Immersed!

That's me working in Immersive Virtual Reality a while ago!

 Almost Minority Report, ain't it?!

Posted for 

Thursday photo contest

Four!

Tonight, a blog turned Four in the blogger world!

And with all the wonderful friends made,

There is every reason to celebrate.

I was on and off on the blogosphere ever since I started blogging. But, the past three months were the most gratifying moments as a blogger because of all the support I've received. Wish to make up for those lost days in hiatus by blogging without any break ever!

Vee

Will the father fail?

Ram Singh, a single father to two sons and a daughter, belongs to lower middle class. He used to look after his family by farming in the small piece of land he inherited from his father. His youngest son has a health problem since birth, and it would cost Ram Singh a little more for his son's medicines. But that's no reason for him to worry since it's nothing beyond what he earns. Very recently, the father chose to invest his money in a business in an attempt to provide better quality of life to his children.

All in good intention, the father decided to use all his savings. Slowly, the investment to start his own business was turning out to be more than expected. He had to sell his land and started borrowing amount from many places. He had to also cut down what he would use for his youngest son's medicines. Only in a hope that everything would come back to a better place once his business starts.

But it wasn't as easy as it should be. The father did not foresee all different problems he could face. Life is a bitch. The not so friendly local politicians would not let the things happen smoothly. Only with more money he could achieve what he had dreamed of. Now, with all his saving gone and with nothing to spare for medicines for his son, Ram Singh is broke. So are the kids. The kid with health problem is now bed ridden, and only timely medicines can get him back to normalcy. Did the father fail? Was his decision wrong? Should he have not dreamed of a better life when he was good at what he was?

It's not a huge amount that he requires to get his small business running. Chipping in a little amount from our side is all it takes to make his life better. All he needs is a little support from you and me. I'm ready to support and to not let the father fail! Are you?

Yeah, I've been talking about the whole Common Wealth Games scenario. The father is the country and the ill son is the poor population. How the father had to sacrifice medicines for his ill son simply reflects on how being a host to CWG effects the poor in our country. Instead of investing in eliminating poverty directly, the government chose to spend money by becoming a host which would further increase the taxes on the common man. But, the negative effect on the poor is expected to be only for a short period since this whole thing is worked out on a wonderful revenue model. Had it not been for the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, the country is expected to profit a lot from being the host. I feel India, currently, is in a deep confusion which puts pressure in projecting itself as  a developed country while we still are developing one step at a time. Unknowingly and unfortunately, this creates the  scenarios for India-Bharat divide, the divide between urban and rural. Between the rich and the poor. And it is this confusion that wants to see ourselves as a capable country by becoming host to such a grand event. Had it all turned out the way it should have. Had it not been for all the corruption!

One thing we can do is to shed the negative vibes and the bad publicity. All it requires is our support as citizens. We had done it by uniting against terrorism earlier, and now we can do it again by supporting the event and sharing the positive energy. Please don't let the father fail!

PS: You can support the post on Indivine at Indiblogger and help it reach more people.

Motorcycle escapades and life

With wind in your hair,

Experience the bliss with

Power and Freedom

In the past, I've written lots of posts on going in and around Bangalore. Now, every time I see these funky guys on their funky motorcycles in the US, it reminds me how much I miss those good old days! This post is dedicated to Bangalore and the days I had fun exploring Bangalore on my motorcycle. The picture was shot on the way to Devarayanadurga.

Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear! How true with life! The road to impossible is very far and without a sign. But, have a look at it through a mirror of hope. Everything seems a little closer, and the task a little lighter making your life a little brighter!

 For
Thursday Photo contest
&

Socialize for Caffeine

I'm not writing about attending meetings and events for free coffee. I know there are quite some grad students among the readers of the blog, and I know it's totally worthwhile writing about free food event experiences. :D

But now, if you want to read more about Heisenberg Food Uncertainty Principle or Opponent-process theory of Free Food or the pros and cons of different types of free foods, then you are redirected to this hilariously written article.

Coming back to what I wanted to write is how socializing will be important for your blog. Socializing in the context of our blogs is social bookmarking your articles by posting the links on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Stumble Upon and what not! Phew! By doing all this we in a way do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For those of us who want to be known, published and read by more people than ever before, doing this now is more important since Google has changed its crawling technique. And they call their new page indexing method Caffeine, at least that is their code name which the general public are expected not to care about. If you still wonder about the reason for that name, I can say that it's the outcome of Google techies after lots of caffeine consumption during meetings and coding times. Well, may be every product of theirs is but with this they might want to show their gratitude to coffee.

With Facebook's huge investment in Hadoop targeting real time analytics with a latency of few seconds, Google now tries to optimize their multi-layered architecture of their indexing mechanism. Caffeine is said to work better for blogs and media content, in finding relevant search results from social media for the search queries to keep up with Facebook, Twitter and other social websites. And this makes our blog entries show up better if the links to our webpages are updated on social media and book marking websites. Here is an excerpt from Google's blog post announcing this new technique:

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.

Now, this change sure comes with some things to remember:

• Earlier indexing method used "meta keyword" HTML tag in the web pages while looking for relevant content. With Caffeine, it's the density of the words.
• High quality inbound links, original content and uniqueness, as always, has their share of importance with Caffeine too.
• The speed at which your page loads is an important factor for Google Caffeine. This is something I need to work on for my blog page also.
• Age of your site or blog also plays an important role with this new technique.

