My Dirty Secret: Wettest Dream of My Life

Today, I'm letting you in on my real dirty dream, wettest of wet dreams I would LOVE to experience, vividly comic'ized by the great artist at xkcd...

All the nerds-n-geeks out there are experiencing a nerd-boner as... .. ... ~~~aarrghh~~~ I'll be back shortly!

Funny Haircut, Again!

Life has been a little too demanding lately. While this is not my normal way of having fun, now that I can't do anything about it, I said to myself: "Rather than being glum over it, why don't you have some fun with it!"

One fine Sunday when I thought of getting the much-delayed haircut, I didn't have this outcome in my mind. I don't know what did the lady hear, but after she heard me she armed herself with the electric trimmer and slapped on some numbered attachment to it. A normal(?) person would be alarmed, but I thought she would trim the side-burns with the trimmer (as has been my usual experience). Indeed she did, but soon she switched gears and, Nooo....(you can hear me screaming, right!) she went straight for the center of my head...  and ~~zaapp~~ one swift movement and a good chunk of hair from the top of my head disappeared! Martyred, my beautiful hair lay on glaze titled floor, ready to be sucked into the vacuum!
What choice did I then have but to let hair on the rest of my head be reduced to same (lowly-)level! (Some of my friends suggested I should have contested and got a free haircut, while some said this should have been reflected in the tip. I did neither).

Surprised with the haircut?

Reaction from all my friends was unanimously from WTF to LMAO! Got a few raised eyebrows from coworkers too.  The ones who didn't share the same reaction were just too polite to admit it.  Some mild reactions were toned down to "Guys look smart in short hair".  Everybody claimed that I must have fallen asleep during the haircut, but they know it is not true. While most of the world pictures us programmers as caffeine-hooked god(?)-made animate beings (most of them think of us as almost animate), none of us would fall asleep on a chair while someone wields life-threateningly sharp scissors around our heads!

But one thing was increasingly clear to me, this incident would make for a good post :-P Esp. when I haven't posted in a while.

As a result of this (pathetic) haircut, my parents almost disowned me. But I convinced my lovely Mom that I will grow them fast (I make her put Dabur Amla Hair Oil every other day.  Anyone has better ideas on how to grow them faster!) She agreed to calm my daddy down :) And all's well now and everybody has agreed to take me back into family for the time being :-D You see, my father still adorns the 70's Vinod Khanna style long haircut. More than 4 decades and there is very little to no change in his hair style.  So it is only natural for him to be very upset looking at his son's navy-styled trimmed haircut given that I'm not in Navy or even closely related.

Anyway, thought it has been a while I posted something, what better choice than make some people chuckle!
Btw, the last time this happened, it was by choice. But this time it was by hmm... force, may I say.  You would have a much harder LMAO session with nice before-after pictures from last episode there: In Search Of Perfect Haircut!

As a side note: A lot of friends I talked to conceded that they have been victimized by a similar haircut fail. Unanimously everyone called out the fail at the chain of Supercuts (just like me)!

Epic MSN Ads Fail!

I just noticed that lately my blog has been filled with too much seriousness. So I thought it might be a good idea to lighten things up a bit. But I wasn't exactly sure how, because I didn't want to (re)post xckd, geek & poke or dilbert. Facebook, lately, it seems is flooding you with such things already. I don't want to add to your spam. Just then an opportunity knocked in the most unusual way.

I was searching for something in my mail archives. A 5 year old email turned up in the results, which I didn't expect to show up for something I was looking for. It was an old email asking my professor at PICT for a letter of recommendation while I was applying for masters.  Google is pretty good with searches (did I already mention that?) so out of curiosity I opened the email.  Lo and behold! I discovered what could easily be one of the biggest Google MSN Ads fail!  Here's the screen shot! Click to read the complete email thread and ads fail!

Epic Google MSN Ads Fail!

I was neither looking for s_x not headache after s_x! Google MSN Ads are supposed to be relevant to the content, or so I thought! But as you can see here, it seems way off the target! There is no correlation, whatsoever, between asking for a letter of recommendation and s_x doctors!  Lol! I thought this was a perfect opportunity to lighten things up a bit!

Keep watching the space, I have a nice post cooked up for some more fun, esp. for geeks! :)
edit, 2011/12/02: You know you are a geek when...

