Category Archives: old beginnings

May 1

Crossroads suck

Why then, must we face so many of them?

Apart from the fact that I am prone to the odd anxious moment when faced with mundane choices, i have never felt as anxious as this moment – facing an imminent end to the structured life of college and classes and curricula and the start of a new life filled with the chaos and uncertainty expected in an entrepreneurial venture. even though it’s in a field i love, and have trained for lo these 3 years, i guess i still have not reconciled myself to the fact that i am taking up a rather serious responsibility. Not to get too emu, but i will really miss the fun-filled and (more importantly) relatively irresponsible life i have led so far.

here’s hoping it all turns out well, and i am glad i have the family and friends i do to help me along the way :)

Dec 23

all i want for christmas…

is a Nikon D3, but that’s not what this post is about. I spent a substantial part of the day shooting a Canon 1D MkIII. it’s what news and particularly sports photographers generally tote around, hidden behind their monster lenses. one of my classmates happens to own one. i had a damn near religious experience. shooting was a joy (not that it isn’t with my D200, but even more so than usual) and there were no niggles whatsoever.

it’s almost instant focussing(it helped that he owned 2 dead sexy lenses) and that big fat vertical grip make it a joy to use… and the image quality is expectedly awesome(better be at those prices). oh, and you should hear it fire away at 10frames-a-sec.

while the 1D MkIII is many kinds of amazing, i dont get the canon interface paradigm at all. the ferris-wheel took some getting used to and for some reason it was setup so that you had to change both aperture and shutter values with the same dial and a button-press. why is this even possible? also the custom function menu interface is so 2001. please canon, implement a nice little ‘help’ button like nikon does on all it’s cameras so that there is a decent explanation of what exactly the function is supposed to do.

oh, my point is that if i can have so much damn fun with a canon, i can only imagine what it would feel like if it was actually a nikon :-D

help a photographer out, buy me a D3! or at least a battery grip so i can pretend to roll with the big boys:-p

Nov 7

public transport and it’s consequences

regarding that Tom Friedman thing a couple of posts back. forgive me, it must have been something in the Sambhar that evening.

Cheaper transportation, more efficient transportation, blah blah blah blah. if he spared a few millions from his personal fortune to you know, actually fund the goddamned thing, then the world would be a better place for it. they can advertise his books or something in return. the AP State Road Transport Corporation carries about 12.5 million people EVERY DAY(probably an underestimation). the scale of maintenance operations is huge because of the number of different buses of different ages etc., that have to be taken care of. the RTC cannot afford to concentrate on urban transport because it’s a state-level transport service that needs to operate to every last village in the state.

btw, there are no empty buses at any time of the day in the city except on really well-covered routes and at rush hour most are jam-packed with people hanging off of the rails and foot-boards. the only real way to solve the public transport problem is to give people a) more buses and b) a better rail system, both of which are in the works. but they are expensive and time consuming. so unless he is either providing some money or other expert infrastructure advice, please mr friedman. keep your opinionating to yourself and your CEOs of high-flying companies (now flying a little lower thanks to the weak dollar)

Nov 5

Twilight Zone

i reveal to you that possibly for the very first time in my short life on god’s green earth, i agree with a certain man with a very prominent moustache and questionable to non-existent judgement.

Tom Friedman argues for better public transport in India’s crowded cities.

i know, i know. i read that and when i found myself agreeing i pinched myself a little bit to make sure this was not a dream. then i looked outdoors and there was the sun continuing about the diurnal illusion of moving from east to west, and no flying pigs or anything either. but you know what they say about stopped clocks and their correctness… speaking of which, david brooks finds a little bit of actual humour.if only he would do a companion piece about the republicans, it would achieve some much-needed(or so they say) balance.

now, on to the overwhelming question of the day based on the articles linked above:

did someone put a little LSD in my breakfast???? (and if you did, could you please make it a habit? kthxbye!)

also: Krugman is finding the nails’ centers of mass and gravity down to the nearest molecule. as is Colbert, obv.!!

this is probably the most i will ever link to the times in one post. 3 links? outrageous!

Nov 2

Weakened Reading (primarily for U.S. Readers)

Simon Tisdall on how Iran may actually have a more diverse democracy than the U.S, despite all the hate-mongering to the contrary

the self-referential Arthur Silber rages against the machine about that one dude who got tazered in front of John ‘Also-Ran’ Kerry, who stood by watching.

Who is IOZ? on the myopic hindsight of one of the more prominent liberal bloggers

Doug Henwood at LBO talks about 20 years of being a Lefty Publication in the USA.

and finally, in case you want to feel happy or amusingly disturbed, Some Dude goes T.S. Lolcat on us (thanks, K)

update: the undead one has a few words to say about Racism

have a good weekend folks, i’m off to study how to føtøgraph, CSI style

Oct 19

i can’t believe it’s not a meme!

the snagaløpe has ‘tagged’ me in a ‘meme’ originating in some far-off distant blog called ‘pharyngula’.

well i guess sometimes we have enough time to waste that we pursue these things.

onward!!

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

— You can leave them exactly as is.

— You can delete any one question.

— You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

— You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] in [genre] is…”.

You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-grandparent is Shakespeare’s Sister.
My great-grandparent is Excuse This Mess…(shayera)
My grandparent is Jennifer.
My parent is Snag

1. The best THRILLER in scientific dystopias is: Dark City

2. The best sexy song in rock is: Pour Some Sugar on Me by Def Leppard.

3. The best cult novel in absurdist fiction is: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

4. The best use of ground meat in american cooking is: the cheezburger

5: The best GAME SHOW produced OUTSIDE the usa is: The Crystal Maze

now to contaminate and mutate, i shall choose the celebrity couple of UC & AG. also, BAAAAINS!

btw, i think this shows more about how many varieties of dystopias exist than any socio-biologico-bloggo-logical information.

also btw, i’m not sure catch-22 is a cult thing, but it’s the only one i know…

and DAMN YOU ONCE AGAIN PILLLGRIMMMMM!!!