Random Thoughts of an Absolute Demented Mind - My Mind -Part II

Here is what is going to happen now. I will try to roll out as much as I can while I watch IPL simultaneously.

There are some general thoughts on mind now about blogging in general. Of late I am running out of titles and coming up with so stupid ones. Is there something like ‘hit the wall’ for bloggers? I guess there must be. No, I am definite there is one - I hit them so vigorously almost at equal intervals of time, it puts me down like a patient suffering from third-degree burns for months sometimes. There was a while back reading certain posts in Lalitha Larking, it hit certain emotional chord in me. Her posts are simple, thoughtful, not much fancy but poignant and heartfelt. I have also decided to focus more on thoughts than on the gloss. How I wish I could turn back the time using time-turner (like the one Hermione had in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and pen down all those sweet memories of Engineering days, those unbearable dimwit lecturers, those bunk the college watch the movie and the list goes on and on. But if ever time permits I will with inputs from Laddo herself J . Here are upcoming titles (well at least then I will have an idea what to write about…)

100th Post Celebration
Mom’s Trip To Bangalore
Plays
Quinn’s Quest to Laptop Series - The End

Apart from that I also have to write a mail to Mihir – poor thing, must have been wondering what happened to me and how come a simple question regarding my occupation could put anyone on high alert. Boy, I am going to have a ball writing that. And then there is one blurb of all my current favorites to my mom’s friends…All in short time.

Random Thoughts of Absolute Demented Mind - My Mind

“IT is the time when I play beyond my capabilities, when I know I am so tired that my legs starts aching, my breath coming out in gasps, sweating profusely, I enjoy the most…” – Jash (sometime, not really sure when..)

Well that aptly sums up my current state of mind. Of course you know coming from Forum, shopping all alone in the Landmark for around 2 hours to get the right books, all my thoughts were focused on one thing and one thing alone – “Blog”. As has been happening for some time now every time I come across a misspelling in a hoarding or something that touches my past briefly or some conversation of “little” significance words starts framing in my mind and I make sure I tinge it with a touch of humor and there is also a auto-spell checker to correct the words – to THAT extent I keep thinking.

So what is the first thing I realize coming here – power cut? Was I surprised – HELL…Yes Goddammit…a big YES… Somehow I feel that one bad rainy day that led to crores of loss, some 60 trees, 100 electric poles, etc. etc. has tarnished ‘Ejipura’ beyond control, beyond normal, beyond the ‘elite’ zones, beyond the ‘no-power-cut’ zone, beyond the sleep-well-in-the-night-with-download-zone. Normally I don’t crib about things like these and just enjoy my sleep mentally noting to get up early in the morning to do at least some of the things I promised myself. But man yesterday was the limit. Successfully making a journey back home half an hour ahead of usual timings, tired, hungry, eager to blog I was welcomed home with a power cut – a very very long power cut that stayed till 12:30 in the night and to only make the matters worse I wasn’t sleepy. And now again on a weekend – can you believe that??? But I am fully prepared now come what may I am here to blog…

Here I am in my room with absolute darkness all around except the light from the laptop, flies moving around stinging me relentlessly relishing every blood drop they suck in. What a stroke of good luck for them eh? This might be the day that they might tell it to their children who will relate it to their children and this goes on and on. What follows is one of the worst jokes you might across..read it with caution...no force “You just won’t believe it, mate I am telling ya. He was rock solid like a stone, first we thought he was dead but when there was some movement in his legs we all backed off and kept distance waiting for those hands to come slamming down. Nothing happened, then we all attacked together and began feasting. It was only little later we realized that we were unnecessarily being cautious. And so remember whenever you come across this bloke with nice specs and a good looking face, sitting in a dark room busy typing on the desk- that would be the day you won’t forget”. And sometime now one of the guys is going to come in and announce to the world – ‘ baap re, veediki pichekindi ra babu, ee mobbulo laptop mundu kurchni blog rayadam ento, aa dunnapothi body ki asalu domalu vunnai anna feeling kuda kalagademo?’ I am just guessing it might be Mr.Thati. (no one has come so far…)

Well for once in my blogging life it is my determination rather than willingness that made this blog and also this is the first time ever I am writing first in ms word before posting it on the blogspot and it feels absolutely ridiculously great. This might be the most meaningless post but if not for this then I am sure it would have taken another week or so to bring it up again. When I started off this I had something else in my mind altogether …

well more on that in the sequel….

