Deepanjan Nag's Magnum Opus

After a long struggle to wriggle out of Bangalore and into Gurgaon, Abhishek (Kumar) will finally have his way. 4th of July will be his last working day in silicon town. I'll miss him dearly. Happy Independence Day!

Have you ever had so much of chocolate in a day that you have multiple burps? Today was one of those days as I pampered myself to my heart's content!

I remember reading as a kid about the Tunguska explosion in Siberia in 1908. Peasants gave vivid and sometimes exaggerated descriptions of what they experienced. One folk said he and his cattle were hurled into the air, such was the intensity of the quake that was recorded the world over in seismographs. I was watching an episode of Carl Sagan's COSMOS a few days ago that described the Tunguska event and the possible causes behind it. Scientists have, for years, contended that the culprit behind the heavenly explosion whose earthly impact caused widespread destruction could only be a meteor or a comet. What makes it all so baffling is that no debris has ever been found in spite of numerous expeditions to the hinterland of Tunguska. The comet hypothesis found favor amongst a majority of scientists (including Carl Sagan) in recent years. Other people have come up with more colorful ideas (like a nuclear powered alien ship meeting with an accident), most of which have been widely ridi...

We can land on the Moon but can't unscramble an egg.

This would be my last blog post. I would have not accomplished many of my dreams (especially buying a reflecting telescope and a computer). But then again, the more dreams you realize...the more they proliferate. Some people will continue thinking I'm better than I really am. Some people will continue thinking I'm worse than I really am. Some will shed a tear or two for a few days. At least I hope they will! I'm sure Diya will miss me a lot. She's begun to grasp the meaning of death by now. My priceless books would disintegrate. My music archive would never be listened to. My Yahoo account (and some lesser ones) would continue to linger for some time before closing. I would have died a bachelor. Some lucky woman would have averted the biggest mistake of her life. I would not have registered for the Cryonics Society. I would not have said many things that I'll never say anyway. Downloading COSMOS would remain incomplete. My Nokia...I don't know what would happen ...

A professional guardian of Islam.

Manilal will be joining Cap Gemini soon. Congrats to him!

I used to feel so lethargic taking dictations from the teacher as he/she droned on and on (especially after lunch), I would do a lot of on-the-fly editing to reduce the writing work. Being a slow writer also necessitated it. Call me pompous, but the lossless compression (!) would be flawless and generally better grammatically structured. The short cuts had actually become a habit later on and helped hone my writing skills. Just remembered.

I had watched this movie previously in bits and pieces. I got to see it in its entirety only today. Loved it. Vasily Zaytsev 's achievements in World War 2 were astounding.

That's how Rediff merchandised a tiny telescope today. I always thought telescopes served to magnify distant objects. How does Rediff's miracle contraption bring objects 30 times closer? Do we finally have the answer to interstellar travel?! Imagine bringing the Moon 30 times closer. Our burgeoning population would be the first one off the block to grab land out there. Soon the entire satellite would be ours to keep. We would only need to strap a homemade cryogenic engine to a low cost plane to realize our dreams. Or maybe we could forgo it and just hurl ourselves through a giant catapult! Simple linguistic nuances are yet to be mastered by us.

I loathe FM. Not the technology per se but the way it is used. FM's greatest fault: people have forgotten AM. FM's other fault: programs aired over it hardly have any distinctive identity. Anyone with a certain way with words will make do for a host. Speak crap, dangle the proverbial carrot in the form of free tickets or gift vouchers and people will surely fall for it. Occasionally get the brain dead audience revved up to air views on pressing issues and see their concerns shoot through the roof as each one tries to outdo the other in coming up with a brilliant solution...something the rest of mankind was oblivious to until now. The reward: 20 seconds of ephemeral fame as the world (limited to your city) suddenly discovers your brilliance. And who can forget SMS? Send your requests to 4141 as long as you are requesting only for a recent hit that everyone has already heard at least a zillion times. No Keith Jarrett, Boots Randolph or Rosemary Clooney. No jazz, no bluegrass and...

I've been busy today collating phone numbers of my contacts. Reconstructing the entire list may not be required, but some vital numbers may have been lost permanently. I need some leads...urgently. I'll use Yahoo! Address Book as a backup from now on. But I feel synchronizing the numbers each time won't be a trivial task. Manilal has tentatively got a new job. Santosh may be left to fend for himself in his old dwelling for the time being.

This was a sombre day for me as I lost my very first phone. I had decided to bunk office today and this to prove a costly mistake. I won't go into the details of how my Nokia 6681 was stolen since the blame would then fall squarely on the one and only suspect. Instead, I'll recount how the theft was discovered. While surfing the Net in the morning, I came to know of the launch of YouTube Mobile . I was happy to learn that I would have one more experiment to do before terminating my Hutch Access subscription. I put my mobile on charge. A few things happened during this period that I won't delve into. I soon indulged in some TV and newspaper. It was only late in the afternoon after lunch that I suddenly remembered trying YouTube on my phone. Alarm bells rang when I discovered it missing. I was thrown into a tizzy as Mantu and I frantically tried to locate my phone. Now I'm usually very clumsy with things, but I've been vary careful with my mobile all this while. We tr...

There's a famous song by Sinatra with the same title. But this is not about the song. It's about an idiosyncrasy of mine. I keep coming across these wonderful sources of news from all over the web. It's hard to let go of them and I end up subscribing to their feeds via my newsreader. Finally, I have so many sources, my reader is flooded with news items within minutes. I feel I'm missing something if I don't go through all the articles. But even beginning to try doing so is futile since there is way too much to read. To add to my woes, sifting through the redundancies exhausts precious time. Yahoo! Pipes may offer a vestigial solution, but brings in its own set of problems. I don't like another insulating layer between me and the news source since it greatly delays news delivery. Also, the concept of pipes doesn't go along well with folders or tags. Sometimes I feel Yahoo! News is more than enough for me. It is per se . But I fear missing quality articles ...

Remember Supandi, the country bumpkin and protagonist of one of Tinkle 's funniest comic strips? With Santosh around, I didn't really miss him. Real life comedy hovers around him. Manilal was in Koramangala this morning and decided to pay us a visit in the afternoon. Cracking jokes is almost customary when old pals meet after a long break, and obviously many of our discussions revolved around my former roommate, Santosh. Mantu and I couldn't stop laughing when the following incident came to light. Poor Santosh, his computer was lying dormant for the past few weeks because the power unit had gone bust. A particularly nosy lizard that had gone where no lizard had gone before (Santosh's desktop's SMPS) was the culprit. Now you can't really train a lizard to avoid such hazardous places and Santosh was getting increasingly restless with his lifeless computer. So he trained his often-slipping focus on getting the machine resurrected. He finally got the power unit repl...

Here's a fact: western classical enthusiasts prefer lossless audio compressions like APE and LAME to MP3.