On a completely unrelated note (lazy to make another post?), the weather here in Seattle today was simply outstanding.  It must have been more than 6-8 months (I'm not kidding!) that Sun was out from morning through evening, without any trace of rains or clouds.  I, for sure, haven't see such a beautiful day in Seattle in months.  On freeways, I could see even the farthest of mountain ranges! I felt as ecstatic watching them as a kid feels after watching his favorite Disney character come to life :)

- - - - - - - - - edit, 2011/04/26 - - - - - - - - -

Thanks to my friend, Magesh, for hinting that the ad in question might actually be coming from sender's email client. I verified that and it indeed coming from sender's client, MSN, and NOT from Google Ads. Screenshot below shows URL when I mouse-over the link.
So I stand corrected, it is an Epic MSN Ads fail! :) Or... given that a few years ago hotmail would deliver EVERY junk mail to my inbox and most of legitimate emails to Junk folder, this was expected? :-P

Mouse-over reveals the link.

Funny Invoice

Recently my keyboard's 'n' key died on me, and I had to get a new one. So, I had my admin order one for me (oddly we didn't have any spares!). So an order is placed with some vendor (thereafter referred to as Smart-Beeeep). The keyboard arrives in time... but what set me off laughing aloud alone in the office for a while was this freaking stupid notice on the keyboard box:


What? You didn't notice? Well, read it again. Don't you find something amiss! Well, sure you must. I'm not a legal-buff, but this piqued my interest:

Before You Open Any Packages:
- Please verify contents...

How the heck am I going to see what's in the package WITHOUT opening it! I had a good laugh alone in the office, pondering the legalese nonsense perpetrated here. The fear of litigation here (by here in mean US of A) is soooooo high, that everybody's first order of business is to Cover-My-Own-Ass first, everything else is secondary. If you observe closely this is _the_ basic premise of any business done here, that is what it boils down to: from health care through real-estate through such menial package deliveries.

Digging deeper, what this notice means is that if I had found anything but keyboard in the keyboard box, legally I can't touch the vendor! Why, because I violated the contract of NOT checking the contents before opening the package! Doesn't matter that it is humanly impossible (most of us don't have super-human abilities to see through a box!), what matters is I didn't follow the instructions! The only way to comply with this is to buy one of those fancy X-ray body scanning machines they are putting up at airports!
Given I somehow smuggle one of those huge x-ray machines out of airport and do find what I don't expect to find in the sealed package, what follows next on the invoice are instructions on return policy!

Darn C-Programmers!

This is exactly what I would dream like if I counted sheep while sleeping! Darn system (C-language) programmers!
Solution: Don't forget to start dream by declaring NumberSheep as long int.

via: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language: xkcd!

Mocking the M$ Vista

M$ has spent $$$s of the tune of millions on this 'Windows Vista WOW' campaign. And see how beautifully someone counters them. I don't know the origins of the Apple Adv, nor if it is even authentic... but whoever did it, it's a master piece of mockery!


I have used Vista on my brother's new ThinkPad T61 (T43 rocks, though!) and MacBook Pro now for a while... and I was LMAO hard when I saw these!!!

Technically speaking, it is freaking true... Vista is a big time sucker. It is so slow, that it got on my nerves the first hour I used it. Even my bro, who is not tech-savvy, and hates Unix to the core, got freaked out the moment he started using Vista. And still curses me for giving him laptop with Vista :D What freaks the hell out of me even more is the fact that all the !@#$ing vendors give ONLY vista by default! They charge some $100 or so for XP! And Vista ain't any good to run on high end laptops. It's good only on THE HIGHEST end laptops. The eye candies Vista claims to provide is still inferior to what Mac does. The security BS that M$ keeps giving us, it's been there in every single Unix since ages: User Access Control, Firewalls, and what not.
Here's what comes to my mind:

Given enough time and money, eventually Microsoft will re-invent Unix!

But, here comes the killer... even Mac OS X isn't too great! :D Pretty bold statement huh!
What rocks is only pure good old Linux. I don't like the tabs and controls Mac provides, they are just not enough for me. Maybe I'll write some good posts to substantiate this. But, for one, things you can do from shell is not as seamless as you can do from Linux.
Ex. If I want to start gvim (i.e. graphical vim) in linux shell I just have to
$ gvim i_love_vim.txt # and the magic begins!

on Mac I have to
$ open /Applications/baah/Macgvim blah blah # forgot what I was supposed to do?
... which is better? Esp when you use something a hundreds of times a day!

There is no 'Run Command' kind of menu option, just the Finder (or whatever it's called). I do Alt-F2 and here pops the window on KDE for me to fire commands. Every 1 in 10 times I wake Mac Pro from sleep, it hangs on me. Every 4-5 hrs it hangs on my colleague, without putting it to sleep!
But yes, if you talk of fancy eye candies... [LU]nix is not there yet. And Mac beats the hell out of all the OSes. But !@#$ the graphics if you can't get any work done, efficiently (efficiently, here, is THE the key word!).

