the lithiumhead

Psychotic stew

2012-02-07T15:37:00.001+05:30

My brain is a vessel
holding the chosuey of my thoughts
perpetually simmering, occaisonally boiling.

As I carried this vessel on my shoulders through the corridors of life,
banging against the shelves lining it,
causing stuff to fall from the shelves into the stew -
new, old, leftovers, rare, inherited ingredients
adding garnish to the soup of my soul.

I remember the day I banged my pitcher into yours,
we ended up spilling our gravies into each others bowls,
was fun.

We walked together through the passage,
exchanging more and more,
becoming one,
till both our stews looked and tasted and smelled the same.

And now half we through life,
as we look back - or into what we have got so far,
I feel proud of what we have become -
A pair of cannibals who secretly kill extremists, boil and eat their hearts and shit on their dead bodies.

Manually etched and solder tinned PCB!

2012-02-04T16:49:00.000+05:30

Manually etched and solder tinned PCB!
Used nail polish to cover the area which i didn't want to be eroded away by ferric chloride. Then after etching, sandpapered away the nail polish and tinned the design with solder. Did this in 2003 - during first year at VESIT

VESIT Journal Cover Pages

2012-02-04T16:11:00.001+05:30

Since we were always in perpetual need of these during college, we scanned them and printed them whenever necessary. Was cleaning out the files from my hard disk, thought I would put these up here in case current students at my alma mater needed them :)
Click on photos to get high resolution A4 size printable versions:

Search phrases:
www.vesit.edu
vesit.edu
Vivekanand Education Society's Institute of Technology
VESIT
Printable Journal Page
Printable Journal Index Page
Printable Journal Certificate Page

Reading way above shit

2012-02-03T11:43:00.001+05:30

is nice :)

My Kinda Meditation

2011-11-28T17:51:00.000+05:30

It seldom happens that while reading one of the numerous books that you will read in your life, you come across something profound that totally resonates with you. One of those moments happened to me while while reading Mark Frauenfelder's book "Made by Hand" (Amazon | Flipkart) . He is the editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine & co-founder of bOING bOING magazine. In his book he quotes few lines by a cartoonist called Seth from his article in The Walrus Magazine:

But drawing and inking are different. They use different parts of the brain. I often find that when I’m drawing, only half my mind is on the work — watching proportions, balancing compositions, eliminating unnecessary details.
The other half is free to wander. Usually, it’s off in a reverie, visiting the past, picking over old hurts, or recalling that sense of being somewhere specific — at a lake during childhood, or in a nightclub years ago. These reveries are extremely important to the work, and they often find their way into whatever strip I’m working on at the time. Sometimes I wander off so far I surprise myself and laugh out loud. Once or twice, I’ve become so sad that I actually broke down and cried right there at the drawing table. So I tell those young artists that if they want to be cartoonists, the most important relationship they are going to have in their lives is with themselves.

to that Mark adds:

I wonder if one of the main reasons people garden, or knit, or retire to their garages and basements to tinker, is because they enjoy this unusual state of consciousness. Some people might be able to achieve it by meditating, but using your hands seems to do the trick, too.

Seth and Mark have given words to the feeling that most marker and storytellers can relate to. Maybe we should get our moms and wives and sisters to read this, perhaps then they'll understand what goes through our heads when we spend lengthy periods of time locked in to a particular activity which to them seems to be pointless or getting us nowhere. They would probably appreciate the emotions that run through us "boys" at those times. I am sure they can relate to these things too.

Come to think of it, there's a particular expression that appears on a person's face when he/she has achieved that level. Having experienced being in such a state many times, I think it would be easy for me to recognize one is currently in it. So now, I will wait till I find my mom in such a state - probably when she is busy with her embroidery. Then I will make her read this... :)

TEDxGateway 2011 @ Mumbai

2011-11-28T00:46:00.002+05:30

Here is a list of speakers who gave talks at the event today (2011-11-27). The event was held at NCPA - JBT, Mumbai. The list includes links to their websites:

Anu Sridharan | Grass Roots Entrepreneur | nextdrop.org
Kranthi Kiran Vistakula | Innovator | CEO Dhama Innovations - ClimaCon | dhamainnovations.com
Mallika Dutt | Human Rights Activist | CEO of Breakthrough | breakthrough.tv
Jo Johnson| Member of Parliament Orpington (UK Parliament constituency) | jo-johnson.com
Julia Silverman | Innovator - Soccer Ball Generator | Uncharted Play, Inc. | soccket.com
Raghava KK | Artist | raghavakk.com
Prof. Ramesh Raskar | Innovator - MIT Media Lab | EyeNetra | web.media.mit.edu/~raskar | eyenetra.com
Illac Diaz | Grass Roots Entrepreneur | A Liter of Light | isanglitrongliwanag.org
Dr. M R Madhavan | Reformer - co-founder PRS Legislative Research | prsindia.org
Narayanan Krishnan | Protecting the powerless - Madurai | akshayatrust.org
Ryan Lobo | Filmmaker and Photographer | ryanlobo.blogspot.com
Michael Pritchard | Inventor - LIFESAVER | lifesaversystems.com
Suneet Singh Tuli | Entrepreneur - $35 Tablet PC | datawind.com
Shankar Tucker | Musician | youtube.com/user/TheShrutibox
Stalin K. | Media and Human rights activist | videovolunteers.org
Sofia Jannok | Voice of Sweden | Swedish Sami singer from Gällivare | sofiajannok.com
Vicky Roy | Photographer | vickyroyphotography.com

... they left the audience with enough food for thought for many days to come
Event Website: http://tedxgateway.com/

Spirituality vs. Science

2011-11-24T01:48:00.000+05:30

To all Spiritualists: Guys and gals please stop misusing words like "Energy", "Evolution", "Universe", "Knowledge", "Elements" etc. in your literature/justifications. These words have specific and precise technical meanings in science and us scientists and engineers are not going to pay heed to anything you say until you stop manipulating the meanings of those words in whatever you are trying to say. Invent your own words to express the various concepts you have come up with. There are a lot of sweet sounding permutations and combinations of alphabets still left out for your use.

To all Scientists: Stop looking for a precise definition of the word "Consciousness", "Mind", "Soul" etc. Let Spiritualists use them and define them. Stop encroaching on the words belonging to their domain. Do unto others like you want them to do to you.

Paintings on the Wall

2011-11-14T02:56:00.003+05:30

Watched Class of '84 at Sophia College Auditorium today.
Followed by a walk along Peddar road and dinner at Cafe Mondegar.
Discovered this on the Juhu Aerodrome Walls today on the way back
Seems to have been done today itself - Sunday, 13th November 2011 - by school kids.
Some of these are really awesome. Proud of you Mumbai kiddos!!!

(Was in an auto returning home when I first saw these, reached home, got my cousin to drive me back there and captured the pics with his Canon 550 - returned home at 2:00AM 14 November 2011 - was crazy enough to capture them fresh!!)

Slide Show and link to all the 44 photos.

Life's Calculus

2011-11-07T22:32:00.002+05:30

All emotions are beautiful. But what seems to make life less boring and more exciting are not the emotions themselves, but the rate of change of emotions. The impulse & step functions which cause sudden changes in emotions - "surprises" for example - are the best of them all; they spew harmonics all around and over!!!

Thamba!

2011-10-29T00:17:00.001+05:30

Sometimes we ought to STOP and smell the roses (or exhaust in this case)

Stop Signal Art - Mumbai Autorickshaws

Chin up bar

2011-10-24T23:49:00.001+05:30

I bought a chin-up bar today. Idea is to regain the muscle mass that I think I have lost due to excessive computer use. This rod cost me 650 rupees. There were two cup like discs which had to be fixed facing each other on the door frame. Each had 3 screws to hold it in place. The rubber edges of the rods would sit it these cups. The rod comes with an L key which goes into the hole at one end of the rod. The rod to fixed into place by using this key to rotate the inner cylinder which telescopes out there by increasing the effective length of the rod slowly with each twist. The rubber ends compress against the cups which had been previously been fixed in the door frame. As it is with most things in life, if u tighten something too much, it break - observe the rubber end which buckled under pressure. I think the rod is still safe to use.

Girls are mad, and boys are dumb

2011-10-17T23:55:00.002+05:30

Girl thinking: "I don't think its gonna workout between us, he doesn't care about what I want!"

Boy thinking: "Isse kya ho gaya hai?"

Girl thinking: "He never thinks about our future together...."

Boy thinking: "What is she thinking? Lagta hai maine kuch galat kiya hai..."

Girl thinking: "Bolta tha palkon pe bitha ke rakhunga, yahan mitti ke dher pe lake khada karke bada khush ho raha hai jaise pata nahin mujhe koi hill station pe le aaya ho!"

Boy thinking: "Lagta hai use kuch cheez chahiye thi, she was expecting me to understand it without her saying it..."

Girl thinking: "Isko samajh nahin aata ki mujhe ek cell phone ki zaroorat hai, itne saste ho gaye hain aaj kal, price list dekho! fir bhi janab ko paise bachane ki padhi hai, post office bonds me daal diye is mahine ki salary"

Boy thinking: "Hmmm.. lemme trace what we did till now, we got up in the morning, I got an SMS that my salary has been credited today, we went to the post office to submit the bond application, and now we are standing here, hawa khaate hue bus ka intezaar kar rahe, aur ab yeh sad face banaye hue hai, lafda kya hai? maine kya kiya?"

Advice to the boy: Abe dhakkan, ek hafta pehle usne tujhe Femina magazine mein kuch dekhne ko kaha tha .. woh Samsung ke naye phone ki advertisement dikha rahi thi aur tujhe laga ki woh uske baju wale page pe money savings ke article padhne ko keh rahi hai.... popat... She is a woman .. women always think of spending, not saving :P

Stuff under a 30x Microscope

2011-10-09T22:20:00.000+05:30

Bedsheet Fabric

FT232RL on an Arduino Duemilanove

Pyjama fabric

SMD Resistor and LED on an Arduino Duemilanove

Hair on the back side of my palm

Logo Engraving on a Canon Scanner

LCD Monitor Pixels

If these photos fascinate you, then do check our these photos taken by a Scanning Electron Microscope which have been published in the book Microcosmos: Discovering the World Through Microscopic Images from 20 X to Over 22 Million X Magnification by Brandon Broll (Amazon link)

While you are at it, you may also like: Would dew believe it: The stunning pictures of sleeping insects covered in water droplets

There is a plan for each of us

2011-07-01T05:35:00.000+05:30

Watched the The Adjustment Bureau today. Reminded me of Allama Iqbal's quote:

Khudi ko kar buland itna ke har taqder se pehle
Khuda bande se ye poche bata teri raza kia hai

Full poem here

God?

2011-07-01T05:30:00.000+05:30

Omniscient (Thank you Google)

Omnipresent (Thank you 3G)

Omnipotent (Thank you cloud computing)

Is Internet God?

Family Time

2011-06-25T20:59:00.001+05:30

Tata Sky+ set top box got messed up today - video was all right but there was no audio. Tried to fiddle with the audio settings of the TV as well as the set top box but couldn't get it fixed. Had to watch Munnabhai MBBS in complete silence while eating food with family. We were having fun trying to remember the dialogs from the last time we watched the movie. Since none of us could remember all the dialogs, we were helping each other complete the lines. It was like family movie karaoke. Should do this often. Discovered a new fun family game. Some movies which are a good candidate for this came (atleast for our family):

Border : "Bhairosingh MMG sambhalo"
Speed : "Harry! Tell me good news, man."
Sholay : obviously..

Leaps

2011-06-21T10:44:00.003+05:30

First there was asexual reproduction and evolution chugged along really really really slowly. Then Natural Selection seldom had candidates to select from and push forward beyond the other individuals of the species.

Then sexes separated and evolution leapt forward. The Natural Selection's offices were then overwhelmed with applicants. The ones with superior genes lived longer and passed on their good genes to their children. But in most cases, Natural Selection weeded out the inferior ones by ensuring that they were killed - in many cases by the superior ones, in other cases by the hazards of the environments or diseases.

To ensure that the superior genes replaced the inferior ones, all the individual with the inferior genes had to be killed and the population which remained would then be the descendants of that one individual which acquired the superior gene first.

In olden times, the population size was limited, so it was easier for Mother Nather to cause death of the non superior individuals.

In modern times, the process of Natural Selection is becoming less relevant. The human population has increased to such a level that say if a single individual had a superior gene, then ofcourse it will take like forever wait till his descendants completely spread and replace the existing population. Only something drastic could do that, like for example a disease which wipes out everyone except a few unique individuals.

On a day to day case, it does not matter if you have some inferior set of genes, because technology and medical advances allow you to over come them artificially - so if you have Type 1 Diabetes, you don't have to worry about dying soon, unless we have an apocalypse and we run out of and start fighting over insulin supply.

Genetic engineering has been progressing an alarming rate. Soon we would be able to add/replace superior genes into bodies of grown adults. We would be able to take control of evolution over from Mother Nature.

There are lots of moral implications of this. It was okay for mother nature to cause mutation to randomly bless some with superior genes and curse others with inferior genes, but when man acquires power to try and do this to himself, he is accused of "playing God". Of course we are playing God. God wanted us to. Mother Nature selected unique individuals over the ages to bring us to this level of technological advancement. If God did not mean for us to discover/invent various aspects of Genetic Engineering, then s/he wouldn't have allowed us to progress to this level. (God also wanted us to build huge buildings of reinforced concrete, but that's a discussion for another day)

So now instead of leaving to chance, the process of natural selection/evolution, we can now identify individuals with good genes and introduce them into the rest of the population and enhance everyone. No part of the population needs to die out. Of course we cant grow a new 6th finger, but if we have the gene introduced within us, then we can pass it on to our children who will then have 6 fingers.

Obviously, while carrying out this process, we will make mistakes. Many patients who "volunteered" for this experiment would die. But we have to think and decide for ourselves - When mother nature did this, it was ok, but when this happens through our hands, it is immoral and a murder! But are we not instruments of God?

We owe it to ourselves and to the power that created us to move forward without fear. The moral rules which tie us back bind us from taking leaps. Maybe our children who will rewrite their own moral rules will be able to accept this fully and progress unhindered to the next level.

One thing if it happens before we reach that level would be good - abolition of poverty. For that we would need clean and abundant source of energy and interstellar travel and knowledge. Instead of amassing wealth, we would need to focus our attention elsewhere - This is the star trek philosophy. This will ensure that everyone has access to improve themselves through genetic engineering - something which only the rich and the wealthy would be able to afford otherwise.
If that does not happen, the difference between the rich and the poor will widen so immensely that, the suffering which will ensue would really be heart rending. Of course the rich will then have an option to acquire a gene which would let them turn off empathy within them.

In the end we will become what we are to become. This might sound fatalist, but it seems Mother Nature had deliberately planned to hand over her tricks of trade to us - it is her calculated move, A leap in Evolution.

Mars and Venuses

2011-06-12T12:54:00.004+05:30

From: Anurag Chugh
Sent: Sunday, June 12, 2011 11:50 AM
To: Upasna Sachdeva
Subject: epiphany of the day..

Women just want to look pretty in every way - Simple.
Men just want big dicks, which I guess doesn't even matter that much to their life partner.

From: Sachdeva, Upasna
Date: Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 12:12
Subject: RE: epiphany of the day..
To: Anurag Chugh

I don’t think so.

Absolute wants never decide anything.

If you ask anyone absolutely, they’ll even want two or three or four husbands.

Unless and until you have choice… you need to give up something to get something else… you have to choose… you cannot measure the true value of anything…. that is how even monetary systems work…

So maybe women want to look pretty … but am sure a lot of them would trade that for intelligence, or just plain chirpiness… or to be good mom…..

Men on the other hand … I don’t know …. :P

From: Anurag Chugh
Date: Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 12:30
Subject: Re: epiphany of the day..
To: "Sachdeva, Upasna"

Kaun tha yeh ?yeh kaun tha??
Original wali Upasna ne jusk peek kya thakeli upasna ke peeche se!!!
Original wali Upasna is still there!!! BRING HER OUT BRING HER OUT!!!

btw, relative wants creates jealousy creates fights.
Absolute wants creates dictator types
Thats why gyaani log kehte hain, capture a snapshot of urself today and agle din try to become a bit better relative to what you are today.
And to decide which way is better, well uske liye ur neural network is constantly learning to identify others who are better than u in some apect so that you know the direction in which u wanna move.

The race should never be against others.. but with ur ownself.
When u get a spouse. You sort of merge together and then the game changes from a single sprint to a three legged race.
It becomes tougher I guess but a lot more satisfying/exhilarating and carefee in a weird way, coz you know now that you will never fall, because ur partner will always be there to save you. And besides if you do fall s/he will fall with you and then you roll on the running track laughing with ur one leg tied together... FUN!!

From: Sachdeva, Upasna
Date: Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 12:43
Subject: RE: epiphany of the day..
To: Anurag Chugh

Dono original and thakeli upasnas office mein baithi hain lekin… K K K

From: RP (bestfriend, guy)
Date: Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 20:01
Subject: Re: epiphany of the day..
To: Anurag Chugh

Women also want their partners to look good - they scarcely say this. But god they so want it.

From higher dimensions

2011-06-11T11:19:00.004+05:30

Jiddu Krishnamurti's discourses makes him seem like A. Square from Flatland who has been to worlds of higher dimensions (3D) and is now trying to explain and induce the feeling of what he felt about that higher truth to his 2D country men. He tries hard to put all that he experienced into words but it is of course impossible for 2D beings to grasp the reality that is 3D.

Incomplete Brownian

2011-06-09T00:57:00.000+05:30

Rainy season is here. Someone left a polystyrene cup out under the tree. There are no stains in it – tea was not its occupant. Vodka seems more like it. A droplet of water slides over the waxy leaves of the tree and falls into it making a plop sound. The water in it seems clear. I think of the restless atoms and molecules that make up the liquid confined by the walls of the cup. Small groups of balls strung together, bouncing off each other, jostling around. Each one alike, yet separate – Kind of like the thoughts in my head. I imagine my brain to be made of water (70% of it must be anyway) contained by my skull - which is also white in colour like the cup.

A dust particle – probably a string of dead human cells - falls into the cup. I look closer as the particle moves over the membrane-like surface of water. Brownian motion. The particle reminds me of a Pinball machine – with the particle’s motion likened to the motion of the ball hitting various invisible thumper bumpers on the playfield held up by the surface tension of water.

Fickle and Non-Linear. Like the thoughts in my heads. I go upstairs to my rented apartments. As I unlock my door and remove my shoes, I decide to allocate some of the processing power of my brain to a sentry task which observes what the rest of my mind is thinking. I have been working on an RTOS/Microcontroller all day long. I will pretend to be a microcontroller running an RTOS with one of the tasks spying on what the other tasks are doing. No wonder that the rest of the world think IT guys are mental – you work on microprocessors day in and day out and sooner or later you start acting like one!

