'Tempe Town Lake' weekend

The long weekend of July 3/4/5 was one of my most eventful weekends in US, thanks to the ASU people - Viju, Ashwini and Teja.

Friday night - Saturday early morning:

Dinner at Delhi Palace, followed by the timepass movie - I hate love stories where I met lot of folks from ASU - Viju, Teja and Harish. Good fun, lots of movie kalaai after ages. Went to the Tempe Town Lake, which is an artificially constructed lake at downtown Tempe very close to the university campus. Apparently the lake side offered an excellent view of the sunrise and I wanted to check it out. I had passed by it during the day but never knew it looked so gorgeous in the night, with lights on all the bridges over it. So, we were there, by 2 am, sitting at the bank, chilling our feet with the water. It felt unf****ng believable (Simbu 's dialogue from VTV :P). Viju's iPod Touch and my Sony Ericsson proved to be a source of several valuable songs as we listened to dozens of Ilayaraja, ARR scores for hours together. Planes that dipped over us at periodic intervals before they landed at the Sky-Harbor airport, added to the ambience. The culmination of Tamil/Hindi/Telugu songs and movie talks went on till 4:30, after which we could observe the horizon far beyond, getting bluish and the clouds getting darker spreading their shadows on the water, which was already well lit up by the reflection. Soon the sky completely brightened up with a smile. We hurried and made a move in order to beat the heat. Arizona heat has a reputation of kicking in so quickly. After hunting around for places to have tea/coffee, I managed to grab my favorite Chai Latte :)

Saturday evening:

Went shopping at the nearby Tempe Marketplace, which seemed a pretty decent place to kill time with many shops and malls.

Saturday night - Sunday early morning:

I woke up from a nap and was called for VTV movie in one of Viju's labs in the university. That seemed pretty exciting. VTV somehow has been a movie for me, that has this wierd characteristic. I hated the movie the first time I watched it (except for its ARR music). I literally cursed Menon for the terrible job. Second watch, made my think that it was not that big a shit as I thought initially. Couple of things like Trisha, Nalini Sriram's brilliant sarees :) appealed to me. Though, Simbu 's acting was still unacceptable and looked outrightly foolish. Third watch, and I seemed to actually like the movie. Alright, so this being the motivation, I was in lab at 2 when we began watching the movie, turning the lab into a movie theater. Ended at 5 with a whole bunch of comments and PJs throughout the movie.

Sunday night - Monday morning:

July 4, being the Independence Day here offered me a chance to join the crowd at Tempe Town Lake for the famous fireworks show.

And so we were there at 9 and witnessed a huge crowd. I got a feel of the night life at the popular and most happening Mill Avenue as I saw the streets flowing with people - old, young, on cycles, with instruments, kids on shoulders, music, flags, etc around. We couldn't get into the lakeside area - Tempe Beach Park, where I could see a stage being set up with a band that was to host the music for the night. We instead got close to the bank beside the park fence, which offered a pretty good view of the lake, bridges and the beach park before us. At 9, there was music and fireworks began.

(Tempe Town Lake side)

It was a 40 minute long incredible fireworks display with the band beside the lake playing. I could identify - Come on baby light my fire at one point during the show. Thanks to the fireworks mode on my Nikon Cookpix L20, I was able to capture several beautiful moments of the show.

View the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVv5rh0UyKk

The sky finally went black at 10 and being hungry, we headed to a Chinese restaurant at Mill Avenue, for dinner. I had not had a good opinion about Chinese food to be honest, but Viju claimed two dishes to be really good there and the food that we ordered did seem pretty good actually, especially the Eggplant dish. My face lit up when I was told that Eggplant was another name for Brinjal, and so the dish finally boiled down to (pun possible :P) a form of baingan bhartha dipped in spicy sauce. Dinner ended with fortune cookies (I never knew they existed anywhere other than on facebook :P), which are typically served with Chinese food as deserts. The cookie has a message inside which is to be read as, suffixed with - ".. in bed" :) And, these were the ones we got :P

We wandered along the Mill Avenue and thought of spending the night again beside the Tempe Town Lake. The place seemed addictive especially during late nights. But before moving in, we spent sometime at the Beach Park entrance, discussing/singing songs from various movies and our childhood days. It brought back many old memories especially recalling the prayer and bhajans which I learnt in my school days. I also realized that all four of us had studied Sanskrit in our school days and so we had lot of common stuff to recall and remember.

At 2, we took a walk beside the lake, did couple of pictures experimenting with the Self-Timer, B&W and Sepia :) After some random discussions on random topics, we made a move at 4 back home, finishing off with a coffee at Ashwini 's place.

