YuviSense: Codin Kid

This one bailed me out today, and I think it’ll help me a lot Thanks Maryam, and good luck with your baby!

Hookin me up, by YuviPanda.

This one, taken with my cousin’s cam a looong time ago, was THE image that got me hooked on to photography. I wasn’t into flickr/zooomr then, and it was the fact that I could create images like this (which looked stunning to me at that time) that got me interested in photography. Just found this while trying to catalog my shots (a losing battle)

I am thinking of switching to Flickr from Zooomr, the only factor in the way now being cost. More on the reasons later.

Oh, and in other news, Rory Blyth just commented on my blog! I’m so high that I need an entire chemistry period just to compose a response! I’ll post that soon as well!

India overtakes US in Nokia phone Sales.

Thanks to Sisir for the link. I still remember the time people were in awe when they saw my Dad with his 2″ screened BW Cellphone. Now, everyone’s in awe as to why I don’t have a cell. Infact, I am about the 5% of the class population who Do NOT have a cellphone. Times change

Way #2

Run. Perhaps the best way. If you are a Velociraptor on wheels, that is.

What else could explain this?

I pity the guy who wrote this. No, Firefox wasn’t compromised: He just wrote a small service that was named “svchost” and popped this up if it detected Firefox. Got this Virus from my School. Was able to clean it off with Process Monitor. I think it would be naive enough to get rid of with taskmon.

Poor chap, the one who wrote this. Must have the social life of a thermonuclear bomb.

There’s no better way to improve writing than to write. So here I come!

Way #1

Get Stallman and Steve Jobs to give it a talk on open source design aesthetics. ’nuff said.

I have nothing against this, but then again, making it Silverlight instead of Flash would give me, as a mere .NET developer, atleast one less reason for not writing Messenger plugins, no?

We were asked to write an essay on “Deforestation”. So, instead of the usual ol’ “Deforestation is bad. Aforestation is good” essay that everyone seems to write, here’s my try. Hope it’s good enough. I’m actually going to submit this thing and check out the reaction….

Introduction

Deforestation is the act of ridding the earth of space eating, moth ridden, water sucking, snake hosting pieces of wood otherwise known as trees. They were once found almost all over the world, but now, due to the untiring efforts of several large organizations dedicated to the preservation of humanity, the prevalence of these pieces of wood is decreasing considerably.

Origins

Despite the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) being created by certain unsavory personalities in the Scientific and Political circles, as well as the media, mankind is not the first to discover the art of deforestation. Dinosaurs raked out so much trees that any attempt to compare human deforestation to the deforestation done by the Dinosaurs would go completely bonkers. And those big lumbering lumbering machines lived 65 million years ago, which is so long ago that if someone were born at that time they would have forgotten their name by now. While it is true that Dinosaurs are no longer alive today (or we would be writing essays about escaping from a T.Rex on a rampage), it was a comet that got them and not the trees. So, to everyone who opposes deforestation, saying that it will ultimately lead to the destruction of the human race, watch out for the comet!

Uses

Deforestation has a multitude of uses that are not being given enough publicity. Like, for example, getting rid of all those damn trees near that Amazon river allowed a lot of people who never knew how to farm to try make a living out of growing crops on a land that never knew how to grow crops. They eventually got frustrated and moved out, leaving the land bare, desolate, even poisoned with the dozen fertilizers they tried, but experience matters, right? They told others, who promptly ignored them and continue the cycle to this day.

Or take the deforestation of the forests of Africa. If not for anything else, the near extinction of the damned man eating Tigers and Elephants (which, while technically cannot eat a man, might try and choke on one. Or might just decide to bore him (him, mind you, not her) with it’s round pointy tusk of a teeth) solely by continued deforestation is an accomplishment in itself. I mean, who likes big yellow striped things which can rip your throat apart on the same planet as themselves? We could have transported them off to Jupiter or somewhere, but deforestation is generally quicker, cheaper and doesn’t cause high noise pollution (We hate pollution, don’t we?) & ugly white streaks on the sky caused by some of the cheaper rockets (the costlier variety just bursts off even without having to take off from the soda bottle).

And the Indonesian forests. The deforestation there killed enough monkeys to make sure that man will never evolve from them again, making sure that us Homo Sapiens have a monopoly as the most intelligent species on the planet, barring species you can’t count because they don’t exist. How cool is that?

Conclusion

So, no matter what everyone else says, Deforestation is good for us. Believe me, despite this poorly constructed essay. If you don’t, you are wrong, because I am right and if you do not believe me, you are wrong. Got it?