But this time I don’t care. No one is there to observe and taunt me. Sure I am going to blog about this, but that’s another thing. Moving on.

So now it was like there were two of me in my head – the “real me” and the “observing me” – or rather “the experiencing self” and “the remembering self” (Daniel Kahneman@TED).

I let my mind wander. Invariably it lands on the thoughts of my friends. Friends and family – stuff that fuels the engine that is Anurag Chugh. I imagine a huge engine churning. People go in, create memories and come out the other end intact. I remember my first day at L & T – soft skills training session. The instructor from Hero MindMine asked us to speak about an object we relate to. I already knew my icon - The Sun. Source of all life on Earth. All Life. My mom says my life is my friends (and now that I am in touch with them – my extended family or as my mom calls it “my biradar” – sounds ghaati J). Of the various important roles that friends play in one’s life, I fixate on the most important one (atleast to me) and look for a metaphor to describe them. I soon find one in Birbal’s Khichri. I remember the poor man in the story who is denied the prize because the warmth from the earthen lamp (diya) kept him warm as he spent the night with his body submerged in the cold waters of the river. Life is like a cold river with all of us floating in it, moving with the flow – our friends are like diyas which spread the light and warmth around us as we make our way thru the calm water as well as the rough rapids. They need not be with us all the time to inspire us, energize us. Some may be thousands of miles away and yet their presence would inspire us as if they were right there next to us. I can recall numerous times when after racking my brains at a problem at office, I decide to take a break from frustration and remember my friends and what they would be doing at the moment. I would crack my knuckles, stretch back on my chair and think of them. Ranjit probably sleeping in his bed with arm under the pillow. Sneha sleeping too, or waking up yawning. Nupur staring at her screen working on a report. Upasna using arrow keys to navigate through thru the excel sheet full of numbers describing the valuation of some company. Ankit calling / facebooking our other friends while travelling back home in his cab after a long flight. Ruchir waiting for the signal to turn green so that he could rev up his Cedia and hit 160kmph for 5 seconds on Western Express Highway. Aastha and Sapan chatting over Sametime planning to go for a swim after office. My dad still wearing his boiler suit, while unloading the photos from his camera for insertion into his weekly report. Juhi finishing off yet another article for the local news website. Deeksha sitting the consulting room at HERI thinking of the idea for next week’s P-TAPs as a burkha clad lady patient calls on her. These thought of these and other people around whom my life revolves brings a smile to my face. It gives me sense of “all’s well with the world”. I exchange messages with a few and maybe call one or two and a few minutes later I am recharged and I can return back to work. As we float together through life, like real diyas, sometimes our own light begins to flicker in the winds. That’s when the light and warmth from the surrounding diyas rekindles our own flame and keeps it alive.

tareekh pe tareekh

2011-05-28T01:07:00.000+05:30

A day is but a single frame in the film reel of your life. Last day pe play hogi movie tumhare life ki. And you will be the only audience. Let it leave a smile on your face when you take in your last breath. One chance, one take. Make it worthwhile :)

abe! sanskar?

2011-05-28T01:06:00.000+05:30

Amit Varma's Article To Hell With Family Values

reminds me of a thought I ones had about KKK soap operas on Indian Television.

Mom discovers medical report which her daughter was hiding from her. Just then daughter enters the alishaan house. Mom is in designer saree. Daughter in bechari salwaar kameez. Mom confronts her daughter, saps her and shouts, "kahan se muh kaala kar ke aayi hai". Daughter bursts into tears. Mom faces the camera "hey bhagwan kya humne aise sanskaar diye is ladki ko ki aaj hamari naak katwa di!"

I always used to wonder "abe sanskaar diye bhi they kya?"

Khud ke koi sanskar nahin ho toh woh apne bacchon ko kya dega? I think we all need to think before having kids. Of course I am totally unqualified (yet!) to speak on the subject but I think people should spend 1-2 years retraining themselves and modifying their own personality, cultivating discipline into their own lives to prepare themselves to become good parents before they actually produce them. Maybe natural selection extended the gestation period for humans to 9 months so that the offspring's parents have enough time to get into the grove - get serious and responsible for the new life that's about to enter the world and be dependent on them for years to come. But lagta hai humans ka zyaada bheja hone ka disadvantage hai... I think we are prone to "haramkhorgiri" way way too much as compared to wild animals...

AV also links to this poem in his article: This be the Verse - Philip Larkin

Different kinds of scholars.

2011-05-25T09:25:00.000+05:30

Been having this thought for quite some time. People who have PhD and those who heal people have the same title conferred to them. Seems a bit unfair to me. Besides it creates unnecessary confusion among the general public (Remember Ross from F.R.I.E.N.D.S.).

Khushwant Singh puts it in better words in the last week's edition of his column "With malice towards one and all" which appeared in Hindustan Times:

Professor RC Sobti, Vice Chancellor of Panjab University and Registrar A K Bhandari came all the way from Chandigarh to confer an honourary doctorate on me.
Though overwhelmed with gratitude, I feel I must confess my shortcomings as a scholar. I went through school and colleges in Delhi, Lahore and London barely able to pass examinations I had to take. Having such a poor academic record, having four doctorates conferred on me is hard to believe.
My motive in writing about it is not a devious way to indulge in self-praise, but to draw the attention to the misuse of the word doctorate.
It has three different meanings. One is for qualifications as a healer of sick people. The second for scholarship in writing theses on topics hitherto not touched upon. And the third for honouring people for their achievements in any field. I think it is time we had three different words for them. Only those in the medical profession deserve to be called doctors.
We have to coin different words for scholarly works and recognition for achievements. Try to think what they should be in Sanskrit, Greek or Latin. And make it obligatory for recipients not to use them.

This is me

2011-05-20T14:26:00.000+05:30

Take me.

Take me as I am...


.. with my acne (comedones) ...


... with my uncleared ear wax and hairy tragus ...


..with my many blemishes...

.. and a million other imperfections.

Take me.

Take me with my Canon 550D 18 megapixel DSLR.

I will show you how imperfect you are, and yet love you perfectly.

The engines that I work on

2011-05-08T01:46:00.003+05:30

Saturday has just fallen off the cliff. Sunday has entered the scene and is now trying its best to put up a good stunt.
No matter how hard it tries to climb the jagged rock wall, 24 hrs later it too shall meet the same fate and fall and end up back in the line behind the 6 other contenders. One hour into the show, Sunday's act was proving to be boring. So I drifted, thinking of the previous one's performance.

This Saturday was different. It was my first working weekend at my third job. Reflecting back on the day, I realised, I had solved three major issues at work. Three issues which had cascaded to result in an irritable bug on the Head Unit of our in car entertainment system - the master microcontroller wasn't able to talk properly to the radio tuner chip. Integrated Circuits and the computers made of them can be made to talk in many different ways, not unlike the numerous human languages. The language of the day was I2C or Inter-Integrated Circuit. This one was invented by some guys over at Philips a few years ago. It's a language specifically suited for a certain kind of scenario. If you recollect the movie "The Mummy Returns" (By the way today is mother's day, happy mother's day to my mummy - Indu Aunty :), just before the final fight scene, Oded Fehr's character utters some words in Hebrew which is immediately recognized as "The language of the Slaves" by Dywane Johnson's character. I2C is somewhat like that. It's used for communication between microcontrollers (the smart ones) and the dumb slave ICs which have each been bred to do one and only one task. The microcontroller is the master in that sense that it controls the tempo (The clock signal) during the whole transaction. All the slaves are lined up one after the other as the master microcontroller speaks its will. The master first yells out the salve number and makes it heard to all of them. Only that IC whose slave number matches the one uttered would bow down and acknowledge, making its presence known to that master. The master would then proceed with delivering its instruction to this one particular selected slave one by one. The slave is obligated to acknowledge every piece (byte) of command sent its way. When the master is done with one slave, it will address the next one and so on and repeat the cycle. This seemingly simple round robin process made our system go. But today, one of the slave was being insubordinate. We wanted to teach it a lesson.

Over the course of the saturday, we found three problems with our system. First we found that we were using the wrong wires to communicate with the slave. This was like climbing out on top of the effiel tower and shouting out instructions, when all your slaves were kneeling down in front of the taj mahal. Of course they couldn't hear zilch. That problem was easily solved by modifying a few lines of code and diverting all the data traffic to the proper wires. Made a note to self - RTFM.
The second problem was related to hardware. The clock and data signal were short circuited. The clock signal sets the pace or the tempo of the communication and the data signal, well carried the actual words. Damn, our king was bloody tounge tied. We applied a little solder flux on the copper tracks (the mouth of the master) and blew hot air (at 200 degrees centigrade) over it. The solder melted and the surface tension caused them to fuse to their bonding pads and become isolated from one another. With the tongue untied, we proceeded on to the next step.
The third problem was to do with the reset signal. The Master Micro wasn't letting go of the reset signal going to the FM/AM Radio Tuner IC. Remove the tape from the slave's mouth when you want him to respond goddammit!!. Easily fixed.... backspace backspace backspace... type type type.. recompile, re program and we are in business.
OK so now the slaves is responding. It can hear the master and we can see it saying " yes sirji" after every byte. We eavesdropped on the master microcontroller and the slave IC's convo using a device called an "Oscilloscope". We can see them talking. We can see the master issuing instructions and the slave acknowledging each one, but we don't see the slave doing what its told - we can't hear any "big, Red, AIR, mirchi, City". Lagta hai apna Master sathiya gaya hai. Bakwas kar raha hai. Slave bechara sun ke le raha hai lekin use samajh nahin aa raha ki woh kya kare.

We came home, leaving the problem unsolved. Tomorrow, we will teach our master a lesson it will never forget - how an Audio Head must talk to a Radio Slave.

yeh kya bakwas likh daala?

2011-05-05T01:20:00.000+05:30

demag ki dahi mein daalo excitement ka masala,
masti karo jee bhar ke, warna nahin hai guzara!

chote se bacche ne dekho hai kya kar daala,
haanste haanste uske papa ka muh hai dho daala!

engineer ne dekho kaisa code hai likh daala,
chalta walta kuch nahin, client ka paisa khoti kar daala!

dekho dekho Nek Chand ne collect kiya hai kabada,
dekhti hi dekhti usne toh Rock Garden bana daala!

tumne hamari zindagi ki aisa hai sawara,
ki ab gali gali ghoomte hai hum, kutte sa awara!

girl to boy

2011-04-30T03:30:00.000+05:30

"abbe kya dekh raha hai? to you I might seem like a delightful arrangement of atoms, but come any closer and TERE arrangement ki dhajjiyan udha dungi!"

Nervous Intrepid Explorer

2011-04-29T09:03:00.000+05:30

In the deep dark cave, his nervous head bobbed up slowly, breaking the surface of water - just like how the plastic air filled ball inside the flush tank would when a some man pressed the lever painfully slowly towards the unsure end of the urination.

Aprilwish

2011-04-28T01:09:00.003+05:30

It’s hot and I wish I had 16 fingers. 8 on each hand.

No, I don’t want wish that I had some extra super human capability over and above the rest of the population. In fact my wish requires that all of the human species have 16 fingers.

A bead of sweat makes it way down the side of my forehead and slides like a glacier over the side of my cheeks. It leaves a burning trail. I hate shaving on summer days. I hate running out of aftershave even more.

I wipe off the sweat and suck on the straw leading into my cold coffee. Nothing comes up. I suck harder. Cold coffee! What a joke – it’s a mix of super-frozen ice crystals, milk powder and ground coffee bean powder. Café coffee day Express. I remember Scrooge “Bah! Humbug!”

I reconnect with my train of thought (taking a nanosecond detour there to Sheldon Cooper and back ). The only naturally feasible way – think evolution – for 16 fingers to be possible is if our predecessors – all the numerous monkey species should have had them too!

And considering how humans have a knack for over complicating things with their “ingenuity” and uncommon common sense, I will include in my wish that we (and our monkey great grands) have had the same number of digits on their toes too – sweet sixteen !

I suck on the straw with all my strength now, putting to shame the suction capability of even the best vacuum cleaner in the world. Just before I was about to burst a vein on the side of my neck, a barrage of ice crystal spurt forward into my mouth. 2 seconds later brain freeze!!

As the pain subsides, a huge pile of innumerable consequences of having 3 supernumerary digits on each hand and toe slump down upon me – or rather spurt into my head akin to the way those ice crystal rushed into my mouth. I try to organize them in some fashion before I start slicing up my brain time to process each of them.

Enhanced pleasure – more fingers to touch, more fingers to feel. Enhanced speed – more toes, more thrust. Enhanced gripping strength – more fingers to pull-up your fatty fat body as hang on to the door pole of the oh so full fast local.. hey but wait! Damn! We would lose out on the most popular and expressive gesture of all – because now there is no middle finger!!! With that said, I am sure we would come up with an equally capable gesture to replace that one.

The heat distracts me again. I wipe myself with my handkerchief. If we had eight fingers, I am sure the Chinese wouldn’t have gotten around inventing the hand fan – Who needs one when you can just use your hands to fan yourselves. The Japanese who had improved the hand fan by making foldable versions would have instead invented some sort of gloves to add webbing between the fingers and increase the airflow. I try to think how one of those would look like and absentmindedly wrap my handkerchief around my hand trying in vain to create simulate one.

I fiddle with my phone. Landmark and Shopper’s Stop can’t stop offering me discounts that I am not interested. The SMS spam guard app kept the phone from buzzing and irritating me when they bombard me with texts. 900 rupees well spent. But the phone complains. It’s battery is low. Which brings me to the point – the batteries of our devices would last longer – if we had those extra fingers. 16 of ‘em.

Computers and all kinds of tech gadgets have the same basic architecture. There is the Central Processing Unit, Inputs /Outputs and Memories. Inputs are those signals which are external to the system and fed to it via some interface. In case of cell phones these are the keypad for the humans to type with, microphone for them to speak into and the radio receivers – one each for the Cellphone network (GSM or CDMA), WiFi, Bluetooth and FM Radio. The USB interface is also considered and Input when connected to a PC and so is the button on the wired headset. The outputs are the RF transmitters (for GSM/CDMA, WiFi, Bluetooth), Speaker (ear piece, loud speakers and ringer), LCD screen, vibrator motor and the various LEDs which light up the LCD and Keys. The CPU is loaded with handling the plethora of I/O devices (some phones have even more of them, accelerometer, compass, GPS, proximity detector, touchscreen, FM transmitter) and hence the code comprising the software running on it is huge – millions of lines. And people like me all around the world spend their days staring at the computer screen trying to make sense of what the guy who wrote the code in the first place was thinking when he put together the piece of crap on the screen in front of you.

You curse the manufacturer when your phone dies on you. But the truth is that some dude just like you was responsible for the messed up code running inside it. But that’s deviating from the topic. I round up back to the power saving part. Computers and computing gadgets spend an immense amount of electrical energy trying to move data from here to there. Data which is represented in binary – numbers which are represented with just one and zero. Now just because we had 10 digits on the ends of our limbs (10 fingers and 10 toes) we learnt to count with 10 symbols – 0 thru 9 and not 2 or 4 or 8 or 16 which are powers of two. Computers use up extra processing power to convert these binary numbers from binary to decimal just so that its naturally legible to us when printed on the LCD screen. If a two digit binary number can have 2 values (0 or 1), then by extension, a two digit binary number can have four values (00, 01, 10 and 11) similarly a 3 digit binary number can represent 8 distinct symbols and 4 digit binary number can represent 16 distinct symbols. Displaying numbers which are stored in binary format but need to be displayed on the screen in a number system in which the number of symbols is not a power of 2 will always require processing. This means someone has to write code for doing this and what you have are thousands of billions of gadgets around the world doing exactly this and wasting energy. So much effort, so much time, so much energy – all wasted – just because we had 10 fingers and not 16 or even 8 for that matter. By the way, there will be the energy wasted in the extra muscle if we have 16 fingers, but balls to that. Making my life easier as a programmer (and the user of a cell phone that doesn’t waste battery on stupid tasks like number conversion) is the point here.

The cell phone beeps and displays the battery low message again. I imagine it shouting at me as if it was a real talking person “abe battery kam hai, charge karna!”. In hindi? Yes, sounds more dramatic that way. I would imagine it saying that in Gabbar tone.

Cell phone (in Gabbar tone): “Kabhi charge kiya tha?”

Me: “Kal Raat”

Cell Phone (in Gabbar tone): “Kitna kiya tha?”

Me: “pacheees minute”

Cell Phone (in Gabbar tone): “bas pacheees minute charge kiya, lekin istamal 10 ghante kiya? Bahut na insaafi hai”

Of course, I am surely must be exaggerating. Playing doodle jump on my Nokia 5800 definitely used up more juice than the trivial itoa() and atoi() conversions. But still Mother Nature has made it a bit inconvenient for us to discover it secrets. She plays with us. It sent us the wrong signals and caused wrong ideas to develop and by the time we realised what was happening, we were already used to the old convention that we found it difficult to change to the actual truth. For example thanks to Benjamin Franklin’s and his gang we have to contend with messed up electric charge signage. Current flows from positive to negative, while in reality the negative electrons which constitute the current flow the other way. And we had to rack our brains to deal with the equations properly while working on electric systems.

Other complications are manmade: like the plethora of measurement units – Airbus’s A380 was delayed because while building the first prototype, some guys thought the measurement in the drawing was in mm and not inches. Also the lack of symbols in Greek and Latin alphabets has really made life difficult. Many of the physical quantities have been assigned the same symbol. On top of that, unintuitive use of symbols as operators in Mathematics (like Calculus) haunts all students when they are first exposed to them. The only field of since which suffers the least from such kind of “natak” is the field of genetics. Genetics seems to be one of the youngest and most organized field - thanks in part to Mendel, who cared enough to acquaint himself with Scientific Method before getting on with his research. Genetic knowledge has few of these weird problems with formal representation of real life phenomenon.

So what we need is a full reboot of the human society withal the kinks removed. That might just be possible. We have screwed up everything here on earth anyway. Maybe when we colonize Mars (aauw – closer to Sun – means “garmiiii”) we will get a chance to do that.

We definitely need to engineer a new breed. To do that we would need to create a transitional breed of engineered humans who would arrive on mars with all the kinks in their scientific knowledge removed and smoothen out. They would then procreate on the new planet - story would be somewhat like James Bond's Moonraker, but we will leave Earth intact.

We would need to draft and document a new legal and socio-economic system. We would even need to get these new seed people to learn and use Lojban – a logically engineered language which eliminates the possibility of misinterpretation of meaning by the listener. This might be the only chance for the people who invented and promote this language to actually get some to use it.

