Part Of Being Sane Is Being A Little Crazy

Yup, that’s were I’m off to. At least that’s what it feels like. No phone (roaming ain’t cheap) & no hi-speed internet (I’ll be lucky to get dial up) means no chatting & talking to friends (I’ll miss you guys), RS(S), email and all the rest. I cannot even imagine the avalanche of feeds that’ll be waiting for me when I get back *shudder*. On the other hand, maybe this time away will do me good. Online is not my life after all. I could read dead tree books, watch a movie on something more than 14” & meet long lost relatives – who should have stayed lost – and …oh what the hell,who am I kidding!!? Its my worst nightmare come to life and then some. I know God won’t give me anything I can’t handle, I just wish he wouldn’t trust me so much.” –Mother Teresa Remember, she said it first folks…and I’ll be back on the 8th of next month. Ciao!

Yes! that’s me. Finally, two years of hard work & toil (read: fun & games) have paid off. My 20 year career in the field of education – 2 years of kindergarten, 10+2 years of school, 1 year of engineering, 3 years of bachelor studies and 2 years of graduate school - phew! that is a lot – is now complete (hey, kindergarten counts too).  So how did all this go down? At a solemn ceremony called the Convocation, I and the entire graduating class of 2009 were conferred our degrees on September 19, 2009. It was a page right out of my dreams as I walked up on stage & received my diploma while my parents, teachers and friends looked on. Of course, I felt like singing and yelling that I finally finished school, but I settled for taking pictures and laughing my head off. And thanks to my sister, my day was chronicled right down to the minute. And what a day it was! Meeting friends again (some of them for the last time, maybe), favorite teachers (definitely not the last

  Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit , currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity . In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Intrigued? So was I. Enough to check out the website and I came away impressed. Go ahead, check it out . I’ll wait. Once there, enter your name. Then sit back and be amazed. As is explained on the page, it is not meant to be utilitarian or even accurate. After all, unless you are relatively famous & have an obscure name (like say Lifehacker founder - Gina Trapani ), it cannot build an accurate description. But the process itself is amazing to watch. I for one, learned that most of my doppelgangers are doctors (my pet hate in school was biology, quite the irony). T

Why I prefer video games to real life: Someone has already written a walkthrough, FAQs, guide or something . If you don’t do well, you can always delete your profile and start over. If you don’t get expert score on a level, you can replay it. If you still don’t make expert, it doesn’t matter. If you don’t like one game, just move on to another. If you do really well, you get shiny trophies. Practice does make perfect. You know how its going to end. You have to pay just once for a game (or even free). You can always RTFM!

What do you get when you mix technology and food? Why, cool futuristic gadgets like the ones below of course! Guess what’s in the pictures above. Go ahead, I dare you. Give up? The first picture is of a Self Contained Biosphere (from Philips) while the second one is ‘le petit prince’ , a miniature greenhouse for - get this - Mars . Biosphere: This Philips non-spherical-biosphere is a self-contained farm that produces hundreds of calories of various food sources a day. Its five-level design breaks down like this: Levels 1 and 2: Plants Level 3: Algae Level 4: Fish and Shrimp Level 5: Organic Waste The system is designed to cascade nutrients from the top to the bottom (back to the top). Optical fibers capture and redirect light to the plants during the day, while methane capture from organic waste can power lights at night. The algae create oxygen for the fish. Cool or what?! Le Petit Prince: We all know that high solar radiation on Mars mea

September 2, 2009  was the fortieth birthday of an invention (do inventions have birthdays?). Well this one sure does…if I can figure out when it was actually invented.  40 years ago, on September 2, scientists connected two computers together which could communicate. The talk was meaningless but hey, at least they talked (kind of like kids?!) So would this be the birth of the Internet? Of course, technically the World Wide Web as we know it was invented in March of 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. We’ve come a long way since then. The WWW was born 20 years after the first ‘communication’ between two computers. The first email was sent in 1971 while the first free web based email service, Hotmail, was launched as late as 1996. Mosaic became the world’s first browser in April, 1993 while  Firefox – King of Browserville – was launched only in 2004. Currently of course we’re rather spoiled for choice here with Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and definitely last on my list, IE.  So

…my true love gave to me - two interview calls from LIC & Federal Bank! Well strictly speaking not my true love & it was more like the last day of August but this just sounds better. After the looong and I mean really long wait, I’m getting results so to speak. 2 out of 3 isn't so bad right? The interview for LIC is on October 10, while Federal is still unclear. And certainly the odds for LIC are pretty good in my favour. At the very least 1 in 4.  And to celebrate, RS had the day off and he came to Noida and we watched the Taking of Pelham 123 (predictable storyline but some scenes were pretty good). Too bad the day started very late and had to end early (by normal standards). At least I’ve got the Sunday to look forward to…Movie Time!