Finally I have made a beginning into changing the look of my page! The task was overdue for around.. well... for around a year or so I guess. I have only started on it and still lots of changes to make. Also planning to buy a domain name and hosting service and move out of blogspot. Any suggestions?
User interfaces and associated technologies have never been my cup of tea. I just hope this one does not turn out ugleee
Unable to manage a big set of pictures, in both physical and digital forms, I decided to choose the good few pictures from last year and burn them into a CD for safekeeping. It turned out to be job way difficult than I initially thought. Organizing them and then trying to get rid of defects/errors in the pictues are eating up a lot of time. Finally, I shortlisted 80 odd original and a few more derived pictures. Here is a small portion of them in some good quality thumbnails.
okay, the BCCI has decided that the players' wives or girlfriends are not to accompany them to SA. I wonder what they are upto. And what is their problem as long as the players meet their basic obligations? Next, the board might as well decide on the underwear brand the players are supposed to wear, and soon enforce whom should the singles in the team should date/marry. Of course they shall keep Parthiv Patel out of this business ;) :D. I curse control freaks that they shall meet doom.
I am getting sick of these world cup promos these days. Grrrr.... there is a limit for everything and enough is enough. Remind me not to go anywhere near the telly for sometime to come. Why don't they come up with sets that automatically switch channels during commercials? :p
At work, I moved into a place near a window yesteday. I used to sit in this place around a year back when I had written a post about my seat. I felt like writing similar stuff today. Lazy as I am, instead of writing, I am reproducing the same old post dated Feb 25, 2002. ;-) Here it is:
JOY AT WORK!
Clarifications first: I did not say Joy of Work.
I sit next to a glass wall. And beyond the wall, stretching close to it is a jackfruit tree, now full of fat bubbles of jackfruit hanging from its stem. The jackfruit tree has some visitors coming in and going everyday and some of them probably even live there. I presume the glasses ensure that the visitors don't get to see us working in the building, but we can see them.
Today morning, first it was that beautiful rare white pigeon that lives in our building(I think) that decided to relax on the tree for some time. As we watched it play around for some time and fly off, soon followed a band of monkeys! One of them pulled out a big jackfruit and started its lunch right away. It took its own time to finish part of the fruit, and when done, decided to drop the remaining down. What came next were a pair of pigeons, which did some walking around in the tree and then took their way. Then there was some peace around the tree. After some time it was a squirrel who was looking around for some thing to eat. He looked around a big jackfruit but finally found some edibles that matched his size. With a full stomach, he decided to take take a sunbath, sitting on the top of the jackfruit, posing like a Maharaja. A little later when another pal arrived, they decided to do some acrobatics around the tree and give us some entertainment. The stream of visitors in the morning ended by that.
Squirrels arrive on the tree almost regularly, but the other visitors are a bit rare. Sometimes there are even crows that bang right into the glass wall and threaten to break down the glasses. With the arrival of fruits on the tree, there are more visitors and they come back more often. And we have more fun.
Rediff blogs is out. Tried it for curiosity's sake. Not bad because the interface is completely copied from blogger. There is lot of room for improvements though. But they seem to have some nice templates. I simply used the template that was selected by default, and found it decent. Here is the page. I am going to delete it in a few days.
Don't ask me which place is this. There is no such thing called free advertising, and I am fairly sure these guys are not going to pay me. :-)
A Doubt: Coconut trees always seem to lean towards the sea?! I can't recall any picture where they were leaning towards land.
Just noticed that I am runnning out of pictures to post. It has been long long time since I last took out my camera and headed out. And prospects are not looking good for some planned journeys, as weather gods are not happy. May be my camera is headed for some hybernation.
I was doing some errands yesterday night while tuned into MCM in the background. Then they played this 'Shoot the Dog' by George Michael and my eyes got stuck to the tube. That sure was a lovely animated video comprising Dubya, Tony the Doggie and a few more people like Saddam, Cherie and more. The cool video, in poor taste, is just what Dubya deserves. The music sucks though. Here is the lyrics, some stills from the video and some statements supposedly from George Michael.