Edit:

Thanks to my grit and determination miraculously the power is back in this course of events. Freaking Awsome Dude!!! - Ya I second that..

P.S. - Many of you who might have come across this googling for the great Arnab's blog and being disappinted due apologies...you see I am outta of ideas for titles and well as I was constantly doing alt-tab, alt-tab I couldn't have better title...

Gimme a Break!!!

Dasatavaram audio was out and spending some excruciating hours on sleep, got up early the next day and googled to find the link for download here only to be directed to a page with such authentication. Can anybody make out of that image above? If yes, please mail me so. Type in the letters with cat above / below? Bull shit, if they gotta restrict people from stopping download well just remove the ‘FREE’ section but with such stupid tricks it just sucks. Every attempt was like the torture the protagonist goes through in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ as they have this 1 minute counter that feels like ages. Well luckily downloading the songs in tamil was much much easier and well I will review them shortly…

Bowel Shaking Moments

Were there not moments when there came a thing that shook your foundations completely and left you befuddled for a while?

Yesterday was one of those days. Well after Paresh (our ex-mentor and one of those rare gems with abundant talent and dedication) put in place MVC architecture for our erstwhile M&E Dashboard , I never really thought there could be another way of doing it. And sometimes it was pretty hard considering I wasn't able to replicate the connection string and also wasn't able to get the classes for objects that made it easier for updating/deleting records. We were very much dependent on the source code generator that Paresh had brought along. Will link up the link in coming times :)..

Yesterday when I saw this it felt as if someone gouged a 5 shot tequila down my throat. Woah..too much to take in I tell ya. I almost jumped out of my seat reading it. If it was SO DAMN easy to establish a MVC architecture then how come it didn't cross our minds AT ALL? And well so began my R&D ** after a very very long hiatus(1 and a half month AT least) and a voluntary break from my nonsensical routine I set out my first task: Binding Images from DataBase to DataList entirely using Database operations.

And for that this seemed just the kind of appetizer I needed to set the things right. But my task wasn't as easy as I thought and after 2,3 days creating,deleting 2,3 projects from Visual Studio I wasn't yet able to get what I needed.This quest of mine surprised my RM too so much so that he goes on record saying : Asalu inta goranga nuvvu SMART ku eppudaina kastapaddava? ...Snippets like that encourages me to not to lose hope.

But the sad part of the whole saga is typed DataSet creates more problems than solutions and though it helps in making our work easier not remembering column names and checking their spellings in terms of changes in Database this is just not adaptable and I figured someother ways to do it and now the application looks sturdy.

Yet, it proved that I am still receptive to such gyaan and capable of taking in much more. .Net never ever fails to amaze me...

**- R&D is quite an interesting term coined by Julie (my ex-RM) for all the work we put in googling for something, trying it out in our applications and making sure the desired requirement is met. One such was having a Delete ImageButton in the GridView and it took me SO much time to get it done. But yes that was when I have first heard the term from her on the teleconference (we had no other way of contacting her then other than that mode) and it stuck with me and started making perfect sense. Uptil then R&D always meant to be associated with PHD's... and now it feel kinda cool to say 'it will at least 5 days for R&D'.

I presume this lingo is not universal as Mahider had a huge grin on his face hearing it from me to the reply I gave to Sunil...so listen up folks if you got something to google, something to copy paste,something to try and you want to tell your pm about it start using R&D..got it?