For how long can I go on with the same essay structure? Let’s see how they deal with this satire/parody/whatever-technical-name-they-call-this-Rory-inspired-work.

Christian Long, a teacher I wish I had, tagged me with the 8 Random Things meme. Let the proceedings continue:

First, the Rules:

1. Post these rules before you give your facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them.
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they?ve been tagged.

My 8 Random Things:

1. Damn Sound Sleeper. Just ask my friends during the NSS Camp how hard they had to try and wake me up. Even kicking didn’t do the trick. I think they just shook me constantly and rigorously for a minute while continuing to kick.
2. I think I might have asthma. I have a family history of Asthma (Dad and His Mom), am unable to exert myself physically, and have had 3 attacks of something which I might call Asthma. Nevertheless, it has not been clinically diagnosed yet, so here’s hoping still.
3. I can be a lazy snob. And most of the time, I am. Sigh.
4. I haven’t watched the Matrix. Nor the LOTR. Nor Harry Potter. Nor Star Trek. In fact, I think I might be able to count off my mind the number of movies I have watched excluding the crap ones on TV.
5. I hate TV. Unless it’s Cricket, or an occasional good movie. Or, of course, Lollu Sabha, which, IMHO is the only watchable thing on the TV I get.
6. I can’t ever get an IIS Server to Run. Ever. Even after a Microsoft Employee tried to help me. Remember, though, that it was a 14 year old guy, and not a 16 year old Things might just as well change when I get my hands on IIS7.
7. I don’t “go out” with friends often. In fact, I don’t come out of my house at all unless I have to or get a fancy. And, I have gotten a fancy about 5 times so far, out of which 4 were to play Cricket at a friend’s house, and one was because my cool friend Shruti asked me to get a life and get out.
8. I name my stuff, and talk to them. My computer is Saki, my Camera is Sano, my watch is Stoke. These are the only objects I can really call “mine”, so I’ve got them a name and actually do talk to them. It turns out that I’m not the only person doing this.

And, here’re the Nine (ducks rule) people I’m tagging:

1. My extremely cool friend Shruti. I quite like her writing style, and we share so much in common that it deserves a blog post on it’s own.
2. Shruti’s boyfriend Tom, who’s also 16 and was an MCP quite a few years ago. And I thought I was young!
3. Rob La Gesse. Need I say more?
4. Deanna McNeil. Always there when I need advice.
5. Good ol’ buddy Aswin, who hasn’t popped in for quite some time.
6. New startup founder Saurabh (Check out his product here)
7. Former Microsoft Student Partner (The guy who made me one!) and current Yahoo! intern Sunil Jagadish. Did I say he was an awesome photographer?
8. Another awesome photographer Sharath.
9. My cousin Sudar. Need I say more?

Getting social is actually quite fun and awesome, you know? I haven’t felt this good in quite a good number of years.

Spoiler: Modafinil, if you had followed the Wikipedia link I had given you, is a safe drug. As safe as Aspirin, you could say, except that I haven’t taken any Aspirin yet. The whole point of this accidental two part series is to try to say that drugs needn’t be harmful to be addictive. It might seem obvious to you, yet it wasn’t to me until this happened.

Another Spoiler which isn’t really a spoiler: Incase you are wondering, I did have Dad’s permission from the second dose onwards. I took a total of 3 doses.

So, to keep it short, what really happened was that though I did get an extra 8 hours of preparation, it didn’t help me at all. Besides the fact that it takes more than 8 hours to get prepared for an exam (lesson 1), I found out that inorder to actually stay fully awake the next day, I would have to continue to take Modafinil. Otherwise, I’d be so sleepy a badger can build a dam over me (don’t ask me how).

So, if I take Modafinil to stay awake, and want to stay awake the next day, the only option is to take Modafinil again the next day. An infinite loop, breaking out of which is hard. This infinite loop, is called Addiction. I never felt that before the 3rd day, when I felt I needed another dose of Modafinil. At this point, however, Rob’s timely advice in an IM conversation a week before proved to be damn useful, and I recognized the addiction when I felt I needed to be on Modafinil to be at my best. It’s a dangerous thing, and thanks (again!) to Rob for helping me get out of it before I get stuck in that infinite loop.

So, the point I was trying to get across is, all addictive substances are not narcotic, but they sure are dangerous!

P.S. Don’t I look like a fool?

This is one of the shots, though containing many glaring technical faults in hindsight, keeps me coming back for more. This was one of the first Supermacros I took, and I think the first one of a flower.

Update: Part II here.

