Karthik Vishwanath's Aphorisms

Artist in Me

2009-11-15T09:21:00.001-08:00

I had a little dream once of becoming a painter or a cartoonist. However, paintings and drawings never bothered to turn its head towards me. My interst level in drawing grew when I bought my new laptop - tx US 2510. The Stylus that comes with this laptop helps you to directly scribble on monitor as you would on a paper.

And then once I stumbled across this site - drawing lessons which provided step by step education on how to draw for rookies.I just found myself a new hobby and a good way to come out of facebook and spend some useful time. Check out below some of my artistic works.

India Shining

2009-11-15T08:43:00.000-08:00

Remember, this was the election campaign tag of BJP. I do not know whether India was really shining during that time. However, I can say that per capita income of the country is raising. Let me substantiate.

I had been to thirumala this weekend though I knew this was a bad time to plan the trip especially knowing the formation of LPA over camorin which is the cause of cyclonic storm Phyan. This made me feel that we can have quicker dharshan. However, I was absolutely wrong. Phyan or katrina, people will always be there.

We did not want to risk ourselves standing in the normal dharshan queue waiting for hours to get dharshan. And for those people like us, they have Seegra (speical) dharshan queue which was obviously costlier than normal. So we got tickets and entered the seegra dharshan. To our horror, there was a huge toll of people standing in the same queue that I went back and confirmed with security that this is indeed special dharshan queue.

We waited for half an hour and the queue started moving slowly. When we were finding it difficult to take a step, some 5 people started running in the adjecent pathway. And the pathway is nothing but normal dharshan.Surprisingly the same thing happened at thiruchaanoor, kalahasthi and thiruthani.

India is shining. Time is money and people are ready to fritter for want of more time. its nothing wrong with this mentality. However, its an issue when all people think alike.

So whats the way out for this???

Mystry behind a country's recession

2009-02-11T15:03:00.000-08:00

March of 2009 is not going good for this country's economy. There has been a big slump in the profit of many goods across the county. To start with, San Andesito looks deserted. A deep slump in sales has been reported there. Unilago has been indefinitely closed due to heavy loss incurred during march.
There was also a marginal decrease in the profit of transmillinea across the city. Coffee production has been totally suspended in the World's best-coffee production house. People are sleeping at Emerald Trade centre. No transactions are taking place at Ban Colombia, Citibank, and the Cambios. Rothello, Luna, Cuarto piso are closed for some time. There is a big drop in profit for MacD also.

The president is baffled by the sudden drop in Economy that he ordered a consultation with Merrillynch and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

No reason could be found behind this mystery. The only thing that they were able to deduce after a month long analysis is that 30 foreigners had left Colombia two months back.

The Mystery still Continues...

Behind the scenes of my First onsite trip

2008-08-10T06:25:00.000-07:00

The flight's at 6:25 PM and I was on my way to the airport. It was my first flight journey and I can feel the enthusiasm and fear inside my stomach. I had never been to mumbai and all through my travel to the airport, thoughts and plans prevailed in my mind as to how I am going to pass the three days in a big city where I am not much used to the language and culture.

I got down from the taxi and reached airport when all of a sudden I got a call from my project manager. Is he calling me back because of some defect in my module ? Is he going to cancel my trip?

PM : Karthik, are you in the airport ?
Me : yes
PM : okie. You are going to travel to colombia.Give me your passport number.
Me : me ? well..actually..
PM : no second thoughts. Its a very big project and great oppurtunity..blah..blah..blah..

And finally I boarded the flight. And for the next three days, thoughts and plans prevailed my mind as to how I am going to pass the days in a remote unknown country where I was never used to the language and the culture.

Unity of Minds

2007-07-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

"Eleven men,
Hiding behind the rocky outcrop of a barren ridge,
Twelve thousand feet above sea level,
And listening to a commentry of a match played at Old Trafford in Manchester.
The war seems forgotton,
As Sachin comes to bat.
Indians, the world is full of flag waving nationalism "

- As we are approaching our 60th Independence, just remembered this master piece from the independence day speech, I made 8 years back.

Happy VIYA year

2006-04-15T00:29:00.000-07:00

I came to know from one of my collegue’s blog that this tamizh new year is going to be called ‘VIYA’ year. So,

EN ENIYA VIYA AANDU NAL VAZHTHUKKAL

It is said that the tamizh yearly calendar follows a sixty year cycle. After the completion of sixty years, the calendar starts again from the first year again. The calendar cycle, which we are in presently now, started with ‘PRABHAVA’, which started in 1987. We are currently in the 20th year of the cycle. The calendar cycle ends with ‘AKSHAYA’ in 2047.

Let this viya year go well for everyone and win in all the resolutions they make.
It seems, new years are the traditional time to take up resolutions. I hope that atleast this year, I should try hard to keep up the resolutions I made. Every year, I make a new resolution, I never care to live up to it. Finally I got fed up with these that last new year, I resolved to make no more resolutions. But later when I thought, I felt that a resolution is a challenging goal, a kind of detailed plan for accomplishing something, a resolve and determination to be something different. So people should definitely should take up this new year day as an oppurtunity to assess themselves and resolve to change themselves.One of the small goals I set is to keep this blog updating.

So once again wishing you a very happy tamizh new year.

see you soon..

