Happy Gudi Padwa!!!

Wish you all a very Happy Gudi Padwa!!! A prosperous and a fun filled rest of the year.

The Indian Cow: Hope you don't forget your english after reading this!

This is a true essay written by a Bihari candidate at the UPSC(IAS)Examinations.
The candidate has written an essay on the Indian cow:

Indian Cow

HE IS THE COW. "The cow is a successful animal. Also he is 4 footed, And because he is female, he give milks, [ but will do so when he is got child.] He is same like-God, sacred to Hindus and useful to man. But he has got four legs together. Two are forward and two are afterwards. His whole body can be utilised for use.More so the milk. Milk comes from 4 taps attached to his basement. [ horses dont have any such attachment

What can it do? Various ghee, butter, cream, curd, why and the condensed milk and so forth.Also he is useful to cobbler, watermans and mankind generally. His motion is slow only because he is of lazy species., Also his other motion.. gober] is much useful to trees, plants as well as for making flat cakes[like Pizza ] , in hand , and drying in the sun. Cow is the only animal that extricates his feeding after eating. Then afterwards she chew with his teeth whom are situated in the inside of the mouth.

He is incessantly in the meadows in the grass. His only attacking and defending organ is the horns, specially so when he is got child. This is done by knowing his head whereby he causes the weapons to be paralleled to the ground of the earth and instantly proceed with great velocity forwards.He has got tails also, situated in the backyard, but not like similar animals. It has hairs on the other end of the other side. This is done to frighten away the flies which alight on his cohesive body hereupon he gives hit with it.The palms of his feet are soft unto the touch So the grasses head is not crushed. At night time have poses by
looking down on the ground and he shouts . His eyes and nose are like his other relatives. This is the cow.......

The Sobel Operator

Sir, we could use the Sobel operator to accomplish that! And then there was silence in the room. One of the great scientists was at risk of losing his credibility by admitting that he had never heard of the Sobel operator and hence he nodded somewhat sheepishly in agreement. I wouldn't be surprised a bit, if he had rushed to the library as soon as we left the room a few minutes later to find out what I had uttered a few minutes ago was indeed the right solution. This person was our so called senior supervisor during our final year engineering project on imaging. I recently ran into the Sobel operator not too long back while post processing some of the snaps in GIMP, and that's when I remembered this incident. I am pretty sure, the supervisor had some sleepless nights after that.

Just to give you guys a brief insight into the Sobel operator here, it is a matrix that can detect edges while processing a 2D image. I wish we had more time on our hands doing the project as the scope of pre and post image processing is really vast. Imaging is a very interesting field and even though I am currently no where near that stream, it was one of the first things of interest while leaping in to the professional world of software engineering.

Happy Holi!!!

Today is Holi, the festival of colors, like the festival of lights it has its own importance. It is celebrated for 4-5 days and ends on Rang Panchami. The uniqueness of the occasion yet does not undermine the purpose of the victory of good over evil. It is celebrated as the day when an evil father Hiranyakashyup tried to kill his son Prahlad by asking him to sit on a pyre of Holika Devi, but on praying to Lord Vishnu, he survives and Holika herself burns in it. It is celebrated everywhere in India by lighting a pyre and praying that the fire consumes your sins and makes you a better person. Then a pooja is done and prasad is distributed among the people who attend the pooja.

For us, as kids, the next day was more fun though. It was time to get drenched, spray your friends with all the different colors and throw balloons filled with water and color at unsuspecting pedestrians. Oh, those were the good days when for a day you were not scolded for spilling/hitting something/someone intentionally. After the 4-5 hours of playing with the colors and water, everyone looked the same, face colored with shades of colors you had never seen, clothes drenched and teeth white as if we had just paid a visit to the dentist. Then there was oil paint. I really used to like the shiny painted faces that the paint created but once someone painted my younger brother's face with an oil paint and we had a pretty tough time getting it off. That was really nasty. It’s been almost 10 years since I have played Holi and would like to plan a trip to India once just for this. Let’s see... Wish you all a very Happy Holi!!!