Overall, a great long weekend.

Fall Colors..

And, this is my favorite (not GT Campus though :P)

Video

And they lived happily forever!

Oct 25 2009 - The average amount of time a youngster spends on a computer is almost half of the total time he is awake. Thanks to the internet.

2015 AD - Work from home - Commuting to and from work became a big overhead. People started working from home full-time.

2025 AD - Play from home/Shop from home/"Do what you want" from home - There was no need to take the pain of going out to do anything. Everything was just a click away.

2040 AD - Most of the menial work human beings do are replaced by machines/computers - ATM's, Gas stations, Automated cars, and fully computerized shops, hotels, post offices, - you name it.

2100 AD - Slowly more intelligent machines replace human beings in other intellectual professions - teaching, research, art ...

2200 AD - The only work human beings have been doing - inventing new machines, is also done by machines now. There is absolutely no job that human beings can do but machines can't.

2300 AD - Machines will do anything and everything. Only activites human beings do are eat, sleep, reproduce. (remember caveman?)

2500 AD - Eating food was such a waste of time. A new vaccine was invented that would be administered as soon as a baby is born, so that it will never get the "hunger disease" in its life. Without human beings eating, he is not able to tolerate other disturbances like plants and animals on earth. Slowly all other plants and animals are "made to go extinct". Digestive system and the related organs slowly become vestigial.

After a few hundred years - Reproduction is the only physical activity that human beings do. Someone comes up with a bright idea - What if I can simulate the "effect" in human brain without having to go through so much physical stress. People started liking the idea and eventually just like everyone fell a prey for facebook and twitter, they adopt this one universally too.

A few hundred years passed - Wait a min... if you are still thinking of human beings as a species with a pair of limbs, a pair of hands and a head over a trunk, you are wrong. They don't have hands or legs any more. They have not been using them for so many hundred years. They dont have mouth or ears. They interact with other human beings through neuro-transponders. They just have a brain (to sense) , a lung (to breathe). The size of a human being is 1 cubic feet almost like a soccer ball.

After a few hundred years the human beings started thinking - "why should I strain myself breathing and sensing all stupid stuff around me?". Slowly they became even more lazy that their only two organs - brain and lungs also became vestigial. After sometime, the rest of the (so called?) human beings get sedimented into a new form of rock called the homo-sapien rocks. And the machines lived happily for ever throwing homo-sapien rocks at each other.

Vadivelu Interview

For all those hardcore Vadivelu fans:

Interview Part1

Interview Part2

Droste Effect!

All those who love recursively designed structures would love this - its a recursive type of picture that infinitely diminishes into a smaller version of its own, unending as it seems to the viewer!

Well, I had seen dozens of email-forwards and mails carrying such with such images that demand a high visual processing by your brain to understand them, but never knew there was a term for it. Thanks to my reader for letting me know.

Read more on this: 50 Stunning Examples of the Droste Effect

Doordarshan

Doordarshan has had a special appeal to me, especially because of the fact that I grew up watching this national channel, which was the only one available during those days (late 1980s and early 1990s). In particular, my bonding towards these DD channels was more stronger that others, I grew up at a place where cable TV was clearly out of reach and I had no choice but to savour the DD1 and DD2 (metro). But, looking back at it, in a way that was fun. I seldom have the same excitement on watching television channels now, infact its not even a fraction of what I used to hold as a kid. The world has metamorphosized and we now only flip-channels. Its a race that all channels have gotten in, to show stuff that would catch you eye as you hurriedly button away to the end of the list. If a channel gave you even five minutes of boredom, they ran the risk of being completely ignored for rest of the day or worse-even being blacklisted so that nobody in the entire family watched it again :) Back then, the case was different, all you had were the twin DD channels with their regional equivalents of course, these entertained the people (whether they liked it or not). But, the entertainment and knowledge-sharing it provided was complete - we had news, movies, documentaries, mythological soaps, advertisements, thrillers, detective serials, educational programmes, sports telecast, so on..

This post is to reminiscence of all those moments, all those good old commercials/serials/theme music tracks that drag me back to those days. My personal favorites were Amul Surabhi (I love the intro music track), Rangoli (the programme was on Sunday and I woke up listening to its songs), Chandrakanta (the thrilling fantasy series), Sri Krishna (I never missed a single episode, this was the best of Ramanand Sagar's creations!) and so on..

These are some randomly picked up stuff I found on youtube that took me back to that age and I felt like archiving them. Hope you do enjoy them as well!

