Uma’s Brainwaves revisited #1
Posted by Uma Damle | Filed under General, Headshot, It's My Life, New Delhi, Technology
<Prologue>For some reason that only people who have visited the seas of Arthemalafasta on a planet called Zenkygnoziata in a galaxy called Farfarawaay (Bear with me here…I am currently suffering from EhtuGeetuitis) understand Prashanth who wanted me to transfer some of my posts from the old blog to this blog. Although just posting a link on the side blog would have been much less painful I figured its no big deal anyway since my blog didn’t go beyond a royal six posts (I’ve told this before haven’t I ?) and it would at least stop him from grumbling about me not posting here for a blissful 43 minutes.This post is a little behind times so please put appropriate correction factors here.</Prologue>
Autodesk Solution Day
Disclaimer:I am typing this post on an old dusty AMD K6 machine running on Win98 whose ancient cherry keyboard has been lying unused for ages, because the new computers are being hogged by other inmates of my house.V on this keyboard is very moody and works only when I thak-thak-thak it half a dozen times. So to spare me and my keyboard all the pain you guys will have to do without V for the rest of the post. I will refer to V as wee.
1st June was Autodesk Solution Day Conference at Hyatt Regency, Delhi. I attended it with my Dad who has been using AutoCad for over 13 years now and wants me to walk along his footsteps in 3D. Though I am tempted to give you a blow by blow account, I understand all the details might be too boring for most of the people.I’ll just giwe you the highlights.
Since teenagers and young students like me weren’t officially invited, I figured it wouldn’t be smart to go in there in my usual jeans and tee and look 16. That does not mean that I put chalk in my hair and wore a sari to look 60. I just donned a professional looking attire of black shirt and trousers. Apparently I managed to achieweee the desired effect with it. An elderly web developer who sat next to me in the conference asked me which company I served and at what post.I decided against lying and said I was a student.When he asked me the name of the college I said I was just a high school student. For one moment I was afraid he was going to yell,”Guards, seize her!!” but he said he was amazed and impressed that somebody so young could sit though all those demos and speeches with interest (that is without nodding off like the guy in front of me did)
The morning half of the conference was slightly dull with the only interesting things being a demo of AutoCAD 2007’s radical new features(Unless you want to nod off too,you don’t want to hear me talk about them) and a fabulous demo of 3DS Max. To my disappointment that was the only Discreet product they showcased from the unbelievably large range of software they for multimedia and movie development.They pretended as if Maya did not exist(I suspect they plan to kill Maya now that they own Alias.They’ll just upgrade 3DSMax with Maya’s features)The rest of the morning they spoke about User Licenses,Autodesk Dewelopment Network and stuff like that.
Lunch was served at Djinns,one of the hottest night clubs for the uber rich people of Delhi.I couldn’t believe I actually got a chance to see it from inside.The decor was a beautiful mosaic of old world artifacts.There were interesting things all over the walls and the ceiling like a pig’s head,a wooden fish as big as me (Which isn’t saying much), a dart board, old guitars, an ancient yellow parchment sign asking wisitors to keep their horses in the stable and their swords with the owner of the inn, beautifully crafted models of old airplanes just to name a few.There was an old western style telephone booth in front of the bar.The music was great.The lighting was breathtaking.I didn’t notice what I ate for lunch but the dessert (Apple struddles and custard caramel) was wery good.
The second half was broken out in 4 different fields called breakouts by the Autodesk people.Manufacturing Solutions, Building Solutions,Infrastructure Solutions and Education Solutions conducted by domain experts from the respectiwee fields.I sat in the education one for a while and got bored with the people on stage yakking about Autodesk’s efforts in the field of education over and over again.I sat for most of the time in the architecture break out which was excellently conducted by architects using Autodesk Software in architecture.They demoed Revit(I hawee typed “wee” here with a lot of efforts) and Architectural Desktop.They made designing magnificent buildings look so easy that for a moment I was tempted to think about architecture as a prospectiwee career option.There was this guy who designed and airport right in front of our eyes.
The best part of the whole conference was one right at the end. A demo of Alias Studio in the Manufacturing Solutions. I went into manufacturing break out just for that and it sure was worth missing some of the last bit of the Architecture solutions. It was presented by a Canadian who was using a Wacom Intuos 3 drawing tablet which is one of my ultimate fantasy gadgets. He sketched a conceptual wrist watch and converted it into a streamlined 3d model. The end product was beautiful. Since Alias Studio is used world over for styling cars he designed one right there in front of us.
From this post onwards I will be starting a blog series (for want of a better word)called Flotsam. They’re just random thoughts floating through the ocean of my brain that come on the blogshore carried by my brainwaves.
Flotsam:I wonder why web logs are called blogs. Wouldn’t it be fun if they are called Ogs? Then we will all be Ogres.