Spoiler: No, I’m not a drug addict. And hopefully, I won’t be one in the future (If I look like being one, you can always point me back here to get me on my bearings). This is just about my very brief stint with a prescription drug (which was not prescribed for me) which seemed addictive to me after about the fourth dose. I stopped it immediately, and am not going back to it. Period.

It started out pretty innocuously. Dad asked me to check out the properties of the new meds that the doc had prescribed for him. One of these was Modafinil. This one said “Wakefullness Promoting Agent”, which, if you are not living under the dead spider between my two RAM chips on my System, is marketing speech for something which I forgot as I was trying to ape Rory and build a mind-numbingly complex sentence which atleast appears to be grammatically correct yet gives you a laugh like saying Modafinil starts with F and end with Y with u and k inbetween.

So, basically, what I was saying before I got sidetracked by thinking about Rory was that I was quite excited to see this “Wakefullness promoting agent” among my father’s medicines. I secretly, silently slipped one off his supplies. He probably didn’t notice.

I took it for a test drive the next day. My idea was that I could stay up later than usual and still be productive (hah!). And, the first day, it worked wonders: I wasn’t feeling the tiniest bit sleepy till 2, and was up sharp the next day at 6:30 without feeling a bit sleepy. It was around this point in time that I called it the “only drug I’ve actually used that actually made me feel good”. I felt a little bit sleepy at around 12 noon the next day, but at that point of time, shrugged it off. I had with me the false notion that I had discovered a wonderful weapon that would be able to get me better grades in the coming exam by allowing me to stay up late, make me more alert in inter-school competitions, be able to wake me up by myself without having the equivalent of 97 instances of Rory working on it full time, and even cure cancer (not mine). In short, I believed that I had found the silver bullet.

Then came the Horlicks Wizkids 2007 competition. I got the second prize in still photography (thanks for not applauding(bigger thanks if you did. Nobody has yet. Even Mom:()) in all of Chennai, and I attribute some of this to the drug: It allowed me to stay up till around 1 with no ill effects. It allowed me to finish up my custom designed album which beat the heck out of the other contestants even though my shots were more candid and so eventually suffered from high ISO induced noise (of the chromic kind, not the Rory is a fish pirate kind). I was damn happy about it the day after, even though I was starting to feel slightly depressed and sleepy (aka my usual state of health) around the next day’s afternoon, but didn’t give it much thought at that time. I thought I had just confirmed that I had found the silver bullet.

Next week was the Mid Terms. I wasn’t prepared to face this in the least bit. At all. I hadn’t studied an ounce of anything. If studies had mass, which mine do. This isn’t new to me, as I had done almost all my exams in this fashion However, the studies started to have non-negligible mass after the 11th Standard, and I’m still trying to cope up with this. I couldn’t just finish everything in 3 hours time and have time for revision like I used to have before the 11th. And this year was just worser.

I snuck up one 200 mg tablet of Modafinil out of my Dad’s meds box without him knowing it, and planned to use it for the days before the Physics and Maths exams by splitting it into two by biting them into halves. I figured I’d be able to get around 8 hours of solid preparation, which’ll set me in good stead. Yeah.

To be continued in a new post, because I’m about to reformat my hard-drive and re-install XP since VS 2008 Beta 2 won’t install on my system But rest-assured, I’m not addicted to anything. Atleast anything physical.

As WLM disconnects every time I try to send this URL through it, here it is for anyone wanting to add me on Facebook and I follow Rob’s policy on adding friends.

Now that life has settled a bit, let me try to explain to you why the last month was almost devoid of blog posts and was of such a type for the description of which only to-be-mommy Rory Blyth has the vocabulary.

Monday was the football match. We had absolutely no practice, and had a lot of fun going into the match. It was an under-17 tournament, but the opposing team looked well over 20. The trip to the stadium (on a city bus) was extremely noisy and fun, listening to half a dozen college jocks “sing” at the bus conductor while “drumming” on the roof. One jock even made the entire trip hanging by the rails of a window. Oh well

The match saw three goals scored. All by the opposing team I was the reserve goalie, but was not swapped in when the main guy let the three in because (ahem) the “coach” who had come with us had already swapped out three players for minor mistakes before coming to know that only three substitutions were allowed. So, I was reduced to cameraman there, and took not too many shots there as I had to be ready if I was asked to go in and the fact that I wouldn’t be asked to because I cannot be asked to did not come to my notice till about the end of the game.

I decided that it’ll be last game that I’d ever play. Just too time consuming on my part. If I have to excel at it, I’ll have to go at it hard, which requires time and dedication, which I decided I didn’t have. Bye Bye Football. Now, if I could locate some weight losing exercise that doesn’t take time….

The drugs, the competition and books from Colin in coming posts!