The seed people would be bought in an isolated environment where we teach them the laws and language of the new society which they would create on the target planet. We will teach them to count – using 16 digits and not 10. Just so that it comes naturally, we would need to pre-modify their genes while they are in their mother’s womb – even before they are born – so that they are born with 8 digits on each hand and feet. As for the mathematics teachers who are to teach them, we will hack into their hands & feet and implant 3 extra digits.

So calling all Genetic Engineers of tomorrow (i.e. biochemistry students of today) – there is lots of work to be done. You need to isolate the genes for Polydactyly (mid ray duplications) and when the technology develops (and people stop cribbing about ethics regarding human experimentation) get hold of some good looking, well built, smart people and get them to have sex with each other and while they are pregnant, screw with the fertilized egg and introduce the gene to create the next stage in the evolution . I remember the documentary they showed on TV about an Indian village where everyone has 6 fingers – what’s its name? Golida?. To start off, they can study the genome of people living there. Or what about that guy from Udaipur who has 12 fingers?. Or even Akshat Saxena : The Indian kiddo with 34 fingers and toes!

While you guys do that, engineers like me will fiddle with our gadgets and modify them for use by these new species. Gadgets ergonomically designed for 16 fingered humans (or whatever we call them) which last longer on a single charge because they don’t have any stupid power wasting numeric conversion calculations to perform.

I dunk the plastic container in the bin. Bid tata to the day dreamer in me and start forcing my mood to flip to being a Tata Consultancy Services employee. This I.T. Analyst has done enough analysis paralysis for the day. The software for 10 fingered humans must still be developed, tested and delivered to the clients. It will be a long time before the 16 finger thing happens. I might not be around till then. And so, I do what’s asked of me. At least the AC is working in the room where my workstation is located.

Look closely

2011-04-24T10:50:00.001+05:30

Look closely at the patterns around you...

..... zoom out a bit and perhaps then you would be able to answer the question "why am i fat and unhealthy?"....

Photos titled: "McDonald's ki maa ki aankh!"

nice quote

2011-04-19T21:12:00.002+05:30

Life is about the people you meet and the things you create with them :)

Almost Died

2011-04-17T02:21:00.001+05:30

warning: unpolished and a bit incoherent BUT factual story ahead (appended video is totally unedited real life video!!)
incident time: 2011-02-27

---

It was a grand plan. A grand plan to admire the beauty of much much grander one - The Sealink.
We were going to shoot a superb video of it and upload it online. We had done it before.
But this time we wanted to be alone about the bridge. No excited shaking and panning around of the camera.
No juvenile shrieks in the background. Just a serene video exposing the awe and wonder that is the Sealink.

We set out. Me at the wheel, Deeksha shotgun and Nehal in the backseat without a belt. Nehal without a belt.
As a driver I was just 5000 kms old. My car was as old as I was a driver - 5000 kms.

I had earned a few minor bumps and scratches over the time but got them old fixed during the second servicing of my new car - A shit coloured Maruti Swift.

Shit coloured - 'coz I didn't care to accompany my dad when he had gone to book the car. Of course the receipt said it was "Sunlight Copper" but that's just

a shiny name for orangey-brown. But once I learned to drive it around, I didn't care - despite the colour, I had managed to convince two girls to ride in it with me. Of course I had grown up with them, had known them all my life and one of them was going to be hitched in a few months - but that’s not the point.

Night. Car. Girls. Sea Link. And a camera to record the beauty. Beauty not of the girls, but of the Sea Link.
I just needed the girls to hold the camera while I drove.

We hit a massive body of traffic while moving on the road next to Juhu beach. People had come out late at night for some god forsaken reason.
Bumper to bumper traffic. I sighed! The city that never sleeps?? Balls!
The city which experiences traffic jams even at 2 am. Damn you Mumbai! Even though you fuck with me, I still love you.

Deeksha was beginning to feel pukey. I had to constantly alternate between accelerating and braking and this was making her nauseous.
Maybe she could hold her stuff till we reach the Sealink. Then I could stop the car and take a photo of her as she puked over the railing.
The camera's flash would highlight the length of her pukey stream and against the dark backdrop of the sea below, would show to the viewer how high the bridge is. I wished we had some water that I could offer her to thin out her puke and lengthen the stream.
I imagine her sticking her head out over the windscreen trying to dodge the wipers and sipping from the mist spray.
That's not what I was thinking as we were stick in traffic. But it could very well have been this. All I remember is that it was something with similar gross factor.

The final vehicle in front of us cleared out and we were free of all the traffic. We rolled down the window to enjoy the breeze. And because that would make Deeksha feel a bit less nauseated. But the damage was done. She declined to hold the camera to shoot the video. She just wanted to go home.
What a bummer. I pressed on "We have come this far, lets atleast go over it and take a u-turn and come back". She agreed.
Nehal, without her seat bealt on, wasn't saying much. Maybe she was asleep too. I thought to myself "thakeli kahin ki".

75 Rupees. Thats all it costs to experience driving over the bridge. Twice.
This time I drove slowly. Below the 50 kmph speed limit. I wanted us to experience the complete package of pleasure one gets by riding over it.

It reminds us of the power man can have over nature. I remembered the three reasons which make Reinforced Cement Concrete possible - steel and concrete have the same coefficient of thermal expansion, the microscopic surface of the steel is such that it improves the cohesion of cement to it and finally the alkaline nature of cement causes a passive formation of film on the steel which slows down corrosion. The awesome fact that all this is possible would make any one start believe in the greatest dude of all - God!. I don't know what else he wanted us to do or how he wanted us to live our lives. All I know is that he wanted us to make buildings. And bridges. Lots of them. And huge!

Anyway coming to back to the story, I drove over the awesome bridge, came out on the worli side turned around the circle and then a U turn later was back on the road leading back to the bridge. I was feeling sad that the girls were being useless and wanted to do something about it. I took out my cell phone. While driving. Over the bridge. Right when I thought the curvature had ended and the straight section had begun. I was fumbling with the cell phone trying to get it into video mode. At 80 kmph. Just then Deeksha shouted "Aya aye hey Anurag!".

I was about to drive into the side wall, and get us all killed. We could have dashed into the side wall, flipped over to the other side, crashed into the oncoming traffic in the other lane and then finally be bumped off into the sea where the filthy mutant fish flourishing in the mouth of the nala that is the Mithi River; would devour our bodies and return it to the polluted nutrient pool.

But that didn't happen. Amazingly neither did my testicles suddenly disapparate from my sac and apparate in my mouth. There was no adrenalin rush.
Within that split second I was able to brake just enough and steered and got the car to veer off away from the wall and back on the track.

Nehal was jerked hard to the other side and hurt her shoulder.
I thought the girls would kill me now. But neither of them knew how to drive. They had learnt how to but never practiced. So atleast I was alive till I got them back home till Andheri. I apologized profusely. I felt different. Like a hypocrite. I felt angry at myself for getting us killed almost. It didn't matter to me that we were still alive. Because this is how people die and I had done everything that could lead us to that. Sealink. Deathlink.
I felt as if my project had failed. Project, not to shoot the magnificent sea link, but to get us killed.

I wanted to kick my sorry ass. I remember thinking to myself that maybe I ought to drop them home and go right back and drive off the sealink. Fucking Shit. How could I do this.

"Dar gaya na" Deeksha said after a few minutes of driving in silence. Yup I was scared all right. Not at The moment when it could have happened. Weirdly I hadn't felt any rush at that moment when it happened. Maybe that helped to save the car and myself and the girls. The scary part came later as I realised slowly what could have happened. And what made it worse was that I was very much capable of screwing up like that in the future too. Maybe I should give up driving. Maybe everyone should give up driving. Damnnnn...

Instead of screwing up my case, Deeksha was in fact thankful to me. Who doesn’t want added excitement in their lives?

As for Nehal, who wasn't wearing a seat belt, she wore her scar on right shoulder proudly. It could very well have been a hicke. So she thought that people would think.

As for me the experience was life changing. Worth sharing. Online.
Worth risking it being read by our parents.
I hope the probability that they will ever stumble across it is the same as the minuscule probability that saved us.
Or better still, I hope it’s the same as the combined probability that we lived and that the camera actually recorded the whole incident!

april wish

2011-04-16T12:14:00.001+05:30

Sometimes I think, do I have a choice? can't I just give up on you? nah!! The shit I am made of has too much of you in it.. punishment
for growing up with you, getting messed up same as you - no i am not being sarcastic - we aren't like two pillars standing parallel holding up elegantly a
magnificent piece of architecture that's what married people are supposed to be like - but they aren't and neither are we, but atleast unlike married people,
we have no illusions about it. we are more like two doughnut shape magnets forged into one another - chipped here and there and with pieces of ferric pebbles and rust clinging to them - as if some kid dropped them in the soil below and now is trying helplessly to get rid of the messy particles clinging to them
but somehow he can't - frustrated he throws them away, runs to his mom and cries asking for another pair.
our friends are like that kids, they have given up on us, discarded us - we are a lost cause they say, they think they have tried enough. according to them we suck all the light out of every room we enter.
a weird thought flashed across my mind today. maybe its not both of us. maybe its just you. maybe you are the screwed up one, the diseased one, the parasite. maybe if i tried hard, i could get rid of you, make it out on my own with whatever life i have left in me.
a few moments later, i flick off the cigarette bud into the toilet, pull up my shorts, flush it and say goodbye to the shit that just went thru my mind.

its difficult to imagine life without you. i call you up. you still haven't left office. like always i cant understand why. i wish we were a better team. i wish
there were loads of tickmarks on our life's combined todo list. but first i wish i had washed my ass before pulling up my pants. its april, sweaty and well now its stinky too!

----

this unpolished, incoherent, demag ki khujli dedicated to the person who only loves to think that she is a lost cause but in reality isn't: http://paroxysmsofacynic.blogspot.com

Ungrateful Queen's stubborn phoenixes

2011-02-24T03:16:00.002+05:30

Like an efficient army of soldiers,
they cover the land they protect - completely,
the land they serve, is alive
ages of evolution, and yet they still survive.

When the cold air starts to convect
at a moment's notice, they stand erect
trying hopelessely to fend off this enemy
which boldly steals the warmth from under their feet.

The queen of their lands
also the owner of their glands
like the one in Alice
is evil and ungrateful.

They enhance her pleasure by amplifying her tactile sensation
but she only subjects them to condemnation
And for them, the femme
hatches a plan to uproot them from their stem

She floods the plains with hot lava
which sticks to their bodies like a parasite
finally relieving them from their plight
she rips their bodies with a sheet in a single strike

Betrayed, they inflict pain to the one who did them harm
also leaving behind red bumps on her arm.
A few days later the red bumps subside
but the essence of the soldiers still resides.

Like Phoenixes rising from their ashes,
they will once more spring forth from pits
repeatedly showing off their grit
and forcing the Queen out of her wits.

Carnal Pleasure(s)

2011-02-24T03:15:00.001+05:30

A need, so essential

A desire, so basic

An urge, so wild

A task , exhilarating

An experience, so relieving...

I say "are you fucking or crapping?"

From a Star Trek fan's point of view..

2011-02-23T21:12:00.000+05:30

Sometimes you are proud to be a Mumbaikar, sometimes proud to be a Maharashtrian, Sometimes you are proud to be an Indian, Sometimes you are proud to be a Human.. Dunno what the big deal is, I am just happy to be alive..

PreTribute

2011-01-30T22:00:00.000+05:30

"This is quite abrupt" she thought
She hadn't expected to do this amongst strangers
She always imagined doing it with the love of her life
She was not alone now, yet she longed for someone..
..someone not amongst the faces in the crowd around her

She let go of the cords that held her in place
Defeating even gravity, as she floated freely
Ticking off another item in her TODO list
even at such a serious moment

Everyone around her was crying, like sheep bleating
But she was calm and relaxed
She blitzkrieged through the 37 chapters of her story
It was a nice story, maybe her namesake would pen it down someday

The lights went out, she didn't care
There were two fluorescent nexuses lit up like fairies
She was swinging and swirling now,
The two fairies wound around her, wrapping her in a double helix

The fairies - they closing in,
She remembered the feeling and the logo of the place she used to work at.
But this was different, she felt warmth - not trapped
She felt content

Over the din, she heard the captain announce
"Ohhh Goddd.. May our souls rest in peace"
She was already at peace with herself
At 300 kmph, the waters of the pacific ocean are as hard as granite.

Eddy

2011-01-30T19:03:00.003+05:30

Concentric circles of water bubbles in an Induction Cooker
(Reminds me of that experiment to trace out
the magnetic lines of force using iron filings)

Kya khoya? Kya paaya?

2011-01-12T00:36:00.001+05:30

Evolution is the prize for sex
Death is the price for sex

A Cross sectional epoch of life in the Empire of the Sun

2010-12-20T13:48:00.002+05:30

He is the ultimate creator. Ultimate enough for this story. He didn’t create the universe, nor did he come up with the laws that govern it – the very laws that facilitated his existence and of those above him. Like a functionary in a huge hierarchy, he sits smug in his end of the galaxy with his progeny (and their progeny) , moving around him - worshipping him.

His eight major sons and daughter (nine if you count the one who was banished recently) respect his superiority – after all they owe their existence to him. Like all families, one of the siblings is the favourite and most pampered of them all – The third one from her father. She has been endowed with a gift of organic life by her father. “Earth” is what her own progeny calls her. Her elder brother Jupiter is quite fond of her and protects her from the millons of their other siblings who - from time to time - in an envious rage hurl themselves towards her.

The Earth is a proud parent of millions of species of life. She carries them around like a marsupial in her pocket - the biosphere. A layer of ozone & a geomagnetic field is what she uses as a defence to protect her little ones from the radiant gaze of her father. At places where the field is weak, the radiance creates wonderful floating ribbons of light – like a nexus between the father and daughter. One particularly naïve species called humans are enchanted by these.

The Earth wants her children to coexists, but one of them has started to bully others. Humans are turning out to be thankless little brats. They hope around multiplying, messing up everything everywhere. But the earth is hopeful, they will grow up someday, take care of her, make her proud.

--Tone Change--

Sun provides for his grandchildren. It sends countless miniscule bundles of light outwards. Some of these fall on the Earth and are absorbed by plants which store this energy in chemical bonds. The have been doing this forever. When they die, they get buried under tonnes of soil and get fossilized and turn into liquid – one so potent that millions of years later, it is dug out by humans and is now used by them as fuel – to power their lives and their greed.

Humans are magicians. They are beginning to master the art of manipulating the small – chemistry. It’s this craft that has improved (or messed up?) their lives. They extract petroleum from the earth and make thousands of useful products from it – some help them move around, some allow them to light up the night and keep working past their bedtime and some let them create nifty strings of threads to adorn their clothing. These artificial fibres are meticulously combined with natural fibres from certain plants to create lovely pink dresses for little girls whose parents are rich enough to buy these for them on their 5^th birthday. The little girl becomes fond of the dress and wears them for a while. She has been fortunate enough to live a life of luxury.

The pink dress is washed in a washing machine in a whirling swarm of detergent molecules and water. Some of these molecules (and those of air later on) who have been promoted to the extreme right end of the Maxwells’ bump are naught enough to knockout a few of the dye molecules off the dress. The ultraviolet photons from the sun who are lucky enough to have evaded the Ozone molecules of the atmosphere hit the dress as it is drying. Some of them have the right energy to penetrate and disintegrate the dye molecule. The colour of the dress fades, the girl grows up, and the dress is donated to the maid servant’s little girl. The dress has a second life.

The maid’s girl dreams of a future life when she is able to buy a new one for herself instead of wearing tatters dumped at her. She studies hard, and begins to traverse the numerous lanes of life. The path is treacherous but the vision of her own new dress propels her forward.

She has now graduated, works at a small firm – small enough to still use Tally for their accounting needs. She needs the money for further studies. She day dreams about the dress. She would need a larger size now. And the colour? What colour would look best on her? Her skin used to be dark when she was young – the same insolation which turned her dark had faded the dress. But now her family had prospered. She didn’t have to be out in the Sun anymore. She was fairer. A customer walks in and makes a purchase interrupting her chain of thought. She punches a few keys, a few electrons give off a few photons which hit other electrons and so the cycle continues within the computer until the printer churns out the bill for the gentleman. The customer leaves, the girl returns to her thoughts. She thinks of her mother now. Her mother is old and weak. The sun burns its hydrogen to provide for life. In the same way, her mother’s bones had parted with some of their calcium to create the bones for her daughter. Old ages had taken its toll, the mothers bones were weak now. The dress will have to wait a bit longer.

(This was inspired consciously by http://tara-think.blogspot.com/2010/12/sincerely-from-biochemistry-student.html and probably subconsciously by one of Upasna's posts)

Restaurant near the beach

2010-11-17T07:37:00.000+05:30

Once there was a restaurant called 'signature',
which received patrons of the highest stature.
Of the good food we were soon bereft,
The restaurant closed down and we were like "What the eff?"

'Shatranj Napoli' was the name of the successor,
Which received negative reviews from all connoisseurs.
The service was bad, and the food did suck,
And the only time we went there, we were like "What the *uck?"

Today there is a new joint thats come up there ova,
Invoking hopes and expectations from everyone in versova.
Let's see if the new one can rise above the muck
After all its been done up and aptly name "WTF?"

Mango Adventure

2010-10-04T15:08:00.000+05:30

Live in Mumbai for all your life - you need not have been born there, but you should have grown up there.
As you grow up, your needs will increase, but don't worry about it, coz your family will prosper as well.
Shift to a bigger house in a new building, coz your parents decide that you and your siblings now need a seperate room each.
Wait for 3-4 years. Mumbai monsoon will wreck havoc on your building - paint will start pealing off and dust/dirt will accumulate in and around the various crevices on the facade of your building.
Highspeed winds and pigeons will deposit plant seeds in this dirt and rain water will cause them to hatch into saplings (Figures 1a, 1b, 1c & 1d).

Figure 1a

Figure 1b

Figure 1c

Figure 1d

In other cases a kid will hide from his mom (or an old mom will hid from her grown up kid who has kids of his own) and without paying heeds to her words, would have just a "last, chota saa, iske baad aur nahin" sweet sweet mango. And then all evidence of the puerile pleasure will need to be hidden - and so the mango seed is ducked outside the bathroom window....(Figures 2)

Figure 2

... whence it falls down bouncing off the plumbing and walls and finally landing on to the ledge outside your bathroom window along with other refuse such as toffee wrappers, gutka packets thrown by workers, pieces of duct tape and of course used condoms and their wrappers (yuck!!).
The next monsoon, the mango sapling takes root, coaxed out of its seed by the rain. Other saplings (mostly useless weeds) growing in the dirt on the ledge keep it company. (Figures 3a and 3b)

Figure 3a

Figure 3b

At the end of monsoon, its time to clean up your house. After fighting off booklice in vain, you decide to do something which you think would be more under control. So you call your mom and tell her about your plan to climb out onto the ledge , clean up the dirt, remove the weeds and save the mango plant. She ways "Waise toh yeh paudhe kabhi ugane se bhi theek se nahin ugte, but kachre mein padhe padhe kahin bhi ugna chalu kar dete hain". You smirk, you were expecting such a line from her.
So you go ahead and remove the glass louvers one by one (Figure 4)..