Doordarshan Signature

Doordarshan AD

DD News Intro

Mile Sur Mera Tumhara

Baje Sargam

Vijayi Vishwa Tiranga Pyara

Jungle book title song

Duck Tales

Alif Laila

Surabhi

Bharat Ek Khoj

Oshin

Chandrakanta (music track alone, could n't locate original video)

Sri Krishna serial Title Song

Shaktimaan Title Song

Om Namah Shivay Serial Title Song

Jai Hanuman Serial Title Song

Cadburys AD

Dairy Milk AD

Bajaj AD

Dhara AD

Asian Paints

Nescafe AD

Tipu Sultan Intro

Vico Vajratanti

Vico Turmeric Cream

Complan AD

Parle-G Commercial

Splendor Commercial

Fevicol Oldest AD

Feviquick AD

Titan Commercial

Lifebuoy AD

Doodh AD

Doordarshan Nostalgic Moments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E78RcIFQCRc&feature=related

Everybody wants a Guitar :)

Ek baar ek aadmi ne badi tapasya ki.

Shivji khush.

Prakat hue.

Bole.

Puttar maang ...

maang kya chahiye tujhey !

Bhakth utha ...

Bola - "Shivji! Mujhey to aap sirf ek guitar de do !"

Shivji bole - "kaisa gadha hai ?"

Unhone kaha - "puttar! tuney badi achchi tapsya ki hai, kuch bada maang!"

Woh fir bola - "nahi ji, mujhey to aap guitar hi do!"

Shivji ne phir samajhaya - "abey .. kuch dhang ka maang ...!"

Par wo to ada hi hua tha ... bola "nahi ... aap to mujhey guitar hi do !"

Shivji usey bade pyaar se khopch me lekar samjhane lage, bole "yaar tu kuch aur maang.. guitar

na maang..."

Woh bola - "nahi nahi nahi !! mujhey sirf guitar hi chahiye!!"

abb shivji gussey main aa gaye ... boley ,(scroll down)

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"Saale!! agar guitar mere paas hota to main ye damaru kyun bajata.."

Wingsuit base jumping

"Wing Suit Flying is the sport of flying the human body through the air using a special jumpsuit, called a wingsuit, that shapes the human body into an airfoil which can create lift. The wingsuit creates the airfoil shape with fabric sewn between the legs and under the arms. It is also knownby the public as a birdman suit or squirrel suit" - Courtesy: Wikipedia

From bungee jumping to sky-diving, this video revealed to me something that could be the craziest ever attempt by a person. This is the heights of risk a person can take, but its just amazing!!

Watch it guys -

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

Yellow Jackets

American Football! I watched one this Saturday, at the Bobby Dodd Stadium, Georgia Tech.

Yellow Jackets Vs Jackson Ville

Yellow Jackets is the football name for Georgia-Tech team, which was supposedly the national conference champion some years ago (1917, 1928, 1952, 1990). Personally, I never had a good opinion about this sport, which was to me nothing but a bunch of guys rolling over each other throughout the match, but this time I did enjoy it.

One thing about this game (at least in GaTech, I'm sure other states as well) is that it manages to gather a huge crowd, something to the magnitude of a India-Pakistan cricket match in India. And, the extent of publicity it receives here is staggering. Every other day, I find people setting up stalls, selling tickets, handing out brochures, websites yelling hard. It kept me wondering if the game was worth the hype.

Well! no comments about it. I watched it for two reasons - firstly, it was a student ticket (costing $0) :P and secondly, I wanted to know what was so special about it.

I would say it is never close to Soccer (or the football that we usually perceive it as). Primarily, because the game is majorly confusing (esp for a newbie), when you step into the match, all you see is a group of guys running around in a haphazard fashion, more or less similar to bees flocking around a flower. And, size of the ball is too small to be even noticed, thereby making your judgement of the game rely on movement of the players, who play deceiving tactics and create false gestures most of the times. Its only when a someone hurls the ball in the air to his receiver, on the other end, that you get to see it. And, the rules are complex as well. You hear all new terms - touchdown, quarterback, etc. It took a while to realize what was actually happening in the field. The game is divided into four quarters (15 mins each), and believe me, each quarter takes atleast 45 mins of audience time (coz of fouls and stuff). So you spend like two and hours totally. And unless, you are a die-hard fan OR the match is exceptionally engaging, you are likely to get bored atleast by the last quarter.

Overall, a good break for me. I am now looking forward to a baseball match, sometime during the season.