Friday, January 30, 2009
Chandni Chowk 2 China = Animated Movie 2 Crap!!!
CC2C reminded me as to how unoriginal has bollywood become in terms of the storyline. This movie is the height of "being inspired" by a hollywood storyline while adding our own masala to stretch the film to a 3 hr play time. Are you kidding me??? A bollywood remake from an animated Hollywood movie - the Kung Fu Panda that too the animated movie in this case being far better. What the hell was the story writer thinking. Its true that the writers from bollywood suck at coming up with a truly original story and hence the original screenplay and story category should be removed from our award nominations altogether. Once in a while you get to see some good movies like "A Wednesday" last year, but 90% of what bollywood churns out each year is crap. I wish we had some quality over quantity here. Please save some money, peace of mind, bandwidth, whatever.... and skip this movie for good.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
The Old Monk Effect
Whats with the title you may ask - nothing it just sounds so cool with a lot of awesomeness (sorry the awesomeness was from Kungfu Panda that I watched a few weeks ago). Recently my brother got me a bottle of Old Monk, actually 2, from Atlanta. I live in Utah so I hope you understand the irony there. At the same time it brought back memories of college days where the old monk rum was one of our favorites. Sure now we have moved on to the Bacardis and the Captain Morgans but Old Monk still has a special place. We had it at new years with Thums Up which is its preferred natural mixer. I was surprised in the first place that he could find it here in the US. Below are a few other cocktails that I have tried out with Old Monk:
Old Monk Martini:
This sure tasted better than the vodka martini that I usually make.
Old Monk Mojito
I used a regular mojito mix to make this. All I can say is - DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!
Old Monk Black Margarita
Sure the color of the margarita was far from the conventional, but this was awesome.
Old Monk Fresh Lime Soda
A dash of the rum on the plain fresh lime soda turned out to be a refreshing drink just like its non-alcoholic counterpart.
Old Monk LIIT
This is your regular long island with old monk instead of any other rum. More sweeter than the regular long island.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Happy Makar Sankrant
Makar Sankrant is one of the most auspicious day for Hindus. Hence the Sun is worshipped on this day at sunrise with a chant of the Gayatri Mantra which is directed to the Sun God. On Makar Sankranti day the Sun begins its ascendancy and journey into the Northern Hemisphere, and thus it signifies an event wherein the Gods seem to remind their children that 'Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamaya'. May you go higher & higher - to more & more Light and never to darkness. When I was a kid I used to wonder as to how the date remains the same every year for this hindu festival unlike the others - the reason is that the hindu festivals follow the calendar based on lunar positions but this is a solar event and hence the date remains the same [January 14th]. Due to this ascendancy into the northern hemisphere, the day starts to get longer and hence the winter season is on the decline from then on. This day is celebrated back in India by flying kites and making and eating Til-Gul ladoos. Ok that reminds me I need to get some sesame seeds and jaggery on my way home. Have a happy Makar Sankrant.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
A FUN Photography Assignment.
Here is a fun photo assignment from Wizwow, for all those who want to add a little creativity to their photography skills. I'll post my photographs when I get a chance to complete it.
1. An image of one thing, that says only one thing about it.
2. A person who represents what you wanted to be when you were 6.
3. A kid who loves you... and I gotta see the love.
4. The thing that makes your mom your mom (or dad, or sister)? Shoot it.
5. You know your favorite song? The one you always turn the radio up on? Shoot a photograph to go on the cover of that album. I don't care if I get it... do you?
6. A bridge. From one place to another. One soul to another. One child to another. A bridge.
7. Your most hated food (for me - liver and onions) but make it look so good you are even tempted. You can have people in the shot, but not more than 12.
8. Show me a sports game in a landscape. No athletes, just the game. No sports field, just the game. No balls, no hockey sticks, no buckets of ice. Just the game as a landscape.
9. Happiness.
10. Any musical instrument, with people or not. Here's the deal though, we should feel something when seeing it, not just 'see' it.
11. Cute kitten... nawww... just kidding. Make it a place that seems abandoned, or lonely... if a place can be lonely make me feel it.
12. The one photograph you would want to sum up your photographic career today. You have been invited to show at the most prestigious show in NY and you can show only one picture. Show me that picture.
