Flickering thoughts

I use a gmail account. I blog on a google owned site. I regularly use google docs. Google search is of course a given. But enough is enough now. At this rate, google is going to take over the world. In my scathing (not really, but cool word, so there!) counter attack to google, I've signed up to Flickr.

You've probably guessed by now that the first part of most of my posts is generally meaningless. So yes, the real reason why I chose flickr over picasa. Simple. Flickr is intuitive, better managed and has a superior layout. And the most important thing. I can middle click images on flickr. I hate picasa more than anything else because it won't let me middle click and open many images in different tabs. I mean, WHATS YOUR PROBLEM, GOOGLE? IS IT WRONG TO OPEN A COUPLE OF IMAGES SIMULTANEOUSLY FROM THE SAME ALBUM IN DIFFERENT TABS? And those of you who tell me to open two instances of picasa and do what I like, zur Hölle gehen.

So yes, I like flickr because I can middle click. Go figure.

Oh yes, the link. Here it is.

Foot in Mouth Disease

Foot in mouth disease is a dreadful thing. Symptoms include talking before you think, blabbering nonsense, unintentionally revealing things that must not be revealed, etc. Now take the example of Abba (yes, of KrackJack fame). On the way back from GMRT, we were having lunch at a highway dhaba. The whole bunch of us had been divided across two tables. Abba and a couple of other guys sat at one table with a bunch of girls, while our table had mostly guys, with a sssssolitary girl. Abba's table was finished with lunch much earlier than ours, but the guys at that table were still hungry. So they hopped over to our table.

Now Abba is a jolly nice chap, who like most ten year olds, imagines himself to be a noble king one day, a resolute knight the other, a brave pirate hunter the next and so on (there is the small problem - the fact that Abba is all of nineteen, not ten, but since he's a nice chap we'll overlook that). On that day, (probably influenced by the number of girls surrounding him) he decided that he would be the Pirate Hunter. Like I said, Abba hopped over to our table halfway through lunch. He must've thought that a proclamation of the state of affairs would go rather nicely with the whole Pirate Hunter thing. But a simple 'I'm coming over there to join you guys' just would not do, would it? Of course not! So he said:
Abba : My seamen have deserted me!
Enthu (eating, bursts out laughing) : WHAT? HAHAHHAHAHAHA
Me (eating) : What? What seamen are you talking about? (to enthu) What on earth is he talking about?
Enthu : HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Me : * Puzzled *
Abba : * Puzzled *
Enthu : HAHAHAHAHAHAHA... Pune Mirror Page twenty-five... HAHAHA
Me : What in the blue hel... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Abba : * Still puzzled *
Me : Pune mirror page twenty-five HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Abba : Arre what's going on here?
Enthu : We are verry sorry, but we cannot help yo...HAHAHAHA
VRD (Realisation dawns upon him) : Arre sheesh... hahahaha
Me : hahahahahaha
Abba : * Still extremely puzzled *
VRD : Arre its just a difference in the stress on pronunciation... like say - please and plizz.
Abba (Now, finally out of the storm) : Oh god! NO!

We continued laughing for a while after that, all of which cannot be captured on this blog.

Will Durant once said, 'One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.' To put it in simpler words (for the benefit of Abba), 'A closed mouth gathers no foot.' Pay attention Abba, pay attention!

Credits
I cannot leave the credits out. This post here ONLY by public demand. The public in question is anu, from here (Yes, only her (and her only, even though that's wrong english)). Form your own opinions. The greySith has said (and laughed) enough.

Salt In My Wounds

You've probably heard the old proverb about how 'rubbing salt into one's (no offence to enthu) wounds' is a bad idea. Well. My doctor did just this. He rubbed Copper Sulphate into an open wound in my thumb. He's not a maniac or anything (despite the fact that he rides a red bike with the registration number painted in a manner akin to dripping blood ). I've had this weird muscle growth around my thumb, and he used the blue vitriol to kill the growth. Now, having rubbed CuSO4 rubbed into my wounds, I am officially the coolest person on the planet. MUHAHA!

Off to GMRT

GMRT. That's Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope for those of you who don't know. It's the world's largest metrewave radio telescope. We went there last friday to have a look. I'd initially thought that the radio dishes were fairly small. I was horribly mistaken of course, and the realisation dawned upon me when I saw this.



'What it do?', you might ask, if you actually like the song by Li'l Flip and Mannie Fresh. The sane ones, though, tend to wonder what it does, and how. So I'll tell you. There are thirty dish antennae like the one you've just seen, set up in a Y shaped array. This behaves like a very large receptor for radio waves. These radio waves are broken down and processed. What you get is a picture of the universe (or you, if you somehow manage to hang in front of the array for long enough), in the radio band. Radio waves travel through dust clouds, so you can actually see behind stellar obstructions. Additionally, radio telescopes are active twenty-four hours a day, as compared to the total darkness required by optical telescopes. Fascinating stuff, such as pulsars, has been discovered by use of radio astronomy.

We visited the control room, from which the entire array is, err, controlled. There was this massive server there, that we have grand plans for. We plan to use it as a large bandwidth gaming server. No really. Why do you laugh?

As usual, there was also the major distraction. Photography. Very conveniently, the site
had approximately infinite scenes that make for brilliant photography, but time only allowed for a few snaps. Here are a couple.

Star Party

You can accuse me of not updating the blog regularly, but no court is really going to hold that accusation up, so HA! Anyway, we'd gone to a village called Pusane for a star party (Go here, if you want to know what a star party is). We set up our telescopes (shop?) on the outskirts of the village to eliminate the modest street lighting.

Oh wonder of wonders! What a sky we saw that night. I, a veteran (not really, but it sounds cool) of three star parties, well past the jaw drop factor that accompanies a fabulous sky, still ended up looking up to the heavens with a sagging jaw. Apologies to you, since it seems the camera shook just a little, but have a look anyway:


Then of course, there was the tea. We were the organisers (again, not really, but it sounds cool to use big important sounding words), so we had to ensure that everybody else got tea. Someone conveniently forgot to bring fuel for the stove, and we were left to make do with this:


Ah well, you can't have it all. And as Darth Sidious (once, famously) said, 'Do what must be done. Do not hesitate, show no mercy'. Forty-five minutes, a few burnt maths assignments, lots of burnt hay (we burned hay when the sun didn't shine), some unburnt wood later, we actually had palatable tea. The whole process was rather complicated, but head over here, if you still want the gory details.

On our way back, I encountered what has to be one of the best sunrises I've seen in a long long time. Does this substantiate my claim?


It was fun, and you can contact me (only through the force, lower forms of communication not entertained) if you want to join us the next time we go.