My Thoughts !

I started this blog 2 years back and I'm writing my 100th blog now. I was confused of what to blog about in this 100th one. Should it be a movie review? a book review? the stupid FCC rules? rains in Chennai? mandaya udachu yosichathuku apuram, finally I decided to blog about this blog.

So I disguised myself as a reporter and thought of an interview with Praku about this blog ;-). Being a typical vetti bandha guy, he refused for an interview. Somehow I got him for you and here is the transcript of the interview:

Me : Hi Praku. This is your 100th blog. How do you feel?
He : Well. Honestly nothing great about it. Its just an other number
(engaluku theriyathakum? ivanaya ellam interview pannanumnu thala eluthu)

Me : So tell me Praku. Why did you start this blog?
He : It was two years back and don't remember. I think I wanted some place to put down my thoughts; kill my free time and also do something creative.
Me : Creative? All I could see was some reviews about movies, books, your trip and other experiences and publish few photos. Whats the creative part in it?
He : hmmm. True. I actually had an idea of Sangaarji jokes.
Me : You mean Sardarji jokes?
He : No. Its Sangaarji jokes. Pronounced as San-gaar-ji. Generally sadarji jokes are about stupid people. Sangaarji jokes about stupid people with a computer background.
Me : OK. But I've not seen any of Sangaarji joke in your blog !
He : (Thinks for a while and then) I thought I need some practice in writing blogs before I write sangaarji jokes. So I decided I'll write at least 100 blogs before I write some sangaarji joke.
(ada paavi. ippadi samalikaran. ivan mattum oru katchi aarambicha CM aayidalam pola iruke. ethukum konjam jakrathayave kelvi kepom)

Me : Mr. Praku, How do you spread out words about your blog?
He : Actually, if you see, I don't spread out word. Only a very few people know the existance of this blog. Even few of my roommates don't know about it. I don't want everyone to read it. I thought sometimes it might cause trouble.
Me : Have you ever encountered any trouble so far?
He : Not yet.
Me : Then may be you can open it up to everyone.
He : hmmm. Let me think about it. I'll go thru all my blogs and remove objectionable contents and if its ok, I'll open it to all.
(thappu panniteno? naan kelvi kekarana illa ivanuku idea kudukarana?)

Me : Which one of your blog, you consider as best?
He : Actually the one 'I see people' is the one that many people said is the best. Which actually motivated me to write blogs in the subject 'I shoot people', 'I read people', etc. Which were eventually considered as crap.
Me : Something like movie sequels, the first one is a big hit and movies in same theme might fail :-)
He : True.
Me : Why there are so many gaps in your blogs? You don't seem to write regularly.
He : Thats because either I don't get time. When I get time, sometimes I don't get system to type. If I get both, I won't feel like blogging and will just browse and go. Its just goes like that.
(ikkum. thoongu moonji. lazyness innu ore varthayila unmayana bathile sollen)

Me : Talking about your other blogs, you parallely started a techie blog along with this. What happened to it?
He : All thru the day I deal with techie stuff. So I thought at least in blogs, let me not technical.
(marupadiyum vetti bantha. techieya elutha thuppu illa innu sollu)

Me : And what about the one you started in the middle?
He : You mean the Tamil Kavithaigal? I think I'll continue that.
Me : Isn't it odd that without any objective you pickup random ones and start writing about it?
He : hmmmm. Thats also true. Let me see. I think you have a point. Summa pura naanooru, kurnthogai, thirukual appdinnu randoma eluthama, athula ethavathu onna eduthu kittu athula irukara enaku pudicha paattellam eluthalam illa? I'll try that also
(ayyayo. ivan naan kekara kelvila irunthe nalla idea ellam suttukarane! ithuku mela kelvi kekarathu thappunnu nenaikaren)

Me : Ok Praku. Thank you Praku. Its good to talk with you. I wish you start more blogs; update all of them more frequently and entertain us.
(oops! ippo naane avanuku directa idea kudutano? Shit!)
He : Thanks. I don't think I'll be creating any new blogs. But I'll surely update it more frequently.
(athana parthan. directa oru idea kudutu atha nee eduthukitta chennaila mala vanthudume. sorry, veyyil vanthudume!)
Me : Bye
He : Bye
(enaku venum. enaku venum. ithuvem venum. innanum venum. avan paatuku ethachum kirukitu irunthan. paetti edukaren paervailunnu naan kelvi kethathula, ippo puthusa creative-ingara perula oru character introduce panni elutha poran. ithula inime intha bloga pathi elarukum solla poran. ithellam enga poi mudiyumo theriyala. ellam en times)

