Waves

2008 was awesome! I hit a few jackpots & had some lows. I changed jobs & made some cool friends. But then above all this, over the last 365 days, I had some phenomenal realizations, which are documented below. Of course, they may be very simple for most of you. But then, I learnt them on my own in some unforgettable ways.

1. Learnt to say “No”.
2. Went punctually to most places this year. I kept a count of the places I had to visit. I had been on time on 85% of the occassions (don’t count the Kalari classes yet). Previously, this used to bug me a lot. Not anymore I guess. Have to bring it to 100% in 2009.
3. Learnt that good things and bad things happen equally. That is, we [humans] must not feel too overwhelmed by the good or by the bad. Few guys may now recall the power of “Krishnarpanamasthu”.
4. Realized that the concept of God is a placeholder.
5. Became a bit more intuitive.
6. Enjoyed life every moment. I learnt to look at life’s happenings from a third angle, thereby, getting some really cool insights. This had been very useful when I’m confronted with a few tough problems.
7. Learnt to focus on the item in context. That is, “getting in the zone” has become easier. Have to improve this in 2009.
8. Started diversifying my knowledge beyond computers. Actually I started this in 2007 itself. But 2008 saw deeper indulgence in art related activities such Kalari and Astronomy. On computer related stuff, I felt *very* happy to see the return of “security related activities”. Started learning how to write secure code.
9. Number of lies have drastically come down. Have to push it to zilch in 2009. I can pinpoint the reasons to which they have come down but I won’t reveal them here 😉
10. The world is not fair and will never be fair.

 

On Christmas day, myself and 2 friends of mine decided to see Ghajini. We got tickets at Mayajaal and headed there for the night show.

Movie Review

The movie is good. For those who have seen the tamil version already, you can guess scene by scene of what would happen & you will not be wrong. It is a scene by scene by rip off from the tamil version, except the climax. Everywhere, just replace Aamir Khan with Suriya and its more or less the same tamil film. All the crew I knew of, except Aamir Khan, Asin’s ad agency’s manager (played by Tinu Anand) and Nayanthara’s role (played by Jiah Khan), were the same as in the tamil film. Hence, the movie is not that much of a surprise. The director has thrown in more scenes of violence than in the tamil version.

Asin has acted brilliantly. It was far better than how she did it in the tamil version. Somehow I felt, her acting had more maturity in the Hindi version and it felt far more ‘complete’ than how she performed in the tamil Ghajini. Needless to say, Aamir did a poor job. Except for his 8 pack body, there was no other “wow” acting moment in the scenes of Aamir. Given his acting supremacy, he should have done a better job. Comparisons are inevitable with the tamil Ghajini. Seeing Suriya in the executive’s role gave a complete feel where as Aamir did a poor job there. Suriya’s acting was more natural while that wasn’t the case with the hindi actor. In many places, I observed that Aamir had flaunted needless ‘gethu’ in the executive role, whereas Suriya’s executive role eased him in to place.

Jiah Khan’s role was more creamy in this film. She had lot of prominence in her scenes & I felt she did a good job. Except in a few places where she was emoting badly, she did a good job (even better than Aamir 🙂 ).

Climax …. Yes! there’s a change in climax in the hindi version. There’s no double action of the villian in the hindi version. Instead, Aamir chases the villian and thrashes his head in just the same way the villian did to him and his love earlier in the movie. What Indian movie is that without needless heroism? 🙂 There’s lot of “hero is supreme” moments here. I won’t give out more details to spoil the climax. So go ahead and enjoy the movie. Climax was one of the better scenes in the whole movie.

Mayajaal

I don’t recommend Mayajaal to see Ghajini. We were given the tickets for the movie on Screen 3. As soon as I entered the theatre hall, my first reaction was, “Oh! Shit”. It stank. Literally. Chairs were not comfortable and within minutes, my back was aching. The theatre is very small and the screen is even smaller. In most places, carpets are off their holdings. Between shows, the hall was not even cleaned. Therefore, there were lot of cups and plastic covers strewn around.

May be other screens are good. But 120 bucks for this screen is totally not worth it. May be 40 bucks. But surely not more. Snacks are priced at atrocious rates. I don’t see why multiplexes should charge atrocious rates for snacks. About 5 spoons of bhelpuri cost 35 bucks. A small pack of popcorn cost Rs. 40/-. Its not the question of money here. Its about the value we receive for the amount we pay, which is zilch.

