Allahabad Unlimited, Luck Limited

Luck. You either have it or you don't.

You get up on a sleepy morning, and find out that the sun is killing, but gather your courage and pack your bags to go on a sightseeing expedition in a Town which has extremely limited places to visit.

You go to the museum, and find out that it is closed on mondays.

You go to the library, and find out that the only books they have on show are the state directories.

Unruffled, you move on to the Planetaurium in the blazing sun, just to find out that it's not just the museum; the entire town's government buildings close on mondays.

Tired of your excursions, you find a cyber cafe nearby, and start posting on your blog, on a system which takes exactly 9.2 seconds(ohh yea i measured it, thrice. This is the arithmetic mean) to open an Internet Explorer window after you click on the Icon.

And then, while you curse your luck sitting precariously on a revolving chair with one wheel broken, you realize that your train leaves in an hour, and you don't know how to reach your hotel.

eeks!

I got gmail!

I just got a mansion in the beverely hills of web mail.

sameer.ahuja@gmail.com

Thank you, Sean, you are a real buddy.

Oh, and by the way, all you peeps can start bargaining for an invitation ;)

This is what happens when you go to sleep when your dad's morning alarm rings

I was browsing around today when I stumbled onto my very first successful experiment with Flash, the dyna3D nav, on flashkit.com. I found out that dyna has had (almost) 20,000 downloads since flashkit download counter resart in 2002. I owe a lot to dyna, I got to know some really very interesting people while working on it.

I, infact, had big plans for the engine. I had made a surface rendering version with flat shading in flash 5 itself, and a completely dynamic polygonal engine when MX came out, and was to release it as soon as i figured out how to add goraud and phong shading. But then, college struck, and life became an intermission between examinations.

Anyways, the point is, 20,000 people downloaded the application. The project is rated 8.40 on flashkit. Using that as a cue, atleast 16,800 (.84 * 20000) of them ought to like it. Using realistic averages of female professionals in Computer related fields, around 6% of these, or 1008 of them would probably be female. Now, since more than 50% of Internet users around the world are from the US, and more than 28% of females in US are blondes, the figure comes to around 150.

Atleast one of these 150 blondes ought to be in her early twenties, with extremely good looks and a shapely body; wondering day and night what it would be like to meet the man who made the Flash based Dynamic Navigation of her dreams.

I think I need to go to bed.

Cool Dood Ghalib

This is one of the most striking ghazals Ghalib wrote, if not for anything else then for atleast for the amount of lover's blood involved.

Excerpts -


"ragoN meiN dauDte firne ke ham naheeN qaayal
jab aaNkh hee se na Tapka to fir lahoo kya hai ?"



"chipak raha hai badan par lahoo se pairaahan
hamaaree jeb ko ab haajat-e-rafoo kya hai ?"


[ pairaahan = shirt/robe/cloth, haajat = need/necessity, rafoo = mending/darning ]

Programming ebooks

This page is a nice index of free programming e-books on the web.

Pizzas, Paranthas and Cardiologists

My past week at my uncle's at IIT Delhi had 3 strong effects on me -

• I gained 3 kgs due to a regular diet consisting of pepperoni pizzas, mushroom soups, shahi paneers, aloo paranthas and all kinds of milk shakes.
  
• I learnt some very interesting things about marketing from my elder cousin brother.
  
• The strongest effect are the thoughts and wisdom of my uncle, a slice of which i brought back with me.
  

Education exists at three levels - Information, Knowledge and Wisdom.

Information is what we acquire from our sensory inputs of what we read or see people talk about. This is the lowest level of refinement, since the only base of this education is what we have heard or seen other people say.

If, however, this information is researched over trusted sources, and its causes, effects and intricacies are studied in detail; the Information is either validated or rejected from our conscience. Either way, what we have now is Knowledge.

Knowledge itself is generic by nature, and needs to be tested and experimented upon for our very own unique case. When we exhaustively test our knowledge for our own case, and become familiar with its undocumented peculiariaties and specialities, we possess Wisdom.

An eminent Indian cardiologist once commented that he practiced smoking in moderation. Thousands thinking about giving up smoking lost all hitches, having got a certificate of authority from the highest power itself. No one cared to have a look at the exact statement, or look at the lifestyle of the doctor, or his physical condition. Turned out he smoked once a fortnight, worked out an hour a day and was atheletic even past his mid age.

The point that struck me came later in our conversation when the question of spirituality and god came. Is there any soul who has ever seen god? No, as far as both of us knew. And if that is so, there is no trusted source of Information on God. Hence every living human is essentially operating at the Information level of education, and is trying to forge newer, logical, better sounding explanation of God and his ways. We need to do that because we just cannot operate normally without having some sort of an explation, no matter how vague or weak it may be, of the world that thrives all around and inside us.

Umrao Jaan

In Aankhon ki masti ke,
mastane hazaaron hai;

in aankhon se baabasta,
afsaane hazaaron hai...

...

ek tum hi nahi tanha, ulfat mein meri ruswaa,
is shaher mein tum jaise deewane hazaaron hai

ek sirf hami mehko aankhon se pila te hain,
ek sirf hami mehko aankhon se pila te hain...

kehne ko to duniya mein maekhane hazaaron hai


is shamme farozan ko aandhi se dara te ho,
is shamme farozan ko aandhi se dara te ho...

is shamme faroza ke parwaane hazaaron hai


Can a song ever be more beautiful, can a voice ever be more sweeter, can the protagonist ever be more breathtaking, can a language ever be more eloquent?

Total Timepass

This is one of those mails which started the forwarding phenomenon, it's a classic though, and never fails to bring cheer to hollywood fanatics like yours truly.

http://bl.net/forwards/movies.html

The Law of Equality

We live in a world of perceptions. Perceptions are the colored lenses through which we see the world, they are the self fulfilling prophecies we subconsciously postulate. Stephen Covey calls it the Pygmalion Effect.

Perceptions can be personal, group or universal. While personal and group perceptions constitute our personality and group behavior, it's the universal perceptions which interest me. If all of us are using a colored lens for our world view, who is going to find that out ?

For hundreds of years we believed that earth is a flat piece of land at the centre of the universe, with every thing rotating around it. We truly believed that heat is a substance, and had no qualms in believing that no one can live beyond 60. The point is, that the most dangerous perception to possess is a perception which everybody else possesses too, because then that perception rapidly becomes truth. In fact, what is truth, but a universal belief?

The devil within

I'm confused by the concept of "Jagrata", or "Jagran". It's supposed to be religious, bringing joy and prosperity and what not to the one who organizes it. For those who dont know, It's a night long, ear blasting, sleep killing pompous show of faith. God doesn't really want his, or her men and women to so blatantly destroy the peace of mind of their fellow beings, does he?

I know someone who does, it's the devil

In any case, my night's gone. If all they want is to lose their hearing power with those ear peircing bhajans at high volumes, why not get some bloody headphones?!