Google's ads. has made web a vulgar place



Google's ad. are like leeches there are on every webpage. Like the above example, placement of ad. could be deceptive.

I do not know why at all a company pays for placing it's ad. because there would be 10 other ads. on a single page, competing for attension. Google is just making money by letting every tom & dick showcase his or her's greed.

Web user is a victim of this maelstrom of Google ads in few ways:
a) Many of these ad. links might take you to a spam site; and a novice user, could easily land himself in trouble.

b) These ads. does not have iota of creativity and are out right vulgar.

c) Web pages have lost their aesthetics and thus taken out the pleasure out of leisurely web browsing.

Is "disable Google ads." button the solution?
What about Microsoft adding a special button to IE called "disable Google ads." button? And can this land MS in an anti-trust pit?

over shopping leads to Breast cancer

"Hormonal imbalance induced by over shopping could lead to Breast cancer"

This is a funny idea but why not try. This might stop us from buying the things that we do not really need. When ever we dispose a working product to replace it with a new one, we generate a chain of waste.

I feel like bribing some University Professor to voice this outrageous opinion in the name of saving planet :-)

as flower blooms

It is such a common phenomenon; petals stay clung to each other during their infancy, but as they bloom, the distance between them also increases.

bare legs in baskets

delicate, bare limbs
will fetch you footwear,
not one but a pile; to cover
till you step-out of this land

Slender fruit, being seasonal
will perish and slide,
but the bestowed baskets,
will persist and stay high

Quote by Cohen

"...she was living with some boy
who gives her soul an empty room and gives her body joy..."

-Leonard Cohen in "Death Of A Ladies' Man"

Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART

In my PC, Chasis fan and CPU fan used to run at 2500rpm and 2900rpm respectively and it was noisy; then I enabled Fan-Q-control in BIOS and CPU fan came down to 950rpm and consequently machine became silent. I have set to Q-Control is OPTIMUM. According to ASUS tool CPU & SYSTEM temparatures are 12C and 30C respectively; but HDDs are hot and I sensed it physically and this is not scientific way to measure.

I came across an article on standard that HDD manufacturer's compy to and according to that standard HDD is supposed to provide info on it's health...

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6983

Black & Decker, why the fuc* rice cooker stops working?

Today my Black & Decker stopped turning on...
1) what fuc*ing unmastered complicated technology runs inside this rice cooker?
2) why you fuck*s make product that fails in 2 years?
3) why do you create unnecessary waste to pollute the planet and then come on TV and talk about saving the fuck*ing planet?

You corporates are disgusting people... I do not even have words for you fucke*s

"Raven hair turns gray" -- how it happened?

This image took shape in my mind during the last weeks of my interaction with my gray-haired friend, Jeanne. This sketch is a last word in that conversation that lasted couple of years.

Following are components and ideas of sketch.

Face
There is a face in the bottom corner and every other component of this sketch belongs to the person represented by this face; and probably that individual is dead or in the vicinity of it. When I started working on this sketch, first, face came out as man's face, may be due to wrinkles and later I tried to change it to woman's face; and it seems eventually it ended up having tiny features of both gender.

Life and it's change
In this sketch, Hair represents life and variation in the density of hair shows change in strength. Hair starts thick with undulations, fluctuation; and with the age it becomes flat,lean and dim, like river in desert.

I used Rapidograph pens to draw hair but Rapidograph pens produces flat, unwavering lines. So, to bring some texture in, I had to use 5 different pens, each containing different size nib(0.25mm, 0.35mm, 0.50mm, 0.60mm and 0.80mm).

Breadth of Life or Age
Line made by parting hair(parting-line) on the scalp is used to show breadth or age or movement in life; and this parting line looks like river. When I started working on this sketch, I wanted parting-line to resemble a winding road and it was a struggle to make it appear like one. After completing the sketch, I went back and changed the road in to river and also threw in two boats; the moving boat conveys living and capsized boat shows stagnation or end.

Why this name 'Raven hair turns gray'?
Even after weeks after completing this sketch, I did not have a proper title. I believe that there should be proper name to represent a painting. Few undeserving titles like "flow" were in the list. Few months back I heard a haunting song by Delgados, and they had used the phrase "raven hair" and it was still lingering in my mind; and one night, when everyone was sleeping I stole this from Delgados and connected with my sketch.

