new year resolutions

again its the time of the year to make resolutions

here goes..
work more, sleep less
learn to cook more dishes
learn a new language
draw/paint more (no, not with a mouse!)
make sculptures
study/read more
exercise regularly
be less flippant with life
sleep at night and live in the day time
break all the resolutions and get a life !

happy new year, guys !

emotional values of a design

A few weeks back I made this design, printed it on a T-shirt, and presented it to our boss, at his farewell party- on behalf of our team.

(me, raghav,sridhar, kishore,pavan, satya, mathew, JV, Aby, Arun, KK)

After giving it I asked him if the size of the Tshirt was right for him. He said it didnt matter as he did'nt have any plans to wear it. I was slightly disappointed by that. He is not going to wear the Tshirt that I made especially for him, after a lot of thought and taking all the efforts.
He continued with a shy smile, " I won't be able to show this to my grand children if I wear it. "

Only then i knew how much he valued it. I was really touched. I dont think will be able to forget the lesson that incident taught me.- For me it was just a design, but for him that was a momento that he will preserve till his lastday - as a treasure-with found memories of the days he spend with us and the company.

Note to self: Always take extreme care when you design something- It might be just another design for you, but the moment it leaves your hands, it will have values and heavy emotions attached to it.

shameless Management Institute

This is bad. Really bad. I wonder how a management institute can do such shameless tactics.

Yea, the same old eye-eye-pee-em thing. (As if you hav'nt guessed it by now, Shameless and management institute in the same breath points you only to one institute ! ). A few days back, if anyone would have done a blog search for "eye-eye-pee-em", they would have got to their site, but along with a 100 blogs bringing out their true story. Now, they have decided to beat us with the same stick.

try doing a search for "link:eye-eye-pee-em.edu/"* now. They have made 100s of stupid blogs in blogger, "eye-eye-pee-em this", "eye-eye-pee-em that", written by "world class faculty", and "gaurav". A'int that funny ?

A simple technique to work their way out of this mess. In a few days, after the spiders crawl over these links, the search engines are going to rank them higher than the blogs we made.

I guess, they started this in the first week of Dec, and the latest was posted 15 hours ago. (when I am blogging this)

But sadly for them, they forgot that blogspot has a nice little feature called "Flag". Blogspot tracks the number of times a blog has been flagged as objectionable and uses this information to determine what action is needed. This feature allows the blogging community as a whole to identify content they deem objectionable.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, I request everyone of you to follow the links and click the Flag button. So when we have enough amount of clicks the Google moves it to "unlisted". Moving to unlisted means that the blog won't be crawled by search engines.


* replace it with the original letters, you know what I am talking about.

Click now, Focus later

How many times have you thought, "I should have focused here than there! " ?



Ren Ng, a graduate student at Stanford University has developed a hand-held plenoptic camera which takes a shot first and allows you to focus later, using a software. The prototype camera is sixteen megapixel, and produces images of 300x300.It has an array of microlenses mounted in front of the sensor. These microlenses create a unique image on the sensor surface which includes not only the amount of light deposited at that location, but how much light arrives along each ray. The image is then reconstructed in software and a focus point can be chosen.

So, dont wait to focus, just go ahead and click. Focusing can be done later. This should be of great help in macro photography, where the DOF is very less. Also in low light conditions where again the DOF is less.

This is just awesome.

see some videos (wmv format) here. more details here. A simple and detailed explanation at wired.

New Movie Blog

I was always fascinated by movies. I watch every movie possible, from the titles to the credits roll up. I have never been late for a movie show. And however boring the movie is- I watch it till the end. I also made a 10 minute movie once- for my company film club. That was a huge flop in the
box office( read general public in my office) :)

I am starting a new blog - movie reviews- primarily english/malayalam/tamil movies and rarely hindi movies-I am kind of allergic towards govinda ishtyle hindi movies.

check out
http://malayalammoviereviews.blogspot.com/

whats in a beard ?

well, i get bored of myself sometimes. I mean bored of my looks. everyday you wake up, wash your face and look in the mirror and see the same face. how boring !

How exciting it would be to wake up to a different face every morning ! you wake up, wash your face and peek into the mirror to see a new face ! with a long beard or blue eyes ! but since that doesnot happen very often, i keep experimenting with my hair, beard, mush and anything that can be modified. So i shave off all the stuff sometimes, grow a beard, trim my hair, grow it long and anything thats possible. The latest thing in my kitty is this french beard. iam getting bored of this too. So i was thinking of innovative ways to change my looks.

In the process i just googled for french beard and the first thing i knew was its not called a french beard outside india, its a goatee or royale.

Wikipedia tell me that, the name french beard in India is from the British, as it was historically worn by French officers.

it also dug up a whole lot of facts about french beard.. the web never ceases to amaze me !

did you know that there is a discussion board that is dedicated to beard ? or there are huge religious issues about just a beard ? or there are so many different styles to choose from ?

heck, they even have a site for goatee, and haikus about it !

I never knew, my humble goatee/royale/frenchbeard has so much in it ! so i decided to keep it for a while, till the next wave of same-old-face thought hits me again.

Does God have a goatee ?

Foss.in Joke of the day

Well, I dropped in at Torvalds Hall for Kishore's talk yesterday. Kishore was explaining about live CDs. By the end of his talk, there was this question from the audience.
Guy: " I 've heard that i can work on Knoppix with just a CD ? "
Kishore : " You will also need a computer, Yaar !"
:)