I’ve been listening to a whole lot of music from Norwegian duo, Kings  of Convenience and off their second album Riot on an Empty Street, this is my favourite single repeat song, The Build Up, featuring Canadian singer Feist.

(Alright, I’m giving up on trying to fix the grammar and punctuation in  the previous sentence. It can’t be done. Besides, in a world where the dictionary now has the word unfriend in it  and people who write for a living don’t know the difference between the words your and you’re I think I spend waaay too much time obsessing about grammar and punctuation, so much that spelling mistakes throw me off when I’m reading ahem… erotica (I know, I know, waaaaaaaay too much information and for the nerds among us… a parentheses inside a parentheses but what can I say…. proper grammar is sexy!))

I almost forgot… Get the MP3 Here.

Music, Random, Rants Feist, grammar is sexy, Kings Of Convenience, Quiet is the New Loud, Riot on an Empty Street, single repeat song, The Build Up, unfriend

One of the upshots of the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ programs put into place by many countries (U.S.A, Germany, U.K., to name a few) to stimulate the economy and ‘save or create’ jobs is that thousands of perfectly decent cars (the ‘clunkers’ traded in) must be destroyed. This is one of the many videos of these clunkers being put to death that is floating around on ‘teh internets’, it looks like a late model Volvo S60 on death row. As part of the deal the car dealers accepting these cars as trade-ins must destroy them. They do this by putting either sulphuric acid or some sort of liquid glass compound into the cars’ engines which are first drained off of oil and then run them till they tear themselves apart.

But can anyone spot what is wrong with this video?

THIS CAR ISN’T A GODDAMN CLUNKER!

Read more…

Rants Cash for Clunkers, Jobs, Obama, S60, Save or Create, Volvo, Volvo being destroyed

So, a few days back the Delhi High Court sort of revoked Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. (it makes sodomy a crime, along with bestiality) And just my luck that I find myself in a new city, sitting in some old geezer’s house as the news channels whip themselves into a frenzy about how this will lead to people running amok in the streets, buggering anyone caught bending (Bad pun, I know)

So, the old geezer is one of those religious farts and he starts right off with his mini-polemic about how sodomy is a Sin and Unnatural according to the Bible and how the Delhi High Court has in one fell swoop, legalised bestiality too, the fools!

He carries on about the Pope (creepy picture above) and the Queen of England being the head of the church and both of them saying that this is deviant, unnatural behaviour (bestiality and sodomy) and he goes on and on and on….

Read more…

Rants Article 377 IPC, Church, Delhi High Court, douchebag, Gay People In India, Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI

Absolutely brilliant execution. Shame about the concept.

I caught a glimpse of this on television a few days back and was intrigued. I saw the full ad film today and I groaned.

Ironman meets the Transformers in a Nike ad? Why are the motorcycles playing basket-ball? Hasn’t ‘machines come to life when the guard isn’t looking’ been done to death? Did one of the bikes do the fucking moonwalk?

Have I been transported back to nineteen hundred and nintey two?

P.S. While on the subject of time travel, I just started reading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and it is freakin’ amazing, like most books that I read totally fuck-all abridged versions of when I was in school as part of the curriculum. No wonder kids don’t read.

Books, Films, Rants Bajaj, HG Wells, New Bajaj transformers TV spot, The Time Machine

Hi all (four of you). It’s been quite a while since I’ve done a proper post (the BS Youtube video posts don’t count) but sickness and a recce that keeps getting postponed over and over again have kept me from writing.

BTW if you’re wondering what my affliction was, I had/have a runny nose, a fever and the nerdiest of them all, an asthma relapse. That’s right ladies! They call me Sexx-Y! (Just like that catchy/crap song by ‘The Ting-Tings‘ that I can’t get outta my head, MP3 Here.)

So, the screenshot on the right with my retarded digital scrawl on it. Let me explain. I’ve posted about Google Analytics before. If you let Google put a bit of code on your web pages they will give you all kinds of interesting information about people who visit your site. For example, a listing of all the search terms people have keyed into Google that led them to this website.

