In which I berate techonological progress

Dont get me wrong I am a slave to technology - laptops, mice, Youtube, Joost, Hulu, GPS, iPods, Guitar Hero. Chances are if i can afford them I will have them. It was in this spirit of being technology's slave-girl that I got an Orkut and Facebook account and signed up for Gmail chat. The honeymoon was great, I loved the way I could keep in touch with my friends on Gmail chat or with scraps (micromail for the attention span challenged) just to remind friends that I am around. I loved the potential for getting back in touch with childhood friends.

This followed a period where I aggressively searched for long lost neighbours from my childhood home and in the process met random people from school who were 8 when I was 14. Once I even made this very heart rending post, where I asked to know of my school friends whom I had lost touch with. The upside to that was thanks to a combination of that post, Facebook and Orkut, I am now very definitely in touch with them.

In fact, I now know whats on the mind of as much as 6 people before breakfast (via status messages on Gmail chat, facebook and orkut) impossible as it may seem.Some of them even have blogs to further subject me to their thoughts and actions during the course of the day, week, year. (Oh wait...!) Not that I am close to any of them. Most of them I have met once maybe twice, few have something stimulating to say and almost all of them have sent friendship requests when I was in a benevolent mood.

Subject to this much barrage of information of who is getting married, who had kids, who moved to Australia, who is going to a certain hemisphere, who got a job and where, who crashed a car while learning to drive, who is making pasta for dinner, who hated sky diving and who is bored, I am losing my sangfroid. Schadenfreude anyone?

Earlier it was all hail-fellow-well-met and then a vacuum which you really only bothered to fill if you had a crush on that person in question but now even the Facebook updates from my highschool crush are a chore to read as he hops from one debauched Dubai party to another. Sometimes I just wants to disappear into a technological rabbit hole of obscurity and emerge in a few decades and then seek out Nisha, Vikas, Ann, V., A., B., W., and the other endearing letters of the alphabet.

Several times I have come this close to deleting my accounts but the addiction persists! I am cursed to live out my life in this Kalyug where friendships after the actual physical proximity criteria is eliminated go from email exchanges, to Facebook wall messages to Orkut scraps to Gchat status messages and finally hang on with the claws of Facebook updates. Welcome to eternal damnation where friendships don't gracefully melt into obscurity but are well and truly forever.

When dreams die

....do they make a noise?
Like the splash when a frog jumps into a pond or
Like the continuous patter of rain on a rooftop or
Like the roaring incessancy of a waterfall?


Most people would say
They don’t make any noise at all
Like a glacier melting.

Evolution

....is put in perspective by a Youtube video. Have fun!



Thanks to The Other 95% for the link!

Look out for the monkeys on a typewriter(get it?? :) ) bit somewhere in the middle.

On Muses

"O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!
O memory that engraved the things I saw,
Here shall your worth be manifest to all!"

- Dante Alighieri, in Canto II of The Inferno

Shogun

I first read James Clavell's Shogun when I was 16 in the summer of '96 before the Std. XII exams, sneaking time between the chemical reactions we were supposed to memorize and the integrations I was supposed to practice.

I was hooked from the first page with his descriptions of Japanese life and customs (boiling of tea leaves during peacetime and boiling of prisoners otherwise). The complex plots and the in depth characterization of even minor players left me reeling. Its descriptions of Japanese concepts of wa and absolute obedience were the closest I could get to escaping the dreary desert sands of the Middle East. All this mind you in the Dark Ages before the days of the Great WWW.

Times changed and here I am in the US of A with a Netflix account.

I find that "Shogun" had been made into a TV series in the mid-eighties! I had it ordered promptly and now the disc is sitting there next the DVD player. I am wondering whether I should watch it at all. Would the watching of this DVD completely ruin my imaginings of Blackthorne, Lord Toranaga and Lady Mariko? Would these be lost to be forever to be replaced by the budget restricted panderings of three executive producers who may not have read the novel at all?

Hmmmm....

A Sexee Witch

....is my new LG Chocolate3 - a 3G 1GB CDMA with iPod like sound quality and a 2 megapixel camera with two screens all for 40 bucks. Me is in love!

Recycle bin therapy

I cleaned out my office desk today in preparation for the Voyage to the Great Beyond.**

Aside from that, I threw away a lot of stuff. I mean lots.

- Old Cd covers (why did i ever keep them in the first place?),
- Old paper reprints (God when did i ever read this?)
- Xeroxes of my certificates (i was OCD case once and to apply to any place i would carry three xerozes or more of all my certificates all the way back to my tenth),
- Non-working mosquito repellants (mosquitoes in the lab?)
- Hand santisers (wtf?)
- Binoculars (wtff?)
- A photograph of a person reading a girlie magazine (this was used to blackmail him by his friends and then left in my possesion. yes i have/had weird friends)
- a blank greeting card that was never sent.
- a new york momento got by Certain someone which i had forgotten. it shows the World trade Centre towers still standing.

All the bins in my lab and adjacent labs are overflowing with my discarded stuff.

I feel as if I am suddenly free of cares and don't have attachments anymore. Its a wonderful feeling. Perhaps this is how ascetics feel when they renouce the world.

** - the Pacific Ocean not the River Styx.