What can I say? Jai Ho!!!

I think Slumdog is the first Oscar winner that I have seen before it got an Oscar for the best picture. Usually it is the other way round where some not so interesting movie will win an Oscar and then I may or may not see it. But due to the movie's word of mouth publicity, we came to know of it much earlier. What can I say? They did rock the Oscars big time!!! 8 Oscars, wow, I would say not too far from Titanic and Ben-Hur ;). Watching the presence of the movie grow in Hollywood from a mere contender to an inevitable juggernaut was fantastic. Also the whole team on the red carpet seemed to have a great time including the kids.

Well there has been a lot of talk on this movie from mis-understood comments from Big B to it not being an Indian movie. I guess the media doesn't have much to say/write about in this economic downturn. Agreed that as much as I love Mumbai and its high profile presence, no body wants to see your favorite city to be shown in bad light. My first reaction to the movie was, why did they have to show the slums. But then, what would the movie be without that. Would an already established millionaire coming on the "Who wants to be a Millionaire" show say that hey, I am here to earn a few extra bucks? I like the movie; I like movies which give you a good feeling after you have watched them, the last time I had this feeling was on seeing "Jo Jeeta Woh Sikandar". It gives you a different kind of a high.

The songs of the movie are catchy but not one of the best scores by AR Rahman. But that should not take away anything from this guy and what he has achieved. Congratulations to him. How much does the success of SM affect Bollywood, we'll have to wait and see.

The ALL-Nighter!

Ah the nostalgia of going through an all-nighter has hit me as I sit in front of the computer working on some client related issues. In short, the client is to be shown a demo of the site first thing tomorrow morning and it is having last minute issues. As I dig deeper, I ponder over the prospect of an exciting all-nighter. There is hardly an engineering student in this universe who has not enjoyed the deafening silence of the night trying to get his or her assignment turned in or preparing for the next morning's board exam.

As boring as it sounds, trust me, we actually used to look forward to these nights during school and college days. Although some nights were simply work-horse-like others used to be fun. The venue used to be different, the music changed over the years, the tasks used to vary but some things that we always did were drink lots of tea from the chaiwala or at home and eat lots and lots of maggi with an extraneous medley of eggs; yummm!!! There was a friend of mine who loved our company so much that he just used to come there and sleep it out like a baby. Others were easily distracted by the then new MTV and channel V music channels. As dawn neared the frequency of the breaks used to go up.

Ok looks like it was a false alarm and everything seems to be in order now after some intervention from yours truly. Tomorrow is president's day well actually today since it's well past midnight, so a Happy President's day to all of you!!! Whatever that means, I have to work though :(.

Orkut... Chirkut... Mirkut!!!

“Are you still not on Orkut?” !!! What a funny name, the first time I heard it I was almost ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing… that’s for those who are ignorant to the IMs and the Texting world]. Sounds like a hybrid between a coconut and Orko, the character from the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe franchise, btw one of my favorite tv cartoons growing up. So, the previous question was thrown at me by a lot of friends and I had to eventually jump in the pool of social networking rather unwillingly at first. Then came facebook and a plethora of other sites but there is still one thing that distinguishes Orkut over all the networking sites is its simplicity of use. l had never imagined that l would be able to stay in touch with my school buddies whom l hadn't seen in almost 17 years. I still haven't seen them but l do interact with them and that is immensely satisfying.

