YuviSense: Codin Kid

Way #2

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

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.

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.

We all hate those forwards that somehow make it into our inbox via the obnoxious relative or friend who has just got an email account. Most of mine just go to the trash, but when I saw the forward below forwarded(?) to me by this cool guy with this cool title above, I had to open it. I wasn’t disappointed to the least, and you too probably won’t be. If I had to highlight all the cool bits, then the whole thing would’ve been a tad too gaudy, so just read it for yourself

My name is Billy Evans. I am a very sick little boy. My mother is typing this for me, because I can’t. She is crying. The reason she is so sad is because I’m so sick. I was born without a body. It doesn’t hurt, except when I try to breathe.

The doctors gave me an artificial body. It is a burlap bag filled with leaves. The doctors said that was the best they could do on account of us having no money or Insurance.

I would like to have a body transplant, but we need more money. Mommy doesn’t work because she said nobody hires crying people. I said, ” Don’t cry, Mommy”, and she hugged my burlap bag. Mommy always gives me hugs, even though she’s allergic to burlap and it makes her sneeze and chafes her real bad.

I hope you will help me. You can help me if you forward this email to everyone you know. Forward it to people you don’t know, the too. Dr. Johansen said that for every person you forward this email to, Bill Gates will team up with AOL and send a nickel to NASA. With that funding, NASA will collect prayers from school children all over America and have the astronauts take them up into space so that the angels can hear them better. Then they will come back to earth and go to the Pope, and he will take up a collection in church and send all the money to the doctors. The doctors could help me get better then. Maybe one day I will be able to play baseball. Right now I can only be third base. Every time you forward this letter, the astronauts can take more prayers to the angels and my dream will be closer to coming true. Please help me. Mommy is so sad and and I want a body. I don’t want my leaves to rot before I turn 10.

If you don’t forward this email, that’s okay. Mommy says you’re a mean and heartless bastard who doesn’t care about a poor little boy with only a head. She says that if you don’t stew in the raw pit of your own guilt-ridden stomach, she hopes you die a long slow, horrible death and then burn forever in hell. What kind of cruel person are you that you can’t take five freakin’ minutes to forward this to all your friends so that they can feel guilt and shame about ignoring a poor, bodiless nine-year-old boy?

Please help me.

I try to be happy, but it’s hard. I wish I had a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty that wouldn’t chew on me and try to bury its turds in the leaves of my burlap body. I wish that very much.

Thank You,
Billy “Smiles” Evans

P.S. Who wrote this? Bloddy hillarious parody. No images of the burleap bag though. And I do know a few friends who might as well actually fall for this!

P.P.S: A bit of ill health and school’s keeping Engadget Analysis Part 2 from hitting the tubes. You’ll find it online within the next few days though.

Awesome read.

[Note: This post does have a lot to do with a dream about Steve Jobs and MacBook Pros. Hold on tight]

I completely redesigned my blog yesterday. In this context, completely redesigned involves downloading a popular theme and making so many adjustments that it still looks like the said popular theme. But, this redesign involves two very major super-exciting improvements which I would’ve not even thought of three days ago:

1. It promeniently features this picture of me!
   The White blowout on the left ear (or is it the right?) is to give the appearance of a strong light source behind me, despite the reality that it’s there simply because I’m a crappy photographer who can’t choose his lighting source.
   Update: This really isn’t an update, but how do I look in that photograph? Dad says I look like a drunkard, so I need to convince him that I am not. So, would you please come out and comment on how I look and feed my ego in the process? Thank you.
2. It promeniently features another photograph of me, this one a smaller version near every post’s title: Please note that it’s a very original idea, and I swear that I did not steal this idea from anybody. I swear. Update: In the course of writing this post, I changed my mind and this second highly original idea of mine would not make it to the complete redesign.

How do I look?

Note that both photographs make me look like I just finished reading through all the comments on Slashdot about Windows Vista without any filter, but that’s just because reading our textbooks is almost an equivalent to that torture. Also, another reason might be that my camera is not that good at photographing the person holding it, because of some personality problems which Sano (my camera) asked me to keep secret. And, it might also be because I’m just a (gasp) teenager! kid, with hormonal changes!

Note that my face usually does not look like the one pictured abouve, and the expression was concoted specially for the occassion to make sure that I won’t scare away any people who might dare visit this blog, ‘coz seeing my other photographs would have been the pictorial equivalent of someone coming next to you and repeating Blood. Blood. Blood. Bloo… It would be that scary.

Steve Jobs

About two days back, I had a dream while sleeping. No, I mean, real sleeping on the bed, with a pillow and all, mainly ‘coz I don’t have Chemistry classes now because I’m having exams. It starts off with me into a very heated technical argument about something I can’t remember right now. And, it’s in a store. The argument might be with an employee, but I’m not so sure. Right in the middle of the flame war, in walks Steve Jobs. I’m sortof silenced for a moment, but something makes me continue the argument with Steve Jobs. And somewhere, I say something along the lines of “But hey, I don’t have any app that does that”, to which he responds by asking one of the shop attendants to give me that app, whatever that is. But, I respond with something like, “But hey, I don’t have a Mac to run that on! I don’t even have a laptop!”, to which Steve replies something like, “OK, give him a Laptop!” And then, I woke up, and my first thought was, “I look nice”

Okay, most of the details are a bit fuzzy, but hey, it’s just a dream, not an XBox 360. Infact, the only words that I can remember having heard very clearly are the “OK, give him a Laptop!”. He said Laptop, rather than Mac Book Pro, maybe hinting that they might preload Windows into their Laptops sometime in the yet undetermined future. Infact, I said it’s a MacBook pro simply because that’s what I felt when I woke up. And, it might also have been an Apple store, but since I have never seen an Apple Store’s inside (heck, not even an outside), I’m not sure.

