cnu

I have moved over this blog to posterous. If people were really following me on here, they would have noticed that most of the recent posts were done using the AutoPost feature of posterous. I am going to turn it off for now and going to start using posterous as my blog.
However, the posts here will remain and I have a use for these later. You can also follow me on twitter and facebook (autopost to these are turned on) .

So, follow cnu here from now on.

This sunday morning I had a very bad dream. It is a combination of many of my fears. It all started out with me standing amongst a group of people in campus containing many high rise buildings. Then I notice that there is a board called TCS. I don't know why I am standing there - whether I work there or want to get a job.

Then there is some announcement and everybody begins to run inside the building. I am also running with all of them and atlast I caught up with a group of 2 guys and there were two other people following me. I was in some kind of a trance and was following them without even thinking what I was doing.

These two guys I was following run along all the stairs in the tallest building and kept running for atleast 5 minutes. Then they jump off the stairs to catch a rope hanging. They fail to catch it and both fall down and are in a pool of blood. I wanted to follow them, but atlast the girl gets hold of me and drags me down to a safer place.

"Safe" I thought for a moment it was, till I see that I was standing in a open type of a crude elevator (which they use to take the bricks and cement mix up the buildings). The girl I was with suddenly throws the lever and the elevator just drops off like a stone with me and the girl.

The worst part was the elevator was falling down but the altitude was rising. It was rising very fast and I can realise that I am dreaming but still my legs were shaky. After a minute or two, with a lot of effort I woke up.

After reading the post you would have realised that I am acrophobic, but I had mentioned that the dream was a combination of many of my fears. Guessing the other fears are left as an exercise to the reader.

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What is the value of 500 Rs for different people in today's world ?

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Understanding Engineers - Take One

Two engineering students were walking across a university campus when one said, "Where did you get such a great bike?"

The second engineer replied, "Well, I was walking along yesterday,minding my own business, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike,threw it to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, "Take whatyou want."

The second engineer nodded approvingly and said, "Good choice; the clothes  probably wouldn't have fitted you anyway."

 Understanding Engineers - Take Two

To the optimist, the glass is half full.
To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
 

Understanding Engineers - Take Three

A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.

The engineer fumed, "What's with those blokes? We must have been waiting for fifteen minutes!"

The doctor chimed in, "I don't know, but I've never seen such inept golf!"

The priest said, "Here comes the greens keeper. Let's have a wordwith him."  He said, "Hello, George! what's wrong with that group aheadof us? They're rather slow, aren't they?"

The greens keeper replied, "Oh, yes. That's a group of blind firefighters.  They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire lastyear, so we always let them play for free anytime."

The group fell silent for a moment.  The priest said, "That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight."

The doctor said, "Good idea. I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist colleague and see if there's anything he can do for them."

The engineer said, "Why can't they play at night?"

Understanding Engineers - Take Four

What is the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers?
Mechanical engineers build weapons and civil engineers build targets.
 

Understanding Engineers - Take Five

The graduate with a science degree asks, "Why does it work?"
The graduate with an engineering degree asks, "How does it work?"
The graduate with an accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?"
The graduate with a liberal arts degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?"

Understanding Engineers - Take Six

Three engineering students were gathered together discussing the possible designers of the human body.

One said, "It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints."

Another said, "No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections."

The last one said, "No, actually it had to have been a civilengineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through arecreational area?"
 

Understanding Engineers - Take Seven

Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enoughfeatures yet.

Understanding Engineers - Take Eight

An engineer was crossing a road one day, when a frog called out tohim and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess."

He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket.

The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me backinto a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week."

The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket.

The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into aPrincess, I'll stay with you for one week and do ANYTHING you want."

Again, the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.

Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter with you? I've told youI'm a beautiful princess, and that I'll stay with you for one week anddo anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?"

The engineer replied, "Look, I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend.  But a talking frog?  Now that's cool."

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A few weeks back I received a email through my college mailing list from a friend about "a girl who lost her hands in a bomb blast and she would get 1 paise for every person to whom the mail is forwarded to". I have received numerous emails before but this was the last straw. So I replied telling her not to be such a fool to believe such mails.

She said "believe it or not, will get satisfaction that am helping a girl...  "

So I said "Along with the satisfaction you will also earn the sin of sending these chain mail forwards to hundreds of your friends." and asked her to instead send out a DD/Cheque to the hospital to which she asked me to prove that such mails aren't true.

