The Weird Side of me!

I was tagged by Mahen, who has written some weird facts about him.
Now I have to write six properties or acts of me that might seem strange and weird to others! So here we go!!

1. My mom still hand-feeds me if I am at home!
2. I cry easily when I miss someone. I think this is weird for a guy! Never seen other guys cry
3. If I find something amusing or funny, I laugh out loud almost instantaneously!! I dont seem to have any control over my laughter!! I remember one moment in my class when the whole class was silent and I burst out laughing loud and everyone turned and stared at me.. I just reduced my laughter sheepishly and turned red! :-D
4. I'll keep staring and meddling my mobile even if I do not receive anything!! I just keep doing something on it.. Go in and out of menu items... Drives my best friend mad!
5. I am terribly afraid of trains, I dont mind travelling in them, but when a train starts moving on the platform, I get very anxious whether or not I am travelling on the train! My knees start shaking, my heart starts racing!! If I have come to see off a person.. I ask them to stand on the train and speak, so that if the train starts, atleast they can go with it! Ha ha! I cant figure out why, maybe it was because of an incident in my childhood when my dad hopped aboard a railway engine on the platform and the driver blew the horn, I was 4 years old or so, but my intelligent pals of those years had told me that once the train blows the whistle, it would start and I was afraid of losing my dad!! That has probably manifested into this phobia now!
6. I start drawing and scribbling on any paper that is near me if I sit still for sometime, or especially if something boring is dragged on in class. I try sketching figures and shapes, and usually write the word "Google" again and again in a particular style, something I cant explain, Maybe I am using the search engine a little too much!

For my turn, I am tagging Persian Humour and Dee. Others are also welcome to write about your weird facts. :-)

My blog featured in a newspaper article!!

My blog was featured in a Tamil article on blogging and related information in a supplementary page of the Dhinathanthi!! The screen shot of the article is given below,


It reads

Kovaiyai saerndha kaloori maanavar oruvar http://www.thiya.net/blog endra paeril oru blog uruvaki irukirar. Adhil kadandha ayendhu varudangalaga dhinamdhorum thanadhu yennangalai padhivu seidhu varigirar. Atthudan nanbargalin karithukalai arinthukollavum dhinandhorum pudhiya pudhiya seidhigalai veli idugirai.

Which in English literally means

A College student from Coimbatore has created a blog under the name http://www.thiya.net/blog . In that, for the past five years, he has been updating the blog with his thoughts on a daily basis. In addition to that, he posts new items everyday to get to know the opinions of his friends.

Thanks to Thiyagaraj (not me!) for including me in his article. Thanks to Balamuralie and Siva Parkavi who brought the article to my notice! :-)

The only thing I would like to add is, I haven't had this blog for five years, I had a few starts and ends.. But I only started blogging on a regular basis from early 2004 under the guise of Thiyagaraj's Jottings. I moved to blogger sometime in 2004 too, but then after a few ups and downs, I have started to blog here from mid 2005, which is indeed powered by blogger. Thank you for reading people!

Spooky!

I was reading Xavier's post on What would you be if you weren't in the Information Technology Services Industry?

This set me up thinking. I had been thinking of many ways to drum up money over the days. One was freelancing in web design, something which I am already doing. Another was serving advertisements on pages, and some more were software development, corporate profile designing etc. Now i have begun to notice that all of these are in the IT field and I have never thought of any other revenue generator other than IT!!

Phew!! This set me thinking! I can try my hand at selling stuff, since I talk well, but it will surely take more than that!! I can write something for publications if they are willing to publish and pay me as well.. ;-) I can start my own laundry business!! Hmmm...

I am out of ideas!
So, I am putting the same question as Xavier put in..
What would you be??

Easy million!

I came across The Million Dollar Webpage again today. It is a totally novel concept of selling pixels to advertisers over a guaranteed five year period and perhaps more which helped the founder of the site, Alex Tew to pay his way through college.

It is kind of interesting to see so many small images advertising and automatically incites us to click on the whacky ones! Looks cluttered, but he's sold out!! At 1$ per pixel, he's already made a cool million!!

I have also come across many copy-cat sites similar to this which aren't popular. On the internet, if one guy (or gal) comes up with an idea, all the others try to ape the same and try to acheive success, sometimes ruining the original business too.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So I think any copy-cat sites will only have pure comedy value, whereas mine possibly has a bit of comedy PLUS some actual pull in terms of advertising dollars (I will be able to afford swanky socks, they will only get to buy crappy ones probably! They could have my old ones, if they like).

Alex Tew in his site's FAQ to the question Are you worried about copy-cats/rip-offs? :-)

Got an original idea? You might just make a million out of it! Good luck!

Orkut sucks!

