In a huff*

"I don't want to go."
"Pleaassee - I promise to be a good girl if I can stay at home."
"How about I just turn around and go with you to the park?" *bambi eyes*
"But she is so mean to us..."
"Waaah - I so don't want to go."

Finally, mom starts laughing "Archu, do you remember, you have actually *paid* money to go to these fitness classes?"

Sigh! Ya, I was whining about not wanting to go to my fitness class. I joined this new class where the instructor makes us do about 1200 abs crunches (not exaggerating) in one go. Needless to say, after 30 minutes of non-stop abs crunching (followed by another 30 minutes of equally painful exercises working other parts), I feel like my stomach has been replaced by a mass of pain. At this rate, I think I will soon be a human being whose top half and bottom half is (dis)connected by air - my abdomen would have run away due to sheer torture.

The sad part is I realize the root cause of the agony: I had taken a fitness-class break of sorts recently for about 3 weeks. Immediately all my built up resistance melted away faster than rain drops on a sun-baked pavement. I ask you, is it fair? I have been going for my fitness classes quite regularly for more than 3 years now and a 3 week half-break is all that is needed to bring me back to my "dear lord, I cannot bend" *groan*, "I can't walk fast" *pant* , "Does the sofa seat have to be really so low down? *ouch* status of the day after the very first ever day of fitness class. Sigh!

One thing to be said for all this trouble is, I invariably end every fitness on a mental high even if I sometimes physically feel like I have just been run over by an extra large truck. Which is probably why in spite of all my whining I still drag myself to my fitness class week after week.

--

Below is the fortune I got on my Linux machine today which prompted this post. Enjoy!

Fortune's Exercising Truths:

1. Richard Simmons gets paid to exercise like a lunatic. You don't.
2. Aerobic exercises stimulate and speed up the heart. So do heart attacks.
3. Exercising around small children can scar them emotionally for life.
4. Sweating like a pig and gasping for breath is not refreshing.
5. No matter what anyone tells you, isometric exercises cannot be done quietly at your desk at work. People will suspect manic tendencies as you twitter around in your chair.
6. Next to burying bones, the thing a dog enjoys mosts is tripping joggers.
7. Locking four people in a tiny, cement-walled room so they can run around for an hour smashing a little rubber ball -- and each other -- with a hard racket should immediately be recognized for what it is: a form of insanity.
8. Fifty push-ups, followed by thirty sit-ups, followed by ten chin-ups, followed by one throw-up.
9. Any activity that can't be done while smoking should be avoided.

--
*like in huffing and puffing.

300

This post is the 300th one on my blog.

Please wait while I hold my mouth open, palms on cheeks, in a newly-crowned Miss. World- worthy pose.

But yes, 'tis true!

In celebration, I decided to do something special - a new look for my blog. Yaay!

My aim was to keep it simple to reduce loading time for the few readers who actually come over to the site to read. It is still in beta-testing stage though - so pliss to adjust.

And oh, I was very smart and remembered to take a back up of my old template in order to safely put back all the stuff on the side bar with the new template. Only, I took backup of the wrong template. Computer science engineers are extra smart when it comes to such things I hear. Anyhoo, that is why some stuff that I had on the side bar previously might be missing. They will be re-added as they surface to memory.

So yes, me and my blog are still going strong :-)!

A post

The weekend is almost here. Time to chill and fudge way out of writing a proper post.

This evening, my mom found a funny "poem" on an aged newspaper clipping tucked inside one of the books mom and dad bought at the library book sale last month. We had a good laugh reading it. I searched for it online and of course, the Great Google located a soft copy for me. Here it is, for your reading pleasure. And oh, this "poem" is specially dedicated to cheer Rads up :-).

When God passed out brains,
I thought he said trains,
And I missed mine.

When God passed out looks,
I thought he said books
And didn't want any.

When God passed out ears,
I thought he said beers
And asked for two long ones.

When God passed out legs,
I thought he said kegs
And asked for two fat ones.

When God passed out noses,
I thought he said roses
And asked for a big red one.

When God passed out heads,
I thought He said beds
And asked for a big soft one.

When God passed out hips,
I thought he said lips
And asked for two large round ones.

God am I a mess.

***

TGIAF* folks!

* Thank God its almost Friday.

p.s. couldn't find the name of the original author of poem.

Freedom

Happy Independence Day!

I am wearing green clothes, white slippers, kinda-orangy earrings and blue hair-clips. My parents said that unless I wore signs pointing to the latter two, no one is going to notice it. Ah well, its the thought that counts! A few of us desis from work are planning to grace an Indian restaurant for lunch later today.

Dressing up and eating is a quintessential part of any Indian celebration. And I am proud to be doing both for I-day :-D.

