To begin with, a very happy new year to all of you. I’m late, but it’s better late than never.

Coming to the topic, I have never rooted for the under dog in Formula One before, that is, until Adrian Sutil came along. The Force India driver is one of the few drivers I like in the politics rocked sport.

A professional racing driver who wants to be a stuntman sometime in the future, Adrian Sutil is a big fan of Metallica and Indian food. Quote, “I love Indian food especially chicken tikka and chicken jalfrezi. I absolutely love gulab jamuns and yes, naan is yummy”. And even though he hasn’t actually won a race yet, the mere fact that he took the VJM02, a much inferior car compared to the McLaren and Brawn cars that dominated 2009, and raced it to 4th position in the Italian Grand Prix; or the second place in the German Grand Prix (that was eventually lost to Raikonnen thanks to a crash the Finn caused), definitely proves that he has potential.

The simple, yet outspoken guy that he is, I haven’t ever read an interview of Sutil like this one that the Times of India published yesterday. I thought it required a mention on my blog, given that Sutil has spoken so candidly about his life and his thoughts about almost everything. Give it a read. If you’re short of time, you might want to skip to the second page.

Come 2010, I’m sure things will turn around better for the German. An exciting season ahead with all the new teams, regulations, and of course, the return of the F1 Legend – Michael Schumacher. I can’t wait for it to start.

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A week has passed since I moved into my new room at SIT, Tumkur. In the 7 days there, I’ve made a bunch of awesome friends, besides knowing everybody staying in the hostel. It’s just great. North Indians and South Indians are bonding together pretty well for now.

Now about SIT. Hats off to the Principal and to the Director. Two amazing men who have gotten together to organize Personality Developmen Programmes to everybody at the hostel. It sounded lame at first, listening to a guy speak about how great he is and all that. But a few hours past, all of us were glued. The speaker, Arjun Devaiah, an international athlete, was absolutely BRILLIANT. It was evident when I spoke to Prashanth HN that I had already changed in just a couple of days. More on this some other time. For now, I’m enjoying classes and the PDP classes as well. SIT is probably the best thing to happen in my life (yet).

P.S. I wrote this in a hurry on my iPod. Leaving back to Tumkur in a couple of hours. So do excuse the lack of information, photos and what not.

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From the past 6 weeks, I can confidently say that I’ve been having the best days of my life, (yet). I’ve gone out with friends instead of being stuck up at home in front of the computer all day. I’ve taken part in some really nice experiences like Paintball (yes, I’ll talk about it a hundred times and still won’t get tired of it. So what?) and Tweetups of different kinds. I even made it a point to meet up all of my old friends at least once.

In June, I was always at home, either watching movies or doing something not at all worthwhile. I was repeatedly told to leave the house and go out a little.

In July though, the complaint was that I was constantly away from home. I would leave at noon, having gotten up only at 10am, and then come back home only past 10pm. There were quite a few times that I had to stay over at a friend’s place because it was too late.

I watched six movies at the theatres in the span of a fortnight, almost each with a different group of friends. Finished watching at least a dozen different TV shows. A couple of hundred movies still left. Gotten high a dozen times. Lost my mind at least a couple of times. Killed my iPod Touch once. Resurrected my iPod Touch once. Almost killed myself once. Waatevaaah!

As with all things, this damn 6-week long run comes to an end. On Saturday, I bid goodbye to Bangalore, at least for another 4 years, as I move to Tumkur,  a town that’s around 70kms away from Bangalore. And although close, I still won’t be able to come down to Bangalore as much as I would like to. I’ve never left the Garden City for more than a couple of weeks. And I’ve never really lived by myself either. This is going to be… weird.

I’m not leaving depressed or even a bit sad. I’m actually looking forward to this part of my life. A whole new friends circle is something that has gotten me excited as well. That doesn’t mean that I forget or leave my present friends circle. Nope. It just means we get closer. The fact that each and everybody close to me has said that they would ‘miss me’ (surprisingly, even the guys!), an emotional phrase that none of them had ever come even slightly close to uttering before, just brought us all closer than ever.

Well that’s that, it’s time to bid goodbye to Bangalore…

Image source: karenebiggs.

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Completely random post written at 2.30 in the middle of an awesome night.

• My English writing skills are terrible.
• People who tweet ads and enter contests on Twitter are jackasses. Period.
• KFC Krushers belong to #foodporn.
• I need a haircut.
• And a shave. I look like a baboon.
• Pissing off autorickshaw drivers is fun!
• Pissing off girls is not.
• But you know what, I don’t care!
• 3 Doors Down are GODs. Nothing short.
• Flickr sucks donkey balls.
• The exact words of this post exist as a category on Priya’s blog. TOTAL coincidence. NO, RLY!