For the past few months I've been sending 'Quote of the day' to the people, whom I can reach from my office id. Every week there will be a theme like J.K Rowling quotes or Elbert Hubbard quotes or Yoda quotes etc. I'm reaching more than 100 people and so there will be variety of people. Its very interesting to see that, few people who even remember the magic spell of Harry Potter and few people who consider it as simply stupid. Same for Dilbert. So obviously I always get mixed response. For a change, this week all the responses were positive. This week's theme? Marriage! I think I'll post the Quotes of the week here in my blog. So here is the this week's quotes:

---

I love being married.
It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
- Rita Rudner

---

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
- Peter Devries

---

Successful marriage requires falling in love many times,
always with the same person.
- German Greer

---

Success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate,
but through being the right mate.
- Barnett R. Brickner

---

Don't marry the person you think you can live with;
marry only the individual you think you can't live without.
- Dr. James C. Dobson

"You get busy living or you get busy dying.
- Andy (The Shawshank Redemption)

I don't know whether I'm living or dying, buy I'm very very busy these days. Got a deadline dictated by FCC and working towards it. Hope its the same with very VoIP product in US. One day, I've to blog about how stupid FCC and rules are. Coming back to the point, I go to office sometime during lunch and back home only after everyone slept. Will be like that till this weekend I hope. Despite my busy schedule, few things happened.

(*) Me and Sathya Went around T Nagar and finally booked a Banquet hall for the Alumni get together this sat.
(*) Had few lengthy discussions with my PM & HR reg my TGP and stuff.
(*) We finally decided the plan for the Delhi trip (along with Agra, Jaipur and Fatehpur Sikri) in December and booked the tickets. Head count is 13.
(*) Another trip to Gangtok in Feb mid is slowly coming up. Gathering people for that.
(*) Anjac was here and one fine rainy week day, 7 of us booked a qualis and went to Mayajaal for a movie. Of course I didn't bunk on that day. Went back to office by 6 PM and started working.
(*) Sakthi has started a blog (which he should have done long back). Hope it will become one more interesting one just as him :-)

A build has gone and have time to browse now. I started reading blogs and then realized that I too have a blog to update. So here it goes a quick entry to my blog!

This was taken when we went to Thrissur. As they say, Kerala is God's own country. Especially when it drizzles and you are visiting some hilly area. This was shot with my Canon K2. The creeper climing up on the stem of a plant was a looking good and I shot it with out any hesitation.

Due to our CIO's visit, the declared pooja holiday was postponed from Wednesday to Friday. That gave us a long weekend! Dinesh was driving force and finally Ravi and me landed at Thirssur along with him to Shine's home. We were there for 2 days: Friday and Saturday. We went to the 'Punnagai Mannan' falls - Athirampalli and two other falls near by also. We also went to Guruvayur temple, a place where all the elephants of the temple were kept and then to a dam nearby. 2 days were jam packed. The best thing was the food at Shine's house. Right from breakfast to dinner, it was NV and poor Dinesh, he struggled a lot :-) Few photos here ...

Every good movie will have a "what if" one liner knot in the story.

Consider the following "What if"s:
What if one day, an alien spacecraft covers the sky of every human city? - Independence day
What if one day you wake up and find all your life is just a dream and reality is something different - The Matrix
What if a freedom fighter starts killing people who demand bribe? - Indian
What if a adopted kid wants to meet her real parents? - Kannathil Mutthamittaal

Then the knot would be developed into a nice screenplay. Here is where the characters will be defined and the whole flow of the movie would be decided. If the knot is the skeleton, this is the flesh of the movie

The final thing is the picturization. Here the length of the scenes, dialogs, camera angle, stunning stunts, technologies, etc will come into picture. This is the dress on the flesh. For a given screenplay, this gives a good out fit and its mainly determined by the budget. More the budget, richer the dress is.

Coming back Gajini, it had a wonderful knot like that - What if a person with short memory loss wants to take revenge on people who killed his wife? But looking at the screenplay, a lot of loopholes. What is the necessity of the Police Inspector's role? Nayandhara's character is not properly defined. How come the hero collects the phone number and other details of the villain? And more importantly, why is he tattooing it when he can simply write it down on a paper? Things like these make the screenplay very weak.

Picturization. Should say in many places it was really good. Esp the climax fight where hero fights with the twins. The technology is perfectly utilized(The worst thing is the twin is introduced in the movie only to use the technology! He has no other role than that) Whats not good about picturization is violence. It is too much. From the starting scenes, were blood dripping from the water tap, to the climax, where the villain kills a gal and removes her dresses. Esp the place where Asin gets killed.

The only thing I liked in the movie is Asin and Surya. The scenes where she comes are really entertaining. In fact I thought if the one liner of this movie had been: "What if a middle class gal claims to love a millionaire, and he really falls in love with her", the movie will be real entertainer.

