Originial Joke of the Day

pure 100% original unintended unintentional joke...a mail to my rm from my teammate whose name is withheld for all practical purposes...

Hi xxxx,

After deployment is all the changes that we have made are working fine which we have included in yesterdays RFC.

Regards,

yyyy

and that's all...who so ever understood the meaning can drop in the comments section...I know it's a tough thing but take your time...my rm has given me plenty of time to make it out..Hint: RFC means Request for change (as if that's going to help...)

Opera 9.5 - Lightning fast and more

It was with a huge frustration that I made a post saying I would not touch this browser again but right from that post till date I haven't let go of this as the speed is just ubelievably fast and also some of the things I mentioned about stumble, imdb, I am not using them much now, so no reason to complain. I do have alternatives for it like OperaStumbler which does the same job albeit a bit differently. I wonder why folks at Stumble made one such yet...

So what's the point in posting now you might ask me. What irked me off with opera was it's inability to handle blogs. For sometime while editing everything runs smooth and then all of a sudden the scroll bar that appears on the right vanishes and the letters start going out of the screen. As it is blog for me is such a painful activity, now with a thing like that it just puts me off, so all the while I used to blog either in firefox or in IE. It wasn't until yesterday while making certain edits for my Dasavtharam post I discovered one amazing thing ability of Opera 9.5 - IT WORKS!!!!

I am blogging this with 9.5. Yipppie!!!!!!Apart from the interface looks stylish topped with black contours with glassy interface it is one amazing upgrade. It is faster than ever before, just try checking your mails in Opera and IE and notice the difference, Speed Dial, and the best thing I discovered (it's been there for long though...) is the abilitiy to navigate with the mouse. Right-Click your mouse and move the scroll button in the middle up or down, didn't you notice something like the one show on the right. For someone who has say 10 - 12 tabs open this is a very very handy interface. And how in the world can I not mention about Sessions. IT's like this. Suppose you are searching on something and start opening up multiple tabs and browsers. You got what you want but are unsure from which set of links you have obtained or you want to do something else now and at the same time don't want to delete all the tabs that you painstakingly have combed the web and brought up. What do you do then ? Simple go to File-> Sessions->Save this Session and give any name you want. Close all the present ones and start your slate clean. I use this a lot of all the things that Opera offers. I know it's comes with some add-ons in firefox but it just can't beat this , upon start you can even SELECT which session you want to open the browser with. And last if not the least it's paste and go...go..go..go.... no more explanation on that...

All in all I am mightily impressed with the folks at Opera who have done a marvelous job in redesigning the browser with all the little tweaks still intact.

Watch out for some more tech reviews and tips coming from Yossarain stable...

Dasavatharam - Watta Movie!!!!

Watching Dasavatharam has been one of my greatest experiences. It is the first time I have been to movie at theaters to a language I didn't understand , tamil in this case. So following this there would be some personal experiences and you are free to skip it and directly read from "Review: " ...

Vijetha assured me that I would get tickets and not to worry but I didn't dare call her up till 1:30 or so and it was only just for the sake of formality I called silently praying : God, please let her forget that she needs to book me a ticket, please, please. Nopes, nothing doing beta , you are destined to see it and you shall see it - tadastu (ding)...

So I agreed, went to PVR, took the tickets from the guy. For a while my heart fluttered seeing the price :300. 300??? So I did some mental calculations. Let's see I saw Horton Hears a Who at 210 and that holds good for any english movie give or take 30 bucks. On top of that if Nikhil had been to a tamil movie of an unknown actor which he finally enjoyed is it not possible for me to enjoy Kamal Haasan's movie? of course... Now all I needed to justify was the remaining 90. That's simple. I just skipped my lunch plan at Meghna (thank goodness the restauarant was full) and decided to go veg the days starting from 16-20th. Phew!!!! Now that things are settled I let out a huge sigh of relief.. As it usually happens my mind starts wavering after certain decisions I make and this time I had SO much misgivings and thoughts like : Who am I trying to fool - going alone to a Tamil movie spending 300 bucks?.

