Archive for June, 2008

#194 Like A Child

It takes a sub conscious mind to reach the point of thoughts where you are yourself, where you are Just Yourself and nothing else, and there is nobody around. No sounds you can hear, no smells you can smell, nothing. It is just you and the vastness of the cosmos.

It takes nothing but music to move you, nothing but innocence to touch you.

We (me and Unitechy ) were on a Photowalk… and planned to cross the southern end from Gateway of India, to Nariman Point. Things somehow went the other way when we discovered a few kids, getting themselves dirty, learning stuff and enjoying themselves…

We decided to “look into the matter”…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dybydx/sets/72157605843339802/

Thats the link, so check it out :)

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#193 Zoomin Photo Prints - Free :)

I had registered on this website www.zoomin.com which basically lets you upload your photos and store them. But the main business of the website is to allow you to print those photos and deliver them to your place. And on registration I got a discount coupen for 25 free prints. It also lets you to import pics from Picasa and Flickr.

So I imported my pics from Picasa and ordered prints… 25 free prints! All I had to pay was about Rs 30 shipping charges. The delivery took less than 48 hours… and here is what I got… ofcourse along with the pics.

The courier pack:

The photo pack:

The free album (backside):

The free album (front side):

The thumbnails printout:

A few of the photos:

And the photoframe:


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#192 The Million Colours In My Mind

It’s been almost twenty three years and a half… I’ve been through stages of life, places on earth, people in the world… I’ve done things, been at places, met people, seen imageries, heard sounds, this, that…

I’ve had memories. I’ve stored them well. Not in buckets or ibibos, but deep in my mind or deep in my heart.

And even today, when I close my eyes in the dark, I can go back to those days, good and bad, happy and sad, be there at that time, feel what I felt then…

I still… remember…

When I went for that interview to nursery and the Father (of the School) gave me an eclair…

When one day my dad came to drop me to school and turned back without saying ‘bye’ to me, and I cried…

When I fell sick and vomited in the school, and told my classmates “those are digestive juices”…

When my bench-mate who used to eat samosa everyday in the canteen, bumped a pointed pencil straight into my wrist…

When I played ‘nibbles’ (snakes) for the first time on a computer way back in 1991…

When I fell down from a tree, while I was trying to climb it, in order to look beyond the compound wall, where we believed there were ghosts in the pond out there…

When my masi bought me a toy BEST bus and I drove it all over her house…

When I walked through knee deep water during floods to reach the hut of our maid servant, just to check if her family was alright…

When I used to sleep on the floor in the afternoon, trying to observe the dust particles that would be clearly visible through narrow rays of light coming through the little space below the door…

When I drew the flag of India and waited eagerly for my dad to come back from office so I could show it to him…

When my mom bought me the first ‘hot-wheels’ car and promised to buy me one every month so that I could make a collection…

When in 1994 I would carry my brother double-seat on my cycle to his teacher’s place…

When I ventured too far away from home cycling on my new cycle in the rains and my grandfather came walking all the way looking for me…

When I made paper planes from lot of junk paper and flew them out of our new flat on the seventh floor, the year we shifted to Bombay…

When I was made to sit with the worst performing student in the class, who used to sing everyday, pulling my cheeks: ‘you are my masala dosa, you are my vada paav’ …

When I used to play cricket in the school lunch breaks and used to make fun of the vice-principal’s driver, who always pissed on the wall we used to mark as our stumps…

When I went for an interschool competition where none of my schoolmates came to cheer their team, but when I went to collect the first prize on the stage, I happily saw my father standing in the crowd and clapping…

When I used to go back to Baroda for a couple of days, the homely feeling that I always got there, something that I missed in Bombay…

When I was thrown out of Agrawal Classes with Ketan for apparently ‘being too happy’…

When we used to make infinite fun of the teachers and teaching methods followed by them at Agrawal Classes and Bhavan’s College…

When I was at home for one whole year after 12th, walking every evening to the temple, hoping for better days to come…

When I had a fight with my parents regarding which bicycle to buy, when they came to leave me at IIT…

When I spent the whole night distributing chits with my name in all the hostels, promoting my candidature in the gymkhana elections…

When I was made to play nude football in the hostel grounds, on the rainy day in July 2005…

When I first saw the glimpse of beautiful Trishul peak from very close neighbourhood in the Himalayas…

When all I could eat for a month was curd and ice cream, while I had got total mouth ulcers as a result of injections I had to take after I had fallen off a bike and got stitches…

When Roshnai fell down from her bicycle, trying to hold the umbrella in one hand and control the cycle with the other, and still got up with a lovely smile on her face…

When I stayed awake all night, grumbling but determined to complete an assignment all by myself…