Figure 4

.. and climb out on to the ledge and start cleaning stuff.Some of the crap fall down and you hear someone shouting from down below. You keep at it, scooping out all the dirt using a spoon and collecting out into the plastic bag. You save the mango plant and clean it up. (Figures 5a and 5b)

Figure 5a

Figure 5b

A few earthworm falt out along with the dirt as you clean up the mangoplants root - they will have to be sacrificed - down in to the drain they go! (Figure 6)

Figure 6

You look down out at the area around your society's gym/club house and pick a spot for your new mango plant. (Figure 7)

Figure 7

You go down and survey the area (Figure 8), find an empty pot and plant your mango sapling. You catch a few earthworm and put them into the flower pot to keep your plant some company. (Figure 9)

Figure 8

Figure 9

You water the plant regularly whenever you pass by and feel smug about it.
And since you have nothing better to do, you blog about it.
Technology (internet, digital camera, irfanview) helps you polish your mediocrity and soon enough, there are people reading about your adventure.
But you like gardening - and getting to do something even remotely close to gardening in this overcrowded Mumbai City is something significant - something worth telling your friends!

Fun times with DVG!

2010-08-06T15:12:00.007+05:30

Here's a list of projects I have collaborated on with Prof. Dhananjay V. Gadre (In chronological order):

AVR Workshop at VESIT
(1 to 5 September 2005, VESIT, Mumbai)
Helped organize/manage. Report and photos here.
Multi Utility Sensor Network
(December 2005 to March 2006, VESIT, Mumbai)
During the AVR workshop DVG suggested us to clone the audience poll voting pad from the "Who wants to be a millionaire?" TV game show using a wired multi-drop network. It was also our final project at VESIT. Project synopsis:
Designed and successfully implemented a wired sensor network capable of sensing and controlling physical parameters involved in any kind of process control. The project involved connecting Atmel’s AVR Microcontrollers over the RS485 bus in a multi-drop configuration. The microcontrollers were programmed in embedded C and the front-end was created using Java. The project was selected to be displayed in the Student’s Pavilion at Elecrama 2006 held in Mumbai by IEEMA. Elecrama is one of the largest biennial exhibitions of Electrical and Electronics products in the world. The project was awarded Distinctive Excellence at the Atmel AVR 06 Design Contest organized by Circuit Cellar (Entry/Abstract Link). An article decribing the project was published in Circuit Cellar 203 titled "Network of Keypads".

DVG wasn't present physically, but he guided us over internet/phone. Our project guide was Prof. Abhay Khirsagar and we had three teams working on the project:
- Embedded Hardware (from Electronics Engineering):
  Anurag Chugh (Me), Shweta Saraf, Richa Tewari, Rohan Raghunath begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, Charuta Ambardekar
- Embedded Software (from Electronics Engineering):
  Sneha Lele, Kirti Ramnath, Varsha Mishra, Smita Kumar
- Host (PC Side) Software (from Computer Engineering):
  Sanket Hase, Parag Shah, Shauvik Roy Choudhary
Reports: Hardware Design | Embedded Software Design | Host Software Design

We dedicate this project to Deep S. Bhattacharjee who left left us in a tragic accident during the floods of 26th July 2005. He was part of our Host Software Team.
A Project for Delhi Metro Rail Corporation
(June - July 2006, NSIT/DMRC Najafgarh depot Delhi)
This involved retro-fitting Train Integrated Management System with Serial Device Servers . Every night DMRC maintenance staff used to access all of the 70 odd trains one by one in each of the three depots around Delhi and download data from TIMS on to their laptops to diagnose failures before they occur (preventive maintenance). The laptop connects to the TIMS computer via RS232 DE-9 Cable (straight cable - 3 wires only TxD, RxD, GND, 115200 bps 8-E-1, no flow control, approx 9000 characters per second). To make the whole process easier and decrease wear and tear on connectors and laptop and conserve man power, DMRC wanted us to make the system go wireless. We tried to replace the wired serial link with XBee modules and Atmega128s, but that obviously didnt work due to the high character rate. Bluetooth was out of question (Bluetooth data rate and range is as bad as ZigBees and as far as we knew, a bluetooth piconet can only have 7 nodes) Then we tried replacing the serial link with an ethernet device server. They had just been introduced in Indian market and we had a real adventure getting our hands on one of them. We combined that Ethernet Device Server with a WiFi Router and it worked successfully. We left the project at that and never heard from DMRC whether they implemented the system or not.
A small Visual Basic software on the Client PC side could have been written to ping IP addresses of each of the 70 serial device servers (or WiFi Routers) on each of the 70 trains in the depot. This software would maintain an upto date list of all train parked in the depot at any given time and the user sitting at the PC could click on any train on the list to create a virtual serial port connection over WiFi/Ethernet to that train's TIMS and fire-up Mitsubishi's TIMS front-end PC application to download the data from the particular train. Of course we never got around to create this software either.
The project was done at Najafgarh Depot in Delhi. The team comof three persons: Me and my friends Sneha Lele and Ranjit Puri. From DMRC's side, Mr. Jitendra Malik guided us. He was the Senior Section Engineer at Najafgarh Depot then.
Various Development Boards for use during Embedded Workshops for Engineering Undergrad
(2006-2008)
- ATmega8
  USB Powered, MAX232, 4 switches, 4 LEDs, 16x2 LCD, Thermistor, LDR etc.
- AVR Butterfly Carrier
  USB Powered , 3.6V NiCd Battery, LEDs and Switches, general purpose area etc. The library I made for Butterfly has become quite popular!
- Xilinx XC9572
  CPLD, Parallel Port programmable, DC powered, 7 segment LEDs, switches
  ... and many other boards too.
Various fun project built around the AVR Microcontrollers
(2006-2009)
- Blinking an LED on AVR using Lemon Power
  Four lemon batteries (pieces of lemon with zinc and copper electrodes) connected in series are enough to power a ATTiny13V microcontroller.Video here.
- 3 Dimensional LED Hourglass based around Atmega32
  This would have been a super cool project, but we never got around to finish it off. I guess we need LEDs which would disperse light sideways. Video here.
- A few projects based around charlieplexed displays
  There was a passing time when we became fans of the charlieplexing technique. This resulted in quite a few projects, some of which made it as articles in electronics magazines: EDN (Two digit Display) and Electronic Design (LED Bar graph). The one in Electronic Design became the Idea for Design of the year 2007.
Fablab
(2006-2009)
DVG has been associated with the Fablab program for quite sometime now and due to my proximity to him, I have had a minor bit of involvement with Fablab too. After the FAB5 conference (photos by Frosti Gíslason) I setup this site - which is an index to various Fablab websites around the world – to enable the community members keep in better touch with each other. Also I was forced to appear (with a dumb hat on! :) ) in this video of Electronic Birthday Candles which was prototyped on Roland MDX-20 Modela (standard Fablab issue).
Textbook on the 8051 microcontroller
(Jan 2008-May 2009)
Cengage Learning approached us to come up with a new and revised version of Kenneth Ayala's classic textbook: The 8051 Microcontroller. 1.5 years and a zillion hurdles later, we finally finished updating the existing book and the updated version was published. The most significant additions include:
- A few chapters on how to program 8051s using the C language.
- A chapter describing newer variants of 8051 available in the market.
- Appendices describe the installation and use of freeware open source development tools for 8051 and a low cost development system.
- All diagrams have been redrawn and the coloured versions of those are included on the accompanying CD.
We have made a companion site for the book here.

Prof. Dhananjay Gadre and I have been in touch ever since I emailed him after reading this article which appeared in May 2005 issue of EFY:

Stuff under 100x Microscope

2010-07-27T22:07:00.004+05:30

Here are some common materials as seen through an Illuminated Microscope (60x-100x) bought from RadioShack

Piece of Fabric

Printed Pape (Magazine / CMYK)

Bhusawal ka chor

2010-06-01T23:46:00.002+05:30

Bhusawal se chada tha woh train mein
choori ke irade se
ek archan aa gayi uske plan mein
khopdi mein bheje ki kami se

He was about to take off with the lady's bag
But was noticed by the husband of the old hag
The lady was being critical about our generation
And now she was being punished for her baseless accusations

Soon the TC and RPF were called
And so began a verbal brawl
The youth began reciting his well reharsed story
And secretly one of us wished the scene would turn gory

Ladke ne fekna chalu kiya lambi lambi
Dene hindi ka exam koi
ja raha tha woh mumbai

TC aur RPF use le gaye
auntyji ka purse toh khojne pe bhi mila nahin
itne excitement se toh bhai hum thak gaye
so kar hoosh kab khoya pata nahin

A few minutes later
There was some further chatter
The lady's bag was located
And her happiness was reinstated

.. a poem about a foiled robbery incident onboard our train as we returned home from Jabalpur inaccurately narrated by me in hinglish.

Versova Post Office

2010-05-24T18:54:00.009+05:30

Cost of couriering some documents from Mumbai to Shanghai:
DHL: Rs. 2150
IndiaPost EMS (also known as SpeedPost) : Rs. 469

And yet most of us end up going for the first option (i.e. Private Shippers) instead of our government's own courier service. Most of us have an impression that visit to government offices is full of hassles - that even a small thing such as posting a letter would take lots of physical and mental energy - not to mention the bribes and forms and getting sent from desk to desk.

Well the truth is totally different altogether. There are proper procedures for getting any work done at a government office. Everything is well documented - only thing is that either most information is not available online or if it is, then its outdated/not organized properly. And since we don't know where else to get that information, we inevitably try to ease our lives by paying agents or avoiding government services altogether.

So being a good citizen, I would like share all that I learnt today at IndiaPost's Versova Sub post office:

Number of postmen: 14
Beats: 9
First Deliver: 10:30
Last Deliver: 14:30
Versova Post Office Accepts Mahanagar Gas Bill Payment
You can also submit Right To Information requests at this post office.
They handle 11,000 articles of post every month.
They are open till 13:00 everyday. If you visit before this time, your work would be definitely done.
You can open savings accounts at post offices too!
You can send couriers around the world using Express Mail Service (EMS / SpeedPost) thru this post office. You will be given a tracking number which you can track thru IndiaPost's website: http://www.indiapost.gov.in
There are lots of general instructions/procedures made available on the website above. If you havent used post office's services before, please do have a look at their website. Of all the government websites, IndiaPost's seems to be the most informative: there is information about philately, saving accounts opening instructions & forms, speedpost price calculator, package tracking and documents describing the various general operating procedures of Post Offices across India.
Finally here are pictures that I took of some notices at the versova post office:

So I hope this information helps anyone looking for it. Please do not hesitate to use our government's postage services. Once you get used to using them (which happens quite easily and quickly), you can reap the benefits by saving lots of money!

PS: Our government has a National Portal too: http://www.india.gov.in/
PPS: The page at: http://www.india.gov.in/howdo/index.php describes the instructions a citizen needs to follow to get any particular work done (e.g. apply for PAN card/ Passport). Maybe I was wrong. All info IS available online - we are just too lazy to look it up!!!!

Fun times at L & T EmSyS with friends

2010-05-13T13:27:00.007+05:30

Here is a tribute to our friendship and the moments we spent at EmSyS, Powai. The tribute is in a story form titled: "agar hamari moms friends hoti and if we were all born on the same day.."

once there were 6 ladies, they were best friends : AM, KM, JM, SM, HM, DM

They were childhood friends fir sab bade ho gaye aur unki shaadi ho gayi and guess what? they were all expecting us on and around the same day...
Sab pregnant the and sab apne apne ghar pe baithe rehte the.. they used to talk to each other on fone whenever they had mood swings.. pregnancy mein hota hai na..
Ek din (very near their delivery date), they were talking on the fone.. cordless .. conference call sab ke sab 6 log.. it was 10 pm at night, thats when KM said "i think my water just broke and I am going into labour". So she kept the fone down called her husband and they went to the Kokila ben hospital. The other 5 ladies thought: "well what the hell, lets us all get admitted together at the same hospital, KM ki baari aa gayi toh hamari baari bhi aane wali hogi!"

So they all reached the hospital and they asked the hospital staff to admit them into the same huge hall... so all 6 of them had their beds in the same room... so KM was already in labour when the other 5 ladies entered the hall, the doctor their looked at the clock and said "its taking a long time, its already 11:59 PM, lagta hai aapka baccha ab kal pesh hoga!" and the moment he said that, the clock struck 12:00am and a baby boy popped out and lo and behold he was named "KALPESH" and then there was joy and happiness and tears and 5 other ladies huddled around KM and Kalpesh.

Two hours passed and their was no action, KM decided to stay on till the other 5 of her best friends delivered, she thought out loud "we are so lucky to have are kids born on the same day!". Well another hour passed and the ladies were getting anxious/impatient.. next kiska aayega... so to pass the time they ordered tea. The nurse bought them tea but then everyone knows, pregnant ladies get super hungry, so AM asked for Rusk/marie biscuts along with the chai and the nurse obliged. Thats when it happened, DM had just dipped a biscut in her Tea when her chance came. After lots of pushing and heaving, out came a girl! and she was named "DEEPTI" (actually nurse vernacular medium school se thi so DIPTEA ki jagah DEEPTI likh diya).

So they were all now sitting together and looking at the two earlybirds.. "so cute! so cute!" is all one could hear. And all that excitement got KALPESH and DEEPTI excited too, they laughed and laughed and laughed... and chote bacchon ko toh kuch bladder control nahin hota toh, aise cute jaisa itna hasenge toh susu bahar aa jaayega hi na.. toh dono ne susu kar diya.. floor pe gir gaya sab. Toh nurse aayi saaf karne with a mop. Mop chota sa tha, so she couldnt clean the whole thing up so AM said "hey nurse I think you need A NEW RAG to clean the whole thing up"... jaise hi AM ne woh bola tab woh labour mein chale gayi and few minutes later out came a boy and they named him "ANURAG". They didnt want a "W" in his name so they changed NEW to NU.

And so now 50% process complete ho gaya tha.. three kids were remaining!
A few minutes later, SM went into labour.. her labour lasted the longest, her kid was the fattest na! thats why! bahut bahut der ke baad ek moti se cute si girl was born. SM was relived and so were the rest 5. The nurse took the girl and bathed her. While she was away the six of them were fighting what to name the girl.. zoor zoor se naam chilla rahe the .. they were so excited that maybe SM and her kid would be awarded the LIMCA book of records ka record for the heavyiest baby and during that lound discussion/commotion, the nurse entered with the latest baby and was asking them "bacchi ka naam kya rakhna hai" . Sab log itna chilla rahe the excitement mein (and ANURAG<>

Praying on a soldering iron!

2010-04-25T02:06:00.007+05:30

These pictures were taken on 2004 July 24 at VESIT during preparations for Robocon 2004.
The pictures were taken using a sad camera (actually it was a logitech webcam capable of taking pictures). The Praying Mantis came in from the open widows along with lots of other insects. This was during the rainy season. Soldering iron's warmth might have attracted it..

Deeksha ne banaya ... mera South Park avatar!

2010-04-19T15:57:00.002+05:30

Thanku Deeksha!

AVRISPwith a blown up AT90S8535

2010-04-16T14:43:00.003+05:30

Q: What happens when an exposed Vcc pin of a target system (with an AVRISP connected to it) accidentally brushes against a +12V DC battery terminal?

A: The AT90S8535 (inside the AVRISP) blows its lid off - literally. The pictures below say it all. (Happened during Robocon days at VESIT)

For a photograph of a silicon chip inside an AVR (A90S1200) with its various regions marked, look here.

AVR Butterfly Eagle part

2010-04-12T20:25:00.001+05:30

Just found out that the AVR Butterfly library I made for cadsoft's eagle has been downloaded by 55,745 people.. whoopie...
"butterfly9.lbr" is the third most downloaded file at
http://www.cadsoftusa.com/cgi-bin/download.pl?page=/home/cadsoft/html_public/download.htm.en&dir=eagle/userfiles/libraries

feels nice :)

Lovestories

2010-03-21T20:30:00.002+05:30

Makers dont need a resume,
Makers have a collection of stories
Stories of Adventures
Stories of their Love for things, people and places...
... stories that never end but fade on to other stores
and this collection of chronological stories forms their lifestory.

I like my lifestory so far.
I like the stories of my friends. Our stories are intertwined. And I am proud to be in the same story with them!

Haji Ali

2010-01-27T21:49:00.004+05:30

Concrete Jungle mein wires ka Jhamela

2010-01-20T13:19:00.002+05:30

Belapur..

Auntyji & Uncleji in the park.

2010-01-20T13:15:00.004+05:30

And the gate of the park they were in..

Like an Oasis in the middle of a Concrete Jungle

2010-01-14T15:37:00.001+05:30

Watchman having a siesta at a joggers park next to our apartment building

Chunnabhatti

2009-12-28T18:09:00.002+05:30

Cult of the dead frog!

2009-12-28T18:06:00.005+05:30

"Cult of the Dead Frog!"
Thats what i am going to call our new upcoming hackerspace!!
(actually lets stick to "ukhadnewale unlimited")
Found this poor guys body near my office.. just a few secs and he would have saved himself.. got run over by a skoda

Toothpaste Sex!

2009-12-28T15:18:00.004+05:30

Actually this seems so gay! (both tubes are same, same gender!)
Mr. "Gillette After Shave" Uncle is the pervert voyeur next door.

Being Bad?

2009-10-26T00:38:00.004+05:30

"Why be good?" Draupadi asks

We have two choices : be good or be bad.
Some times badness increases in burst mode (world war, mahabharata..), only to be overcome by goodness again only so that humanity survives again - and have a chance to be bad again. Thats probably because our activities increase the entropy of our universe. When we are bad, the entrpy generated is even more during that time, but we cant keep at being bad for long lengths of time because we might destroy ourselves...

There is an inner voice which keeps most of us inclined to being good for most of the time. Its an evolutionary response I guess, because if it werent so, we wouldnt trust each other. Shopkeepers won;t sell stuff to people, we wouldnt give our money to the banks or banks wouldnt loan us money.

People worry about too much corruption and evilness in this world. But maybe its a bit overrated. There are so many self correcting mechanisms in this world. If any one thing increases too much, the world, line an organism responds to automatically adapt the other parameters so as to cause the decline of that one surging thing. Econmic booms and recessions are a part of this mechanism driven by peoples greeds and fears alone : sometimes greed overcomes fears and at other times vice versa.

