Today has been a day where I have seen why perseverance does make a difference.

First off, I've been wanting to buy a basic but decent set of speakers for my PC since I the last time I had speakers was when headphones had far better quality and I had never looked back. As I was driving past e-zone, I noticed that there were a few vacant parking spots and decided to stop by. I managed to find a 2.1 speaker set that I liked since it seemed to have provision for attached a headphone that would automatically mute the speakers. It does mean a lot of convenience since I don't have unplug the speakers for those occasions when I need to use a headphone. The sales guy didn't know all the tech specs and so I decided to help myself by hunting down the package and reading the details on it. On the face of it, the speakers looked expensive at 2690. I sort of started cribbing saying that the MRP was 2695 and the price was unreasonable. On further investigation, it turned out that it was actually selling at 1650!

Just before I reached home, I wanted to stop by Ranga Shankara and see if by some freak chance they had the tickets for today's show. The even bigger challenge tends to be finding a place to park the car. And by some chance, not only did I manage to find a place to park the car, I also managed to pick up a ticket for myself and while at it, also call up home and ask it someone is interested.

Once I'd hooked up my new speakers, I started hunting down the audio CD of my French course that I had not managed to find ever since I had resumed the classes. And find it, I did.

Lastly, I'd given up on my desktop mouse since it was not responding and have been using a small and rather painful laptop mouse along with my desktop. Some tinkering with the connection and voila! the good old desktop mouse started working again.

In effect, all that I was reminded of today is how not to give on something because of past failures (also known as don't learn from your so called mistakes/experiences) and just keep trying. Just because something has not worked enough and more times in the past does not mean it won't work ever again.

I have the joy of announcing the launch of my new blog dedicated exclusively to tech related stuff called Statistically Incorrect. It is meant for serious technology related stuff. It has taken me forever to get this thing going but there it is.

Readers of this blog no longer have to deal with long boring tech texts that is unfit for mainstream consumption.

Ceci mon premier inscrire en français. Franchement, je n'ai pas une thème pour ce blog. Alors, je vais écrire sur dormir.

J'adore dormir. Malheureusement, je n'assez pas dormir. Maintenant, j'ai decidé de dormir pendent 8 heures par jour. Ça c'est très important pour la santé. Hier, j'ai dormir pour 7 heures. Aujourd'hui, je vais dormir environ 8 heures.

À matin, je chercherai un bénévole pour corriger cet inscrire.

The news that made my day is RSS pledging to fight regionalism against SS & sons. Both organizations have a history of being associated with wanton violence and have also been seen as member organizations of a larger conglomerate.

What makes this development even more interesting is fact that RSS is headquartered in Nagpur. For those of you who missed out on geography (and politics), Nagpur is situated in Maharashtra and is also the quasi-capital of Vidharba. Maharashtra is largely composed of 3 regions: Konkan, Marathwada & Vidarbha of which Vidarbha has that region that has been least affected by the communal chaos.

While I've been largely indifferent to the activities of RSS, this is a good time to start showing interest.

Historically (and statistically) speaking, I've always found it very hard to score decent marks in language exams. Two exceptions happened to be my first level scores in French and German. The scores were abnormally high and any paranormal activity scanner would have picked up the anomaly. The scores in this round of my French course seems to be demonstrating a scary pattern: a monotonically decreasing sequence. The scores have been 9, 8.5, 8 and 6 (on a base of 10). I have a strange feeling that my score in today's exam is seriously flirting with the number 5 and might even succeed at going under it. This would effectively mean that unless I can buck the trend of monotonically decreasing scores, my French saga shall come to an unpleasant end with me actually failing to pass in some course for the first time in my life. That would make for an appropriate but uneventful use of the word débute.

As to why I've been performing so miserably, it is no secret. The lack of attention (read time spent) is clearly showing. My idea of preparing for a test has come down to hoping I can flip through the pages and read about opining Christian Lacroix's collection while waiting at each traffic signal on my way to the class. My complete lack of control over how I spend my time (a recurring theme in my recent posts) is taking it toll in almost everything I do (or should be doing). Let us see when if ever, I learn from my mistakes.