Review:

Story:

This is a nonstop action movie in the likes of Kshana Kshanam, Anaga Anaga oka roju (incidentally both directed by RGV himself) tinged with comedy and action right from the word go. The story is fairly simple. Kamal works for a giant pharmaeucitical company and under his guidance achieves a outstanding breakthrough in generating a biological weapon -George Bush (Kamal himself ...will come to that later...) himself phones in to personally congratulate the team involved in it you see. Seeing that hero won't be bought with money the baddies try to smuggle the goods themselves . Hero finds out and reaches to the crime scene first and steals the compound and there begins the chase. And the rest of the story is about how the hero successfully manages to keep off the assassin and fail all his attempts.

Music:

Reshmiyya's music never really enticed me , somehow my ears just can't take in his nasal voice that goes uuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnn....and luckily for me not one song was sung by him. Ya..ya..he is talented and all that...anyways I enjoyed this films so much so that I downloaded, coincidentally, Tamil music as telugu ones were not available and liked them immensely. I did get telugu ones after a while but stayed with the former. Music never really feels like a distraction here and it is blendedly nicely along with the story. Here again unfortunately Mallika's item number is so gaudy right from her dress to her steps. I found her tolerable in 'Guru' where I found her dance a bit sensuous... And a special mention regarding 'Oh oh Sanam' song: you willl truly appreciate this song and it's meaning too after seeing the movie ..

Acting:

Asin: She has a dual role in this film. The first one is a fairly short one as a wife of temple priest and the second is the main heroine role where we see her acting as a second fiddle to hero and a staunch krishna devotee. She does her parts well.

Mallika Sherawath: Good news, her role is really really small and she had ample scope to display her assets and that's all I have to say about that. Anything more then I would be doing her a great disgrace...

Kamal Haasan: Of all his avatars I liked him the best in 2 notably the telugite inspector who remains dumb throughout the movie and the other is the main role. Acting wise we see the vintage Kamal with his funny bone intact and this movie reminded me so much of Michael, Madana , Kamraj

Best Parts:

1. First and foremost has to be George Dubya Bush (played by Kamal). I wonder if it was the delibrate intention of the director to potray him like a joker but the result was freaking hilarious. With such gaudy makeup and funny accent, his walking style, and the way he jumps and walks up to the mike at the last scene.
2. Fight between the Kungfu master (kamal again) and the rogue assassin (do i have to say it? ) at the end. I was just not prepared for it. I mean it looked as if they copy-pasted it from a hollywood flick. In a word: Awsome.
3. Scenes involving gulti character.

Some groans:

1. Makeup in this movie sucks big-time and among all the ten roles only 4 look realistic and the rest look as if some dead skin has been patched up and you can see the abnormalities either in the cheek bone (the kungfu master) or the eye, or the skin (when playing the old lady, her hand was like a huge slab of bread) or the whole face itself (like the lambu or Bush).
2. Special Effects, the less said is better-you wonder if it is the same Kamal who had given us Bharateeyudu, Hey Ram? Maybe he didn't really bother about this department and let the director have the final say. Frankly I had too much expectations, it being Kamal's film but it turned out to be another Mrugaraju or Deviputrudu for that matter. All this hype about costliest film just gets on my nerves. Where the heck did they put all the money ? Just sample these:

• A stadium just looks like one of the badly done Microsoft screensavers,
• So-called mind-blowing tsunami which excepting for the height of ways looked like a huge swimming pool was given a shake from the other end.
• The lab, which at first sight anyone who has bit of English film knowledge would immediately associate with the one in ‘The Rock’, looks authentic enough but for pete’s sake why can’t they have water looking like water? You know the scene where we see water flooding inside to neutralize the atmosphere; even a 1 year old could understand that it was graphics. It looked that bad.

