Anand's Blog Added to Links

Please Welcome Anand Srinivasan and do not forget to check out the link in "Is this guy for real" on his blog. I will let you browse his blog and search that. I will add a link in the right frame also.

Anand and I go back a long way. Anand, Sourabh, Abhijeet and Nikhil used to have fun on the last desk of Somalwar Junior College in our 12th standard. We used to disturb the fifth guy, Nitin Garg, who used to listen patiently to all the lectures.

There are far too many anecdotes to list from those years in school. I will do it one at a time.

Here is one:

Sincere Nikhil is already in class. Anand, Abhijeet and Sourabh who usually come together to school are late. (I can guess right who was not ready in time :)) So it is 10 minutes into the first lecture and our Chemistry teacher has started the Class. He used to like to show authority whenever someone is late.

So all three come running in to enter the class. Abhijeet and Sourabh, seeing that the Class is already in progress have a brilliant idea. They turn back and run off. Idea is to spend few minutes outside and sneak in before the next lecturer enters. Brilliant!

Anand hesitates and is a little slow in turning back and is caught by the prof. The Prof does not see Abhijeet and Sourabh and calls out to Anand. "SHRIVASTAVA", he said (Anand Srinivasan was always Srivstava for him.)

Guess what Anand did. Anand called out to his comrades who were out of sight "Abhijeet, Sourabh, Sir bula rahe hain." (Abhijeet, Sourabh, Sir is calling *us*)

All three of them were writing an "apology letter" in the break as demanded by our Chemistry teacher. Lets say this was fair as I am pretty sure that it was not Anand who was the reason for their late start.

Photo Stitch

Rarely do I double-blog, but it is ok when one of the posts is a weekender :) (Nowadays I don't blog as much anyway).

I love my camera but I do not have a wide angle lens. To offset that I use the photo-stitch utility (Canon has both, Firmware and Software support for it). I have ben pretty happy with the results so far. Here are a couple of "stitches". . I have not had the time to fine tune these but I just wanted to put them up. You can click on them to see how big they are and then you can view them in a size appropriate for your screen dimensions. I have 2-3 more, I will put them up later.

Plagiarism

This late weekender is inspired by (actually copied)from Anand's comments in one of the posts. The puzzles are interesting and I will copy the rest from his comments.
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Anand said...

Check out the couple of interesting puzzles (not difficult) on this website. More interesting is how to get to the solution.

http://www.chriscoyne.com/puzzle/
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Anand said...

Btw, similar to that relpats website, IIM-Indore guys have created some puzzles. They are a lot simpler though, at least the initial ones. Check out.

http://www.iimi-iris.com/iris/irising/klueLESS/
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And can you guess these movie anagrams. If you do not get the first one, stop right there :) (Question and exclamation marks are added just to make anagrams sound better.)

Got Pun?
The Hog Farted
Big Absent Man
Fine as the Barbaric Poet
Folding Shorter: The Foreign Trunk
Oh! Fetching Superman


Fill in the blanks:
Pumbaa is the first Disney character to .... on screen.

Man on Fire

Yesterday I saw a preview of a new Amitabh movie. After watching it, it was clear that the movie is "inspired" by Man On Fire. I knew the story of this Denzel movie.I had not seen Man on Fire then.

Today they are showing it on cable and I am watching it as I write this post.

This has to be the most cold-blooded revenge movie I have ever seen and I have seen quite a few. I am sure the Big B version is not so violent.

No Weekender Again??

If I continue like this pretty soon even the people who are interested in the weekenders will lose interest.

With Mom and Dad leaving this weekend, the weekend was quite busy. We did some shopping to keep ourselves occupied too. After working with Bluetooth for last 2 years, I finally have a Bluetooth phone. It's a motorola and I would have uploaded its picture but the only way for me to do that right now is to use the bathroom mirror and I will wait till I have some other camera handy.

