Humor

I have an axe to grind with Siri. I use Siri every day to time my yoga routine. These are short reps of 30s poses. It takes about 30 mins to complete them. I searched for a good timer a couple of times in the past and then gave them up altogether once I figured I could use Siri to set up the timer for me. On a good day, it’s all good. But on most days, Siri is deaf. Not just any deaf, she’s so deaf that I’ll be screaming at the top of my voice to get her to effing wake up. Eventually I figured, maybe if I used a headset, things might get better. So I picked up a $75 Beats headset. Excellent headset actually. Stays snug fit in my ear – something the default iPhone headset doesn’t for me. Apparently, I don’t have the generic ear that the rest of the world has. Turns out, though, Siri doesn’t care if I used a Beats headset because it still depends on hearing me properly. Incidentally, Beats has a small button that I can press to summon Siri. The problem for me, though, is that I need to start the timer after I get into the pose. When I am in the pose, I can’t move around my hands much. So summoning Siri with a button is a non-starter. ...

I stumbled upon this pure genius on Netflix by serendipity. And I don’t think I have laughed as much on anything else. This is the kind of absurd humour that I enjoy the most – I wonder what that says about me, sometimes. This genre is somewhat hard to find, though. For a long time, it was only the Monty Pythons that worked on this genre. Then I stumbled upon Douglas Adams and haven’t looked back since. I think Douglas Adams is the absolute epitome of this genre. There are so many instances in the hitch hiker’s book that I still reminisce and laugh over. Dirk Gently, incidentally, is from Douglas Adams too. ...

We recently completed all 12 seasons of the big bang theory (BBT). I loved the piece so much that I miss having them over during our dinner time. And my 4 years old son (yeah, he definitely shouldn’t be watching this one), dresses up like Sheldon on most days. Now that its over, I am kinda rewatching Friends. My go-to sitcom is Seinfeld, but Netflix seems to have run out of that one. ...

I think I came across this phrase in school. Since I chose to study “Hindi” as my second language, I probably didn’t get to study this phrase first hand. “Poruthaar Boomialwaar”. A very powerful phrase that every kid should learn, understand and imbibe in his/her life. I told Noni that the only thing I want to teach my kid would be “delayed gratification”. I cannot say it is an uninfluenced thought, we all have heard of and seen some version of the marshmallow experiment. But my reasons are slightly different. I have personally felt places where I won just by sheer perseverance and places where I lose sleep simply because I can’t wait. And I have generally seen some form of correlation between impatience and poor skillsets (learning/execution/planning) etc. So I sort of have my own subset of proofs for the marshmallow tests. So one thing I want to teach my kid (if it is teachable) is delayed gratification. ...

I have fancied publish-subscribe middleware(pubsub) architectures for quite sometime. When we were still very new in CTS, I came up with a wild suggestion to try this for getting a data dump from a legacy system into our moodle instance. I was quite clueless about what this would entail in terms of development effort, but I could create a PoC setup within a few days which made me quite confident of being able to pull this off. ...

After a lot of deliberation, discussions, depressions, planning and meticulous budgeting, Noni convinced me to just stfu and pick up that damn device. So we did just that. I am still a little unsure whether I like the feel of the device. I love my iPhone 5 because the form factor is just about perfect for me. This is my first 4.7″ device in the last 4-5 years that I have held a smartphone. Way too old for tech? Maybe. ...

 As I was rolling in the bed y’day night trying to sleep, I weirdly started thinking how Hindi as a language fared in my life. When I entered middle school, I had to make a choice for the second language. And my parents rightly made my choice for studying Hindi. They felt, I would anyway pickup Tamil and knowing the national language is very important. Yes. I totally agree today – besides, I am sure Hindi was simpler than Tamil. In those times, choosing Hindi has its own disadvantages. For instance, during Engineering college admissions, if two candidates had all parameters equal, then the candidate who chose to study Tamil would get preference. At least that is what I was told. I never had to validate it though. ...

I was in Chennai last week. I had to go out someplace and I had hired a cab since I am not very keen in driving in Chennai any more. It was a 40 minute drive one way and it was a pretty hot day. The cabbie was the only relief all along the drive although both my wife and my mom found him a tad too annoying. The man was naturally gifted at talking. He spoke a naturally funny dialect of tamil. And he picked up topics from the road. Every street name, car, building, office space that we cross, he had something to quip. Some where just a rant or a while, but a lot many were just good humor. It is clear that he doesn’t mind. That’s like the best stand up comedy show I have been in – not that I have been in a lot. I listen to them a lot. ...

After a period of absence, I am back to the writing board. Lot of things happening and I hope I would take some time to pen them here for future laughs. I am sure most of us have used a pain killer spray. There are a quite a few good brands out there and we usually stock one called “Moov”. We don’t use it very often, but sprays are handier than the ointment tubes. Especially for me. I have noticed that every time I use the ointment, I need to pee almost immediately. And no amount of washing your hands can save your *** from getting a bit of ointment treatment that would leave it frigid for quite some time. So, sprays are definitely better. ...

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. ...