Facebook is a (wo)man's best friend

Those were the days when a book (or even a dog) was a man's best friend. Now Its the Facebook. What else can you say about a relation when you share everything intimate/personal with someone (rather something). Facebook being the 'in' thing everyone wants to show off their everyday doing on it.

The comments are even more ridiculous. Any pic of a couple garners a comment of nice couple, best pair etc. Any pic of a baby gets cute kid, nice kid etc. Even puppies get comments like cute etc.
Worst part is when someone thinks their account is not active and posts another picture of the couple or the baby or the puppy, and get comments again.

Worst was when a guy posted a pic of a new born. By new born I mean just born. He takes a pic and uploads it on facebook saying welcome to this world, you are now 5 minutes old. It looked more like people plan not only about the kid but also plan what to post on facebook.
The worst is yet to come when people say 'Hey, my FB has been inactive for long. Let's have a baby and post a pic on facebook'

They say, if there is enough space for a cockroach to insert its whiskers into, then that space is enough for the entire cockroach to get into that space. Actually the cockroach calculates the space it needs that way.

Similarly, for most of the men, if their tummy can get into a space then they can fit into or get through that space.

As a corollary: For most men, their tummies make an entrance and then they do.
As a lesson: Reduce tummy.

speaking of love

Recently a friend confided in me about his married life. I asked him the usual question shot at newly weds. I asked him how was married life treating him. Without a moments delay he said, good. We are completely involved. We make it a point that the other half (often referred to as better half, not to sound rude) is not left out. We share everything. My curiosity got the better of me and I asked him to explain. His explanation is as below, in first person for the sake of 'getting into his shoes'

We share a lot of things. Sometimes we take-up the whole thing. She shares all her expenses and I share all my money. When I asked her about the plans for the weekend, she said, she would like to try the new hotel at Jayanagar. She also asked, should she bring back anything for me at home or do I wish to cook on the weekend aswell. See, she still thinks about me.

Its all about being connected

Since we work at different locations (4 to be specific), we peers communicate using Google talk. If the manager asks someone what is happening at some location, they just ping their colleague working at that location and report back casually. He was not aware that we used to communicate among ourselves before answering his questions. We all appeared real smart by being aware of what the other person is working on. There was another benift due to this. Before any bomb (workload dumping, called delegation) being dropped, we would be aware because the manager has this habit of thinking out loud and our colleague messaging us about the oncoming work. We, ofcourse as good employees, would find a reason to say we were busy by time the call arrives.

Recently he realized we were all chatting among ourselves just before answering him, all thanks to my colleague who was away when I pinged him. Now my manager thinks adding everyone on his messenger list would make him efficient and also avoid dialing the 100digits before making a call (those sick password restrictions). All of us added the boss to our messenger lists. Now before we would realize what hit us, we would be neck deep in work.

Not to appear suspicious, gradually we all signed in as invisible. Now we are back on track at appearing smart (appearing only). We ping each other, but do not reply to the boss as we were not online. These days he thinks we are too busy to come online and also doesn't give us his work to complete. Bottom line of this, in case you are online and have me on your messenger list and feel like talking or even saying a small hi, ping me. I am online, always. If you are the important one, I will reply back.  All this is needed in case I don't wanna be too busy.

Of course I might have marked myself as busy, so that the status message does the talking for the ones you wanna avoid. Because for the ones I want to talk to, I talk to on the phone ;) because its all about being connected.

At home

When I get home this time around I wish ...

I could ride in the peak hour traffic and sit through a jam without cribbing
I could eat at Vidyarthi Bhavan licking my fingers
I could eat an idli and a kilo of chutney at Veena stores
I could run the entire perimeter of Lal bagh and Cubbon park, not together necessarily
I could run atleast from 45th cross to 29th cross in Jayanagar (provided the trees are still around)
I could go for an early morning shoot at BR Hills, starting by mid-night on bike

I could go to Mangalore for a week
I could ask the fisherman I befriended to take me out for an entire day on his boat when he goes fishing
I could sit for an entire sunset, without telling sunsets are over-rated
I could eat an ice-cream at Ideals everyday I am in Mangalore
I could go to an areca field and smell the sweet blossoms of arecanut blooms (supari)
I could sit around listening to my friends, and not pass any sarcastic comments.

