Finally

For the nth time again , I am back... I know , this is sad.. Forget writing, I didn't visit my own blog all this while.. No wonder , Life is what happens when you are busy.

Random Rambles

Itz been one helluva week really. Yeah, with no work and me lazing around at home (On Vacation:) ) , wondering whether the sky looked this blue on a Monday morning I transcended the normal human thinking and realized the true meaning of "InActive".

Talking of Action, Technocrati has now come up with the list of top sites that are getting Attention - Technocrati Attention Index . Youtube tops the list as usual but was quite surprised to know that Ny times comes second. Weird. But given the current scenario not very surprising either.

Wish u all a Very Happy New Year

It's been a long break, so long that it is a different year now. There are resolutions obviously, but then if all resolutions turn into actions then there is no point of having resolutions...

Let Life be simple in 2009 ( literally, figuratively etc etc ..)

Long time No see...

And i am back once more after a long long break. Itz just that there were too many things going on at my work and in the world in general that blogging never entered my mind. But still, like Sachin says, i dont have any plans of getting retired in the near future.

Come to think of it, the near future is getting gloomier. The US financial market crisis is getting from bad to worse day by day and being part of the firm that is in the epicenter of this tremor is always gonna be difficult. It is just like a movie, a child is born, a young boy plays, couple get married, and in the last 5 mins or so during climax, couple get old or couple die. Complete in 3 hours. The fate of lehman bros and Merryl lynch were pretty much the same. 158 years of legacy was just buried in a weekend. This is claimed to be the worst crisis after the 1920's economic depression in Wall Street.

Come to think of it, those were days when Wall Street meant "Walled Street" and Fed meant nothing. Honestly, be it dot com bubble or bust, it did not count. But the last few years have been so much enlightening in terms of the financial markets and how things work. Inspite of being a ardent fan of "some of "Ayn Rand's philosophies, only recently did i truly understand to appreciate it. But then, given that we are in India, it is a long shot.

Come to think of it, Indian markets dont seem to function independently as claimed by some wise investors. As i had posted in one of my earlier posts, India is not going to be shielded from this crisis. Being globalized means to share the fame and the pain equally. The extent of damage caused by financial markets might not be very high, but then there are lot other issues in India that makes up the cumulative damage sum high. The journey has just begun and it is a long road ahead.

Come to think of it, the grand prix in Singapore was just awesome and sheer grandeur not because of the race but because of the roads. As rediff rightly put, both Alonso and Singapore were winners in race against time.

Finally as our good old Indian cricket team, who always makes us expect the unexpected, the author will like to ensure that he is not part of this team and does not value this principle very highly.

Bottomline ... more posts coming along....

I am still there...

I know... I am back to the old ways of taking an uneventful break from blogosphere. Yet, this time it is different. Going thru some real hectic schedules and deadlines at work. But will bounce bak.

Sooon....

Oh, in the meanwhile, happened to see Indiana jones. Don't even feel like blogging about it.

The movie started great, went on great, but the ending sucked.. big time, And that really spoils everything. Worth seeing once, but deftnly not in PVR on a weekend.


Rating : ***

Legends :
* - Only to be seen in wall posters.
** - Try it out at ur own risk.
*** - Worth watching once.
**** - Good, really good.
***** - Amazing.

The Iron Man (P) Review

Name :
The Iron Man

Language :
English

Whats the story about :
Hero wants to do good. Villain doesn't want to. So they fight.

So whats new :
"IRON" man.

So whats old :
Everything else.

Whats good :
Special effects and the hero's acting

Whats bad :
Take the old superman movie. Cut the old villain out, Bring in Terrorism and a new villain. Cut the "Super" , blue attire out and bring in "IRON". Throw in a heroine for side dish. U get Iron man.

No Honestly, what do I think :
Well it is definitely a movie worth watching once. The acting is good and the concept albeit old, is really good. The special effects require special mention. The robots and the gizmoz are just amazing. The hero is an arms dealer.. well arms designer u can call. He gets kidnapped and is taken to Afgan. Here he sees that the very missile he had designed for the Army are being used by terrorists to kill. The terrorists give him one day to build a new missile. Instead he builds the IRON man. To be more specific, builds the components necessary to become the Iron man. He fights, kills, flies and escapes. Once he escapes and back home, he refines the Iron man structure and becomes super powerful. He destroys all his missiles in the terrorists camp by flying to their place and flying back home. However little does he know that his own partner is the one who smuggles the arms. His partner finally gets hold of the secret energy source with which the Hero built the Iron man. So there u go, u have another "I don't know what metal" Man. Then they clash, hero wins, villain dies and movie ends.

Rating : ***

Legends :
* - Only to be seen in wall posters.
** - Try it out at ur own risk.
*** - Worth watching once.
**** - Good, really good.
***** - Amazing.

Random Thoughts - freak '()' nomics - I

Disclaimer : purely imaginary. No guarantee for accuracy of predictions.

