Daylight

For all of you in Ann Arbor, in the next couple of days if look at the sky at exactly 10:00 pm, you will still see a hint of daylight.

Alas, the days start to get shorter now :(

Monsters

Time flies, doesn't it?

It's been more than 12 years since I passed out of secondary school, and It's been 10 years since I first started attending Engineering classes.

Those were the days.
Engineering exams, late-night group studies, table tennis in the gym, energy (coffee flavor) at the cafeteria, secret romances, the list is endless.

Procrastinating

I sense a couple of long posts coming.
But I'm trying to avoid those as it's against the philosophy of this blog and that is what led to the demise of my old blog. Moreover, I don't think I have time for long posts. Anyway, let's see.

Twin Bores

Pirates of the Caribbean, one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and a performance by "Strange Fruit," very innovative concept but very boring routine.

Leaning Tower

To all men out there ...

I've found this adage to be pretty useful (and true):

"If at first you don't succeed, then try it your wife's way"

:)

See anybody you know?

Message from aliens?

Can anybody read this?

Summer Festival

Confessions of a Sick Mind

Anybody heard the saying "A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind?"

I am considering making a movie of my desk from still photographs taken daily for a month or so. It would be interesting to see it's dynamics and whether the Spirited Gator's Law of Kitchen Sink holds.

For now, here is a pic of my desk with some comments.


click on the pic for a larger version

• Obviously, I have two computers, a high-end Mac and an old but pretty fast PC
  
• My desk if often cleaner (the piles of papers on the left), but at times it's much worse too :))
  
• Wedding photo in the back (right)
  
• Need a mousepad for the Mac
  
• An old pair of Phillips headphones (left) serve me well. Music is an integral part of work. :)
  
• The wife's photo (left) is burried behind a pile of papers. Time to clean up.
  
• The coffee (top-left) does not belong to me, it's my officemate's. BTW, his desk is the dirtiest desk around.
  
• The queer-looking brown cylinder on the left contains a large quantity of pennies that I'm trying to get rid of (Waiting for the departmental penny wars)
  
• Don't ask me how many of the books on the shelf have I read
  
• The wallpaper on the PC was a pic taken on an Indiana highway (en route to Chicago, from Indianapolis)
  
• I'm a big pencil guy, and the blue pencil on the left (it sort of looks like a pen) is my favorite, cannot work without it
  
• There's more stuff on shelves above and the drawers in the desk not visible in this photo
  
  

Any questions?

Walk through the Arb

Superman

Ever wonder why Superman wears his underwear outside? The answer is simpler than you might think. Seen a guy wearing plain tights? It looks ghastly. A little under(over)wear goes a long way in not looking like a ballet dancer.

Spiderman, however, has come up with a more natural solution; wearing patterned costumes, operating mostly in the dark, and rarely standing up straight (mostly crouching, climbing, swinging). Come to think of it, have you ever seen a poster (or wallpaper) of spiderman standing tall in broad daylight with a chest held high with pride such as this one (a natural superhero pose). Let me know if you find one.

Checking video embedding

Don't forget to watch till the end. :)




You might have to see this a couple of times to understand the "seriousness" of the situation.

Changes

As you can see, I'm experimenting with the layout and looks. The pic in the header, which I clicked almost 2 years ago, looks to be ideal for a header, but the colors don't match the rest of the color scheme on the blog. Also, I thought the idea of the video bar was pretty cool, but it is sort of lame, since there is very little control over what videos are shown in the bar. All I can do is enter search phrases, and t automatically pulls up videos matching the search phrases from youtube and google video.

Let me know if you liked the video bar.

Ultrapod

First snaps with the new ultrapod

90 deg in the shade

Ladies and gentlemen, we have the first 90 deg F (32 deg C) day of the summer. It's awfully warm for early June.

But these are some of the best days to be in AA.

Starting this friday is the Ann Arbor Summer Festival

Do Not Run !!

Some old pics:



Notice that the sign specifically says do not run :)
Jammy, you ought to pay attention to signs.

BTW, the water was a lovely deep blue.



Another view of the 450 foot drop.

Parents Beware

Stone-age fishermen

What we found out yesterday: mints (mentos/polo) are very poor baits for fishing. Not because fishes don't like mint, on the contrary they seem to like mint, but because mints are too big for the fishes' mouths. All they can do is nibble.

The story:

Kela, Yusuf, the wife, and myself were walking around the willowtree lake yesterday, and encouraged by the large numbers of fishes, we decided to try our hand at catching some. Armed with a piece of dead branch, some thin rope-like plant stems, and some mints (the only edible item we had on us at that time), we put our fishing talents to the test. The plan was to pull out the fishing line as soon as any of the fishes took a bite at the mint. Flock to the mint they did, but alas, none could bite and hold on to the mint.

Frustrated by our failures, kela and I resorted to throwing mint pieces into the water to attract the fishes and then spearing down on them with the dead branch. I swear I almost hit one fish. Maybe there is an injured fis limping somewhere in the lake right now.

I'm sure if our lived depended on it, we could have figured out a way to catch some fishes, even with the extremely limited resources tht we had on hand.

Apple (cont.)

Turned out to be a disappointment. Nothing new was unveiled.
Oh well ...

Apple

There's a lot of speculation about what Apple (Steve Jobs) will unveil today at the WWDC. Possibly new iPhone and Leopard features with maybe some new devices. More on this later.

Wanted: Summer pics

It's time I ventred out with the camera and captured some fresh images of the full-fledged summer. Maybe in a couple of days.

Ultimate Frisbee

After a long long time, I played ultimate frisbee yesterday. I was half expecting my stamina to be dramatically improved (thanks to my half marathon training). But I was jolted back to reality when I was gasping for air within the first five minutes of the game. It turns out that stamina with slow steady running doesn't help you much when it comes to alternating fas sprints and stops. Hopefully, I'll get a lot better at it before the end of the summer.

For those who haven't played ultimate frisbee, it's a very enjoyable sport. Definitely worth a try.

Shrek 3

Funny jokes, but boring for the most part. I wasn't particularly impressed.

Wikimapia

An interesting website:

http://www.wikimapia.org/

The site is based on google maps, and lets users add places of interest and some explanations.

Zoom into any place you like and you can look at user-tagged places and explanations. You can also add your own places (see top left) and once a few people vote that your place is genuine and useful, it is made permanent.

I spent a good couple of hours exploring areas around my primary and secondary schools, some of the places we used to hang out (Linking road, 4 bunglows, Bhavan's campus). I also found some comments from people I know (Many of my neighbors had marked our society as their territory :) ).

p.s. The site is on the slower side, it takes a few seconds to load all the places, every time you zoom or pan.

Courage

Remembered a quote:

Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is that little voice at the end of the day that says: "I'll try again tomorrow."

Road to recovery

Still recovering from the Half marathon from yesterday. I promise to post pics of the run soon.

Meanwhile, here are some pics(taken by action sports images) from my traverse city run.
(I didn't realize you were supposed to smile at the finish line :)), but you can tell that Yusuf knew )

http://www.backprint.com/go.asp?20511374

Race weekend

Finally, race weekend is here. I'm excited about the race, but I'm equally excited about getting done with the run and finally being able to do other stuff on weekdays. :))

It's also unusually warm here the last 3-4 days. But it's supposed to rain tomorrow.
It's going to be fun. We also have the AA food festival with half off for runners tomorrow!