On the concluding note, Google Caffeine works better for bloggers since it is faster in indexing our content. But, with the increasing content it gets difficult for your page to be among the results of a search query unless you write with more focus on content. Carving a niche for your self become more important than ever before.

Adios,

Vee...

How dependent are you on Internet?

What would you do if on one fine day all you encounter is "Page not found" or "Error 404" no matter what page you try to access? How would you react? How dependent are you on the Internet?

To maintain all my monetary transactions and to split my bills with my friends and flatmates, I use a web based online tool. And very recently the site went down. Although, I'm still not sure if the site would ever be.working again and if I will get my information back. And this left me thinking about the loads of information we share on the Internet. What if, one day we can NOT access any of that information? To make it worse, what would happen if all the information falls in the wrong hands? Scary, ain't it!

And there is another aspect to this topic. Is your dependence on Internet addictive? How much time do you spend on Internet (Facebook, Orkut and what-not) even if you don't have to? I came across this funny yet sensible article by a university counseling center which talks about Internet Addiction Disorder on the similar lines of Excessive Compulsive Disorder. (Also see this fun and informative web page dedicated to Internet Addiction.)

Have you ask yourself lately if you are addicted to Internet?

~Vee

Impression that wouldn't fade

Frozen Memory

Of her radiant beauty

In that morning shine

They say its a small world, but is it really? Certain memories never fade out, they make an indelible impression on you. Those little chats during morning run time, and those endless discussions about likes and dislikes. Its been more than two years and I still feel the same sense of void. All it needs to figure out the turbulence inside me is one rendezvous, for I'm not sure what it's all about. Samhita!

For the next three months, every morning I would go to that park in Jeevanbheema Nagar. I would also not forget to cross by her house on my way back and from work. Later, I moved from Bangalore to the US. But it isn't easy for me to move on from her thoughts. Every morning I plug-in my iPod, the same one I used while jogging in Bangalore, and start for jogging. But, going on runs doesn't interest me anymore. I just find a chair in the park and get lost in thoughts.

"We can express these meanings in many ways... through art, music... or dance", she said panting while taking small strides in the park area. 

I just nodded giving my affirmative smile and said, "Yeah!"

"Mind..... begins.... expectation..."

Not all the words she would speak enter my head, as I used to get lost looking at her expressions and excitement she would show while making a point.

"Interesting"

"By projecting our ideas..............", after a pause she said, "Why don't you something more than that? Are you listening?", giving me that look and smile. Ah! That smile.

That was our last conversation as I remember. She would talk a lot about human mind. May be she studied psychology. Sometimes about music, and I would talk about my guitar classes. She was more the melody types but I think she also followed pop. Definitely an intelligent and confident girl who knows what she wants. Thinking of the petty arguments we had still brings a smile on my face. She would walk away after an argument, only to show up the next day at the usual time. I always suspected that she faked her anger, but never had a chance to ask her.

With increase in the use of Facebook and Orkut, I make it a point to search the word combination "Samhita Sharma" every once in a while only to not find any relevant results. At times the thought of something fateful happening to her also crops up in my head, and that gives me shivers. May be I will come across her soon sometime and get a chance to ask her the reason for turbulence inside me. After all, its a small world. Isn't it?

P.S.: An extension to my fictional work I posted more than two years ago - "One fine day"

Also for

Return

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 14; the fourteenth edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

Sliver of hope and
Stillness in heart, I return.
Strong and confident!

Vee...

P.S.1: Thoughts on my mind inversely proportional to words on my post.

P.S.2: This picture was clicked by my friend Sri. Do check his wonderful creations.

The fellow Blog-a-Tonics who took part in this Blog-a-Ton and links to their respective posts can be checked here. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

Resurrection

Phoenix from ashes;

Moth to butterfly. I wish

leaders are for trust!

Image Courtesy

Written for

~Vee...

War, peace and the side effects

Just a few hours ago while I was traveling in the local bus, I became the subject of a strange situation. Although I was expecting such a thing to happen sometime, I was quite shocked when it actually happened. I happen to grow my beard a little longer than usual these days. And today I was asked by my fellow passenger in the bus to not blow away the bus with a bomb. At first I thought he was kidding and laughed back in response, but he kept on saying that for about 6 - 8 times until he got down the bus. He said its okay for him if I trigger the bomb I was supposedly carrying after he leaves the bus. To add to my shock, a bunch of other people around me were laughing when all this was happening. Not sure if this incident comes under racial abuse or whatever but it really disturbed me for sometime. And it really left me thinking how many others face this scenario in their lives and how disturbed they get.

And this made me think about the chicken and egg kind of question, but in this case it's easy to find answers. Did terrorism start first or greed? More specifically in the context of USA, did terrorism against them start first or did their greedy nature to become oil power of the world by saving natural resources in their land and declaring war on Oil rich countries? I think it is the latter case. After all the damage has been done in Iraq, thanks to Bush and other masterminds, Obama has taken up the job of scavenger to clean the mess made by his predecessors. Listen to Obama's speech from the Oval office about declaring the end of Iraq war. But is the war over yet? 

Will it be the same to all those who lost their loved ones on both the sides? And, with the situation gone so far will there ever be peace? To me, when I think of this whole war situation I feel the fire was light and fuel was added. And, its just the matter of time to let the fire rage! 

~Vee...

P.S.1: Not thinking of giving up on my beard look yet! 

P.S.2: Thinking of reading War and Peace which I've been putting off since years.