A pack of popcorn … 40 bucks; A movie ticket … 120 bucks; Petrol expenses to drive to Mayajaal … 100 bucks; Theatre stinking for the all money you paid … priceless!

I highly don’t recommend Mayajaal for another movie. Its useless to drive 30 KM from the city, to sit in stinking theatres, to watch remade movies. Nevertheless, the movie was good but please don’t see it in Mayajaal. Totally not worth it!

Hello my dear dudes and dudettes, I have added a new menu bar to the blog header to enable ye’ all to find some of my nice blog posts really easily. If you are on a feed reader, do visit the website and check out the horizontal bar & give me your feedback. 

Here are some more items that are on the roadmap:

1. Blog post toolbar – At the top and bottom of each blog post, you will be able to see a toolbar using which you can easily digg the post, email it, share it, print it (minus all the other graphics) & export it as PDF.
2. Search – Coming soon!
3. An experimental Facebook Connect integration for the comments section. This will come after quite some time.

Menu Bar is such a waste of screen real estate in web browsers. There was no inbuilt preference in opera that would enable me to hide or show menu bar with a single key toggle. Opera allows the users to customize its keyboard shortcuts to a great extent. So, here’s how you go about toggling the menu bar in opera.

1. Go to Tools -> Preferences.
2. Click the “Advanced” tab.
3. Select “Shortcuts” from the left side menu.
4. Select “Opera Standard” under “Keyboard Setup” and click on “Edit” button.
5. From the “Edit Keyboard Window” popup, select “Application” and then on “New” button.
6. Now type “F10” without quotes, press Tab key & then type “Enable menu bar | Disable menu bar” without quotes.
7. Now click “OK” button on both the windows.

Enjoy!

For the first time ever, twitter proved amazingly useful. It proved how useful, as a tool, it is for marketing purposes & connecting with customers. I was writing a simple blogging client to post to various blogs. I have never tried TypePad until now & visited their website to sign up to open an account. To my surprise their sign up required me to link a credit card with my account even for the 14 day trial, which put me off.

So, I logged in to twitter and posted this tweet. Within a few hours, Ms. Ginevra Whalen (I even had a doubt whether it was Mr. Whalen or Ms. Whalen and successfully addressed her as Mr. Whalen at first) responded & said that they would give me a free trial if I wasn’t up to anything nefarious 😀 . I was really so damn impressed and surprised to find that a company took my 140 characters seriously & emailed me.

Today morning, I got an invite code which gave me free trial for 30 days & signed up.

Thank you Twitter. Thank you Six Apart.

Update: Check out the conversations that were generated using this tool 🙂

Have you had a tough time following a conversation on twitter? Only to find that a frustrated you had to wait until the last tweet in the thread was done and then you navigated through the replies backwards. Not anymore 😀

Visit http://www.aswinanand.com/twitter.html and give the last twitter ID in the whole conversation list & watch as the page gets populated with tweets in the order in which they were posted.

This was quickly hacked up in an hour & hence its kinda very rough. Kindly use this and give me feedback.

Enjoy!

Whoa! never expected that this feature would come so soon. Now orkut is deeply integrated with Google Talk and you can chat with your gtalk friends and orkut friends (with google account) from within the orkut interface itself. Considering the fact that lot of my friends are on orkut, this is a very good feature that they have now. Good for India in general because everyone I know is on Orkut rather than Facebook or MySpace.

Here’s a screenshot for you:

Clickfor a larger image.

Hey guys, thanks to Sudar I came to know about Webbynode.

Its a new linux based VPS service that lets you host your django, rails and other LAMP based apps with full root access to your VPS. Moreover, there are ready-to-deploy stacks for RoR, django and LAMP. Do check them out at http://www.webbynode.com.

As of now, what I feel lacking from their website are the number of technical articles. Just see how many Slicehost has and you will know. Guess they will surely follow up with more as they launch.

Today morning I logged in to Gmail and was pleasently surprised to see a yellow information announcing Themes in Gmail. Looks like Google is enabling themes on a step by step basis for everyone. If themes have been enabled in your account, go to this link.

This is how the themes UI looks like. Click on the image for a bigger view. Has it been enabled for you?

 

Update: My friend Sriram, who accompanied us during the trip has written a very good post. Please check it out here.

