Up... up... and above - Photographic weekends #21

Captured this one at Colva beach, Goa. Though its momentary, how good it feels when we are flying in the air!

Mission 'amla fruits'

Today, while we were having post-lunch walk. We saw one amla tree and we want to pluck some, but there was no route to climb up the tree. I asked for permission from the house (tree) owners. Mario has planned for this pyramid. Sivaram and myself have formed the base. Suvarna has taken the photos. All of us have relished them while continuing our post-lunch walk. Had fun!

...with love - Photographic weekends #20

I shot this one at Janjira Fort, around 150km from Pune.

hOLi है!

This was made with collective effort of our team members on the day of HOLI. Thanks to all of them for getting their hands colorfully dirty to materialize my crazy thought!

Ghostly me - Photographic weekends #19

I was experimenting with the shutter speed settings... so is this ghostly photo with 3 seconds of exposure.

PS: I haven't clicked anything interesting lately. So is this funny thing ;-)

You fall, I lift - Photographic weekends #18

Shot this one in Kashid beach, near Alibaug, Maharashtra.

PS: Can anyone tell me why a falling/setting Sun always comes out as an ellipse, instead of a circle?

Free time? - Random thoughts #2

For the last few weeks, I have been hearing news about the layoffs and other awful effects of global recession. Some of my friends, including my wife, have expressed their fears of getting laid off. If I am not sounding harsh, I feel all this fear is just because we are not prepared, really! We are habituated to this lifestyle with comforts and fat salaries, and started taking them for granted. I feel that most of the times, most of our time is spent, most inefficiently, by most of us.

I know few exemplary friends whose learning curve is always in growing direction. I often wonder what makes them so consistent in doing that. To my horror and disbelief, one of these exemplaries has expressed a fear of getting extinguished with the current learning speed. With his consistency and religious regularity, if he says like that, where am I? A difficult question to ask myself. Instead of passing time with social networking sites like orkut, twitter and gossiping on gtalk, the same time can be used for more constructive things. If we are prepared for the worst and ready with necessary weapons in our arsenal, I think, even the ugliest possible situation in life becomes manageable. All this is an outcome of reading Seth Godin's post.

If we have free time, we should feel blissed and make best out of it!

Programming blues - Random thoughts #1

Being a computational researcher, most of our time is spent in writing programs. When we do a thing repeatedly or for a long time, our thought process and henceforth the ideas get moulded in that language. Here are some such random things!

1. When I see people, there are different kinds of smiles. If smile is considered as base class, cunning_smile, deceiving_smile, healthy_smile, encouraging_smile, lifeless_smile etc. are the derived classes. When I think like this, I am involuntarily giving a gentle_smile.

2. When I want to get up early in the morning, I put my alarm into an infinite for loop, with 10 minutes as snoozing time. Of course, the loop will be ultimately broken by my wife. How it's broken depends on many factors, though ;-)

3. Whenever (most of the times) I don't feel like going for jogging, I comment that activity for the day.

4. When I am preoccupied with too many things, I tend to forget certain things. I blame this on insufficient memory, and give a segmentation fault. There can be unexpected response due to uncleared cache etc.

5. Most often, I take too long to boot up in the morning.

6. Few things like washing clothes, arranging house etc. are simply declared in the program, but never defined or executed!

7. Improper allocation of resources (like time, money etc.) will lead to the decreased efficiency of the program (life)!

Now, this is being terminated due to insufficient time!

A bit of paradise - Photographic weekends #17

Location: Munnar, Kerala.

Valentines forever - Photographic weekends #16

I captured this memorable shot near Mulshi dam today. The way this mother and daughter have dressed in red was impressive and it suited to the occasion.

Happy valentines day to all of you!

Random thoughts on randomness...

Being a random boy, I was searching for some random things on this vast space of internet. This is where I found some random posts about randomness written by my random friend Krishna. Well... as you can see from his posts, everything is deterministic with some governing rules. But, we perceive them as random just because of our inability to find out those governing rules. I am totally amused at these thoughts, and I totally agree with this perception. Though it looks random, I guess there has a lot of sense and meaning to it. As I try to apply this rule to life, in general, it looks completely random and out of scope. If we try to observe it from a higher level, we may actually find some sense of these governing rules, which may guide/help us in leading it in a desired direction. I guess, I am generating random thoughts here ;-)

PS: I just got a random thought that I would start a series of "random thoughts". Followed by it, I've just randomly decided to write something about beauty in my next post.

Sunset or sunrise? - Photographic weekends #15

Shot this one during trip to Matheran, last weekend. I had to exploit both optical and digital zoom facility of my camera, for capturing this view.

