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Yet Another Self-Important Blog.
Rohit Singh
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[Wed, 06 Oct 2004]
What Happens If...
..you have no middle name (e.g. me)? Usually it's not a problem, right? Wrong! A friend's email address is "first.x.last@oracle.com" . Proabably, in his initial HR forms he just crossed off the Middle Initial box and some genius in HR thought this guy had "X" as his middle name, kinda like Malcolm X. After all, all Indians are supposed to have a middle name, aren't they ?
You are in even more deep shit if you have only one name. This is the predicament of another of my friends. Whenever he's on the phone and they ask for his last name, he has to say "no last name". It takes about 15 min of convincing the call center guy that it *is* possible for somebody not to have a last name. At other times he has said "none" and gotten letters addressed to "Joe None".
[Sun, 03 Oct 2004]
Talking of Chutzpah...
..Here's another guy with that quality in big heaping quantities:
One of the few things good about being the youngest sibling in a family has to do with financial support during college:
- Your older siblings have college-trained your parents. Mom doesn't groan too much when she asks on the phone if you need some cash and you say "hmm, yeah..a bit."
- Your parent(s) have gotten a promotion or two since your older siblings went to college. The resulting prosperity has a trickle-down effect on college allowances.
- Your older siblings(s), if they are working, can probably be conned into giving you more cash. Said cash is usually a whole lot more than you could even imagine asking your mom for.
- Your friends, many of whom are older siblings in their family, are stuck with paying off *their* younger siblings. Net result: even more relative prosperity for you.
Yes, being the youngest child has some benefits, partly alleviating the numerous problems.
I Swear, Mom!
Little kids have great chutzpah. Atleast my nephew does. Here's a sample: "main bade mama ki shaadi miss kar diya to kya hua mummy, aapki shaadi mein to thaa". [so what if I missed your elder brother's wedding, mom! I was there for *your* wedding]. And he insisted that there was a photo of his wearing that cool blue dress and standing between his parents on their wedding day. Given enough leeway, I am sure he'll even dig up the appropriate photo.
I love his dramas (except when he's acting them out on me!).
[Fri, 01 Oct 2004]
Only in Japan...
The rich MBA will probably kill me for posting this, but I couldn't resist. I wonder why such techno-fads show up first/only in Japan. Remember Tamagotchi?
Gadget fascination is prevalent in many sub-cultures but with the Japs the whole thing has become just too outlandish.
[Fri, 24 Sep 2004]
Hot Pics of Sonia Gandhi
It takes all types. I was looking through Sitemeter records-- most of the people who show up at this blog seem to be people who googled for something quite unrelated. "Boston scooters" and "toi mumbai edition" are among the more common search terms. But this one took the cake: some fellow had searched on Google for "hot pics of sonia gandhi". Ewww...
The more interesting aspect of this is that Google thought my blog was a "hit", ableit only the 23rd or so out of 44 matching hits. Apparently, notwithstanding the minor point that I mentioned "hot" and "sonia gandhi" and "pics" in totally unrelated posts, Google thinks I am among the top 25 people in the world with a strong apolitical interest in the Congress president.
Ah well, why be relegated to the 3rd page of search results! Hence this post. Now this blog is bound to land up on the first page the next time somebody searches for comely portrayals of Mrs. Gandhi. Just to be sure, I'll repeat the magic words once more: "hot pics of Sonia Gandhi."
[Thu, 02 Sep 2004]
Kitne aadmi thei, kaliya...
Growing up I used to think that people who used to listen to movie dialog tapes were big time losers. I still think so. Well, almost. The thing is, on musicindiaonline.com, I clicked the play all songs from Sholay without realizing that the "songs list" also included all the Sholay dialogs. This is great!! Now while coding, I get to listen to
"hum angrezon ke zamaane ke jailor hain..." or
"arre soorma bhopali..." or
"tumhara naam kya hai basanti..." or the best set of dialogs ever...
"kya kahein mausi.."
Yeah, I know that you got the picture (pun unintended!).
[Thu, 29 Jul 2004]
Aarrgh...
It's bad enough when you have to bear verbal/oral puns, but a comic-based pun?!!! Moreover, on a particularly stupid turn-of-phrase...
[Tue, 27 Jul 2004]
Globalized Gods
From Rediff Diaries:
My wife and I enjoy window-shopping. We explore every new market and mall that comes to our attention.
We were more than happy when I took up a job in Bangalore; it gave us the opportunity to explore the malls in a new city.
