February 6th, 2007
4:54 pm
Life
Just got off the phone with one of my best friends from B-School.. he’s gonna be a father soon! Woot 
And to think that just a few short years back the biggest question in our lives was – Is Waters God? Or is it Gilmour
These big moments in our lives tend to creep up slowly across the years, so it’s often a shock to look back and think of all the things that have happened since we last staggered back to our hostel rooms after a night of revelry.. but it’s all for the best.
So congrats to M & S on the upcoming addition to their family and wishing them all the best in the years to come!
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It’s been a loong time since I posted here, but I came across something today that moved me so deeply I just had to say something about it.
Yesterday was the 4th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. At that time I am sure everyone of us wondered briefly what was going on in those final few minutes before the shuttle broke up.
Via Metafilter, I came across a site where an enthusiast has compiled all the video available for the final 8 minutes of the disaster and synchronized the audio track of the conversation between Ground control and the shuttle crew. The entire video plays in realtime and can be found here
Since it plays in realtime, it’s an incredible experience – you will be by turns terrified, saddened and amazed as you watch and hear this video. In your heart, you know what the ending will be, but it’s amazing to hear the calm tones of the shuttle commander and when the audio blanks out towards the end.. it’s one of the loneliest moments I have ever experienced.
Please go watch the video, and spare a thought for those astronauts and their families – Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown and Laurel Clark; R.I.P. May your spirit inspire generations to come.
Everyone’s heard of it and I’m sure you’ve mistakenly fallen into that trap a few times as well – clicked on a link and found yourself at some blindess-inducing Myspace page – filled with flashing colours and annoying looped background music that leaves you scrambling for both the volume control and the close button on your browser at the same time.
It appears that Myspace is not the only website where such idiotic things happen.
I was recently asked by one of my good friends to join Orkut, which is probably the grand-daddy of the whole “make a profile, leave comments, join a group” type social websites. I joined up, saw my friend’s “friends list”, added a few friends – so far so good.
One person I added decides to leave a scrap (Orkut term for a comment) on my profile page. I see it, click on reply, enter some text and click “submit”. I get a message saying “Success! Your scrap has been saved on <friend’s> scrapbook“. In case you missed my emphasis, that’s “friend’s scrapbook“.
Which genius came up with this design? There’s a reason why all sites where people discuss various things starting from BBS’es to forums follow a threaded, date-stamped model. It’s just more intutive and easy to follow.
As a user and an IT Business Analyst, I’m horrified at this design. Take this (admittedly hypothetical) situation – you have a friend on Orkut – you leave two “scraps”:
1. “Coming to the party this week?”
2. “You want to do lunch today?”
He replies “No” and “Yes”. What do you see? On your scrapbook, two messages:
1. “No”
2. “Yes”.
So which one’s for which? Imagine a more complex scenario, you and your friend are discussing (via Orkut) how to mod a PC.. can you imagine the confusion a messaging interface like Orkut’s would cause?
Why can’t everyone just stick to the basics??
Working on this photograph gave me an oppurtunity to reflect on the remarkably full life that my grandmother has lead.
She married my grandfather aged 18 and was a mother before she turned 21. She suffered the heartbreak of watching a daughter die, but has seen the birth and marriage of her grand-daughter.
She has lived through seeing her uncles put in jail fighting for India’s independence, a World War, the Independence of India, an Emergency, the slow death of those grand dreams of a socialist paradise and the emergence of a new “liberal” India.
Coming from a generation where most women never left thier homes, she would travel the length and breadth of India, found a school, run a charity that educated the children of a 100 poverty-stricken families and still run a household that had 7 families and over 20 children under 1 roof.
She would conduct the marriages of nearly half the children who grew up under her care, and remain the person everyone turned to when it came to the marriage of those children’s own sons and daughters.
She suffered a massive heart attack that left her bed-ridden for months, but has through sheer determination, beat the predictions of every single doctor who has treated her.
Through good times and bad, in sickness and in health, she remains the anchor-stone for my extended family.
I salute her and can only say one thing in summary – They broke the mold when my grandmother was born.
I have been on a serious photography trip recently, and the blog has suffered for that. Having seen the efforts of some truly magnificent photographers, I have been motivated to try my hand at it as well.
Here are some of my more recent attempts that I judge relatively worthy..
For contrast, here are some of the great photos I have seen on Flickr recently:
I still have a long way to go.
Since I am at heart a geek, I immediately set about finding out what better tools I could have (though great cameras do not mean great photos) and for now, have my heart set on a Sony Alpha 1000 dSLR. But it will be a while before I can actually get one
So almost unbelievably, I’m posting again, after a gap of (checks the site) 6 weeks :O. What happened?
