The Creative Corner

Journey to office

2009-08-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

Yes it was a journey today! The morning shuttle took a circuitous route today to office due to a huge traffic pile up on usual route. It was a journey in itself.

After some initial few minutes on this new route(new to me) the hustle bustle and traffic started waning. Then it seemed that the bus was on its way to a countryside excursion. Contrastingly it was grim inside the bus as it was actually on its way to office. Except for few like me who were curious of the impending journey. With few good spells of monsoon in past few days, landscape was green outside. I was amazed to see some beautifully built farmhouses on the way. Then there were dense teak wood plantations, vegetable farms and flower farms. I was astounded to see the flower farm as it was truly colorful with flowers of different kinds and varieties flowering at daybreak. The bus went past a small village followed by a big lake. It was picturesque to look at this lake which was overflowing its capacity.

And then the scene in front changed. Skyscrapers started dotting the scene..Now I could see the offices of big IT companies and that reminded me of my intent to reach my office. And when I looked at watch it was already thirty minutes past eight. An hour went by so fast! (slow for few actually). Then I reached office and found that our shuttle was one of few which reached quite before others as the traffic pile up was still there on the ususal route.

Mind Stimulative Games

2009-08-09T06:08:00.000-07:00

This weekend was one where I got to know two interesting Mind Stimulating Games. On the Friday evening I got chance to play Pictionary, a game of pictures and words. "Draw throughout to win it" is the motto. This game brings out the creativity in you. It stimulates your mind to think hard. It strengthens your non-verbal communication. And most importantly you enjoy it because you laugh a lot!

I would like to play it more and also would like to have levels for the words like - easy, hard and hardest. Maybe there is a scope to add more words ourselves! Thanks to my friend who introduced this game to me.

The other game which I came to know over the weekend was "Mafia" alternatively known as "Assasin", which I couldn't play it as such but have desire to play it. Its not a board game but a group game. A group of 8 could do. To simplistically describe this game - a person could be a mafia or non-mafia(a citizen). So there are two factions - Mafia and citizens. Objective is to make your faction survive. Interesting thing is that nobody knows what is the role of other person! It will surely titillate your mind to strategically guess the role of all others. The best ones to strategise would win. I would try my hands on this and share the exprience!

The Olympic Dream - watch it out!

2008-08-11T00:59:00.000-07:00

"Dream is not what you get while sleeping, Dream is the one that don't let you sleep!" A very inspiring statement from Indian Olympic hopeful in boxing Akhil Kumar, is just so profound and so apropos to any and everything. The Olympic dream has taken the sleep off from many like him for days and now they are in middle of the world's largest arena at Beijing, struggling fighting to fulfill their dream.

The opening ceremony at Beijing this year was a marvel in itself. Be it the synchronization of thousand drummers or lighting of the Olympic flame or the rings rising above ground, everything was just awesome spectacle. Olympics, which unites more than 40 sports, stimulates motivation. From the silent sport like archery to the adrenaline pumping football, every sport inspires reverence. In my opinion it is the biggest entertainment that can ever be watched. If you watch one event/match I am sure you would be glued to watch more of it. So dont miss this action, emotion, drama packed event, otherwise you would repent for four years!

Engineers Decoded

2008-06-14T09:18:00.000-07:00

While reading "The Dilbert Principle" by Scott Adams I came across a very genuine, sincere and fascinating effort to decode the entity called Engineer. I have compiled these fascinating facts/statements below. Realize the appropriateness upon reading them.

"Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems available they will create their own problems"

"No engineer can walk away from an unsolvable problem untill it's solved"

"Engineers are notoriously frugal. For engineers every spending situation is simply a problem in optimization."

"For engineers its not "who you know" that matters, its "who knows less than you do" that counts"

"Engineers have amazing trait to cocentrate on one subject to the complete exclusion of everything else in the environment"

"Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationship."

"Engineers are always delighted to share wisdom, even in areas in which they have no experience whatsoever"

Courtesy - "The Dilbert Principle" by Scott Adams

Crossword

2008-06-10T21:16:00.000-07:00

A newspaper is incomplete without a crossword and I feel so are the news portals. Ever since I started reading news online I had wondered why don't they put daily crossword on their website. It would be much fun and much learning if we had crosswords online. Advantage being you don't have to wait the whole day to know the answer.

In my quest for good crosswords I came across a site called bestcrosswords. It is a neat site that provides some wonderful interactive crossword puzzles. Here you can choose from a variety of crosswords like casual, competitive and of course puzzles created by other users. Also you can set difficulty level and keep time and score for yourself.

Its not that crosswords were not at all available on news portals. Hindu, Deccan Herald and other newspaper sites do provide a printable version of the crossword. But that is as good as good as solving it on daily newsprint. Some others like indiatimes do link the crosswords to their gaming portals.