When I walked my way back from the lab to my room through the student market and restaurants during my 10 week internship in Korea…

When I played endlessly in the snow near Nathula border in Sikkim… and then could no longer bear the cold and the sunshine getting reflected from the snow…

When me and Roshnai had mango milk shake with ice cream that one last time in kgp…

And the rest are all recent memories…

Memories will keep accumulating. Some with some sounds, some with some picture,  some just as a memory. Eastman colour, or maybe just black and white…

The piano keys are black and white,
But they sound like a million colours in your mind.
- Katie Melua

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#191 The Tagging Game

Unitechy tagged me over here and i believe i have to list down things for me

4 Jobs I’ve Had (in chronological order)
None… I’ve done only internships that too in university labs and NGOs:
IIT Bombay
INHA University, S Korea
Apne Aap Women Worldwide
ZS Associates (yet to begin)

4 Movies I Could Watch Over and Over
The Classic (Korean)
Maeumi (Korean)
Our Happy Times (Korean)
Life Is Beautiful (Italian)

4 Places I’ve Lived (in order)
Vadodara, Gujarat (little more than 10 years)
Mumbai (little less than 13 years)
Kharagpur (little less than 4 years)
Incheon, S Korea (about 2.5 months)

4 TV Shows I Like
Lonely Planet
Megastructures
Those are too many I guess…

4 Favorite Foods
Ice creams
Milkshakes
Pizza
Bibimbap

4 Places I’d Rather Be
Incheon / Seoul
Beijing / Shanghai
Kolkata
Gangtok

4 People I’m Tagging (who havn’t been tagged in this game before)

Hunee
Chhavi
Manasa
Sumit

Disclaimer: Doing this cos it doesnt take much time, and I’ve not much to blog about right now.

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#190 My new specs frame!! (Part 2)

Part 1: My new specs frame!! Published December 9, 2005

Part 2:

So this is my new frame.. I dont think it’s that clear in these pics.. but anyways it is.. A coffee shade with anti glare plastic lenses. Cost: Rs 1800 for the frame and Rs 700 for the glasses –> Rs 2500.

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#189 Who, What and Why: A Disclaimer

Simply, I am a 23 yr old guy, recently graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Born in Baroda, Gujarat, I’ve spent a considerable number of years staying in Baroda, Bombay and Kharagpur. I do not know what my native place is and where I belong. I speak many languages and love to think a lot and write a few things.

I have mostly written about things around me, and my life. I have written about people and places, posted photographs, incidents, talks, memories and feelings in general. I shall continue doing so as and when I get the time and opportunity for the same. Little things matter a lot to me, and many of my posts are inspired by little incidents. I write what I feel and am convinced about. I have not hurt any one through my writings and if I have, I wish they communicate with me personally.

I write a blog because I feel it is a good record of what I felt or thought at a particular time. I write a blog because I love to share most of my feelings with anyone willing to read me. I wish to show to the world, the people and places I come across, because everyone may not be fortunate enough to do the same.

In the last three years, I have written almost 190 blog posts, got more than 500 comments on them and have had about 15,000 visits. People have liked my blog posts and written me encouraging comments. People have criticized my writing, laughed at me, written sarcastic and teasing comments. I have not stopped blogging and would continue blogging, still blogging about what I feel, what I see and what I interpret of the life I see in and around me.

I do not see blogs as a way of social networking, but knowing different types of people through this platform of social expression is good. I have come across some really nice people and some absolutely horrible people. But that is the way it would always be~

I would not force you to like my blog. The way I feel about things, you may feel differently. You may or may not agree to what I write. I am thankful to the handful of regular readers that I have, and their comments often help me improve or edit my posts to make them more readable. If you wish to clarify something, disagree about something I have written and would like me to understand your point of view, or any type of communication, the best way to get me talking is by writing a comment on the relevant post, or just sending me an email!

Thank You.

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#188 The Season of Ants - II

They are freaks! Beware of them!



They came to an end thanks to lots of Gamaxine powder. A few days later it rained heavily and the balcony got flooded, with that the core of the ants kingdom got flooded as well!

They were RED and BAD!

For a recap of the previous episode please refer:
#179 The Season of Ants

#187 Misadventures of an old computer

July 1997:
I got my first PC. Configuration: Pentium 1, 166 MHz, 16 MB RAM, 1.2 GB HDD, FDD, Creative 12x CD ROM, ESS Sound Blaster Sound Card, Running Windows 95.

By the next few months I also got a 9600 bps modem and a VSNL internet shell account. In another few months I was using a 33.6 kbps modem with the VSNL TCP/IP account and browsing the net on IE 3, or 2 not too sure, sometimes used Netscape, chatting on ICQ and YM, listening to music on Winamp, playing DOS games and a few Windows based games.

