Your Turn Challenge

I came across this post from Seth. And hence this challenge link. I have enough reasons to participate. And I have a big ball of laziness that says I should not commit to anything publicly. Let me see. I am giving myself a day to decide. Maybe I’ll convince myself that I can actually publish everyday for at least 7 days in my life. It is my turn to challenge myself.

January 16, 2015 · 1 min · abishek

On Ideas and Starting up

Ever since I joined college, I have wanted to be on my own. I never wanted to work for a boss. But given my family conditions back then, it wasn’t quite possible. So I ended up taking a job. Most of the decisions I took, excepting my marriage, were meant to serve this purpose. It is quite pathetic when I think that I still haven’t been able to get there. ...

January 14, 2015 · 3 min · abishek

Spam

I wonder how stupid the spam crawler bots are. I get really silly and extremely obvious comments that scream of being just a script. I guess they need some good machine learning algorithms to check which blogs to spam. And then what to spam. At the very least, pay to get akismet database to see how they classify spam. Then see how to beat that. Pointlessly writing on blogs that have no visitors can only waste the spammers internet bandwidth. Right? ...

January 13, 2015 · 1 min · abishek

Firing is not personal

but it is private. Perhaps, firing is not a politically correct word in the first place. Our jobs could be on the line for reasons that don’t include us. And we need to accept that as a fact first. I recently came across a post where someone was getting terminated and were pissed off at how they didn’t give them a proper reason for termination. Well, if you think about it, one of the lines in the employment contract would say that the company reserves the right to not give you any reason. ...

January 12, 2015 · 2 min · abishek

A Bad Joke

We were walking down to Velocity@Novena y’day evening. The subway leading to the Novena MRT felt very slippery. And I was wearing a pair of slippers. That got me thinking – how can slippers be slippery? Apart from that the sole is really worn out, but mine are quite ok. Slippers seem like a bad name for footwear; it sounds as if slippers are meant to slip, right? They should have been called something else. I know most of you call it flip-flops these days. Perhaps, they realised this ahead of me. ...

January 10, 2015 · 1 min · abishek

My problem with haircare and toothpaste ads

is that they are quite silly. Have you noticed that they almost always have transparent touch screen displays? And that too fairly large ones? Well, that is my problem. I would like to believe that these ought to be expensive. Consumer television sets with 34″ and above that aren’t transparent cost quite a bit to buy. For instance, my TV cost me about $200 and is only about 32″. Ok, it is a smart model but I am sure the majority of the cost is the display technology. So transparent displays ought to cost at least that much, right? Even if you picked multiple small displays and just cascaded them, the cost of the additional hardware/software to make them look seamless would negate the apparent gain in price. ...

January 10, 2015 · 2 min · abishek

8 January

January the 8th is a very important day for us, Noni and Me. It has some history to it which is not the subject of this blog or the topic of this post! That reminds me, I have a place where I have written that up but never made it public. Maybe I should do that some time. We usually try to make this day special. As long as we were in Chennai, it was quite easy. We usually took the day off and spent it together. After the marriage, we managed to take a short vacation around this time. But once we moved to Singapore, it kinda got a little difficult. So, in the last two years we celebrate this day with wine and dine. We only try to leave a tad early from work. ...

January 9, 2015 · 4 min · abishek

A Short Story Challenge

TL;DR You are right. Now get some popcorn before you start reading. Noni is a dreamer. Not a day dreamer (she is more realistic and practical than I am, in most things that matter) by any metric. But she seldom wakes up without a dream. I can probably count the number of days she woke up after a peaceful sleep. Her dreams are superb fantasy, gory violence or she is flying across the world. Yea, I know. On the days of the gory violence, she wakes up visibly tired after 8 hours of sleep – so much for a dream! ...

January 7, 2015 · 8 min · abishek

Being Unique

There was a talk show where one of the participants mentioned this: “In order to be unique, I decided to have long hair. I pick my attire and vehicle based on the occasion …” and some more along those lines. I think this is quite sad. I don’t think uniqueness has anything to do with appearance, although unique people tend to have a strong sense of style : one way or the other. A person would need to be unique in who they are, in what they bring to the society, in how they act or behave in a situation and not by how they look. Looking unique won’t take you very far if it does not get sufficiently supplemented by other facets. It might get the door to open, but it won’t get you a seat! ...

January 3, 2015 · 1 min · abishek

Happy New Year – 2015

So, the new year is here. Happy New Year. The day has been fabulous to say the least. In that sense, the year has started off on a great note. The very first thing I did in the morning was a pending DIY worktable. The work is not complete, but is about 50% complete. And this is great, because this is what I want to do the rest of the year – do stuff myself. ...

January 1, 2015 · 1 min · abishek