FPS - The Play

A Nutshell Review –
Book costs 100 bucks, ticket costs 200, travel costed 200 and top of all this another 100 for food that night – 600 in total. Was it absolutely worth it, not really. Well read on…

ENJOY THE 1-Minute Teaser

First of all I absolutely loved the book and consequently had huge expectations on how it is going to turn out as a play. It was going to be staged by none other than the troupe ‘Evam’ themselves. Maybe it was just a coincidence but it just happens that Evam’s ‘The Odd Couple’ was my first ever play and it was their play again that I am going to after a very long hiatus.
Play started little late than usual with a very unusual long somewhat boring adulating speech from an unusual person. Just when I thought enough was enough there was a startling revelation that it was 300th performance and well guess what we were also present for their 100th one. With lights out, and a while later came echoing beat of the legendary Pink Floyd’s ‘We Don’t Need No Education’ …

Woah…spell binding and the kind of opening I was just hoping for. My face flushed and had some goose bumps all over hearing that song. I controlled my irresistible desire to get up and dance. The whole point of the book was breaking the myth – all IIT ians are extremely talented bunch of guys, super whiz kids who just can’t do anything wrong in their studies or in their lives. And man that song just SUMS up the whole idea.

They had a very simple setting – one huge square platform with one step which took care of buildings, classrooms, dhaba, ice-cream parlour, insti roof (got the point?), one small desk and chair to the right (different rooms in the hostel…well a room that’s all), a bed with a cot to the right (same as the former) as you can see one such here.

It being an adaptation, I don’t want to go more into the story. If you are looking for one you can find it in my review of the book. The casting was excellently done including profs. Prof. Veera looks uber cool maybe because he was the only young prof out there. Of the whole lot I thought Ryan and Alok were like the perfect jigsaw pieces.

For some reason as the scenes were played out one after other I was co-relating more with the book anticipating the next scene with certain urgency. It was great to see some liberties that the author took and not adapting it literally. Especially the scene where they break up (a la Sid-Akash tussle minus the discussion of the how-why of such relationship) it was freaking hilarious to see Hari replying back with F*** off when Ryan flushed with pride to see Hari stay back ‘You made the right choice Hari’. And there were few more such hilarious scenes.

Well frankly I don’t have anything much to say. It is harder for reviewing something that you know could have been done better or for something you are much more familiar beforehand. I didn’t like it as much as the book and the unnecessary clapping between the scenes was irritating to say the least. I am happy at least I have made Ranjit enjoy the beauty of theater and he loved every part of it.

'Five Point Someone' - A Book Review

IIT or IIM no big deal. Everywhere students are students and the pranks they do are universal. And most importantly there are STUDENTS like US.

It was only two days ago read I read the book (in four hours flat actually) 'Five Point Someone' By Chetan Bhagat. The only reason why I took up the book is because so many people said it's similar to the movie 'Dil Chahta Hai' which is my favorite.

It's exactly that. You have three guys Ryan, Hari and Alok (Akash, Sameer, Sid....) who get ino the prestigious institution in India , IIT -Delhi. Ryan is very creative, highly intelligent and with that naturally comes arrogant attitude. Hari is the one who narrates the entire history of them. He is fickle minded. It takes no more than some juicy talk to influence him. And the most important of all the characters whom you might have seen from your intermediate to this year- Alok. He is very studious, poor, and fat. He loves food. The story starts with how these three guys get to know each other through one of the most dreaded things in the first year's life, you guessed it, ragging. From then on you will get to know each character in depth with absolutely superb narrative. Ryan keeps bickering about the IIT system and there are quite a few instances where you would ask yourself “What is the big deal about IIT then? ". While Alok being highly sensitive, poor with no friends dislikes him somewhat but all the same follows him. Hari, though throughout the book says he is unbiased, always flows with Ryan. It boils down finally to a stage which they never could have imagined.

Well, if it were to be only this then man I wouldn't have touched the book with a pole long stick, there is this small story interwoven with the small plot, between Neha and Hari which gives the afterlife to the book. The interesting part about this book is at no point of time you feel bored or hackneyed or dragging. Everything goes with a breakneck speed especially ' The longest day of my life' (how ironic eh?) series. It is because the characters are so similar with the everyday life, you are sure to enjoy it especially if you are a backbencher.