So if everyone went about being bad, they will sooner or later realise that they might actually die if they dont start being good to each other and trusting each other.....

Mahatma Gandhi said "You must be the change you wish to see in the world"
Maybe thats a simple interpretation of the self correcting mechanism.
Why should I treat someone in a way other than how I would want him/her treating me?

People are good only when presented against the backdrop of bad ones.
What use is goodness if there is no badness for it to conquer.

Consider the Output Variable for a simple control loop to be the "current amount of badness in the world"
The control system is configured to decrease the badness - not to zero (because then the control loop wouldnt be needed at all and everyone would be good to each other and hence life would be boring) but to some lower constant level which ensures our survival till some universal law deems our the event of our extinction more useful than our continued prosperity. In the feedback lie the good people. People switch from the forward loop to the feedback loop all the time - sometimes being good, sometimes being bad.

What part of the loop do you belong to at the moment?
Dont worry if you are good or bad - we all have our part to play.

Sounds fatalist? Yes
My friends would even say that what I just said are actually against my own beliefs too - I believe that we have the power to control our own destiny and we are ourselves responsible for our own actions.

But look at it this way: My quest of being more & more like Roark carries meaning only because there are others who strive to be like Keating, Gail, Toohey, Dominique or Cathrine.

Maybe we all give meaning to each other's life. "you are, therefore i am"

Take a Left, Take a right or standstill?

2009-10-08T01:09:00.003+05:30

Reading Page 119 of "The Difficulty of Being Good" by Gurcharan Das:

Perform necessary action;
it is more powerful than inaction;
without action you even fail
to sustain your own body.

In other words, do not renounce the world and become a hermit. Instead, learn to change your attitude while living and working in the world.

Reminds me of two things..
1) Dead people people on Miranda who stopped living because of the side effects of the chemical gas released in the ventilation system in Serenity
2) South Park - Spontaneous Combustion.. the episode in which people start blowing up because they dont fart.

Moral: We must fart to sustain our lives.. you have two options.. go fart in the bathroom or in front of your girlfriend, but dont choose not to fart. prrrrrp!!

fishy.swf

2009-05-10T20:27:00.013+05:30

Play here: fishy.swf

Anu-gags..

2009-05-03T17:49:00.005+05:30

so here are a few collection of Anu-gags.. all of 'em courtesy deeksha arunachalam.. except for where specified

Q: What do u call anurag when he's stuck in a marshy place?
A: Anu-bog

Q: I got a new one... What do u call anurag when he's all old n wrinkled n doesnt use botox?
A: Anu-sag. .. Ha ha ha. Cyrus the virus.

Q: What do u call anurag after he gets dressed fully?
A: anu- garb.

Q: Got it! What do u call anurag when he's obsessing about sex?
A: anu-shag. Shag in brit means to have sex n not khud khushi.

Q: Anu and frog?
A: Anufrog (this one was by amruta)

Q: What do you call Anu when he is busy playing stupid fish games? (google fishy.swf)
A: Anu-rawas

Random:Yaaaay! I knew it. U maybe unpredictable but are quite dependable. Anu-wah-wag :-)

Another Random: Anu-virus. Wait, i'll draw ur diagram...

Q: What do u call anurag when he shows off?
A: Anu-brag

Q: What do u call anurag when he visits the Czech capital?
A: Anu-prague

Q: What do you call a mad anurag?
A: anu-the-rage (Kunal Zope used to call me that .. even before Deeksha invented it)

Q: What do call anurag when he suddenly dresses up like a woman?
A: anu-drag

Q: What do u say when anurag sells his latest idea to...say....microsoft and then becomes a millionaire overnight?
A: an anu-rags to riches story.

Q: What you call anurag after he has done some stupidity?
A: Oh-no-rag (this was my own i think)

Random photos in and around belapur

2009-03-24T01:07:00.003+05:30

marna padega sabko..

2009-02-23T10:52:00.004+05:30

let them die.. let us all die.. i will die..
die die die

consider reproduction:

asexual: one mother creates two daughter.. two line.. if one line has better mutation , it survives and the other line dies..(but mutations are rare..)
consider if both lines have two different mutations.. both beneficial for survival... then both lineages will survive but then the good genes would never mix.. because no sex.. so this aint so good.. and since very little genetic diversity, any abrupt change in environment can wipe out the entire population.. so not good for evolution

sexual: requires two different kinds of individuals with differently developed organs, time is required for courting/mating etc etc.. basically cumbersome because of time required and the chance factor.. (what are the chances of finding the rght mate(read falling in love) at a given place? - you will eventually find one, but the point is that it takes time.. so population grows slowly)

so in old days one male with good genes mates with a female with good genes and produces child(ren). these original parents with one good gene each are allowed to mate with other males and females to produce more and more kids (we were originally promiscuous .. and still are subconsciously - brave new world) one of these kids has the best genes.. so he/she lives longer (ie is brave so isnt killed in some acccident or can resist disease better) .. so for this new good mutation to be passed one, one requires that this one guy have many children and he should pass on his gene to them. Then these children mate with others of the population and then the new population all have these genes. This means that others who do not have this gene must die out..(unlike in asexual reproduction, parents divide into two children, so no one dies) .. hence this also means, each of the "selected" guys parent must die out eventually because each of them have only one good gene..

so death is important for sexual reproduction to be beneficial.. good genes only propogate when others without that gene die out.. hahah

so in olden days of monkeying around, death was easy - climate change, accident because of falling from trees, fights etc etc...

now a days, we are civilized... we try to save even those who have birth defects (unprivileged ones with bad genes) .. we condem them and their parents to a sad/pathetic life... this aint what nature wanted..

in olden times a handicapped born child (blind, deaf, lame) would easily fall prey to so many possible death and hence would be weeded out by nature itself...

but now, we want to conquer nature... instead of euthanizing the disabled at birth, we want to let them survive because its morally "incorrect"... balls to morals..

morals (result of male ego?) prevent you from being promiscuous ... which isnt good because if you and your 1 or kids (all from same spouse) die... your whole lineage is gone... maybe you had a good gene.. so now its gone... bad for humans..

and besides, its taboo to have more than 2 kids...
and even if you have 5 kids.. all other millions of humans on this earth have to die for them to keep surviving into the future with all their good genes...

so now we have like in this world of 6.6 billion people, tens of thousands of isolated lines of good gene lineages which rarely interact with each other (good gene may interact with bad gene lines to become extinct or with normal gened people to continue.. chances of two good gene people interacting with each other is less)..

so now with so many good genes we have in our population, none of them would be able to proliferate all thru the human population because for that two happen, millions of death should occur fast.. like a catastrophe....

so maybe some one will now really blast a couple of nuclear weapons.. atleast then the humans would be reduced to a managable number and then they would leave their morals aside and males and females will have a huge orge and fuck each other and then atleast 4-5 of those thousands of genes would proliferate thru all of humans and then atleast then humans would come out better... we can then have more mass extinctions again and again to ensure good genes prolifrate thru the populations (i know its random wiping of humans, and some good gene lineages would die out, but then better that then prventing any good genes from prolifrating )

so mass extinctions are required.. maybe a comet with hit earth soon...

maybe religion was a safe guard for humans so that morals dont prevent mankind from killing most part of itself... otherwise how would natural selection proceed

maybe this is the function of ego (another reason for war and hence mass extinction) at a macro level...

so we need to find a way to artificially perform genetic therapy (replace bad genes with good genes or simple introduce good genes) into full adult humans..
in case we arent able to do it in the near future, someone will have to kill most of us all soon enough... because that might be the right thing to do...

anyone needs a idea?... target the slums... kill'em all, but before that survey the slum populations and take out the people with best genetic codes (they will - in all that shit and filth - surely have males and females who are able to resist disease much better than any of us...) and keep them save along with the most beautiful (and most intelligent ) men and women of the would

then after the apocalypse, you can force them to interbreed... to product nice good humans.... reminds me of that bond movie - moonraker

there has to be a better way to do it without destroying the planet...

in anycase, i guess i am a waste... i dont mind if i am killed for such a cause...

हे भगवन !

2008-09-18T02:24:00.013+05:30

Everyone has some concept of God which they believe in. Those who don't believe in it are actually those who simply disagree towards the use of the word "God" for the set of principles which they turn to for guiding them thru life. I have a set of principles too. My concept of God might be very different from what many people believe in, but it is surely very much compatible with theirs. After spending lots of time looking at people and probing my inner self and reading books and stuff, i have finally been able to put into words some of the things i believe in.

I believe that the entity "God" has four (or more) functions for those who believe in it/him/her. I think people are a bit confused about the various implications of the word "God". They mix up these four (or more) different things that the word might imply and hence i think thats the basis for all this war and turmoil between people of different religions who interpret the four (or more) functions differently.

Indian parents teach their kids about god and religion since childhood. People are forced to blindly believe in stuff without asking for reason. 12 years of studying science and 4 years of studying engineering still doesn't change their rock solid belief in the principles which were passed on to them by their parents. Now I am no one to question those beliefs but then isn't science like a religion in itself then?

At home you are taught to follow certain religious rites/rituals and develop certain virtues without being given the liberties of asking your parents "why" we do this? And at the same time at school/college you study science which tell you to question everything you come across.
Two different preachings.
Two different religions.
No wonder people (specially engineers) are so confused...

And confused engineers are bad for society. It was not some invisible force that was watching over you and taking care of you when there was an engine failure in the airplane you were in and the captain was still able to bring you safely to ground. It was actually sheer human ingenuity. Countless people might have sacrificed their lives in numerous crashes before you to provide valuable lessons for man to make his flying machine more perfect, more safer for you, for himself. We can't just expect God to watch over us and save us every time we take off in an airplane, that way all those crashes and live which were lost would have been attributed to God being angry at us and then no one would have even cared to study the cause and effect of the disasters and we would still be living in the Dark Ages.

My concept of god:

Function of "God" 1: As a creator of the Universe
The first function of the word "God" is to act as a placeholder for "The Creator of the Universe" whoever he/she/it might be. This makes you wonder if there actually exists a creator in the first place!
Well I simply think that just because something exist, there must be a creator. So since just because this universe exists, there must be a creator. And as engineers we ask, how do we know the universe exists? Well the answer in my opinion lies in The Anthropic Principle
Some extracts from the wikipedia article on Antropic principle:

In physics and cosmology, the anthropic principle states that humans should take into account the constraints that human existence imposes on the kind of theoretical universe that can support human life. Our present universe is of course the only one we can ever actually observe, but we can speculate about such things as the probability that our universe formed within the finely tuned limits that support human life. Our human understanding dictates that the only kind of universe we can occupy is one that is just like the one we are in. If it were a completely different kind of universe, no human would occupy it.

Roger Penrose explains the weak form:
The argument can be used to explain why the conditions happen to be just right for the existence of (intelligent) life on the earth at the present time. For if they were not just right, then we should not have found ourselves to be here now, but somewhere else, at some other appropriate time. This principle was used very effectively by Brandon Carter and Robert Dicke to resolve an issue that had puzzled physicists for a good many years. The issue concerned various striking numerical relations that are observed to hold between the physical constants (the gravitational constant, the mass of the proton, the age of the universe, etc.). A puzzling aspect of this was that some of the relations hold only at the present epoch in the earth's history, so we appear, coincidentally, to be living at a very special time (give or take a few million years!). This was later explained, by Carter and Dicke, by the fact that this epoch coincided with the lifetime of what are called main-sequence stars, such as the sun. At any other epoch, so the argument ran, there would be no intelligent life around in order to measure the physical constants in question-so the coincidence had to hold, simply because there would be intelligent life around only at the particular time that the coincidence did hold!
—The Emperor's New Mind, Chapter 10

And I am somehow also reminded of a quote from Douglas Adam's H2G2:

Once something actually happens somewhere in something as wildly complicated as the Universe, Kevin knows where it will all end up — where "Kevin" is any random entity that doesn't know nothin' about nothin'.

So as far as "God as being the creator of the universe" is concerned, I consider sun to be my God. It,s not the creator of "The Universe" but it is responsible for the creation of "My Universe" and me. Life on earth wouldn't have been possible without the existence of The Sun. So Sun can very well be called the "God of Earth and Humans".

Most religions have anthropomorphised Sun into a human form. Best example being "Jesus" in Christanity. Yes I watched Zeitgeist and I do believe in what is being said in it.

The Sun is the single most source of power on earth. Its life giving light nourishes as like a parent nourishes its kids. This makes it seem omnipotent to us.
As the earth rotates on its axis, it makes the sun seem to rise and fall everyday making it appear to us as omnipresent. It gives us a sense that our creator is watching our every move and would judge us on the actions we do. The ancients rightly worshiped the sun as their god and thousands of years later, men hungry for power over other men have twisted that concept and anthropomorphised it their gain to tame the vast public into submission.... these are the men who decide for other men what actions they must do (the good) and what they must not (the bad) because their god is watching them and would judge them on a certain day called "the judgement day"..

Well I am not the one to buy all this. I think our creator (who ever that might be) is like a scientist and our universe is like a big experiment which he/she is performing. He observes each of us, and tries to induce various situation to observe how we would react to those circumstances. Some of these are good and some are bad. Its is impossible for us to know who his next target would be so we must just live our lives to the fullest and just be ready to take head on whatever life (or our creator) throws at us.

In simple words, as an icon, I believe in the Sun as my creator and I believe it is just a waste of time thinking how God might treat us tomorrow. I think we all have moral values instilled in us by our elders since our childhood which allows us to distinguish good from bad and so it should be pretty easy to take the right path no matter how difficult it might seem at each of crossroads in our life. Thanks to our neural net which works overtime to help us find out and learn the good things even in the presence of the noise created by the bad things.

Function of "God" 2: As a Moral Judge
I have covered a lot of part related to this function towards the end, under the previous heading. As engineers, we believe in science to guide us to take care of ourselves and our environment and to prosper as a race and progress as a society. But science hasn't progressed enough to give us answers to each and every question which might crop up in our head. Science cannot explain everything, at least not yet. So when we are faced with a decision, we need a way to choose the "right" from the "wrong". In most cases science can help us decide relatively easily ("killing people randomly is not good" or "walking to the nearby store is better than taking the car, which causes pollution"). But there are times when science is not able to help you decide. Thats where God/Religion fills in the gaps and comes to the rescue.

Our elders tell us that if we do good, then we would go on to heaven after death and that God will decide who has been bad and who has been good after looking at the whole of our life. They have played on our fear of death to get us to do the "right" thing always. But there are times when the distinction between "right" and "wrong" is pretty vague. And these are the oppurtunities for power hungry men. They manipulate the people to rule over them.

So how do you decide what to do when you are faced with a dilemma? Well I think all the answers lie within us. We just need a catalyst to bring them out. For me, my friends and family are the catalyst. I ma glad to have so many good friends. Whenever I am in doubt, I can rely on them to just enforce whatever it is that I was already thinking. Sometimes you just need a person you trust to just be there for you and inspire you to listen to your inner self and do the right thing. Hence our parents always warned us to be wary of bad company!

Function of "God" 3: As a source of Inspiration
There also times when people feel depressed for no particular reason or because of reason out of their control.. minor things which cause irritation. Sometimes a few bad things happen one after another and causes "acute" depression and at other times "chronic" bad mood builds up over time due to various miniscule incidents. Lack of sleep and stress are main factors for these conditions. At times like these you feel as if the world is a real shit place to live in.

To come out of such loops, people turn to things like meditations while others turn to drug abuse. For me there are many sources of inspiration. I am able to draw inspiration from all sources - the young mother teaching her little daughter poems as she waits for her school bus to arrive in the morning, parrots flying around gaily amongst the concrete jungle of buildings, a tiny sapling growing in a pond of muddy shit, an earthworm struggling to wriggle across an open road full of passing traffic to get to safety and a young lady being courageous and telling off a stranger to stop teasing her or else face the consequences...
But then there are times when everything seems so dull and irritating. At these times your friends could help you handle the "Bad day" but then you would risk passing on your bad mood to them. Thats where "the Sun" comes to my rescue again. Sometimes just a walk outside or a look outside the window is enough to lighten up your mood. It makes you realise that the Sun has risen today and so today is just like any other day and everything is going to be just fine! Its effective enough to help me to a large extent to contain my anger and frustration and depression within myself and prevent it from passing it on to my friends. And then I just wait for the night time when I can sleep and just get the day over with!

Anyway, I guess being descended from grandparents who either Aryans or Sikh, I am not so much inclined towards idol worship. But i do need an icon which I can sense with almost all of my 5 senses.. an icon which would give me a sign thats all well with the world... and what best icon other than our "Sun" itself. It makes its presence felt directly or indirectly thru all our senses... we can touch, taste, smell, see and hear it or its effect on life on earth. We don't need to go to any temple to worship the sun, we just need to step outside and look up. And as I hold my chest up high to look at my God, I feel as if he is as proud of me as I am of him.

Function of "God" 4: As a Guide for Life
This is what we call Religion. It comprises a set of principles to guide us to live a content and happy and fulfilling life. It is also supposed to show us how to live in harmony with others and with nature. But unfortunately men seeking power have reduced us to mere brainless idol worshipers (many of us indian don't even know why we ring the bell/gong when we enter a religious site). There are so many auspicious days in a year and we just mimic our parent as they perform the various rites and ceremonies. Again I am not the one decide what is correct and what is not. But I am not sure why people can't think of such ceremonies/rites for what they really are : as an occasion for fellow humans to gather together in small groups and share a sense of belong to each other.

Take the Ganesh festival for example. It was traditionally supposed to be a family affair until Lokmanya Tilak. He made it into a public festival. Now bring a larger group of people would seem quite effective in promoting brotherhood, but according to me, after a certain threshold (of around 100-200 people) the group of people turns into a mob - having a mind of its own - one which is very intolerant of anyone who doesn't have the same beliefs as itself. Such mobs are the fuel for religious riots and can prove counter productive. Then there is the case of using the cheaper plaster of paris rather than the traditional clay and vegetable paints. Due to involvement of politicians and people with commercial interest, the ganesh festival is turning into a futile and damaging competition. Mandals want to establish their superiority over others by making larger idols - ones which don't even get submerged completely in the ocean and washup on the seas the next day. The government officials have to use huge hammers to break the idols brutally and throw the broken pieces into the ocean.

People talk of people of one religion hurting the "religions sentiments" of the people of other religion.. what crap.. its hypocrisy when you cant respect your own God.. using hammer to break down the idols you worshiped for the past few days..