Ok, in chronological sequence:
1. Oblivion – TES IV sucked almost 3 weeks of my life. Mostly in figuring out how to get it to play on my laptop (Many thanks to asp and his awesome Oldblivion). Once I had finally figured out the configuration settings that would get me a stable, playable framerates (You’d be surprised how playable TES IV is even at 6 fps 
), I wound up spending a mess of time figuring out all the mods I should have in the game. Hence, many hours spent over at TESS
2. My laptop’s hard drive crashed. A complete, unrecoverable crash. The BIOS couldn’t see the Hard drive kind of crash. 
(. Since I operate mostly from my client’s offices, I never had a network drive to back stuff up onto, so 3 years of offical and personal data is now trapped in my old hard drive (More than 3 years actually, I had email archives and downloads from my college days on it as well )
I’m still hoping I get my data back, though there was quite a ruckus in my office over the price of getting the contents recovered in Singapore. So it’s gone to India and I await further news on it.
It took me forever to recover from this, simply because I had to scour the Net again for installers for all my favourite software. It took me a while just to remember what were all the programs I had installed!
I’ve got myself an external hard disk now (200GB, USB2.0) and am using Second Copy to back up all my stuff. I did play around with SyncBackSE initially, but it wasn’t reliable enough for me (using Windows scheduler to trigger the backup jobs really put me off).
3.Work – obviously losing all my data put a major crimp on my productivity. Once I had my laptop back, there was a metric fuck ton of work to catch up on. Just as I was getting my head back above water, I was asked to travel my company HQ in Bangalore for a conference.
So I’m back in Singapore now, recovering from my Bangalore trip (more on that in a little while) and picking up the threads of my blog 
.
PS: Many thanks to Richie – his gentle questioning forced me off my lazy ass and back on this blog
May 28th, 2006
3:49 pm
Life
I had bought myself a Creative Zen MP3 Player in September last year. But heartbreakingly for me, in December last year, after a trip to a shopping mall, I couldn’t find the player in my backpack and despite frantic searching and calls to the mall security, nothing was found.
I have dreamed of owning an MP3 Player since I first saw a Creative Jukebox MP3 Player in a PC magazine way back in 1999 and I can’t even begin to describe how I felt that day when I lost it.
Well anyway, today I was looking for a clothes brush to clean up some lint on a pair of shorts. Thinking I had left the brush on top of a cupboard, I put my hand there and instead of a brush, my hand closes on something small and hard.
I pull it down and find myself looking at a small dusty bag. I think my heart stopped the instant I realized what that small bag held – my missing MP3 Player! With bated breath, I open the back and yes, it’s my MP3 Player!
woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. um yeah, I’ll stop.
Anyway, I rush to find the charger, plug it in, pull the slider to on and it works!.. It’s sitting beside me right now and I can’t begin to describe how I feel right now
May 28th, 2006
3:30 pm
Life
This morning when I went to check my mail, I found a letter postmarked Granada. My first thought “I don’t know anybody in Spain, WTF am I getting a letter from there? Is it one of those scam things?”
Come back home – open up the letter and guess what? I’ve won something in the euro millione (that’s the spelling in the letter) lottery.
And as proof, a piece of paper with fuzzy pictures that are so obviously copy-pasted in word and then printed out using a laser printer.
There is a reference to a Ministry d Economic y Hacienda (The Economics Ministry of the House?? WTF??) and obviously I have to keep this secret.
Finally, obviously, a form I have to fill up and return after which the claim can be “processed”.. )
I had a good laugh this morning I can tell you that. I only worry about how these buggers got hold of my postal address.. hm?
I have been reading the book Getting Things Done by David Allen the last few days.
I haven’t actually started implementing GTD yet in my life though in the course of reading the book I have tried to start putting atleast the 2 minute rule into effect.
What I just wanted to say is that it has been a long time since I found myself nodding to things written in a book or even saying aloud “That is so true”. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to underline a sentence in the book because it sounded so much like what happens to me
More than anything, that experience gives me some hope that GTD is a technique that will actually help me get my life back on track.
I am hoping to start on the “pyschic RAM” sweep this weekend – let’s see how it goes.
April 20th, 2006
8:43 pm
Life
An article by JD’s girlfriend on self-sustaining gardening, lead to a small discussion on JD’s blog about the fantasy fruits we’d like and any other tips that anyone could remember.
I mentioned that some vegetables and cereals can attract wild animals and in passing mentioned elephants and how they could demolish walls to get what they wanted.
To prevent that discussion from going too off-topic, here’s that story on elephants
Back in the ’80s, my dad worked for the tea division of Unilever India. We were staying in the estates where the tea was grown and these were typically in isolated hilly areas in South India.
Just before the rainy season started, the company would stock up on several hundred kilos of urea fertilizer. Unfortunately, this was also the time when the elephants went on their annual migration from one forest range to another and the estates along with the shed storing the fertilizer was right in the middle.
The elephants could smell the salt used in the fertilizer and would head straight for this shed. Shed locked and made of brick? No problem – just knock it down!
So by the next morning when everyone went back to work, there would be no shed left, only rubble, mostly empty bags of fertilizer and lots of elephant poo and elephant pee all over the place.
The company eventually moved the shed to another place far away from the elephant trail