Now I didn't know whether this girl was in her senses or not. I was determined to clearly explain her. So I typed out a long mail which I am producing here in full.

[Explanation]

1. There is no way anyone can track down how many people read a particular email. 
   
2. There is no way to even know whether the email was forwarded or not.
   
3. Current mail standards doesn't have the ability to do thingsin point 1 and 2. And they won't be implemented forever - as for manypeople feel that privacy and confidentiality is more important thanearning 10 cents/mail.
4. Only if someone is tracking all the forwards, they will be able toaudit and give the poor girl the 25lacs. From #3 you can be sure thatthe forwards which you send are totally useless. 
5. Money doesn'tgrow on trees. If you had attended your primary physics classes, youwould have learnt about Law of Conservation of Mass. In simple terms -the total amount of matter in the universe is constant. You cannotcreate more money. Especially, you cannot create more of anything byforwarding mails - except maybe the amount of spam mail, the anger ofyour friends who get the spam, etc.
6. You may counter #5 by telling that someone may donate the money forher cause. Assuming that there really is someone who is donating themoney for charity - it would be easy and faster for them to save thegirl's life (by directly donating to the hospital) than to wait for thehundreds of youngsters to forward mails to millions of people. It isn'tworth the effort.
7. If earning money was as easy as forwarding emails, then all indiansworking in the so-called indian multinational companies will be therichest guys. Sorry - couldn't resist that one.
8. After gettingtens and hundreds of such emails since you created an email account, ifyou had applied some logic - you would realise that this is a hoax andyou are only making a fool of yourself by forwarding. Come on, logiccan be applied to places other than the interview puzzles.

[/Explanation]


After reading such a long explanation any one would understand and stop this nonsensical chain mail mania, but I was proved wrong after reading her reply.
"I dont take things seriously. I thought you might be getting angry onmy reply. whenever I saw these kind of mails i would pity for thosepeople. So,I will be forwarding atmost two people who r very close tome.(they will not tell anything na). "

உங்களை எல்லாம் திருத்தவே முடியாது

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Here are the pics we took when Sudarsan, Pratheema, Raju and me went out to Anna Nagar. And by the way, don't miss the shot from the tower lights.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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I was thinking of a blog for cruns and yesterday decided to start off with tumblr. But now I see posterous and found that it has support for custom domains, multiple authors (setup multiple email addresses) and automatically posts to various other services too. And it automatically converts the files into nice gallery or MP3/video players.

One reason why I am thinking of a hosted model is that I didn't want to setup wordpress for this, but would like to export my data out if needed to some other blog engine at a later stage. Which one will allow me to export? I think Posterous may be more into listening into their customers as they are from ycombinator.

Maybe I should try out posterous a bit more before I jump into one. What do you think I should use? Posterous or Tumblr? Any other suggestions?

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Found this small tree on the wall in Kamaraj Hall

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haha

I have been a ping.fm user for 10 minutes now and really like the way the messages are sent to multiple services at the same time. If you want to try the beta use the beta code "pingyoulater" on http://ping.fm

Trying out http://ping.fm

For the last two days (sat and sun) I was out in Chromepet for Radhika's wedding. On saturday, after some small function in her house in the morning, I went back home and return in the evening by around 18:30. Then our friends came in one by one and we all as usual took up the balcony. Sudarsan was sick with chicken pox and Pratheema was also having fever - so missed them. Radhika still remembers the days in college when we used to tease her with Sudarsan.

The reception was different, they had arranged for some sweets, drinks, ice creams, pop corn, etc where people can go and get things to eat (before the dinner). There were also balloons, comic characters for entertaining the small kids. I haven't seen any reception like this and this was a great idea to make the kids happy and quiet. I didn't hear even a single kid cry and everyone were happy.
We all waited till about 2300 hours and then me and Yamini went together in her car. We talked on the way back about the problem and decided to come early in the morning (8:00 is not early).

Then today morning I woke up on my own (what a great record) and started from home by about 7:45 and reached Vadapalani bus stand and was waiting for some bus to start. Then decided to go by auto to Kasi theatre, where we planned to meet. Then I saw some girl in a saree who was waving her hand towards me. I had seen her somewhere, but couldn't get her name or where immediately.
Then I asked her name and she said "Sudha Priya". I said, "Yeah Yeah. Now I remember" (idhuku mela enna nyabagam vendi kedaku? Ellathayum ava kittaye kettachi).