I had to practice by drawing few samples to fill-in the gaps in my imagination; and here are those samples.

Final sketch of "Raven hair turns gray"



Trial 1



Trial 2


Trial 3

Calculating power consumption of PC...

I am not to write about save power to salvage the drowning world....

Recently I found out that on AMD Dual Core machine, "Smart sharpening" of Adobe Photoshop takes just 2sec to sharpen a image of resolution, 3000x4500. That shook me because same operation takes 40 sec on my 1.8ghz single core PC !!!!
So I started thinking of buying a new motherboard, RAM, Dual Core CPU...
but I wanted to retain existing power supply and was not sure whether it can feed 5HDs and also new Dual Core CPU. So, I wanted to know, how to measure the power consumed by 5 hard disks that are currently sitting in my PC.
This hightly informative and also practical post guided me while estimating the power consumed by devices of my PC.
In the early stages of this research I found out that once started that my 410W PSU can supply the WATS required by 5HDs and DualCore CPU, but in this investigation I found out that what also matters is the power required at the time booting because devices draw their peak current ONLY at the time of booting. So I dug out manufacturer's specification for all HDs and noted down the maximum current needed at the time of booting.
This is my power supply (PSU) specification


As the image shows my PSU could deliver a maximum of 20Amps @ 12V.
Following shows the current drawn by various devices, at the time of booting..

Samsung(250gb)----->1.9
Samsung(250gb)----->1.9
Maxtor(200gb)------>1.5(guess)
WD(60gb)----------->1.8
Stg(160gb)--------->2.0
Case fans(3)------->0.5
AMD Dual CPU------->8.24
VGA---------------->0.5
DVDR--------------->0.8
-----------------------------
Total 19.14A
-----------------------------

Conclusion: 19.2A is not far from 20A, which is the maximum current that my existing PSU can deliver, so I decided to buy an external harddrive enclosure to host Samsung 250gb SATA drive and this would bring down boottime current demand from 19.2 to 17.1...

Mount St. Helens a collage

Recently I was at Mount St. Helens hiking Norway Pass/Boundary Trail; this is a 5 mile hike which took us right across the cradle of the crater. It is hard to describe the things that we saw on this trail,I would say that land looked like a collage of tree, rock, ash etc.

I came across a site with interesting facts about Mount St. Helens.
http://www.olywa.net/radu/valerie/mshbefore.html?
http://www.olywa.net/radu/valerie/mshduring.html?

Indian ink bleeds on Gesso board

I admire the flexibility of using acrylic color ink and acrylic paint in a same painting. This works out quite well on an canvas made out of cotton, but fails easily on Gesso board, but I was expecting Indian ink to hold on, but it turned out that even Indian ink bleeds, but not to the extent of Acrylic color Ink; any bleeding is unacceptable.

Last week I initiated a sketch using Indian ink on a Gesso board and today, by accident came to know that ink is bleeding. Fortunately I had not proceeded deep in to the sketch. Initially I could not believe this, I doubted that I could have re-filled the pen without drying it properly after cleaning it with water, but that turned out to be not true. To test this out once for all, using Indian ink, I scribbled on a Gesso board and few hours later a wet brush was able smear the lines. Here is the picture of this....



So the lesson is NEVER to use ANY ink (Acrylic color ink or Indian Ink) on Gesso board; canvas seems to be best in gripping ink

.

Can market economy bring Democracy?

Is this really possible? today I heard yet an another discussion on this subject on radio.
Could this be a myth, being propagated intentionally, by greedy corporates who are profiting disproportionately, in disguise?

In an undemocratic state, Can the establishment of a successful business unit guard the ordinary citizen from getting arrested for no reason?


Well, I can not change anything.. writing because there is no one to talk... another sunday night talk....

To whom the life is not fair?, "potential US president" or "the deer"

A candidate running for US presidency(2008), while addressing National Rifle Association, said something to this effect, to cajole the gun loving audience to vote for him "...today my friend went to deer hunting but I am here addressing your organization: life is not fair...." and the lines triggered a round laughter.