To me these ceremonies are more important because of the way they bring people together. Nothing unites people when they have a common goal which they all believe in. Although I might not have faith the same concept of God which my friends and family believe in, but I have an even more immense faith in the healing and goodwill promoting power of religious ceremonies. Its the togetherness which people share during such events which makes me a stern supporter of such activities.
But then all this shouldn't be at the cost of harming the environment. Who says you are not allowed to have the same amount of fun and excitement with a 2 centimeter high idol as opposed to a 15 feet high colossus. Its the feeling inside which should be larger than life rather than the statue itself. An what fun it would be to have few small ones made of clay - you would submerge them all with your friends and family in the sea and you can actually feel the heightened emotions as your "God" dissolves into the see, to return the next year to bless you all with prosperity. It would impart a sense of completion and finality of the ceremony and would leave you feeling exactly the way you are supposed to - feeling inspired and full of happiness and faith in yourself and our family/friends.

I think schools should teach children how to make idols of ganesha themselves using clay. That would inspire creativity and a sense of belonging. Besides it would teach children a plethora of moral values. And sculpting would surely be an added skill for all those aspiring to be engineers in the future.
It is somewhat like how we were taught to make rakhis in craft class at school and the girls used to tie them on the boys wrists!! It did promote brotherhood (or sisterhood for that matter) and also doomed the possibility of getting married to your childhood classmate in the future!

In any case making your own idols and then submerging them in sea would teach children a very important lesson in life: "to let go off of your creation or something which belonged to you for a very long time and become detached from it" in other words we would be teaching children the fact that "all things come to an end". It would take them one step closer towards accepting death as a part of life. It would teach them that its okay to be sad for sometime but whatever we have is now and here and that we must live life to the fullest with our loved ones.

Somehow god wanted us all to be together. Somehow we are all missing the point.

Another ADSL Splitter..

2008-07-08T22:07:00.006+05:30

bought in delhi.. number of components in adsl splitters are reaching an all time low.. does no one care about following any standards...

.. and even after checking multiple shops, this was the best splitter i could get my hands on..

billi

2008-06-23T01:23:00.001+05:30

billi ko billi kyun kehte hain?
kyunki woh meow karti hai

(from dexter in hindi)

what reminds me of

2008-05-27T01:55:00.006+05:30

what reminds me of the author of the blog "After the Masquerades......" ??

When someone mis-spells "check" as "chek" ...
... like the subject of the first mail i received from this person (on Friday, July 14, 2000 2:10 PM):

"chek out the attatchment"

So after 8 years... you can see all the crap that collects in a persons' mind over time...

remembering simple random stupid stuff...

being reminded of close friends every now and then...

because of those certain "special triggers" you create when you walked closer together earlier in life....

so i was reminded of this person when some recently sent me a message with the subject: "schematic for cheking"

PS. the attachement in the original mail was:

this is my way too!

2008-05-27T01:53:00.000+05:30

We will either find a way, or make one! by Hannibal

2000 3000

2008-05-27T01:52:00.000+05:30

2000 AD : Mom to kid : beta cycle chalane ja rahe ho?.. building complex ke bahar mat jaana

3000 AD : Mom to kid " beta spaceship chalane ja rahe ho?.. solar system ke bahar mat jaana

engines

2008-05-20T21:25:00.003+05:30

In old days, people who used to work on engines were called engineers, now-a-days anything which engineers work on are called engines!

just made that up...

seems somewhat ironically similar to "cutting down trees and naming streets after them"

A Nother Question.. old one!

2008-05-15T22:37:00.003+05:30

I have been wondering about this too long now... been too lazy about not looking it up earlier.. or might have looked it up and forgotten about it...

so now i finally commit it to blog..

Why does it feel like you are dissipating energy (or in physical terms... power is being used up.. or work is being done continuously) when you have lifted up and are holding and object, because then ideally, physically speaking, the work done by our body on the object is ZERO..

here are the hits from google which answer that question.

Incidentally, it also also explains why some peoples hand seem to shiver when they are lifting some heavy unevenly shaped object or doing some delicate work...
..because their muscle cells are kind of contracting and expanding continuously to hold the object in place...

work: Holding something up
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-119026.html

HyperPhysics:Work
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/work2.html

Did I waste my years at school/college?

2008-05-15T22:18:00.006+05:30

..because i cant even answer a simple question like..
"is it ok to drink water during a meal?"
of course its a debatable question...

Discussion with DVG led us to two point...
1) water might dilute the acid in our stomach and hence since the pH value is now increase, the reaction might not fully complete... (like as if that matter, the food wont stay stuck in the stomach if it wasnt digest.. it will probably move out, you will just have to eat more to gain the same amount of nutrients!)

2) water might form a nice soupy mixture in the stomach and hence cause further atomization of the food , hence increase the surface are for reaction to occur... but then the acid ions would probably waste time hitting water molecules...

anyway... looks like i picked a wrong question to assume i had wasted my years...
here are some google hits for the above doubt... looks like there is a big debate on it...

people say drinking water doesnt affect digestion, but there are people who still dont drink wanter while having meals..

Google Answers: Q: Water Intake during Meals...
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=549283

Why the French don’t drink a lot of water during
meals (and why you shouldn’t either)
http://www.everydayfrance.com/2007/03/05/why-the-french-dont-drink-a-lot-of-water-during-meals-and-why-you-shouldnt-either/

Blood transfusion and DNA

2008-05-15T22:00:00.007+05:30

So with all the esoinophilia causing much ache and lethargy, i was free to let my thoughts wander .. since those were the only things which could get to wander... couldnt get of the bed or couch for long, so no chance of letting the body itself wander...

so back to wandering.. (and wandering led me to think of blogging..)

I was thinking.. having donated blood 4 times, what would happen if some one was to accept a transfusion of someone else's blood..

would that person live on forever with two (or more) different types of blood cells?
because both the blood cells will have different DNA and they will obviously replicate.. and hence both.. the original and donor's DNA maybe present in the blood stream of the patients..

Or maybe since the patient has more of his own Blood Cells of his own DNA, they would probably replicate more and much faster and the blood cells of the other DNA might get phased out..

Anyway, before i could wander further on that one, google led me to the answer on the first hit:

Can Getting a Blood Transfusion Change my DNA?
http://www.wisegeek.com/can-getting-a-blood-transfusion-change-my-dna.htm

The Owl Next Door

2007-10-01T21:01:00.003+05:30

We live on the sixth floor. Today a friend gave us a visit. Probably a Barn Owl (http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/thefalconrysuppliers/Owlpage.htm)
The page above says that their vision is 1000 times better than ours. This particular owl was actually sleeping when I took its foto. The powerful flash of the digital camera woke him up. After that as I took more pictures, it just kept staring... actually nodding, rocking his head in circles...
I suppose the camera flash would really be blinding for him. But he still looked on. Cute creatures.
Wonder if he will be my friend? or is it a she?

Robocon India Videos

2007-08-20T10:00:00.001+05:30

Robocon 2007 - Indian Nationals at M.I.T., Pune
Vivekanand Education Society's Institute of Technology, Mumbai
versus
Nirma University, Ahmedabad

Robocon 2007 - Indian Nationals at M.I.T., Pune
Sardar Patel College of Engineering, Mumbai
versus
Sagar Institute of Research and Technology,Bhopal

Robocon 2007 - Indian Nationals at M.I.T., Pune
M.I.T.
versus
S.I.T.

Robocon 2007 - Indian Nationals at M.I.T., Pune
IIT, Delhi
versus
IIT, Mumbai (Finals)

Robocon 2007 - Indian Nationals at M.I.T., Pune
MIT Pune 2007

Robocon 2007 - Indian Nationals at M.I.T., Pune

Robocon 2007 - Indian Nationals at M.I.T., Pune
College of Engineering, Pune

Robocon 2006 - International at Kuala Lumpur
China
versus
India (Quarter Finals)

Robocon 2005 - Indian Nationals at M.I.T., Pune
The night before the finals
(Ranjit Puri, Parag, Shauvik and Ashish Bhangale from VESIT can be seen in this video)

No Cheating!

2006-12-14T00:48:00.001+05:30

I like people who dont cheat. And I find that its difficult for Marketing/MBA people to stay away from it.
After all who will by a "standard" product. Everyone wants more and more features.. And the marketing dudes advertise the product such a way that people get fooled and get wrong notions about the product..

I dont know how far their claim is true but Pest Control of India has a nice brochure which at te least educates the consumers about the technicalities of they provide..see for yourself .. its somewhat enlightening.... after all who thought that there were so many varieties of so many pests in mumbai! (i dont know about the copyright issues involved in this but since they were mass distributing the brochures for free I suppose there wont be any problem withme scanning and putting it up for everyone else to see... beside its even more free advertising for them.. see what morally correct advertising can earn you!!! - still more publicity!)

Some More Assorted stuff...

2006-12-03T21:44:00.002+05:30

These were all accumulating up, so today i have decided to write them down here.. before they are lost in the oblivion...

Lonavale Trip

On 9th september, the dude and dudettes of our batch at L & T EmSyS, Mumbai went for a picnic to Lonavale..

The Bushi Dam was all dried up so we climbed up to the waterfalls.. the actual source of water to the dam.. A few minutes uphill walk took us to a small waterfall, where we all cooled off. But it wasnt fun enough so some of us went even higher up to another waterfall. This involved trekking thru virgin land. The whole route was actually a sort of rivulet and it was so much fun making our way up further, higher up to the better tub shaped cavity in the big rock into which the water was flowing. Me, Jithin, Saurabh,Biswadeep,Bhagvath and Joseph were the first ones to get there. Many of the other people why were trying to get there had got bored and had turned back from the half way point. But we kept moving one. And it was worth it. We spent 10-15 minutes there having fun in the cool water and taking pictures. Then we decided to get back as there were other part of our gang woh was waiting in the bus and probably worried about us (read "getting agonized"). But then again while getting back, we came across himani and shweta (shirali) who had came back to look for us, and it was just a matter of a few seconds before they had coaxed us into take them back there again. Its difficult to keep up with squirrel like antics of himani. You cant hold her back. She just hopped here and there and moved up the rocks even before you knew it.

The whole experience was invigorating. Specially since we needed a break for so long. All that trekking with friends actually made me feel good. Those experience wasnt "life threatening" and we never held each other's lives at the end of a line but still it fulfilled my wish of mountain climbing with friends to some extent. So atleast i know which guys do actually like adventure sports...mazaa aayaga tha..

While returning to mumbai, we made a stop at khandala .. some park where there were lots of monkeys... there i was trying to pick up shweta.. and dropped her.. she could have hit her head hard on the railing there.. and it would have been smashed open (himani and other guys caught her in time).. all because of my stupid over confidence.. (ek haath se uthane chala tha....himani ko ek haath se uthaya tha na pehle .. but of course she is halki phulki)... Well aaj tak jo bure marks (exams) ne nahin kiya tha woh dostone kar dikhaya.. they actually cured my over confidence.. (if only to a certain extent).. but what a price to pay.. sheesh.. i could have killed her.. and the stupid girl doesn't even realize it!! bhagwan bachaye logon ko mujh jaise doston se..!!

Railways..

If you have traveled by mumbai suburban trains then you are likely to have noticed a few things.. there are a lot of things strewn on the railway track.. especially at the stations.. These mostly include footwear.. and all of these are one of the pairs of slippers or chappals which have slipped off the foot of many of unfortunate commuters.. And they are found always in singles .. only one of the pairs... Either because only one of them slid off the foot of the owner or the owner might have thrown it on the track.. having lost the other one at the previous station!!

Then there is the rose line along the track... The red line created by the spit of the paan chewers.. (see MTV's campaign website http://www.dhartikelaal.com) .. I was wondering many people die by falling off the train... most of those who fall off the train are those standing at the door hanging outside.. and most of these people are paan chewers.. who obviously want to spit out the red when they are thru with it... i say if they don't die by falling off the train, they would surely die because of cancer... so no point feeling bad about them...

Customer Service

It always pays to be loyal.. I have had a hutch (which was formerly "orange" and which in turn was formerly "maxtouch") cell phone connection for past 6-7 years.. right from 11th grade.. and so after 2-3 years of service they activated STD for free without deposit on my fone and now i have got them to activate ISD too and they didnt charge me a thing...

..then there are the HDFC people... the other day i requested a DD and there was they misspelt the name of the beneficiary... some error due to incompatibility of netbanking with the firefox browser...and even though i used my moms account to conduct the transaction, they fixed the DD without her being there just because the lady there knew our family well.. Thats what you call Personal Banking!!!

Mumbai Radio Station and Autorickshaw Drivers

I had an idea the other day... we all have heard the song "yeah mumbai shahar haadson ka shahar hai, yahan zindagi hadsoon ka safar hai, yahan roz roz har mod mod pe hota hai koi na koi hadsa.."
Our city really lives up to it:road accidents, train blasts, bus blasts, floods etc etc...
And then there are road jams.. and during the road jams, the people stuck in there could actually use some real information about their city.. the information of the kind that isn't available thru newspapers or TV or timetable or poster.. but thru word of mouth.. and what best way to get it other then from the people who traverse the length and breadth of the city everyday: the BEST bus drivers and the Autorickshaw drivers..
The FM radio stations of mumbai are really sad, the RJs call up dumb people who aren't entertaining enough and usually don't know what to say. Its actually not their problem, because common people seldom see much action every day. But it would be really great if these stations could give a few Auto drivers and BEST bus drivers cellphones. Auto drivers normally are mast people and these dudes usually just stick to a particular area of mumbai. A few drivers in each particular areas could be given cellphones. The Radio station could call them up once anytime during the day and ask them for the latest updates from their area. This would really be better as the drivers would actually give eye witness accounts of the various "hadse" in mumbai. Same is true for the BEST bus drivers/conductors. They ply on the same route again and again everyday and have information of all incidents happening on those routes. Actually many of the incidents/hadse happen in the BEST buses themselves....

Clinical Compromise

Many people are really lazy when it comes to taking medicine. Its really shame that so much time, effort and money spent on medical research goes to waste because of these people. But more than the time, effort and money, its the lives of the fellow humans that these people put at risk by not taking medicines on time or by leaving the recommended medical course incomplete.

Whenever we visit the doctor to course some microbial sickness, he/she prescribes us certain medicines to be ingested at particular times during the day for a particular number of days to ensure that the microbes causing the disease are completely eliminated. Many people leave the course half way and stop taking the medicine. They think that since they are already cured, they don't need to take the medicines anymore. But this is a very wrong perception. Usually even when the symptoms are gone, some amount of microbes still remain in our body. Taking those medicine for a bit longer time even after we seem to have been cured ensures that even those left over microbes are killed and the disease is completely gone. If we miss out on the final doses, it may happen that the remaining microbes might mutate and become resistant to the medicine. If this happens, the person might fall sick again and this time the medicines wont work on the new resistant strain anymore. In fact if this guy passes on his disease to any other person, he too will get sick and the medicines will have no effect on him either. This is called clinical compromise. So by not taking the medicines properly as per doctors recommendations, we are not only putting our lives in danger but also those of our fellow men and women. We have absolutely no right to do so, therefore we must act responsibly and take our medicines properly, on time and completely.

Cause and Effect

2006-12-03T19:50:00.006+05:30

Yes, we are being taught crap in colleges in India... Yes i screwed my acadmics to gain a bit more insight on the practical side..(eventough i still keep forgetting how a transistor works).. and Yes, many people have said many things on how to fix the system... but whats the use...

Lets see what one of them wants to say.. : Sudheendra Kulkarni - Why India needs to learn how to teach

Now what this guy says is truly correct, its the right way to fix the system, but its hard to visualise how to actually go on implementing those "renovation stunts". I mean the stuff presented in the article is simple enough to be understood.. you dont have to be a PhD in economics/engineering/psychology/sociology to understand what the dude is saying.. but there is no way a simple common man can come up with actual implementation plans for this. I look at people now a days.. they dont have the bloody time to think anything... You tell them that we have a problem... you even go ahead and tell them that this could be the solution .. but still that isnt enough, because they wouldnt know how to implement the required plan of action. We know that bureaucracy is a big killer, but if you ask a commn man on how he would propose to eliminate it, he wouldnt have a clue.. so why talk about only the abstract part of the solution, why not tell people specificly what to do... Prof. Gadre has a better take on it..see:

This article appeared in EFY a few quarters ago.. and I was into robotics and had already got my HAM license by then.. and thats when i first mailed him. I know him ever since.

Getting back to the topic, when we read Prof. Gadre's take on it, we actually get to understand what we could do actually do about it.. Get a hobby: Robotics or HAM. This is simple enough for people to understand. Common people can encourage their children to take up such hobbies.. and the plethora of technical event held by so many colleges (no matter how sub standard and no matter how much MBA giri they involve) can really sustain their interest in such hobbies..

But has any one thought of the root cause of the whole damn problem???????

The problem is that in India and other such developing nation, we still have to "FIGHT" for our daily living. Earning enough money to run our families isnt something we do pleasurably but some thing which kills some of us. Look at the people in Mumbai for instance.. The roads are crap, the autorickshaws have no suspensions, Buses and trains are jampacked and arent comfortable enough and lead to physiological pains, the offices and homes of the worker classes are never located nearby and so the whole damn mass of people have to travel so many kilometers in those crapped up modes of transportation that no one has time to think freely...

All this stress uses up all the RAM and processing power of your brain. You hate your work because your family didnt have any money to allow you to pursue your dreams of a career that you liked or you didnt take up the job of your choice because they didnt pay you well there.. Engineers turn themselves into MBA just to earn more money... and then end up sad internally even though they might have enough money for a prosperous life... Why????? because you see that the people with lesser money suffer a lot... but then look at all these people.. when it comes to travelling everyday to work and back , none of them is any better.. yes the rich people have cars of their own and they dont have to suffer the fists and elbows of the crowded trains and buses everyday.. but they still get stuck in traffic jam.. You call this civilised??? I dont..
Even if you have more money, you cant spend your time in your car while transiting from office to home thinking up new ideas, there is nothing inspiring to look outside the window to get the ideas from (we are talking about Mumbai here).. You just get ideas for stupid anecdotes for your next presentation (remember the dudes with the umbrellas doing the morning business under the kurla flyover on eastern express highway??).

So wasting hours just trying to stand up straight and breathe in those trains and buses is tiring to the core.. so when do you think up new ideas to be a better human, a better society, a better nation???

So when even after fighting so much, a person's basic physiological and safety needs are just satisfied, how can you expect him to focus on higher needs? see Maslow's hierarchy of needs

In Delhi there is another reason which impeads free reasonable thought. People are just too trying "jugaads" to earn more money (by hook or by crook) to show off!!... and yeah they "HAD" the transportation problem there too.. But with the setting up of the Metro Rail, that is solved to a very very large extent. In fact Metro is a great leveller. Its no longer cool to take out your brand new merc to travel from one end of the city to the other when you have a sexy air condition Metro Rail. Besides Since it moves above the ground in most places, a ride in one of those is actually pleasant (you can enjoy the scenery/landscape) and people can actually spend time reading or thinking about the next big thing while travelling.. so whether its the rich or the poor, both pay up the same amount of fare and both travel happily... and so feel good and think nice thought while doing so.. thats being civilised.