BlueGeneMaid
Bluegenemaid
The 3 Mistakes of my Life by Chetan Bhagat: Book Review
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under Headshot, Readable Enough, School Life
This one was long anticipated. The best-selling Indian novelist brings together another installment in showcasing the everyday life of some of the most common, unassuming and inconspicuous people of India. Titled 3 Mistakes of my Life, but disappointingly, has nothing to do with Mr. Bhagat’s life in itself. Anyway, its something fictional, but an entertainer in all. Before I consume your patience with vague descriptions like these, let me get started with the review…
The plot is pretty simple, 3 average students, Govind, Ish and Omi having a hard time living think of entrepreneurship. In middle come an entire big hoard of people, problems and pressures. Its about how they react, solve and live with those problems. Just like his older books, he chose a batch of people who truly represent a good proportion of urban India. This book is picturised in the older and slightly lesser developed part of Ahmedabad, Gujarat and features loads of Gujjus(Read: Hindi slang to refer to Gujaratis). Although no vernaculars could be observed in the book to make it funny in the slapstick sense, the very style of writing makes it really funny and entertaining. Many things that might feel Gujju there might be references to several places or locations in Ahmedabad, Gujju food, and of course, names that truly sound Gujju. But then, I really missed the name Jigness Kumar and a whole bunch of *readable* Gujju vernaculars there! 
After reading the book, I kind of felt that it had just one major objective. Making the Indian youth vigilant and aware of some of the biggest problems that plague its society. The list of problems could be very long, but well, Wordpress’s tinyMCE editor does have a bullet/numbering functionality for some reason, right? Feel free to scroll down and continue reading the rest o the review. I just wanted to point out that Chetan covered the following problems in his book…
- Expensive Education
- Lack of development in smaller towns
- Conservative mentality
- Extremism in politics
- Sick politicians
- Religious extremism
- Bias towards agnostics and atheists
- Poverty amongst the brighter lower-middle class youth
- Extreme competition in entrance exams for college admissions
- Success is hard to get
- Offbeat ideas receive suppression
- Lack of sports education/infra-structure in schools, etc
- Completely study oriented schools
- Small-scale businesses are extremely risky
- Advanced coaching for exams is expensive so only the upper-middle class receive that
- Drift between religions, castes, etc
- Conservative mentality of parents
- Hypocrisy among public, politicians, and everyone alike
- Lack of awareness, foresight and ideas due to lack of quality education
- Smaller schools lack funds and money in everything, just bigger school students get everything
- Bad quality contraceptive devices that don’t allow Indians to get bold early
- Heavy mugger-friendly curriculum
- Monotonous books, pathetic teachers, result oriented study
- Lack of scientific temper
- Students prejudiced about certain subjects and losing interest
- People just want to earn, and passion for anything is dead
- Prodigies and talented folks are mostly unrecognized and all that dies away as unharnessed potential
- Expensive international air tickets, nice food and even good reference material
- Stereotyped mentality of 99% of parents …. I had enough of it and I guess you did too. Just know that it had many more of it…
Oh well, I could go along all my life just covering the problems Mr. Bhagat put on those measly souls. But then, he makes a point clear. Indians live with many of these, even most of the readers do. The story was just a nicer way of illustrating the most extreme faces of these problems. In some places, the book does seem a little cliched with a few situations seeming too obvious in the setting. Like there is this bloke named Ish, who is a talented cricketer who didn’t go anywhere thanks to his involvement with cricket. So well, it was too obvious that his parents, especially his stereotypically grumpy Indian Dad always taunting against his failures, sometimes, simply for the heck of it! And simply for the heck of covering many of these problems, Bhagat creates or sets up certain scenarios a tad too forcefully… He even chose the best possible time-span to set the story in. Between 1999-2002, India faced the worst of all. Worst of riots, the worst of earthquakes and there were a hoard of problems especially in the part of India he spotlighted on. So well, the book in the end seems a little more than a detailed study of these problems… The book did go pretty much on the over-board side, especially in the ending. Seriously speaking, it did feel like a wonderful plot to a hindi movie with Chetan Bhagat trying to keep the book as riveting as possible.
But then, I did find the book an entertainer, but not for the same reasons why I found his previous books, Five Point Someone and One Night@the Call Center. Story and setting did slack off at places, but the writing style simply caught my mind. Several one-liners, witty metaphoric comparisons and unique usage of words with examples plucked from lives of all of us living in the sub-continent did have me bowing down at the same time munching at the food for thought he provided. A few things that he wrote in the book were such that, we might always have it in our mind, but then never have we ever managed to phrase that situation out into a clever statement… At times, he feels just so right. But then at times, it feels that parts of this book were just Chetan speaking out to the public and having his opinion read. And the pricing of the book makes it affordable for even those people documented in the book and even piracy-proof!
