I almost forgot I had a blog! I’m not sure if this is worth writing about, but who cares. Blogs are for such BS.

Winter is officially over. So what? there’s still snow up there! So yesterday we went for a short snow-boarding trip to Aizu in Fukushima. Its around 200km form here, which makes it *perfect* to slip in a movie.
On a similar trip two weeks ago we saw this Oscar winner Okuribito (Departures). Sad and funny at the same time but good movie. The other one was The World of Golden Eggs Vol 3 and 4 DVD.

This week someone turned up with two new DVDs ^^

1) CROWS zero 2

Trailer:

and

2) Hancock

Trailer:

Both of em could be categorized as action movies. Ok, Hancock has a little bit of SF going on, but then the long haired Japanese guys are doing some super-human flying kicks too!
Frankly speaking, I’m not into manga. So I find it extremely difficult to relate to Japanese movies, which are mostly based on manga (anime) characters. One more thing that I fail to understand is what makes these movies so uncool for me. Look at the lead characters of Crows. Thin, small, loads of attitude, long haired guys (supposedly portraying high school kid characters!) This guy Oguri Shun is apparently one of the coolest guys out here (Facing tough competition form Kimutaku and Arashi. Cool? Tell me why!  ). In almost every scene in the movie he’s either looking down or  up in the sky. He never stands upright (almost as if theres something up his a**) On this DVD there was a trailer of this movie called Yatterman. I think I’d have to shoot myself if I have to watch something so stupid. I’m not against Anime, but real people as anime characters? No.

I, like most normal people, grew up watching Hollywood movies and in spite of Hancock being a very bad movie, I still think Will Smith is a cool guy. I wonder what Japanese people think of him.

And not to forget Bollywood. I’m not sure if I’ve seen more of Bollywood or Hollywood, but yeah we do have some cool looking guys back in India too ^^;
Here’s an example. Hrithik Roshan. What say? Though he may not be able to act very well, he can dance pretty well!

Disclaimer: This post might seem to be a lil bit gay to some of you, but don’t worry, i’m fine. Its about coolness, not guys. AND I wanted to test MacJournal too. A better looking blog is in the making. I’m already sick of this dark theme.

Regards,
Ady

I'm gonna talk about Twitter and social networks in general over here.

As some of you may know, I have been fairly active on social networks such a Facebook, Twitter, mixi, etc. I agree these are a major time wasters and writing this post itself is utter stupidity. But, something happened in the last two days which I think should be written down. That's the only way I'm gonna get over it.

On Twitter, I follow some very awesome people. Though I have never met most of them, some of them do regularly engage in fairly interesting debates. In spite of following so many amazing people, I do miss friends of Twitter. Most of my friends are still busy playing FarmVille on Facebook. So I do regularly run a search on my gmail address book to check if anyone else has jumped on the bandwagon. Last week I found a Japanese colleague! His Keitai (Mobile) address somehow landed up in my gmail address book! As he had just started tweeting a few days ago, I immediately followed him and said hello. He doesn't follow anyone and probably has on idea what an @ reply is. So yesterday I told him about the discovery and he seemed to be pretty shocked about it. He said things like 個人情報がばれちゃいましたね (My private information has leaked).

Second incident.

I follow this bot @unfollowr. It does simply one thing, sends you a DM when someone unfollows you. Generally consists of other spam bots whose accounts get deleted and some people who are annoyed by my tweets ^^;. This time it was a friend (at least i thought of her as a friend!). I had noticed that she had been consistently ignoring my replies for a month or so. So I left a blunt final reply saying a little more than 'thank you'. Again, she was shocked that I even noticed her unfollowing me. A while ago I received a looooooong mail explaining the whole deal about why she unfollowed me. I'm not complaining about that part. Things happen. People change. Understandable.

My problem is that the culprit here is Twitter (Japan).

Both these people tweet solely from their Keitais (Mobile phones) and have no idea what kinda stuff the Twitter API is capable of. The part where Twitter breaks the rules of social networking in Japan is the Address Book Search feature. To the best of my knowledge, none of the major social networking sites have this kind of feature. Recently some have started 'suggesting' friends, but address book search is just a no no! I bet the Keitai interface of twitter (twtr.jp) doesn't even have this feature. Can someone confirm this? I only have an iPhone ^^;
Even facebook has a similar problem. Out there its worse! Pictures are involved. And no one has a clue of things like Privacy Settings!

Thanks to this, I just lost the trust of two people I thought were my friends. In my book of rules, if you cant accept me on a silly social network, how the hell can you be a friend in real life!? Screw you!

As @mona says on her blog, I don’t care who you are, what you do, who you know, or where you come from. Here – the Internet – we are all the same: pixels

I know this is a stupid post. Eff you twitter. Eff you Facebook. Long live email!

Ady

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Keeping aside the work culture thing, the real reason behind writing this was probably cutting costs. People here invariably tend to take it easy and work into the late hours of the night. Coz apart from managers and senior engineers, everyone gets paid overtime. So if you don’t have any plans for the weekend, go to work n get paid to watch YouTube. Sick but true.