I also played some "traditional" football this weekend. Axe and I bought this together but *never* played against each other. Although it is very difficult to score a goal in this release compared to other ones, that is what makes the game special. You have to earn every goal. The 10-2 scorelines are a thing of the past. And once you score a goal, you are sure to spend next 10 seconds pumping your fist. Well, at least I am sure about myself.

And to make up for the weekender here is a link to something weekender regulars would enjoy.
http://www.relpats-eht.com/
It gets pretty tough later on. I do not know anyone who has seen beyond the last page. So a good incentive and we can keep this going on in the background. This is NOT the next weekender.

Self Referential Weekender.

I like this type of quizzes. This one I have copied from a site and the original author is Martin Henz. The solution is available on net but it is great fun to solve. The original url is polaris.lcc.uma.es/~afdez/srq/srq or something but is very slow. So I will reproduce the questions here.


A good exercise would be to design another quiz like this yourself that has a unique solution set. Have fun.

1. The first question whose answer is A is question
(A) 4 (B) 3 (C) 2 (D) 1 (E) none of the above

2. The only two consecutive questions with identical answers are questions
(A) 3 and 4 (B) 4 and 5 (C) 5 and 6 (D) 6 and 7 (E) 7 and 8

3. The next question with answer A is question
(A) 4 (B) 5 (C) 6 (D) 7 (E) 8

4. The first even numbered question with answer B is question
(A) 2 (B) 4 (C) 6 (D) 8 (E) 10

5. The only odd numbered question with answer C is question
(A) 1 (B) 3 (C) 5 (D) 7 (E) 9

6. A question with answer D
(A) comes before this one, and not after this one
(B) comes after this one, and not before this one
(C) comes before and after this one
(D) does not occur at all
(E) none of the above

7. The last question whose answer is E is question
(A) 5 (B) 6 (C) 7 (D) 8 (E) 9

8. The number of questions whose answers are consonants is
(A) 7 (B) 6 (C) 5 (D) 4 (E) 3

9. The number of questions whose answers are vowels is
(A) 0 (B) 1 (C) 2 (D) 3 (E) 4

10.The answer to this question is
(A) A (B) B (C) C (D) D (E) E

360 and The Revolution

Xbox360 is out and I do not own it.

I never intended to do so at launch. There is something missing. It is not pulling me towards it with as much force as it should be. The original xbox could be one of the reasons as it still has a lot of life left. There are not enough new features on xbox360 for me. Agreed that TopSpin2 will be available only on xbox360 but I can wait easily till the second price drop. It will eventually be ported to other systems too as MS does not own PAM, the studio that makes TopSpin, anymore. But I am not crazy enough to wait for 24+hrs in a line just to be one of the first to buy a 360.

I am crazy enough to do that for Nintendo Revolution though.

This is the second reason why I have decided to postpone the verdict on xbox360. Xbox360 has the same old gametypes with better graphics (only if you own a HDTV) and an ability to turn that into a media player. BUT, I have always believed that a game console should concentrate only on one aspect: Games. I do not want a PC for my living room or basement. I want the interaction, I want lots of "That felt so cool" moments. I use cable TV and music system to experience the non-interactive "That looked/sounded so cool" moments. What does xbox360 give me regarding that over original xbox?

Nintendo seems to get it the best for next generation console. Add to it the ability to download and play the complete Nintendo library till date and I am sold. For those who do not know, the controller is the most interesting thing about Revolution.

People remotely interested in Game Consoles should browse:

IGN takes Revolution Controller for a Joyride

Nintendo Revolution Controller Teaser Video

IGN's Nintendo Revolution FAQ

Till then, I will continue to buy (now cheap) and play and enjoy games on my xbox.

Numero Uno

Just had a heavy Mexican lunch at a "hole in a wall" authentic Mexican place. Cost a little more than $5 and should last till tomorrow morning.

A big snow-storm is headed this way and we can officially go home. I am car-pooling with my wife and as a result I am stuck until she is done. So I will have to postpone the plan of sitting in basement with masala chai on a snowy afternoon; sipping it while I am respawning.