I've made enough progress in learning French to the point where I can understand que sera sera. In fact, I don't know if the quote is of French origin but it surely does translate literally into what shall be, shall be. Anyway, this post is not so much about French as it is about the quote.

A question that I've always found annoying is Where do you see yourself 5 years from now? I don't know how people have an answer for that but I've found it very hard to have an answer, regardless of what context the question is posed in. To be honest, at best I might have on opinion on where I want to be in say 2-3 years from now but that still is very different from where I think I will be.

As I walk back in time, I can say that more often than not, I don't end up achieving what I wanted in 2-3 years from that point. In fact, I end up drifting a slightly different direction ever so often that in 5 years time, I'm fairly "off course" if you extrapolated what I was doing at that point. And once you are off course, you cannot even measure how close you go to something. All all you physicists, don't think of using vector components to solve this problem. The saving grace comes from the fact that more often than not, this course deviation is something that I do like.

The reason why I wrote this is to make a blanket statement to the effect of how bad we are at predicting the future and the way to realize it is by going back in the past and seeing how we have being doing a bad job at it. Disagreements are more than welcome.

Last week, I was sitting on a bench by the street side in a certain lively part of our country observing a variety of people and wondering what has helped in making them all so different from one another and from myself. Unsurprisingly, the answers to those questions were nothing new; just things that people had told me long ago.

For the most part, I believe that if you want to qualitatively do something, then you can do it. For example, if you are afraid of water and want to do scuba diving, you can actually do it. But if you wish to beat Michael Phelps' record, then you may not be able to do it regardless of how much you try. It is important to be able to make this distinction between being able to do something and being able to do something in a certain fashion and under certain circumstances.

As usual, I have strayed away from the main idea so I shall try and get back to it. If you want to be able to play a guitar, then you can. If you want to be able to service a television, then you can. Of if you just want to wile away your time reading a blog that sounds like a self help book, you can also do that.

However, the thing that you need to realize is that it takes time to do anything (including but not limited to doing nothing or just indulging in procrastination). And time we have to do this is something is a thing that we all have in equal amounts. Everybody has the same amount of minutes or seconds or moments in a single day. Till date, there is no practical way by which we as individuals can break away from this constraint.

This is what makes us all equal and different and less importantly, an amusing paradox. While we all have the same amounts of time, we all choose to put it to use differently. And it is this choice that makes each one of us different. For better or for worse, every choice has an amplifying effect as time progresses. For example, someone who has spent great deal of time learning spoken languages might have to spend much lesser time learning yet another new language than someone who is trying to learn a second language. For all the time this person has spent in learning spoken languages, she has not spent that time doing a myriad other things that set her back in all those things she did not do, relative to the millions of people who were indeed doing those other things.

Coming to terms with this idea is both liberating and depressing. It helps in rationalizing why you can't be able to do everything, let alone being good at it. And it also reminds you why you won't be able to do everything, let alone be good at it.

I guess what is acquired by our choices can be deemed as wealth (not to be confused with money) and wealth is something that is used as tool to exchange what one person has attained through her choices with what someone else has attained through a different set of choices that he has made. And this is how we try to make up for our differences; by trading our wealth. Somewhere along the road, people chose quantify wealth to increase the interchangeability of various forms of wealth created this beautiful disaster that we call money. But that story is for another day.

Hello world. Long time, no pseudo-intellectual stuff. So here it goes!

Gautama the Buddha said desire is the root cause of all sorrow. While most of us would agree, we still do not change our ways. And nothing is wrong with that actually. Much of the trouble comes with the difference that exists between what we wish for and what we have.

I now believe everything that everyone has, has come through exactly one of two ways: either by inheritance or by worthiness. Worthiness is something that I use to describe working towards achieving something in the right way and to the right extent. I shall refrain from elucidating on righteousness or even what qualifies as right. Everything else qualifies as inheritance. Right from the literal meaning of inheritance, I mean everything like winning a lottery, stealing from someone, getting an undeserved opportunity, to even something you are on your way to become worthy of but aren't quite there as yet.