Check out this shameless, outrageous and yet funny act: Dow Chemicals, the now owners of Union Carbide(of Bhopal) have SUED some of the survivors of the Bhopal tragedy!!
hmmm.... These days I am beginning to find quite a few weblogs sick to read. And sometimes I even get sick about the state of my own blog. Well, I guess for everything comes a day when you get bored of doing it too much.
Yesterday, my mailbox told me that rediff is going to get into blogging stuff. A good number of you may know this already. What is the implication? It means that they will have a link to their blogging site somewhere in the front page of rediff, and so every other Indian will figure out what a blog is. And probably every tenth guy/gal will own a blog. Next time you think abt bloggers in your town meeting up, look out if you can book some big conference hall. :)
The bitter cold breeze at some quite place away from town was doing its bit to annoy me. Smoked not one, not 2 but 5 sticks of tobacco one after other!! Does that qualify for chain smoking? The last time was a few months back. The next time shall be few months away.
One of the things that I always cherished was to live like one of my uncles, at least for sometime in life.
They lived almost in the middle of the forest somewhere in the western ghats. The first time I recollect visiting them is when I was a small kid. We had to walk around 7km from nearest motorable road to reach their house! They owned a farm, where they grew beetlenut, cashew and a few more things. Their village consisted of just a few houses and you had to do quite a bit of walking to reach your neighbours. These days, the place is accessible by vehicles seasonally but the roads will be in really bad shape during rainy seasons. Their farm was surrounded by very dense forests and hills where you could easily loose your way. And a few hundred meters away from the house was a river that was feeding the farm. The forest around was so thick that tigers used to live there. My cousins tell me about this incident when they had to helplessly witness their dog being dragged away by a tiger! But that was more than a decade ago.
During my school days, I would spend most of my summer vacation with them. The fun there never used to stop. With a couple of cousins and neighbourhood kids to play with, there was not a thing that we would not do. The best of everything was swimming in the river. To everyone's dislike(and the fear that someone would drown), we would run to the river sometime around 10 in the morning and stay put for 2-3 hours until we all were exhausted. I still remember the first time in life when I tried to dive into water in this river. The platform(a rock) was only a few feet high. Looking at other guys happily diving and having fun there, I decided to try it out myself and fell flat on my stomach. It was such a blow, I think if I remember right, my stomach had turned slightly green. After that incident, I had a great phobia of diving that I did not try that feat again for a couple of years. The best part of the whole thing was swimming races. Being not very well verse with swimming, I always used to be first from the last but would never give up and invite every one again and again for another try. After spending a long time in the water, we would still not comeback until someone came from home to herd us out saying it is time for lunch. And when you are tired and hungry like a lion, a heavy lunch is just what you would be wishing for.
somewhere in western ghats...
After lunch, while the elders would get busy with their siesta, we would go wandering in the farm and the forest around. The farm had a lot for us to offer, especially during summer. It was actually tough to choose where to start our loot among guava, mangoes, papaya trees and many many more. Mangoes were obvious favourites. Along with the taste, the shorter and accessible trees would also add the pleasure of climbing them and playing around. When there was enough of this, we would just go around walking or while away our time near the river or someplace. Often in the evenings, I would go to the river, find a stone in shallow waters, sit on it and keep on watching the flowing river. Occasional small fish passing by would try to byte my leg and tickle me off. Many days I would be sitting like that until sunset and slowly walk back home with a very content feeling. And on some days we would go herding cows that try to be mischievous and refuse to return home by themselves at the end of the day(There are times when people lost cows to tigers). As the sun sets down, people would slowly start gathering in the veranda and many chatterboxes would start working. Soon some of us would gather and start off with a game of cards that will go on till dinner and sometimes continue much furthur.
There was much more to do even after dinner. A few miles away was a very well known place where they would play Yakshaganas(a kind of musical drama famous in the locale. link) all thru the night till morning. Many times, I would walk 3kms to the venue with all the enthu to watch the play, only to sleep off at the venue! ....and wake up to the morning that has much more fun to offer.
I haven't been able to go there since the days I have started working. No summer vacations you see.... The fact that all my playmates are now grown up, and some of them are married also makes a big difference to the way things are. Especially missed are my cousin sisters who moved on from the place after their marriage. To them is this post.
