This and that

Took a short trip to Steinbeck country last weekend. This was my second visit to the area and it was as beautiful as I had remembered it. Enjoyed a very scenic drive from San Jose to Marina on US101 and US 1. Strolled on a private beach in Marina, enjoyed Ghirardelli ice-cream while watching the Pacific Ocean in Monterrey, had an extremely hearty dinner meal at this place and a lovely outdoor brunch at this place in Carmel (ok enough with the food!).
The highlight of the trip was going out for whale watching on a cold, rainy and grey Saturday morning.Got to see a hump-back whale from pretty close quarters. More amazing was the literarily thousands of pacific white sided dolphins that surrounded our boat, when we had chanced upon a feeding area. This is the closest I have seen dolphins in the wild. They were swimming alongside and below the boat (called bow-riding) - there were several in the distance that were doing aerial jumps and flips. (I might have caught it on my camcorder too. Will try to post pictures later). Pretty amazing sight.

All in all - a very satisfying mini-vacation - except for some rather tiresome experiences at the San Jose airport. For an airport located in the heart of Silicon Valley and hence quite heavily used, it is quite poorly designed and lacking in some basic infastructures. After renting a car, I had to drive around for about 2-3 miles through all the terminals before I could actually exit the airport area and find my way to the freeway ! The terminal was small, had very few choices for eating - half of the joints had closed by 9pm and the gate area was cramped and stuffy. Combine that with the very large number of desis hanging around (it is Silicon Valley after all) - for a moment I had a feeling I was back in India.

In other news, it is exploding amphibians in Hamburg, Germany ! Well, at least its not raining frogs.

Finally, check out this post (and this) in the Indianwriting blog on pavement bookshops near Churchgate in Mumbai. I fondly remember spending hours browsing these shops while I was in Mumbai (that is whenever I could overcome my inertia and make the almost hourlong KanjurMarg-VT trip). This was where I first found Dirk Gentry !
College Street in Kolkata has a similar book bazar - unfortunately all you can get there now (or at least when I went there last in 2004) are IIT and other such engineering and medical 'joint entrance examination' prep guides.

The cult of the Mac....

Interesting story from BBC about how Apple's product-line (epecially iPod) has almost spawned a new religion.

While, I am not about to perform an aarti on my iPod, I have to admit that it is a very good product and it came in a goovily packed black cube-shaped box (it looks so good that I haven't been able to throw it away - even when I moved). However, this is yet to happen to me:

During his regular evening walk, software executive Steve Crandall often nods a polite greeting to other iPod users he passes: He easily spots the distinctive white earbuds threaded from pocket to ears.

But while quietly enjoying some chamber music one evening in August, Crandall's polite nodding protocol was rudely shattered.

Crandall was boldly approached by another iPod user, a 30ish woman bopping enthusiastically to some high-energy tune.

"She walked right up to me and got within my comfort field," Crandall stammered. "I was taken aback. She pulled out the earbuds on her iPod and indicated the jack with her eyes."

Warily unplugging his own earbuds, Crandall gingerly plugged them into the woman's iPod, and was greeted by a rush of techno.

"We listened for about 30 seconds," Crandall said. "No words were exchanged. We nodded and walked off."

This blog refers to it and late last year there was a story on NY-Post how an Apple store in Manhattan are replacing bars as dating and pick-up joints:

"People in here glance at each other just like they do in a bar," Frederick Pina, a writer and Apple Store regular, told the New York Post. "It's not a problem to open a conversation because you know everyone has similar interests." Actress Nina Rutsch agreed. "When you're checking your e-mail online, you're really near your neighbor, so its an easy place to strike up conversation," she said. "And if you talk to a guy in the Apple Store, you already know he's going to be modern and up-to-date and sober. It's healthier than picking up someone in a bar."

H2G2 early reviews

The movie version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is to be released in the US (worldwide as well ?) next week. It has been eagerly anticipated by H2G2 enthusiasts like me. A few early reviews are out mainly based on pre-screenings inEngland. The reactions were mixed. While this review by a Douglas Adams fan pretty much says the movie sucks, BBC gives it a middling review, while The Telegraph gives it a thumbs up. I guess we will have to wait and find out for ourselves.

Earlier posts here and here. Also see this !

Attack of the Nerds II

The hackers from MIT strike - not against Caltech in retaliation - but to make a point about worthless scientific conferences.

....the graduate students involved were sick and tired of receiving computer generated spam soliciting entries to what they felt were questionable academic conferences.

Jeremy Stribling, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said yesterday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with nonsensical text, charts and diagrams.

(Blogger News Network)

Scientific conference spams ?? - you better beleive it - I keep receiveing about 2-3 such invitations every week to Biotech related conferences. Read more about it here.