Anyway, I am yet to write about rest of our trip and I will do that later. The point of this post was I was doing some egobrowsing and guess what I found.

My blog is the first google hit for "Welcome Aboard The Black Pearl". I am not sure how long it will last but I am sure enjoying it. Thanks to everybody who is directly or indirectly responsible for it.

And yes, it has started snowing finally!

The Return of Weekender

These are some of the puzzles that we attempted from American Airlines Flight magazine.


Let's warm up:

1. Fill up the blanks with words synonymous to the meanings on left and right.

Form of Precipitation -------- Greeting
Part of a Wheel -------- Uttered
Uniion Term -------- Assault
Allow -------- A License


2. Another Lap.

K N I T
N - - -
I - - -
T - - -

Fill in this 4X4 Matrix with 3Es, 2As, 2Ds, 1M and 1O to have valid words Down and Across. 9 Blanks and 9 Letters.


3. "How much I love thee? Let me count the ways."
The answer to this is hidden in the following grid. Start with any letter and complete the sentence, the next letter would be adjacent to this letter in *any* direction. When you finish the sentence you would have travelled the whole grid.
(I could not change the font to equal-width one, so it might be better if you write these letters in a grid yourself on a piece of paper.)


A L C F Y R O
T U L O I R S
O A Y R G P S
R C M T O O O


Hint: Do you need one hint or O hints?

Travelogue: Day1

In my last post I had mentioned 200+ pictures of the trip and hinted at 250+. How wrong I was! I had completely underestimated the trigger fingers and the fact that I had set the camera to click at second highest resolution and had purchased another memory card for this trip.

The total number of snaps is more than 500.

Lets talk about Day 1. Wednesday, the 23rd of November.

Ideally, we should have packed our bags on the weekend. We did that on Tuesday night (insert BITS flashbacks here). Ideally I should have finished recording songs for the trip latest by Monday. I took care of the last album on Tuesday night. What's the big deal? We were supposed to leave the next day, right? A small detail: Our flight was at 6:30 am on Wednesday from Lexington (1.25 hrs away from our place, don't blame me, blame priceline). We finished packing around 11:30 pm and then I started going through the camera manual and packed the camera and the chargers and the tripod that I would carry with me like a blackCat carries his semi-automatic. (Well Friends and Family ended up holding it for a big chunk of time too. Thanks everyone).

So by the time I could sleep it was midnight and we had to leave by 4:00 am, so I did the obvious thing.

I played xbox (halo2) for the next 1.5 hrs. Haven't been playing lately so it felt great.

We managed to leave by 4:00 am and reached Lexington around 5:20 or so. We parked in the long term parking lot and in that dazed state, I left the map-light of the car on. When we were waiting for the AAA guy to show up after our return to jumpstart the car, mom mentioned that she had told me about the light but in that sleep deprived state I had told her that it will switch off automatically in a minute or so. Our RAV4 lights do not work that way. I really needed some sleep.

Our flight was via Chicago and this means only one thing. Flight delays! ...and gate changes. We met my sister's brother-in-law, Mithilesh, and his wife at the airport. They also spent the thanksgiving weekend at Vegas. We were supposed to reach Vegas at 11:00 am local time but we reached at 12:40 or so. We ignored our request for a full sized car, took a convertible, tried to fit in our luggage and ourselves, returned it and took the full sized car.

We drove through the strip and we were off to San Diego. We hit a high traffic patch for about 20 miles near SanDiego but otherwise the drive was smooth... and fast. We checked in our hotel around 8:30 or so, postponed all plans of going to the heated pool and slept like a log.

The fun would begin tomorrow.

I don't have any pictures of day 1 right now, so here are a couple of misc ones.

This is where we stayed in San Diego. It is technically a "Resort" but they have stretched the definition. I am not complaining as we could not spend any time at the hotel anyway.





Beach ke beech mein shooting each other.