Final thought is that if Murugadass booked Vijay Gandh for this movie, it would have been a block buster as their previous combination - 'Ramana'

To give a one liner about a movie, I can say that: An ugly shaped body on a strong skeleton wearing a good looking dress, which is torn in few places!

Two days back, I was sitting at my desk and was busy working. Heard a 'Hi' and turned back. A guy was standing. Very familiar face but I couldn't identify who he is. He smiled and said 'Remember me?'. I couldn't. Then he said 'remember CSC? Manikandan, Laxmanan, Sabareesh?'. Oh Yeah! I got it. He was a student of mine, when I was teaching C & C++ CSC. It was long back - my 2nd year of UG. Laxmanan, who came to my desk, was studying 1st year BE then. After 7 years we meet! Now he has 3 years of experience and joined here in Verizon few days back. 3 years and this is his 4th company. He couldn't believe that I was sticking with the same company for all 3 years. It was good to see him back and was talking to him.

I was reminded of those good old days in CSC. The golden evenings. Esp. the rainy days. Mostly no students will be coming to the computer center if it rains. We, staffs, would order tea & hot snacks from the JM bakery and have a round table conference, teasing each other in turns. Apart from CSC, I even worked as a pager operator also. Cell phones were just then introduced and rates were too high. Rs 8/- per minute for incoming and around Rs 20/- for outgoing!!! Pager was very popular as its pretty cheap. People would call us, the operators, and give the message. We have to get the message and type it, check it manually and then send it. Our efficiency is measured by parameters like the number of seconds we talk in the phone, the number of spelling mistakes we make, how soon we send the message and get ready for the next, etc. Somehow I hated that job and luckily my boss at CSC was asking me to join back.. I thought for a while and then joined back. Result: I got a hike :-) The pay with hike put together won't even fetch me a booze in a decent bar now. But it was a very big amount for me in those days.

Now the staff and the student are the same company with same experience - most probably he might get a better pay than me. Other guys who was there in CSC - Mani & Sabreesh have now 5 years experience and getting more than twice of what I get here.

Life is really weird!

Yes, Finally Gajini is released! Heard that the opening is so grand and its already booked housefull for few days! The initial comments from the movie-goers are also good. I was so longing to go for the movie on the first day, but didn't get tickets. Somehow one guy booked the whole balcony on sat morning show and it was exclusive for Verizon and CTS makkal. I got a chance to get the ticket, but then I had other important work to do at that time and so decided not to go. I gathered a group for Sunday, but alas no tickets - even in Mayajaal, its booked. May be I'll plan during a weekday sometime next week. I'm not going to miss this film by any chance. Its not for the hype, not for the screenplay, its not for the songs, its not for Suriya and its not for Nayandara. Its all for the cutie Asin!

Again :-( I'm still not sure whats wrong, but my PC is not booting up. I guess the trouble could be with the SMPS as the SMPS fan itself is not working. This weekend, I've to get it ready somehow. I tried contacting Sify to suspend my account till it gets ready. The guy at the call center asked me to mail me. What the heck? I'm calling them because I'm not able to bring up my PC and they are asking me to mail! I went to a browsing center and sent a mail. Then I get a reply that the product can't be suspended. Well. Get lost. Somehow I got Sree's laptop connected and started working. Its all fine now. But all my bookmarks and data is in my PC. I've to get it ready soon!

Last friday I attended the first BEA User Group's meeting. The presentations were about Diablo (Code name for Weblogic Server 9) and Service Oriented Architecture. I was quite surprised that many people didn't know about Eclipse. When the guy who was presenting asked how many of you know about WTP, I was surprised that only 3 hands were raised(It was me, Chaitu and Dinesh). How can that happen? Does everyone else is using MyEclipse or WSAD? It cant be. I guess people who use Eclipse, still use the plain text editor in it to edit JSP, CSS, HTML, etc and use an ant script to deploy. Only 3 among the 300 were using appropriate editors!!! Why the Indian techies has gone so bad? I soon got an answer. One guy had a printout in his hand and was asking me, 'is this the right conference na?' I looked at the printout it said 'Win a mobile phone'. Looks like there is a mobile phone to be given out to one lucky person and he came only looking for the chance of being lucky. I could see few others came for the good food (to be honest the hot dosa with chicken curry was very tasty) So I decided that the real techies stayed back at office/home and were busy coding while the vetti guys who have less/no work and guys looking for free mobile & food came for the meeting. (of course there were 3 exceptions and you know who ;-))

Soon after that I was going thru the blogs which I've read for few weeks. Look here and here for interesting entries about Cedric & budding Indian techies (look for the comments). hmmmmm. Hey fellas, welcome to the club. You got lot of company in the industry.