Creative commons
thescian | December 4, 2006Town twinning indeed. Amersham is twinned with Benshiem Bensheim in Germany and Krynica in Poland sez a signboard in Amersham. Finally, after looking at the signboard in Amersham for a few months, I've looked up on what it is all about.
thescian | November 30, 2006As I was cycling on a street near my home I noticed some plumbing work going on in a house. The plumbing company van was parked outside. Of course, this mundane affair doesn't merit notice. What was of some linguistic interest was the name of the plumbing company. "Pipe Dreams" . That's right. "Pipe Dreams"! Surely, the proprietor of the plumbing company is out to prove the linguistic wisdom of the smoking crowd wrong. My hearty wishes to their indomitable naming spirit. They are taking Pipe Dreams to a place it has never been.
thescian | November 26, 2006Some sensible things happening over here in the rainy country. No copyright extension for songs reports the BBC. At present, copyright for artists (not the same as composers, who get 120 years of exclusive rights) extends for 50 years in Britain. Within this time artists can collect royalties for their performances whenever they are aired. In US of A this extension is for 95 years - which is, IMHO, greedy and that's what the British artists like Sir Cliff Richard want (the operative word is want. The other word to bear in mind is need, which does not apply in this case.) Of course, more than…
thescian | November 14, 2006During my visit to India last month, I promised myself that I would accomplish one important task. I would do everything in my power to eliminate the tech support role that I was playing to my parents. You see, my parents had inherited (ah, sweet pun) a desktop computer from me and in my absence had taken the help of local young men who gleefully installed Microsoft Windows software (pirated, of course). Pirated software, you must realize, is like getting a new pair of shoes with godawful bugs in them. They bite and you can't ask for help from the seller or go to a qualified doctor. My…
thescian | November 8, 2006Hurray! Without further delay, here are the results of TheScian Science Fiction Short Story Contest 2006!
1. 'The Asylum at Bergen' by Aditya Sudarshan (Winning entry)
2. 'To Sleep Perchance to Dream' by Rohinton Daruwala (second best)
3. 'Now We Live a Full Lifespan' Cyril M Gupta (third best)
The other stories that I and the other panelists liked, ordered according to their scores:
4. 'WATERSMOKE' by Rajat Chaudhuri
5. 'Cell Death' Chetan Rao
6. 'Happy Happy Joy Joy' by Manisha Lakhe
7. 'The Forgotten Future' by Ramnath R Iyer
8. 'The Entomologist Laughs Last' by Vivek Nityananda
9. 'The…
thescian | October 28, 2006Am back in Amersham after a three week trip to India. The vacation (a misnomer) in India was wonderful. So wonderful it was that at one point my body gave up digesting in disgust. A few books I read during the vacation:-
Temptations of the West by Pankaj Mishra - Very engaging autobiographical sort of book.
Tom Sawyer and The Innocents Abroad by Twain
Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L'Amour - Thanks to a note sometime back on Sunil's blog that introduced me to this book.
The Enigma of Arrival by Naipaul (currently reading)
I'll post a longer list of books I have bought to read…
thescian | October 3, 2006Let's talk music and software for a moment. Shall we? This post is about the software I use at home to organize the audible bits I have accumulated and keep accumulating everyday. You must remember that I am not an expert on any of the software applications discussed below. If you have technical questions, try the forums of the software you are curious about.
For the past one month I have begun to regularly use three OSes at home (Mac OSX, Ubuntu Dapper, Windows XP). Ubuntu and Windows are new to my home. Like all new arrivals, they've given me both joy and pain. Ubuntu's Disk Manager can be…
thescian | October 3, 2006Al Gore at TED Talks. He mentions releasing the climate crisis presentation under an appropriate licensing term (he's working with Lawrence Lessig) for young people to remix. Brilliant. A tremendously engaging talk with Gore relating hilarious stories in the first few minutes. via The World's Fair.
thescian | October 2, 2006Oh dear! I can't get this out of my head [embedded audio. Via MF]. Want more? Try setting this to music.