I got interested in above lines, not because of the stature of the candidate or the significance of the event, but the line ...life is not fair... can be interpreted in different directions; to whom the life is not fair?, to Mike Huckabee(potential president) or the deer that is being hunted....?

Democracy in middle east

Why did not US chose Saudi Arabia to initiate the process of the democratisation in Middle East?

Democracy needs consensus and because US is in good terms with Saudi Arabia, it would have been much easier to trigger democracy there compared to Iraq.

writing on tombstone

I told my friend that "tombstones will not mention our friends or relatives but about ourself", and he responded by saying that your body will be burnt...

recording dictations

Recently I purchased a portable recording device, it is as small as iPod, but made by Olympus. I purchased this with the intention of using it to record the notes about technical subjects, that I have accumulated in past 11 years. Once done, I could listen to these recordings while doing mundane things and maintain the technical boundaries within the sight.

Why do I have to refresh?
Because there are too many; I have worked on several technologies, both transient and elemental, in past11 years. Most of the technical puzzles, that I come across today, need me to have grasp over these elemental concepts. Without the fresh feel over the subjects, I have been failing to decipher the problems and justify the solution. For me, it is not enough to say that "it should work that way", instead I should know why it is supposed to be that way. Essentially, I should replace 'gut' feeling with 'reason'

This week I dictated few topics out of DON Box's Inside COM in to the recorder; and results encouraged me to dictate an article that I was reading about mixing acrylic paints. Yesterday, at work, I had to dig in to the subject of URL encoding and I collected those notes and dictated it, later in the night, in to the recorder.


My immediate goal is to record the docs that I have prepared on COM, C++, AD, Exchange Server, MAPI etc... and use those recordings to prepare for the job interview.
I want to make it a habit to record as I read; this paraphrasing, on the fly, needs some mental work but will definitely help in the long run.
Let me see how this goes...

mindless Nature

I am coming back from vacation, where I spent most of the 12days, hiking and turning pages of nature. I saw glaciers, fighting not to melt in to a magnificent waterfall; and I came across streams, that did not mind running over anything, including me; and I got seduced by tender leaf; and I hiked in volcanic land of Mount St Helen's, where there was more ash than forest, like light-house,lives there, were far and few; and I waited for smoke/fog/cloud to drift away from mountain peaks, but they rarely responded in time, it appeared that cloud's intention was to curb the naughty mountain peaks from making an indecent exposure, especially when the stage is tall, light is bright; and then I also saw living bark, oozing some kind of sticky substance; and I walked past, dead trees exposing myself to glare, mellow light of sunset and etc...

After seeing so many sources of energy, that constitute this nature, I feel that nature can not be stopped, and every element of it, irrespective of size, is ruthless and mean when it comes to survival. Nature juuuust wants to live.

Usually, the interaction between two aspects of nature gets glorified as mutual understanding, example: a tiny plant sprouting out of the crack off of a rock sitting precariously on a harsh mountain peak; but I do not see any hint of mutual understanding there because when the for survival comes, mountain could crush that plant without giving it a thought; and same goes to plant, slow and steadily, this plant can grow in to a tree and slit the rock in to pieces.

These faces of natures are leading me to believe that Nature is mindless, it has been moving persistently since the beginning of time; look at the stream of water, it always is trying to conquer
Note: To to continued...

undivided

undivided is night,
streak less is light,
but mind is in pieces

Maternity hospital and "Made in USA"

Recently while shopping I could not find anything that was not made in China...
Then I started asking....
What is still being made in USA?
Where can I find it?
My crooked mind said " it is in maternity hospital" -)

being dead.... feeling like dead....

It is sad to be leaving everything to go dead, but feeling like dead is much worse.

heaven, hell and normalcy

Religion tells about heaven and also hell, but we humans, most of the time, just need normalcy

Forester quote

...life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish...

- E. M. Forster from 'Howards End'

This is very common,...just recall the assurances and emotions that poured during happy times; like a holiday season.

Excerpts from novel "Fathers and Sons"

Excerpts from novel "Fathers and Sons" by Ivan Turgenev

Q1)
"In the first place, I'm far from good; and in the second place I no longer mean anything to you, and you tell me that I am good . . .It's just like placing a wreath of flowers round the head of a corpse."