There are some people (including myself) who can think perfectly well in even in the crapped up transportation of mumbai too... but by the time they reach home they are just too busted to write their thought down and propagate them... and thats the reason why i get very little time during which my mind is fresh active and free to actually write them down properly enough...today is one of these days..

Today in the afternoon, while returning from dadar, I couldnt find a working Coupon Validating Machine at Dadar station so I looked around to buy a card ticket to Andheri, but the lines were so damn long that i decided to travel without a ticket.. and i was ready to bore the consequences if caught. And it happened. The TC caught me at Andheri station and fined 250 rupees. Well thats why they say time is money... In case of travelling, i would rather sacrifice money and reach the destination comfortably and early rather than standing in long queues and allow people around me more time to pass me their infectious diseases by sneezing without covering their faces... You cant think free thought when you are really really sick.. and The Air conditioner at the office only makes it worse... I wonder how fast they can build the metro in mumbai...

We were ruled over by british for 250 years and 60 years later, we still arent free.

My Boss Mr. Bhupendra Bhate (SBU Head, L &T EmSyS, Mumbai) had narrated a nice observation to us during his intro speech.. He identified a region (parallelogram shaped) on the world map that included the United Kingdom and the surrounds. He said that more than 70% of the discoveries and invention had come up in this region. Why? because the environment around them had forced the people to innovate.. eg. the Holland people built Dikes to "keep the sea away" and so became good at construction ... and he went on to give many more examples... but one think to realise is that there was another factor in all this... the dudes in those parallelogram also conquered the rest of the world and created frenzy all around while maintaining peace and civilisation in their own homes. This way all the basic needs of the people in their own land were satisfied and they created new things and came up with new ideas. The rest of the world couldnt do so when they were ruling it (Imperialism - the fine art of conquering the world). The Americans were the first to get freedom and hence become prosperous first and hence became civilized earlier than the rest of the world...
And hence came up with so many inventions...

In India, besides the fight for basic needs, there are always terrorist bombings and criminal activities going on.. and still some stupid leaders call us an IT superpower... right now we do IT only for a living... we can do a million times better we didnt have to worry about whats going to happen tomorrow...and with terrorist activities increasing everyday... we dont even know if we would make it thru the next day alive!

What s the solution to all this?? IT companies (or any other companies for that matter) should make it a point to setup new office very close to residential areas and should make sure that their employees are happy by providing them help (by means of loans or subsidised rents or by actually constructing apartments) in obtaining a resediantial place very close to the office... That way they dont have to tire themselves out by travelling so much... of course there are a million other ways to help in achieving a higher level of civilisation .. you can think up more ways during the free thinking time that you get after you have shifted to a place near your office!!!

Why is soil brown?

2006-12-03T01:00:00.001+05:30

Some quarter years ago, while sitting in a bus, i just wondered:"why is soil brown?".. a pretty common question...
its common because the subject involved is common... but we seldom stop to think about such things..
A scientist/engineer would know why things are coloured:
There is a photon associated with each wavelength of light.
Light of different wavelength are composed of photons having differnt energies.
The lights of different wavelength are perceived as lights of different colors by our eyes.
Hence the different colors of light, are thought of as representing photons of different energy.
Now object on which white light falls, are composed of molecules or ions in a lattice. The electrons in these materials can only move between well defined discrete levels. And while doing that these electrons
absorb (lower energy level to higher energy level) or emit (higher energy level to lower energy level) photons. Since their energy levels are discrete, they can absorb only those photons which have energy higher than the difference of the two energy levels between which the electron transits. If a photon has a higher energy, the extra energy appears as the kinetic energy of electron which has now reached the new higher energy level.

If on the other hand, the electron transits from a higher to lower energy level, it will emit a photon which has energy which is the difference between the two energy levels.. this will form the monochromatic light which appears to be "reflected" from an object when a beam of white light (having photons of all kinds of energies) is incident on it.

There are two ways of producing a color as seen by our eyes:

a) shine a light of a particular wavelength on our eyes so as to produce that color

b) shine light of different wavelengths having different weights (intensity) to form the same sensation in our rods and cones as the single wavelength light above.

But there are some colors like purple and brown which can only be produced by method (b).

(see http://acept.asu.edu/PiN/rdg/color/color.shtml)

The reason for this is as follows:

consider the "Normalized typical human cone responses (and the rod response) to monochromatic spectral stimuli" chart given at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision and also given below:

We notice that there are certain overlapping regions between the "band pass filtering" type spectrums of the three different cones. Light of single wavelength in these overlapping regions of sufficient amplitude would produce a colour perception in the same way as the lights of two or more different wavelengths (and having appropriate amplitudes) appearing in non overlapping regions of the three curves. Purple for example can be created with a mixture of wavelengths in both the red and the blue. Brown requires a more complex mixture of wavelengths.

L M S are the different kind of cones in our eyes. See the above two links, (especially the wikipedia link) for more info about how the colour is perceived by our eyes. By the way, our eyes are more responsive to green color because our very first food were plants..which reflect green light!.. and why are plants green? .. aw! we know that one...They taught us in school..: Because they have chlorophyll! and according to http://www.pa.msu.edu/sciencet/ask_st/081496.html

"It turns out that eons of evolutionary design have matched the absorbance of chlorophyll to the actual color of the sunlight that reaches the leaves. Sunlight consists of primarily blue and red light mixed together, which are exactly the colors that chlorophyll molecules like to absorb. Light is a form of energy, so the chlorophyll is able to harvest the sunlight with little waste."

Getting back to topic of soil, its probably brown because of the lots of diffrent kinds of stuff mixed in it (dead or alive). See the Image on the left side : I dont remember where i got this article from , but it gives a bit more insight as to why soil is really brown.. For more on Maillard Reaction, see wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction

This is like another one of those natural cycles... as for me , I think the soil is brown because its has lots of stuff in it which can reflect light corresponding to different areas of color wheel. Its like water colors, now matter how much or how many colours (except for black color) you dissolve in the water, you always get brown color!

Similarly there so many things in nature which have different colors.. bright yellows sunflowers... green leaves... pink roses... red hibiscus.. orange oranges and mangoes etc etc..

All of these colors eventually mix (dead or alive) to form the soil....

In fact humans, who eat foods of different colors (omnivores) are also brown colored!!!

So when we die the brown of our skin mixes with the brown of the soil... ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST..

Talking about brown colour reminds me of one last thing.. a PJ..

Haldi (Turmeric powder): a single word which when uttered during the lunch time among my friends who know this joke can make them lose their appetite. I asked my mom what is the function of turmeric powder in our food.. she said she didnt know any major reason except for the flavouring and the antiseptic properties. Now the antiseptic properties have nothing to do with the haldi being used in food and as for flavour.... i am not sure it has one anyway...

So the only reason the chef uses it might be to warn the eater....

You see, when in the morning we are sitting on the sacred toilet (i say sacred because sitting on it has become a ritual and most rituals are sacred... and things which are sacred bring peace to our hearts (in this case, our stomachs)) we observe that what we excrete is brown in color, almost similar to the color of haldi (yellow). So in a way haldi in the food reminds you of the eventual food you are going to eat. Mostly this haldi is used in spicy foods, which is only fair... people need to be warned of the consequences of eating too much spicy food by reminding them of what they would have to deal with the next morning..... in this case the daily ritual would be painful but seem truly "sacred" later on!

Life+money+Engineering/R&D+consumerism=Cycles

2006-12-03T00:48:00.001+05:30

There are cycles in our biosphere.. Water Cycle, Carbon Cycle, Nitrogen Cycle and then there are theoritical Cycles eg. Born Haber Cycle. Then there are the season... Similarly there are cycles in our socio-economic lives...
Most are chains of cause and effects.. I just realised one of these cycles: I as an engineer am working currently to develop a new product. This is involving one of those field sensors which is used in factories. I am working on creating a generic design (hardware/software) for those. This design could be used to make a field device for measuring any specific physical quantity. I am getting pay me for doing it.
Later on, we expect that an external client/company will give us a contract to design a specific product
using this generic thingy. They will pay our company for it.
They will then mass manufacture this product and market it. Customers will pay for these to use in their own factories which in turn mass manufacture some other product. This is probably an intermediary to be used in making some other product.
The company who makes this other product will pay the company making this intermediary for it. Finally the distributors/shopkeepers will take the final product to the market for consumption. And people like us (Engineers are human too!) will pay for these thereby completing the "money cycle". Come to think of it, the main function is to keep everyone busy.
People get paid for stuff and then they use this money to pay for other stuff. There are many small small money cycles like these and together they forme a larger money cycle. Those who have larger cash flows and larger cash outflow form the richer section of the society. They are the people who are a part of a larger number of these small small money cycles. They therefore can buy and do buy more kinds of "stuff" in to play with. Greed occurs when people want to be lazy. Being Lazy is easy. You dont have to do anything. But to do that you must have large reserve of money. For a large reserve of money you have to work hard and/or cunningly (read illegaly). But i wonder why people do that. Being lazy/greedy isnt being "civilised".

Talking about civilisation.. I rememeber a chapter from my 11th grade book... it was an excrept from a book "The story of Civilization" by C E M Joad. He says that civilization is not about beauiful palaces, bountiful riches etc etc... they make you happy, but after some time you get bored with it. Its neither about being able to buy anything... you cant buy too much of anything.. .. you would get bored this way too..

"Being civilised means making beautiful things, thinking freely and thinking new things, and keeping the rules, without which people couldn't get on together. Grown-ups call the first of these things "Art", the second"science and philosophy" and the third "political justice, and ethics"

I suppose there is nothing civilised about amassing lots of money... you get bored of not working anyway... and empty mind is a devils workshop...

There are some people who are just plain stupid..but still other plain people like them...

Take Shah Rukh Khan for example.. he goes around telling people that Amitabh Bacchan is a great man and no one can match him .. not even SRK himself. Yet he goes around doing things that Amitabh Bacchan did.. SRK is now doing the same advertisements that Amitabh Bacchan did, SRK did a remake of Don and now SRK is going to be on Kau Banega Crorepati.. come on give us a break, why are you making our lives complicated ..............

Let's pretend : The world's oldest game... how to play? simple... pretend to be someone else!!!... its too much simple... its too much fun... The whole film industry is a commercialization of this age old game.. (atleast they haven patented it!!) .... They make money by enticing us to watch them play it... And its so stupid of us to pay them to see something which we can play ourselves...Of course many of use cant do the stundt they can... with help of computers of course..

Anyway.. SRK is pretending to be the Big B... its like a Let's Pretend game within another Let's Pretend Game.. ""Game mein Game Parag Game""

Switch switch switch

2006-11-04T23:41:00.001+05:30

the wall socket connected to the ...extension board and extension board connected to the.... monitor....
and then there are switches!!
theres one on the wall, theres one on the extension board and then theres one on the monitor...
(the switch on the monitor is a simple microswitch which turns on the high voltage section via a bigger (more power handling capacity!) solid state switch - DP904C (POWER IC PWM Samsung Power Switch ))

So whats the big deal about the switches??... yeah , yeah you have heard many people tell you that they are the most under respected components.. and they are the most important... but simply said.. they have LIFE!...

Or in more technical words, "Mean Time Between Failure" ... The datasheets (the technical documents provided by the guys who make 'em) specify these numbers in number of cycles... ie they specify the number of time you can switch them on and off before they fail... of course these numbers are just a rough estimates...
and they probably don't factor the varied load conditions that the switch might experience in its life time..
so some switches give way earlier than others... while some last longer...
Common wall switches in humid places (Mumbai) get screwed beause of the corrosion of their terminals.. while the same ones in a dry place with extreme climate (Delhi) get screwed due to daily cycles of extreme temperatures (the plastic starts to crack)...
So what the hell do you do to avoid any inconvenience?.. simple:
1) connect many switches in series, some of these switches will be the ones inside and accessible from the front panels of many instruments.... use those ones in the chain most frequently which can be easily replaced... keep the other switches in the chain always on..
2) if there are more than one easily replaceable switches in the chain... use both equally to get double the MTBF..

so heres an example.. consider my computer system.. or rather just the monitor... there is a switch on the wall and then one on the power strip and then one on the monitor..
I used to use the switch on the power strip as the "main" switch... ie this was the first one to be switch on or off and was responsible for cutting of the flow of power to any equipment. What i mean to say is that i used to tun on the power to the system using only this switch while all other switches (one on the wall and computer) remained on. Consequently the electric arc that formed when i used the switch to cut the power eventually got the best of it and it gave way.. i had to open the power strip and i soldered thick wires across the switch effectly isolating it and shorting it out. The power strip was now permanently on! Now I had to use some other switch in the series to turn on and off the power to the system... The wall socket switch was it next!... but during all this time i used to use the monitors front panel switch to turn it on and off whenever i had to leave my computer un attended (while downloading, burning dvds or just going to the loo).. its a good idea to turn off the monitor while away to cut the power consumption.. monitors, especially CRTs are the main power consumers in the computer system. But turning off the monitor physically is not a good idea, because you are using up the precious number of cycles between failures of a switch which is in accessible for you to replace easily.. and on top of that its a semiconductor switch...not easy to obtain and solder back. So what do you do?? just set your monitor to blank out after 1 minute through the power options page in control panel. I suspect that virtually turns off the semiconductor switch; but not fully... its a PWM switch so probably the duty cycle goes down and it doesn't have to switch large currents instantaneously to do so. So in this way we probably preserve the life of those inaccessible switches. (I screwed my DP904C inside my Samsung Syncmaster 793s before i learnt this lesson fully!)

As for using the wall switch, well I will use that one to switch the mains power on and off to my system... arcing during turning off and humidity will probably get it long before its estimated MTBF .. but then what else have i got two spares for?... and plus i can easily replace those myself... heck ! even my grandma can replace those!.. you dont need to be an engineer for that!

so all contacts arc when seperated under loaded conditions (ie you see a spark when you turn off a switch)
and its this sparking that can cause whole load of damage,
Go thru the following video to see how bad and mean an electric arc could be. (go thru the rest of the page too, its quite informative!) http://205.243.100.155/frames/longarc.htm#500_kV_Switch

Talking about life and switches, all electronic components have the following characteristic life curves:

taken from: http://www.monarchtechgroup.com/Newsletters/Newsletter%20vol%203%20-%20issue%202_3-1-05.htm

taken from:
http://www.torinoscienza.it/lab-vr/agilent/laser/index01.htm

These are called the bathtub curves... because they resemble one!
I believe humans and many other living/non-living things follow this curve.. When we are young there many factors which can cause our lives to terminate. Barring attacks by predators, disease or non-natural accidents, SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) http://sids-network.org/facts.htm
seems to be a major cause of child death. It seems SIDS is like the having your brand new computer failing with the first week of its purchase... (I have heard the story of brand new computers failing the very next day many a times.. i have one of such experiences myself!)
In case of humans, there isnt much you can do, atleast not yet, but in case of electronic components, there is something called a burn in test, wherein a manufacturer operates each products that rolls out of its assembly line for a few hours at a testing facility and catch as many infant mortalities as it can. The thought is that since the device failure probability is very high during the start of its life, its better to have the device failed at the manufacturers end than at the customers end so as to save time and money wasted in transo=porting a "to be" defective piece of equipment to the customer and back; not to forget the lost goodwill of the company!

See page 909-910 of Digital Design - Principles and Practices by John F Wakerly (3rd Edition updated) for more on this bathtub curve!

nanhe munhe bache pechan kaun!!

2006-10-25T01:30:00.002+05:30

This picture was taken on 22nd January 2006 which was Elecrama 2006 Day 5 . The MUSN team went to watch a stupid hollywood movie "Just like heaven" at Inorbit mall malad. This hollywood movie turned out to be worse than a stupid bollywood movie....
The restroom featured above is the one inside the multiplex at Inorbit mall.

This picture was taken on 27th March 2006. The location is Juhu Circle... The circle has been broken now and traffic lights have been put up; but people still call it Juhu Circle. Pleople who are new to Mumbai get confused with this... they keep asking where is the circle. Even more confusing fact about it is that it was maintained by Lokhandwala Builders, so some used to call it Lokhandwala Circle (there was a big signage "Maintained by Lokhandwala Builders" on it. This lead to total confusion as there is an another circle just outside "Swami Samarth Nagar" which is popularly known as Lokhandwala. So just to avoid the confusion, the Municipal Corporation of Mumbai broke one of them (Juhu Circle)!!...
Anyway, the above picture shows how a person can extensively influence the minds of millions in just a few minutes. Kudos to Naveen Prabhakar for achieving such a feat. Laughter is the only way to win the hearts of so many in so few moments!! He created an instantaneous fad in India. Its some what like the fame that Bill Gates has achieved. Everyone uses Microsoft Windows. And everyone knows Bill Gates as the founder of the company which made Windows. And surely each Indian has initiated atleast one phone call to his/her buddy with the phrase "Phechan Kaun?".. And everyone knows it was Naveen Prabhakar who said it on Worldwide Television First!!

NP is a dude!!! Waise Raju Srivastav bhi koi kam nahin... Thats another guy who has a good imagination!! He has an uncanny ability to personify non-living things like tubelights and candles into actual living beings. And his comic narration of Marriages leaves one laughing like a mad man...

Laughter is the universal binder among all living beings. Thanks NP and RS for making this world a merrier place to live in!!

el lamington road kaminos!

2006-09-27T23:08:00.002+05:30

ADSL Splitters Gallery.........

This is what you get with your ADSL Router when you subscribe to MTNL Triband:

This is what you get for 225 rupees from a supposedly "trustworthy" shop in Lamington Road (we bought Deepti G's computer from this shop!! and thats working pretty fine... although her monitor was a wee bit off.. but we got it fixed for freeeeeeeee)... bloody piece of shit this splitter turned out to be.. wasted 225 rupees.. that to from my first salary... One measly inductor and one capacitor... WTF is this world coming too??.. I hope the guys who sell such stuff get Gonorrhea or Syphilis :

This is what you get for 110 rupees... sexy chinese stuff.. works better than the black box which you get from MTNL. Got this one from Lamington Road too. From a shop which specialized in telephone components. When in Lamington Road, its pretty hard to figure out whom to trust and whom not to!

Oh and why do we need a splitter?:
(following taken from http://www.adslguide.org.uk/howitworks/splitter.asp)

What is a splitter?

Everybody uses splitters on their telephone lines. If you want to connect up more than one telephone into the same socket, the chances are you're using a splitter. When you're connected via ADSL, you need a special type of splitter which contains a micro-filter.

Why do we need a micro-filter?