I could make myself at home when I get home. But every wish need not be fulfilled.

Know your audience

Have you guys checked the latest blog stats provided by Google to your site? Check it and feel good. 
Its available under dashboard>stats.

Mine below.

Coming back to Republic of Moldova, love you guys. Thanks for visiting my blog, though its true I hadn't heard about you guys before. I know you guys have blazing fast net. This probably means you guys are done with browsing everything under the sun and had nothing better to do. So, you decided to pay me a visit. Thanks again guys. Keep visiting more often and get your country green in the map above so that I get to know where your country is.

The 100th one

Well, people have been asking me whats up off late. How have I been. What am I up to. I don't seem all that active these days, both online and offline.
Well, people, nothings up. I have been good. I am always online and invisible ,stalking some one unsuspecting.

Coming to online, I was doing some research for some purpose and found some interesting results. These were studies done for the launch of a product. I was checking market behavior to a product. This product is being launched as the next big thing for people connecting to the WWW.

So they are promising tremendous increase in speeds. I agree, as I have used the product and a minimum speed of 24Mb/s was observed. This is would increase the average speed of the nation, provided everyone goes for it. Believe it or not, US is NOT the number 1 when it comes to internet speeds.Have you heard of republic of Moldova? They come in 3rd and I had not heard of this country before


I always go to the extent of looking up stuff to see where we are back home. We fair better in terms of speeds delivered to customer per unit of money paid. Before that, several things that came to my mind were:
1. We are not people who go online all the time. I prove this with a screen shot of my usage data in the past 3 months in the US. In India I never crossed 2 GB.
2. People have other means of entertainment.
3. People are still peoples' people. (I don't know if you can understand).
4. One thing I like changed would be we need to charge for speeds delivered instead of data usage. i.e. ask a person to pay a fixed price for a speed of 2Mb/s instead of speeds up-to 2 Mb/s and 2 GB limit per month.

Speeds around the world

Where we stand
Watch out for our neighbors above and below us

My internet usage history for the last 3 months

Few screen shots with the numbers. All the images courtesy of speedtest.

PS: in case you are wondering about the title, yes this is my 100th blog post :)
100 good for nothing posts floating in the internet, wasting up the space in those 450,000 Google servers.
Well, about the title, you know.

What do I do with this much data? How do I manage? I have a paid subscription to  one of those all you can watch movie websites and I also watch shows online from my internet service providers streaming sites. :)

A nail biting climax.

I always wondered why this term came up. What was the origin of this term. Not to be thrown out by the word 'climax' lets concentrate on nail biting. The camera zooms out from the current webpage to our protagonist who is about to enter an IMAX cinema to watch a movie. Of course, inception. The first person narrative is just for the feel, not necessarily self experience. It is just a coincidence that I am the protagonist, I went to watch inception in IMAX.

After 3 people suggested me to watch the movie, I decided to give it a try. I bought the tickets and entered the movie hall. While entering I bought a small drink. The definition of small changes. It is the smallest of the glasses available. It can hold 1 liter of the drink. I bought this and entered the hall.

Midway through the movie the drink was done and my stomach was full. Story was also building up well on screen. 10 mins later, my stomach was still full along with my bladder. No I really had to go. I tried all sorts of stuff (censored), of no use.

These guys don't have breaks (intermission as known back home)

By the end of the movie I could not control and had to go. But the movie was interesting as well and I could not risk to blink. So I just waited for the movie to be over. By the end of the movie I realized that I was biting my nails due to the pressure (not in the movie). Finally the long long movie was over. The long long wait was over, is what I thought. But there was a long long queue in the hall for the loo. I was again biting on my nails, now that I did not have the luxury of sitting, and gravity acts in weird ways.

Finally I get to the loo, pee and get out. This was the nail biting finish

Rambling: All in one

I have seen it since I was kid. All the games kids play are decided by whats being watched on TV currently. For example whole of last month kids used to play football on the streets. I was no different to this. Only difference being we had to make do with whatever was available to us.