Basically this is my first novel with Indian author, the classroom activities, the professor's, mugging up, ragging, bunking so on so forth are so familiar with what we do. So go ahead and read it if you reallly want to know 'what not to do at IIT' or if you are feeling disappointed for not getting into one ( you might feel happy after reading this..).

This book is recommended to everyone.

(Brought to you from Yossarain Archives...)

*** M*i*n*d*B*l*o*w*i*n*g ***

!!!!That's Me...yohooo...that's me!!!!!

(Left To Right)
Me: That's Me.. as in M-E me...
Hari: Gullible precoucious little kid
Nikhil Mohan a.k.a (Nikmo) : Hmmm...naa..I don't have proper words to describe him.

It's not everytime you see a pic and think "woah...Is that really Me?". Well...this is one such pic. Taken at beach house near Pudicherry (pondicherry FYI). Frankly never once I feel I look good in snaps and you know it's quiet difficult to get the pose right and man to make the matters worse I ain't got no photogenic face / muscular body to speak of. And SO this snap is much much special for me in this context. Wow in the words of Geet "Mein mere best fan hoon" ...

Apart from this there is one other snap taken by Ms.Talkative and that was great too... After taking that snap here goes what she said:

"Nee life lo intakante best photo radanukunta...Nee pelli chupulaku pettu pakka flat aipotharu..."

(This must be your best snap in your whole god damn life. Rishta pukka ho jayega ye phot dikhane se)

I can't find it now but when I do I will update it. It's been hellava time since I updated...

!!!Keep Watching This space for more!!!!

WTH is happening?

8 Days...8 freaking days since I installed Visual Studio 2008 trial version and I have programmed not a thing.
Ain't written no mail to Laddoo
Haven't completed the Quinn's Quest to Laptop series..

--ditto-- with " Elsevier Week "


Why do I feel extreme laziness in doing what I like the most? And adding more salt to the injury I might have been robbed of this blog too had it not been for Citrix. I would have loved to put all the blame on Hari for asking me to bed early (oy..no pun intended). Were it not for his no-so-subtle-hints about his loathing for me having the lights on till 3 to 4, maybe I could have done at least some of the things listed above..

Frankly excepting surfing I wasn't doing anything significant anyway during those times , so I saw no point in eihter protesting or satisfying myself thinking if-only-hari-didn't-ask-me-to switch the lights off. Partly maybe the initial euphoria of savoring "my precious". Loading all the movies, updating the anti-virus, some softwares and oh, yes, how the heck can I forget downloading movies.

I said to myself last Friday at the same time as I am typing this : Next week I am going to completely focus on the job. Complete the new requirements one by one , constanlty imagining the shock on the face of Sunil (our onsite lead) when he reads out estimate for coding as : 2 days . In the process having a photo of the same..Tadaaan...

Ok back to reality. The situation is as good as it was a week back. No damn progress. On top of which I am again doing the same things I have been doing the last week and the week prior to that which is :

1. Log on to Citrix.
2. Open Outlook and check mails
3. Then go to IMDB.com , read through some posts, reply if I can (which I don't)
4. Go to Top 250 and start goign through the ones I wish I had
5. yada yada...

Sometime in the middle just go through the requirement doc. And also keep checking if Mahider is watching over me or if Shrikanth is going around. It sounds silly trying to act like a school kid hiding himself when the teacher starts coming to the back rows..

Ok, now for some action: I solemnly pledge/swear that from now onwards I am going to get up early in the morning, do at least "some " development work if not the whole website.

!!!AMEN!!!!

Jeez, did I really write all that??

Elsevier Week

When was the last time you took part in something for the first time? There were many such occasions for me but the result was not always satisfying and most notable of them was the New Year Bash that was held here( seriously our college fest was 100 times better). I am glad to say Elsevier week wasn't such.