I was pretty perplexed after this dream, considering that

1. I have never seen Steve Jobs. Never. Not even a photo or video. Seriously.
2. I have never seen a Mac of any shape, provided the ancient mac at the school(which is used as a paperweight(for around 8 years now)).
3. I’ve touched a 3 year old laptop some 2 years ago, and haven’t seen one since.

So, I’m not completely sure why I had that dream. Still, it was quite cool.

Looks?

If you know me, and know me really well, you’ll know that I had an inferiority complex about my looks. But, after that dream, that inferiority complex vanished as if it was never there! That rocks, ‘coz I think that Steve Jobs’ RDF(Reality Distortion Field) can actually cure phsychological diseases! Yikes!

So, thanks to the cure, you’ll find a very badly photographed photograph of me both in the first part of this post as well as my Blog Header. This is different from how I was before that dream, when I uploaded my photo to Zooomr only because Timo bugged me into it.

(Also, note that my writing style(if I ever had one) might have changed, slightly because this is 1 am and my first pseudo-all nighter to watch a cricket match (and also maybe because I spent too much time reading through Rory Blyth’s Archives and watched his videos(He deserves a place in my history book though))(did I close all the braces?)

Steve Pavlina on Ten Reasons you should never get a job. Awesome Article. Something in the ninth reason caught my eye, and I was instinctively able to rewrite it:

9. Loss of freedom.

It takes a lot of effort to tame a human being into an employee student.  The first thing you have to do is break the human’s independent will.  A good way to do this is to give them a weighty policy manual filled with nonsensical rules and regulations.  This leads the new employee student to become more obedient, fearing that s/he could be disciplined at any minute for something incomprehensible.  Thus, the employee student will likely conclude it’s safest to simply obey the master’s commands without question.  Stir in some office student politics for good measure, and we’ve got a freshly minted mind slave. As part of their obedience training, employees students must be taught how to dress, talk, move, and so on.  We can’t very well have employees students thinking for themselves, now can we?  That would ruin everything.

God forbid you should put a plant sticker on your desk bag when it’s against the company school policy.  Oh no, it’s the end of the world!  Cindy has a plant sticker on her desk bag!  Summon the enforcers!  Send Cindy back for another round of sterility training!

Free human beings think such rules and regulations are silly of course.  The only policy they need is:  “Be smart.  Be nice.  Do what you love.  Have fun.”

Truer words of Wisdom never spoken!

I’ve been a journalist for almost 6 months now. A Journalist for my School Magazine, The Marian Star. I’m the One and Only Designer, One of the Editors, and an ocassional photographer(without a cam:D).

And, it’s been an awesome experience. I learnt lots of things, from Serif and Sans-Serif fonts to writing Reports and Headlines. And the peer-review process and bare-bones editing were fun and challenging as well. Inshort, joining the Marian Star (which happened by accident) is probably the best thing for me since sliced bread, since I got to do a whole lot of stuff, some of which you’ll be seeing in the days to come…

But, If I’ve been a Journalist for 5 months, then why haven’t I blogged about it before? Well, main reason being, I wanted to show some work for being there, so I had to wait till I had something significant, something interview-worthy. And now, since I have not one but two of those, I guess I can break the news…

As of now, we’ve published 7 Interviews, 6 with teachers from our school(including the Principal) and one with the General Manager of Lotte India, and we’ve some good ones in the works. We’ve also covered every major and minor event in our school, and littered the place with reports and surveys.

So today, I am publishing those 7 interviews. PDF format. Licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial licence.

PDF Alert!

At School

Our Principal, Fr. Paulraj

Our Assitant Headmistress, Ms. Selvi

Our Hawks House Master & Mr. Best-Teacher-ever, Mr. Nicholas

Our Owls House Master & Mr. Computer, Mr. Darius

Our Swifts House Master & Mr. Motivation, Mr. Arul Rajan

Our Eagles(my) House Master & Mr. Newly Married, Mr. Dominic

Outside

The General Manager of Lotte India, Mr. In Do Hwang

PDF versions for now, but I’m working on HTML versions of them as well…

And what do you think of the designs? With 20/20 hindsight, they all look crappy to me, since they were done when I was a noob and used (horror music) Microsoft Publisher. While there’s nothing wrong with that, and it certainly introduced me to designing on paper, I’ve overgrown it and my next interviews use the f’awesome Adobe InDesign.

So, feel the Design is Crappy? Flame me:D

Less is More. So, I’ll rewrite some of my tech posts from the past, with less words and same matter…

Aswin’s enjoying at Blogcamp, while I sit here trying to study[sic]. Enjoy dude…

Well, some posts have disappeared. Why ? Well, I read them back after some help from Aswin, and I noticed one thing: THEY WERE ABSOLUTE CRAP! Yeah, like, I was violating every thing I’ve read by Joel. Those were, like, absolute crap. No good. So, I’m goanna practice some good writing, and come back to you, to make sure that nobody dies reading my posts:D

So, I just want to thank Aswin for pointing out my flaws, and enabling me to correct them. So, if you feel that something here is crappy, just blast me here, in the comments section;)