At one particular mall, we liked the showpieces and decorative items that were on sale -- they were inexpensive and very good. When we came to the section where beautiful idols of Indian gods were displayed, my wife fell in love with an idol of Lord Shiva. I liked it too. We put it in the shopping bag.
Later, when I was examining the idol again, I happened to turn it upside-down and burst out laughing. It was made in China!
Sumit Bhatia, Bangalore
[Thu, 22 Jul 2004]
Poor Accelrys...
Sitemeter tells me somebody visited my homepage after doing a Google search for "accelrys sucks". Well, I haven't said Accelrys sucks-- I rather liked my time at Accelrys. I had said Times Of India sucks and had mentioned Accelrys elsewhere. Google thought I said Accelrys sucks--- my blog shows up on the 3rd page of search results. Apparently, somebody isn't enjoying their Accelrys job too much.
[Sun, 18 Jul 2004]
Naked, Life Dunk, Toyopet, Bongo et al.
Forbes has a really funny article on good, bad, and just-plain-weird automobile names. Interesting tidbits there. For example, all Lamborghini cars are named after bulls (the "Diablo" is such a cool name!). Japanese cars that are limited to a Japan-only marked often have very weird names (the Daihatsu "Naked" and the Toyota "Toyopet"). And there is a whole set of weird high-sounding names for really mediocre American cars (the Buick LeSabre, for instance).
The article also talks about the mechanics of car naming and how hard it has become to find something that's cool and has not been taken. It also talks about how (and why) luxury car makers avoid giving names to their cars and just use alphanumeric strings.
They don't have Indian cars on the list but here's my list.
Good: Premier Padmini (nice name for a really pretty car), the Indica/Indigo offering from Tata (good word-play on the whole made-in-India theme)
Bad: Cielo (and the whole madness of car names ending in "o": Santro, Alto, Scorpio, Bolero, Baleno)
Just-Plain-Weird: the Wagon-R
Retro-cool: Ambassador and its lovely nickname, Amby.
[Sun, 11 Jul 2004]
Atleast somebody's getting something good out of the floods in Assam. This guy's fishing on the water-logged NH-21. So, an interesting question is, how did the fish end up in this road-pool in the first place. This pic's taken from Indian Express' website.
[Fri, 07 May 2004]
Some dating options
Saw this on some blog's banner ad. At least in this respect, India is so much better than America. In India, you can have mom running for seat on a BJP ticket and son running on a Congress ticket(the Scindias). In U.S., it seems Republicans only want to date other republicans :-)).
[Fri, 23 Apr 2004]
Looking for verrrrrrrrry smart kids
Siddharth Basu wants to find India's smartest kid (age: 10-13). Thankfully, can't think of any immediate family-member who'd qualify for that age-bracket. This guy thinks its all a ploy to make him feel bad about himself. Methinks he doth protest too much- he's way older than 13. Instead, he should be commiserating with the poor kids. Talk about pressure on those little guys...
Reminds me of a conversation I overheard at Stanford once. Remember, this a university setting and people here are supposed to be comfortable with unnaturally smart individuals.
Voice 1: You heard ? There's a new world record for the youngest doctor in the world. Some [Indian-American] kid in NY is 14 or something and already a doc.
Voice 2: Geez! I couldn't even do arithmetic well when I was 14
Voice 1: Yeah, but do you *want* to be treated by a 14-year old ?
Voice 2: Well....
Child prodigies annoy me- they make me feel stupid. And, anyway, exactly how many patients will a 14-year-old doctor get?
[Thu, 15 Apr 2004]
Durbar Mahila Samannoy Samiti
Given a billion people, there is a very high likelihood that, at any given time, a large number of people will doing something that is just outrageously hilarious, even though they are dead serious about it.
Seriously, a union of prostitutes- only West Bengal can have that!
[Sat, 10 Apr 2004]
When you are angry, beat your chest...
Some people have too much time on their hands. Look at this study.
[Mon, 16 Feb 2004]
Poor Kid
I hope nobody minds when this kid goes for a second marriage, when he grows up.
[Fri, 13 Feb 2004]
Ahh, to have Calvin's insight about life and stuff
[Wed, 04 Feb 2004]
:-))
Think about it- this is so much more flexible/extensible than John Doe Jr/Sr.