So, the other day I was looking at the Google Analytics app on my iPod Touch (BTW, that app is so well made that I’ve stopped looking at the site on a computer) and amongst the many search strings that included the name of NDTV’s most famous anchor was the one you see here. Needless to say, my nose instantly wrinkled, my face contorted into a potty expression and a loud, involuntary EEEWWWWWWW! escaped my lips before I remembered that:

a> It isn’t nice to comment about how people look.

b> Specially for someone with a mug like mine.

c> Beauty is in the eye…  etc. etc. It takes all sorts to make up this planet and after all, people actually read this site, so there’s obviously no accounting for taste.

Anyway, I’ve walked around with that image in my mind for four days and now it is my gift to you. Enjoy!

Hell! At least it leads some credence to the frankly quite unbelievable stories that friends from NDTV have told me over the years.

So, in closing I shall say “Good for you Ms. Dutt!”

P.S. To the dude who keyed in the search term in question: I know who you are!

P.P.S. To Ms. Dutt: Mail me and I shall give you the dude’s contact info, you never know when you might need it….  and I won’t judge.

Also, on an unrelated note. I caught a glimpse of CNBC TV18 last night and some sardar journo had pitched a shoe at our honourable home minister, Mr. P. Chidambaram. I had/have two observations:

1> The surd in question throws like a girl. (But I shouldn’t talk)

2> Rajdeep Sardesai needs to switch to decaf. Seriously. For the entire three odd minutes that I could bear to watch, Mr. Sardesai looked and sounded like he had been given a chilli enema sometime between when he finished make-up and  when the bulletin started. I’m just sayin’

Music, Random, Rants barkha dutt, CNBC TV18, journalist pitcehs shoe at Chidambaram, journalist throws shoe at Chidambaram, NDTV, P Chidambram, Rajdeep Sardesai, That's Not My Name, The Ting Tings

Please don’t leave smart-arsed one liners about this blog being read exclusively by the women I’ve been with. Haa Haa, I’ve heard all of them before.

So, here’s why I haven’t posted in a few days. First off, I’m torn between:

The knowledge that I ought to post regularly if I want more readers on this blog. (To what end, I haven’t figured out yet.)

&

My long standing laziness and more recent apathy (maybe I’d go so far as to say misanthropy) to everything and everyone around me these days. Its hard to write when everything you see,hear and read about in the world around you either pisses you off or you don’t care enough about much anyways and would rather spend your time blasting away at endless hordes of zombies in Valve Studio’s latest PC game, Left4Dead, which by the way, is absolutely brilliant and deserves to be spoken about in a post of its own, but I digress.

Read more…

Random, Rants Left4Dead, Spammers, Valve

At this early point in El Presidenté’s (my nick name for Obama) first term there are already films calling him out on all the campaign promises he has reneged on and all the lobbyists and ex-banking motherfuckers he has filled his administration with. (Rahm Emmanuel anyone?)

For people not clued in to the conspiracy theories (for want of a better term), this film may seem to go off on the deep end about global banking agendas and a New World Order but even so, just the laundry list of promises (already) broken and shady back room deals makes for thoroughly interesting viewing.

Something for all you Obamabots to really think about and form an opinion that is actually your own, not the product of some fucking Facebook group.

Films, Rants Barack Obama, El Presidenté', facebook, New World Order, Rahm Emmanuel, The Obama Deception

Sorry for the bad grammar. But thats it. I can’t take it anymore. No more Times of India. I’m not paying a hundred bucks a month to look at a main paper that is filled with nothing but redundant, syndicated stories from the AP or Reuters and full-page, government adverts about what a great job it is doing and a supplement (Delhi Times) that is filled with bad pictures of wannabes and has-beens, only there for the free booze, at parties that are so lame that they have to pay for coverage. I mean seriously who are all these fuckers? Are we shipping them in from somewhere in trucks or something?

And the government adverts in the main paper? Sonia Gandhi, Shiela Dixit or some other cowherd-looking ‘government servant’ grinning at me idiotically from every second page and our ‘Health Minister’ Ramadoss-something-or-the-other’s mug on every third page. It makes my blood boil.

As a Delhiite, I harbour a particularly deep seated and vicious loathing for Dixit (Is she still Delhi’s CM?) Every time I’m stuck on the stretch of road with the fucking BRT corridor on it I curse her and the IIT dudes responsible for this mess in language that would make a sailor blush. I do it loudly, with the windows down. People nod and cheer.