1. An image of one thing, that says only one thing about it.
2. A person who represents what you wanted to be when you were 6.
3. A kid who loves you... and I gotta see the love.
4. The thing that makes your mom your mom (or dad, or sister)? Shoot it.
5. You know your favorite song? The one you always turn the radio up on? Shoot a photograph to go on the cover of that album. I don't care if I get it... do you?
6. A bridge. From one place to another. One soul to another. One child to another. A bridge.
7. Your most hated food (for me - liver and onions) but make it look so good you are even tempted. You can have people in the shot, but not more than 12.
8. Show me a sports game in a landscape. No athletes, just the game. No sports field, just the game. No balls, no hockey sticks, no buckets of ice. Just the game as a landscape.
9. Happiness.
10. Any musical instrument, with people or not. Here's the deal though, we should feel something when seeing it, not just 'see' it.
11. Cute kitten... nawww... just kidding. Make it a place that seems abandoned, or lonely... if a place can be lonely make me feel it.
12. The one photograph you would want to sum up your photographic career today. You have been invited to show at the most prestigious show in NY and you can show only one picture. Show me that picture.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
CLR Programming
I want to keep this blog as generic as possible and hence the name "Literally No Reservations". Hey, a lot of people will tell you that your blog should focus on a particular topic, but I beleive that should not be the case. So adding to the variety of topics, here is my first technical blog. The topic deals with one of the aspects of my day to day work.
Over the span of my IT experience I have used many different programming languages ranging from Pascal to C# and every step has been a progress towards opening a new door to the possibilities of effective programming. I recently started working with CLR (Common Language Runtime) integration in SQL Server 2005. At first I was skeptical about the design and the purpose of this process, but as complexity increased I could see the benefits. Usually we are only used to programming the database layer using T-SQL and the application layer using .NET. But embedding the .NET code in the SQL Sever does give us a lot of flexibility. e.g. with T-SQL it is cumbersome to do heavy computing and procedural tasks as well as cross server data extraction and manipulation. But working with the extracted data and performing a variety of transformations and computations on the data using a .Net compliant language like C# makes it a lot easier. Recently I have been dealing with a lot of scenarios where I have to deal with cross server databases as the architecture has been widely dispersed, and using CLR to do the work is a great help.
Well there are some restrictions to this process though. e.g. it is not a good idea to use this when the amount of data being worked on is really big. This would really slow down the application. Debugging is also a crucial factor in deciding to use this path, as debugging can be troublesome, like with debugging and re-deploying any other assembly. But overall, for me as a solution developer, the pros out-weigh the cons. I would rather prefer writing a well maintained code than trying to gain a few nano-seconds over the performance of the code.
Below are some of the books that would be a good read on this topic:
Over the span of my IT experience I have used many different programming languages ranging from Pascal to C# and every step has been a progress towards opening a new door to the possibilities of effective programming. I recently started working with CLR (Common Language Runtime) integration in SQL Server 2005. At first I was skeptical about the design and the purpose of this process, but as complexity increased I could see the benefits. Usually we are only used to programming the database layer using T-SQL and the application layer using .NET. But embedding the .NET code in the SQL Sever does give us a lot of flexibility. e.g. with T-SQL it is cumbersome to do heavy computing and procedural tasks as well as cross server data extraction and manipulation. But working with the extracted data and performing a variety of transformations and computations on the data using a .Net compliant language like C# makes it a lot easier. Recently I have been dealing with a lot of scenarios where I have to deal with cross server databases as the architecture has been widely dispersed, and using CLR to do the work is a great help.
Well there are some restrictions to this process though. e.g. it is not a good idea to use this when the amount of data being worked on is really big. This would really slow down the application. Debugging is also a crucial factor in deciding to use this path, as debugging can be troublesome, like with debugging and re-deploying any other assembly. But overall, for me as a solution developer, the pros out-weigh the cons. I would rather prefer writing a well maintained code than trying to gain a few nano-seconds over the performance of the code.
Below are some of the books that would be a good read on this topic:
- CLR via C#, Second Edition. Author : Jeffrey Richter (Wintellect)
- Professional SQL Server 2005 CLR Programming: with Stored Procedures, Functions, Triggers, Aggregates and Types. Author : Derek Comingore, Douglas Hinson
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