Orkut is a good community website alright, but the functionality sucks in a whole variety of ways. There's something called the Scrapbook, which is as the name suggests, Scrap.

It is something which you can write notes and other stuff and post it for others to see and others can write in your scrapbook too, but of late, it has become a convention of sorts to 'scrap someone' as it is called and then, the reply has to be 'scrapped' in the scrapbook of the person initiating the conversation!!

Crap!!

Small messages are good, but people who I believe either do not have any work to do or Google is paying them to scrap, they just start chatting right in the scrapbooks. There is absolutely no privacy, anybody and everybody can track what you are talking with one another. Replying is another pain if you follow the convention of replying in the scrapbook of the person who initiates the conversation. There is no "Reply" option. You have to Click on the person's name, migrate to the person's profile, click on his scrapbook and then scrap!! Crap again!! And there is no way to easily track what you are talking about if a person is late to reply and your original message drowns under newer messages!!

The community feature is another pain. Yeah, Anybody can create communities, but there is no way to search for posts within a community which is not very good news. In a large number of support related communities and other similar communities, people ask you to 'search' for posts before posting a similar one.. And with over a 1000 posts and an even larger number of replies, it isnt easy work and we'll be better off asking someone directly instead of through the community and being at the receiving end of the Orkut Experts who can somehow search for entries magically(as they ask you to do).

Orkut is good at networking friends and having contacts, but other than that, it sucks bigtime. I do occasionally hangout there, but everything for courtesy's sake to reply to people who 'scrap' me and to prevent myself from going to the dumps by not replying to friend requests. Eventually.

Searching for a place to live!

My friend Vignesh set off on a quest to find us a decent place to live in that wouldn't be too far from our workplace at Bangalore. Due to some illogical reasons, I was unable to accompany him to the same. He went to a few places and was almost contented with a house which had a small hall and two small bedrooms. This would be more than enough for the two of us, but he wasn't contented and set off again.

He hasn't had any luck today and is on his way back. Think I'll have to go with him the second time and see if the previous house I was talking about is still available and maybe finalise the deal. I need a place to stay and I need it soon.

People from Bangalore, Any peaceful-residential locality-near Bannergetta road at Bangalore? Hope I am not asking for too much.. :-D

Create mobile picture messages to be sent through SMS easily!!

I came across this nifty utility for converting conventional image files to the OTA format to be sent as picture messages using your mobile phone. The source code and the binary for the same can be found at The Code Project. Since zipped files are only available for download to registered users(free) of the Code Project, I am uploading it to my own server for your convenience, Instructions to use follow below.

The source code and binary available here were developed by Alireza Naghizadeh and are available for free download here. All copyrights for the below two files rest with Alireza Naghizadeh.

1. OTA Converter Source 5.79 KB
   
2. OTA Converter Binary 4.58 KB
   (Ready to Use, Requires .NET framework, WinXP ready)
   

The interface is very minimalist with only one option as shown below,

All you have to do is, drag your black and white image of dimensions 72 pixels Width X 28 pixels Height (The standard size of SMS Picture messages) into this tiny window, Here you can see that I have dragged a small logo into the utility.

Works best when the image is 72px by 28px and in the .bmp format and has only black or white pixels. You can draw using MSPaint too.

When you click on Convert, it'll prompt you with a dialog box to store the resulting file as an OTA picture file with the .ota extension occupying 256 bytes. You can transfer these .ota files to your mobile and then sms your friends with your custom picture messages messages!!

This application is not good at converting grayscale images, but you can create bitmap images having only black and white and use this to convert to the .ota format.

You can also get hundreds of preview images of picture messages online which you can convert to the .ota format without paying a penny! ;-) ;-)

Some cool free preview images can be found at the Moby Project. Just save all the pictures that you like from the site, download the OTA Converter Binary, Drag your selected pics into the application, convert it to the .ota format, transfer to your mobile and message your friends! Save money by not paying premium rates for direct mobile downloads! Enjoy!

Monopoly sucks

With the Football World Cup fever at its peak, I consider myself lucky that my Cable TV provider, SCV, has decided to air ESPN on which the matches are shown live. For over two years, some channels were not provided here at Coimbatore since they were pay channels and not everyone was willing to pay for it. And with the absence of Set-top boxes, we cannot individually ask for the channels to be provided as there was no way for custom downlinks.

I lost two years of Formula 1. Two full seasons since Star Sports, the official broadcaster wasn't provided here. I wasn't interested to follow the happenings online as the thrill of watching a live race is absent. :-(

Ofcourse, it was my mistake of not going in for a Direct-to-home connection like Dish TV.

But anyways, as of now, they are temporarily providing ESPN and I can watch the football matches. Peace. And my dad has announced that we'll be going in for a DTH connection soon. :-D Sadly I'll be far away..