Overall:

I enjoyed this film right from the start to end barring my few groans above. I don't understand why people are complaining about the movie saying this is just mediocre and all that. Yes, there are so many lose plotholes like the pre-historic storyline that just doesn't add up at all, and so much more that can be improved but ultimately it kept me entertained and that's what I was looking for. Excepting for one story with a political backdrop everything else I understood and the movie had me in splits so many times. So folks, don't listen to all the crap that is being said and just enjoy the movie for what it is : a no brainer pop corn flick with a real fearsome baddie ... 

Ulaga Nayagane ~~~~~ 

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My 100th Post - My precious

It is a very very special moment for me and as I write this I just feel the whole history of my blogworld race through my mind. Blogging has never been easy and I realized it takes more than passion to write to come out with highly creative and readable ones that not only me but many others can enjoy. It is a tiring job too, one that demands constant care and scrutiny and bit of love.

hoW it alL begAN:

"Blog" was as alien to me when I started writing my first post as the word "RSS", "Widgets" are now. It was Ramakanth (my ex college mate) who after reading my article about our trip to NIT Warangal suggested : Why don't you have a blog or something? You write well. Tadaan..the rest they say is history.When I first began I wanted to keep it an secret affair, a online personal diary kind of a thing. But few posts later I realized maybe bit of publicity within my friends circle won't be a bad idea. Also I wanted this to be a place where I can have every damn thing ranging from my job, my family, my reviews, my dvd’s , my books etc and actually it is the last one I mentioned was my real impetus. Then something else struck me, why not have a few more people to lend their voices and add some more flavor. This led me to coalition with Ms.Talkative, Laddoo, SwamiNaidu (henceforth will only be referred as Venkat, for reasons not yet known) and my bro (prat). After a lot of coaxing and making some mild threats they finally penned down some posts. But eh when there is force, there is resistance, when there is resistance there is unwillingness,here there is unwillingness there is boredom and well hellava dust gathered before I began the second round.

But during that initial time I felt like being possessed and more often than not I had series of blogs on one topic and devoted a lot of time too in making edits, coloring, embedding image etc. Always made sure there was humor in it so as to have that re-read value. It is after coming to Bangalore that my writing took a terrible. I was running out of ideas and that was mainly because for the first time I realized I missed some support, some sort of encouragement, some pat on the back or anything. I felt neglected and lost interest which would have continued if not for my guilty conscience.

Ms.Talkative on her part somehow spared sometime during that period and made some comments and also posted one of her own – a rib-tickling hilarious post about her frustration with her team mate who went onto concoct some bizarre story as an excuse for not getting her one small lousy damn rubber (I will try to translate it in the native language sometime following this day). And then Harry Potter happened and I wanted that special moment to be captured in my blog and I feel extremely proud of myself for doing that. The Day Before the H-Day, Was it worth the Wait? – sigh…can’t believe there isn’t going to Harry Potter no more.

Too bad I couldn’t capture many of the M&E Dashboard (my first ever project in Satyam with one of the best team mates I could have asked for). After a long time surprising myself I have come out with another “series” – Elsevier to the Rescue (sequel) (melancholic and nostalgic too…) just before our team’s final break-up and separation.

Apart from that coming to the site in general I had statcounter for a while which well kept the stats of the people who have visited my blog. Then I had to remove it seeing I was the only one who was making it tick. I made some changes to what my blog represented and also removed contributors from the RHS, added ‘My Fellow Bloggers’ and ‘Links’ section. Now am planning to have a map kinda thing that maps the locations of the people who make a visit here and then have more video blogs, photos etc. Will be more regular now, try to pen in general things too and not make it more personal thingy.

I for one don’t am against the hype about numbers- 100 days 100 centers, No.1 Best Seller, No.1 collections throughout Indian history etc..etc.. but this one time I can’t fightback the temptation to shout :

HIP HIP.. HURRAH!!!! HIP HIP.. HURRAH!!! HIP HIP.. HURRAH!!!

P.S: Well I have made a round up of all the posts from no.1 to 100 and have come to realize Ms.Talkative is a very talented gifted writer. I just wish she keeps her promise that she would post again.

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...)