Recently IBN live has started publishing daily crossword on its website. I found this one interesting as it provides daily crossword is classified as per topic like sports, entertainment, business, cricket and general. The clues are moderate in difficulty and related to recent events and happenings. Also it is well interactive and neat.

With so much progress in world of mobile, I think the next logical thing for the newspaper people to make the daily crossword available on mobile.

Thought for food

2008-05-17T23:09:00.000-07:00

What is the most precious thing today? Gold? Maybe for few but for majority it is the food. The food prices have gone so high in recent times that they have caused "food crises" in some countries. Fortunately we are not one of them. Its predicted that if inflation continues this trend then almost 30 countries will see food riots and they will collapse. Hence it is very important that we give a thought for food do something to prevent the catastrophe.

Consider the food equation, which is a simple equation with demand on one side and supply on other. The supply side of this equation is nothing but the food producing capablity of earth. This will most likely remain a constant for while, boosted at times by new technologies and novel researches. On the other side of equation we have billions of people(whose number is increasing) multiplied by demand of each person(which is also increasing).

Today the two sides are out of balance and the problem for each one of us is to think, think and think in order to balance them. I am sure, if each one of us spares some time to think on this problem, we can together crack it. One way which I have thought is to stop food wastage of all kinds so as to keep check on its demand. If it is done by billions of people I am confident that it would help. So people what has come out of your thoughts?

Amusing sense of direction

2008-05-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

Whether you are in Mumbai, Bangalore or Amsterdam there would be situations when you have to seek directions in order to reach your destination. This act turns out to be very funny at times and believe it or not but we all have amusing sense of direction.

In Mumbai you ask one person standing on a best bus stop "Arre mama, sector 29 kaise jana?" He comes near and peeking into your car and says "Nice car..santro hai kya?". Frusturated you ask angrily"Sector 29 ke liye kaise jana batayenge". You get a reply "Gussa kyun hote ho, aap sector 29 mein hi ho".

In bangalore at a junction you wonder which one is mysore road so you ask one fellow "Hey which side is mysore road "He looks at you with straight face and says" I am not sure but you can definitely take the left one".

In Delhi you seek directions to say Karol Bagh from some person near a pan shop. What happens is some two three people idling around pitch in for help too. Each one has a different direction in mind for Karol Bagh. They start quarelling quarelling among themselves on who is right. And you are left perplexed.

Its no different in foreign countries. And I feel that you end up in amusing situations more often there because of varied reasons like not knowing language of land or not finding anyone to seek direction from or you fail to understand GPS or GPS fails to understand you.

You may be prompted to ask "Which tram you take to the musuem?" as you are standing at a tram station in city of Stuttgart and unable to read the map which is in german. A gentleman might inform you very politely that you should take tram U1. Thanking him for his kindness, you board U1, but soon realize the mistake that it is taking you to the musical instead of museum. Lucky you that at that time there was at least someone around to speak with you. But at times in these lands there could be situations when you are lost and there's no soul around. You are entirely dependent on your intution and luck to resolve your way.

You might think that GPS is a precious gift to solve the navigation problems in the alien places. Very true, and I fully agree. GPS is indeed a wonderful gadget, but tit could as well lead to some comic situations. Like it could happen that when you want to go to Santa Cruz in CA, the GPS starts taking you to Santa Cruz in Texas as you wrongly fed Santa Cruz, TX. Now thats blunder (Jana tha japan pahunch gaye chin..) and only because GPS failed to understand you. It could as well happen that you fail to understand GPS. GPS rightly informs you that you need to take the next exit to Mountain View, but there are two roads at exit and in the darkness you take the wrong one. One more mistake in following GPS and you are lost.

Leaving you with a funny picture of yourself, in a situation where there is car with 4 people, you are at the steering, you are in foreign land, you dont have a GPS in car, you have some paper map of region, signs on road are in an unknown language and everyone is yelling at you to follow his directions...

"Chak De" for Cricket

2007-09-01T01:22:00.000-07:00

Another one dayer slipped from hands of Indians. I don't grieve for the lost match. But what surprises me is the fact that they fail to

learn from the mistakes. Failure is supposed to be the first step towards sucess. But in this case failure is first step towards a catastrophe. And you need not be an expert to tell that the problem here is complete lack of team work.

A good suggestion to the cricket team would be to go and watch the movie "Chak De" and follow its simple message. But wait a second, whats this link. Oh man this was already done for them. There was a special screening of the film on eve of the match for the team...!

Huh..so if Chak De couldn't induce the effect of team work then nothing else will. So be prepared for the disaster..

Informing on t..r..affic

2007-07-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

Traffic - The most frightful thing I can think of..A lot has been written about traffic conditions but noone ever informed me about the live traffic at particular location area when I needed it..

