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.

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.

The Big B Blog

Anyone interested in reading Amitabh Bacchan's Blog? Here it is:

http://bigb.bigadda.com/

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.

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.

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:

• 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

Wish you all a very Happy & a Prosperous 2009!!!

As we near the end of 2008, here are some of the activities that we did and places we visited this year:

December: A trip for the nth time to Antelope Island from the time we have been in Salt Lake City.

My sister-in-law was here and we decided to show her around. The good part about Antelope Island is that it has its own beauty in summer as well as winter. I enjoyed shooting some scenery with my new Canon Rebel XSi.

November: Diwali Party at our place, OUR Birthday party and then a fun 2 weeks of travel, first to Las Vegas and then to Colorado Springs.

At the beginning of the month, my wife Radhika and I had organized a Diwali party at our place for the Maharashtrian group we had met earlier. It was fun and we got to eat a lot of faral. Then it was the time for Aarav’s 2^nd birthday. We do share the same birthday btw. You know, that’s like a 0.5% probability of that happening in the entire world. We threw a party at our community clubhouse for our friends. Radhika made food for like 40 people which was awesome. It was also great to have my brother Ashvin and his wife Sarika [also my sis-in-law] at the party. Then it was time to celebrate their first wedding anniversary and we were off to Vegas. It was more than a year since we had been to the sin city and I could feel a lot of changes already as we passed by the strip. We had a great time there, eating at PF Chang’s, twice, and playing roulette. We then came back and in a few days and were off to Colorado Springs to meet our Cousins for Thanksgiving. It was some experience driving in the snow storm there but overall we enjoyed the trip.

October: Celebrated Diwali and Halloween

Aarav was dressed as a Giraffe this time at the Halloween party. He was looking damn cute. We celebrated Diwali and the Hindu New Year also by decorating our house with lights and eating a lot of sweets. We also made a day trip to the Alpine loop to see the fall colors.

September: A ride on the Trax

Since Aarav loves the trains so much, we went for a ride on our local Trax. It was a hot day but the little guy loved it.

August: Trip to Oklahoma City and Houston

My parents were due to leave from Houston and so we decided to visit our cousins in Oklahoma City and Houston. We basically just ate and drank in OKC but in Houston I loved the trip to the Keemah boardwalk and NASA. At the end of the month my parents flew back to India. Aarav was missing his aaji aaba for quite a while after they left.

July: Yellowstone and Salt Lake City tours

This was a fun month filled with a lot of travelling and family reunions. We had our relatives over and had a lot of fun showing them around here in Salt Lake City. Some of the places that we visited were Antelope Island (n-1 and n-2)th time, the Copper Mine, Wendover, Snowbird, Gateway, Temple Square, etc. The entire gang then left for Yellowstone. It was one of the most gorgeous national parks I had ever seen and the place we stayed at was awesome. I would definitely love to go there again next year.

June: Zion and Bryce Trip, Bear Lake and the Hogle Zoo.

The beauty of the Bryce Canyon NP was truly breathtaking. Zion NP was also a great place to stay. It was also the birthday month for my Mom and my wife. We also had a great time power-boating on the Bear Lake. We went to the local Hogle Zoo which Aarav enjoyed thoroughly as it was his first trip to a zoo. The sight of the giraffe truly fascinated him.

May: Wedding Anniv, Aai Baba came to US, Camping trip, Thomas!!!

It was our 4^th wedding anniversary this year, boy 4 years have just flown by. By the end of the month, Aai Baba had come to visit us and Aarav was onto them instantly. We also went on our first outdoor camping trip here in Utah. That was a fun experience. Since my boy is such an ardent fan of Thomas the Tank Engine, we got a chance to take him to see the real life version. He just loved that ride.

April: Trip to Capitol Reef NP, IPL, Fishing Trip

We went to the Capitol Reef National Park here in Utah which consists of the natural rock formations. This is the smallest and the newest of the NPs in Utah. It was fun to drive the 4X4 off-road. Indian Premier League started this month and as we all know it was a great success. I really enjoyed the format, but still am a big fan of the test cricket. This month we also went on our first fishing trip. We picked up some basic fishing gear from Sportsman’s warehouse and headed off to Piute Lake which is in central Utah. We never expected to land a catch but to our biggest surprise, Radhika was able to net a Rainbow Trout. We wanted to eat it but later decided against it.

March: Indoor activities

There was still some snow around and we had fun visiting our friends and taking Aarav to the Jungle Jim.

Feb: Valentine’s Day

We celebrated the V day by going to a nice Chinese restaurant.