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As you all know, @hnprashanth and myself recently launched sk1d.com, a “personal” URL shortening service. What most of you do not know is the real story behind sk1d.com.

As URL shortening got more and more competitive after the explosion of micro-blogging service Twitter, we depended more on more on Tr.im, one of the leading URL shorteners that also offered statistics. Early Monday morning though, Tr.im closed down service. This was all fine and dandy. There are other services like 3.ly, u.nu, and bit.ly (with statistics). The only problem was, Prashanth was using Tr.im as sort of a URL shortener + bookmark service to keep tab of links he shared and liked, in spite of me repeatedly telling him not to. With Tr.im closed down, his collection of links is, well, dead. Lesson learnt.

After all the taunts and teasing, he was looking for a new bookmark service. Delicious was my obvious first suggestion, followed by a tongue-in-cheek comment about setting up a URL shortener on our server. But, he actually took it up as a suggestion and in a few minutes (~10 minutes to be precise), with the help of urlShort (open source URL shortener), I created sk1d.com.

Sk1d.com wasn’t even supposed to be launched to the public. It was sort of supposed to be our little repository of links. I was supposed to password-protect the site too, but one little tweet and to our surprise, people actually started using the service (and liking it too).

We pretty much realise that the service will mostly be used by our friends, but that’s fine with us. Sk1d.com wasn’t even intended for public release, let alone financial gains or traffic. It also means that without the burden on the server, sk1d.com will probably by all means, live longer.

Wanna Try It?

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A bucket list! Aha! Something that I wanted to pen down since watching The Bucket List way back in 2008. So without further ado, here is my wild list of stuff that I want to do before I die, (in no particular order):

1. Be the CEO of my own company. (current status: in the works already)
2. Live far away from the city. Probably a nice little village on the outskirts of Bangalore.
3. Splurge on all the latest gadgets I can lay my crappy hands on, just once. (technology jumps a mile each month, so no point splurging over and over)
4. Build a sound-proof room. (for various naughty reasons)
5. Drive at 200+kmph, with the windows down and my head out, doggy style. lol
6. Bungee jump. (lets keep it realistic, I doubt I’ll ever be jumping out of an airplane)
7. Create something (anything) that I would have usually bought from a store instead.
8. Get a damn tattoo. Even a small one will do.
9. Attend Rock in Rio \m/.
10. And while I’m there, visit “Christ the Redeemer” and perhaps Peru (Machu Picchu :D.
11. Slap a wild bull on its arse, TWICE! (like in the movie Wild Hogs)
12. Eat a live squid. (yes, people actually do this!)
13. Break a guy’s nose. (oh c’mon, you’ve seen it so many times in the movies. Just once I would love to do it! Volunteers anyone?)
14. Try and watch all Star Wars movies in a day. (Wow, there’s _actually_ another nut like me. And thanks to him for the image for this post.)
15. Add some more stuff to this list.

Stuff that should have been on the list, a.k.a. the ones that I’ve already completed:

1. Paintball. (yay! never expected it to come to Bangalore _ever_. Read here.)
2. Get stoned. (disclaimer: if you’re family, this never happened!!)
3. Get involved in a street fight. (if you know me well, then you know that this just _had_ to have happened to me)
4. Smash an electronic gadget (preferably a mobile phone) to pieces. (props to my friend C.S., who wanted a reason to buy a new mobile phone.)

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Was stumbling Wikipedia when I came across the Pan-American Highway. It’s been officially recognized as the world’s longest motorable road, spanning an insane 25,000 kilometers!

I did the math, and in the end, if you use a car with a 15kmpl average mileage, you’ll require about 1666 litres of petrol, and around Rs. 83,000 for the cost of petrol (w/o taking wear and tear into consideration). Anyone up for a road trip?

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Tweetups in Bangalore have been getting not only better, but more common. This edition of Bangalore Tweetup, hash tagged #paintballtweetup, was organized in less than a couple of days, but it was loads of fun. The venue – Indian Paintball League (ironically called IPL), located off Sarjapura Road.

Getting there was a challenge in the first place. A two and a half hour drive through the interior parts of the city finally took us to the Paintball Arena, about an hour and a half late. But that didn’t stop us from shooting the crap outta each other — Counter-Strike style — once we arrived there. Take a look at some of the photos below.

The last photo features HN Prashanth, Arun and Jerry Mannel showing off their (*ahem*) battle scars.