Where is the EXIT?

I am talking about the almost obsolete floppy disk. I have known it to be one of the most unreliable of digital media that I have personally used.

Right now I am looking after an internet cafe. Sathy, my friend, who owns a browsing centre near my place asked me to take care of his cafe since the usual worker was on a holiday. A customer came along, saved some document in his system and asked me for a diskette to store it on. I turned around to the shelf and took a CD, but he was like "NO! Give me one of those floppy diskettes!" CDs cost lesser than floppies, but maybe this chap did not have a CD drive in his destination or who knows what, he wanted his data in a floppy and I was only too happy to oblige.

I have come across a lot of people who chose to use floppies to CDs even though both cost almost the same and the only drawback in using CDs is that you need a CD writer which is usually not present in systems more than two years old here, unless it had been specially ordered. They usually keep a floppy for a few months and after that, attempt to retrieve the data in them. They would be lucky if it was intact.

The year was 2003. I was in the twelfth standard in my school and it was the time of the year when we have the customary farewell. I had planned some cartoons and animations to be displayed on a LCD projector and had painstakingly designed some cartoons and other stuff to go in hand with some of the onstage events. I stored the same in TEN floppies, with separate archives for each file and each floppy had two copies of the same data. And with the function about to start in ten minutes, I inserted the floppies, one after the another and you know what happened...

All ten failed.

Damn.

I did not know the reason, maybe I accidentally brought it near some magnetic material, but I was so annoyed that I tore each one down and threw it in disgust. I managed to run the show with some on-the-spot crappy looking development(The original system was in my cousin's place some 18 kms away so couldn't take an immediate backup :-( anyway)

I haven't used a floppy since. I am always amused to find people still using them and throwing up their arms in disgust if it fails on them! But they still keep using them, but floppies are definitely on their way out now! Good bye good ol' Floppy Disk!

Get-together '06

I have informed most of my batch mates from my school about our annual get-together. The response wasnt as usual, not many responded, but having taken up the responsibility indirectly of getting everyone together, everyone expects me to contact everyone and make arrangements and I would be happy to do so, but I am not sure about the next year... All the other guys have one more year to study while my college life is over and I have to take my new responsibility at my workplace and I am not sure about my availability one year from now,

So the plans next year, only time can tell...

Watch out for that Fireball!!

I was wasting my time over at Google Mars when I recollected the famous "Face on Mars". It attracted huge attention in 1976 when it was made public and which was put to rest in 2001 after more detailed photographs were published by the Mars Global Surveyor Spacecraft that it was just a plain landform, though the original caption explained it in plain terms that "is formed by shadows giving the illusion of eyes, nose and mouth."

I was lead to the photographs site where a 3D photo of the Face of Mars was given with instructions on how to view it in 3D,by means of a special eye glass, I immediately remembered the movie "My Dear Kutti Chaatan", a 3D movie in which we wore glasses to see the movie and had always wondered how it worked!! I immediately searched for it and was led to HowStuffWorks.

The technology used is really simple, it just makes one eye see a part of the image(which the other eye cant) and the other eye to see another part. The brain merges both and you get the illusion of a 3D image!! The simplest form in which this can be acheived is by having a red filter in one and a blue in the other, thus seeing only red in one eye and blue in the other, But modern 3d glasses use polarisation for better results and full colour!! It simple alright, but who would have thought of it?!! Hats off to the guy who invented(or discovered) it!!

Nuts!!

All along, I had been waiting impatiently for my call letter from my prospective employer! And I received it too - July 18th is the day!

And now, I am wishing that it could have come a little later!! I want to spend some more days here!! I am nuts! Nuts I am!!

Palani - A holy city

Yesterday, I was on a trip to Palani, the holy city with my Parents and my sister to offer prayers at the Temple there. The company for which my dad works has been commissioned to make the guard rails and other crowd controls made of stainless steel and my dad had to go there to check if things were fine.

We started from home around 6:00 AM for the three hour or so journey to the city, reached there around 10 and proceeded to have breakfast. Then we made our way to the winch or rope car as it is called here and were disappointed to hear that two cars weren't functioning and the available one would take two hours till the next trip began.

So, we decided to walk and trotted on to the entrance(the Winch entrance is quite some distance from the main adivaram or foothills). My father and mother had some difficulties climbing the steps to the top, but eventually we made it, Mom struggled a lot though. There are no other ways to the top, only by the stairs and the rope cars/train which weren't functioning sadly.

The Gold-plated Spire of the Palani Murugan Temple

We waited for our turn, and then had a good darshan, offered our prayers, had lunch at the temple and then we returned the same way, and were home by the evening. I was ok till evening, but now, I have cramps in my legs!! But it was worth the climb!!