The trouble with inheritance is the ability to retain what you have inherited. If you were not worthy of something but just inherited it, then by definition, you lack what it takes to get it in the first place. Chances are, you will not know what it takes to keep it either. There are enough and more illustrations of this axiom. Most lottery winners usually go back to their old standard of living say within 5 years of winning the money. Founder CEOs of even moderately successful companies don't get to keep their job beyond a certain point (though they may be permitted to keep the title for much longer periods of time). Marriages between incompatible people don't last forever.

The one thing that people tend to overestimate is what it takes to actually get something that you aspire for even when you are not worth it. Should you inherit something, one can always work towards becoming worthy of it before it is too late. Or else, sooner or later, you are going to lose it. And then it will cause you all the more sorrow. There really is no solution to this, for you can undeservedly get something even when you are not pursuing it. The only option I see is to always have you feet on the ground have the ability to genuinely assess where you stand with regards to the worthiness of everything you have or shall have in life. Then you either work rapidly towards bridging the disparity or come to terms with having to forfeit it at some point in the future.

With TED coming to India, all of a sudden a whole lot of people seem to know about it. I knew what TED was almost a decade ago. And I also knew why it was so elitist and aspired to be a part of it someday. Back then, the number of people I knew who knew TED was practically zero. Even 5 years ago, that number would have been less than 10. Today, all of sudden, everybody seems to know what TED.

While this is a good thing for TED (both the speakers and its newfound audience), personally I feel betrayed that something that was so elitist that I knew and most people didn't know has become a lot more commonplace. This is akin to me knowing Deepika Padukone some 2 years before her debut in Bollywood or google back in early 1999.

How do you react when you see the possibility of mass popularity of something when it is relatively obscure and then it does indeed become commonplace?

It has been a while since I wrote anything in the name of a blog regardless of how pointless it is. Not surprisingly, that coincided with me starting to use twitter. Twitter is awesome is so many ways but certainly not meant to be a substitute for elaborate writing. I've seen a lot of old time bloggers temporarily give up on proper writing when they got hooked on to twitter and it wasn't any different for me either.
I'm making this post from my E63 just to see how hard is full fleged logging from a QWERTY mobile device. Apparently it is not that hard. Anyways, expect to see more of me here.

I am an exceptionally slow person when it comes to catching up with things. Right from learning cycling say paying attetion to grooming or even using something like a blog; I've been years behind others. One thing I tried to resist was using twitter but I finally got on to it (beyond nominal presence).

Usually, I curse when I try out new things. Surprisingly, I am not doing this with twitter. People talk of user generated content democratizing the world. Until twitter, that just hadn't happened. Also, the six degrees of separation is now staring at my face like never before.

There is something about the way twitter has caught on. The fact that I have sense of what anyone from Werner Vogels to Gul Panag is upto never happened. Never before could I know that Werner had a bad day with Paxos or Gul just landed in BIAL. And also, this is first time I see 6 degrees of separation in action. I know someone who prepared for the IIT entrance exams with Chetan Bhagat who in turn seems to be in touch with Shashi Tharoor and Neha Dhupia.

Heck, inspired by valhenson's post, I think twitter should be the main thing outside of email to stay connected in the online world.

Update: Scott Adam's timing couldn't be more appropriate http://dilbert.com/fast/2009-10-04/

Today I finally got down to making a simple chicken dish all by myself. And it didn't turn out to be half as bad as I expected. I don't know what to call it but it is just getting some "Real Good" boneless chicken, slice & dice, add some seasoning and cooking it. Also, I managed to make rice today which again is no big deal in large scheme of things but was a first for me. If only I were more serious about learning to cook, I'd have gotten much further by now.

I tried using a bit of facebook blasts and a few followup on twitter but I realized I just can't help but be loquacious much like Saif in Love Aaj Kal (and the similarity probably ends there). For lack of better things to do, I finally decided to go see that movie knowing three things: there is an element of my second home, my idea of a pretty woman and the first 10 minutes of the story.