Swades and thoughts on Rahman

Finally watched Swades last night and I was pretty much disappointed. Frankly, it is a half-baked product. Ashutosh Gowariker takes an interesting plot, weaves an extremely ordinary story around it, shoots some scenes at NASA and Washington DC, throws in a few songs (in all the wrong places except perhaps for Yeh Jo Desh......) and somehow expects everything to work out. Much of the movie is undone by extremely poor acting. Did shooting in the US and paying Shah Rukh Khan drain all the budget so that the producer could not afford any half-decent actors ? Maybe I am being harsh on the actors - it could be the director's fault too - but then Gowariker did quite a good job on Lagaan. That gripping intensity of Lagaan is sadly absent in Swades. You can understand that the director is trying to make a statement here and trying it subtly enough, but poor execution makes the effort fall flat.

I was particularly irked by the female protagonist played by Gayatri Joshi - it seems her only role was to look nice, show up in the scene with just a handful of expressions, (a stern face, a playful smile or on verge of tears) and pretty much not do anything else. She could have been intelligently used as the 'conscience' of the movie - but with her painted face, pristinely clean and colorful attires, she simply sticks out like a sore thumb in every frame. And I will not even go into the logical and factual errors strewn throughout the movie.

While the movie overall was a let-down, I did like some of the cinematography and the songs, which I had heard before, I must say were very good - especially Yeh Jo Desh....you cannot help but feel a twinge of homesickness and patriotism on listening to it - Rahman at his best.

On a slightly different note, does A R Rahman produce his best music when it is a patriotic or India-related theme ? Recently, I was listening to the music of Bose (a Shyam Benegal movie on the life of Subhas Chandra Bose, whose release has unfortunately been held up for a long time), where once again, Rahman is in top form. A few compositions from Bose stand out

- Apne Desh ki Mitti, like Yeh Jo Desh, is an evocative number and you cannot help but conjure nostalgic images in your mind while listening to it. In particular, I was touched by the following two lines: "Beete pal chhoone lage hain dil ko aise... Dost rakkhe haath - kandhe pe jaise"

- brilliant use of the orchestra and millitary drums to enhance the patriotic effect in Kadam Kadam Barhay Ja (the unofficial anthem of Bose's Indian National Army originally composed by Ram Singh) and Hum Dilli Dilli Jayenge (based on Bose's famous call 'Delhi-chalo').

- the orchestral version of Jana Gana Mana in Bose is perhaps one of the most soulful and heartfelt rendering of our national anthem.

While I did not start out this post with the idea of a detailed commentary on the music of Bose as well, I must mention that there are two drawbacks in the sountrack - first is the composition called Durga Puja - it sounded more like a 'Ganpati-bappa' procession in Bombay than any Durga puja I have been to. In fact, the drums ('dhaak') played during Durga puja is one of the most melodious rhythms you can hear - why Rahman chose to destroy it with a high pitched shehnai is beyond me. Secondly, the use of the lines 'jodi tor daak shune keu' written by Tagore in freedom-fighting era Hindi movies has become cliched. It is used in Bose during the song "Tanha Rahee" - but I have to say it blended in nicely with the rest of the song. What irked me though was the use of Nachiketa for singing those lines - was he the only one they could find among vast number of Bengali singers, most with much better voice than this guy ? I would have thought that someone like Srikanta Acharya or Suman would have suited the song much better. Well, thats two Bong-related nitpicking from an otherwise brilliant album for you.

Getting back to my original point, if you consider the songs in the album VandeMataram along with Swades and especially Bose - it does seem that patriotism or perhaps a love for the country inspires Rahman produce great music.

Attack of the Nerds

So how do the uber intelligent kids at Caltech and MIT relieve their stress from the daily grind of maths and physics problems ? They play pranks of course ! Both Caltech and MIT have traditions of students performing oftentimes elaborate, but usually innovative and amusing mischief. At MIT, they call it 'hacking', a term that apparently originated in their campus prior to its association with computers.

Now the worlds are colliding with some students from Caltech traveling cross-country to pull off a variety of pranks at MIT during the latter's prefrosh weekend. The pranks included handing out T-shirts that say 'MIT' on the front and '...because not everyone can go to Caltech', floating Caltech balloons and inflatable palm trees and (my personal favorite) placing a banner over "MASSACHVSETTS" to read 'The Other Institute of Technology". MIT students responded by placing their own banner to read "The Only Institute of Technology". Read all the details at this website.
(Via Slashdot)

On a related note, the most famous 'hacker' at MIT would have to be Richard P . Feynman - those who have read "Surely You are Joking Mr. Feynman" will remember the 'removing the door' episode (there is an online account here).

Bond

....James Bond. British actor Daniel Craig is supposed to be the new face of James Bond:



I dunno - I would have preferred this guy, having watched Sin City recently (more on it soon):




Apparently, Owen turned it down.

Resuming...

..blogging activity - hopefully I will be able to maintian my semi-regular schedule. Of course, today is April 1st....

Speaking of April Fool jokes - Google, as usual, has the best gag - with their new product Google Gulp (Beta version of course and can be had through invitation only!). Google also ups the ante in the e-mail storage-space war by offering 2GB capacity on Gmail on the occassion of its first anniversary (Yahoo! announced it was going to offer 1GB) and true to the spirit of the day, takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the ever-exapanding storage options.

Also, check this out - a hilarious spoof of the popular Boing Boing site.