What are you doing?

p.s. anyone who says stuff like, "O - I am going to do social service", "I am speaking for India in the UN" and similar stuff will be whacked - hmph.

What happens in Vegas ...

... stays in Vegas.

Unless the visitor happens to be me in which case all the happenings get published onto a blog. Trip highlights.

DEFCON
Definitely very different from every other conference I have been to. I have never seen speakers arrive *drunk* at any other conference! Most of the talks were interesting - though now I have become ultra paranoid. From what the speakers had to say, it seems like every time I log on online, my passwords are out there available for anyone who is interested.

My best conference moment came when I heard Fyodor speak live. I have been a big fan of his Nmap ever since I got the chance to use it.

Okay, enough techie stuff.

Queen Nefertiti
In a fit of ego-maniacism, I got my profile sketched. I don't look like me, which is why the sketch is posted on this blog. I think I look like African Royalty (I know, I know). For some reason the name Nefertiti popped into my head and I have christened the picture Queen Nefertiti (okay, I admit, that is the only African Queen I know off the top of my head) . What do you think?

Cirque De Soleil - Mystere
These folks are famous for a reason. The entire performance was spectacular and a total visual feast. I think I watched only half of the show - there was simply so much going on that it was impossible to see everything at once.

Tuft
My dear dad won Tuft (the stuffed penguin pictured on the right) for his darling daughter. Apparently dad was the only parent who did not have a small kid in tow while playing those games. But as mom pointed out, he was after all winning toys for his child too :-D!

Gambling
If there is a Lady No-luck, she took my permanent residence with me when I was in Las Vegas. Good thing that I am not that interested in gambling.

Madame Tussaud's
It is a better class of wax museum. Some of the figures were quite life-like. But coupled with a trip to "The Venetian" (in front of which it is located), it is definitely worth a visit. Venetian has the best indoor decor I have seen yet in Vegas.

Ryan Seacrest
This dude has started appearing on my local radio station as a DJ of late. There was (and is) a lot of hype and hoopla surrounding his addition to the radio station. I find him pompous and full of himself and was wondering why on earth he should be treated different from any other John Doe DJ. Turns out I am out of touch with the entertainment world. This Ryan dude has a wiki page devoted to him. Just how popular he is in the entertainment world came home to me when I saw a wax statue of him in Madame Tussaud's!! Oh well - I *still* find him pompous and mostly annoying.

If I were a fruit-eating monkey...
One of the nights I ordered a "supreme fruit salad" in quest of a light dinner. All our orders appeared one after the other. I got a muffin and some yogurt (which were part of the fruit salad order) and also a small cup of fruits. I thought the fruit cup looked rather small but would still make a filling meal combined with the muffin and yogurt. I had just dug into the fruit cup when the grandmotherly waitress arrived at the table again and pointed at me and mock-crossly said, "Shame on you - that fruit cup is hers!" (pointing to my mom) "This is your order." Saying which she placed this dish in front of me:
You now know why my jaw dropped and I goggled at the waitress before gasping "This is HUGE". I shared some of the fruits with dad. Yet I had enough left over for breakfast the next day too.

Walking
I walked so much that I am sure the soles of my slippers are thinner now by at least a few millimeters. The good part is, while walking, there is so much to ogle at that the miles simply get eaten up. The tough part comes when you retire to bed at night. O boy - never realized my legs could protest so emphatically. Taking along a good pair of walking shoes is probably the most useful Vegas travel tip I can give.

***

That's all I can think of.

You know work is ruling your life ...

- when some days you don't even get online to do the random surfing/blogging/blog-hopping/chatting after getting back home. And don't miss it (yup yup, I have not been kidnapped and replaced by my clone. Or so I think).

- when you haven't done one of your erstwhile favorite timepass activities - looking at your blog's visitor stats - in ages. And don't even realize it.

- when, given the looming deadlines, you start having second thoughts about the wiseness (is that a legal word?) of your decision to do the company-sponsored trip to attend a conference in a fun destination .

- When the only thing you can think of when talking about work is marvel over just how much you have to do.

- when you haven't posted in a while and yet glance anxiously at the clock to ensure that the latest whiny post is not going to take more than 10 minutes.

The last point is the reason why this post's quality is even lower than the already low post-quality threshold on this blog.

Hopefully I will get used to this madness soon and start churning out inanity more frequently for your reading pleasure :-)!

Orkut

Recently, yet another of my friends asked me if I was on Facebook. I said "Nah, being a member of one social networking site I don't use is enough!". I was, of course, referring to Orkut.

The first invitation I got to connect on Orkut was ages ago - maybe in 2004. That time I simply ignored it as one more specimen of junk unsolicited invitations. Around 2005-2006, the Orkut craze started picking up. Finally, I too got on board.