And Ramadoss. Jesus, what is this dude’s fucking problem anyways? Why is he so desperate to get his mug in the papers and on television everyday? Will someone just give him a two bit role in a South Indian film and let him get it outta his system? First he fucks with AIIMS, then he wants to outlaw smoking, now he wants to outlaw alcohol. Let me just say this to him.

THE COMMON PEOPLE NEED THEIR VICES MR. HEALTH MINISTER. IT’S THE ONLY THING KEEPING US FROM RUNNING WILD IN THE STREETS AND LYNCHING GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS.

That goes double for Dixit and the Gandhis. And you politicians know where you can stick those adverts too.

So anyways, no more Times of India. It pisses me off too much nowadays (as you can see). Between The Indian Express and The Hindustan Times I think I’m killing enough trees as it is. The news is filled with stories of how print newspapers are dying. I say it can’t happen fast enough.

Random, Rants AP, BRT, BRT corridor, Delhi, Delhi CM, douchebag, gandhi, Hindustan Times, Indian Health Minister, Ramadoss, Ramadoss vs. AIIMS, Reuters, Shiela Dixit, Sonia Gandhi, The Indian Express, The Times Of India

I consider myself a pretty nerdy, techy guy. I’ve been around computers for twenty years now. I’ve built computers for friends, worked in tech support, I can edit video and audio with ease. Yesterday, to test the performance of a new hard drive I disassembled this laptop. Twice.

So why the fuck is it that in all my days I have NEVER found a single text editor that doesn’t make me want to throw the computer I’m using out the window? Am I specially-abled or something? Am I fucking retard? 

I’ve tried them all. Microsoft Word is the most vile of the lot, every now and then when I’m stuck on a Windows machine and confronted with doing any writing on it, my scalp tingles. So many years of Word crashing on me after I have slaved over some writing for hours has left me with an instinctual, feral, aversion to it. Oh and by the way, the fine folks at Microsoft that designed the ‘Autosave’ feature in Word? Please mail me for my home address so you can come over here and kiss my arse.  

Even simple stuff like dragging a margin or creating a hanging indent in Word damn near drives me to tears. Word on the Mac is better by an infinitesimally small amount. Geez. 

Open Office sucks too but I’ve always lived by the adage that you get what you pay for and Open Office is free. My point proven.

Apple’s Pages is bearable, until you start getting adventurous with the formatting at which point all bets are off. Also you usually have to export your work into the de-facto Word Format (so the 99% of the world not using a Macintosh can read your opus) which is another crap-shoot.

And now there’s a new joy in my life. WordPress! For the most part I still use the online interface. It’s actually that good, even for an old school ‘apps for everything‘ dude like myself. Except for the text editor.

Now and then when I’m making a post WordPress will decide to totally fuck with me by adding a line-feed where I don’t want it or right justifying something I want left justified. The previous post was an example. After half an hour of trying, I gave up on getting WordPress to format the post the way I wanted. I rewrote the entire post from scratch and this isn’t the first time this has happened. Brought to my goddamn knees by some HTML and some javascript. Pathetic.

So. Can anyone please tell me, why is a self-confessed ubergeek like myself flummoxed by what are essentially fucking text editors on steroids? Anyone?

Rants, Tech apple, I hate MS Word, Microsoft, MS Word Sucks, Open Office, Pages, Text editors suck, Wordpress

This is the new Microsoft OS for Smart-phones (for those masochists who don’t get enough of the awesome ‘Windows Experience™’ on their computers. Thwaack! Thank you sir! May I have another?)

Notice how even in the demo the phone isn’t actually doing anything.

Oh and BTW! My favourite part of all this? This might be Microsoft’s answer to the Apple iPhone. It’s iPhone killer as it were.

And what have they called it? The MyPhone! LOL. This shit just writes itself! I don’t even have to try with stories about these monkeys.

Thank you for coming ladies and gentlemen. Don’t forget to tip your waitresses. I’m here all week.

Random, Rants, Tech apple, iphone, Microsoft, MyPhone