But today I came accross a site http://www.btis.in/ which provides the live traffic conditions on streets of Bangalore. The traffic condition at various places is plotted on the map of Banglaore with red, orange and green colored dots representing heavy, moderate and no congestion respecively. It also provides this info on the mobile phones through SMS. This website is a partnership of Mapunity, Airtel, and Bangalore Traffic Police - a great effort by all of them. So today onwards, before I leave the office I will quicky glance the map on this website and take the less busy route to my home accordingly. Such a powerful way of INFORMING about the Bangalore traffic. Just try think beyond informing, where this information be used and there are dozens of it!

I had seen that this service was made available sometime back at http://www.maps.google.com/ but it was restricted to US. The traffic density is shown by coloring the roads by different colors and it looks truly amazing. But I was equally amazed to see similar thing for our own Bangalore. The UI may not be as good as that of google but it serves the purpose well.

I am now waiting for the day when real time traffic would be available on dashboard of my vehicle besides the speedometer. I can sense that the day is not so far..

Excursion on banks of Kaveri

2007-07-20T06:46:00.000-07:00

The month of July, a chilly cloudy Sunday morning and a bunch of IT geeks what else you need to start off an excursion?

Of course you need a vehicle..

The vehicle was the last one to arrive at the meeting place. But as it arrived the eagerly waiting bunch of IT geeks hopped on to it. The ten of us were cosily accomodated in the tempo traveller. No sooner the vehicle was moving that it was thumping with the beats of AR Rahman. The juice and chips packed by some of us were soon set free out of the packaging. The music and munching kept us so busy that we didnt realized that we had reached Kanakpura, the last known town where we could find some good food. Guys soon found a descent darshini and satisfied themselves with idly-vadas. Considering that food will be scarce further a paked lunch of rice was taken aboard and lots of packaged water.

There were lot of places that were thought about in planning stages of the excursion. The first one on the list was Chunchi Falls. When we reached this place, eveyone had an inquiring look "are there any waterfalls here?". But soon the thought faded away as everyone was busy in capturing the beauty of the place in their cameras. The falls as such are very small and lean but the rocky creavases created by them are just awesome. Some 1 gig of photos were clicked at this serene place. The return path to bus was an uphill task but it was joyous.

Next on the list was Kaveri Sangam. The bumpiness of the road leading to this place wasnt felt at all, as everyone was busy being deaf and dumb for the game of dumb charades. As opposed to Chunchi falls Kaveri Sangam is full of water in this month of year. The water seemed to overflow the banks. To go to Makedatu you need to cross the Kaveri river here in small "Choti si aasha" boats. After the boat ride we reached on other side and found a rickety bus waiting to take us to Makedatu. But hold on it was already full and the driver was busy in replacing the tyre that had got punctured. We requested the driver to allow us to travel on top of bus he agreed to that and also gave a discount for that! When the bus started moving it felt like riding an elephant!

Makedatu is place where the rocky banks of river Kaveri are so close that it is belived that a goat could cross it. Its amazing sight to watch the river flow with such a huge thrust. We spent some time there shooting this flow, jumping about the rocks. Then we set back to the Kaveri Sangam where the packed lunch was waiting for we the hungry geeks.

After the lucheon we decided to see if we can catch some fishes at a fishing camp nearby. But unfortunately we were denied entry there as we didnt have the bookings. But we were amazed to see the river flow so serenly here contradicting what we had seen some time back some 5km away.

It was just 2pm and only spot left nearby was "Shivsamudram". By majority we decided to go there and complete the list. It was a 2 hours journey but very peaceful as the drowsiness overcame the activeness. The sight of the lively gushing falls brought back the energy. Gallons and gallons of water was falling through them and creating a photogenic picture. We also had some time before sunset to get a glimpse of "Gagan chukki" falls on other side of Shivsamudram.

The bumpiness of the Indian roads wasn't felt at all on the return journey as we were busy watching a Bond movie. As the movie ended we realized that night had fallen and we started thinking of ways and means to reach back home. Some even started dreaming of next day in office.

I have uploaded..

2007-07-13T04:37:00.000-07:00

Some years back most of the people were obsessed by the word "download". I will download that song or that game, that software, code, movie, lyrics and what not. The one to download it first became the hero, the inspiration for others. New heroes were born day by day who were powered by google. As art of downloading became a commodity it started loosing the charm. In the process the creative ones started looking for uploading as newer technique to be kewl.

Instead of downloading, "Uploading" became the buzzword. Todays everyone uploads. Everyone upload photos, songs, movies, code, softwares, scraps, answers to questions(forums), information(wiki) and also blogs. In this uploading era blogs have attracted my attention the most. With power of google again I can blog and I can blog conveniently! After publishing this this I can convincingly say I have uploaded a blog.

Yes I have uploaded...