Fettucini and Rotini not listed
Pasta varieties- the Boston Globe had a full page article about the
various kinds. Only the more esoteric kinds were listed. Here's another
page with the literal meanings of a larger selection. The weirdest, but quite tasty!, pasta dish I've had is pasta and curry chicken. Friends
who spent a summer or two in Switzerland invented the concept- they
couldn't find rice there and swapped pasta for rice in the meals.
[Mon, 15 Dec 2003]
Heh
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a flock of pigeons flying with a load of compact flash cards :-))
[Fri, 12 Dec 2003]
Quake Deathmatch, Level 1: "Don't hurt me please"
If you have an army, albeit with an acronym like GSDF, you are supposed
to be paying those people to fight. And fighting involves getting hurt
(unless you are playing Quake at the newbie level). The Japs want to go to
Iraq but they'd rather not have their troops put in danger. So the problem has
been to find a safe zone in Iraq for them. :-)) Too many nasty jokes come
to mind, both about people who want to give the impression that they are sending
troops and people who want to give the impression that their allies are sending
troops...
[Wed, 10 Dec 2003]
Frodo On Management
Guardian has a really funny tongue-in-cheek commentary about the
characters of Tolkien's (and, also, Jackson's) LOTR. Some choice comments:
"destiny will have great things in store for him, although no razor blades
[about Eomer]". Can't wait for the movie.
[Tue, 09 Dec 2003]
Calvin...
The first one is cool because Dad gets back at Calvin with a good one, for a change.
This one is cool because....well, just 'cos...
[Tue, 11 Nov 2003]
Newtons Second Law: Conservation of Elks (offer valid only in Canada)
Seen on Slashdot, here's the gist of comments:
1: [obscenely high pay for] Athletes is about supply and demand. There are very few people who can supply an accurate, repeatable 50 yard pass(or whatever) while 3 or 4 300-pound guys moving as fast as an elk bear down on them.
2: As fast as an elk? Is that some kind of Canadian measure of velocity? Can you get a speeding ticket for going 2 elks in a school zone? What is the speed of light in elks?
3: It's a Canadian unit of velocity AND mass. (So now that I think about it it's a unit of momentum). It's defined as the momentum of your average elk running at the average maximum [!!!] elk speed. A football player with all his gear does about 0.2 elk
4: Re: What is the speed of light in elks? Zero. Elks are opaque.
[Fri, 07 Nov 2003]
Tickle Machine
I can't make up my mind if this belongs in Hotshots-2 or Austin Powers- The Spy Who Shagged Me. Probably Hotshots.
[Sun, 26 Oct 2003]
Singing away to freedom
There are crazies everywhere.
[Fri, 24 Oct 2003]
Jabberwocky...
Once upon a time there were big computers which took punch cards. These
amazing machines could do calculations amazingly fast. People wrote
programs to do cool stuff with these things- like proving simple theorems. Soon
enough, there were predictions about how computers could do all the hard
tasks. They would play chess. They would be put in really smart robots.
They would also be used to translate documents in Russian into English so
America could keep tab on what the Russians were upto. Of course, it was
just a minor annoyance that the existing programs were still a bit rough
around the edges- a Russian sentence which said "The wine is good but the
food is bad" was translated to "The spirit is willing but the flesh is
weak". What went wrong was that while comps are pretty good at doing
complex math stuff and logical stuff they are not yet good enough at stuff that is
intuitive to us- our common sense, our visual abilities, our ability to
generalize from examples to theories etc. Of course, AI paid for the
bragging. Funding died down in the 80s and early 90s and is only now
coming back when people have scaled down goals and are trying just solve well-defined subproblems well. Microsoft Office's clippy is a somewhat topical,
if not glowing, example of the current piecemeal approach. One of our
profs at Stanford mentioned that the guy at Microsoft Research who did
work on the Bayesian Networks ideas underlying the clippy is horrified at
his version of the Frankenstein Monster.
The Loebner prize has an interesting history. Early on, somebody (I forget the name) created a program that would chat back to you. He invited his secretary to try it. 5 minutes later the secretary, slightly uncomfortable, looked at him. Could he please leave the room- she wanted some privacy! Ah well, the program was actually quite cute- it'd throw parts of your sentence back at you, along with some suitably vague conversation keep-alive-ers. ("H: I am sad? C: Why are you sad?") But it was really stupid otherwise. In the 80s/90s a guy called Hugh Loebner set up a Loebner prize: invent a chat-bot that would fool humans. The prize was worth $100K. Of course, until that ambitious goal is achieved, a prize of $2K will go to the best chat-bot at the annual competition. The AI community, predictably, was enraged at this trivialization of their research: not only is the goal of the Loebner Prize totally unachievable (atleast for now), the work involved in it is not "useful" research- it is just a bunch of hacks. Marvin Minsky, one of the greats of Old AI, set up a prize of $100 for the first person to get Hugh Loebner to revoke the prize. In a classic move, Hugh Loebner advertised this as Minsky co-sponsoring the Loebner prize: the final winner will also "get" Loebner to stop the competition and win $100,100 (the $100 coming from MM) . Academic fights are so much fun.