The Paintball Tweetup was something out of the ordinary when it came to tweetups, and it was absolutely awesome. If the Paintball Tweetup and the Bowling Tweetup are anything to go by, the next unique Bangalore Tweetup we have in mind should be even better. Anybody can attend it, so subscribe to the blog and follow me on Twitter so I can let you know when the next one is up.

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Lately I’ve been finding myself manually converting PNG files to JPEGs. It can get quite tedious and frankly, boring. I downloaded a couple of apps that could automate the process, but each of them had their quirks. They would either watermark the finished image or limit me to trying them out for a finite number of days. I had to resort to manually editing them using MS Paint, and then saving them as JPEG files. The quality was bad, all thanks to the disastrous MS Paint. So I set out to find a way to convert them using Photoshop. What I ended up was writing my own Action for Photoshop CS2.

I’m just illustrating how you can use Photoshop to convert PNG to JPEG in this how-to, but you could use it to convert any image format (including PSD) to JPEG. I’m going to save them using the “Save for Web” attribute because that’s what my purpose was to begin with.

1. Open the PNG file in Photoshop.
2. Go to Window -> Actions.
3. Click on the ‘Create New Action’ icon (found next to the trashcan icon). Give it any name and function key you want. It’s now recording your actions.
4. Go to File -> Save for Web. Choose whatever preset you want. Save the file.

The above action can be used in the future by activating the function key you defined. The image you were working on will be saved as a JPEG with the preset you chose, into the folder you chose. Saves a few clicks. But we’re not done with the batch conversion yet.

1. Go to File -> Automate -> Batch.
2. Choose your Action, the one that you saved previously.
3. Choose the source folder and the destination folder. Optionally set a naming scheme for all your batch files.
4. Wokay. You are now done.

All this could have been avoided if Apple had a bloody option to save the screenshots you take on an iPod Touch as JPEG instead of ridiculously sized PNG.

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• The progressive tense in stative verbs: I am understanding it. She is knowing the answer. Also, “I am working at XYZ Company” instead of “I work at XYZ Company”. This is an influence of traditional Hindi grammar; it is more common in northern states.
• The pluperfect tense used in verbs where International English speakers would use the simple past. I had gone for I went.
• Use of would instead of will as in “I would be going to New York this weekend”.
• Use of do the needful as in “do whatever needs to be done”
• Anglicisation of Indian words especially in Chennai by adding “ify” to a local Tamil word, usually humorously and not used in general speak.
• Idiomatic English for quantification in use of preposition “of”, as in “There is so much of happiness in being honest.”
• Use of “open” and “close” instead of switch/turn on/off, as in “Open the air conditioner” instead of “Turn on the air conditioner”, and “Open your shirt” for “Take off your shirt.” This construction is also found in Quebec English and also among Arab speakers of English etc.
• Use of “off” and “on” as verbs rather than adjectives, as in “On the light” instead of “Turn on the light” or “Off the fan” instead of “Switch off the fan.”
• Use of “y’all” for “you all” or “all of you”, as used in Southern American English, especially by Anglo-Indians. However, unlike Southern American usage, it is only used as a subject or object in a sentence, never to address a group of people.
• Swapping around the meanings of “slow” and “soft” as in “I shall speak slower for you” meaning “I will speak softly” and “Make the fan softer” to mean “Make the fan go slower.” This is because of influence from Indian languages. In Telugu, for example, the word ‘melliga’ can refer to either slow or quiet, and in Hindi “Deerai” can mean slowly or softly.
• Creation of rhyming double-words (rhyming reduplication) to denote generality of idea or act, a ‘totality’ of the word’s denotation, as in “No more ice-cream-fice-cream for you!”, “Let’s go have some chai-vai (tea, “tea and stuff”).” or “There’s a lot of this fighting-witing going on in the neighborhood.” (Prevalent mainly in Hindi- and Punjabi-speaking states.)
• Use of the word “since” instead of “for” in conjunction with periods of time, as in “I have been working since four years” instead of “I have been working for four years” or “I have been working since four years ago“. This usage is more common among speakers of North Indian languages such as Hindi where the words for both “since” and “for” are the same.
• Use of “Can you drop me?” and “We will drop her first” instead of “Can you drop me off?” and “We will drop her off first”
• Omission of the definite article: e.g. “Let’s go to city” instead of “Let’s go to the city”
• Use of “the same” instead of “it”, as in “I heard that you have written a document on …. Could you send me the same?”
• Use of “told” instead of “said”. An example would be “Ravi told he is going home” instead of “Ravi said he is going home” or “Ravi told me he is going home”. This feature is more prevalent in South India.

From the Wiki Entry for Indian English.

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