East Coast Road is an amazing stretch of road from Chennai to Cuddalore. The road is very smooth and long with plenty of instructions along the way on how to drive (with redundant bright boards). So much that you just can’t miss any of them.

So, on Sunday (02-Nov-2008), Nagarajan, Siddharth, Sriram and yours truly decided to drive to Pondy by bike along the ECR. Its about 150 kms from Chennai. If you drive non-stop, you can reach Pondy in two and half hours. I will blog about the Pondy trip in another post ‘cos I’m waiting for the photos to get ready.

This post is about the driving lessons I learnt when we were driving along the ECR for the first time. This post would be useful to you if you are driving along the ECR.

Day Time Driving – Until Mahabalipuram

Though many consider day time driving to be fairly easy, it is not. Until Mahabalipuram, you will encounter lots of villages where dogs’ favourite playground is the middle of the road (or) one crazy dog would have seen a calf or rat on the other side of the road & they would form small packs to hunt them down. I witnessed a medium sized dog being brutally run over by a bus. But then, nothing can be done. If it were a biker who ran over, he would have surely fallen down and broken his bones.

Please follow the instructions along the road. There are many places where there are sign posts with “speed limits”. That’s an amazing guidance. There are also lots of sign posts which announce “accident zones” and more importantly “cattle zones” where livestock is bound to cross the road and tend to become deadstock. So, drive carefully. Until Mahabalipuram, driving through villages is very risky if you overspeed.

Day Time Driving - After Mahabalipuram

After Mahabalipuram, there are back waters of the sea on both sides of the road for most part. Hence, there are not much villages. So there are no cattle/humans/fighting-dogs waiting to be hit by you. Actually in most places, you have to drive at a minimum of 80 kmph 😀 . That’s a boon for racing freaks. But be careful ‘cos the 100km stretch after Mahabalipuram is full of wild twists, turns and bridges. Most medium and heavy vehicles such as cars and busses turn without even honking. So, the safest bet is to travel at 60kmph on the left side of the road. But if you are a bit adventurous like me, you may want to experiment carefully and do turns at 85 kmph 😉 with a Toyota Innova overtaking you at an even greater speed.

There are quite a few places where there are 4-5 km straight stretches without no villages in between. The road is clearly visible. You can go at full speed your bike allows. I touched 100 kmph along such stretches & its pretty much safe.

Oh! You must bring down your helmet’s visor. Otherwise, your eyes can’t stand direct dragon fly hits.

Night Driving

I loved it. Driving during the nights on highways like ECR is a superb experience.

Nothing can be more wrong if you say night driving is dangerous along ECR. Its actually safe. For all its bend and curves, if a vehicle is turning along from the opposite direction, its headlight gives away that something is coming. That will give you enough time to adjust your speed and balance. All along the curves, the sign boards illuminate beautifully when light is showered on them. Even the road’s medians light up very well along the drive way. So you always know where you are driving.

Always dip-dim-dip your headlights when you see a vehicle coming in the opposite direction. When you are overtaking another vehicle from its right side, switch on your left side indicator before completing the overtake.

Night Driving – Good, Fair and Ugly

On the way to Chennai during night travel, you will encounter lot of insects which will hit you. Putting on the helmet visor is a problem because light from the opposite direction will disperse and will make it tough for you to see. So, follow a big vehicle from a safe distance.

Siddharth did just that. For nearly 30 kilometers, he followed a Chennai bound bus at a safe 10m distance. The bus took all of the glare of the vehicles from the opposite direction, all insects don’t reach you and most importantly, you are shielded from dangerous overtakes. Wherever the bus overtakes, you also do the same. Wherever the bus stops, you also stop and the wherever the bus goes fast, you also go fast. It will be safe, fast and secure.

Second best thing is to follow another medium sized vehicle. I did this. Most cars travel at not less than 90 kmph. So, you can actually wear your helmet visor, shielding yourself from insects and you can also drive very fast. Chill wind kissing your body is a superb feeling 🙂

All the villages along the ECR after Mahabalipuram (towards Chennai) sleeps early. So, no cattle/dog torture in nights. This enabled us to cover the 55 km stretch from Mahabalipuram to Chennai in 30 minutes flat 🙂

Hope these instructions will be useful when you drive along the ECR. If so, do let me know. Definitely give importance & follow all of the sign boards along the road. That will ensure a very safe dirve. All in all, it was an awesome driving experience. Pics of Pondy coming in the next blog post.