Anyway, here's the winner of this year's Loebner prize: Jabberwock. See if you can fool it. (Hint: try using some garbled words). On a related note, but one thats a lot more pleasant to real CS researchers, see if you make out real photos from computer-generated images in this set.
[Sat, 11 Oct 2003]
Murder at Nob Hill and Honolulu
Pity, this would have been a good time to be at Stanford- with such juicy rumours of the Univ's first president having poisoned the Univ's founder about 100 years ago [via AS].
Believe
Red Sox 1 - Evil Empire 1. I totally didn't get baseball in the 3 years of
my stay in the U.S. Then I came to Boston and, during orientation, they
got us cheap tix to a Red Sox game. I had the good fortune of sitting next
to a couple of very enthusiastic Red Sox proselytizers. Not only did they
explain the game to me, their fervor also rubbed off. I must be lucky for
the Red Sox- the very year I show up in Boston, they are up in the league
championships hoping to beat the hated Yankees (one reason Red Sox rarely
makes it to the play-offs is that we share the division with Yankees and
they usually win the divsion- they're too rich). Here's hoping...
[Thu, 09 Oct 2003]
Arnie Kennedy
Its ironic that the one of the most inexperienced "politicians" of our
times is
related,
in a roundabout way, with America's *the* political dynasty, the
Kennedys. His wife, Maria Shriver, is related to the Kennedys. On a
related note, the comedians' club of California campaigned for Arnie, choosing him over
Gary Coleman and Mary Carey :-) . Also, here's a nice infographic about which areas voted how. Predictably, Bay Area, in general, and
Berkeley, in particular, went against Arnie. SoCal went for him. San Diego was
weird that way- a mix of surfer-dude culture and conservative politics.
Finally, when will all the Terminator puns stop!! My current pick: "Hasta la vista, Davis"
[Wed, 08 Oct 2003]
Because its there....
Geek meets adrenaline-junkie. The new cousin of geo-caching. BTW, its
interesting that Yemen has so many confluence points, its a relatively
small country. So I checked the map: the country is almost a rectangle
with an east-west orientation- good for latitude/longitude crossings.
[Fri, 03 Oct 2003]
Off-Roading Without a Key
A NYT
article
about a drive through the Adirondacks. Looks interesting and all that, but this was the best part:
"a road trip through the Adirondacks is a compromised notion if it stays on the road. It's an off-road place by definition, and no matter what the advertisers (or snowmobilers) tell you, if you have to start it with a key, you are not off-road."
Theater of the Absurd
NYT Magazine has a really great
article
about all the nautanki in
California. Among the juicy tidbits: Gray Davis' neighbors don't like him
one bit, a guy called S. Issa (nobody knows who he is)
filed to run as Governor just so people would
confuse him with Darrell Issa (the Republican who financed the recall
drive) and a meeting of the less well-known candidates took place to form
a common platform (remember that these guys are running *against* each
other...)
[Wed, 01 Oct 2003]
[Wed, 24 Sep 2003]
Heh!
Maybe desi crooks can learn
something
from British crooks.
[Sun, 21 Sep 2003]
Mini or Rolls ?
Pick the mini, seriously! The new Rolls Royce
looks hideous.
Plus, the Mini's a tad cheaper.
She's not fat, she's a ballerina
The Bolshoi ballet
is
firing one of their more prominent stars. Ostensibly, one of the
reasons is that she's too umm...big for others to lift her.
[Tue, 16 Sep 2003]
Worst jobs in science
Popular Science has a
list
[via Slashdot]. They even have "postdoc" in it somewhere :-))
Earthquakes or Isabel: pick your coast...
So whats
the difference between an earthquake and a hurricane ? Buildings fall
on trees in one and trees fall on buildings in the other. Go read the whole Slashdot
thread, its classic Slashdot humor. After all, "Hurricane Sauron"
does sound terrifying ;-) I wonder if the Nazguls had individual names-
maybe we can start naming the bachcha hurricanes after them.