Sunday, October 30, 2005

Books

I finally decided to catalog (almost) all of my books and found an excellent website that eased things for me. Although my collection is just meagre, the cataloguing was fun. Here's my catalog.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Caged

Superbad
Saint Germain
Aloha
Omigosh!!!! If anyone can make an ounce of sense out of these sites, I'll be forever grateful to 'em. This....this is just weird....plain wierd. It's like I've just come out of the cinema hall after a really bad movie with the sounds still bellowing inside my ears and my head starts spinning like a furious top. I mean, what's the purpose of all this piece of crap?? Does it have some hidden secret or puzzle, which I'm unable to figure out? Is it a text adventure? What the bloody is it? I remember this feeling I'm having right now. It's like the one I had when I was watching a movie sometime back - a supposedly horror one - "House of 1000 Corpses". Horrible movie that one. In the words of a character from Friends, "I felt like putting my fingers through my eyes into my brain and twirling it around". (shudder). Oh, by the way, the movie also has a sequel - "The Devil's Rejects". Now, who in the right mind, would trot along and make a sequel to that? Then again, who in the right mind, would have even made the first one?
(links via:digg)

Friday, October 21, 2005

Flocked Ya

I received an invitation from flock today, requesting me to try out their "developer-edition" release. Nice browser - this one. It's based on the Mozilla browser and hence has a lot of customizable features and extensions (a la Firefox). It was also laden with tiny noticeable bugs during my first 15-20 minutes with it, but that's fine - still an infant, this one. The interesting part is that it's actually a social browser of sorts ; has extensive bookmarking/tagging options and complete integration with del.ic.ious, blogger, wordpress & flickr. Sweet!!!. It also has exciting feature-sets such as "On the Fly Aggregation", that creates an aggregated view of various feeds and displays it on a single page (a wee bit similar to Google IG, start or netvibes), "Blog-This" - The ability to blog any piece of text on any page (kinda similar to the one on digg) and "The Shelf", which can store snippets of interesting content for later blogging. My only regret - like Firefox, this one too hogs close to 90 Megs of memory on my system when left running for a coupla hours. But, other than that, maybe I've finally got a worthy replacement for "The Fox".

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

iPod, therefore I am


Well, it's 12:30 A.M. now and I've just finished reading the live text-feed from Apple's conference. What's new???
A new blue-tooth remote, sleek 20'' Mac G5's (ooh la la!!) and the ubiquitous iPod, now in a brand new flavor that's thinner, sexier,comes in black and plays videos (mpeg4 and H.264). Holy God, if only I had 300 greenbacks!!!!
(rolls eyes mischeviously and prays that someone gifts him the new iPod).

It's a binary world after all.....

Just out of curiosity, I decided to find out how many bits were required to uniquely identify every human being alive - turns out to be just a handful. Let's see -
The current world population (14:24 GMT 10/12/05) - 6,472,184,054.
Converted to binary, this is - 110000001110001011011000011110110.
That's 33 bits.
But, with 33 bits the maximum number that can be obtained is 8,589,934,591 (around 8.5 Billion). At the current growth rate(of 1.4% p.a.), this'll overflow around 2024. Hmmm, no good.

Let's try adding a bit. Since adding a bit doubles its max value, we can go upto 17,179,869,183 (17 Billion) with 34 bits. Now, the population doubling time with a 1.4% growth rate is around 51 years. Hence, having 34 bits will fail around 2075. So, assuming that we don't nuke ourselves to kingdom come in the next 400 odd years, we just need 37 bits to safely cover the entire human population ( for the next 400 years atleast ).If that does'nt make us seem insignificant, what will? ( The Total Perspective Vortex perhaps????)

Saturday, October 08, 2005

The Travail Of Passion

"When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;
We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,
That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy witha dew,
Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream."
-W.B.Yeats

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Black Flowers

"If I could be any part of you, I’d be your tears. To be conceived in your heart, born in your eyes, live on your cheeks, and die on your lips."

Saturday, October 01, 2005

A Lament

Coming home every night, I think to myself that I shall not succumb to you, I shall not give up my resolve, and I shall not let you take over my mind and my body; and every morning, in retrospect, I realize I am, but a hopeless case, when it comes to resisting you. YOU – evil conjurer of the dark, seductress of the night winds, charismatic devil of the underworld, you stalk me all through the day and devour me at night; you devour me like a vampire, seeping your fangs into my fragile neck and weakening my consciousness till it capsizes under your immense power. Devil of the dark, I call you. Hideous creature you. Night after night after night, you unleash your minions upon me; I can feel them moving all over my body, slowly at first, then faster and faster, their speed rising exponential with time. In a matter of minutes, I am all but vanquished. A zombie is what I become; waiting on your every whim till dawn breaks and so does your spell. My mind is your playground. You are but a megalomaniac; your desire to play with my mind is what makes you that. Haughty you. Night after night, I succumb to you, shamelessly, helplessly. All my attempts to overthrow your reign have been futile. An evil King is what you’ve become; tyranny is what you practice on me. Bah!!!! Your stench makes me nauseas, yet I can’t turn away from you. You have me in a stranglehold. I struggle in your grasp every night, writhing painfully, my eyes fixated on you, struggling to free myself from this merciless demon, this --- this vixen. But I fail, I fail every single time, every single night. Your most fearful minion, you unleash upon me. His….his “methods” are very different from yours. You are a silent killer, one who stops at nothing till your goal is reached, your aim fulfilled, your efforts aptly rewarded. And then you rejoice silently, letting your victims realize their defeat at your hands. Not he!!!! I am terrified of him. His modus-operandi is….is….”different”. His visits are sporadic all through the night, his stay much more random. And the visions he shows me are puzzling, dangerous, impossible and sometimes terrifying. Every night, you make sure he visits me. But, of his sojourns, I remember none at morn, except that he visited me. I hear whispers, whispers loud enough for me to hear, whispers loud enough to make sure I hear them, whispers that say you call him “Dreams” - A plural representation of a singular entity. I was puzzled initially, puzzled at this thought. It doesn’t matter anymore. None of this does. When I defeat you, none of this will remain. They’re all useless, meaningless without you. You are the ONE - The one mastermind behind this endless drama unfolding every night, the drama that ends with the first light of dawn. I have hopelessly tried every devious attempt to thwart your actions before – but not this time - this time, I have sided with your arch-nemesis - caffeine - he is now my closest compatriot. Together, we shall overthrow you from the throne you’ve taken over in this kingdom, this kingdom where you’re no longer needed. We shall banish you from this place, this holy land, where nothing was black, before you came. We shall watch you limp in agony to the wastelands, to the lands where there are none as helpless as me to devour, none who shall even endure your companionship. You will regret the day you took over me. Mark my words. You will come to regret it. Till then, I shall call you by the name most fear to utter even in your absence.
“SLEEP”. damned “SLEEP”!!!!!!!

(Inspired by a 3:00 AM dream I had last night).