The initial months on Orkut were a heady rush. It was just so much fun to try and locate long lost friends. Either done by yourself or with someone else. Shilpa and I located a classmate from the seventh grade with the aid of cobbled together snippets of information.

Of course, once we figured that most of our blog buddies owned Orkut accounts, we became quite proficient at locating them based on the hints that their blog posts unknowingly dropped (of course, some of the people locations were a lot more straightforward with the people in question simply sending us invites to connect).

I remember getting quite a thrill when I located a classmate from fifth grade. Considering that I switched schools (and cities) every three years on an average throughout my schooling, this was no mean feat. Of course, once I did connect to the classmate and say hi, I discovered I had nothing more to say. Oh well - the journey had still been fun.

But like too much of any good thing, slowly the attractions of Orkut started to pall. There is only so much scrapping and so much hunting you can do before the boredom of sameness sets in. My logging into my Orkut account dwindled from multiple times a day to about once in two or three weeks. By the time the Facebook craze hit, my only reaction was: ho-hum.

Today, I logged into Orkut for a lark. I just clicked on a random contact of a random contact of a random contact and landed on an album in a stranger's profile. Call me weird, but I *like* looking at pictures of people. It can be pictures of people I have never met in my life and don't know from Eve. As long as the pictures have some variety to them, I can happily browse through them with interest (which one more reason why I stopped frequenting Orkut as a time-passer after they introduced the concept of photo locks - if you are hung up on privacy, use picasaweb or something, no :-)?).

Anyways, this stranger had mercifully not locked his album and I generally browsed through his pictures. Which was when my eyes finally fell on the name of the album's owner. It rang a bell. Could it be that guy? Then it struck me that the name was unusual enough for it to be belonging to the person I thought it belonged to. Some more research and hey presto, I found his brother's name in his friends list (the names of the brothers rhymed - so I have always remembered them). Tada!

I knew this guy when I was around six years old. We both were among the youngest kids in our entire apartment complex and hence were slighted together by the "older" kids. Regardless, during the long summer months as well in the busier school months, we were in a gang of indefatigable younger kids who were always ready to run out and play whether in the blazing hot noons or in the sea-breeze cooled evenings.

Thus, today I have set a new record for locating a person from way back in my childhood on Orkut. The interesting part is, I was not even "hunting" this time. Which is why, though I am not planning to add yet another person to whom I will never say anything other than hi to my friends list, I still am grinning.

Bits of unrelated and random notes

Missing mouse pointer. Today my computer mouse died and became a ghost. So while I could see things getting highlighted and cursors magically appearing when I clicked on text pads, I could not see the actual mouse pointer. This kinda of thing *might* be fun if you have nothing better to do than to play "guess where the mouse pointer is". Unfortunately, I did. I heaped only about 2 million imprecations on Bill Gates' head while I rebooted my laptop which as usual, restored sanity. Aargh and double aargh.

A song. Very nice, this one. I read somewhere that looking at it from a Carnatic music angle, Harini has not sung it properly. But I don't care - the song is just so soothing and I love listening to it.

Height of sycophancy. I thought our Indian politicians would be the recipients of the best sycophancy in the world. I was wrong. Have you heard the lyrics of this song from Dasavatharam? Even with my not-so-strong lyrics deciphering skills, I heard lines like "Tamilnadu is so proud to have given birth to you", "You are a great artist and ever youthful", You can even understand Freud" (wth) - really, I am not making any of it up. If anyone plied me with even a fraction of the praise in that song, I would probably die of embarrassment.

Most spurious argument ever. Ah, you don't get it! followed by a "Hence proved" look. Got reminded of this after n number of Kamal fans offered this statement as argument whenever anyone expressed not-so-favorable views of Dasavatharam. That phrase conveniently substitutes logical argument with a flaky presumption that you have to be in someway gifted to be able to understand something. Which is a very poor argument as arguments go. Oh, I have used this non-argument before. Once when I was explaining why I thought Calvin and Hobbes was funny to two non-fan friends, I smugly said, "You just don't do get it do you?". The look that I got that day will forever keep me from thoughtlessly uttering those words again.

Fireworks. After five years of living in the same city, I finally decided to go to the local city park to see their 4th of July fireworks display. I dragged my parents along too - a slice of Americana I said (hahaha, Americana in the Bay area - that's a good one). The road in front of the park had been blocked off. We joined the happy crowds as everyone made their way to the park. The display was simply awesome. It all ended with a fantastic finale. Gets a complete five star rating for the atmosphere as well as the actual display.

Latest crush. WALL.E. How can a robot be sooooooo darned cute? Especially one which is so rusty and looks like a dabba** from all possible angles? The folks at Pixar must be hogging approximately half of the creative genes in the world I think.