Before Orkut the only way of keeping in touch with friends was through IMs like yahoo and msn messengers, some times email and rarely phone calls. Agreed that other sites like Facebook and Myspace have a wider appeal here in the US but Orkut helps me keep in touch with friends and family back in India too. The earlier versions sure left a lot to be desired but now the site seems to me much more mature and stable. With close to 2,000 apps the number is set to balloon to 20,000 by the end of this year. Choices are good but a lot of choices just confuses the user. How the hell are you going to browse through so many categories of apps and find the right one that you need? Teen Patti has been my favorite app out of the few that I have managed to look at. I personally think that Orkut was better off without the Facebook style status messages. Does anyone care if you just got 2 hours of sleep and you want all your friends to know? Or does it matter that you are now going from one grocery store to the other? Anyway, just a personal opinion, some people just like to let others know how bad of a day they are having or how the 3 day old biryani has made their stomachs worse.

The security of the site still remains an issue as well as the legality of age etc. Even my ten year old cousin has a profile on Orkut. But it still has some features where you can restrict access to your scraps or photo/videos. Being a networking and a “personals” site as decided by our search engines and web crawlers, this site is blocked at work and for a good reason, sometime its really addictive. Just to guage the popularity of this website in other countries, primarily being Brazil, take a look at some of the stats below as gathered from their website.



So let me know some of the other good and bad things about this social networking, down time stress reliever, site with the funny name, that come to your mind.

Looking for Whitepapers?

If you are in an IT research field or are a Business Professional looking for technical info or a white paper, this is a very good site to find one.

Find Whitepapers.

Aai's Rangolis

Below are some of Aai's rangolis. Thanks for sharing Ashvin.

The Super Bowl - What's so Super about it?

President Obama was right on the mark - The Pittsburg Steelers edged out the Arizona Cardinals in a last minute touchdown to win the Vince Lombardi trophy, the Super Bowl, the most coveted and the most prestigious trophy in NFL. In any finals of any sporting event, I have the tendency to support the underdog and so I was rooting for the Cardinals. They did put up a good fight but in the end they fell a little short. Plus the Steelers had already won the trophy five times and this was their sixth which is an all time record for Super Bowl wins. Ah well! its not like I have some money invested in a team like SRK does. Neither was I a die hard fan of any of the teams contesting. After we moved from Kansas City where we actually had a local NFL team to support, the Chiefs!!!, no matter how bad they played, Salt Lake City does not have a NFL team nor does any city in Utah. The folks here are satisfied with the excitement they get over the clashing of two of the local college football teams. These are people who find happiness in small things... just kidding ;).

The Super Bowl dates back to 1967 and is a game between the top teams in each of the 2 leagues in the American Football namely the NFC and the AFC which are the National and the American Football Conferences respectively. So, even if it is not as old as some worldwide sports like cricket or soccer, it is one of the greatest events in the American sports calendar. The highest sale of potato chips, sodas, buffalo chicken wings and pizza happens on this very day. Oh and beer too. There are numerous super bowl parties that we usually get invited too. This year we decided to stay home and watch since Aarav was not feeling too well. I have had numerous discussions with people here and some back in India as to how and why they call it a football game as neither the foot is used as its supposed to nor do we have a round ball. I will not go into that discussion again. I still prefer to call soccer as football which I feel is the true foot-ball. Same goes with the baseball world series... people!!! Soccer can have a World Series but not baseball. More than 140 countries play soccer, where as professional baseball, a handful. The halftime show has higher ratings now than any other normal music show after the Janet Jackson episode. Hence the conference fearing any such unusual event, have reverted back to bringing old rock stars and such who are in their 60s now. This year though, Bruce Springsteen did put up a good show. The other attraction is the good quality of super bowl ads. This year it was expected that the number of ads would be less due to the economic downturn but guess what; ads worth 206 million dollars were aired yesterday. Do you know that like super bowl parties there are super bowl ad parties too!!! They mute the volume during the game and un-mute during the ads... what a bunch of bozos!!!

So the purpose of this musing was not to rant about how strange some of the sports traditions the US has, but to appreciate its sports culture and certain traditions that can be found only here. I can never imagine myself playing American football though as the thought of I being tackled by a 300 pounder sends chills up my spine.
NFL link.