Think is there any connection between the Software Boom in India and the Indian rail industry becoming one of the most profitable organizations ? There is. Example - goto IRCTC and try booking a chennai-mail ticket from Bangalore to Chennai one month ahead for a weekend. Consider urself lucky if you get a reserved berth. I can bet, most of this crowd is the young softies who hail from chennai and work at blr types. The more software industry grows, the more employed youth become, the more they travel outside their home place for jobs implies the more they Travel.

Conclusion - "Software boom directly proportional to Indian railways boom."

In any case, I am the sort of person who travels to/fro blr/chennai almost every week. Some people call it Nostalgic, i call it the smell of good food.
On the day of return I usually take the famous electric train to come to Central station from my home. Last week on a similar train journey, i got a chance to sit near the window and watch outside (It is very hard indeed to get a seat).

I was seeing the change. My association with the Train journey goes way long back to 1994. Starting from my school days to college and now work, the train journey has become a inseparable part of my life. I donno whether Nayanthara really enjoyed the rain when she looked out of the small car window (REF : Yaaradi nee mohini), but stand in the foot board of a running train on a windy(rainy) day, i can swear that it will be the most memorable journey ever. Ofcourse, you want the incident to be memorable and not to become a memory, so be cautious when you stand in the foot board.

On a crowded day, which btw is almost everyday, you will be able to see all the vagaries of life in a running train. Blind people selling lottery tickets, singing old songs, a family of 8 sitting in a berth for 4, students completing their homework, tution notes before school, middle aged people carrying lunch boxes and rushing to offices and many more. Nothing much had changed last week, only that most of the young people who usually stand outside the train, literally, are now standing inside listening to IPOD :). Here you go, my second correlation..

"With the IPOD boom, many young people have started buying IPOD and listening to songs, which means they no longer are interested in standing in the foot board and as a result of which the number of people who die because of foot board travel injuries have decreased".

Conclusion - IPOD boom is inversely proportional to No of Train journey deaths.

It is not only small children, but even adults, prefer to sit near the window. No one knows really why, but thats the way it is. Maybe calculate the relative velocity of the passing train or enjoy the fast moving view of buildings and the surroundings. One thing i really noticed was the number of open spaces. The number did not go down that much, but the open spaces were indeed OPEN, rather empty, which is very surprising. Those days, i never saw a ground that was empty. It was always occupied by boys playing cricket. A single ground was usually shared with atleast 3 teams. One team playing with a cricket ball, one team playing with a tennis ball and one team not really playing but practicing. Forget grounds, even the apartment car parking areas were usually mini cricket grounds. But now i was wondering whats stopping the young boys from occupying these grounds.. The person next to me was talking about the latest IPL matches and the genral player bashings. The thought suddenly stuck me, Kids who are usually passionate about playing cricket will never miss watching cricket. Those days the number of matches relayed were low, so lots of playing and some watching. But these days it is the reverse. As a result of which more kids are now glued to TV sets and computers instead of playing cricket which means the play grounds are now empty, which makes life easier for people who want to buy houses and have children as they no longer look for playgrounds,open spaces for their child and because of the demand the real estate prices go up.

Conclusion : IPL Matches are causing the rocketing real estate prices to shoot up even more

--to be continued....

Sun steals the show.. and I am back

It isn't a good sign to pop in once a while and check if my blog still exists or blogger.com has decommissioned it citing inactivity. So made up my mind today with some reminder from one of my friends to come and scribble.

Been doing good albeit hectic schedule. 2008 hasn't revolutionized my day to day life yet, so nothings much changed from where i was earlier :).

Came across the latest developer.com awards here :-
Dev.com

Seems Sun products have won in most of the category. Good to see that the Scripting feature for Java has won the best award. Hoping that next year, closures will be in the race as well for this.

Java has undergone a complete facial remake in terms of features and extensions. With Java 5, the emphasis was not only on just API extension but to include in a lot of language extension, developer friendly typing features as well. Generics is one good example. Though many argue that generics is not quite robust and has some fundamental flaws , from a developer perspective, i think it satisfies what it was meant to. Strict typing was a major difference that put Java in top of many dynamic pgmning languages and by making it compile time, genrics helps handle unneccesary surprises.

At any case, the point I was trying to say was Java SE 6 has also won in the developer.com category. And with Java 7 including some better functional programming practices within it, i will place my bet on it.

Gods must be crazy !!!!

No one likes to lose, especially in a game where all the odds are stacked up against ,you put on a brave fightback, when there is a possibility of a tie up and you are so close that u actually think you wont lose. Yet India lost. Only this time as Anil kumble rightly said "It hurts to lose. But Only one team played in the spirit of the game".

It was a contest with 11 on one side and 13 at the other... The two extras cost us the game and the series.

Height of Social Networking - :)

Given that i have the habit of taking long breaks after every blog, i decided to do something different in 2008 :- Publish a consolation post for no apparent reason with no specific content. Here it goes:

Evil twin of facebook - Enemybook

This quote is cool btw

Enemybook is an anti-social utility that disconnects you to the so-called friends around you

As if this is not enough, click the below link to read the article published recently

Social "Hate" Networking