Enthu beans. Talking of creativity, even software engineers can be creative. Yesterday, as part of an exercise during training for some software development process, we had to design a travel brochure for an imaginary company offering tours for Martians visiting Earth. I was pretty surprised by the creative, interesting and fun inputs from everyone (all hard core software developers) in the team. Software engineers are not always from the stereotypical nerdy and boring mold, I tell ya.

SATC. I finally watched the SATC movie a couple of weeks ago. Watching the movie reminded me all over again why I liked the series. The bond between the four female leads is believable and true to life. Thus Carrie walking practically all the way across NYC to meet Miranda just because Miranda felt lonely did not seem dramatic but an entirely plausible scenario. Thank God for female friends. BTW, though I enjoyed it, I thought the movie was just average.

Cute lyrics - These lyrics "nadanthu kondey parandhu sellum azhagu*" sound super cute, no? It so vividly captures the image of someone happily skipping across.

Mandatory rant. Apropos of nothing, I hate singer Madhushree's voice. It puts me on the edge and I feel like yelling "shut up, shut up" into her ear whenever I hear her singing. Kinda sad since these days she gets to sing a lot of otherwise very nice songs. I assume someone out there likes her voice - can't see why else she gets to sing in spite of going "gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan" as soon as she opens her mouth.

TGIF folks :-)!

** box
* sorry, you got to know Tamil. Translation will take away the charm

Dieting tips for the new age

Most people keep cribbing about how they need to lose weight. This is a common refrain especially among the female of the species. During one such refraining session, a colleague said, "You know what, instead of striving to eat lesser, all that a person needs to do to achieve optimal weight is to grow taller till they are proportional for their weight."

Aha. Now there's a thought. I have never consciously tried to grow taller and all the height I have so far came by on its own without me staying away from as much as a celery stick. In fact I distinctly remember that eating well contributed to my height.

Based on this evidence, growing taller seems to be a more hassle free and enjoyable alternative to eating lesser. Of course, there is the caveat that sometimes, before reaching optimal weight, a person might need to extend vertically till his/her head is sticking somewhere into the ionosphere. But hey, tall is good (for reference, look at the heights of super models).

So I am all set. From now on, off with watching what I eat and other old-fashioned ideas. Only growing taller for me.

Now, if someone can tell me how I can communicate to my body that it is supposed to grow vertically and not horizontally whenever I eat.

Annoy-o-meter

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of the special relationship I share with Aishwarya Rai. Namely, I can't stand her acting. I find her plasticky, annoying and the target of my prayers for being an early victim in any movie having any chance, however minuscule, of killings.

Given that Ash usually just has to make a physical presence in a movie to make her annoying, in Dhoom 2, she managed to take her "my-annoying-self" performance to sterling levels. Five minutes into her appearance, I was wanting to throw something at the screen. Ten minutes later, I was pulling my hair out in frustration. Fifteen minutes later, I hoped Hrithik or Abhishek or even random character on the road #3 would have the good sense to bump her off.

Of course no such thing happened. At the end of the movie, finding myself still sane, I felt like a survivor. I found a new appreciation for the tolerance levels of the entire crew of Dhoom-2. And though I woke up at night in cold sweat with echoes of "Funny guy" and "Sunehri like likes you" in my head for quite a few days afterwards, the frequency of these incidents gradually decreased.

The point I am trying to make is, after watching Ash in Dhoom-2 I thought the absolute zenith of an annoying performance in cinema had been reached. No matter how annoying any other actor was in any movie, beside Ash's spectacular Dhoom-2 performance, they were mere fireflies beside the sun. That Dhoom-2 performance would forever occupy the numero uno position in my Annoying Performances Hall of Fame.

Or so I thought. Then I watched Asin in Dasavatharam. Till she opened her mouth to talk, she looked very pretty. The words "En perumal-a kudu" were the harbinger of doom. High pitched, irritating, murder-inducing, annoying - Asin managed it all and more!

Why on earth could not the character Fletcher who seemed to kill everyone else at first glance not have killed Asin on a priority basis? I think it was his devious plan to try to drive Govindraj to suicide due to unbearable torture by giving him Asin's constant company. Seeing the sheer number of places where Asin could have been bumped off convincingly and yet was still left alive was like being denied candy after being taken all the way to the checkout counter again and again.

By the time the end of the movie rolled around, I was eagerly awaiting it. There did not seem to be any other way out of watching the torture called Asin.

To be fair to Asin, unlike Ash's role in Dhoom-2 which *might* have been saved by a better actress, *anyone* performing Asin's role in Dasavatharam would have been equally horribly annoying. Which is why I have decided to let Ash retain her title of most annoying performer ever. But let me tell you, it is a very very narrow victory.