Get Beaned

2005-10-15T03:49:00.000-07:00

Yet another apathetic day in the office and I started home by around 10:30 PM. Its a 10 minute drive to my home and its really cool riding my Streethawk over Gemini flyover during nights when there is not much traffic. I always feel like forgiving everyone when I fly my bike. Once I reach home, I relax myself watching some comedy shows in KTV or Raj TV. I always preferred vivek or vadivelu rather than kaundamani.. I had to wait untill one of my favourite program featuring Mr. Rowan Atkinson in my favourite channel POGO.

THUD!!! Mr. Bean falls from the sky as the play starts in this way. One thing I like about him is his physical comedy with very little dialogue. The humour largely comes from his original and most complicated solutions to simple problems and his total disregard for others, his pathetic behaviour, sympathetic face expressions,innocent walking style; often seems unaware of the basic aspects of the way, the world works. One of my favourite is Mr. Bean taking exams. His Show-Off character stands out large when he tries to compete with others. There is a one particular scene when his collegue takes out a pen, pencil and rubber to get ready for the exam, Bean shows off that he is not the kind of person to be underestimated by taking out a huge mass of pens and pencils and puts it before his collegue. The thing is that none of the pens actually write and finally he had to grab a pen from his collegue and start writing. The hilarious thing is the way he puts it in the sequence, especially the expressions that make you laugh when he blinks through whole of the exam trying his best to copy from his neighbour only to find in the end of the exam that he started off with the wrong question paper; whereas his question paper for his specialized subject which he had actually prepared would be inside the cover.

One other character to be mentioned is his cute lime green car, Austin mini. Look at the security he provided. A bolt and latch rather than use an inbuilt lock fitted on the car.

Anyway, it’s a good program that hooks you to your television set for half an hour. There are lots of other funny programs worth seeing like Just for laugh Gags, Takeshi’s castle, World’s funniest videos and MAD. Check out these programs. You would really enjoy.
See you soon..

The God's Paradise

2005-09-07T02:28:00.000-07:00

Hey guyz, I am back after a week long hiatus. This week was rather hectic in terms of both work and fun. After a protracted struggle, my parents wheedled me to come to Kancheepuram. Though I'm a strong believer of God, I'm not an orthodox kinda person. But on other hand, despite these facts, there is something in these temples that always mesmerizes me. The resplendent artistical works, the adroitness of our ancestors in carving out such dazzling sculptures and finally my passion for digital photography. To say, I would forget the world when I have my Casio Exilim Digicam with me. I spent lota time in temples takng snaps rather than praying, thus making myself conspicuous to the passer-bys. Though a Rookie in photography, I always get tips from one of my friend, Durai, who has hands on experience in Digital photography. Click Here to visit some of the best snapshots of this Don.

Well..Let me walk you through the two major temples that I visited.

Sri Varadaraja perumal : This Vishnu temple is extremely large with abundant sculptures. Also called Devaraja swamy temple, the sanctum is built on a rock called Atthigiri. The main deity of Sri Varadaraja perumal is believed to be second in size only next to Sri Venkateswara of Thirumala - Thirupathi.

Sri Kamakshi Amman : The Kamakshi Amman temple is the hub of all religious activities in Kanchipuram. This was built by the kings of the Chola empire in 14 A.D. The main tower over the sanctum (Vimaanam) of the temple is gold plated. Also of significance is the Golden Chariot in this temple. The Golden Chariot is taken in a procession around the temple on Friday evenings around 7.00 PM.

Apart from these, I also visited my family God which is in a small tidy village called Akkoor. Though a short trip, it was really a good tranquilizer in the midst of battles with ASPs and .Nets.

see you soon..

Combatting Spams

2005-08-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

In November 1999, there was an online poll conducted to find which is the best graduate school in computer science. But students at Carnegie Mellon wrote a program that voted for around thousand times. The next day, students of MIT also wrote a program that started to vote for them.

How could anyone trust the result of such polls? How would you know if a human has voted or its a program that has voted?

The answer to this is CAPTCHA, an acronym for "Completely Automatic Public Turning Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". Captcha, coined in 2000, determines whether the user is a human or a program. When signing up for email accounts like Yahoo!, you could have seen a small rectangular graphic containing some distorted words like "none","care","happy" etc. This is known a CAPTCHA process. A human can read these distorted text, but computer programs cannot thus preventing spam and bots from broadcasting unwanted messages to your email.

But still some bots started using Optical character recognition to identify hidden words. The captcha was fist broken by Jitendra Malik. So, to overcome this, people at Palo Alto Research center(PARC) developed something called BaffleText. The process involves printing the image, then scanning it back, thresholding it, adding noise to it and making more worse that even the OCR cannot decipher it.

The main drawback of this technique is that, it is unfriendly to visually impaired people.

For Potter Maniacs

2005-08-26T00:27:00.000-07:00

The much hyped JK Rowling's sixth novel "The Harrypotter and the Half-blood prince" opened a few days back. Though late, I have just bought the book and have alredy started it. Its the most gripping novel I have ever read and I was hooked right from the first paragraph. The first two chapters are most thrilling and imaginative that hooks both new readers and those who are familiar with the Harry potter series.

The war against Lord Vold..oops.."He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" is not going well. The Death eaters are begining to join The Dark Lord and have started spreading evil among the wizarding community. This book prepares the reader for the battle with The Dark Lord, whose past is examined much more detail than the previous books in this series and it also deals with romantic relationships of various students.

The book has been a greatest hit amoung the Muggle society, thereby making it the fastest selling book in history.

People who love to be imaginative and creative would dfinitely like this series. I would recommend new readers to try out The Encyclopedia of The Harry Potter before you wish to start off with The Half-Blood Prince.