There are two reasons why they're required. The first is to stop the ADSL signal interfering with the voice part of your phone line - this sounds a bit like 'fast clicks' when it happens. The second reason is to ensure that the ADSL line is terminated correctly. Without becoming too technical, an unmatched termination can cause reflections back down the line. This is a bad thing and can cause errors on your ADSL connection. The above graph shows the frequency range that your phone (POTS) and ADSL occupy. Don't worry if you don't understand because it's not all that important to the end user.

for a bit deeper info see... http://www.ja.net/development/network-access/adsl/technical.html

finally! Mumbai will have its own metrooooo!!

2006-09-27T20:31:00.001+05:30

AVR Workshop at VESIT – A Report

2006-09-07T00:18:00.012+05:30

The Electronics and I.T. Departments of our college had organized a workshop on Embedded System Design Using AVR Microcontrollers. The workshop was held on 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th of September. Professor Dhananjay Gadre from NSIT Delhi was invited to conduct the workshop. 45 Students attended the workshop.

Professor Dhananjay Gadre is a certified AVR Consultant and has written a book on the subject together with numerous other articles in various magazines. It was one of these articles that prompted me to contact him via email. From then on I have in constant touch with him. I had let him know about Robocon and how our college had been faring in it over the years. Since he was in Pune at the time of the competition this year, I invited him to look at our robots during our stay at MIT, Pune.

He met our guide Professor Abhay Kshirsagar and it was then that the idea for conducting the AVR Microcontroller Workshop came around. On returning from Pune we immediately set towards organizing the workshop. Professor Gadre has quite a lot of experience in holding such workshops so organizing it was a breeze. We were constantly in touch with him via email and phone. He had developed 2 kits for such workshops and had agreed to bring those for the participants to work on.

The following are the details of the workshop:

Day 1 : 1300-1900 Hrs, Thursday, 01 September, 2005

On the first day Professor Gadre taught us the basic principle of designing an embedded system. He threw light on the various constraints which a design engineer must take into account before designing a system. He started right from enumerating the differences between a microcontroller and a microprocessor and went on to speak about topics like Real Time Processing and Hardware/Software Partitioning which lie at the core of the subject. He made the atmosphere lively by sharing anecdotes and practices followed by the industry in this field.

After the Tea break, the kits (PCB and components) were distributed. The participants were divided into groups of 3 each and each was assigned the task of soldering a kit. The idea behind getting the students to solder the kits themselves was to let them get the feel of the microcontroller system before they went on to program one. The whole exercise took on a totally different track when all of us soldered the wrong resistors on the PCB. From then on it was what one would call an “Organized Chaos”. Students had to get on to de-solder the wrongly placed components and put in new ones in their place. Such an incident helped the students become more aware of the problems which one might face when creating an embedded circuit and how they could prevent those by carefully paying attention to each step involved in the process.

In all, the first day turned out to be a fun exercise.

Day 2 : 1300-1900 Hrs, Friday, 02 September, 2005

In the morning, before the workshop, some of us took on the tasks of rectifying the errors which the students had made while soldering the kits the day before and we were able to fix all of those kits before the workshop began.

Professor Gadre spoke about the features of AVR Microcontrollers. He also spoke about the instruction set in brief and at the end he assigned us the task of controlling the brightness of LEDs using the technique of PWM by writing a simple program in assembly language. Some of us completed this exercise on the same day while the rest of us were successful in doing it by the start of the next day.

Day 3 : 1300-1900 Hrs, Saturday, 03 September, 2005

In the morning we took Professor Gadre to Lamington Road where he bought some components for future workshops. On returning back for the workshop, he explained more about the AVR Microcontroller series and the onboard resources available on these microcontrollers.

He explained about implementing serial communications by giving us an example of how one could design a system similar to the voting system used in the television programme “Kaun Banega Crorepati”. The idea was to use the RS-485 Communications protocol to carry out broadcast and unicast commands on the same network.

After the tea break we made a list of projects that we would make for presenting on the Technology Day. Each group was assigned a project and we set to work on them.

Day 4 : 0900-1900 Hrs, Sunday, 04 September, 2005

We spent the whole Sunday completing the projects which we had taken up. At the end of the day, all of us were successful in finishing the project with much time to spare.

At the end of day 4 we had a photo session before the official end of the AVR workshop. We thanked Professor Gadre for spending his valuable time to teach us the basics of the AVR Microcontroller.

Technology Day: Monday, 05 September, 2005

On the Technology Day we presented our projects to the college staff and students.

The projects which we had made during the workshop were:

Brightness control of LEDs using Pulse Width Modulation - The brightness of LEDs were varied by changing the on and off times (Duty Cycle) of the square wave applied to them.
Real Time Clock - A Real Time Clock was designed using the onboard counter and timers and the computer terminal was used as a display. The microcontroller communicated with the computer using the onboard USART.
Inter-Microcontroller Communication using PORT pins - A running LED pattern was implemented using total of 8 LEDs; 4 each from two different microcontroller boards. The microcontroller communicated with each other to display a continuous pattern spanning all 8 LEDs
Digital Oscilloscope - The onboard Analog to Digital of the AVR Microcontroller was used to sample the input voltage and the waveform was displayed on the computer terminal using USART
Displaying Patterns on a CRO - A Microcontroller with 2 attached DAC was used to control the electron beam in X-Y Mode to display any pattern of our choice.
Electronic Dice - An Electronic Dice was made by using seven LEDs and the on board counters. The random nature of the time elapsed between two key presses by the user served as the randomizer for the Dice.
Multi Counter - A counter which was able to count in binary patter or Gray code pattern or Excess-3 Pattern was made. The counting mode was selected by input from computer terminal via USART
White Line Detecting Circuit – A circuit was made to detect a white line from a dark colored background.

We received an overwhelming response from the staff and students. The first year students were particularly enthusiastic in getting a first hand look at such projects. We told them how they could go about making such circuits. We promised to provide them help in the future for organizing such workshops and any projects that they may want to take up.

In all, the AVR workshop has been a pleasant experience and we have learned a lot from it. Thanks to Professor Gadre’s insight and experience, we were able to achieve more than we could imagine. Due to lack of space, we could only allow the fourth year students and the VESIT Robocon 2005 Team for this workshop. We hope to hold such workshop again in the future for the second and the third year students also.

Anurag Chugh

D16 04

lost my religion

2006-09-04T23:39:00.001+05:30

What is religion?
- a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny
- an institution to express belief in a divine power

What is god?
The term God is used to designate a Supreme Being; however, there are other definitions of God.
For example:
Many religious and philosophic systems consider a God to be the creator of the universe.
Some traditions hold that the creator of the universe is also the sustainer of the universe (as in theism), while others argue that their God is no longer involved in the world after creation (as in deism).
The common definition of a God assumes omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence. ...

In brief , religion is a belief system and God is a symbol to represent it. How wierd can that be, you cant see or touch or smell belief.. and you cant do that with god either!
If God is supposed to be the symbol of belief then we should be able to see, touch, smell or atleast feel "him"

Many people believe that God exists.. others believe that he doesnt!

As for me... I believe he exists... he/she is the creator of the universe...
How can I prove his existence?
Simple, just because something exists, therefore there must be a creator, hence just because the universe exists, therefore there must be a creator... we choose to call him/her "GOD"

But my definition of god is rather limited. I just see him only a "creator".
And because god exists, hence there must be a God's God too!! (Hint hint: Stephen Hawking style!)
By limiting the God's role to only being a creator (and maybe an observer... the creation of the universe was his experiment and he is busy noting down the observations!)
I mean to say that man is actually the creator of his own destiny.

Consider the whole universe as a big experiment being conducted by an experimenter called GOD. Now for every event that takes place, GOD makes a note in his notebook. Every event could have been triggered by either of the two causes:

(1) GOD was being too curious, and that curiosity led him to interfere with something and that led to that event happening place

(2) The event took place as an outcome of the "natural" interactions between components of the universe
(by "natural" I mean the set of rules or mathematical model which forms the basis of GOD's experiment!). Man is a component of the universe.
(After thought: Woman is also a component of the universe (heheheh). We consider men and women to be the different sexes of the same species. But another way to look at them would be to consider them as two different species having a symbiotic relationship... they both need each other to flourish and "supposedly" prosper!.... for more on this read Dr. John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006016848X?v=glance)

getting back to the topic..

Most people believe that (1) is the case with the GOD's experiment... GOD is just to curious.. and interferes just too regularly... so they try to attract his attention by praying and stuff... so that he would interfere in their lives and somehow make them happy! he would interfere not to make them happy but out of mere curiosity of knowing what would happen if such and such thing was done to such and such "components of the universe" (read men)

I believe in (2). The experiment that GOD has started is has features diverse enough that he doesnt need to interfere. All events happen because of the natural interaction between the components of the universe and GOD is kept busy just noting down the observation... he doesn't have time to interfere in its working!!

There is one funny aspect of this ridiculous theory of mine, most people believe in (1); and most of these people who believe in (1) also believe that ignorance is bliss...
So if you believe that ignorance is bliss and also believe that GOD can interfere in your life, then you must also believe that GOD is curious!

ignorance is bliss and curiosity... both opposite ideas!!!

my theory sucked anyway!

Coming back to deciding our own destiny, let me first reproduce here, one of today's top news story:

--->

Sydney- Zookeeper, film star and environmentalist extraordinaire Steve Irwin died as he had lived: getting as close to, and personal with, Australia's most dangerous creatures. It was as if the zany 44-year-old showman had devised a way of death that both summed up his devil-may-care attitude and had an eye to how it would look on his tombstone: Speared through the heart by a stingray while diving on the Great Barrier Reef.

Irwin was a jumble of contradictions: an astute businessman who liked to pass himself off as a village idiot; a self-made man who actually inherited from his parents the money-spinning Australia Zoo on Queensland's Gold Coast; a nature lover who seemed obsessed with stalking and taunting wild animals.

Irwin was set up for a life of danger by his zookeeper parents. They gave him a python on his sixth birthday and by the age of nine had him catching deadly saltwater crocodiles with his bare hands.

Or, at least, that's the way Steve the charmer liked to tell it.

With the catch-cry "Crickey" and togged out in khaki shorts and shirt, Irwin won worldwide attention as the Crocodile Hunter. The television series boasted an audience of 500,000 and spawned merchandise like Crocodile Hunter dolls and led to a feature film.

He was at once shocked and delighted by his instant and amazing success as a filmmaker.

"It's insane, mate," he hollered at the Sydney premiere of the 2002 feature film Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course. "I'm bigger than 10 bears. I reckon you'd be pretty right if you said I'm the best known Aussie in the world."

When United States President George W Bush visited Canberra in 2004 Irwin was on the guest list for a barbecue at the prime minister's residence in Canberra. Characteristically, Irwin turned up in his trademark khakis to greet the most powerful man in the world.

The muscular bloke with the bleached hair and the ragged clothes had a penchant for exaggeration. Everything in his hyperactive world seemed larger than life.

He famously declared Prime Minister John Howard to be the "greatest leader in the entire world" - injudicious remarks about a political leader that raised hackles.

A knack for self-promotion and a business-savvy American wife led some to see him as having grown too big for his desert boots.

Said Irwin's business manager John Stainton: "It's what happens in Australia. You stick your head up and you've got 10,000 shotguns pointed at you."

Worse was to come for Irwin. In 2003 he was left defending the indefensible after cameras caught him feeding chicken to a hungry 4-metre saltwater crocodile with one hand while holding month-old son Bob in the other.

Pictures of a stunt performed in front of a paying audience at Australia Zoo flashed around the world and had viewers wondering whether the madcap bushman was simply mad.

Australians, in letters to newspapers and in comments on talkback radio, were universal in their condemnation.

Stuart Hastings, writing to The Australian newspaper, noted the logical inconsistency in Irwin's declaration that little Bob's life was never at risk: "If his baby was in any danger from the crocodiles, then Irwin was guilty of gross dereliction of his parental responsibility. If there was no danger from the crocodiles, then the whole of his crocodile feeding act is a fraud."

Irwin took on a much lower profile in his homeland after the episode with baby Bob.

He leaves a wife, Terri, and two children. Bob is now 3. His sister, Bindi Sue, is 8.

Sting ray gets its name from the razor-sharp barb at the end of its tail, coated in toxic venom, which the animal uses to defend itself with when it feels threatened.

Attacks on humans are a rarity - only one other person is known to have died in Australia from a stingray attack, at St Kilda, Melbourne in 1945.

"Stingrays only sting in defence, they're not aggressive animals so the animal must have felt threatened. It didn't sting out of aggression, it stung out of fear," Dr Bryan Fry, Deputy Director of the Australian Venom Research Unit at the University of Melbourne said.

"Steve came over the top of a stingray and the stingray's barb went up and went into his chest and put a hole into his heart," said the ebullient Irwin's longtime producer John Stainton, who was with him at the time.

"It's likely that he possibly died instantly when the barb hit him, and I don't think that he ... felt any pain," a tearful Stainton told reporters

<---

Another great hero, lost! Yes I like to think of him as a hero! He was my kind of hero.. I would have given anything to be in his place! His passion for nature was and still is like a communicable disease. Just watching him on TV, one would feel like as if he/she was actually there with Steve doing what he did best: getting up close and personal with the wildest and the most ferocious... ok ok .. I know I sound like thepromo for The Crocodile Hunter!

But the fact is that its much too painful to know that he is gone forever! His family would miss him a lot!! The whole world would miss him a lot!

Why did i like this guy so much?? What was so great about his act? How was it any different from the guys who tried to break records buy swimming naked in sub zero waters for seconds?

Consider this... there is a beautiful and intelligent girl which is the most eligible bachelorettes of our time...
What would this girl think when he sees two men on TV:

One is the guy who is trying to break a worlkd record by swimming the ongest in subzero waters and the other guy is Steve Irwin who is trying to rescue a crocodile from some dirty marsh..

what would go on in the girl's mind?

"The first guys is probably stupid, what do I care about under sea swimming at sub zero temperatures?.. we are never going to do that!!.. and probably half of that guys' reproductive system might have got screwed by now after spending so much time in sub zero waters!... i dont want deformed kids!!

but look at this Steve guy, crocodiles apart, this guy is fearless and is quick witted. He has nice muscles and probably knows how to survive in nature.. If the ice age was nearing, I would probably marry the first guy... but before that happens, I think we would be under threat from our own selves .. some one would probably blow up an Electromagnetic Pulse Bombs... The ones used in the Matrix movie series to fry the electronics of any machine. (Detailed: http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/kopp/apjemp.html)
Very few people would die of such a bomb instantaneously, but its after math would be real bad... crippled economies, no food or hospital services, no electricity, no water supply... Skills of 95% of the worlds population would be rendered "ZERO" , Getting 90% in your university exam wont help you in dealing with things to follow, So I would rather go for Steve. He would keep me an my kids alive even when the industrial world crumbles under its own weight! We would flee to some forgotten of the cost of Australia and live happily ever after!".

Stupid hypothetical situations apart, the fact is that I really beieved in Steve.. So what if he fed a hungry croc with his baby on his side... Maybe I would have done something like that too!!... I am equally insane.. He had a passion ... a mad passion for nature... He lived that passion and thru TV made it possible for all of us to share it with him !! HE WAS A FOUNTAINHEAD!!

He lived life dangerously.. no he wasnt a fraud... he knew it was dangerous and that someday he would have to pay for it... he forced luck on his side and never got killed before until this once... stupid stingray...He is the only other person to have been killed by a stingray...

I believed in Steve for his passion. I believed in Steve in trying toshare with people his passion for nature. I believed in his craziness. I feel sad for his wife and kids... but they should be proud to be Steve's family. He and his wife Teri were a perfect match.. If you want to know the meaning of "MADE FOR EACH OTHER"... well they were it!

Today also happens to be the Birthday of my dearest friend Shomika. One of the most influential girls in my life. She could stay calm in all situations.. one who held her head high above her shoulders and had a courage which never faltered.

If all this about God, heaven and "afterlife" is true, then I have no fear of death.. because I know that I will meet my dearest friend Shomika on the otherside.

I learned a lot from Shomika. It was many days later after her that I actually came to know that she was gone.. I coulndt believe it.. more than 2 years later and I still cant believe that she is gone.. Whenever I pass near her house, I always rememeber seeing her standing at the bus stop every morning in her uniform waiting for the bus. I remember her too well. We both knew eactly what our friendship meant to each other. In that sense I dont have any regrets. But what I do feel sad and helpless about is the fact that I wasnt there with her during her last moments. And the fact that I came to know about this so many months after she was actually gone only makes it worse.
It was because of her that I could make my way through worst of the days.. I would remember how some people around her mad her life sickening for her... and how she dealt with it so smoothly..
I always thought if she could do it, so can I..
She was one of me role models... just like Steve

I believed in Shomika.
I believed in Steve Irwin.
I had ultimate faith in them.

They were a part of my belief system; my religion.
I lost Steve, I lost Shomika, I lost my religion.

Shomika was the first person to fill up my scrap book.. her is her entry:

Here is a pic of me and shomika at the 12th Std Farewell party :

Here is a picture of me, shomika and ayush s .. at the 12th std farewell party:

The Last Question

2006-08-07T21:59:00.001+05:30

Recent floods (previous year's 26 july 2005 and the ones happening around today) evoke one to think about the fate of human race... Remember the movie "The day after tomorrow"? .. Maybe we are screwing up too much with our environment??? But then again maybe thats the way its supposed to be?
The second law of thermodynamics states: "The entropy of an isolated system not at equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value."
So one of the logical outcomes of the second law is that the human race will continue to exist as long as it manages to increase entropy of the universe at a rate greater than what it would be if it were extinct. So all the nonsense we do actually enables us to survive longer as a race... Imagine.. all the hot soupy particles of the solar system came together to form the sun and the planets (decrease in the entropy!?!) just so that we would be born - and the universe will have nice candidate to help facilitate its own extinction.. The ultimate state where all energy will be distributed evenly and finely over the whole universe..
Its called the Heat Death theory. It makes a nice read .. e specially on bleak windy and rainy days when you are trapped indoors. Well if you are trapped indoors, then a better idea would be to read Isaac Asimov's The Last Question.
Where will you get a book on a rainy day when you are trapped inside your house?
Well, just buy or borrow the book and wait for a rainy day!

UPDATE ON 2007-12-25 21:50 +0530:
You can read The Last Question here: http://www.multivax.com

Radio/TV License

2006-08-06T13:54:00.003+05:30

I can't believe that we were required to have a licence to own and use a Television for Receiving Broadcasts. Indian Posts and Telegraphs used to issue such licences in India. Some countries still require users to have these licences (See Wikipedia Article on Television licences)!!
I found our old TV licence stashed somewhere in our house. I scanned it and put it up here. Imagine the waste of time, standing in line, to fill up forms, submit documents and getting this license - so much effort, for just being a lazy couch potato.