For the most part, I found it to be an exceptionally mature story. And when I say mature, I mean literally; not the connotations attached with "mature content". What I found refreshing for a mainstream Bollywood movie is that it lets the two protagonists be completely accountable for their actions. There are no random circumstantial twists, no confusing triangles or pentagrams or some other external forces in play. The notion of you can be as stupid as possible, mess things up as much as possible but that it you ought clean up the twisted little world that you built for yourself was brought out elegantly. Of course, the entire dual story with the flashback seemed like more traditional Bollywood stuff but I guess that was put in to probably help bridge the gap for people with orthodox expectations.

Another completely different aspect of the movie is that it was scattered with a lot of memes from my life. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Just to make it clear, I'll try and list a few: thinking everything will be ok as long as I'm playing some stupid game (on a PC or the likes of a gaming console), a very specific aerial shot over the Thames that seemed very close to a sighting I had when flying over London, mulling in front of the two towers: iron pillar & qutb minar (which happened to be my phone wallpaper for 2+ years), believing pursuing one's passion as profession is everything in life, hopping aimlessly on and off those cable cars, look at a bunch of people dance and struggle hard in attempts to fit in, using the expression "angreez ban raha hain" and then indulge in something similar at a later point, etc. etc. Of all the movies I've ever seen till date, this one had the maximum numbers of bits and pieces from my life strewn in a different sequence, in a different context but certainly in ways I could relate to.

All in all, watching the movie worked out for me but for anybody else, the maximum they can hope to derive of it is as earlier said: a Bollywood movie with a mature storyline.

Found this page that makes We didn't start the fire all the more enjoyable.

It has been a year since a few things happened. First off, there is no denying that I miss my previous incarnation and I will remain eternally grateful to it. With that being said, I'd venture to say my current avatar has taken my understanding of life to place in ways I could never imagine.

For starters, it has completely redefined my notion of responsibility. It is fun no doubt, much life how there are fun things to do all your life (if you aren't having fun in your life, go fix it) but there is certainly a difference much the one between the fun and carefree life as a 8 year old and the fun and not so carefree life of a 20 year old. What I do know is that at the end of the day (or year to be more precise), it has been totally worth it and I am happy for myself that I was able to make the so called giant leap from a big organization to a small place which I've heard (and also seen first hand) many people find extremely hard to do.

About 5 years ago, I went to a sushi place for the first time. It was also the first time I was in the US&A and never before did I have to figure out using chopsticks. Not knowing how to use chopsticks when dealing with Sushi and more importantly Wasabi is a nightmare that is hard to explain. Despite all the damage, I still liked Sushi. A few years late, I managed to import large quantities of chopsticsk and began my self inflicted training of trying to use it on many food items. The hope was that one day, I will be able to gracefully handle Sushi. Today happended to be the day of reconing when I unexpectadly ended up at shiro and had to put my skills to test. Suprisingly, I had no issues dealing with it and it seemed simple. All the years of practise did finally pay off.

I've always been a disaster at tying shoelaces. It always gets undone within a couple of hours. On Sunday, I discovered a new way to tie your laces. And the works like a charm! Finally I don't have to feel like a retard.

The only downside is that I am compensated a gift to make up for my inability to get the laces right: I can stand on just one foot, lift my other foot up and tie the lace. It has been quite a showoff fact, especialy with ladies (not that it has anything more than a momentary effect) and now that skill will be rendered irrelevant thanks to Ian.

People worry about what will happen to a lot of things after they are gone. The funny thing is that it matters only until you are not gone. Once you are gone, it doesn't matter to you.

A good example is what happened to this. Apparently it has gone on to earn certain kinds of honours. The funny thing is that I find a lot of random (read people outside that team) people congratulating me for it. It was the last big thing I did before I was gone. I still don't have an iota of an idea of how I'm supposed to react. Am I supposed to feel happy for the team? Am I supposed to feel proud of myself? Or am I simply supposed to solicit advice on how I'm supposed to react?

Maybe they are talking of people who don't go home and work from office all the time but to me this ad seems borderline crazy

Install wvdial. Have the following setting in /etc/wvdial.conf

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtelgprs.com"
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99***1#
Password = airtel
Username = airtel
Stupid Mode = 1


Thanks to CadCrazy for the original post.