Mac fanatics and Vista fanatics (vista fanatics... well I'm sure they do exist.... in the figments of our wild imaginations) are gonna pounce on me now:) I believe Windozes are just not engineer's OSes. But I'm not interested in starting OS war, so I might not respond-to/delete flame comments :) Every one has her own needs, and chooses the OS that best suits her. I chose mine, and have never looked back ever since :) Good or bad, that's all relative. They are just conveniences... man-made illusions... only personal preference... there are no absolutes in life, except absolute bullsh!t ;-)

See also:
[0] M$ IE Sucks
[1] Even the M$ IE 7 Sucks!
[2] M$'s Master piece of FUD!
[3] Fastest way to convert base of numbers
[4] My Love

Funny Sticker

It was a smooth drive back home yesterday evening... though the sheer thought of visiting dentist sent chills down my spine. And suddenly I saw a big car ahead of me sporting a weird sticker. Reading it, I almost pumped down the brake pedal, and the very next instant I realized what an interesting typo it was!!! Fortunately, even at 60 kmph, I was able to click this photo, just to share with you all:

The sticker reads:

'Brake Down & Towing Vehicle'

What!!! Don't get it yet??? Read it again... B R A K E down! Brakes out of order, it implies!!! Imagine what would be your immediate reaction when you are driving at high speeds on city roads and read this sign on a BIG vehicle ahead of you :)

The sign actually intended to read:

'Break Down & Towing Vehicle'

Photographed with Sony W700i from a moving vehicle.

Weekend update and funny demands

After a LONG LONG time, maybe a couple of months, we played a full game! We have been playing short games for quite some time now, due to lower turnaround of the gang. It took me a while to get adjusted to full game, it requires completely different skill set compared to short games. Controlling ball from long passes and making one is really tougher. But it was FUN! Wish the fun continues! There was once a time in U2 when people used to be at the ground at 7 SHARP, so that they don't have to wait as substitutes to get into the action. Even the senior-most and best of the players had to wait if they came late! But not anymore :-(

Apart from that... I would like to share a really funny thing from my workplace... There's a concept called as 'mid-week status report'. As the name suggests, its idea is to track where you are going wrt your schedule at the mid of the week, rather than at the end of the week. So that corrective measures can be applied (if applicable ;-) ) And guess what... we are expected to send such reports on Monday EOD! ROTFL!!! Such a ridiculous thing, isn't it! I couldn't control laughter when I heard about it! There might be logical reasons to demand this report by Monday EOD, but I wonder the usefulness of such reports. What makes it funnier is that we do send a weekly report just on Fridays! Plus 1 more report sometime during the week. GOD! I completely lost track of *when* all should a report be sent. Sometimes such things just drives me crazy :(

Besides that, weekend was plain average, but relaxing. With 2 product releases going on in parallel, I don't have much time for myself, and very little to share here. Hope to get over it soon.

In a lighter vein

Warning: All the characters presented in this post are NOT fictional. It bears all resemblance it can to any and every person living or dead, even unborn! ;-)

Me, in my good old sunny days, on my way to Mumbai with my buddies!
When, outing was not just going to off the corner katta for lunch. And fresh air was the one only found after 2-3 hours of trekking on some hilltop.



After a few months of 12 hrs per day grueling-n-grinding work...
When having relaxation was a good enough reason to smile, despite being confined to a 10x10 cubicle, only source of light was glowing yellow lights on the ceiling & breathing the so called GOD damned conditioned air (i.e. AC air).

And this is what becomes of you after gulping down 5 cups of tea, endlessly debugging-writing-reading-n-fixing code, taking ToT (Transfer of Technology), all you dream of is while (1) loops, bit operations, short-circuit evaluations, meeting deadlines, data types, and above all crossing that red line of 12 hours of staring at apparently meaningless bytes on your monitor and ruthlessly assaulting the keyboard...


Credits
Concept : myself
Photography : Arun
Costume(???) : myself

Well, this pretty much explains my silence for quiet some time, despite so much to share, like Nevis' momentous victory of 4-0 at inter-IT TMKM tournament against UGS, sad loss or 2-0 against Patni, etc. etc.

So, to everyone's relief, I'm not abducted neither have I gone underground after the disastrous 11/7 blasts in Mumbai (don't let your imagination run too wild, the only connection I had with it was with my innocent fellow citizens who lost their precious lives). But I'm pretty much here & alive (only in different dimension, maybe, ever hear of parallel universes?) kicking a$$ harder than ever ;-)

Cheers! Am trying to enjoy every bit of life, no matter how hard it is!!! For every night is followed by a day, BRIGHT sunny day!
Err... I already missed a meeting today morning, I got to leave now before I'm caught taking a break, catch you later....