Rubiks cube family... expanding!

I have been friends with this wonderful puzzle game since mid 1999. During those days this simple fact, that it can be rotated in all 3 directions without breaking, has made me so fascinated towards this game. I remember how desperately I've played with this on the very first day. It took almost a month for me to completely solve this. Huh, what a joy that I've felt when I've completely solved this. Mathematically, the total permutations of a solvable (3×3×3) original cube is given by: or 43 quintillion, in short. Highly unimaginable to list all those configurations by hand. The facts and figures of this game are always interesting. When I read that there are people who can solve this game just in 7.08 seconds I couldn't believe it. There is an extensive mathematical research that has taken place on how to solve Rubik's cube. It was found that any random configuration of the cube can be solved in just 26 steps. You can read the article here, quite mathlicated though! Well... that's just the tip an iceberg.

One fine day, when I was browsing for information on Rubik's cube, I came to know that there are 4X4X4 and 5X5X5 versions are available with fully functional models. Recently I have seen videos of 7X7X7 and 9X9X9 version of the game in fully functional form. What an amazing design. Just try to imagine its internal design. You'll surely come out with an expression of wow.

No... that's not all of it. There are softwares available to play the game online. If you are too bored and have already solved the smaller versions like say 9X9X9 manually, you can play the higher versions virtually. I was dumbstruck to see the videos of how people have solved up to 100X100X100. Checkout here to see how 20X20X20 is solved.

No... that's not all of it yet! There is a whole family of twisty games which come in various shapes (see the video of dodecahedron here, and read about Pyraminx here), sizes and complexities. I feel like buying all of those and try solving one by one! Huh, too high an ambition for an amateur like me!

Bottom line is... we humans, though very lazy, though very arrogant, though very egoistic and blah blah blah, are blessed with this powerful brute force. I guess, that's what is making us understand this mother nature step by step. If nature is not this beautiful and complicated, all our research efforts, and life in general, will lack motivation.

Cars and colors - Photographic weekends #14

Life can be funny!

I did some crazy thing a week ago. We are around 100+ heads in our office and there are only 4 urinals available. Because of the air-condition or just the natural urge, people do visit these so frequently. Lately, I got so frustrated with the way they spill it there. I don't know how many companies do the job of pasting instructions of how to use western toilets, but somehow I felt that there is a need to instruct about how to use urinals properly. I got this idea of putting up a funny-poster somewhere, and pasted the following poster.

Everybody was coming and asking the admin-person about who has pasted that. Huh, I think people are not ready to stop spilling. Instead they are insecure about their manhood. Read more about this insecurity here. Yesterday, one of my colleagues has drawn a cartoon depicting the situation. I am posting it here, just for fun!
Have a fun-filled Friday!

Back from hibernation!

I think, it's more than six months after I have written anything that is substantial here. Reasons could be many. Post-marriage blues, laziness, busyness, retrospection, tiredness, blah blah blah... Many a times, I felt that my posts are looking too personal and mundane! Also, I observed that people write more when they are out of comfort zone. As far as non-professional blogs are concerned, blogs have become venting points. Personally, I could see that many of my previous posts are just out of frustration, depression and some such nonsense!

I am happy to see regular visitors to my blog, despite of my continuous trash! I started photographic weekends series just to make sure that this blog remains (attr)active. Now, I am back from hibernation and joining the regular bloggers!

Wish me all the best and keep visiting!

By the way, those who can read Telugu can visit my Telugu blog here.

Innocence doubled - Photographic weekends #13

Shot this one during Mahabaleshwar trip last weekend! I could visualize these two little girls as those described in the story "Little girls are wiser than men" by Leo Tolstoy. These twins have doubled the childhood innocence!

Solitude or loneliness? - Photographic weekends #12

Shot this during Sinhagad trek a week ago... Amidst many colorful flowers and plants, I found this one amusing! Sometimes, we are not sure if our mood belongs to solitude or loneliness!

PS: I have become more and more lazy these days. May be because of my resolution to reduce my laziness and extra pounds. Hope I will update regularly! By the way, I wish all of you a very happy new year!

Yellow again - Photographic weekends #11

Somehow, these little flowers are really soothing in look... they look like treasures scattered in the grass and other unnoticed areas. Shot this during one of the treks we did recently! By the way, I am yet to produce a good quality miniature!

Auto-mated road - Photographic weekends #10

We have visited Charminar today... I found this view quite interesting! I was wondering how these people are so good at managing through these roads, amidst the unending chaos!