonable, 28 (11.2%) felt that fear was interfered in their daily routine and 20 (8%) realized both the fear as excessive and unreasonable and interfered with daily routine

Yeah well.... excessive and unreasonble fear is a relativ term. And yeah it DOES interfere, if only as mildly as checking every door u open for lizards.

--------------

Also, some geniuses proposed to use traps for capturing lizards.. hell, nuke the fuckers!

Waaaaaaaaaanh!

2005-08-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

I got a follow up in my jury. Well, Let's be diplomatic (said the jury) and NOT call it a follow up, being a dirty word, rather, lets call it "ADDITIONAL RESEARCH".

It's all for my own benefit actually, now that my project's been done and dead for about 4 months, its about time i did some actual research.

Unfortunatly MY work didnt show ENOUGH Chinese influence, nor did it show ENOUGH Indian influence. Apparatly, India and China have a combined history of 10,000 years, yet my work in the Honorable Microsoft Corp wasnt good enough cause it didnt show that 10,000 year influence.

The fact that it's an American company making American Products for the American public is not acceptable for the powers that be. So now, have to write a research paper, to atone for my sins.

Feel like screaming....

Wa! Originally uploaded by Gogi.
Uploaded by by Gogi

Off to Ahmedabad

2005-08-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

It's time for the final Jury at the National Institute of Design, the premiere design center for India and bla bla. Jury's tommrow and it's 2 30 AM and I'm still stuck on the 4th slide. There will be much screaming and grinding of teeth by the time the panel is done with me.

And to top it, the flight's at the unGodly hour of 5:30! What kind of sick bastards schedule a domestic flight at 5:30 AM?? And that too a one hour flight, so u arrive at the source at a wierd time, and it's still a wierd time when u reach the destination!

Look out for photographs of the Act I of The Rape of an Interaction Designer.

Goodbye cruel world..

Cows are nice

2005-08-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

-- from subhasish

Cows are nice
If you put them in ice,
And keep them cold all day;

Cows are nice
If you add some spice,
And cover them with purple clay.

Cows are nice
If you mix them with mice,
And add some sugar and salt;

Cows are nice
If you give them advice,
And show them how to pole-vault.

Cows are nice
If they don't have lice,
And haven't got sore throats;

Cows are nice
If you mix them with rice,
And stir in seventeen goats.

Cows are nice
If you drink them with slice,
And maybe some coffee or tea;

But cows are nice,
Especially nice,
If you give all your cows to me!

Some old anonymous cow poem I found somewhere. Previous cow related posts from my other blog.

1. Cow Urine Aftershave
2. Bird Flu/Mad Cow Disease

And did those sheep, in ancient times....

2005-08-16T11:04:00.000-07:00

Don't ask how I got to this page. But its definitly one of the wierdest ever!

Got a bunch of sheep singing William Blake's Jerusalem (Wikipedia). Apparantly its a ringtone too :(

Here's the link, download the whole movie. It's hilarious in a wierd sort of way.

P.S. By the way, I'm looking for the original song. Preferably sung by human voices. Any clues?

ze Metro

2005-08-15T23:25:00.000-07:00

DSC06409
Originally uploaded by Rit Mishra.

Havent checked the Delhi Metro yet. But Rit here has some illegaly shot photographs which show a (strangely) empty station and (even more strangely) a clean one, with (the strangest thing ever) potted plants as eye candy.

It's cool. I like Delhi.

Projectile Vomiting and Social Messages

2005-08-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

Maleaji on Flickr

Why cant we have proper signs? I mean, painting these signs costs right? Why not spend a little more and get an artist to do this? Same for other "social messages" for AIDS, Population and misc projectile vomiting.

All characters look like Happy Content Cows. And there HAS TO be a lame slogan. Any social movement is useless without a slogan, since the wordplay is as skillfull as the artistic quality of these paintings, the slogan rhymes, but doesnt make sense.

AIDS KA GYAN, BACHAEY JAAN.

For fuck's sake, write somethign helpfull and say:

USE A CONDOM, DON'T DIE.

Forget about paintings and poetry.

p.s. I would like to comment on the skill of the Cholera Vomiter in the top pic. He's unloading a whole bucketfull of ex-lunch into this small bowl and that too perfectly! Not a drop fell outside. The tuberculousis phlegm-sprayer on the other hand just unleashes a hail of huge droplets in a totally unruly manner. Also, the Vomitter has a better hairstyle.

Artificial Intelligence

2005-08-15T03:15:00.000-07:00

Keyboard problem?
Originally uploaded by Really Dead Thing.

Didnt even try to be intelligent..

I'm cute - don't eat me!

2005-08-13T02:42:00.000-07:00

I'm cute - don't eat me!
Originally uploaded by Cilest.

Green doors....

2005-08-12T03:54:00.000-07:00

1. From Sanzen
2. From Eileen Delhi
3. From hurleygurley
4. From Me
5. From Linda6769
6. From Pete Ashton

Passage to India

2005-08-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

An exhibition of old india paintings from the time of the Raj and their contemporary photographs.

Link

The India of palaces, towns, fortresses, landscapes and places of worship: the same sites from the same point of view, demonstrating what has or has not changed over 200 years.

>>snip snip

The Englishmen Thomas and William Daniell, uncle and nephew, criss-crossed India between 1786 and 1794. During their long journey, they made many drawings and watercolours of the towns, palaces, fortresses, temples and natural marvels of India

>>snip snip

Two centuries later, after a great deal of research, photographer Antonio Martinelli was able to recreate the itinerary of the Daniells, and set out to retrace their steps during four trips between 1995 and 1997.

>>snip snip

Seems worth seeing.. unfortunatly, NOT in India and link to exhibition not working.

:(

My Photos across the net.

2005-08-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

Two blogs I found till now who are using my Flickr images as header pics.

One is Work in Progress and another THIS GUY. W.I.P. guy gave credit at the end of his blog, like a good Creative Common Guy should, Although he skewed the image quite a bit. The other dude "forgot" that the pic he so conviently used is actually somebody else's KHOON PASINA KAMAI. What bastards!

Then this tourism like site called 43places using my Tianemen Square Pics, Here,

Then another site called Nationmaster Encycloedia's Beijing section (which looks suspiciously like Wikipedia) features a Summer Palace Pic here. They took the liberty of taking the high res shot too. With due credit.

That is all for now.. enough mental mastrubation.