Jan: Move to the town house

At the beginning of the year, we finally moved out of our 2 bedroom apartment into a newly built town home. It was a big change in terms of the space as after Aarav’s birth we had started to outgrow the earlier place. This place was now 10 minutes from my work so it was all the more great! It also has a 2 car garage which means that I no more had to clear the snow off my car in the winter which was a big relief.

An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore - Wow!

After his "I invented the Internet" fiasco, I was not so sure whether watching a film involving Al Gore would be a good idea. My cousin had recommended it a few months back but I kept putting it off until last week when I finally got to watch it. It's not like I was not aware of Global warming as a term but this documentary helped put the concept in to perspective. The one thing I liked about the documentary was the way the facts were represented as figures, graphs and trends. It made me realize that we are not aware of so many things happening around us that contribute directly or indirectly to this phenomenon. I would not say that suddenly I have started caring about the planet after watching it but at least from now on I can gradually start making the changes towards solving this issue. I would highly recommend to all of you to watch this documentary and to take a stand which I am pretty sure there would be just one way to go about it. Below are a few of the quotes that I found really interesting:

Al Gore: [quoting Mark Twain] "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so."

Al Gore: [quoting Upton Sinclair] "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Al Gore: We have everything, save perhaps political will. But in America, I believe political will is a renewable resource.

Al Gore: I don't really consider this a political issue, I consider it to be a moral issue.

Al Gore: You see that pale, blue dot? That's us. Everything that has ever happened in all of human history, has happened on that pixel. All the triumphs and all the tragedies, all the wars all the famines, all the major advances... it's our only home. And that is what is at stake, our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization. I believe this is a moral issue, it is your time to seize this issue, it is our time to rise again to secure our future.

Al Gore: You look at that river gently flowing by. You notice the leaves rustling with the wind. You hear the birds; you hear the tree frogs. In the distance you hear a cow. You feel the grass. The mud gives a little bit on the river bank. It's quiet; it's peaceful. And all of a sudden, it's a gear shift inside you. And it's like taking a deep breath and going, "Oh yeah, I forgot about this."

Al Gore: Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, "What were our parents thinking? Why didn't they wake up when they had a chance?" We have to hear that question from them, now.

Al Gore: What we take for granted might not be here for our children.

Al Gore: It takes time to connect the dots, I know that. But I also know that there can be a day of reckoning when you wish you had connected the dots more quickly.

Salute to the Little Master

His 103* at Chennai last week against England is one of the best compiled innings I have ever seen. Some of the other test innings have been more flamboyant but this got rid of the "Tendulkar cannot bat in the second innings" stigma for sure. I had decided to watch the match only until 1:00 am that night as I had to go to work the next day but I got a hunch that something special was about to happen and boy was I glad that I didn't miss it. At no point of time did he play a false shot in this inning. He very much stuck to the basics, curtailed his cover drive and was ticking the scoreboard beautifully. As the total got closer he was more vigilant in his approach and guided Yuvraj in the chase. Below are some of the quotes that others have said about him.

"Sachin is cricket's God"
- Barry Richards.

"He is 99.5 per cent perfect. I'd pay to see him"
- Viv Richards.

"I have seen God. He bats at number 4 for India"
- Mathew Hayden

"There is no shame being beaten by such a great player, Sachin is perhaps only next to the Don"
- Steve Waugh.

"I still think Tendulkar is the best batsmen in the world ahead of Steve Waugh and Lara"
- Glenn McGrath.

"You take Don Bradman away and he is next up I reckon"
- Steve Waugh.

"Cricketers like Sachin come once in a lifetime, and I am privileged he played in my time"
- Wasim Akram

"Sachin Tendulkar is a genius. I'm a mere mortal"
- Brian Lara

"Don't bowl him bad balls, he hits the good ones for fours"
- Michael Kasprowicz.

"It's scary, where the hell do we bowl to him"
- Allan Border.

"Yeah mate, but that's with all great players"
- Ian Chappell.

"He's better than Ben Hur"
- Paul Wilson.

"There's no doubt about it. He is the best"
- Tony Grieg.

"Technically, you can't fault Sachin. Seam or spin, fast or slow - nothing is a problem"
- Geoffrey Boycott.

"Destined to be a great"
- Barry Richards.

"You have to watch India in India truly to appreciate the pressure that Sachin Tendulkar is under every time he bats. Outside grounds, people wait until he goes in before paying to enter. They seem to want a wicket to fall even though it is their own side that will suffer"
- Shane Warne.

Aai's Canvas Magic

Here are some of my mom's recent canvas paintings. Aren't they simply amazing?