We got an auto and went to Kasi theatre and were standing below the bridge for about 35 - 40 mins for Yamini.
Whenever we called she used to say that she is coming. One such conversation
We were trying to see if there were some other road where she is standing. Then there was no sign of her and I was standing there with Sudha who was constantly speaking about all the stuff about college, her job, me job, her sister's marriage, etc. I was quite amused seeing her talk so much.

Later Yamini came in her car around 8:45 and we all went together and on the way Chitra called me.
Then realising that we were near airport and that we can pick them up on the way, I asked her to come to Pallavaram bus stand. We all went and got to the marriage hall.

Today too we went to the same place and sat together. Then Pratheema called up and said that she is on her way and asked me to pick her up. I got Ananthu's bike and went off to Chromepet bus stand and came back.

This marriage was quite different from the others I have been to. There were no aiyars, no smoke, no chanting of some manthram (which no one knows the meaning of). There were some political leaders (Periyar's party I guess) who talked about something which no one listened to. After that the bride and groom took a oath and exchanged garlands and the groom just put the thali onto Radhika's neck. It was a different experience and most of us haven't seen marriage like this. We went and gave gifts and ate lunch and was waiting for Radhika to finish with her photo shoot.

All of us were trying very hard to make her smile while posing for the photos and this was the same case with the reception. Then we were all trying to get her tensed by telling "nanga kelambarom". This would lead to a cold stare from her and which would make the photographer angry. Thank god he didn't ask the watchman to throw us out.

Atlast after all the photos, she went off to eat and she asked me to wait. Since everyone were leaving, I too came with them. We (Pratheema, Sudha Priya, me) got into Yamini's car and came back to Vadapalani. The journey was so tiring because of the heat and Sudha and me got down and went and drank some Frooti in McRennet.

After that we got into a share auto to Saligramam and I came back home with a very bad headache. After the bath I tried to see Prison Break Season 2 Ep.07, but couldn't. So I just slept there and woke up by 6:30.

For the past two days I was very happy and saw lots of old friends. I even got a new friend - Sudha Priya. The one thing that I like about her is that she began speaking non stop(kadhu valikuthu) with me the minute I saw and didn't stop (even though I didnt speak much). One should be really talented to talk like that.

Anyway, it was a nice experience and I wish Radhika all the very best for her married life. Its great to have her as my best friend.

You may all know that I did an (very unsuccessful) experiment where I stopped using any shampoo on my hair. It ended in just 2 days. Last week after getting a haircut, I decided to start the experiment again. So, I used shampoo on monday (28th Apr) morning and then I just used plain water to wash my hair. This went on till Saturday (3rd May) morning when I had to use shampoo as my mom applied some stuff on my hair to change its color. This is the longest streak (5 days) of me not using shampoo. I think I will again restart this experiment from tomorrow.

I usually dont get scraps. But got 4 scraps - with the same contents.

HEY ITS DIANNA, FROM THE DIRECTOR OF ORKUT,EVERYBODY SORRY FOR THEINTERRUPTION BUT ORKUT IS CLOSING THE SYSTEM DOWN BECAUSE TOO MANY BOTTERS ARE TAKING UP ALL THE NAMES, WE ONLY HAVE 57 NAMES LEFT,
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO CLOSE YOUR ACCOUNT, DONT SEND THIS MESSAGE, IF YOU WANT
TOKEEP YOUR ACCOUNT ,SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR LIST.
THIS IS NOT A JOKE, YOU'LL BE SORRY IF YOU DONT SEND IT. THANKS DIRECTOR OFORKUT, TIM BUISKI. WHOEVER DOESNT SEND THIS MESSAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILLBEDEACTIVATED AND IT WILL COST YOU $ 10.00 A MONTH TO USE IT..

The more time you spend with something, the more attached you become to it.

Today while riding to the train station venkat asked whether today is thursday or friday? I too didnt know wat day of the week it is. Then i remembered that yesterday i didnt read xkcd and found that today is friday.

It was interesting to see that I have been posting to this blog through so many clog clients. I have tried the normal web based interface, flock, emacs, through my mobile. There are so many more clients but I still cant find a really good client. What do I expect from a blog client? Hmm. Sometimes I ask myself such questions.

This is a test post from my Nokia 6300. I atlast got gprs activated on my hutch phone after 4 weeks.