By the next couple of years I could download music from the internet and fill up the little hard disk that I had. Allan Border Cricket and then Jonty Rhodes Cricket and FPS Doom, Duke Nukem and Blood soon became my favorites. Soon I bought a CD of Cricket 97 and it became the hottest game of the season. I had a proud collection of almost 200 MB of music can you imagine? My source of  entertainment was my computer. It was everything to me.

One day it just crashed. I frantically tried to backup my songs from the DOS that was still working. Do you know how? By splitting songs using song splitter and then putting them on Floppies! That was 2001. The computer was put in the cupboard. And it stayed there for almost forever.

What I did not do with that computer was upgrade its hardware or software in time. But it would not have helped. The computer which cost me Rs 48,000 in 1997 and stopped working in 2001 had become obsolete in those 4 years. Pentium III was in by that time and so was Windows NT.

August 2003
Being almost without a computer for  two years, I was gifted with yet another PC! This time I knew what I wanted, though not really! So I got one: Pentium IV, 2.4 GHz, 128 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD, FDD, 52x Samsung CD Writer, 15 inch digital monitor running Windows XP and it looked good for Rs 40,000. But my misadventures started soon and they had to!

128 MB RAM was never gonna be enough for Windows XP. From somewhere I managed to get a 64 MB RAM. With complete enthusiasm I put that stick on the motherboard. It wont go in, but how the hell it defy my orders? And I switched on the CPU… WOOOOOOF… something blew off. The computer just wont start then.
I soon realised that I had put in an SD RAM in a DDR RAM slot. It should not have fit, it did not, but did I care?

Fortunately, being still in warranty period, I got my mobo repaired for free. It would have cost me anything between 7-10k. Things went on. Soon I added another 128 MB RAM to it and things looked better. Slightly better if not much. Little did I know that Windows XP needed a minimum of 256 MB.

May 2008:
This is what the same computer has gone through in the last 4 years (after 2004).

1. Addition of a UPS.
2. A few formats and fresh Windows installations.
3. A couple of linux installations and deletions.
4. Two changes of SMPS. [This really runs your computer! Ask me how]
5. Few thousand GBs of downloads: movies, songs, softwares, games, almost everything!
6. A final addition of 512 MB DDR RAM stick!
7. Fresh installation of Windows Vortex. [You would not want to know what this is!]
8. A new keyboard since the first one was done away by ANTS!
9. Oh did I tell you that I even painted the sides of my monitor with red and blue water colours?

And for a list of resource intensive applications that worked, if not worked wonders on it:
1. Mozilla Firefox!!!!!
2. Matlab 7.1
3. Adobe Photoshop CS2
4. Corel Draw X3
5. And now Windows Vortex… that is Vista on an XP engine!

And it is working well…

Key points to note so that your computer works well for years to come:

  • Keep it clean, from outside, but more importantly inside. A clean motherboard works much faster.
  • Keep a check on your softwares, OS and accordingly use an appropriate RAM. Obviously a 256 MB RAM would not be enjoyable if you are using Windows XP!
  • Format your computer atleast twice every year! It helps to clean up the useless registry entries that stay when you install and then uninstall any programs.
  • Keep a backup of the installations of your softwares and if possible use the versions that suit your computer configuration the best. You need not use the ‘latest’ versions.
  • Decorate your computer. An old computer looks a bit repelling in its natural beige colours. If you personalise it with stickers and some paint, you will not want to part with it even years later.

If everything else fails to work with you… Do the following:

  • Sell your PC for Rs 200. That is what I did with my first PC. I just gave it to a junk yard.
  • Use your CDs to decorate your car or house by hanging them at the window or wind shields.
  • Break open any floppy disks you have and use your own creativity.
  • Use the CPU cabinet as a stationary box!
  • Sell away your monitor to PC vendor. Old monitors still sell well in India.
  • Break open your keyboard and use the keys to play scrabble.
  • Give the mouse to your cats and dogs to play with :P
  • Keep your UPS for yourself, you would want to use it with any electronic gadgets you have. It is a safety hazard to dispose a UPS without careful considerations.

I soon wish to buy a laptop but my old PC will keep working.

Like mine, I hope your computer does no longer stay as a consumer electronic, but become a Consumer Durable!

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The Integral...

Life is a complex frame of time. Things aren’t always as they appear from a distance, you’ve got to go close, see, touch, taste and feel them to understand.

Name: Aditya Marathe
Location: Somewhere in the World
Age: 23

aditya.ee@gmail.com

November '08 Coin Box

My Current Fascination is
Jet trails left by aircrafts flying in US skies

The Most Amazing Fact is that
China tried to sell motorcycles in India for dirt cheap prices like $100 - $200 but it was a fail!

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