There are lofty many things that make Chetan Bhagat a wonderful writer targeting Indian youth. His writing isn’t the same as H2G2, where enjoying the humor means inclination to something, isn’t the same as fantasy writers, who spend a large portion of their publications just explaining the jargon and commodities that they imagined, and neither is it like those philosophical but anecdotal ones like say Sudha Murthy… It just feels almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Me, and many others who are a part of the growing India. The way he managed to put the un-phrased thoughts sitting in the minds of many of us is something that brings me to no surprise to have his third book soaring for success. I would be waiting to read more from him… I wish he updated his so-called blog more often!
Price: Rs. 95/- although ask for discounts in leading book stores.
PS - The book doesn’t have as much of cricket or the fanatic kind of cricket you might assume after looking at the cover, which does look pretty neat.
Why Hand-held Consoles (i.e Smaller Gaming Devices) Suck…
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under General, Headshot, Technology
I know quite a few people who blow up money on vices such as smoking, drinking, drugs and a lot other booze. I also know people who play on the PSP. And this post isn’t just bashing Sony’s shitty creation, but also many others that it is competing with. Nintendo can be credited for wasting time, money and energy in the creation of several models of handhelds very very uncreatively named as GameBoy, GameBoy Advance (GBA), GBA SP, GBA DIG, GBA ACP, and quite a few more ripped off from positions offered to the police forces in India.
There are a few notable features common in all of them -
* They have really small microscopic screens which makes hyper-metropic people like me dizzy.
* They have a shitty catalog of games which fans claim that they are just as diverse as those for the PC
* The games come on proprietary storage devices that cannot be accessed by any other device made by them
* They suck bigtime
* They are friggin’ expensive costing even more than top end Graphics Cards…
They even have hypnotic effects on their users. I have actually seen that happening. I had a friend who claimed to have similar opinions about handhelds. But then, it was only until he played on a PSP owned by a PSP owner I know. In that very experience, his mind was captured, with his reasoning capacities nailed by the AI being that sits inside the small shell of plastic(, metal, glass and a whole lot of materials that could have been better used to create cellphones). From that very day, he wasn’t the same person I knew. Since then, he found NFS Underground on that screen smaller than my own mouth “just-as-good” as NFS Carbon on my PC on which I spent nearly three and a half times more! I realized then that Sony had another victim to proudly advertise, another innocent human who could have raised his voice against the hypnotic phenomenon. This post I assume is the first venture in going against those all-powerful evil beings sitting inside Sony’s HQ plotting conspiracies into dominating the entire world. Today Sony could make one guy say something that would have any sane person raising his eyebrows. It could have someone changing sides. It could reduce the love someone had towards his own PC. Tomorrow, it could influence the world peace meetings in a big way. It could cause another World War. It could cause international allies changing colors and sides. I can already imagine in chinky (read:An Indian slang for an east-Asian or a Japanese looking guy) in a tuxedo sitting on swivel chair inside a darkened conference room throwing up the evil “Muhahaha” sort of laughter the way bad bosses in Hindi movies do. Their policy goes something like this - If you can’t beat them with intelligent reasons to own, get them joining you using mind control processors embedded inside those tiny devices.
What might seem like rivals in sales of shitty devices, is actually two rival plots to take over the entire world… Wake up folks! Wake up… it’s about time a mutiny starts up. Those awful devices must go down… I know this particular post is going against sentiments of a zillion people around. I apologize, but then it’s time things change!
Oh well, perhaps several days of NOT playing GTA and NOT watching South Park is getting on me. Now for some saner reasons to not go for consoles. As I said, the experience isn’t at all as wholesome in my arrogant opinion atleast. It is obvious that handheld consoles have much lesser processing power than their towering daddies. For several reasons, any console is only powerful enough to just render graphics optimized for the tiny little screens that it comes with. Tiny in terms of resolution that is… 480*272 is 7.9 times smaller than what I play on my humble monster with a 17″ TFT. And that is as big as it gets in console gaming. Cheap (in terms of nature, not pricing) stuff like GBA (All variants!), Nintendo DS, and wannabees like Nokia N-Gage have even smaller displays, at times requiring magnification devices. It really hurts me when people spend several thousand bucks on buying games for it which only comes on devices which would never take off and never become a standard. Take UMD for instance. It just doesn’t play anywhere else other than those damned sony devices. Ditto for Memory Sticks (every possible kind of it!). These are atleast reasonable in front of those shitty cartridges that you need to buy to use the Nintendo’s offerings. Really, it takes you back to the 1990’s…
Have a sense for spending money wisely. I understand that gaming is a lovely gift technology has given to its users. Its always better to have a wholesome experience of it. With stellar graphics, heart-thomping sound, and the cinematic experience that just pumps adrenaline in your viens! PC gaming rocks!
Ideas for upcoming posts: Bash console gaming, More gibberish about handheld gaming and also bash corporations not taking out PC versions of its games a la Rockstar, Namco, Konami, THQ, and a lot more…
PS: Believing a damned rumour and then waiting all the while till October for the PC version of GTA seems worse than watching Telugu movies which are put up around the place where I currently am… I guess I can put myself into suspended animation till then, or better still - Study for the big exams which people an year older to me are currently going through… Sheesh! 