(The words written in the cloud are, 集中して頑張ります, I shall concentrate and work hard. ). Only today ^^

Ady

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Long time no see 久しぶりですね！

Seems this guy, Arun Krishnan, has been podcasting weekly since 2006. Even if you are an Indian with MA in Hindi, I’m  very much sure you’ll enjoy this podcast….Unless you hate Bollywood Movies But who does ?? I wonder if theres an an episode covering the dialogues of Gunda

Episode 90. Vampires. by Arun Krishnan
Download now or listen on posterous

Episode 90. Vampires..mp3 (8070 KB)

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Came across an interesting brochure a few days ago. You might have also heard about the Honda Insight, which is technically similar to the Prius, it is still a Hybrid (to a certain extent). And it has been selling like hot cakes out here in Japan. I also believe it is a prettier car.  And someone is surely not happy about it ^^

Shown below is the brochure of Toyota Prius. They have tried to explain the working of a hybrid car. And why the Insight is not a real hybrid. They claim (indirectly), that it is a Mild Hybrid. If you believe in this brochure, you’d say, the Insight is cheap, but its cheap for a reason!

It seems Honda was not happy about this stupefying move by Toyota. I’m not exactly sure what happened between the two of them, but looking at another copy of the brochure today, guess what I noticed ?

Only one page had changed !

Anyway, I’m not a big fan of Hybrid Cars. I’ve watched every episode of Top Gear at least 5 times over, how can you expect me to like Hybrid Cars ?? Remember when Jeremy raced an M3 with a Prius, and ended up getting better mileage on the M3 ? It’s more about ‘How’ you drive, rather than ‘What’ you drive.

以上。

Ady

Its so small …. anyway I don’t wanna start complaining now. This was supposed to be a happy post

Compared to the earlier one, my new dorm is at a now a whole 3km away from work! The earlier one was so near, I could be in my seat within 10 minutes of waking up! Not that I ever tried doing that

Anyway, its been one week of commuting, have had surprisingly wonderful weather for the entire week. Used the car just for a day, and till it gets freakin cold I’m gonna stick to my mountain bike for a while.

Caught this wonderful sunset on my first evening in the new place. Wish to see more of these in the future ^^

Anyway, coming back to the main subject, the past few days, commuting to work has been a real pleasure. Day before yesterday, I attached my camera to my bike and shot this video. Should give a nice idea how rural
japan (Inaka/田舎) looks like. But seriously, perfect blue sky, with not a single cloud, this happens one once or twice a year.

this was taken on my new fujifilm F70EXR.

BTW, I did tweak this a little bit in iMovie ‘09. Not much though, just 5 minutes worth on editing. The rendering and uploading part did take a lot more! Will upload this to Vimeo later. Just wanna check the video quality.

Someday, I have to do this with Tokina 11-16 f2.8 on my 5D Mark II. Only problem is the camera costs a little more than 10 times my bike, and I need to find some good way to fix it to the bike. The added weight is surely gonna make it a slower ride

Finally, I’d like to add that my inspiration for this video was this one, shot by Sam from daily dose of imagery. Amazing blog !

Biking with 5D Mark II from Sam Javanrouh on Vimeo.

Testing the Canon 5D Mark II with a super wide angle lens while biking on King street and Yonge street in Toronto. Unfortunately it started raining and a raindrop on my wide lens ruined the second half of the shot.
This was shot a few weeks ago and was before Canon release the Manual Exposure firmware. It’ll be interesting to test different shutter speeds for this now.

Anyway, bye for now, have a lot to do …

以上

Ady

  
Posterous rocks !

  
どぅも。

 今日マジ疲れた。

 仕事でもこんなに疲れたことないわ。

 部屋の片付け一通り終わった。

 今インターネットない。

 マックは生きてるからとりあえず、写真を携帯に入れられた。

 今部屋はこんな状態です。

See and download the full gallery on posterous

音楽を聴くか寝る事以外なにも出来ない。
 
明日９時から引っ越しスタート。
 
一番の心配なのは、５人でも持てないテレビ、どうやって運ぶか。
 
引っ越し会社の人たちも結構Dちゃん系多いから、レアルで持てな い可能性がある。
 
今日、ひたちなかで新しく出来た、「なか卯」でご飯食べてきた。
 
ダッカルビっていう奴。

See and download the full gallery on posterous

昼はちょっとまずいインド料理。
 
やっぱらんがる最高！
 
明日また、お疲れモードの一日だと思いますが、頑張ろう！
 
インターネットない本当に切ないね。
 
iPhoneあるけどね。遅いよ！
 
じゃ、そろそろ寝よかぁ。
 
以上
 
Ady
 
PS: this is polarized ciggy ↓
 
Nice app, give it a try

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 Back in college days, made this stupid Line tracing robot . Th event was Vishwatronix ‘08.

 Most of it was junk though. A Tiffin box, Stepper Motors from Juna Bazar (Pune), and some Toy wheels.

 I remember we were very keen on fixing Blue LEDs in it.

 While making this, we forgot that it was a ‘Race’. Rather than speed, concentrated more on the accuracy.

 However, Vishwatronix being a home event for our college, we did manage to convince the judges to give us the second prize.

 Damn, I need to do more of this stuff ! College was fun. Most of it.

 Project partners in this were Pushkar Sambhoos and Mihir Wagh. Anybody else I’m forgetting here ?

that reminds me, its 2009!
 
getting old eh :-/
 
以上。
 
Ady

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