thescian | October 2, 2006It's a gritty movie that was surprisingly good and highly engaging. I and Ramya watched it a week ago. The movie is based on the novel by P D James (I haven't read the novel). The story is set in 2027 when the world of humans has gone infertile. No more babies. While the science behind this is not bad, the real impact of the movie lies in the camera work and the deft handling of the plot. I am impressed.
thescian | September 30, 2006Ladies and Gentlemen, the submission date for the Scifi Contest has ended and I am absolutely delighted with the response. We've received around thirty stories for the contest. About ten were received before Sep 15 and the rest in the past two weeks. I am thrilled by the enthusiasm and energy. By any measure, we are onto a fantastic start. The panelists have already started reading the stories.
A word on how the stories will be judged. The method is quite simple. I asked the panelists to supply me with a single rank for every story at the end of their exercise. They would use their own set…
thescian | September 29, 2006"Blogger. N. Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do,", kindly ventures Guy Kawasaki. Shit. There's no middle ground for bloggers, is there? Bloggers either hold their gaze steadily to their navel or fanatically bludgeon their flailing egos. Anyho, go Heighten Your Sense of the Absurd.
thescian | September 28, 2006A joke I heard over the beebs as I was driving today. I paraphrase.
An old lady was talking to a friend.
The Friend: "You seem quite happy and in good shape. What's the secret?"
Old Lady: "I have two packs of cigarette everyday. Drink a bottle of whiskey every week and gorge on fatty food all year."
The Friend: "My! That's something! How old are you?"
Old Lady: "26".
thescian | September 22, 2006A gravity well is a hole dug out in space for frogs to live in. No one knows who put the frogs in there. The well keeps the frogs inside and the frogs have been suspicious of Something Beyond for a while now. They've been trying hard to see the Outside. Unfortunately, even the most athletic ones that jump three feet high cannot get out of the well. Some of the more enterprising frogs have been trying to get out of the well using a Froget. A Froget is a two feet cylinder with gunpowder at one end and a brave frog wearing goggles at the other end. Most of the time the Froget has the right end…
thescian | September 18, 2006A few more days before we close the Scifi Short Story Contest. Thanks to Ramya for the nifty countdown javascript. Now, you can visit the scifi page and feel the urgency.
thescian | September 18, 2006What's a good age to start a business of your own? 10, that's what sez Intrepid at Everyday Entrepreneurs, a blog that I would gladly recommend to all.
thescian | September 12, 2006Contrary to my usual software updates posts where I post about updates to the blog software or to TheScian.com, this one is about the updates to the computers I use everyday. I use a PowerBook at home and a Dell Latitude with Windows XP at work. Due to a momentary lack of judgement on my part I upgraded the Adobe Acrobat Reader in the work machine to the latest version. Well, that did it. All hell broke lose. Everytime I reboot the machine, Acrobat would take over and download all of Adobe's products and would insist that I reboot once again. If I did reboot, the process would repeat again.…
thescian | September 12, 2006What drives readers away from a blog? Joyless and monomaniacal writing says James Lileks who blogs at The Daily Bleat. Mark Savage of the BBC is meeting bloggers.
James Lileks, a journalist from the American Mid West, has made an art of writing very funny and entertaining pieces on everyday subjects from bin bags to bagels.
His site is a brilliant example of what you can do on the internet, including his blog The Daily Bleat, a regular podcast from The Diner, home movies which you can download and a glorious collection of 1950s ephemera.
His advice is simple: "You can be joyless, you can be…
thescian | September 10, 2006Ramya and I went to the STOMP show yesterday in London Westend. The STOMP folks create rhythms out of everyday objects like brooms, sticks, sinks and such. I dig such performances where ordinary objects are transformed into artistic expressions. STOMP is in the same vein as the Blue Man Group (which is another great show to watch).
STOMP is a very high energy show with loads of ear splitting noise, gut spilling stomps, and palm numbing claps - all great fun, of course. I had my ears throbbing all night. I also had my neck permanently bent from yesterday after watching the whole show with…