The first on the menu was "Caps and T-Shirt Day" (Day 1 in the mundane language). Until and unless someone told you that this day meant meant a cap and a T-Shirt had to be worn you would never know that it is. You see, there were only 5 to 6 with a cap on. Anyways around 4:30, an hour late than planned (as is the Indian norm :D ) we were all assembled near the basketball ground. Teams were divided by numbering out all the odds and even ones with whole team standing in a circle and for a while I thought Leonard (from Memento) possessed me because no sooner did I recite my number and the round ended I forgot what it was I chose. Once agreable but THREE times? My fears were short-lived though thanks to Kunal who seems to suffer from the same. Phew!! It was with a great reluctance and sense of absolute dread I went with my 2 team to be part of the circle as we were about to play Elimination game. My mind was busy churning out images of the events that might follow like Musical Chairs, Antakshari which among many others are the two most favorited(Heaven Knows why? ) and frequent chores that happens when all the aunts and uncles with the unfortunate children (for someone above the class 10 that's much more worse...man I have been to those quite many times...) and this was the cause of dread within in me. No offense intended. The scene here was eerily reminiscent of the same excepting that this time around it is all the tweenies here..

But boy o boy what a game it actually turned out to be. There was constant adrenaline rush within to get the team out and the sense of urgency was quite palpable on all the faces. Shoot the legs, that's the rule and shoot we did alright with ball going from one corner(not exactly a circle it was) to another and the whole bunch within trying to dodge the attacks was as exciting as seeing last few overs of the T-20 World Cup finale. The excitement just got better in the second half as I found myself jumping, running and finally falling (which saw me out of the game) to avert the oncoming onslaughts. I might have appealed for third umpire as it was not 100% sure if the ball had touched me and ultimately save the game for our team who unfortunately lost. Not all was proper though there were some rumours floating around of how Rishvi had manipulated her watch and that the 1 team broke the rules and were huddled much closer than expected (which still haven't been confirmed by the sources...).

Moving on (and thankfully my fears were unfounded) it was the Tug-Of-War and mind you it did turn out to be one with some heavy casualities. Kunal, Uvarajan and me were the most affected of all. It was again between team 1 and 2 in a space of 3 rounds. Being in the first round and taking the bait was me. Tying hankie first on the hand and making one round go through my fist I held the defense ready for the call. Whistle blew and aaaaaahhhhh... oh..god what a pain it was! Not mental pain not because we lost three times (that of course was part of it) but the physical. What in the world was a nylon thread doing here. It should have been jute all the way. I was actually expecting some resistance with cheers and encouragement but man this turned out to be a 5 to 10 seconds affair. Even now it stumps me how the other team did manage. Surely something fishy out there...again a Rishvi conspiracy? Did she know which end was more secure beforehand?(unconfirmed yet.. :D)

The best of the day was yet to come. Everybody there burst out laughing seeing Imtiaz and his buddy running hand in hand totally mindless of the embarressment they are causing or the absurdity of doing such thing and set out trying to outrun the teams of two's who were tied leg-in-leg to reach the mark. What a site it was! Strange it may seem but the micheveous duo couldn't cross the mark. All in all a wholesome entertainment.

What truly hit me was the energy and sportiveness with which everbody participated and made the day most memorable. For the first time I felt a sense of belonging and oneness. Well there ended the day one but not the fun....You ain't seen nothing yet

!!!!Watch out for Day 3.!!!!

(Oh..hello,, I do know numbers , Day 2 ain't worth the line I am typing out here. So don't bother...)

Te zee Pe On I yum dee be - yippie yippie

Did I miss something? Blimey, how could it happen. The moment I saw it I knew I had to take a print screen and save it somewhere. There was no way it was going to stay for long on the chart. And boy o boy was I not true. One Week there it was and flash out of the chart and kicked into oblivion. I guess there ain't many regular fellas liking Indian movies for sure to be so kind to allow a mainstream entry into the elite team.

Haven't followed anything yet, pathetic, well click here and that my friends is a achievement in itself. Personally though I thought it was average fare.