Me miss India?
Well actually what i miss more is food/drinks and friends
Sancheti and cafe mondega ki beer
Pakiya and burger King
Kaushal and movies + of course kapila ka kaathi kabab
Kaushal + Rakesh in the Balcony Sutta :)
Billo ki bakchodi + old monk
Pakiya + Mahesh with the guitar
Mahesh, Paddy n the gang at Shrimaan + aur apna world famous MSP dip !

Moving to the cloud...

As network speeds continue to increase and the internet becomes more and more accessible, will we move back into the age of owning dumb terminals?

Soon there will be no need to own software or install/uninstall software onto our computers. Everything can possibly move to the ‘cloud’. Some antivirus companies offer online services, so you don’t have to keep updating your local virus definitions. Traditional locally installed software utilities are increasingly available on the net, like archiving, file zipping, file format conversion, document editing (Google docs), gaming. Maybe one day most of the operating system will also reside on the net. Just like it used to be long time ago… we’ll end up with dumb terminals and mainframes. (?)

This concept is also extending to other mediums than software. Movies, books, music. It’s been a while since I have bought any music album. Now I just listen to my online playlist, I don’t need to buy songs, or movies. I will be able to watch any movie at a touch of a button, when all movies are stored online.
Books have shown a lot of resistance, since the current generation grew up reading physical books. It’s the same resistance older people show to computers. Our coming generations will be more accepting to e-books, especially with devices like the Kindle.

If everything moves into the cloud we might own nothing and subscribe to everything :) I wonder what other categories the cloud might affect?

I need a good movie! It's been a while since I saw a decent movie. The last one I saw (and this one I actually paid for!) was Defiance with mr james bond in it. But a boring slow movie, i didn't like it too much.
Oh wait... I remember over the winter break I saw Sin city, great movie, I really liked it, a little too much violence but that's how those comic books are. Loved Mickey Rourke's character. Hope he wins this time for that wrestler movie, though I haven't seen it.
I read the Watchmen comic too some time ago. interesting, now I have to see the movie that's coming out. Should be alright, although I wonder how they will manage to tell all those parallel stories running in parallel. I guess they will omit some, like the pirate comic story in the movie. They do have an interesting website, check out http://watchmenmovie.warnerbros.com/.
Chalo, later then, lets do some homework :S

Once out of Chandigarh, I was never quite at home I guess. In India, even if you travel to another state, you can feel alienated especially if it has a different language (which it most probably does). Different accent, different facial features, different hair color, and that’s all it takes. Why did you come here? Why didn’t you stay on in Chandigarh?

So it really doesn’t matter, once you are out of home, you can go anywhere, so why not the US? Better infrastructure, more money, less intrusive people!

And then you are expected to go all gaga over India, and show how patriotic you are. Bullshit. Its been over a year now, and I have started listening to hindi songs and feeling more and more patriotic recently though, especially after the Mumbai attacks. The Mumbai attacks, publicized as the 9/11 of India, How very American! Yes we like to copy American culture and movies and songs, even terrorist attacks!

Well that was quite a digression, what the f#$% was I talking about? Yes... alienation, someday I'm going to write a nice short story on this, if I ever have the motivation to actually do that.

Saw Wall-e yesterday, for free on the Paramount lot. :) I love free movies and free food. As expected it was nicely done, great animation, everything as expected by pixar. But I liked the animation at the start of the movie even better, the one with the magician and the rabbit. Wait.. was that cartoon part of the movie or just a small clip shown before the movie?? dunno.
The ending was like those studio ghibli movies, where the ending credits continue to tell the story. Although, i like ghibli's movie endings better, more subtler :) The movies end with us feeling wanting to know more, and then they show the credits those happy still shots of the story continuing, like in 'My neighbor Totoro', or Kiki's delivery service. Also the movies starting credits sometimes have the storyline, like in 'Nausicaa, Valley of the winds'. Walle too had this kind of animation in the start, kind of hieroglyphics telling the story.
Ok I should get back to work now. Oh btw, also recently saw ghibli's 'Tales from EarthSea', wonderful.

my favorite movie ending dialogue.....from trainspotting :)

So why did I do it? I could offer a million answers, all false. The truth is that I'm a bad person, but that's going to change, I'm going to change. This is the last of this sort of thing. I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life. I'm looking forward to it already. I'm going to be just like you: the job, the family, the fucking big television, the washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electrical tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisurewear, luggage, three-piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing the gutters, getting by, looking ahead, to the day you die.

Went to a demo held here in LA, at an ad agency called IPG Labs, and saw an amazing software product. The software uses a video camera to recognize images off a brochure or the picture on a shrink wrapped box and superimposes a real-time 3-D image onto the TV screen. Imagine you walk into a store and want to look what a toy truck is like inside a packed box, (without opening it of course!). You put the box in front of a camera and on the screen you can see the 3-D toy and even Interact with it, using a regular game controller ! It was freaky. Wish I could find a video on it, but cant find one on youtube.

Camera to the face
I love the camera to the face shot... you know, like when they fix the camera in front of the character's face, and all you can see is his/her expressions and some background, as he moves around. If I'm still not being clear then see this from Kusturica's movie Underground (I love this movie), when the guy is singing I guess it's his wife's death anniversary or something ( I really need to see this movie again).


Or the other one was Scorsese's shot of Harvey Keitel




I like Kusturica better, I can never understand Scorsese ! Just finished watching "When father was away on business" another good movie. Which brings me to another point, that I have generally liked movies in which the main character narrates the story, especially if s/he's a child. Its beautiful. If I ever make a movie, I'll do that :D

Google is a bad thing for ADD
Google is so convinient for searching for information quick, it helps aggravate my lack of attention to one stream of thought. Everytime I think of some alternate train of thought while working on the computer, I end up looking it up on google and subsequently end up far away from where I was headed!
I try to keep of the internet while working, if I need to look up something I note it in a document and access the net only after I have finished my current task.
But shit, if I could only stick to practicing this method!

Anyway, till I learn how to discipline myself, I can blame everything on google :)