As cricket is the one that'll be watched atleast once a week at home, we all became natural cricketers. We used to feel that we were the best in our field of 'specialization'. There was this guy who used to 'bowl' well (atleast everyone in our group found it difficult to play him). He used to feel Sachin cannot stand more than 3 of his deliveries. Now even I agree. The ball never made it till the end the batsmen stood. We had shortened the field for him.

Coming back to the topic, We used to have this tennis ball with wich we played everything. It was cricket all year round. This was broken only when our folks used to watch tennis. We played tennis with the same ball and some cardboard we could find. This time around some cup came up for hokey, and ofcourse we played hockey with the same tennis ball and ofcourse cricket bats, some plastic as well.

Then came FWC. We played football with the same tennis ball, mostly because none of our parents agreed to buy us a football. Finally after a couple of bruised feet and torn shoes, we got our new ball. This was to be the new all in one for sometime to come. We used to run around kicking the ball. our only aim was to kick the ball. We never bothered which side. Half our play time was spent searching the ball which went into the bushes and the woods. The other half was spent arguing whos team someone belonged after a goal was made. Everybody obidiently said they were in the opposite team after they had made a saelf goal. Once even our goal keeper said, he was in the other team.

Then came the volleyball. We used the same new all in one ball. We considered ourselves lucky compared to those poor girls shown on TV who could not afford shorts and Tees and played in bikinis. Also they did not have a ground and played in a beach. But we had nice Tees and a ground. The Tees used to be nice until we started playing.

Then came basketball, which none of of us understood. Still we played aiming at the dogs face in the first floor because he used to bark incessantly when we played football. Well, basketball stopped after the ball got stuck in the first-floor next to the dog, and the owner let the dog loose on us.

It was time for cricket again and no body remembered where the old all in one was. Finally we had managed to convince the dog/owner to throw the ball back promising not to trouble the doggie and his pet again. So we played cricket with the new all in one ball until one of us broke a hand and convinced ur folks to buy us a new tennis ball.

Go dunk your head in a truck load of $#!7

What is it that keeps you ticking? What do you live for? what takes over you? What controls your mind? What gets you upset even though you had one of the amazing days?

For me atleast, I had an awesome day. A good 5km walk in the morning and an even better 5km run in the evening. In between all this I had squeezed a days work, some interesting discussions at work, a good lunch etc etc. When I was feeling good about all this, there comes a ping at night. A simple Hi from a person I dislike a big deal. Even though the conversation was one sided, why do I sit here and sulk about nothing.

I am still not able to figure out what got me upset?

A day when world's productivity dipped to a new low due to Google's PAC man doodle. They decide to keep it going for 2 days. As if this wasn't enough, they let you Embed it into your site

What is love

a real analysis about what the brain does when two people are in love, an interesting talk on TED.
Watch the podcast. Else online here:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love.html

TOW I almost got slapped

That pretty young thing (PYT) which meets me everyday in the bus-stop smiled at me today. We got talking, one thing led to another and ... baaam... there comes my bus. We sit next to each other and continue the topic we were talking on.

PYT: DO you like silica?

Me: Errr... (all confused) well.. yes.

me thinking: May me she is too forward. These phoreeners can talk about anything. All this is very new to me. May be its no big deal to talk about silica the first time you meet some-one. May be....(censor board intervenes)

PYT: You know, actually they are good. Built for performance. Thats why they are being sold like hot cakes.

me: Hot, I agree. But cake? I dont mind calling it cake.

PYT: they are quite small actually. Not as big as they appear to be.

Me: Small? I thought you get them in any size. I have seen pretty huge ones before.

PYT: (confused) what do you mean sizes?... Oh I got it, they actually come in only 2  sizes.  coupes and sedans.

ME: Errr.... (is she crazy, first she calls them cake, now cars, what all does she compare "those" to? )

PYT: You know, I have silica. The smaller one.

Me: (about to faint, don't know what to say. Be good to others, said HE) Oh thats nice.

PYT: (confused). Since I don't find parking by the time I reach office, I prefer the bus.

This is when it clicked me, we were continuing the talk we had started about before boarding the bus. Cars.

BTW She was talking about this.

I was talking about... you know what.

