Impromptu #2

5 days , 4 places.

Sounds pretty good , doesnt it? and its good while it lasts. But when these places each have a different weather pattern and you travel through them that quickly, there are two major problems that you realize later.

1) You never really did see all of any of the places and didn't do justice to visiting them and staying there.

2)You end up sick, really sick , because of the difference in climate , especially when the temperature difference is large.

But at the end of it, its still a time that will be remembered, if not for the joy of exploration, atleast for the photographic opportunities presented by going to so many places in the short time. The challenge? Keeping your camera batteries charged!!!
Do check out the pics i clicked in the photo-fiesta page

                                         

Temple Of thought

An incredible album by poets of the fall has me hooked on for a while. Its their recent masterpiece and i only found one song i didn't like ( and yeah, its a song i've not been able to listen to at all, strangely enough its called The Happy Song ) There's three songs that i really love in this album ( not to say the others are bad, but these rock! ). Try them out!

               

Existentialism: How it probably came about

Warning: Plenty of Ranting against education system and exams ahead!

My mid semester exams are going on right now, and an observation i made was that everyone turned philosophical a few moments after the exam, specifically because the education system is aimed at trying to prove that they did not know something instead of trying to prove that they do. So, when a friend of mine had two exams one after another, he came back and said 'Sab mohmaya hai' ( Translation: Everything is an illusion) and he isn't the only person to react as such. It has often been observed that when unable to accomplish the objective, people tend to think that their actions are pointless. Another friend of mine came back saying 'This is fate' and another saying that no matter what we do, the world is against us doing well in the exams ( well, i'll be honest, he said lecturers, not world, but hey, an extension is possible. )

So,anyway my point being that Existentialism as a philosophy states that human actions are pointless and that nothing that we do matters. Sounds similar to the reactions of my friends, doesnt it? I think they are the same, Existentialism is a philosophy that is steeped in depression, probably founded by a person in depression and the fact that we still talk about it and make movies on it (Ref:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_the_Absurd  ) shows how we don't want to let anything go, no matter how useless it is. Add to that the fact that its a part of my syllabus makes it all the more  more laughable and shows how the education system is the last thing that will evolve despite the fact that its supposed to be the first.

PS: if you've made it this far, thanks for reading me vent my frustration. Here's some songs for relaxing.

Insomniac Thoughts

 

"Sleep is a naturally recurring state characterized by reduced or absent consciousness, relatively suspended sensory activity, and inactivity of nearly all voluntary muscles"

8 hours a day is said to be the ideal sleeping time for a human but i wonder, how many people across the globe actually achieve that? In school? maybe, but after that, at college, 8 hours is a luxury.

There was this particular night, i was unable to sleep practically all night, But there were a few things i ended up pondering about, mostly because of a few recent movies i'd seen. And that got me thinking about sleep.

So a little reading later i figured out that REM sleep is by far the best thing in human evolution, thats the stage in which we dream, and the reason its that good is because it satisfies youre desires without them ever getting satisfied in real life.

So, My next question, is that good for human evolution? If the person's wishes are granted in his sleep, why does man want to wake up and work, is it because he wants to work or because he wishes to improve on his dream?

Is dreaming simply a means of projecting the ideas of man using senses for better visualization so that it can be improved on later? If that is the case, is dreaming actually a part of conscious thought?

I wonder... perhaps i can dream up an explanation sometime. Brings a whole new meaning to 'I'll sleep on it' .

Microsoft Windows 8 - A review

Heya folks, first off, i'd like to apologize for the long gap, but i've been keeping busy this last month, and you can expect a whole lot of posts trying to sum up the experiences.

Anyway, Back to the subject of this post, As a student of BITS, we all get a licensed version of windows 8 free ( :D ) and earlier than the official release. So, I installed on my laptop and this is a summary of my experiences with it.

Laptop Specs:
processor - i7 2670QM
Ram - 8GB
Graphic card - Dedicated Nvidia GT540M 2GB

The first time i booted up windows 8, i was a little confused by the layout and had trouble finding my way around. It Basically has a start menu which occupies the whole screen and offers an entirely new way of interacting with the computer. The live tiles allow quick access to most regularly used applications.

Another important difference is that while the main UI is the same as that of windows 7, the Modern UI ( The start menu ) is meant more for touch devices , and allocates more importance to the mouse, specifically the right mouse button ( which is for the most part ignored in windows 7 ) is used a lot to navigate around.
The corners of the screen are used for navigating the UI and once you get used to it, it seems almost intutive that this is how a  UI is to be navigated. ( The start button is removed and the lower left corner takes it's role )

The fact that all drivers and applications designed for windows 7 seem to work on windows 8 makes this upgrade less of a hassle and a natural upgrade. The battery life remained almost consistent with a slight increase after shifting to windows 8.

But despite all that, the OS is a mixture of two entirely different ecosystems and the continuous shifting between the two isnt the most pleasant and the fact that there is a lot to learnt to learn before shifting entirely from windows 7 to 8 might be a putoff for a many.

All in all, i'd recommend an upgrade since even though its a chore to learn the nuances of windows 8, it makes sense once you start using it and the look of the modern UI more than makes up  for the trouble.

Impromptu #1

I think this blog has gotten a lil bit too serious and has far too little of randomness, so, i'm going to start a series of posts labelled impromptu which will contain random, unorganized thoughts posted as they cross my mind. Hopefully, this will let me cover a wider range of my thoughts and opinions while keeping the blog uncluttered.

#1

This number, i'd like to call the number of madness. Atleast in Hyderabad where i live, it is.

The simple reason being everyone craves for that number being applied to them. Any other seems like too much of an insult to bear. I really wonder why. I agree, striving for perfection is good, but aiming at the stars while forgetting about the ground that you're walking on isn't. The best example for this would be a look at school's in Hyderabad. The parents' want only their child to be ranked as number 1 and refuse to accept that there can only be one first ranker in a class of 30, talk about forgetting reality. Anyway, I guess this just goes to show how much people crave power and just how much power a simple number holds in public perception of a person. The difference between 1 and 2 is no longer 1, atleast not when it comes to perception of these ranks.

PS - I thought id keep my private life out of this blog entirely, but some things are far too important  to keep out. 

My Brother got married recently, and an amazing time i had, That's the reason why there was such a long gap since my previous post. I'll get back to regular posting now. Cya folks around!

A Simple world

"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated."

Confucius

Life sure has gotten a whole lot busier lately, and complicated and that makes me wonder, is it worth it.I wonder whatever happened to the simple pleasures of sitting on the terrace on a beautiful day staring at the clouds making up tales. I know i sound like an old geezer whining but frankly sometimes i think in our pursuit for happiness, we have forgotten what it truly is.

Mania

Heya folks,

Been a while, ain't it? Well, i was travelling , made a quick trip to madras , then went on to tirupati in what turned out to be a very eventful trip.


Location:  Madras
Songs:  The Animal Song - Savage Garden
           Welcome to the Jungle - Guns N Roses
           Earth Song - Michael Jackson      

Spent barely a day here but enjoyed it thoroughly. My parents lived in madras, so took my mother's advice and went to the snake park in the afternoon and took a whole bunch of pictures.

Then, went over to the beach at sunset and ate seafood watching the sun set on the far side of the ocean. The riot of colors that i witnessed that day shall be hard to forget for a while, sadly i couldn't take a pic of it because i ran out of charge on my camera.Well, U can't hope for everything i guess.

For more pictures, open this article and scroll down.