ME: My stop. I need to get down.
PYT: but you get down 2 stops later everyday.
ME: mumbling something under my breath

Note 1 to self: Concentrate on the topic. Don't get diverted however hot they might be.

Note 2 to self: from tomorrow, take the earlier bus. She might have figured out what you were talking about.

minute details

When is it that you start looking at minute details. When is it that you find those small things to be corrected, which in normal circumstances you would have over looked. When is it that you go in search of perfection, if you call correcting the minute things as perfection.

I was watching one of my favorite movies 'Hera Pheri'. I have watched it a hundred times earlier. But have never found Tabu's dance for the 'Po po pon' song this funny. I know she is an actor of good caliber. I also agree that she does good (in) movies. But for the first time today I observed her expressions in the song/dance sequence. She is just too good.

Back to the topic. Was it because I have seen the movie a lot of times that I started observing her expressions in detail. How was it that I missed it earlier. I then started thinking in th lines of when does one observe minute details.

My take:
1. You are done with all the big stuff.
2, You have nothing new to see and a person needs something new every time in life.
3. Or he/she must be drunk


your thoughts please

The Bombay of US, the New York of India

I didn't see much difference in New York. The first thing that came to my mind was words of a dear friend who said, New york is similar to Bombay. Now that I have seen it, I cannot disagree with those words, hence the title.

A city of dreams, a city of opportunities, a city where a person has no names,  a city that never sleeps. My first impressions of the city were that of awe. I was dumbstuck looking at those buildings. They extend to as high the eye can see. This is when I realised to click a building you should not visit the place. You should actually go miles away from it and then click. Else you end up with just a couple of floors.

The traffic is just filled with taxi es and irate cab drivers. These cabbies honk their hearts out.
Food is too good. You find food from every corner of the world. I got a chance to taste mexican, indian, italian and american foods in the short duration I was here. Mexican the best. There are busses that take you on a day tour and night tour of the city. They have painted the buses in some countries' themes. I could spot a couple of 'Incredible India' buses as well. 

Public transport also consists of a network of underground trains called the subway. I got a chance to try out the subway, and it is very much similar to Delhi metro. If you have travelled in DMRC, you have travelled in the subway. But the life in the subway is completely colorful. you find a rich diversity. Surprising par being on Saturday nights you find the trains running full of Indians, especially the PATH route to New Jersey.

This was just about the impressions. A travelogue coming soon. Pics already posted.

At home

For a week now I have been taking the public transport to work, bus to be specific. Its more like our busses back home.  All the people who travel in the 0821 route 'A' are regulars. There was some uncertainity in the bus the first day. But now I am a regular too. Now the driver knows me by my first name. He wishes wishes me every morning, and I do too. There is this guy who comes with his seeing dog. He gets to know when I get in the bus and smiles at me. The dog wags its tail near the door. There is this sweet lady who keeps me a seat. Sadly she gets down at the next stop ;)

The people here try to make me feel comfortable. There is a couple who wish me 'na-mas-tey'. The icing on the cake was when this African American wished me 'namaskara'. He said 'Have a nice day' in Tamil.

I feel at home in the bus. This gives me a nice start for the day.

Kid for sale

Need I say more?? See for yourself.

a talk with a foreigner

Very recently (2 days ago) I got a chance to speak to a foreigner. By foreigner I mean a Lebanese. What interested me was his sense of humor. He is a citizen of here for 26 years now. Here is a jist.

Lets call him J. I asked him, do you stay locally. For this he said, yes. The conversation started because he asked me where do I saty. On knowing the place he told me he too stayed closely and why he selected this place.

 This is where he started speaking. He said his was a big family which migrated to US regularly from 1921 to 1988, he being the last.  In the olden days, Lebanon did not have any electricity. His forefathers survived with candle light. Since they had no other source of entertainment, they said why waste the candle. Lets put it off and make babies. This continued for generations till his father. His father bought a new house and settled away from the family. But the house did not workout well for him. He realised that a railway track passes his house, just behind actually. And a train passed on the track everyday at 4 in the morning. What could he do early in the morning, awake. So the couple decided, lets make.... err.... babies.

Ok, the point of this conversation was, he said, dont buy a house near a railway track. You end up spending more on kids.

What more can I say

Break neck speeds. Find anything interesting in the stats around the pic?

BTW do you want me to download anything and get it.
Let me know if you are interested in how this was achieved. I mean this is not shopped

Pasta tonight

Well! Finally it was sunny. The eternal sunshine forced me to try something new. So I though of Pasta. How bout pasta for dinner. There are 2 recipes. Lets call it, my way and the right way.

My way first:
Get pasta from some sooooper store. Boil hot water with salt. Put the hard pasta in this and allow to boil again.
Put aside the boiled pasta. Take some(not some actually) butter in a pan and boil (I mean melt it) Add water and maida and boil again, add milk (Yes!! thats right. A little bit of milk) This would taste like pasta sauce.  Add the pre-boiled pasta, add jalepenos, pepper and salt to taste. And enjoy your pasta.

The right way:
Get pasta sauce from the sooooper store and heat, add the pre boiled pasta, add wine and put fire in the frying pan, Go ahead enjoy your pasta.

Sadly I have an electric cooker and cant add wine and burn it. Without burning the pasta would taste like liquor.

Come home for dinner

come home for dinner doesn't mean you shamelessly come home and wait for dinner. There are many interpretations depending on who invited. The most important being:
1. It was just courtesy, I had to call you as it was dinner time and did not have any mood to have dinner with you outside.
2. Or the Scottish invitation like, come home for dinner. Bring your own dinner and have it with us.

welcome to the new world. It sucks, but you're gonna love

The Godfather

All work places follow some craziness in naming their workareas. For example, we have a building where conf rooms are named by the rivers of India, another by planets, another building has conf rooms by flowers, and another by those old lazy fellows who we call philosophers.
I am currently at a workplace where they follow the norm of naming each room facing a direction, by a different norm. Err... I know that's a confusing statement. To make it clear, all the rooms facing north are named after  movies.
I was so happy when I was assigned a room all to myself, and it was named Godfather :)
Next to my room is the Company vice presidents room and that room has his name on it. But my room has godfather written on it. So cool. When somebody passes by they check the name of the person sitting inside put up on the wall, and they sure do check me out.

Why do people become socially (web-social) active when they travel to an onsite location? is it because they wanna show-off. Or is it because of lack of anything else to do. I guess its easy access to net and nothing much to do.

Differences I saw here are a lot. People seen to acknowledge your pesnce. You know the person or not, you stiil smile and talk. I was spoken to by a lot of people in the lobby.
Movies show blacks in bad light. A nigerian went out of the way to help me reach my place in the US.
Cars are a necessity here, not a luxury.
People follow rules, in all walks of life. Be it driving, crossing the road or anything.
People here are open. They admit they were wrong if they were so, and also expect you to.

many more to come

Do you really know yourself

All your life you have been aloof. or Atleast giving an impression that you are aloof, alone, detached and loved being that way. You feel you are strong and can manage anything,  all alone.

Then strikes the lightning, the realization  You are attached to people. You were just acting/showing off (to whom) that way because maybe you wanted people to to notice you. people tend to notice weirdos  You were that weirdo.

Inspite of that acting, four close friends drive up to see you off, even when whom you expected to did not turn up. There might be chances that the people you expected to turn up know that you will be alright, you can manage etc. Ther are chances that the people who showed up wanted to confirm the wierdo is gone, gone for good. What ever the case, my eyes welled up when I was entering. I got the feeling of getting detached :(

Oh!! beautiful stranger, an ode to thee

Oh stranger, I wait for thee
unknowing whats in store for me,
The train is about to reach
Finally it comes to a halt with a screech.

There you are out and you too get down
Full of hopes in a new town,
Little did you know that you took my breath away
And in my heart you were forever to stay.

As in every formality you wish me, hi
Not knowing that I would never let you say goodbye,
I too wish you very slyly, saying a 'hi'
Wishing in my mind, never would I have to say a goodbye.

Finally, one thing led to another
making us stay together forever,
here I am, thinking you would agree
when I ask you, will you marry me?

A wish

Happy new year 2010.






May all your wishes come true. Be careful what you wish for, you might end up fulfilling the wish